Looking into your mail

Ask any old detective and they will tell you, the average criminal would do very well in the business world by going straight, following the rules and using that noodle to come up with brilliant concepts and marketing schemes. And many long-established firms would do well to hire on some of the young people who have done their apprenticeships, so to speak, in the field of narcotics sales, automobile theft and resale, and mayhem.

Then along comes Dushaun Henderson-Spruce from Chicago, with an idea so fiendishly simple that you just can't help but send him a little shoutout.  Oh, you might have to send it to a federal hoosegow, but send it nonetheless.  He will have like 25 years to read it and get back to you.

The deal was that Henderson-Spruce got one of those "Change of Address" forms from the U.S. Postal Service, and submitted it on October 26 of last year.

Well, what's the matter with that? you're asking. We've all filled them out when we leave home and get our own apartment and then when we move back home because the guy who was supposed to share the apartment turned out to be a piker who never paid his 1/2 of the rent. And then we turned in a new one when we moved out for good, and then again when we bought our first house, and then when we moved into our real house.  There is nothing wrong with those change of address forms, and you are steamed that poor Dushaun got in trouble for filling one out.

You've got mail!

And all he did was to ask that mail addressed to a certain address in Atlanta be forwarded to his apartment on the North Side of Chi. The problem is that he had no business doing so. The address in Atl just happened to be UPS, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Oh.

The post office did what they were supposed to do, which was to forward the mail, and Henderson-Spruce started getting the UPS mail brought to him by the USPS, according to the newspaper.  We don't know what he did with the normal everyday mail, but we read that he cashed and deposited $58,000 worth of checks previously payable to UPS.

UPS told NPR News that it "was notified that some U.S. mail, intended for UPS employees at the company's headquarters address, was redirected by an unauthorized change of address by a third party. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) corrected the issue and the USPS Postal Inspector is investigating the incident."

The criminal complaint filed against Henderson-Spruce says he received  "[s]everal thousand pieces of First Class US mail and registered mail" addressed to UPS.

It must have been like one of those movie scenes where someone suddenly gets a ton of mail. Henderson-Spruce was getting so much mail that the letter carrier had to leave it in a USPS tub outside his door.

I don't know what the post office policy is for this sort of thing, but wouldn't common sense tell the mailperson that if Joe Blow is suddenly getting a boatload of mail addressed to some corporation a thousand miles away, someone should look into it?

It would seem not, because it was UPS security people who notified the  U.S. Postal Inspection Service about this mess in January. The USPIS searched Henderson-Spruce's apartment in late January, finding about 3,000 pieces of mail addressed to the company in Atlanta, court documents say.

A Tribune reporter talked with Henderson-Spruce outside his apartment and said that "he hinted that he'd received the UPS mail as a result of a mix-up that was not his fault and that his identity may have been stolen, but he declined to elaborate."

Henderson-Spruce is charged with mail theft and mail fraud, for which he could serve up to 25 years, unless he is notified of the sentence by mail, in which case he will probably have forwarded his mail to Rudy Giuliani, and never serve a minute.