America Denis Staunton Claude Allen was shopping at Target, a chain store in the prosperous Washington suburb of Montgomery County, when a store detective made a discovery that would wreck Allen's career as a top adviser to President George W Bush.
"A Target store loss prevention manager observed an unknown man enter the store . . . with an empty Target bag in a shopping cart. The man was then seen selecting merchandise throughout the store and placing items in the Target bag. He put additional items in his cart. The man then went to guest services, where he produced a receipt and received a refund for the items he had just selected from the store shelves. After receiving the refund, he left the store without paying for the additional merchandise in the shopping cart. He was apprehended by the store employee," a police report said.
A police check on Allen's credit card records found that the 45-year-old White House staffer had received refunds from department stores on about 25 items worth a total of more than $5,000 over the past year.
"He would buy items, take them out to his car and return to the store with the receipt. He would select the same items he had just purchased and then return them for a refund. Allen is known to have conducted approximately 25 of these types of refunds, having the money credited to his credit cards. Throughout 2005 he obtained refunds for items ranging from clothing, a Bose theatre system, stereo equipment and photo printer to items valued only at $2.50," the report said.
Allen was apprehended in January and resigned from his White House post the following month, telling his superiors that he wanted to spend more time with his wife and four children. He denies any wrongdoing, claiming that his credit card records were mixed up because he recently moved house.
White House colleagues wept at Allen's leaving party and Mr Bush expressed shock and disappointment at the allegations. "If the allegations are true, Claude Allen did not tell my chief of staff or legal counsel the truth, and that's deeply disappointing. If the allegations are true, something went wrong in Claude Allen's life, and that is really sad," the president said.
Mr Bush's compassionate response was not matched by commentators on the left, some of whom gloated over the misfortune of a right-wing ideologue who once worked for conservative senator Jesse Helms and whose nomination as a judge was blocked by Democrats in Congress.
Allen found notoriety when he declared that one of Mr Helms's political opponents was connected to "queers" and "radical feminists". Explaining himself at his confirmation hearings, he told senators that by "queers" he meant people who were "odd, out of the ordinary". The left's schadenfreude was all the more intense because, unlike most conservatives and White House aides, Allen is black.
The great-grandson of slaves, he was born into a poor Catholic family in Philadelphia and grew up in a two-bedroom flat in Washington. His twin brother, Floyd, was a tearaway, but Claude was known as a "goody-two-shoes" who was born again as an evangelical Protestant at university.
A protege of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, Allen became a key member of the tiny group of prominent black conservatives embraced by the Republican Party in recent years.
His stepmother, Renee Allen, told the New York Times that when she heard the news about Allen's shopping problems she immediately assumed that the story was about his twin brother.
Allen is the latest in a succession of black conservatives to have been hit by scandal. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan's housing secretary, Samuel Pierce, was accused of corruption and influence-peddling, and Clarence Pendleton, Mr Reagan's appointee to head the US Civil Rights Commission, was alleged to have had illicit business dealings. Clarence Thomas was accused of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings and, last year, black Republican Armstrong Williams was revealed to have earned almost $250,000 from the White House to promote Mr Bush's education policies while posing as a neutral media commentator.
Writing on the left-wing website CounterPunch, black commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson had little sympathy for Allen.
"Conservatives desperately need blacks such as Allen to maintain the public illusion that black conservatives have real clout and a popular following in black communities. Their great value is that they promote the myth that a big segment of blacks support political conservative principles . . . The young black conservative political activists such as Allen spin, prime and defend administration policies on affirmative action, welfare, laissez-faire capitalism and anti-government regulations with the best of white conservatives," he wrote.