Ten inches of snow blanketed the ground. The
temperature was 6 degrees below zero. Schools were closed that
Monday in January 1999 as the entire state recovered from an epic
blizzard that had claimed at least a dozen lives over the weekend,
most as a result of heart attacks suffered while people shoveled
snow.
It was just another workday at Land of
Lincoln Goodwill Industries.
Scarcely believing her eyes, job-placement
specialist Susanne Cooper watched as a bus filled with the
developmentally disabled and physically challenged pulled up that
morning at Goodwill headquarters on North 10th Street. Cooper
carried a lunch cooler for a woman who clutched her with both hands
as the pair waded through drifts to make it to the building. That
very day, Cooper wrote it all down in a diary she kept, chronicling
the bizarre world of Goodwill in Springfield:
The level of disregard for client well-being
astounds me. It’s bad enough to expect staff to report in
sub-zero weather to an unprepared building, but to expect people
with disabilities, many of whom are old and in poor health, to come
in is just outrageous! Larry said (as I remember hearing it
reported) the last time we closed due to weather that he’d
never do it again because then people thought the stores were
closed and they lost money on store sales. As if he couldn’t
close the training and program facility and specify that the stores
would be open — and how much money would he lose, anyway? I
am convinced Debbie and Larry have absolutely no concern for
clients — or staff — and no business in rehab.
That wasn’t all. Time and again in her diary, Cooper documents
fast ones pulled by executive director Larry Hupp and his top
assistant, Debra Neece, to create the illusion of a smoothly run,
professional operation. Eventually, though, the law caught up with
them, forcing their ouster from one of Springfield’s
highest-profile charities.
Last fall, prosecutors finally nailed
Hupp and Neece for deception dating back at least five years. The agency’s board of directors refused
to do anything. Even today, board members — among them some
of Springfield’s best-known citizens — duck
responsibility, saying that they shouldn’t be held
accountable for an agency that descended into chaos, lies, and red
ink.
Cooper’s written account ranges from
the tragic to the petty to the appalling. “It was a crazy world,” she says
in an interview. In 1997, Cooper writes, Goodwill was short on
donated items to sell at a silent auction that was part of a
fundraising dinner. Cooper says she had seen several things that
could have been sold, including a pewter tea set, silver flatware,
a coin collection, and a Marilyn Monroe lithograph, but these items
either disappeared or weren’t deemed appropriate by Neece or
Hupp. In the end, she says, Hupp and Neece told her to shop antique
stores until she’d found enough items that could be billed as
having come from donors and sold at the fundraiser.
Then there was the day Cooper had an
appointment scheduled with a client for a one-on-one session to
help him find work. Shortly before the client was scheduled to
arrive, Hupp told her that he was sending a half-dozen-or-so
developmentally disabled clients to her office, which doubled as a
classroom, so that she could pretend to teach a job-seeking class.
A group from the United Way was touring the premises, Cooper says,
and Hupp thought that a class would look better than just one
person.
“ ‘We have to have a dog-and-pony show’
— that’s what he would say,” Cooper recalls in an interview.
“That’s when I would just go off — that’s
probably why I’m not there anymore. I said, ‘Why do I have
to do a pretend class when I have a client scheduled?’ It was
very insulting. What is this, a [expletive] zoo? It was
‘Let’s go look at the zoo.’ ”
Darker yet are Cooper’s recollections of
how Hupp and Neece dealt with inspectors charged with determining
whether Goodwill was doing a good job of helping the disadvantaged. Neece came into her office in January 1998
and announced that a former employee would be flying in from
Phoenix to help the agency prepare for an accreditation survey by
the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities, a
national organization that ensures that organizations such as
Goodwill are trustworthy and provide quality services to the
disabled. The woman, who did not return messages left on her home
and cellular phones — would be in town for at least one
month.
The CARF survey was vital for the nonprofit
agency, which runs seven thrift stores, including four in
Springfield, and uses the proceeds to help the handicapped. The
organization’s very existence was at stake. The state
requires accreditation as a condition for receiving public funds,
and Goodwill was collecting nearly $675,000 in government grants
each year. Furthermore, Goodwill Industries International, the
Maryland-based organization that oversees more than 200 Goodwill
chapters, requires its affiliates to be accredited.
Cooper, who’d worked at Goodwill since
1986, says that she and other employees could have gotten the
paperwork together for surveyors, who typically spend three days
combing through records and talking to staff. Instead, Neece and
Hupp decided to bring in an outsider in from Arizona. In addition
to giving her a paycheck, Cooper says, Goodwill also set the
ex-employee up in an apartment. As a new mother, the ex-employee had her own
priorities.
“She wouldn’t come without her baby,”
Cooper recalls. “We had to hire a friggin’
babysitter.” Goodwill also provided a daycare center —
in Cooper’s office. “I asked, ‘Where am I supposed to
be?’ ” recalls Cooper, who was so taken aback that she
snapped photographs. “She [Neece] said, ‘You can be
here with the baby,’ like it’s the most normal thing in
the world. They bought a crib. I couldn’t believe it. I was
flabbergasted. This babysitter would come and take care of the
baby. We all kind of played with him.”
By that time, Cooper’s career at
Goodwill was drawing to a close. Although she hadn’t had any
regular work assignments in months, she says she remained on the
payroll for about a year for doing little or nothing. Still, her
office, which Cooper also used as a classroom to teach job-seeking
skills, was no place for an infant. “I was still getting
calls from clients,” says Cooper, who was fired in 1999.
“There would be a baby crying in the background. It was just
bizarre.”
Cooper and other employees
suspected that something beyond daycare arrangements wasn’t
right.
No one seems to really look at what’s
going on. Staff disgusted that everything is fabricated.
Don’t know what’s being hidden, but do know that since
Feb. 24, when call of inspection came in, there has been a frenzy
to complete time studies and locate files. A lot of evidence has
been altered. Irregularities apparently more serious and more all
encompassing than we could imagine.
That diary entry was written in 1998, one
month after Cooper’s office was turned into a nursery.
Inspectors from the U.S. Department of Labor had just arrived to
determine whether Goodwill employees were being properly
compensated. While employees spirited developmentally disabled
workers out a back door, Hupp invented a story about burst water
pipes closing down operations, and everyone stayed home the next
day, according to state police and Cooper’s diary. The ruse worked so well that Hupp used a
similar ploy the next year, when a state Department of Human
Services surveyor came calling to determine whether Goodwill was
doing a good job. Sorry, Hupp fibbed, but we’re closed
because the boiler broke and there isn’t any heat.
“Many witnesses suggested Goodwill’s maintenance man .
. . helped turn off the boiler that day to help fool the DHS
surveyor,” writes Illinois State Police Sgt. Rodney Miller in
a 2005 report confirming many of the misdeeds Cooper documented.
With the state none the wiser, the survey was postponed. That was just three days after Hupp demanded
that everyone come to work in the wake of a blizzard.
Neither Hupp nor Neece returned calls seeking
comment for this story. Cooper says she kept the diary partly as a
CYA move and partly because she’s a compulsive note-taker.
Notes she made recording the progress of a client who did clerical
work for the state Department of Children and Family Services in
1998 bear out her penchant for recordkeeping. Each day, Cooper accompanied the
developmentally disabled woman to state offices to help her
succeed. In minute detail, she describes the woman’s struggle
to learn a filing system and her triumphs, such as successfully
completing an assignment. Similarly, Cooper kept copious notes as
she gently persuaded another client not to apply for a promotion to
a state post for which she was not qualified. In both cases, Cooper
had stepped in to replace a job coach who had unexpectedly
resigned. Her caring nature and skill won her accolades from
outside Goodwill. “Susanne’s dedication and commitment
to the well-being of her clients is appreciated,” writes
Christina M. Griffin, DCFS personnel manager, in a thank-you letter
to Hupp. “Goodwill is fortunate to have her on
staff.”
Hupp was the essence of terse a year later in
a “To Whom It May Concern” letter of recommendation he
signed after letting Cooper go. “Ms. Cooper was laid off due
to lack of work,” Hupp writes. “Ms. Cooper work [sic]
cooperatively with area agencies and businesses. We wish Susanne
much luck with her job search and know that she will find a
position that matches her qualifications and experience.”
Today Cooper works at the Springfield Center for Independent
Living, which helps people with disabilities live on their own. Getting laid off hurt.
“Goodwill paid better than most any
other place,” says Cooper, who worked as a job-placement
specialist at a different social-service agency before Goodwill
hired her 20 years ago. “I may never recover from not working
at Goodwill anymore — I’m making now what I was making
in 1986.”
Until the end drew near, Cooper believed that
the agency did good work and really helped people. She recalls
landing grants to help disadvantaged youth and get welfare
recipients off the dole and into the workforce. She remembers
applying for grants to help the homeless. But she says that the
agency’s focus shifted away from everything except the stores
and the physically disabled or mentally impaired. She says that her
workload vanished because Goodwill stopped applying for grants to
help the at-risk youth and welfare recipients in whom she
specialized.
“That was the excuse they used: We
don’t have those grants any more, so there’s really
nothing for me to do,” Cooper says. “I went to see an
attorney after I left. He basically said Illinois is an at-will
state and they can let anyone go for no reason at all. He wanted to
know what I wanted. I really didn’t want my job back. “I said I wanted him — Larry
— to be held accountable.”
Law enforcement steps in
A half-dozen years later, Hupp
has finally been held accountable — but not by the Goodwill
board of directors, which has the power to hire and fire the
agency’s executive director and is charged with keeping the
charity on course. The board includes some of
Springfield’s most prominent citizens. For nearly three
years, they stood by while investigators with the state police, the
FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service built cases against Hupp
and Neece.
The board was informed of the investigation
in the spring of 2003, shortly after it began. Last fall, Hupp
admitted that he’d ordered employees to falsify records as
part of a scheme that cost taxpayers an estimated $38,000. Neece
confessed that she’d helped. Both were forced to resign, but
not by the board. Rather, Neece and Hupp left after the U.S.
attorney made an offer they couldn’t refuse: Quit or be
prosecuted.
In addition to cooking the books, Hupp was
running a leaky financial ship. In fiscal year 2004, the most
recent year for which federal tax returns are available, Goodwill
lost nearly a quarter-million dollars. Since the investigation
started, Goodwill has spent at least $90,000 on lawyers. Tax
returns for fiscal year 2005, which ended in June of last year, are
scheduled to become public within a month, and they likely
won’t be pretty. The agency’s interim director, who
calls himself a “crisis consultant,” says that Goodwill
was losing money when he arrived in December to clean up after
Hupp, whose pay soared while the agency’s finances tanked.
“The condition of the agency when I
came in was fragile,” says James Verpoten, a Goodwill
superhero of sorts who rescues troubled chapters that call national
headquarters seeking help. “This Goodwill has to make some
very tough decisions to turn it around financially.”
Bottom
line, he says, Goodwill should be generating about $8 million a
year. Instead, it’s been taking in between $6 million and
$6.5 million a year since 2002, according to records on file with
the Internal Revenue Service. More bad news may be on the horizon: An
ex-employee who says she was fired for cooperating with
investigators has filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit that’s
just beginning to work its way through the court system. State
appellate court judge Thomas Appleton, who has served on the
Goodwill board for a quarter-century, won’t comment on the
merits of the case, but he doesn’t sound ready to cave.
“We’re aggressively defending it,” the judge
says.
Diane Cox, a former Goodwill program manager
who’s suing the agency for more than $50,000, says that she
was fired in October 2003, just one month after testifying before a
grand jury. In court papers, Cox says that she told the grand jury
that Goodwill concealed an employee’s felony conviction from
the state, doctored documents to show that employees had undergone
training that had not actually been accomplished, claimed that
staffers held jobs that they didn’t really have, and retested
disabled clients to show that they needed more help than initial
tests had indicated, thereby allowing Goodwill to collect more
state money. Several of Cox’s accusations were borne out in
statements-cum-confessions that Hupp and Neece signed last year to
avoid prosecution.
A grand-jury investigation. Huge legal fees.
A river of red ink. Falsification of documents by top
administrators. All this begs the question: Why didn’t the
board —which includes two judges, the Sangamon County
sheriff, a bank president, and a television-news anchorwoman
— get rid of Hupp volition instead of relying on
the U.S. attorney’s office to hold him accountable?
“We weren’t capable of figuring
out what the truth was — it was a ‘he said,
she-said’ situation,” Appleton answers. “There
was no real reason, until this whole thing blew up, to even think
about making a change.”
Even after signing an agreement with the feds
in October, promising to resign, Hupp kept his job for a month.
Rather than cut him a lump-sum check for accrued vacation, sick
leave, and other benefits, the board kept paying Hupp his full
salary until last month. Even now, Appleton dismisses the charges
against Hupp and Neece as more form than substance —
paperwork snafus as opposed to deliberate falsehoods.
“It’s more a bureaucratic imperative than anything
else,” he says. Appleton also won’t concede that
Goodwill improperly collected $38,000 in Medicaid funding.
“I
don’t know that the state’s ever found that,” he
says. But the prosecutor who demanded
accountability and forced Hupp’s ouster says that this was
much more than crossing t’s and dotting i’s.
“Of course it’s a serious matter
— it’s an extremely serious matter,” says former
U.S. Attorney Jan Paul Miller, who is now in private practice.
Miller points out that Hupp admitted, in writing, that he’d
ordered employees to falsify records to mislead state inspectors
who were trying to find out whether Goodwill qualified for state
money.
As for the $38,000 in Medicaid money, Miller points to a
paragraph in a pretrial diversion agreement Hupp signed in November
to avoid prosecution: Between June 2002 and April 2003, various
Goodwill employees created records that falsely reported hours of
vocational rehabilitation services that Goodwill provided its
clients. The submission of the false records resulted in an
overpayment of approximately $38,000 to Goodwill.
“I don’t think it can be any
clearer than that,” Miller says. “Hupp admitted he was
responsible. I will say that when you have, as was admitted here, a
head of an organization such as this, directing folks to falsify
records regarding basic job training, it can’t help but have
a detrimental effect on the individuals that Goodwill is supposed
to be serving.”
Rich Behl, a program service administrator
with the state Department of Human Services, says two of the three
employees for whom Goodwill claimed to be providing rehabilitation
services were actually temporary workers hired through an agency.
The workers sorted clothing and other donated goods, says Behl,
himself a former Goodwill employee.
“They, realistically,
didn’t need job coaches,” Behl says. He recalls that
they were independent enough that they had drivers licenses.
Pointing out that he wasn’t here when
Hupp got in trouble, Verpoten — who is leaving Springfield at
the end of this month — won’t say whether the board
should have fired the director before the feds forced him to
resign. What if he had been on the board? “I would have put
him on a leave of absence pending further investigation,” he
says.
That would have been silly, Appleton says.
“What’s the financial benefit of doing that?” he
asks. “By putting him on leave, I’ve got to pay his
salary plus someone else to do his job, and now I’m down a
whole bunch of money. That’s dumb.” Although Goodwill was performing
far below its potential, Hupp and Neece saw their salaries
skyrocket. Between 1998 and 2004, Neece’s salary
went from $53,500 to $75,540. Hupp, who was getting paid $78,500 in
1998, did even better. In fiscal year 2001, for example,
Hupp’s pay shot from $84,500 to $106,880, an increase of more
than $22,000 in one year. He didn’t get a raise the next
year, but his salary zoomed to $131,444 in fiscal year 2003, an
increase of nearly $25,000. The agency’s revenues that year
exceeded expenses by less than $5,500, thanks in part to tens of
thousands of dollars in legal fees that started showing up on IRS
records as the criminal investigation got under way.
In fiscal year
2004 alone, Goodwill spent nearly $56,000 on attorneys. Hupp saw a
pay cut that year — his salary went from more than $130,000
to $117,415. Appleton says that Hupp’s annual raises
were triggered by bonuses. “We’re talking store sales
now — if the incentives were met, he got a bump,”
Appleton says. The judge points out that revenue under Hupp
increased year after year. “When I went on the board [in
1980], store sales were at $1.5 million,” Appleton says.
“When he left, they were approaching $6 million. Every year,
it got better. If you’re sitting on a board, looking at a
benchmark, it looks pretty good.”
In retrospect, however, Appleton concedes
that the agency didn’t live up to its potential. He agrees
with Verpoten’s assessment that revenue should be in the
neighborhood of $8 million. “There were some things that
could have been done better,” he says.
Besides Appleton, the 16-member board
includes Sangamon County Sheriff Neil Williamson, Sangamon County
Circuit Court Judge Patrick Kelley, Springfield Mass Transit
District director Richard Fix, Long Elevator vice president Mike
Long, and WICS-TV (Channel 20) anchorwoman Julie Staley. How could all of these community leaders be
so oblivious?
“The board was isolated,”
Verpoten offers. “The executive officer did not share with
the board of directors, nor did he share with the staff. That is
not the way a nonprofit should work. We need to be
transparent.”
Cooper, the former job-placement specialist,
says that employees didn’t dare contact board members to air
concerns. “We were not supposed to have any contact with
them,” she says. “We weren’t supposed to know who
they were. I thought it was odd that the board never came around
and met the staff people. If you went to the annual silent auction,
no one made an effort to introduce them.”
Appleton says that the staff is free to speak
with him or other board members. “I don’t think
there’s a single board member who would decline to hear from
an employee,” he says. Was that made clear to employees?
“That, I doubt,” Appleton answers. Would employees have
known that the board had an open-door policy? “I don’t
know,” the judge responds.
Under terms of the deal with prosecutors he
signed last fall, Hupp agreed not to seek employment with any
agency that helps the developmentally disabled and receives more
than 5 percent of its gross revenue from the federal government. He
is now under the supervision of federal probation officers and must
obey all laws. If he does not, or if he violates any provision of
the agreement, which expires next year, prosecutors can file
criminal charges. Neece, who also admitted to wrongdoing, signed a
similar pretrial diversion agreement to avoid prosecution.
A do-nothing board
Even as Goodwill melted down, board members
treated the charity as little more than a notch on their
résumé belts. By all appearances, the board
wasn’t in the business of seeing or hearing evil. Sheriff Williamson, who’s been on the
board for three years, says he didn’t find out about the
allegations against Hupp until last year. That’s more than a
year after the FBI and state police served a search warrant at
Goodwill headquarters in June 2003.
“I was totally shocked,” says
Williamson, who estimates he’s missed about two-thirds of the
monthly board meetings and hasn’t attended one since
Thanksgiving. “I had known the director, Larry, for quite
some time. I always thought that the operation was run
professionally, with no problems. Of course, the board, we
don’t really have a lot to do with the day-to-day operations,
per se. We meet once a month and pretty much rubber-stamp
what’s already been done.”
After answering a few questions, Williamson
starts saying that Judge Kelley should answer for the board because
he’s the chairman. Although a state-police report summarizing
the highlights of investigators’ findings is dated Feb. 8,
2005, Kelley says that the board was in the dark until the very end
of Hupp’s tenure, late last year.
Even today, Kelley
isn’t familiar with tales of broken pipes and boilers,
invented by Hupp to hold off government inspectors, that are
chronicled in the police report. The board never spoke with anyone from the
state Department of Human Services, the state agency that first
discovered wrongdoing. Kelley says that the board was kept apprised
of the investigation by J. William Roberts, a former U.S. attorney,
Sangamon County state’s attorney, and counsel to former Gov.
Jim Edgar who is now a managing partner at Hinshaw Culbertson, one
of the biggest law firms in Illinois.
“He gave us information
about where the investigation was going,” Kelley says.
Roberts did not return a phone call from Illinois Times. Now that the investigation is over, Kelley
agrees that Goodwill underperformed financially under Hupp and that
Hupp misled state inspectors.
“Certainly we can and will do
better than we have,” Kelley says. “I see it as a
cathartic event.” Other board members are not so enlightened.
“Larry Hupp and Debby were a delight to
work with,” says Julie Staley of WICS. “They were full
of integrity and are very much missed.”
Internal Revenue Service records show that
Staley has been on the board since at least June 2003. She remains
on the board today, according to her biography on the television
station’s Web site, which also notes that she was honored in
2002 by United Cerebral Palsy for her reporting on people with
disabilities. Staley claims that she had no power to do
anything about any misdeeds, real or alleged, on the part of Hupp
or Neece, even though she was on the board when the federal
investigation began.
As the questions get tougher during a short
interview, which ends when she abruptly hangs up, the news kitten
turns into a lion, saying it’s not fair to hold her
accountable for what happened at Goodwill, whether the issue is
suspected criminal activity or lackluster financial returns. “I wasn’t on the board when all
this went down,” she says in a rising voice. “I really
came in after the fact. I was not here before it happened. I
wasn’t here when the alleged events happened. I’m just
after the fact. “I really was an innocent
bystander.”
Sins at Goodwill went beyond
innocent paperwork mistakes. On Hupp’s watch, deliberate
violations of safety rules and regulations put real people at real
risk, according to insiders familiar with the investigation.
The first crack in Goodwill’s veneer
appeared in March 2003, when a man named Fred Malcolm called the
state Department of Human Services to ask why he hadn’t
received a certificate from the state documenting that he’d
been trained to watch over the developmentally disabled. Maryam
Mostoufi, a bureau chief in the department’s Division of
Developmental Disabilities, answered the phone.
Malcolm told Mostoufi that two other people
who’d been trained by Goodwill and were sitting in the same
room with him had gotten their certificates. He also told Mostoufi
something most disturbing. Illinois requires 40 hours of classroom
instruction, plus 80 hours of on-the-job training, before
certifying someone to look after the developmentally disabled. Yet,
Malcolm told Mostoufi, Goodwill had told him and others that they
were qualified after just two or three days in a classroom.
“The math didn’t work out,”
Mostoufi says.
After a little checking, Mostoufi learned why
Malcolm hadn’t gotten his certificate. He’d been
convicted of writing bad checks more than a decade earlier. As a
felon, he couldn’t get a certificate unless he or Goodwill
asked the state for a waiver — but Goodwill hadn’t
informed Malcolm of the requirement, nor had the agency applied for
a waiver on his behalf. It was enough smoke to justify a spot
inspection of Goodwill’s training records.
State surveyors
arrived, appropriately, on April Fool’s Day — but they
weren’t fooled. Signatures were obviously forged on sign-in
sheets for training sessions held to teach Goodwill employees how
to oversee developmentally disabled workers. The attempt at
trickery would have been laughable if the stakes weren’t so
high. Names were misspelled on signatures with handwriting that
didn’t jibe from one purported training session to the next.
At least as serious were photocopied Red Cross cards that were
supposed to show that employees who watched over the
developmentally disabled had undergone first-aid and CPR training.
It appeared that employee names had been
written over whited-out sections so that it would look as if
workers had cards and had undergone training. Original cards were
missing — Goodwill couldn’t come up with anything but
photocopies. DHS checked with the American Red Cross and learned
that there were no records showing that Goodwill employees with
photocopied cards had gotten the required medical training.
This was a serious matter. In addition to
taking drugs that put them at risk of adverse reactions to
medication, the developmentally disabled are more prone to seizures
than most people. Yet here they were working at Goodwill
headquarters, with no one within eyesight or earshot qualified to
help in the event of a medical emergency. Mostoufi contacted the state police. Yes
— police were interested. The FBI was called in.
Investigators made plans to serve a search warrant. But this
wasn’t going to be a break-down-the-door, run-of-the-mill
assignment.
Before the cops went in, experts with DHS gave them
printed handouts and trained them in communicating and otherwise
dealing with the developmentally disabled: Use soft voices. Be
patient. Don’t wear clothes that might alarm them. Allow
these folks plenty of time to digest and process what you’re
saying. “I have to tell you that the state
police and the FBI were remarkable,” Mostoufi says.
“They were just like sponges. They really wanted that
information. I have never seen such a level of
professionalism.”
The search team walked away with more than 60
boxes of documents. The State
Journal-Register duly reported
the raid on June 19, 2003, along with comments from Hupp, who
professed complete surprise. The executive director who would later
sign a deal to avoid prosecution said he had no idea why the police
had come. “We’re just cooperating and, as I
indicated, we’re working internally from the management
standpoint to make sure we don’t have any problems,”
Hupp told the newspaper. “And hopefully we’ll get this
issue resolved quickly.” But it didn’t get resolved quickly. 2003 turned into 2004, then 2005.
Finally
prosecutors proposed pretrial diversion agreements, promising not
to prosecute Hupp and Neece if they resigned. Before offering the
deal, the prosecutors checked with Mostoufi and other DHS
officials, who gave their blessing. Like so many cases of white-collar fraud,
this one was complex. The agencies involved ranged from
social-service offices to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
which was concerned about an underground storage tank at Goodwill
headquarters. “Hupp lied to the [EPA] investigators and
claimed the tank had been inoperable years before he became
executive director at Goodwill,” Sgt. Miller writes in his
police report summarizing the case against Hupp and Neece.
“They explained it would be two to five
years before we could go to trial,” Mostoufi recalls.
“During that period of time, none of us could guarantee that
Hupp and Neece would be gone — it would be quite possible
that they would be there until the time of the trial. There was a
culture that had developed there that could not change until they
left. The culture could possibly continue in a way that could
jeopardize the health, safety, and welfare of the individuals
Goodwill is supposed to help. We could not assist the agency in
providing technical assistance we needed to ensure health, safety,
and welfare. There was a climate of distrust.”
Cooper, whose journal was scrutinized by
investigators who had interviewed her more than a year earlier,
read about the deals in the newspaper. “I just didn’t think it was
enough,” she says. “It was better than nothing, I
guess.”
The aftermath
Everywhere he turned, Verpoten
found a mess when he took over from Hupp in December.
The agency was losing $30,000 a year on one
contract alone in which clients worked as janitors. Stores were
staffed with temporary workers, which was costing the charity as
much as $200,000 a year in fees paid to temp agencies. There was no
human-resources department. There were no limits on administrative
expenses. The same accounting firm audited the books year after
year without having to bid on the work. None of the managers of the charity’s
seven stores had met each other. Stores looked cluttered and dingy.
Employees working amid fear and dissension did what they were told
without asking questions or coming up with suggestions. The agency
used unattended wooden sheds to collect donations, a practice that
ended 20 years ago at modern Goodwills, which have donors bring
items to stores instead of leaving stuff in areas open to thieves
and the weather. Besides giving staff a chance to personally greet
and thank donors, in-person collections reduce the likelihood of
receiving junk that must be hauled to a landfill. The agency raked money from stores in
Jacksonville, Champaign, and Bloomington but provided no services
to the disadvantaged in those areas.
“That’s the old
way; that’s not the new way,” Verpoten says. “The
new way says you don’t take something from a community
without giving something back. We’ve got such fantastic
things going on around the country. We’re trying to pull this
one up by its bootstraps and get it on track.”
During the past 15 years or so, scores of
Goodwills across the nation have transformed themselves from musty
secondhand outlets to gleaming storefronts that generate cash to
help the disadvantaged. The charity, founded in 1902, flourished
during the 1990s, when Fred Grandy, a former congressman who played
Gopher on the television series The
Love Boat, became head of the national
organization. Under Grandy’s leadership, Goodwills became
much more than junk stores that benefited the handicapped.
Shopgoodwill.com, an online auction service patterned after eBay,
went into business in 2000, attracting bids of hundreds of dollars
for items that might previously have brought in just a few bucks.
Besides the physically and mentally challenged, Goodwill started
helping welfare recipients, the homeless, newly released convicts,
battered women, foreign refugees, and others who needed a hand to
make it on their own. But not in Springfield, where the focus is on
the severely mentally and physically disadvantaged.
Verpoten envisions an agency that will one
day branch out to Decatur and other communities, helping a wide
array of people in need, not just the disabled. But Goodwill first
must stabilize itself. Plans are afoot to ensure that residents of
Bloomington and other towns with Goodwill stores are represented on
the board of directors. The board this week is scheduled to vote on
a new set of bylaws that will include, among other things, term
limits for board members.
The agency has put its auditing work out
for bid and adopted a policy limiting administrative expenses to 12
percent of revenue. A human-resources department is in place. The
board expects to hire a permanent executive director any day now.
And Goodwill has repaid the $38,000 the state found had been
inappropriately collected from taxpayers, Verpoten says.
Temporary workers have been replaced with
employees who earn more than $9 an hour and can get benefits.
Unattended collection boxes are being eliminated. Employees are
encouraged to ask questions and offer their opinions. Supervisors
have been sent to training seminars to learn the right way to run a
Goodwill.
“The best way I can describe it is,
everyone is talking about the new Goodwill,” says Verpoten,
who plans to return soon to Buffalo, where he’ll rest up for
a few weeks before going to Arizona to help another Goodwill.
“We’ve brought everything out in the open. I
wouldn’t be backing out now if this chapter didn’t have
a good future. We fixed it.”
Mostoufi is encouraged.
“We’ve seen a lot of
progress,” she says. “I think he [Verpoten] has done a
very good job. I think he’s very sincere. He has a good way
of opening things up and making the staff feel valued.”
The renaissance was palpable last week at the
Wabash Avenue store, which celebrated a grand reopening after being
closed for more than a month to repair tornado damage. The store is
spotless, featuring racks neatly arranged with clothing marked with
color-coded tags to streamline inventory control. This
doesn’t look like a junk store — a dozen pairs of
lightly used Doc Martens are on display in a glass case, with
prices ranging from $11.75 to $23.75.
More than 25 people stand in line when the
doors open. Michelle Sgro is at the front, having arrived nearly an
hour before the ribbon-cutting. Sgro sees no shame in shopping at Goodwill,
where she once found a baseball glove autographed by Mark McGwire
that she snapped up for a dollar or two. She buys shoes for herself
— her closet measures 12 feet by 12 feet and is nearly full
— and shirts for her husband, who works in construction.
“He’s the only builder who builds in Ralph
Lauren,” she boasts.
Sgro knows Verpoten — she bumped into
him a week earlier while shopping at a different Goodwill. She
gives him good marks, except that she thinks merchandise needs to
stay on shelves longer before it’s sold by the pound on the
rag market. Clothing is removed so fast, she says, that the racks
look empty. It’s a minor quibble, one that Verpoten says is
being addressed.
Appleton is the only board member present,
and he keeps a low profile, leaving media interviews to Verpoten.
Facing the cameras, the interim director starts talking about
rebuilding Goodwill, reaching beyond the disabled, and otherwise
recovering from the Hupp years. Mark Thoma, a reporter for WICS,
looks confused. “Rebuilding — you mean
nationally?” Thoma asks. No, Verpoten answers, here in
Springfield. Thoma wants to know whether this is about the tornado
or something more. Stick with the tornado, Thoma advises —
that’s what we’re interested in.
The story glows in the State Journal-Register business
section the next day, noting how clean and polished the reopened
store looks. No mention is made of Goodwill’s newest
competition just down the road. Less than a mile away, Hupp and Neece are
opening a new thrift store in a strip mall at the intersection of
Wabash and Chatham. Opening day is expected within a month.
Staff writer Dusty Rhodes contributed to this report
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 3, 2006.
