Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 4, 1990 TAG: 9005040062
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ART HARRIS THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: BOCA RATON, FLA. LENGTH: Long
Why does the housewife act so perky as she bounces down the aisles in a red dress, black stockings and high heels, gold loop earrings dancing, her cart piled high with: Almond Joys for a beautiful 7-year-old daughter she won't see for a while, Jerky Treat chew sticks favored by her two cute Doberman attack dogs, Duncan Hines cake mixes that her husband has plenty of time to bake now that he's out of work as a jai alai player?
Her goodies are free.
FREE!
Well, almost free.
"I love free stuff," says the bodacious bargain hunter, foraging in her cardboard-box file for discount coupons to match with items on the shelf on the eve of her departure for Club Fed. "Why buy a product when you can get something for nothing? I hate to pay."
With no product loyalty, it helps to have a palate you don't have to pamper. "I'll eat anything as long as it's on sale or I've got coupons," she says, ignoring healthy Idaho potatoes for fried Micro Magic Tater Sticks, scorning rival brands for thick and hearty Ragu spaghetti sauce, then grabbing squeezably soft Charmin toilet paper and forsaking Clorox for sweet honey-scent Gain detergent. It's all for her stockpile at home.
Down the aisle, there's Kevin, 25, husband No. 2, scratching his head, wearing white Converse tennies she bought with a coupon deal. "I've been trying to teach him how to shop so when I go to jail he won't have to pay full price," she says.
Indeed, it's his shakedown cruise. He's going to have to go it alone while his coupon queen, clipped last year by U.S. postal inspectors in the first undercover sting of its kind against coupon counterfeiters, does time in a minimum security prison in Marianna, Fla.
Today, she has $20 in cash (plus coupons) to pay for two carts groaning under the weight of Chef Boy-ar-dee pasta, Schweppes ginger ale, Minute Maid orange juice, Tree Top apple juice, four bottles of Gatorade, Bounce fabric softener, Sara Lee petite all-butter croissants, Nivea hand cream, Ronzoni pasta shells, Oscar Mayer hot dogs and so much more.
Connie holds her breath at the checkout, as a neophyte cashier named Pam rings it all up. At first Pam's in awe, then she grows suspicious as the customer forks over a fistful of coupons for credit.
"These aren't phony, are they, like that lady I saw on TV who's going to jail?" she asks.
"That lady is me," says Connie, blushing with the afterglow of criminal celebrity that got her courted by Geraldo, though she opted for Donahue instead. "No, these are coupons I've saved for a long time. They're OK."
A manager comes over, gives a nod. Now it's time to subtract her coupon credits from the total: $157.63. Bing, bing, bing, goes Pam. Down, down, down comes the total.
Connie owes $19.72 for the groceries.
In her go-go days before the bust, Connie Arvidson earned upwards of $40,000 a year prowling for garbage in dumpsters along Federal Highway here. That's not counting mythic forays to supermarkets to redeem freebies with coupons clipped from a garage full of stored refuse she beheld as gold. She brags about bagging $300 in groceries for $8 and change. As word of such scores spread, she was catapulted onto local radio talk shows; newspapers here featured her advice to the bargain-hungry, as she preached the gospel of garbage, uttering her coupon catechisms.
For Connie, nighttime was the right time for bagging trash. What she sought on her nocturnal prowls to the bins were discarded products that promised rebate checks for proofs of purchase, valuable currency in the world of coupon clippers.
She waited. And gradually, her mailbox began to fill up with checks, $1 here, $5 there, until, glory be, she was sometimes scoring upwards of $500 a day in rebates from companies rewarding her for items she'd never even bought.
"America is a wonderful country," says the Portuguese immigrant, waxing patriotic about her adopted homeland.
Indeed, long before she hooked up with a West Texas coupon con man and "greed supplanted need," as one federal agent put it, coupons and rebates bought her family the good life: color TVs, a VCR, toys, a pink four-poster bed and $1,300 in savings bonds for her daughter from a diaper company that offered college money for proofs of purchase, a water bed for her and Kevin.
With her first husband, Kevin's older brother, Danny, she bought a comfortable $100,000 house in a middle-class subdivision, remodeled it, put down gleaming marble floors. She once drove a Corvette and a red BMW.
On her demo shopping spree, she plops down coupons to buy 10 cans of deodorant. Ten cans! Does anyone smaller than King Kong need that much?
"Eventually," she says, shuddering at the very thought of running out of anything.
It's all so sad, she reflects now in her sparse living room, maintaining innocence despite the January verdict of a Dallas jury that she was guilty on three of six counts of mail fraud and conspiracy. She was convicted for her part in a nationwide scheme to buy and sell bogus coupons worth $2 million through a West Texas counterfeiter named David Rackmill. She denies she knew his goods were phonies. Arvidson claims she was simply responding to what turned out to be "too good to be true" ads in a coupon newsletter in June 1988.
To pay her legal fees, she refinanced her home, discounted $20,000 worth of beloved garbage in her garage to a coupon clipper for a bargain $1,000 cash, sold her freezer, a grandfather clock, the Beemer, the 'Vette, the pickup, declared bankruptcy. As for the stockpile of food she squirreled away, it's dwindling fast.
"I never did anything wrong in my life," she sighs. "I was just a poor immigrant looking for the American dream."
"Only if the American dream is ripping off manufacturers and the public," scoffs Steven Sucsy, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case. "That's not my version of the American dream. She was dealing in counterfeit coupons by the thousands, ordering them and selling them, knowing what they were."
Whatever, it began to unravel March 31, 1989, when U.S. Postal Inspector Sam Prose burst into a trailer 70 miles north of Abilene, Texas, his .357 Magnum drawn. "FREEZE!" he shouted. David Rackmill put his hands up. He was in his mid-40s, a convicted con man, ex-crack addict, divorced, a used-car salesman wanted in an unrelated mail fraud case.
Prose, 42, was serving that arrest warrant and acting on tips that Rackmill dealt in bogus rebate coupons. The suspect consented to a search.
"That's when we saw a few coupons and phone bills" with lots of calls to Coupon Connie, says Prose, an 18-year veteran inspector who hates coupon shopping even though his wife does it.
But he saw no super stash of counterfeits, and the suspect was mum. It was a Friday, too late to make bail. Prose figured jail might soften him up. By Monday, Rackmill was ready to deal.
Rackmill had used a printer to crank out phony product codes for Luv diapers, Wesson oil, Orville Redenbacher popcorn, Folgers coffee, batteries by Duracell. "These were high dollar, $9 off Maxwell House, free Folgers worth $10, free Luvs worth $20," says Prose, who calculated Rackmill printed 600,000 phony coupons worth $2 million as "the top of a pyramid. He'd sell you $5 worth for 25 cents and let you resell it for 50 cents, a sweet deal."
During the next three months, using Rackmill as bait, agents taped conversations with clients, including one of his biggest, Coupon Connie, according to testimony and records introduced at the trial. "Over about six months, she paid him $30,000 to $40,000 for coupons worth easily 10 times that much," reselling them for $80,000 in profits, says Prose.
With Rackmill playing along, inspectors set up the sting, mailing off counterfeit samples to Arvidson and his other clients. Only she was wary, antsy. Unknown to Prose at the time, she'd gotten a visit earlier that January from another U.S. postal inspector asking about coupons - later traced to Rackmill - that she'd sold to a Cleveland woman.
Told they were counterfeit, she said she had no idea they were bad. Nor did she know a man named Rackmill, she said, offering up a phony name for her source. It all came out at the trial.
So when Rackmill, working the sting, offered more coupons, she balked. She feared her phone was tapped. She called a pal to play go-between: Jimmy Caprose, 35, a part-time dockworker with a full-time crush on Coupon Connie, say prosecutors.
"At first she didn't know they were bad, but later she did and she kept dealing them," says Caprose with a sigh in a telephone interview. Five codefendants, Caprose included, agreed to plead guilty and testify against her in exchange for probation. "They pressured us to go against her, didn't have no other choice. She knows we didn't want to tell on her."
She says everyone else is lying.
Last month, having been dethroned as coupon queen by a Dallas jury in January, Arvidson was sentenced to two years and three months in federal prison. Rackmill, who testified against her, got one year in prison for his role in the ring, and another three years on separate mail fraud charges, to which he also pleaded guilty.
U.S. District Judge Sidney Fitzwater said he believed Arvidson didn't set out to break the law in the beginning, but tried to cover up her role in the scam by lying on the stand. So he imposed the longest prison term allowed. She aims to appeal.
On the stand she wept, invoking poverty as a setup for greed, American style. "It seemed like it was my American dream - coupons," she told the judge. "It seemed unreal, the things I could get for them. I realize now I must have gotten greedy at a certain point. We never had coupons in Portugal. Times were so hard."
She was one of six children born to a factory worker and his wife who landed in New York in the late '60s, then sent for Connie and the rest of their brood. They settled in Bridgeport, Conn., where she dropped out of 10th grade and got a factory job.
Soon she married cabinetmaker Danny Arvidson, got pregnant and discovered a way to stay home with her daughter and put food on the table: coupons. Then the whole family moved to Florida, where coupon mania trashed her marriage. "At first she did real good," says Danny Arvidson, 38. "Then it got on my nerves. She'd bring boxes of garbage into my cabinet shop and empty them on the floor," alienating clients. "One day I told her, `Pack 'em up and get out.' " After they divorced, she married Kevin and they all lived as one big happy family.
After her bust, she tried to go cold turkey but couldn't stop. "For a while I stopped trading, but it was hard to go to a store and pay full price," she reflects. "So I started clipping again, finding [coupons] in the trash, saving everybody's shampoo caps, toothpaste boxes, soap box wrappers."
She pauses, contemplative. "I took them to an extreme, but I was able to get anything I wanted with them. I had coupons in my blood."
by CNB