The Boys in the Bunkhouse by Dan Barry

Author:Dan Barry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

The years melt into decades

THIRTEEN

THE BUNKHOUSE AND THE BOSSMAN declined together. Its windows boarded up and his body breaking down, the ceiling leaks and drinking, the twinned damage of general neglect to flesh and brick. One of his crew members refused to go on any more liquor runs for Johnson, saying the drink was killing him. The basement boiler stopped working, but instead of paying for repairs, the company bought space heaters, their many extension cords coiling like snakes in a fire inspector’s nightmare.

Here Johnson was, the great and powerful TH, living like a shut-in a thousand miles from his home and family in Texas, drinking too much, hearing his headstrong assistant, Ardis Reyes, saying he needed to shave and shower. Yes, here he was, the National Association for Retarded Children’s “Employer of the Year,” 1968.

Unable to stem his own alcohol consumption, Johnson would rage instead against his occasional drinking companion, Keith Brown, who would get so drunk that Johnson sometimes had him locked in a room with a bucket until he sobered up. But the boss saved his fiercest anger for the nemesis that had hounded him for decades: the government.

In 2001, Johnson wrote a letter to his Texas congressman to complain that the US Department of Labor had been conducting on-site inspections and reviews on “more than a regular basis,” including four time-consuming audits in two years. He noted that Henry’s Turkey Service had received many awards and commendations over the years, and claimed that its work with the “mentally challenged” had saved the taxpayers more than $100 million. The company had followed every guideline set forth by every state and federal agency it had come in contact with, he wrote. “No discrepancies have ever been noted.”

This was false. Four years earlier, the Department of Labor had determined that Henry’s Turkey Service had failed to pay the men overtime for the labor they put in beyond the forty-hour workweek. But facts melted in the heat of Johnson’s wrath. If the government harassment did not end, he warned, this life-affirming, tax-saving program “will cease to exist.”

The congressman, Chet Edwards, followed up on his prominent constituent’s complaint. Months later, he forwarded to Johnson a summary report from the Labor Department, along with his regrets “that the information could not be more favorable.”

The government report laid out prior violations of the law by Henry’s Turkey Service that allowed the payment of sub-minimum wages to employees with disabilities, as well as the company’s persistent refusal to provide payroll records. At one point, it noted, Johnson had warned investigators they “would need to bring armed marshals in order to review the records.”

The report also alluded to curious bookkeeping detected by the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General. Henry’s Turkey Service was deducting $864 a month from each man’s pay for lodging, meals, and other services; multiply that by forty, every month. It was paying $600 a month in rent for the schoolhouse, yet claiming yearly expenses of $67,200; the extra $60,000, it argued,

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