To quote Billy Preston, let the bad guy win every once in a while, and that's just what Jacques Cartier Bridge toll attendants appear to have done for decades.
The bridge linking Montreal to the South Shore opened in 1930 and those crossing had to pony up with cash on the barrelhead right into the attendant's palm.
The human collection system endured until 1959 when it was replaced by an electronic system.
The federal authorities in charge of the bridge were in for a complete shock after the first two months after the collection became automatic.
Their revenues had jumped 30 percent.
They concluded that a small group of toll attendants had fleeced them of massive amounts of cash over the decades.
One out of every three dollars, it would seem, the equivalent of $80,000 a month was being grabbed.
The feds were suddenly making $20,000 more per week after the attendants lost their ability to cheat the system, based the numbers of Oct. and Nov. 1959.
On May 27, 1960 cops rounded up 26 men,* who were charged with various degrees of fraud, although some of them were subsequently released.
A bit of math suggests that 26 toll booth attendants might have been engaged in pocketing $960,000 a year in 1959.
That's almost $40,000 a year each guy, back in a time when buying a house cost about $1,000.
Multiply that by 29 years.
In one of the cases, Eugene Benoit was charged with stealing $8,000 over a decade on the job, so perhaps the numbers weren't quite that high.
The toll booth drivers were pocketing the money from trucks whose drivers had to pay $1.60 to $1.75 to cross the bridge.
The truckers would give a $2 and get a $1 back, so they would be paying less than the official rate. A witness who testified to this effect was threatened in the hallways outside the courtroom.
Another witness, a supervisor, said that he didn't see any theft, as attendants had to empty their pockets before a clerk before leaving just to show that they didn't steal anything and the receipts were sealed so as to avoid doctoring.
In the end, to attendants were given $1,000 fines, another got six months in prison, not sure if there were others. (Soon after, the most-discussed accused, Eugene Benoit, was sentenced to six months and fined $2,000 for defrauding an insurance company).
One toll booth attendant wasn't happy with the way things turned out: Andre Lacas,, 21, simply went in to a booth and stole $400 of cash and tokens before getting busted and charged.
The case eventually dissolved into political bickering in Ottawa. The feds issued a report on the scandal in 1960 and one point noted that irregularities had been noted in 1934, 25 full years prior, but it had been buried.
The tolls were removed in 1962, satisfying a constant demand for their removal that Quebec leaders, including Premier Duplessis, had been making at least since 1943.
The feds were surely embarrassed to learn that the tolls they fought hard to maintain were being siphoned off by thieves, something which surely contributed to their removal soon after.
In Nov. 2011 authorities floated the idea of putting a $1 toll back on the Jacques Cartier Bridge. The new Champlain Bridge will have a toll and having a toll only on one span might cause some disruption.
*On May 27, 1960 six men were charged with theft of over $25,000. One was Eugene Benoit 38 of Chambly. He had worked there for 10- years. Others arrested: Wilfred Gagne, 39, Montreal North, Andre Paul Beauchamp, 44, St. Michel, Marcel Duceppe, 37, Montreal South, Andre J. Decary, 37, of Hogan St. Mtl, Joseph Michel Savoir, 47, of Longueuil, G. Roy Repentigny, A. Turcotte Duquest St. Mtl, L. Gagnon 25th Ave.Rosemount, W. Forest Drake St. E. Lanteigne Laval des Rapdies, A. Belisle, Thobodeau St. Edgar Wheeler, Delanadiere St., Peter Dumbrowsky Coroner Ave, R. Bolduc St. Bruno, F. Jalbert, Charleroi St, Roger Rioux, Trois Riviers, H. Adams, Manning St, Verdun, G. Henry, St. Michel, Frank Baker Marquette St, R. Toupin, LaSalle, R. Hachey Ste. Rose, Marcel Ste. Marie Ste. George St., E. Phaneuf, Foucher St. Normand Lanteigne, St. Denis St.and G. Flynn Hamilton St.
I have some of those tokens, plus a couple older ones.
ReplyDeleteTolls on the Champlain Bridge were finally abolished on May 4, 1990 following an outcry by south shore municipalities that they were being unfairly targetted. Likewise, north shore municipalities were blaming increasing traffic slow-downs due to toll collecting stations on Autoroute 15.
ReplyDeleteFinally, the then PQ government relented and abolished all bridge and autoroute tolls on the aforementioned date.
Tolls currently exist on the Autoroute 25 Olivier Charbonneau bridge which opened on May 21, 2011 connecting Montreal with Laval, and the Serge Marcil Bridge which opened on December 15, 2012--a segment of the recently-completed Autoroute 30.
Tolls are collected via new technology involving cameras identifying users' license plates as well as optional transponder tags attached to windshields.
Stay tuned: who wants to bet that some hacker will find a way to beat the new toll-collecting arrangement!
A similar thing happened in Outremont, I believe in the late 80s. In those days, there was one guy with a bucket on a trolley who used to go around emptying the parking meters. The meters only took quarters in those days and I would assume there was no way to verify how many quarters were in each meter. I do not remember the exact amount, but they found that the guy doing it have skimmed hundreds of thousands of dollars over a number of years.
ReplyDeleteJimmy Z
Crossing the Chamlpain Bridge in the 60s I remember how the red lights were flashing and the alarms ringing all the time. It was only when I was a teenager in the 70s I realized my father - along with hundreds of other drivers - were just pretending to toss money into the machines.
ReplyDeleteChamplain bridge tokens could be used as quarters in vending machines. You could buy them in bulk for something like $4 for a roll of 50 - i.e. 8 cents each. (likewise - 20 centimes French coins (worth about 4 cents each) could also double as quarters).
ReplyDeleteThe use of foreign coinage as well as slugs to trick parking meters, vending machines, and laundromats is as old as the hills.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, it didn't take a genius to figure out that a specific diameter of washer would also substitute quite nicely for a quarter.
However, the best one I ever heard was someone in the U.K. decades ago who froze water into a coin-size mold and deposited the "ice slugs" into his dwelling's gas meter.
Naturally, the ice would eventually melt and the remaining water evaporate, leaving no evidence.
The suspicious shortfall of actual coins inside the meter inevitably revealed the scam.
There was a very clever toll scam on the Champlain Bridge which went on for more than a decade. It cost 25 cents to cross the bridge but if purchased in a roll of 20 tokens, the price was 18 cents for each of them. So...a driver would give the toll booth attendant a dollar. He would be given 75 cents change and the attendant would throw a coin - presumably a quarter - into the basket except..... it wasn't a quarter. It was a token for which the attendant had paid 18 cents. So for each of these transactions - and there were thousands each day - attendants would make 7 cents. If an attendant did 500 of these a day, he'd make $35 or $165 per week, about the same as his regular salary. I knew of one guy who did this for close to ten years pocketing more than $70,000.
ReplyDelete