The Full Catastrophe (4 page)

I had arrived to see Markos Bolaris, the deputy health minister, who had put off our meeting several times during the day. It was late in the evening by the time I entered the building and passed a bust of Hippocrates in the lobby. In the bathroom, there was no toilet paper, hand soap, or paper towels, and the building was empty except for a hive of activity in the deputy minister’s office. There, I met the aide I had spoken with over the phone. He was working in front of his laptop in a black T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of Converse sneakers. He took off his thick-rimmed glasses and rubbed his sweaty face. “Do you smoke?” he said in English. We stepped out onto the balcony. “Everything is so fucked,” he said as he looked down onto the street below. He’d gone to school in England, and his combination Greek and English accent made him sound Scottish. “Everyone is panicking and each and every day there are strikes,” he said. “How are you going to fix anything
without working?” He said he had been putting in twelve-to fourteen-hour days, and was making less than 1,000 euros a month. “And then they say we Greeks are lazy!” he said, before adding that health ministry workers planned to occupy the building the following day; to bolt the front entrance shut in order to prevent the minister’s staff or anyone else from working.

Bolaris sent word that he was ready to see me. I walked over to his office and found him behind his large wooden desk, a plump, middle-aged man with a thick gray mustache, wearing a broad red tie and a gray suit. A gilt icon of Mary holding Jesus hung on the wall directly behind him.

“How big is the problem of fraudulent disability?” I asked.

“Very big,” he said. Bolaris seemed to like to speak in short sentences, as if this added weight to his words. The Greek government at the time spent nearly one billion euros in disability benefits annually, he said. Over the course of the previous years, hundreds of millions of it had gone out to fraudulent claimants. Local politicians with the authority to grant the disability benefits knowingly signed off on the claims in exchange for votes or political favor, he said, and doctors diagnosed them in exchange for payoffs. To illustrate this point, Bolaris removed a folder from his desk and sifted through some papers. The papers showed that an Athens pulmonologist diagnosed thirty people in Elefsina, a waning industrial area close to Athens, with disorders such as neck pain, back problems, and depression—conditions that had nothing to do with their lungs. “A pulmonologist!” Bolaris reiterated, sticking an index finger in the air. When enough ailments were combined, the patient would qualify for heavy disability and a benefit of up to several hundred euros a month. Furthermore, there was no evidence the doctor had ever seen the patients other than to exchange the paperwork and cash. “They had stores!” said Bolaris, referring to doctors that engaged in the “industrial production of disability certificates.”

The government would begin attacking the problem, he said,
by starting to keep centralized records of who was receiving disability benefits on a computer system. This would help them see irregularities such as an inordinate number of disability benefits given out in a particular town, or by a particular doctor. To an outsider, it might have seemed self-evident that a contemporary European government would already have had such a computerized system in place. The fact that Greece did not, however, was due not so much to administrative inertia and ineptitude—though these factors certainly played their parts—but to willful neglect. Politicians and government employees on both the federal and local levels had maintained byzantine record-keeping methods, because doing so obscured accountability, enabling the graft and the patronage from which many of them benefited. Now, under pressure from its creditors, the Greek government was being compelled to start keeping better records in order to determine how it was spending its money. In order to build a database, the health ministry was mandating that citizens receiving a disability benefit show up at government offices around the country and register into the new system. Otherwise, their benefit would be cut.

Of course, because the great majority of people in Greece receiving a disability benefit actually qualified for it, this meant that people with disabilities—including the truly blind—would be forced, unless a caretaker appeared for them, to report to a government office and register their condition. This naturally upset rights groups for people with disabilities, which felt like their members were being unfairly and insensitively singled out for having supposedly cheated the government. Greek television coverage of the disability benefits scandal did not help matters. The issue of benefits fraud was debated on one television channel that ran constant footage of a blind man—or an actor pretending to be blind—navigating the streets of Athens with a walking stick. “The portrayal of persons with disability in the mass media has been absolutely unbearable,” the president of Greece’s National
Confederation of Disabled People told me at the time. From this perspective, the government’s reform effort seemed somewhat farcical, which underscored the fact that the Greek government had not, despite the urgency for change, suddenly become a smoothly functioning entity. One therefore had to beware not only of the government’s hesitance or incapacity to undertake reforms, but also of what happened once it tried to undertake them.

Ultimately, some 200,000 of the nation’s disabled showed up in government offices around the country to register. This was about 36,000 fewer people than had been receiving the benefits. Presumably, according to the health ministry, these people had not shown up because their benefits claims were fraudulent. The difference translated to annual savings of some 100 million euros. This turned out to be less than an initial estimate given to me by Bolaris, who, along with his aide, seemed sometimes swept away by reform gusto. Still, it was a large sum, particularly when compounded over several years. It was also only the beginning of a process to uncover wider fraud. The new digital registry would be emulated by other ministries to track an additional five billion euros in social welfare benefits handed out annually in Greece. When at this time I tried to find out the precise number of the social benefits in Greece, an aide to a labor minister told me no one knew for sure how many exactly, because management of the benefits was spread among several ministries. There was, it seemed, the possibility to discover more fraud.

The social security system was another problematic area. The Greek labor ministry at the time also undertook a “census” to determine how many people in Greece were collecting a pension, and what kind of pension they were receiving. Greece had an array of underfunded social security agencies that handed out pensions to various segments of the population (this included disability pensions, a separate category from disability benefits). At one point, labor ministry officials said a dubiously high 8,500 pensioners in
Greece were over one hundred years old, at least on paper. That figure, were it legitimate, would have meant that Greece was by far the world leader in terms of its per capita number of centenarians. Rather, government officials determined that a great number of retirement checks were being paid to dead people—or “ghost retirees,” as the Greek media called them—whose family members had failed to notify the state of their loved ones’ passing. About 40,000 pensions were shown to be fraudulent, the Greek labor minister announced on television following the initial census results. The total cost of all social security fraud since Greece entered the eurozone was hard to measure, and Greek government officials threw out some widely disparate figures. In 2014, the labor minister estimated the cost at some five billion euros. To be sure, fraudulent benefit claims—costly as they were—were not the reason Greece found itself in a financial crisis, but the phenomenon did hint at the broader levels of waste and graft that, together with the custom of political patronage, had cleaned out the government’s coffers.

On Zakynthos, a preliminary police investigation found that 498 of the 680 people who received or requested a blindness benefit did not qualify for it. Sixty-one of them had driver’s licenses. The apparent scheme on the island cost the state some 9 million euros, according to an initial estimate. Bolaris, the deputy health minister, and other government officials vowed to get back wrongfully taken money, though that would be no easy task.

During my conversation with Bolaris, I asked him why it had taken so long for the government to do something about these “thieveries,” as he put it at one point. He answered with what seemed like a line he had used before. “Greece passed through an era of the fat cow,” he said. “Now we are the skinny cows. If it didn’t matter to some people before, for us today, it must matter.” He then offered a historical explanation for why these things happened in Greece. Perhaps someone like me could not understand
it, he said, because I had never lived in a nation that has experienced foreign occupation.

“We, Demetri,” he said, using my Greek middle name, “in Thessaloniki, in Macedonia, in 2012, we’ll celebrate one hundred years of freedom.” Thessaloniki is Greece’s second largest city, located in the north, and the liberation he was referring to was from the Ottoman Empire. “People had above them the sultan. The one who didn’t pay taxes to the sultan was smart. He was a
magas
,” an untranslatable and complimentary term that can loosely be understood to mean “badass.” “He was resisting the sultan. This happened here in Athens for four hundred years. In northern Greece, for five hundred years. These things don’t go away easily.” Bolaris was making an argument I heard commonly around this time. Greeks, through centuries of foreign domination, had antigovernment feeling imbued in their blood. The government was a foe, and if you could defraud it, you were not only enriching yourself; in a way, you were a patriot. I wasn’t sure I bought this argument, though there was something to the notion that, in Greece, disloyalty to the state did not equate to disloyalty to the nation. Greeks don’t necessarily synthesize their
ethnos
—a word that means “nation” but has a racial, tribal connotation—with the republic. The
ethnos
is far vaster. The
ethnos
is thousands of years old, and unparalleled in its magnificence and import to humanity. What contemporary state could embody such grandeur? This has long been particularly true of the Greek state, which Greeks know to be dysfunctional anyway. Scamming the state, therefore, was not the same as scamming the nation.

Bolaris then went on to talk about Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first president of Greece, who was born on the Ionian island of Corfu but had long served as the foreign minister of Russia under Tsar Alexander I. Kapodistrias was living in Geneva, Switzerland, when the revolutionary Greek national assembly, judging his international connections and prestige advantageous, elected him
to govern the country. When he arrived in 1828, the condition of the budding Hellenic state and the immensity of the task ahead must have come as a shock. He found a largely agrarian, underdeveloped country, tattered by years of fighting and beset by disease and poverty. A government and an infrastructure had to be built from scratch, a task made harder by the fact that the revolutionary factions fighting for independence were often warring with one another. Kapodistrias had plans to modernize the place, but did not have much of a chance to implement them. A few years after he arrived, members of a powerful Peloponnesian clan he had upset shot him dead.
“Bam bam,”
as Bolaris put it. I wasn’t sure what moral the deputy minister was trying to impart by mentioning this, other than to point out how ungovernable the nation was, and perhaps remained. “After that, the barbarians came. From Germany. Otto. Otto came.” The Otto he was referring to was Greece’s first king, a prince from Bavaria who came to rule at age seventeen, a decision of Britain, France, and Russia, who secured Greece’s independence by defeating the Ottomans in a decisive naval clash—the Battle of Navarino, off the southwestern tip of the Peloponnese. Otto arrived in Greece with a considerable Bavarian entourage, including his personal confectioner, in order to establish the new nation and capital in Athens, which was then a small, rustic town, and he brought a Bavarian architect to build a palace, the austere, neoclassical building that today serves as the Greek parliament. I was astounded at how casually the minister referred to Germans as barbarians, but I would later find out that this was commonplace. “He brought German soldiers, German judges, and a government started to form,” Bolaris added. “But the Greek on the bottom said, ‘Good, it’s Greece, but the Germans are in control.’ It didn’t bother us if we didn’t pay taxes to the Germans. Do you understand?” he added. “It was resistance to the foreigner.”

On Zakynthos, as I was leaving one of the local government offices one morning, an elfin woman who had heard about the reason for my visit approached me. “My grandmother is one of those who took the benefit,” she said. “Now she lost it and she is angry about it. Maybe she will talk to you.” This was a terrific stroke of fortune, as I had tried to find someone on the island who had taken the benefit and could see, but no one had been willing to single out an offender. It seemed a worse transgression to squeal than to commit fraud. The woman, who was affluent and had a good job, told me her seeing grandmother had paid the doctor 1,500 euros for the necessary diagnosis. She asked that I say nothing to reveal her or her grandmother’s identity.

The next morning, I met the woman and her husband at an outdoor café in a square in the middle of town. As we talked over a cup of coffee, it became clear that they were somewhat depressed about the moral condition of the island. The local stories of corruption were apparently not limited to the suspicious number of blindness benefits. The former mayor, a man named Akis Tsagkaropoulos, was accused of soliciting the services of an Albanian immigrant to burn down the municipal building where financial records were stored. (A municipal police officer caught the Albanian with a great deal of gasoline and other flammable liquids before he could set the building ablaze.) Tsagkaropoulos allegedly had an interest in seeing the records destroyed. He had been accused by city council members of using forged documents to take out millions of euros in municipal loans without their prior approval. A fire in the building where records were housed would have erased evidence of the alleged financial irregularities. Tsagkaropoulos, who was an orthopedic surgeon at the local hospital before becoming mayor, was eventually convicted of attempted arson and sentenced to eight years in prison, though he appealed the decision and was released from custody. He later died at age fifty-six of a heart condition, according to Greek media reports, having maintained his innocence in both the arson attempt and alleged improprieties regarding the
suspect loans. “The judgment of people stops with their death,” a local newspaper wrote of his passing.