Nothing about last Thursday’s press
conference was by the book. The announcement was hasty (less than
an hour’s notice) yet the cast included the mayor, the police
chief, two city attorneys, and the director of the Lincoln Library.
Between the short notice and the long list of bigwigs, the sense of
urgency was unmistakable.
The big news? Springfield Police Department
had caught a library employee selling donated books on eBay. Lori
Burger, a $28,570-a-year library assistant, confessed that she had
taken about 2,000 books over the past 18 months and sold half of
them on an eBay subsidiary. She immediately returned about a
thousand books to the library, but the scandal made televised
newscasts that night and was splashed across the front page of the
daily paper on Friday morning.
I missed the big spectacle because I happened
to take a late lunch just as the city sent notice of the press
conference. But now I’m wondering if I missed some previous
press conferences too — like the ones exposing Springfield
firefighters and cops who pleaded guilty to driving drunk, or the
big announcement last Christmas when a maintenance
worker stole $11,000 from the credit union.
Oh wait — the mayor didn’t host a
roast for any of those employees. This shindig ending
Burger’s library career appears to be the first time city
officials formally and publicly hung an employee out to dry.
Ernie Slottag, the city’s
communications director, says Mayor Tim Davlin wanted everyone to
know that he does not “allow those kinds of activities to
occur in city government.” Asked why Davlin passed up similar
opportunities, Slottag said such decisions are made on a
case-by-case basis. “I don’t think we’ve ever had
anyone charged with stealing books and selling them on eBay,”
Slottag says. “That’s pretty unusual, don’t you
think?”
He’s got a point. Even Burger admits
that what she did was odd.
“I’m not your garden variety
criminal, no I’m not,” she sighs. “I’m an
idiot.”
Dragged into my office by her AFSCME rep (who
is filing a grievance asking the city to resolve any future
employee legal problems without public humiliation), Burger admits
that she took some donated books and sold them on half.com, the
fixed-price part of eBay.
But she says that, at the time, she
didn’t realize it was wrong. “They were books that were
not going to be added to the collection,” she
says. In fact, many were destined for the gray Dumpster-size bin near
the parking garage stairwell, where they would have been sent to a
shredder.
Textbooks, for example, are routinely
discarded by the library. “We try to discourage the donation
of textbooks,” says library director Nancy Huntley.
Volumes that are damaged, dirty or moldy also
get tossed. And book club editions of recent bestsellers
don’t usually make it to the library shelves, Huntley
confirms, because they tend to fall apart.
Back during the 2003 city budget crunch,
Burger proposed helping the library increase revenue by selling
unwanted donations online. “I thought that idea might take
some investigation,” Huntley recalls. When the budget crisis
evaporated, the proposal was shelved.
So Burger eventually tried it herself.
“I’m not saying I was innocent in all this. I’m
guilty,” she says. “I took some donations.”
However, she insists that she didn’t
steal all the books she sold on half.com. Some books she bought
from the library. Others she purchased online or at yard sales or
Goodwill. But Burger can’t prove it.
“Who the hell gets a receipt from a yard
sale?” she asks.
If she hadn’t taken the books, they
would have gone to the library’s used bookstore (where prices range from $2 for any hardback down to 50
cents per paperback), or to the Friends of the Library sale, where
prices are even lower. Instead, Burger sold them for the standard
lowest rate on half.com, earning, by her own estimate, slightly more
than $10,000.
SPD detective Matt Madonia, whose computer
expertise turned an anonymous tip into a Class 3 felony charge
against Burger, says Burger has no previous criminal record. When
he went to her home, he realized she wasn’t living a lavish
lifestyle.
“One of the things we look for is are
they stealing to support a drug habit,” Madonia says. Burger
has a different weakness: “She had a house full of
books.”
Burger, 31, and her truck-driver husband live
in Modesto (population 252), near her uninsured, medically fragile
parents, who count on her for help with hospital bills, groceries,
and daily life. “Books are my coping mechanism. They’re
my weekend,” she says. Her college degree is in British and
American literature.
She confessed and returned all the books in a
vain hope that she might somehow be allowed to keep the job she
loves. “That’s the hardest thing of all this. I love
the library,” she says. “I had no intentions of hurting
anybody there.”
This article appears in Aug 18-24, 2005.
