In the Eye of Concrete Crime

Note to Readers:  The events described here occurred well before I knew I would spend my working career investigating and writing about white-collar crime.  Perhaps these events played a subconscious role in my career arc.  Personal names in this story have been changed to protect privacy.  The photos are stock photos, not from my time on the job.

I will not forget my last summer job during my college years.  Ever have to work a job that appeared to carry the risk of being thrown into the Mississippi River in a pair of concrete boots?

I was working for the City of Minneapolis as a “paving test aide.”  Not exactly an evocative title, nor a particularly illuminating one.  Still, it is a rather precise name for the role.  With several other young college men, I was a quality control inspector for materials being used to pave the city’s streets in concrete.  It was a civil service job that paid well.  Most of my young summer colleagues were engineering students at the University of Minnesota.  I was a journalism major, but I had studied enough science in college to pass the civil service examination in chemistry that was required for the job.

It was my third summer in the job at the City’s Paving Test Laboratory.  The first two summers I worked exclusively in the Lab, putting sample concrete cylinders from our various street construction sites under pressure to see how much they could take before they would crack (to ensure the concrete being poured at the jobs met strength standards), and testing samples of rocks and sand from the City’s stockpiles to see that they did not contain too much moisture before being added to the cement and water to make concrete.  Too much moisture in the concrete mix weakens the concrete.  The work was quiet, routine, and relaxed.

I started again in the Lab at the outset of my third year, but about a month in I was transferred to the other wing of the role:  supervising actual construction of streets in the field.  And this is where I ran into trouble.

I could see the trouble coming before my first day in the field.  The talk in the Lab among my fellow inspectors was that the private company hired by the city to do this particular paving job downtown was crooked and was “stealing the City blind,” as one colleague put it.  One method of the company’s theft involved preparing the streets for paving, which comprised tearing out the old road surface and then removing any bad soil from the roadbed and replacing it with new soil.  (The soil under pavement needs to be suitable for compaction and relatively dry.)  The City’s engineering crews had gone out and drilled into the soil, mapping the places where it was poor and how deep the poor soil was, indicating to the company how much soil had to be removed and replaced with new before paving the road.  The problem was that the company was being paid by the truckload of soil removed and replaced, and it was removing much more than the City survey had indicated.  Thus it was able to charge the city more money for the “extra” truckloads, growing the company’s profits illegally.

When the paving aide on site told the company that it was removing and replacing too much soil, the reply was, “No, it’s got to go.  It’s all shit!”  The theft continued.  Not only that, but two of the four owners were under federal indictment for alleged crimes in other matters.

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The night before my first day on this job, and rare for me, I stayed out too late drinking too much beer with a friend of mine.  I was trying, I think, to drown my anxiety.  After a few hours of sleep I was up at 5 a.m.–with a hangover headache the likes of which I had never had.  I had to drive to the Paving Lab across town from where I lived, pick up a City truck, and drive it to the job site in downtown Minneapolis by 6:30.  I arrived on time with my head as dull as the sledgehammer that seemed to have clocked it.  The construction site was in downtown Minneapolis where a major street was being repaved.

As soon as I put my feet on the pavement, I saw a sizeable, middle-aged man with blond hair approaching me with fervor.  Herb wasn’t smiling.  He knew I was the City’s newest inspector on his company’s job, and he had something to say to me.  He was one of the four owners.  Indicted?  I don’t know.

It sounded to me like he was yelling.  What he said was something like this:  “Look, I don’t want any trouble from the City inspector!  We don’t need you looking over our shoulder.  We know what we are doing!  Everything will be just fine if you stay out of our way!”

Somewhere in my brain fog I realized that Herb had something of a point.  I was a 21-year-old college senior with a liberal arts major and I had never worked any sort of construction before, let alone as a quality control inspector.  My bosses at the Paving Lab simply gave me a booklet to read about how concrete street construction should be done and cut me loose.  Meanwhile, the private company had been building streets for years.  And I was to be the only City “official” regularly at the construction site.  The only real credential I felt I had was the jiu-jitsu training I had taken up that summer–in case I needed it.

However, through my fog I watched myself make this reply:  “We both have our jobs to do.  You have yours and I have mine.  If we both do our jobs, we’ll be fine.”  Herb said, Fine.  It was to be the warmest moment of our working relationship.

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Much of what followed was a daily game of cat and mouse.  A truck of concrete would pull up and slowly discharge its load of concrete onto the street bed while workers began to distribute and smooth it.  I would sample the load to test its water content and to occasionally make a cylinder for testing back at the lab.  If too wet, the concrete would be weak and begin breaking up very prematurely, in only a couple of years or so.  I had to reject such loads.  This rarely occurred.  The concrete is monitored at the batch plant where it is made, and so almost all trucks arrive on site with acceptable loads.

So the load is fine and as the truck moves up the street, discharging the load, I stay back to ensure that the crew properly places the steel reinforcing rods and the expansion joints in the fresh concrete.

One day I look back up the street where the truck is dumping the remainder of its load around a manhole.  Even from a distance, I can tell that the concrete is now the consistency of soup.  The company’s worker, Rich, had told the truckdriver to add water to the remaining concrete–which he can do unseen from inside the truck–so that it would be easier to smooth over with hand tools, hence a quicker job.  The faster the company can complete a paving job, the greater its profit on its contracts with the city.

So I approach Rich and tell him that the concrete he is now spreading and smoothing around the manhole is not acceptable.  It is well below standard.  I tell him he has to dig the concrete out and replace it with good material.  He argues with me.  Just as we are at loggerheads, both the company’s foreman on the job, Harvey, and the City’s civil engineer assigned to the job both show up.  My man, Ralph, the professional engineer, is rarely on site as he has other jobs around the city that take most of his time.  But here he is, a man in his mid-30s with considerable professional experience.  He will see the problem immediately and force the company to repair the situation.

Ralph listens to the arguments and understands the matter.  But instead of simply telling the company employees to fix the problem, he turns to me and says, “What does the Paving Lab say?”  I shake off my surprise at his “deference” and respond, “This stuff (the concrete) has to go.”  Only then does he tell Harvey and Rich to take it out and replace it.  They scowl.  I had never more appreciated the authority gained from studying the liberal arts.

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Watering the concrete to make it easier (and quicker) to smooth was a recurring problem on this job.  Workers did it occasionally in the truckloads and more commonly by adding water to the surface of the poured concrete while they were finishing it by hand.  The crew knew the rules, knew that they were weakening the concrete, but they persisted whenever they thought they could get away with it.  Then they ceased even worrying about getting caught.  One day it began raining lightly, not quite enough to stop the pouring and smoothing, but enough to ease the job of finishing the surface.  Moments later I discovered that another worker hand-smoothing the new surface was nonetheless adding additional water to it from his bucket!  I told him to stop.  He refused.  Finally I called my supervisor at the Paving Lab to come to the site and force the issue.  He did, and still the worker ignored him, watering the concrete further in the rain in front of us.  Simple contract theft.

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I had had enough.  I had been sent to do a job that proved impossible to do.  I was feeling angry and righteous.  So on another day when the project’s civil engineer happened to be on site, I approached Ralph privately.  I told him I wanted to make a formal report and complaint to the the City’s top engineer, the Director of Public Works.  I reviewed the ways in which the company was cheating on its contract with the City, effectively stealing from it.

Ralph replied,  “Pete, if you want to go see him, I’ll go with you and back you up.”  There it was again.  The professional engineer taking second chair to the college liberal arts student.

I figured I should alert the head of my unit, Merton, a man nearing retirement who directed the Paving Laboratory’s operations.  So I approached him in the Paving Lab late one afternoon and told him I was going to report the company’s misdeeds to the Director.  He did not wait to reply.  “No, you’re not.”  Merton said it calmly, not with anger, not with surprise.  Calmly.  So calmly, in fact, that I did not ask the obvious question:  Why not?  So calmly that I sensed his response as signaling that I was about to touch some dangerous “third rail” of secrecy.   That was the sum of our conversation.  I said “OK” and walked away quietly.

Now I do not know what really was behind his reply.  I do not know why so many City functionaries knew what was going on in our street construction projects, and were nonetheless keeping this particular company on the job.

But if I had had to swallow my senses of duty and justice, I was relieved to think that I had evaded the risk of concrete boots in the Mississippi, which was only a few blocks from my job site.