Mugshot From the Great Recession

A Mugshot from the Great Recession

by Eric Obenauf

by

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Eric Obenauf

imothy J. Bowers is a red-blooded American every-man. I had seen his profile picture at the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s website. When I was first attempting to contact Bowers I spent some time looking at the thumbnail image. On the surface, he appeared to be a no-nonsense person, although I can’t imagine those pictures revealing much of a person’s spirit. Bowers wore his white hair in a crew cut, was stocky, and his shoulders seemed to droop forward and complete the frame. He didn’t appear especially desperate or tired. What he did look like was defensive.

Bowers is a laid-off delivery driver for a drug wholesaler. He has worked as a pest control technician, an Encyclopedia Britannica salesman, and for a significant period of time, a cab driver. At the age of sixty-two, Bowers turned the keys to his apartment and mailbox in to his landlady, walked to a nearby Speedway gas station where he dined on their two hotdogs for two dollars special, before entering a branch of the Fifth Third Bank in Columbus, Ohio. There, he handed the teller a note informing her that he was robbing the bank. The note included instructions to place loose bills into an envelope. The teller did as she was asked, also inserting a dye pack to accompany the bills. She tripped the silent security alarm, but that wasn’t necessary.

Once the teller had complied with his demands, Bowers strode directly up to a security guard where he passed him his receipts from the robbery—a meaty eighty dollars—saying, “Here, be a hero today.” He then took a seat and waited for the

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police to arrive. Bowers was secured in the backseat of a police cruiser by the time the dye pack erupted.

This may sound unremarkable, like one of the worst bungles in the history of bank robberies caused, perhaps, by a case of last-minute nerves or a guilty conscious. Bowers went on to serve nearly three full years behind bars in the Hocking Correctional Facility in Nelsonville, Ohio, however, his crime was perfectly executed. “I succeeded in my plan,” he said, in the summer of 2010. ***

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owers’ crime was committed on May 1, 2006, a gray, anonymous off-year. 2006 was post-Katrina, when the commoners of the privileged American republic swallowed the uncomfortable fish-bone of truth that their government didn’t give a damn about them, and pre-AIG bailout, when federal officials threw themselves like a fire blanket upon a burning victim, tagging one of the more corrupt corporations in the land “too big to fail.” The year of Bowers’ crime disappeared into the quicksand of history as the nation at large sunk into its worst depression in nearly eighty years.

Bowers lives in Ohio, which occupies an intriguing place in the national psyche, cropping up in melodramatic fashion every presidential election cycle. Ohio has been the backdrop for some of the most sensational national news coverage in the past year: in the rape trial and conviction of two high school football players in Steubenville, and in the case of the Cleveland kidnappings,

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when three young women were taken by Ariel Castro and locked in his basement for a decade. The stories’ mooring in reality seemed to be doubly tenuous because the crimes were committed in Ohio, the anchor of the Midwest, where the outcomes of presidential elections are decided, where the temperature of the nation is averaged. In an essay titled “Ohio, Oz and Other Zones,” in his book, Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale ponders why Ohio is the setting in so much postmodern fiction: Its strangeness and liminality are foregrounded by its being located not on the edges of the continent, but at its center. It is the historical descendant of the frontier zone, transposed to the flat, middling (in every sense) American heartland. ***

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owers pled guilty to robbery. That was part of his plan, too.

At the time of his crime and subsequent arrest, Timothy J. Bowers was sixty-two years old and unemployed. “At my age, the jobs available to me are minimum-wage jobs,” Bowers said in court, “and the jobs I would prefer to have I can’t because of my age.”

According to AARP, unemployment amongst older workers surged a dramatic 330% in the first decade of the 21st century.

While the percentage of unemployed American workers 55 and

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older is currently slightly lower than most other age brackets, studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that this demographic has the most difficult time finding new jobs. In spring 2010, the average duration of unemployment for workers aged 55 and older was 35.5 weeks, which is nearly twice as long a period as for workers 16–24 years old.

“I could have taken a job paying minimum wage, or a bit higher,” Bowers explains, “but at that wage level I was destined to go broke and lose everything I had.” At the time of his crime, federal minimum wage had been stalled since 1997 at a meager $5.15 an hour. In 2006, Senators Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and Robert Menendez succeeded in enacting a bill that raised the federal minimum wage in three phases over the course of the next three years to a 2009 hourly wage of $7.25. In late2006, Ohio voters managed to raise the state minimum wage ahead of federal mandates to $6.85 per hour, but when Bowers committed his crime in the spring, the minimum wage was still $5.15. In 2013, with the minimum wage rooted at $7.30, according to Poverty in America, the living wage for a single adult in Franklin County (where Bowers resides), is $8.15.

Age discrimination has been a common lament during the recession. In 2008, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, age discrimination lawsuits achieved a record high, with 24,600 claims filed in a single year. In modern times—with longer life spans, employers slashing retirement benefits, and discussion rampant to raise the age to receive Social Security—it has become necessary for workers to maintain employment until a later age in life than ever before.

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“Your birthday is October 29. I’m going to give you your birthday present. You’re sentenced to three years in prison.”

“Mr. Bowers is due to receive Social Security when he turns sixty-six years old. That will be in three years,” Bowers’ attorney, Jeremy Dodgion, informed the judge at his sentencing. “He would like to be incarcerated for that entire time to alleviate the day-to-day travails of living life and being responsible for paying bills and housing and whatnot.”

Judge Angela White granted Bowers his wish. “Your birthday is October 29,” she said. “I’m going to give you your birthday present. You’re sentenced to three years in prison.”

The United States was in the midst of two unpopular international wars, propped up with regurgitated, canned phrases in support of freedom of the individual and democracy. Here, in the breadbasket of personal liberty—as truck commercials would have us perceive—an individual was electing to spend his life caged rather than free. Timothy J. Bowers appeared to embody the fallacy of the American dream. However, as I found out, there was more to his story.

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***

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hen I first got in touch with Bowers’ attorney, he agreed to aid me in contacting Bowers. However, he pointed out, Bowers had passed on talking to everyone else in the past, listing the queries from Bill O’Reilly, Michael Moore, and 20/20. I understood that he was prefacing my rejection.

When we were first in touch, Bowers didn’t understand my angle, why I’d be interested in his case so long after the crime had occurred and he had already served his sentence. Bowers was convinced that once he started talking, I’d immediately cast him in some political light, likely leftist. “I am only going to tell you what I want you to know,” he wrote. “I will not give you any information you can twist and distort for some LEFTIST propaganda.” And, despite his crime and eagerness to live off of the state and social programs, Bowers is staunchly conservative.

I wasn’t and I’m still not entirely amused by the political ramifications of his crime. I wanted to know how he decided that spending the next three years of his life in prison was the best option available to him. His tragedy was political only in that it served to sabotage the proud ideologies of both major parties, as well as weaken our own self-applied national brand.

In the stories that dealt with the recession, the image that always seemed to accompany the news stories were pictures of neutral-colored McMansions, a foreclosure sign stoic in the manicured front yard that looked as though it were implanted by a design program. But that was too impersonal; the measurement was wrong. A greater gravity was awarded the object over

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the individual. There was no human face. I imagined Timothy J. Bowers could be that human face for our Great Recession; he could occupy that void in people’s imaginations, appearing in school textbooks to personify our national low. ***

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owers’ case is tinted with enough absurdity to season a Kafka story. It could even be funny if it wasn’t true. A man unable to survive in a hyper-capitalist society elects to forsake his own freedom in exchange for basic survival amenities: food, shelter, a toilet.

Hocking Correctional Facility houses just south of 500 total inmates. The prison features a number of educational and vocational programs, from aerobics to basket weaving to horticulture, as well as GED training. Maybe prison is a viable option for ailing unemployed middle-aged workers?

I asked Bowers what a typical day in prison consisted of, to which he forwarded me a letter he had received from Dean F. Purnhagen, at the time, a 75-year-old serving twenty-five years in Hocking, Bowers informed me, for raping his wife. (In later letters Bowers forwards from Purnhagen, Bowers shortens the crime to, simply, “rape.” However, a search on the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s offender database also includes mention of a child victim. Child being defined as “a person age 12 and under.”)

Friday (7-8-2010) They woke me up very forcefully

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for a MRT [Medical Round Trip]. I told the C.O. I never signed up for a MRT and was told I was going… It’s an emergency! Yuck—fed a wonderful breakfast of a peanut butter sandwich and an apple, I was truculently chained up like a wild animal and off to CMC [Corrections Medical Center]. Ugh. I sat and sat!

Then I was escorted to a doctor’s (?)(?)(?) office and told to give an urine sample so he could recheck the amount of blood in it. Duh? I did, waited, waited, waited, and he came back and said my urine was clear. I then asked, “when was there blood in my urine since I haven’t given any samples in over a year.” Oh! He looked at my name on the blotter and it was something like Fermmannor (?) not Purnhagen. He then asked what I was doing here and I repeated the story of being woke up and being dragged to CMC. I had no idea of why.

Apart from the appeal of their programming, their reputation for “managing the aging offender,” and the occasional inconvenient early-morning medical round trips, imprisonment in Hocking Correctional Facility does come with risk. In his introduction to Purnhagen’s letter, Bowers mentioned that both he and Purnhagen had served time in H-Block (“the Hole”).

According to Bowers, they were blame-free, having both been attacked unprovoked. “When two inmates are involved in

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violence they both go to the Hole. I was attacked by a crack-head nigger, from Cleveland, and even though there were many witnesses attesting to the fact that ‘He didn’t do anything’ (some were guards) I still served 15 days in the Hole.” ***

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reedom, I thought,” Bowers wrote to me in one of many letters, “is having the choice of not doing something you don’t like doing. Freedom is just up and quitting a job you don’t want to do anymore.”

In high school, Bowers worked as a salesman hocking sets of Encyclopedia Britannica over the phone. After a stint in the military was fulfilled, Bowers returned to Columbus hoping to be rehired. He found the office where he previously worked in shambles and took it upon himself to build it back up. Sales branches at the time functioned as franchises, and when the owner sold the branch, Bowers, feeling neglected and overlooked, promptly quit.

Bowers then found employment, in 1964 at the age of twentyone, as a cab driver, all the while still plotting to launch his own mail-order subscription service, which eventually did get off the ground and even performed better than he had anticipated.

“Driving a taxicab gets in your blood,” he remembers fondly.

“At least old-time taxicab driving of the 1960s and ’70s.”

One evening, Bowers is sent by his dispatcher to pick up a passenger at an office after business hours. He helps the passenger load various office supplies into the cab, but when they reach

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the destination and the man can’t afford the fare Bowers offers him a cheap pay-off for the blatantly stolen items. He learns their worth and gradually sells them to various passengers he drives. After enough pick-ups ask for booze on Sundays—when liquor and 6% beer sales are prohibited—Bowers begins stocking whiskey and beer in his trunk.

What began as a way to make some extra cash becomes his means to get ahead, and he ends up selling more and more stolen goods. “It was not unusual for me to go out to deliver a six-pack of beer and come back with a car full of typewriters, adding machines, guns, cameras, golf clubs, or a TV or two.”

Bowers saved enough money to go into the restaurant business with a fellow cab driver. They would buy cheap produce from grocery thieves or delivery drivers and even a meat inspector, allowing them to under-cut the competition by offering meals at lower prices. The restaurant, named the Scarlet and Gray after the colors of the nearby Ohio State University, eventually starts selling alcohol out of their basement to under-age students and running prostitutes out of a nearby apartment complex.

“There were a lot of crappy, low-paying jobs in the 1960s,” Bowers writes. “Some people [...] went through the process of putting in their time and building up seniority, and gradually moving to less and less strenuous jobs, at the same low pay.”

The way he describes it, theft was the opportunity for employees at factories or warehouses to correct a measure of unfairness in the workplace. In addition to how the restaurant received their

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meat and produce, all the dishware used at the Scarlet and Gray was stolen by employees from a factory in Zanesville.

“In the 1960s,” Bowers explains, “racketeering was alive and well.”

There were enough stolen goods floating around that Bowers opened a furniture store with a second fellow driver, which they called J+B. The need to not sell products in the store that would appear on hot-sheets with local law enforcement demanded a working relationship with a counterpart named “Jerry Kasee,” out of Huntington, West Virginia. Over the course of a couple years, the two men would meet and swap their stolen goods. On one such trip in 1966, upon arriving at the usual drop-off point in a chain-grocery parking lot, Kasee fails to show. For several days, Bowers developed a routine of scouring Huntington for Kasee, keeping up with his mail at the furniture shop and even paying off some of his bills for him. And then, one day, the Diversified Savings and Loan in town is held up and the bank robber slips away. ***

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athetic people working low-wage jobs and living boring, uneventful lives were envious of young men, full of daringdo, with wads of cash in their pockets,” Bowers writes. “They hoped the young risk-takers would be arrested and thrown into jail so they could relish the downfall and feel satisfied they were following the right course in life, which was servitude—economic slavery.”

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Bowers was fated for his own downfall. He had been harangued by police officers on several previous occasions for minor infractions, but after buying a suitcase of stolen Rolex watches, Bowers was nabbed by the FBI for the robbery of the Diversified Savings and Loan in Huntington, West Virginia.

“When you are arrested for the first time it is a shock. It’s like falling through the ice on a frozen pond or lake,” Bowers writes.

“You feel the cold water, then you wonder how deep it is. Then you wonder if you’ll be able to get out, or if you’ll drown.”

This was 1966, and Bowers insists to this day that he is innocent of the robbery. “I expected I would be arrested some day by some police department, on some charge, and I was ready for it,” he admits. “I wasn’t ready for the FBI to arrest me for a robbery I did not commit.”

What begins as a playful game of cat-and-mouse with the arresting FBI agents devolves quickly, when Bowers, housed at the Franklin County Jail awaiting extradition to West Virginia, learns from his attorney that local police are also investigating him in relation to a series of five homicides involving gas station attendants (he apparently owned a similar model gun). Bowers recounts his prison stint as if it were an unfortunate dream: the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches served for lunch and dinner on weekends; having to form alliances with his cellmates to protect his belongings; how when his mother came to see him in the Franklin County Jail, several inmates stood at a distance behind him flashing her through the visitors’ window; how he came to loathe all holidays because the prison kitchen staff would be off-duty and there was no mail in or out.

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At the time of his first substantial arrest for bank robbery at the age of twenty-three, Bowers was living the high life. He was emulating the cunning mafia racketeers of the Prohibitionera. He owned residential and business properties along the High Street strip in downtown Columbus and had established a legitimate mail-order magazine subscription service. He had girlfriends and people he looked up to. And while he engaged in a slew of illegal activities that jeopardized everything he had as well as his own future, he valued his personal freedom. In short, he did not want to go to prison. ***

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ver the course of our correspondence, it became apparent that Bowers did not feel that his was a tragic tale. He refers to his most recent prison stint as a success. He didn’t want to be what I expected him to be. Or who the scores of media attempting to pin him down wanted him to be.

“The news media people were so ignorant and naïve they thought I was the FIRST PERSON in history to seek refuge in jail or prison,” says Bowers. He accuses a former inmate named Harry Woodbridge of gruesomely murdering his own in-laws in a bid for the “security and comfort” that apparently comes with life imprisonment. To further illustrate his point, Bowers also mentions how farmhands in the nineteenth century would enlist in the army during the slow months of the year in exchange for room, board, and a paycheck, only to desert in the spring when work picked up again.

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Forty years after his first stint in prison for bank robbery, Bowers was sixty-two and nearly broke. He was applying for employment at businesses that would pay him $5.15 an hour, which likely wouldn’t provide him with enough of an income for even a humble existence. He would be forced to serve in the system of economic slavery that he despised and railed against.

Bowers was a racketeer and a con man. Harry Woodbridge and the farmhands of the 1800s were relative to himself because, to Bowers, it was all a hustle for survival.

He wasn’t a tragic figure.

Bowers had conned the system and he had won. ***

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t’s clear in his letters that Bowers does not enjoy the spotlight; he’d much rather loiter in the background, avoiding attention, dictating the terms of his involvement. Which is probably what was most attractive to him in agreeing to discuss his story with me: I wouldn’t force him to get dressed up and sit on an uncomfortable chair before a bouquet of warm lights before dismissing him altogether. He could string me along at his own pace. It took him eight months and four-hundred double-sided handwritten pages before he even reached the period of his first imprisonment.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed reading about the Columbus racket of the ’60s that occurred during the same period of time that my strait-laced parents were enrolled farther down High Street at The Ohio State University. I enjoyed

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the suspense of tearing through letter after letter, curious as to what became of Jerry Kasee. I enjoyed Bowers’ friends, who peopled his writing like characters in a novel: Continental Bill, who lost his High Street lounge, The Continental, to the IRS; Frankie, who earned his nickname by providing the arresting officers with his name as Frankie Avalino when he was busted for a burglary; a young writer named Doug who was employed at J+B Furniture Store while he wrote a novel about five teenage outlaws from New York City traveling west across the country.

I had naively believed that Bowers could provide the sympathetic face for the Great Recession, the conveniently framed snapshot of despair that the rest of the media had attempted, and failed, to capture. Bowers would be my own prop and ploy to reveal this unsightly national truth. But in the process something much more human had emerged.

Here, revealed, was a portrait of a man. He is well-read and plain-spoken. He is crafty and scrappy. He has engaged in a host of nefarious activities and served time behind bars for some of his transgressions. He often refers to African-Americans as “niggers.” He was desperate and poor and propelled to action by a concern for his own basic survival. He was successful in his plot and he was successful in relaying his story to me. He is now old enough to live off Social Security, and does so quietly in a single room in downtown Columbus. And that is the end. ■

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