Frank Krauser had already received his fifteen minutes of fame. Tomorrow he would be famous again, but he wouldn't live to see it. Frank Krauser was on his way out, about to meet his Maker. He was eating his proverbial final doughnut.

Doughnuts were what got Frank Krauser in trouble in the first place. He ate a lot of them, and he spaced them out throughout the course of the day. The problem was that he never left the Dunk-A-Donut shop in between doughnuts—even while he was on the clock for the Chicago Streets and Sanitation Department.

Somebody at Channel 8 News did some hard-core investigative reporting, which involved sitting in a car on the street and aiming a video camera at the front of the Dunk-A-Donuts, turning the camera on and letting it roll. The place was all windows; the camera saw everything that happened, clear as day. Channel 8 came back with six hard-hitting hours of video of Frank Krauser sitting in the corner booth at the doughnut shop, reading the Chicago Sun-Times, talking to cops and other city workers, chatting with the locals and the staff, reading the Chicago Tribune, reading the back of the sugar packets and generally not performing his duties as an employee of Streets and San.

At the end of six hours, Frank pushed himself to his feet, spent a good ten minutes making his farewells to the staff and he walked down the street to the work site, where the crew he was supervising was cleaning up after its day of street repairs.

Channel 8 didn't show all six hours, but it did broadcast forty-five seconds of it during a sweeps piece called "Slackers at Streets and Sanitation." The mayor held a news conference in his rumpled suit and promised an investigation and immediate reforms. Frank Krauser was suspended.

The Committee for a Cleaner Streets and Sanitation Department roamed the city of Chicago for days, then public interest waned. The committee turned in its official Report, which was actually the same report turned in years ago by a similar committee made up of the same committee members. They did go to the effort of changing the dates in the margin and, unlike the 1999 report, they ran the spell check. So you could say it was a new report.