Fifty-year-old paper boy Martin T. Holtet of Wisconsin pleaded guilty yesterday to bilking The New York Times out of more than $200,000 through a bunch of bogus subscriptions. The Madoff of paper routes!
Holtet, who may or may not have still been living with his parents, “delivered” papers for the Times for six years, and was apparently paid for every paper he “delivered.” An enterprising businessman with Wall Street logic, Holtet submitted more than 8,500 imagineered subscriptions to the Times‘ website, increasing subscriptions in the La Crosse area of Wisconsin “from 65 daily and 103 Sunday to 2,781 daily and 2,818 for Sunday,” the La Crosse Tribune reports. And because “the Times‘ policy lets subscriptions go unpaid for months before canceling” (great business plan! I can’t understand why the newspaper industry is in crisis…), Holtet kept getting paid for delivering thousands of papers that he just dumped in a trash bin. Holtet apparently didn’t even recycle. And his exit strategy? Madoffian.
When District Judge Barbara Crabb asked, “What made you think it wouldn’t be detected?” Holtet replied, “I didn’t think (about) that.”
Let’s run the numbers on this. On Sundays, Holtet claimed to deliver 2,818 papers. Assuming he took 24 hours to deliver them, that would be two papers a minute, every minute, for 24 hours. Though that 24-hour schedule might anger the folks who got their Sunday paper after Andy Rooney showed up on 60 Minutes. So let’s assume a more reasonable delivery window of 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. That’s nearly a dozen papers per minute, or about five seconds per delivery, in a 480-square-mile county. Maybe the Times‘ subscription department ought to invest in some calculators. Though to their credit, they did fire Holtet last year — after they’d paid him $227,096.
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