The Southern Belles
Recommended Listening: Money [E] by Cardi B
In the early 1950s, the Southern Bell Telephone Company had a very strict, secure system for the way it handled it the collection of payphone change. Men employed by the company would collect the change in containers that were immediately sealed, placed in armored trucks, then transported to the company headquarters in Miami, Florida. The containers were then handed over to the all-female staff in the counting room, who then tallied it for the first time. Access to this room was severely restricted, and only female counting employees were allowed to possess safe combinations and keys to the counting room. However, once the change containers were in the counting room everyone was allowed to relax, because everyone knows that women don’t steal.
Betty Corrigan, Marie Orr, and Billie Ruth McNabb were three Southern Bell employees who worked in the counting room at the Miami headquarters in 1950. The counting room itself was 15’ x 20’ with a glass wall separating it from the rest of the office. When the women worked at the counting machine, their backs were turned to their male supervisors outside. This was the first official tally of the money taken in for the day, and the ladies found that the company didn’t notice if a bit of change went missing here and there. The easiest way to get it out of the counting room was to put rolls of quarters in their bras – about $75 worth at a time.
Now, those of us with breasts (and even those of us without) may be wondering “300 quarters smuggled out in a bra? My phone won’t even stay in there”. I’ll do the math for you: Quarters prior to 1964 were 90% silver, making them slightly heavier than modern quarters. Long story short…
1 quarter = 6.25 g x 300 quarters = 1875 g = 4.133667 lbs.
That’s about 4 pounds. You got yourself an extra set of D cups there, or two wigeon ducks according to an amazing chart that is linked in my references. But these were not your average everyday bras my friend, oh no. No “Barely There” for these ladies. Their bras were brassieres and had names like “Bullet” and “Torpedo”, full of wires that brought them to a nice little point. Your boobs stayed where they were and did what they were told. They could handle a little extra weight.
Still, the ladies weren’t just going to walk out the door with what amounted to medieval weapons on their chests. They had several different ways of getting the change out of their bras before leaving for the day. Often, Marie or Betty would excuse themselves to the restroom, where they would meet Billie and empty the change into a suitcase, which Billie then managed to get out of the building. Sometimes the ladies would just go to their lockers while on break and put it right in their purse. Betty’s husband William would sometimes leave his car parked at the telephone company so that she could go down on her breaks and dump the money out into the glovebox. They did this for 2 years and no one was the wiser until on September 24, 1950
Rita called the cops.
Marie lived at home with her parents, and living there also was her brother John and her sister-in-law, Rita, the latter who was paid to convert the change to paper currency. Early in the morning on September 24th Rita (who was 18 at the time and sounds a little dumb) called the police to report that $150 dollars was missing from her home. When involved in criminal activity its best not to get the police involved when someone steals what you stole, just my opinion.
Officer R. Ira Mills arrived, but since he found no signs of forced entry, he said he’d be back later with his “fingerprint men”. Billie heard about what had happened, and she sent her fiancé, Major Sergeant William Albert, to pick up a box with several thousand dollars in it and get it out of Rita and Marie’s house before Mills got back. Unfortunately, William got picked up by a patrolman who was a bit curious about the fat stacks, and good old Willy wasn’t a very good liar. Officer Mills got a phone call from a detective telling him he might want to head over to Billie’s house and have a talk with her. When he got there, Billie (who was about as good of a liar as William) spilled it all.
The next morning, on September 25th, Betty and Marie came back from an out-of-town trip. As they were pulling in the driveway, they were met by a group of waiting Miami Detectives. Fuck. Betty had $4,107 in quarters in her trunk. Double Fuck. The ladies made a full confession. They admitted to using the money to pay off their mortgages and buy cars. The police had to call the Southern Bell Telephone Company to tell them what was going on, because up to this point, they thought the ladies were doing a great job.
When the full story was told, 14 people were involved and arrested:
o Betty Corrigan (Main Defendant) 23
o Marie Orr (Main Defendant) 21
o Billie Ruth McNabb (Main Defendant) 27
o Rita Orr (We all know who she is and what she did) 18
o Gladys Orr (Marie’s Mother) 47
o John Michael Orr (Rita’s Husband & Marie’s Brother) 21
o George Winters (Rita’s Father) 43
o William Albert (Billie’s Fiancé) 21
o William Corrigan (Betty’s Husband) 24
o Bonnie Herbert (Southern Bell Employee) 22
o Larry Herbert (Bonnie’s Husband) 23
o Lennox Gayton (Marie’s Boyfriend)
o Jean Nolan (Southern Bell Employee) 21
o Cecilia Hay (Southern Bell Employee) 20
Except… they couldn’t prove it. When the lawyer arrived, Mr. James S. Rainwater, to represent the ladies he asked for proof that the money the police had confiscated (around $10,000) had come from the phone company. When they couldn’t provide it, HE DEMANDED THEY GIVE IT BACK! Cojones of steel, that one. The confessions hadn’t been signed, so they were taken back, and the women all showed up at work (with Mr. Rainwater) like nothing had happened and tried to get back in the counting room. It didn’t work, but I absolutely love that they tried.
The police estimated that the ladies had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Southern Bell Telephone Company over the years, but the phone company wasn’t willing to admit to that. They tried to make light of it, claiming $18,880, and said if everyone would just “keep their brassieres on”, that they would prove it. They hired a special auditor to come in and go over the phone record and here is where it gets a little iffy:
The auditor claims that on August 23, 1950, there should have been $1,300 in the telephone booths for the five routes that day. Exactly $1,300. However, the deposit slips for the day show $835.25, which is demonstrably true. Billie Ruth McNabb, Betty Corrigan, and Marie Orr were the only three women that were working the day that $464.75 “went missing”.
$464.75 = 1,859 quarters.
Quarter in 1950: 6.25 grams
6.25 x 1,859 = 11,618.75 grams = 25.6 pounds
That’s a lot of ducks.
The ladies confessed that the most they ever got out was $150 a day – 8 pounds. They couldn’t handle anymore than that, and as we have seen these ladies were not very good at lying (at least initially). But 25 pounds?!? Those are some heavy honkers. Some weighty whoppers. Some majorly massive milk duds. The Southern Bell Telephone Company had to make sure the theft was over a certain amount so that they could charge the women with Grand Larceny (Marie and Betty) which is a felony, and Principal in the Second Degree (Billie).
Their unsigned confessions were read out loud in court, which is also illegal, but their lawyer was overruled. I’m not saying these women weren’t guilty, because clearly, they were, but the Big Bad Phone CompanyÔ was not playing fair and they were going to take these women down no matter what. They were eventually found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay back $24,118 of the $18,880 that Southern Bell claimed it lost (because we all know they got away with SO MUCH more). When the verdict was read, Marie and Betty appeared nervous, but it is said that Billie had a small smile on her face.*
I would like to take a moment here to say something about women’s prisons in Florida in 1950. There weren’t any. But wait, where did they send women prisoners?
No…
Yes.
300 miles North of Miami was the Raiford State Prison, which housed 2,500 inmates, around 150 of whom were women. I cannot imagine a crime so horrible, that the punishment is to be sent as a female to a male prison. I (personally) would rather be hit by a semi-truck; incredibly painful, but over in a second and then recovery could begin. These women had to live in constant fear every second for years, sometimes decades. Any woman you sent into that facility would be mentally gone by the time she got out.
Incredibly, the three women did not have to endure Raiford. While their appeals were being considered by the state pardon board, a series of articles came out in the St. Petersburg Times highlighting the women’s issues at the state prison and a case involving a grad student who had been sentenced to 20 years there. Realizing a year of sexual abuse is going a little too far, the governor granted them a pardon.
There is nothing on on the ladies after that, and good for them. I hope they all were able to pick up the pieces and live decent lives.
Except for Rita. Dumbass.
*I had a Grandma named Florence, but we called her Billie. She and my Grandpa had a 32-acre ranch in Temecula, CA, and some of my earliest memories involves riding ATVs and motorcycles around it with them. She once confronted a robber in her house and yelled “James, go get the gun!” although my grandpa had been gone for years. The thief noped the fuck out of there. I love a woman named Billie.
References
Boese, A. (2015). “The Brassiere Brigade”. Retrieved from https://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_brassiere_brigade
Chaline, E. (2010). History’s greatest deceptions and the people who planned them. New York, NY: Quid Publishing.
Lynch, A. (2019) “Handy chart tells you if your breasts weigh more or less than a newborn polar bear.” Retrieved from https://metro.co.uk/2016/07/07/handy-chart-tells-you-if-your-breasts-weight-more-or-less-than-a-newborn-polar-bear-5991663/
Miller, V., 2013. Respectable white ladies, wayward girls, and telephone thieves in Miami’s “Case of the Clinking Brassieres” University of Nottingham eRepository. Available at: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/2184/