Citron’s Fast Fall to Earth

Imagine a classic suburban street, a long, wide block of low-slung ranchers. It is early evening, that sweet last hour before sunset. The sounds are of lawn mowers firing up and kids screaming as they chase balls from yard to yard. A mother still in her nurse’s uniform pulls a wagonful of children down the middle of the street, called Sharon Road. A dog follows, completing this happy tableau of middle-class Orange County on the first Monday in May.

Go now to a beige house in the middle of the block. The garage door is up, revealing a tall, silver-haired old man bent over his workbench. He putters away with a power drill on some unseen project--a study in contentment.

Yet when an unfamiliar car pulls up, the old man does not smile, wave or say howdy. He does not offer to show off his latest handiwork. Instead, he flips a switch and abruptly the automatic garage door grinds down and locks shut. As “no comments” go, this one by Robert Citron is especially poignant.

The pity is that Citron’s caller had not come in a hostile mood. Ever since the Orange County financial scandal broke, Citron has seemed to me to cut a figure more sympathetic than demonic. Orange County is full of foolish old men who lost their shirts trying to run with the big money boys. They buy into the sweet rumor that money’s purpose is to make more money, that failure to invest savings and home equities and pensions in fast markets is as silly as hiding cash under a mattress. Of course, Citron had a special problem. It wasn’t his money.

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Last week Citron pleaded guilty to six felony counts stemming from the frantic attempts to keep afloat the county investment fund--an effort some experts suggest smelled a lot like a classic Ponzi scheme. He faces a maximum sentence of 14 years in that place where possession of power tools is frowned upon. Some skeptics have said Citron simply was running low on money for lawyers. Others suggested he wanted to buy time, to forestall prison by turning witness.

Still, his was a refreshingly noble act. Citron could have followed the more conventional response to political scandal. He could have lied, sniveled, stonewalled, alibied, shredded, erased, engaged in limited hangouts and non-denial denials, whined, wheedled and appealed to the highest court in the land. Instead, Citron spared Orange County the expense of what one attorney called “our own miniature O.J.” Admittedly, the savings don’t resolve the $1.7-billion hole Citron left behind, but, hey, every penny counts.

Citron also activated the sweat glands of other public officials. Before puttering in his garage, he spent five hours Monday talking to investigators with questions such as: Who knew what, Bob, and when? Since his pleading, county politicos have been frantic to declare the matter resolved. “Closure” is the preferred term. See, they have clucked. Citron did it. We are but victims of the Lone Investor.

This won’t wash. “More heads,” one political consultant assured me, “will roll.” Fiscal custodians of hundreds of agencies plunged money into the investment pool. Did none wonder what risks were required for Citron to achieve his famously high investment returns? Did none reconsider his essential bet--that interest rates would keep dropping? Old saws reverberate, sayings inherited from Depression-era ancestors who truly did bank money under mattresses: You can’t con an honest man. Anything that seems too good to be true, probably is.

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For now, though, Citron is the fall guy, and there’s been much discussion over what his sentence should be. This is what I had come to talk to him about, before the garage door closed. At 70 years of age, with no prior criminal record, he seems an implausible mate for Charlie Manson. And everyone concedes he did none of the funny business for personal gain.

His was a crime of ego--believing that with his 10 office telephones and his gimmicky investment portfolio he had escaped the orbit of mere county bureaucrat and now flew with the Geckos. He embraced that dubious new credo: Government Should Be Run Like a Business. He just didn’t know how.

So what to do with the felon-treasurer? Here’s a suggestion--unusual, but not cruel. Put him in an orange pickup marked with signs like “Bob Citron, Public Servant” and, “Your Tax Dollars (What’s Left of Them) at Work.” Let him roam the county, a handyman on call to help patch the holes in mundane service created by the bankruptcy. Sweep schools. Guard school crossings. Repair potholes.

No need to work the man to death. Simply make him serve out what would have been his term as treasurer--a roving monument to hard work and humility in government service, hubris in coveralls and on parade. Something tells me the old guy at the workbench might go for it.