Burke Devore’s false job advertisement scheme

Burke Devore’s false job advertisement scheme turns the ordinary machinery of job hunting into an instrument for finding rivals. Under the name B. D. Industrial Papers, Burke invents a paper manufacturer, places a plausible specialist-management vacancy in a trade journal, and collects the résumés of people who might compete with him for work. The scheme grows out of prolonged unemployment and a labor market in which capable candidates outnumber openings; its decisive turn is Burke’s decision to treat the returned applications not as a pool of potential hires, but as a map of threats.

Creation and Cover Identity

The scheme takes shape in February, almost three months before Burke recounts it. At first, he has no settled plan. He has already obtained a post-office box in a town more than twenty miles from home; his next step is to use the family computer in Billy’s room to create letterhead for a company that does not exist. He calls it B. D. Industrial Papers and gives it a businesslike mailing address: P.O. Box 2900, Wildbury, Connecticut. The box is actually number 29. Adding two zeroes makes the venture seem larger, while the real post office branch has only sixty-eight boxes.

Burke makes the false address part of a performance of ordinary small-business activity. When he collects mail, he jokes with the postal clerk about the extra zeroes and offers an explanation for the volume of correspondence that could make him appear to be starting a trade journal about trade journals. The casual exchange helps keep suspicion away from the actual purpose of the mailbox. Burke is alert to the possibility that the scheme might be mistaken for mail fraud: even if it is not illegal, he fears that exposure could be embarrassing and damage his chances of finding work.

The invented company also provides a way to keep the solicitation separate from Burke’s own identity. He pays for the advertisement with a money order and signs the accompanying letter Benj Dockery III, using handwriting deliberately unlike his own. In this arrangement, the business name, distant post-office box, invented signatory, and payment method reinforce one another: each supplies a small piece of the cover, and each reduces the chance that the applications will lead back to Burke.

The Advertisement and Its Returns

Burke models the vacancy on advertisements he has spent more than a year marking in help-wanted sections. The notice calls for a manufacturing line manager at a northeastern paper mill specializing in polymers and capacitor tissue and film. It describes a new product line and a rebuilt electrolytic-capacitor paper machine, asks for at least five years of mill experience, and requests a résumé and salary history. The technical detail is crucial to the ruse: the position is broad enough to attract qualified managers, but specific enough to sound like a genuine opening in Burke’s own field.

He arranges for the notice to run in The Paperman, which he believes carries more such advertisements than Pulp. The cost is forty-five dollars for three consecutive monthly issues. The journal’s classified-ad department accepts a money order after Burke presents B. D. Industrial Papers as a small mill with little experience hiring outside its region. He sends the wording and payment on copied company letterhead, with Benj Dockery III again as the supposed signatory.

The first advertisement appears in the March issue, which is released in the last week of February. By the first Monday in March, Burke finds ninety-seven replies waiting at the post-office box. The mail then settles into a trickle, rising again in the days after each issue appears. When the May issue is still current, he has received 231 responses and expects perhaps another ten to fifteen before the advertisement stops producing mail. The figures mark the scheme’s growth from a fabricated vacancy into a substantial collection of candidate records.

From Job Applications to a List of Rivals

The scheme depends on the conditions that have made Burke’s own search so dispiriting. After layoffs, workers may initially imagine unemployment as a short pause before another job; in practice, reductions spread across industries while hiring remains comparatively scarce. Applicants prepare résumés, pay for copies and postage, search advertisements, and subscribe at their own expense to trade journals that employers once supplied. Burke has done the same work himself, studying the paper trade and sending applications, often to receive no answer at all.

His experience makes the vacancy’s apparent logic persuasive. Burke knows specialized industrial paper well and believes he could take over many management jobs in the field with little additional training. Yet employers can choose applicants whose experience fits a narrow requirement exactly, often at lower pay and with fewer benefits. In a market like this, general competence may not be enough. The false advertisement exploits that imbalance by asking candidates to disclose precisely the qualifications, employment histories, and salary expectations that Burke wants to compare.

At first, Burke reads the applications as evidence of the range of people displaced by the industry’s recent reductions. He sees fear, determination, and gallantry in some résumés, alongside self-importance or poor judgment in others. Many applicants, in his assessment, apply too broadly and lack the specialized paper-industry experience the fictional job requires. They are not his competition. The distinction matters: the scheme is not simply a net cast indiscriminately over the unemployed. Burke uses the invented job’s technical profile to sort the applicants according to how closely their experience resembles his own.

The dangerous group consists of candidates whose qualifications are nearly identical to Burke’s, or perhaps better. A slightly stronger educational record or a comparable professional background could make one of them the applicant an employer selects instead. Burke identifies Edward George Ricks as an example of this kind of rival. The applications thus change function in his mind: what had appeared to be replies to a vacancy become a private register of people who might displace him.

A Search Strategy Bent Toward Elimination

Burke’s own repeated interview failures help explain why the scheme grows more consequential than a job-market exercise. An occasional response to his résumé briefly raises his hopes; he pays his own travel costs, prepares carefully, meets interviewers, and may tour a plant, only to hear nothing afterward. One failed interview makes him see the process more coldly. His résumé may get him through the door, but the interview is a sales pitch in which he must sell himself, a task he recognizes he is not naturally good at.

That sense of personal inadequacy exists alongside a structural shortage of suitable work. Burke places the résumés in his files within a particular wave of paper-industry layoffs, spanning roughly six or seven months before and after his own dismissal two years earlier. He regards these applicants as the labor pool he must contend with. He also fears that another round of reductions could send a fresh wave of qualified people into the market. The number of serious rivals is finite for now, but, in his calculation, could soon multiply beyond what he can manage.

This reasoning turns the scheme into a component of Burke’s campaign against résumé competitors. He does not merely hope to improve his own presentation or find an employer before someone else does; he begins to see the removal of competing candidates as a way to secure a position for himself. The false vacancy gives that campaign an unusually efficient starting point: rather than searching blindly for rivals, Burke invites them to identify themselves, describe their credentials, and send their records to an address he controls.

Significance and Limits of the Scheme

The advertisement’s realism rests on the same labor-market practices that burden the unemployed: specialized qualifications, trade publications, résumé screening, salary histories, and the hopeful expense of applying. Burke borrows the conventions of recruitment so successfully that the candidates supply the information voluntarily. The scheme’s cover is therefore not an elaborate technical deception; it is an imitation of a process its targets already recognize and have reason to trust.

It also exposes the difference between collecting information and openly competing. The applicants believe they are seeking a real job, while Burke is using their responses to assess the danger they pose to his prospects. His own unemployment gives him intimate knowledge of the documents and anxieties that make the trap work, but it does not make the arrangement mutual: the supposed employer controls the interaction, and the candidates do not know that the vacancy is fictitious.

The scale of the returns gives Burke both evidence and momentum. Ninety-seven applications arrive almost immediately, and the total rises past two hundred within the advertisement’s run. Those numbers confirm that the market contains many people willing to answer a plausible opening; they also let Burke distinguish the applicants he dismisses as unsuitable from the few whose backgrounds make them frighteningly comparable to him. The scheme’s central irony is that a fabricated opportunity, presented as a route back into employment, becomes Burke’s method for turning the desperation of other job seekers into intelligence for his own increasingly violent purpose.