Even at a downtown intersection at 8:45 in the morning, I recognized the man the moment he rapped on my car window. He was wearing a tweed sport coat with leather patches on the elbows and a rep stripe tie. He had a bulky ring of keys in his hand, and he looked frustrated and impatient, like a late-for- work lawyer. “Can you help me?” he asked. “My car’s been towed.” I couldn’t suppress a grin. “Love to,” I said. “Get in.”
I must have come off as a bit too enthusiastic, because he hesitated for a second before opening the door. But I couldn’t control myself. I’d been waiting a year and a half for this moment, ever since the first time this guy approached me at a red light and asked for money. At the time, he called himself Derek Richardson. He said he had been on vacation in Washington for only a few hours when his car was carted off by the city’s overzealous parking police. He needed $ 48 to get it back, he said, and could I help him? He promised to repay the money the second he got back to his job at the ” Foreign Service School in Bonn, Germany.”
It was a pretty good story. I fell for it, at least. Lots of other people must have, too, because 18 months later, the guy hadn’t changed a single word. He was still Derek Richardson, still just in from Bonn. And, of course, he still needed $ 48. He was as personable as ever. “Where do you work?” he asked as we inched along through rush-hour traffic in search of a cash machine. I told him, and he nodded knowingly. “Doesn’t Mort Kondracke work at the Standard?” Sure does, I said. Great guy, too.
By the time I spotted a car of uniformed Secret Service agents parked a block from my office, Derek and I were chatting like old friends. “People are so cold-hearted,” he said. “You know, you’re the first person . . .” He stopped in mid-sentence when he saw the squad car. “What are we doing here?” he asked as we pulled up to the curb. “Oh,” I said, “there’s a great cash machine in this building,” pointing to the headquarters of the American Association of University Women. “We can get tons of money out of it.” “Cool,” he said.
Within moments I was out of the car and making a scene. “This guy stole money from me,” I yelled as passersby looked on confused. The Secret Service agents scrambled over, and the four of us spent the next half an hour on the sidewalk waiting for the District police to arrive.
I found out pretty fast that the man’s name was not Derek Richardson. According to the driver’s license he produced, he was Jeffrey A. Cohen, a 36- year-old resident of Springfield, Virginia. Nor, it became clear the longer I looked at him, was he a late-for-work lawyer. Squinting in the sunlight, chain-smoking Marlboros and shaking, Cohen looked a lot like a junkie.
A local cop finally showed up, and I explained what had happened. The cop snorted dismissively. “There’s nothing criminal here,” he said. “You gave him the money. It doesn’t matter whether he said he was Bill Clinton or Uncle Sam. You gave it to him. He didn’t do anything fraudulent. This is not a police matter.” Cohen looked at me and smiled. Then he walked away.
It wasn’t the first time he’d gotten off lightly. Cohen, according to court records I found later, has been convicted of all sorts of crimes over the past 10 years, including possession of narcotics, theft, and at least three counts of forgery. He’s served some time, but not much. Looking at his record, I became even more determined to get my money back. Before he left, Cohen had given the police his home phone number. I wrote it down on my hand as he spoke. One afternoon, I dialed it. His father, a retired Foreign Service officer, answered the phone. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said when I told him about Derek Richardson. “It comes as kind of a shock.”
Actually, it was obvious the news didn’t come as a shock at all, but as another sad reminder of what had become of his son. “We don’t see him very often,” Cohen’s father said wearily. “The only thing I can do is wait till he gets in touch with me and ask him to call you back. Maybe you can get some solid answers out of him.”
I didn’t have high hopes. But about a week later, I got a message from Cohen on my answering machine. “Hello, Tucker,” he said, sounding not at all like a drug-addicted con man, “this is Jeffrey Cohen. I don’t have your address to send the money to. I’m calling from a pay phone. I’ll try you back later.”
He didn’t. That was more than three months ago, and I’m still waiting for the call. I’m not discouraged, though. Somehow I know I’ll see Jeffrey A. Cohen again. Washington, it turns out, really is a small town.
TUCKER CARLSON
