THE CHEATING OF AMERICA.

• Author: Johnston, David Cay
• Position: Review

THE CHEATING OF AMERICA by Charles Lewis, Bill Allison, and the Center for Public Integrity William Morrow, $25.00

ON MY DESK AT HOME SITS A small faux rock, a flat black sheet with broken edges and a maze of tiny white symbols etched into its face. It is a replica of the Rosetta stone, famed as the key to unlocking the hieroglyphic language of ancient Egypt. Less well-known is the text on this stela, a convoluted and flowery pronouncement in which a pharaoh claims credit for the prosperity of the people and then makes a grant of tax relief to the priests on whom he relied for the flow of revenue to his government and for ensuring the fealty of the people to his administration.

As it says in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun.

There are, however, always new stories, and the ones told in The Cheating of America were chosen to make your blood boil. They are tales of the rich and powerful who granted themselves tax relief and found themselves in battle with the IRS. Their schemes are available to anyone willing to dig through the mountain of paperwork at United States Tax Court and other government offices in search of nuggets of fact.

Through a lot of hard work, the authors and their team expose loopholes big enough for the late Larry Hillbloom to fly his DHL Worldwide Express right through. There are the schlock movie makers, best known for resurrecting Sylvester Stallone's star, who with a patina of legitimate accounting glossed over massive tax evasion, and bought a guilty plea to a mere misdemeanor. And there is the inept government pursuit of Joe Conforte, the taxi driver-cum-whorehouse entrepreneur whose Chicken Ranch made him millions of untaxed dollars, which he now enjoys in Brazil.

Oh, and the outcome of these cases? Mostly the tax avoiders won and got to go on, their pocketbooks nicked as much or more by their lawyers as the government.

While the book focuses on the way the law, and the IRS's budget and rules, are weighted in favor of rich tax evaders, there are also a few stories of big-time losers in the game of moving symbols around on a piece of paper to make tax bills vanish. One of them is Gary K. Bielfeldt, a speculator in Treasury-bill futures from Illinois corn country who amended his tax returns to label himself a dealer, rather than a trader, in the government debt markets. He asked for a refund of $81 million and ended up paying $50 million extra and now says the world would be a better place if someone...