appropriated it in hopes that he would shut up and go away. Vain hope. Andy felt that
he had finally gotten one foot in the door and he simply redoubled his efforts; two
letters a week instead of one. In 1962 he got four hundred dollars, and for the rest of the decade the library received seven hundred dollars a year like clockwork. By 1971
that had risen to an even thousand. Not much stacked up against what your average
small-town library receives, I guess, but a thousand bucks can buy a lot of recycled
Perry Mason stories and Jake Logan Westerns. By the time Andy left, you could go
into the library (expanded from its original paint-locker to three rooms), and find just about anything you’d want. And if you couldn’t find it, chances were good that Andy
could get it for you.
Now you’re asking yourself if all this came about just because Andy told
Byron Hadley how to save the taxes on his windfall inheritance. The answer is yes…
and no. You can probably figure out what happened for yourself.
Word got around that Shawshank was housing its very own pet financial
wizard. In the late spring and the summer of 1950, Andy set up two trust funds for
guards who wanted to assure a college education for their kids, he advised a couple
of others who wanted to take small fliers in common stock (and they did pretty damn
well, as things turned out, one of them did so well he was able to take an early
retirement two years later), and I’ll be damned if he didn’t advise the warden himself, old Lemon Lips George Dunahy, on how to go about setting up a tax-shelter for
himself. That was just before Dunahy got the bum’s rush, and I believe he must have
been dreaming about all the millions his book was going to make him. By April of
1951, Andy was doing the tax returns for half the screws at Shawshank, and by 1952,
he was doing almost all of them. He was paid in what may be a prison’s most valuable coin: simple goodwill.
Later on, after Greg Stammas took over the warden’s office, Andy became
even more important–but if I tried to tell you the specifics of just how, I’d be guessing.
There are some things I know about and others I can only guess at. I know that there
were some prisoners who received all sorts of special considerations–radios in their
cells, extraordinary visiting privileges, things like that–and there were people on the outside who were paying for them to have those privileges. Such people are known as
‘angels’ by the prisoners. All at once some fellow would be excused from working in
the plate-shop on Saturday forenoons, and you’d know that fellow had an angel out
there who’d coughed up a chuck of dough to make sure it happened. The way it
usually works is that the angel will pay the bribe to some middle-level screw, and the screw will spread the grease both up and down the administrative ladder.
Then there was the discount auto repair service that laid Warden Dunahy low,
It went underground for a while and then emerged stronger than ever in the late fifties.
And some of the contractors that worked at the prison from time to time were paying
kickbacks to the top administration officials, I’m pretty sure, and the same was almost certainly true of the companies whose equipment was bought and installed in the
laundry and the licence-plate shop and the stamping-mill that was built in 1963.
By the late sixties there was also a booming trade in pills, and the same
administrative crowd was involved in turning a buck on that All of it added up to a
pretty good-sized river of illicit income. Not like the pile of clandestine bucks that must fly around a really big prison like Attica or San Quentin, but not peanuts, either.
And money itself becomes a problem after a while. You can’t just stuff it into your
wallet and then shell out a bunch of crumpled twenties and dog-eared tens when you
want a pool built in your back yard or an addition put on your house. Once you get