A Visit From the FBI

My angry alcoholic boyfriend was in court the day that the FBI knocked on my door. He was on probation. He had been arrested for gun possession after he waved his gun around in his former employers face when he was drunk. Every now and then, he had to go back to court. In the meantime he lived in a domestic environment that his probation officer approved of and which helped to keep him out of jail.

I on the other hand, was in college studying to be an accountant. I had a cheap, Section 8 rent controlled apartment in Chelsea where I lived with the above mentioned probation approved boyfriend. I had a job working for an answering service and had just started a second job working for a hip restaurant in midtown as a bookkeeper.

I had offered myself up to this restaurant at an outrageously low rate, hoping to be paid off of the books. When I told him my rate, my new employer’s eyes lit up. “I am hiring you as a contractor and I am going to have to withhold social security”. I was naïve enough and young enough to accept it. I just needed a job and figured that I would do it until something else came up. At one point, my boyfriend was hired to cart trash for them during a garbage strike. He would throw the bags of garbage into his station wagon and then dump them onto another corner. He was paid off of the books.

The restaurant was very hip. I was extremely un-hip. The restaurant was a location for people with money to have a meal before they hit the clubs. It was somewhere near Times Square and was owned by two partners; the asshole and another dude who was fueled by coffee and cocaine, spoke really fast and bounced around the restaurant socializing. I spent a couple of very uncomfortable days working in the office which was occupied by some very hip people who sniffed coke off of the desk and ignored me completely. I preferred to work from home.

When the FBI showed up, I let them in. Mostly out curiosity. I kept the restaurant books in my tiny apartment. The restaurant did not use a computer and pre-historic accounting books were huge. They took up a great deal of space in my tiny living room.

I casually mentioned that I was doing bookkeeping as I moved the books off of the tiny couch so that they could sit down. They told me that they already know about my job. Once we were all seated, they showed me some pictures of several people and asked me if I recognized any of them. I didn’t particularly recognize any of the people in the photographs but they did look familiar. “I may have seen some of them on TV”, I offered to the agents. The background of the photographs looked a bit like the background of Patty Hearst's famous SLA photograph and one of the photos might even have been of Patty Hearst. They laughed and thanked me, still declining to tell me why there were there and left without incident. I never saw or heard from the FBI again.

The next day, I got a phone call from my asshole employer at the restaurant. “I’ve hired someone more experienced to do the books”, he told me. “I’m sending a messenger over to pick up them up” I was a little surprised by the suddenness of it but not particularly upset. It was a horrible job. I packed up the books and gave them to the delivery person who came to get them.

A few days after the books were picked up, I got another call from my former employer. He wanted, he said, to know where a specific receipt was. I didn’t have it. It seemed very odd that he should make such a big deal about a receipt.

I moved on from the probation approved boyfriend once he was off of probation and free to commit crimes again. A couple of years later, I caught a glimpse of a story about a woman being arrested and it all clicked into place. She looked like me, except that she was much older. My sleazy, thieving employer and his coke addled partner had mistaken me for a wanted fugitive and had turned me into the FBI for the reward. This was why he suddenly needed his books and the follow up phone call was clearly an attempt to ascertain if I had been arrested.

I never received an official accounting for the social security that the restaurant “withheld”. Fortunately, my next employer was an accountant who was outraged by my story. I had check stubs where the amount "withheld" had been very clearly recorded. “Write a letter to the IRS”, he instructed me, “send it in with your tax return. They will take care of it”. I don’t know what happened after that, but I can guess that they got a visit from the IRS. I bet that it sucked.