Chutzpah, in the First Degree

Welfare administrators are frequently described as impersonal bureaucrats with no sensitivity to the personal needs of their clients. Welfare recipients are sometimes categorized as underprivileged persons who lack the intellectual or social skills to accommodate to modern urban life. It is not always thus.

Take, for example, the relationship between the New York City Department of Social Services and a relief client named David Davis. With supporting testimony from three doctors that his wife had asthma, he applied to the department for an air conditioner. Although 99% of the city's relief recipients do not have air conditioning, officials decided that the request fitted a vague legal definition of "medically approved special needs" and approved it. Nothing succeeds like success so Davis then persuaded doctors to prescribe "special therapeutic experiences," for which the kindly welfare officials agreed to provide extra stipends; Davis spent the money on golf lessons and greens fees for himself and his wife. Emboldened, he then pleaded for money to 1) let his wife vacation at a dude ranch, 2) send her three times a week to a psychiatrist, and 3) buy a trotting horse.

At this point, welfare administrators finally twigged. Last week Davis was in court, charged with receiving four welfare checks, cashing them, and then falsely telling caseworkers he had never received them so that he could get replacements worth $222. Technically, the charges against Davis are grand and petty larceny, but District Attorney Burton Roberts found Davis' real crime a bit different. "If there were a crime of chutzpah [gall]" he said, "this man would be charged with it in the first degree."

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