Integrity valued higher than a bag of money in the bank

SOUL FOOD

‘Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue,” wrote Seneca a

long time ago.

In a recent front-page photo in the Los Angeles Times, Scott

Sullivan, the former chief financial officer of WorldCom, was shown

being taken into custody on allegations of fraud, conspiracy and

submitting false statements to the Securities and Exchange

Commission.

The good fortune of Sullivan seems to have run out; his success

built, perhaps, more on vice than virtue. The fiscal high jinks

Sullivan is charged with, and those of other Wall Street icons like

him, have left our nation astonished.

More interesting, though, than the story about Sullivan, was a

story in column one. Some people in the “Ballad of the Poor

Samaritan,” would turn the wisdom of Seneca upside down.

Write it this way: Hapless and unfortunate virtue is called a

crime.

The poor Samaritan of the story is Ascension Franco Gonzales,

though the headline is somewhat misleading. Franco did not do a poor

job of being a good Samaritan. He did not walk away from an occasion

to do a good deed for a neighbor in need. Not Ascension Franco.

For those who have forgotten and for those who never heard about

him in the first place, Franco is the illegal immigrant from

Tepeapulco, Mexico, who found a bag full of money last August --

$203,000 -- and returned it to its rightful owner.

The money fell from an armored truck. There was no one around to

see Franco pick it up. He confided, when he returned the money, that,

yes, he’d thought about keeping it. He just couldn’t talk himself

into it.

So he called the police, told them his story and gave them every

cent of the money. The only thing he asked for was his laundry bag

back. Franco had stashed the money, which had fallen to the ground in

a see-through sack, in his laundry bag for safe keeping.

At the time, the minimum-wage dishwasher’s honesty was heralded as

remarkable and heroic. Many believed he’d be flooded with offers of

better jobs -- a reward of sorts, at the least.

Franco did get a reward. The armored car company gave him $25,000.

After taxes and a $700 check-cashing fee, he came away with $17,000.

He used the money to frame a house -- still unfinished -- for his

family in Mexico.

The dream of building this house for his mother is what brought

him from Mexico to work here in the first place. Of her son’s

honesty, Franco’s mother said, “I cried for joy.”

The job offers never came in, though. And over the last year,

Franco’s honesty has come to be derided by many. Franco says he is

called “un buey,” an ox, meaning he is an idiot, or mocked as, “nino

rico” -- rich kid.

They tell him the money was money from heaven, money God secured

for him. They see it as a sort of justice, a recompense for the

underpaid labor of so many working poor immigrants.

I have to wonder, who are the oxen here?

“Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil,” said the

biblical prophet, Isaiah.

Franco isn’t tempted to adopt the convictions of his critics. He

doesn’t regret what he did. It’s easy for others to criticize him, he

says, but they don’t have to live in his skin. Yet it stings him when

they insinuate his honesty belies his drive to succeed.

“They said I lacked malice that night,” the story of the poor

Samaritan quotes Franco as saying. Perhaps the right word is not

quite malice. Perhaps, he said, it’s a word somewhere between cunning

and ambition.

Perhaps cunning and ambition not unlike the cunning and ambition

that got Scott Sullivan and some others on Wall Street arrested.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer and graphic designer from

Huntington Beach. She has been interested in religion and ethics for

as long as she can remember. She can be reached at

[email protected].