JACKSONVILLE, Ala. -- The middle-aged parents, unmistakable in their Boy Scout leader browns and khakis, clumped outside a training meeting here, their worries spilling out. These are troubled days for the grown-ups at the Scout get-togethers sprinkled among the churches, back yards and schoolhouses of Alabama's rolling northeast.
Federal subpoenas have been flying around. FBI agents have been asking questions, and the administrators down at the Boy Scouts' Greater Alabama Council headquarters in Birmingham have had to fess up to hundreds of volunteers that their 22-county organization is under federal investigation. The same U.S. attorney's office in Birmingham that this week opened its case against HealthSouth executive Richard M. Scrushy, one of the marquee corporate corruption probes in the nation, is also investigating the local Boy Scouts.
Volunteers say paid Scout leaders have created fictitious "ghost units" for years to pump up membership numbers to trick donor groups and charities, including the United Way, into giving them more money. In some cases, the alleged membership scams do not even appear to have been very clever. Volunteer Tom Willis, a 1960s Eagle Scout who is also the father of two Eagle Scouts, says he was presented with a roster for a supposed group of 30 youths in Fort Payne, Ala. -- each had the last name Doe.
"It seems to go against the basic things Scouts are about: trustworthy, loyal . . . trustworthy, most of all," volunteer Susan Backus said as the stragglers trickled out of the Jacksonville training meeting.
The uproar in Alabama, the latest in a string of at least five bogus-membership scandals in Boy Scout councils around the country since the 1990s, has exposed an undercurrent of tension between unpaid volunteers and the professionals who are paid -- sometimes handsomely -- to run Boy Scout programs.
The United Way of Central Alabama, which received a subpoena and is one of several chapters that contributed money to the Greater Alabama Council, has given more than $6 million to the council in the past five years. Big membership numbers can translate to big donations, promotions and pay raises, many volunteers say, providing temptation for ambitious Scout leaders to engage in creative accounting.
"Just because these people call themselves Boy Scout professionals doesn't mean they're going to adhere to the principles of the Boy Scouts," said Ralph Stark, a Boy Scout volunteer in Locust Fork, Ala., and a retired investigator for the Office of Personnel Management. "They're playing the game of a businessperson."
Stark and other Boy Scout volunteers here describe a high-pressure recruiting environment, something akin to the get-the-numbers-up hype of a sales convention. Boy Scout enrollment has been declining at the same time that the organization has been dealing with lingering controversies about the dismissal of gay and atheist Scout leaders. The number of youths in Scouting programs -- including Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts and coed Venturing groups -- dropped more than 5 percent in 2003 from the year before, to 3.2 million, according to Boy Scout statistics.
The decline worries volunteers, such as Backus and Stark, who volunteer 20 hours a week and rave about the impact Boy Scout programs can have on young people, particularly those without solid "family or religious" foundations. But the possible manipulation of numbers, both here and elsewhere, worries them even more.
The Boy Scouts have a long history of membership imbroglios. In the mid-1970s, a large council in Chicago was caught boosting minority enrollment figures. During the 1990s, councils in Los Angeles, Vicksburg, Miss., and Jacksonville, Fla., were tangled in ghost-unit controversies. In the past few months, as the Alabama case has grown from suspicions to a publicly acknowledged investigation, a civil rights leader in Atlanta has accused local Boy Scout leaders of falsifying minority enrollment figures to get more grant money. U.S. Postal Service investigators and a federal grand jury in Dallas have looked into allegations as recently as 2003 that a large Boy Scout council manipulated membership numbers.
"It can't be happening in so many parts of the country unless there's pressure from the top," Willis said.
Sometimes the controversies have exacted a financial toll. Private grant money was pulled in Jacksonville, Fla. Charity donations decreased when the Los Angeles council corrected its numbers. The Dallas council has gotten less United Way money since deleting nearly 12,000 names, which was about a quarter of its alleged membership and included a large number of names in low-income areas, from the rolls.
A common denominator in the Dallas and Alabama cases is Ronnie Holmes, the top-ranking executive in the Greater Alabama Council, one of four Boy Scout councils in the state. Holmes was a regional administrator when allegations of numbers-fixing arose in Dallas in 2000. Dale Draper, a Dallas Boy Scout employee who discovered the phony membership figures, said his concerns were "swept under the rug" by Holmes during an internal audit.
"Before they did the audit, he told me, 'I can tell you, we won't find anything,' " said Draper, now a Scout volunteer in Utah. "It seemed like the good-old-boy network."
In Alabama, Holmes is one of the Scout executives who volunteers say has not been responsive to complaints about ghost units. Volunteers have been irked at Holmes, who did not respond to five phone calls requesting an interview, and others over the handling of the council's $7 million annual budget, the proposed sale of old campgrounds and the symbolism of the council's $2 million Birmingham headquarters.
Volunteers blanched after discovering this year that Holmes was paid $221,369 in 2003 -- more than eight times the $26,735 median household income in Birmingham and significantly more than Alabama's other Scout executives, who made between $82,000 and $145,800 in the same year.
Randy Haines, a Compass Bank executive and incoming chairman of the Greater Alabama Council's volunteer board, a group stocked with some of the Alabama business world's elite, declined to discuss any aspect of the organization's publicly disclosed finances or to say whether the council has hired a defense lawyer. Haines said that he is unaware of manipulated numbers but that the council is cooperating with investigators and conducting an internal audit.
"I really don't want to get into a lot of detail," he said. "We're restricting our statements."
A Boy Scouts of America spokesman, who did not return calls for this article, told the Associated Press that the national organization is "dedicated to the accurate reporting of membership." Federal prosecutors also did not return calls about the case.
Backus, one of the volunteers, said membership scams have been an "open secret" for years in Alabama. They even had nicknames. One was called "Up and Out" and involved signing up Scouts near the end of the year and then double-counting them as new members on the rolls of that year and the next, she said. Volunteers also talk of getting long lists of units with fake names from council headquarters and from mid-level district executives. Backus ran across the problem seven years ago when she tried to contact unit leaders about a Cub Scout day camp.
"They'd say, 'That pack has been dead for years,' " she recalled. "You're seeing all these units on paper, but you're not seeing any people. . . . You can only blame it on bad record-keeping for so long."
Already, charities in Alabama have begun to worry about fallout. These are not easy times to raise money in the financially struggling state, and the Boy Scouts' woes may only compound the difficulties.
"Any scandal -- or the appearance of a scandal -- hurts all charities," said Steve Kirkpatrick, chief executive of the Madison County United Way chapter, which has given the Scouts' Greater Alabama Council more than $900,000 since 1998. "People use it as a reason not to give."
Yet, as the case unfolds, Scouts are still bucking for merit badges in Alabama, still reciting their oaths, even as their parents fret that the grown-ups' troubles will seep down into the psyches of the kids. The council is making plans, too, touting one of its next big events. It will be in March, and it is called "A Night of Honor."
Research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
