Lázaro Báez pero en el far west. Empresarios y políticos involucrados, y un presidente que hizo lo que había que hacer cuando se enteró.
A diferencia de Argentina, el tongo era tan grande que nadie fue preso.
In the 1870s, the U.S. Post Office was quietly paying millions of dollars to deliver mail that barely existed, and the men behind it walked away free.
Out West, in places the railroads didn't reach yet, mail was carried by stagecoach, wagon, or horseback. The government contracted these routes out to private carriers. In the official records they were marked with three stars, standing for "celerity, certainty, and security." People called them the star routes.
Here's how the scheme worked.
A group of contractors would bid ridiculously low to win hundreds of these routes. Then a friendly official inside the Post Office would approve "improvements." More trips per week. Faster delivery times. Each change came with a huge raise in what the government paid. The contractors would split the extra money with the officials who signed off.
On one group of 93 routes, the yearly cost jumped from around $700,000 to about $2.8 million. Some of those routes carried only a handful of letters a week.
The man inside was Thomas Brady, the Second Assistant Postmaster General, who controlled the contracts. The biggest name tied to the ring was Stephen Dorsey, a former U.S. Senator from Arkansas.
And Dorsey wasn't just anybody. In 1880 he was secretary of the Republican National Committee and one of the key operators behind James Garfield's presidential campaign. After Garfield won, Republicans threw Dorsey a celebration dinner in New York. The new vice president, Chester Arthur, gave a speech joking that they'd won Indiana with "soap," which everyone understood as slang for money spread around to buy votes.
A few months later, Garfield's new Postmaster General found the star route fraud and brought it to the President. Garfield ordered a full investigation, even though it meant going after people who'd helped elect him.
Then, in July 1881, Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau. He died in September.
That made Chester Arthur president. The same Arthur who'd been joking at Dorsey's dinner. Most people assumed the investigation was dead.
It wasn't. Arthur surprised nearly everyone and let the prosecutions go forward. Dorsey, Brady, and others were put on trial in Washington in 1882.
The first trial ended with a hung jury. Then came accusations that jurors had been bribed. The second trial in 1883 ended with acquittals across the board. Dorsey was defended by Robert Ingersoll, one of the most famous lawyers and speakers in the country, and he walked out a free man.
Nobody important went to prison. The government estimated the fraud had cost taxpayers millions of dollars.
The scandal did leave a mark. Coming on the heels of Garfield's assassination by a man who felt he was owed a government job, it helped push Congress to pass the Pendleton Act in 1883, which started the federal civil service system and began ending the practice of handing out government jobs as political rewards.
It's called the Star Route scandal, and almost nobody has heard of it.