Editorials

Betty Bunton died on Sunday. She complained about shortness of breath, and an ambulance was called, but she was dead on arrival at Alta Bates. It was probably asthma, which she’d had as long as we knew her, now at least 10 years. 

Many people in Berkeley who didn’t know Betty by name knew her on sight. She was that skinny little dark-skinned African American woman, missing one foot and usually wearing a bandanna, who scooted around town in a series of hard-used manual wheelchairs. She’d been homeless for many years, even before she lost her foot. It was partly her own choice, because she said she didn’t like to sleep indoors in the summer, but she’d been kicked out of a lot of places too. She was one of the many victims of crack cocaine, a habit which few can ever beat, and she didn’t beat it.  

She made her way in the world on the basis of her considerable personal charm. No matter what shape she was in, she had a wry quip and a good story to tell as she asked for help, most often financial but sometimes a ride somewhere or some food. Her stories were often not exactly true, but they were touching. We knew her before she lost her foot, which was amputated after she survived a jump from the roof of a building which shattered her ankles. Why she was on that roof and why she jumped varied in the telling, but the most likely explanation is the terrifying paranoia which crack can sometimes cause in its users. She said she thought someone was chasing her, but it was probably her own personal demons at her heels. 

She came from Oakland, but chose Berkeley to live in because she liked the people here, and a lot of them liked her. A lot of them tried to help her over the years.  

A lawyer named Steve got her on SSI, doing all the considerable paperwork needed to prove her disability. Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is a Federal income supplement program funded by general tax revenues (not Social Security taxes). It is designed to help aged, blind, and disabled people who have little or no income, and it provides cash to meet basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. One might ask why you need a lawyer to prove that you’re disabled if you’re missing a foot, but with our safety net in tatters people have to cross incredible hurdles to get any help.  

Bill at the Roxy Deli on the corner near our office let her run a tab when she was down on her luck, as she frequently was. Many households gave her occasional money or food when she rang their doorbells, most of them probably worrying as we did that the money might go for drugs instead. After she got on SSI, friends who hoped she could beat her bad habits talked to Affordable Housing Associates, and Ali Kashani found her an accessible apartment. That lasted only until someone gave her some crack, which caused her to climb up to the roof of her unit in a drug-induced frenzy, going through a glass skylight in the process. AHA said, regretfully, that they just weren’t equipped to deal with someone like her, and told her to find another place.  

The place she found, more often than not, was on the street or on someone’s doorstep. St. Paul A.M.E. Church tolerated her sleeping under their eaves, and she sometimes attended Sunday services and took up her own collection afterwards. Her health got worse and worse, but she still slept outdoors when the weather permitted. In bad weather, she knew a few motels which would take in disreputable looking people with cash. She hated shelters—“all those crazy people in there, you can’t get any sleep.” 

Betty was delighted when the Planet materialized in her Ashby BART neighborhood. She’d take copies around to merchants and tell them that they ought to be advertising. Sometimes she passed them out to people getting off BART, not demanding but accepting some change in return. She figured out that she could find people in our office on deadline nights, and came around to ask for a few bucks when she needed them. 

Money was always a problem, of course. Her SSI stipend, if she could hold on to it, might have been enough to support her, but it frequently slipped though her fingers, undoubtedly sometimes to buy drugs. She lost a lot of her money in a blatant scam perpetrated by one of America’s major corporations, one which they’re probably still using on gullible poor people. Ever since we took over the Planet, we’ve been intending to do a real investigation of how the con worked, but we never got around to it. Now that Betty’s dead, we wish we had. 

Every time we saw her, she’d ask us when we were going to put in the Planet the story about how Wells Fargo was stealing from poor people. We’re working on it, we’d say, and we kind of were, but not hard enough. It’s a complicated story, with legal twists and turns, but it’s time now at least to lay out the bare facts about what happened to Betty. 

She arranged, on advice from us and Steve, to have her SSI check automatically deposited in an account at Wells Fargo, because it’s hard for someone with no fixed address to cash checks. The account came with an ATM card, which she would use from the beginning of the month until it stopped working towards the end of the month, and that was fine for a couple of years. Since she had no address, we let her use ours to get her statements, which she had trouble reading, so from time to time she’d come by and we’d explain them to her.  

One day a year or so ago she appeared at our door in great distress, because she’d tried to use the ATM card at the bank to take some of her money out for food, and even though it was the beginning of the month she couldn’t get any cash. We pulled out her most recent statement to take a look at it, and discovered that she seemed to have gotten some sort of automatic loan provision for up to $500 dollars additional per month. She knew nothing about this, hadn’t asked for it, and even though we’d been looking at her statements we knew nothing about it either.  

Following her normal pattern, she’d been taking out cash as she needed it, not realizing that she’d used up her monthly allotment, and had inadvertently gotten deep into debt because of this new scheme. Even worse, payments on this debt were being automatically deducted from her $800 government check as soon as the money came to the bank, before she’d seen any of it. And worst of all, the interest rate she was being charged, printed right there on the statement, seemed to be an incredible 90 percent, which guaranteed that Betty’s Social Security check was now encumbered by so much interest that it was going to be completely confiscated every month, forever.  

We studied the statement carefully, trying to figure out how this was possible. But even though one of us is a lawyer and the other has a Ph.D. and we’ve run a successful business, we couldn’t figure out what was going on. 

It seemed so incredible that we called Wells Fargo up thinking it must be a misprint or some other kind of computer error. Not at all, we were told, that’s just the way this new product works, it’s a service to our customers. It turned that this was not just any kind of a loan, but was a “Direct Deposit Advance”, paid out in the certainty that the client would be getting a check deposited at the first of the next month, so the bank was sure to be paid back. What if the customer doesn’t ask for it and doesn’t understand it, we asked. Too bad, was the answer.  

We were sure this couldn’t be legal. We called a lawyer friend who worked in a San Francisco firm which often handles lawsuits against banks, and he thought it sounded highly dubious. He agreed to look into it pro bono, spent several days researching the procedure, and came back to report, amazed, that what Wells Fargo was doing was perfectly legal, thanks to an obscure recent court decision. He had coincidentally encountered a similar case that same week. A developmentally disabled man in Marin had been having his whole disability check taken by Wells Fargo. His brother finally figured out the problem and came to the law firm looking for redress, but there didn’t seem to be any. 

The lawyer said this practice would have been illegal under California law, but Betty’s statement revealed that the “Direct Deposit Advance” loan came from “Wells Fargo Bank Nevada, N.A.”. The lender was not subject to California law since it was registered in Nevada. Someone somewhere in the Wells Fargo empire must have worked hard to figure out the loophole which essentially lets a lender take a depositor’s whole check, every month, if she has withdrawn too much money for one or two months. When you multiply Betty’s $800 a month times all the SSI recipients and other vulnerable people who have direct deposit accounts, it adds up to a big haul for Wells Fargo, and a lot of poor people in trouble.  

What could we do for Betty? We introduced her to another local lawyer, Osha Neumann, who tried to extricate her from Wells Fargo’s clutches, but couldn’t get back the money which they’d already taken as interest on her “loan.” 

What can be done about this practice? We don’t know, and we don’t even know if it’s still going on. We’ve laid this all out here so someone else can try to figure it out. Barbara Lee is on the House Banking Committee, so maybe she can take a look at remedies. Loni Hancock or Wilma Chan might want to see if anything can be done in California. We hope other publications will find other victims and do stories about them. It’s too late now to do any more for Betty, but in her memory we hope that telling this story as she wanted us to do will help someone else avoid getting conned as she was. 

What can be done for other people with the crack habit which ruined Betty’s life? Not much, certainly not while there are not enough places in treatment programs for addicts like her. Even with treatment, beating crack addiction is generally believed to be close to impossible, so it would be better to keep people from getting started. But that’s another long story, too long for today.  

—Becky O’Malley…