Breaking news: Taitz SSN gambit crashes and burns

Orly Taitz has been living and breathing conspiracy theories against the Social Security Administration for years now, filing countless lawsuits and FOIA requests. Just as she’s imagining that she’s about to close in on the elusive Social Security SS-5 application for Harrison J. Bounel that she believes is the real owner of Barack Obama’s social-security number, the rug has been well and truly pulled out from under her, so says private detective and blog commenter Rickey. Here’s what he has learned:

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I had ordered a copy of Harry Boymel’s SS-5 and the SSA sent me a notice that I should receive it within 30 days. Well, it arrived today.

Harry applied for his Social Security Number on July 11, 1941. Although the SS-5 form which was in use then had a space for entering the name and address of the applicant’s employer, Harry noted that he was unemployed at the time. He was living at 915 Elsmere Place, Bronx, N.Y., the same address where he was living at the time of the 1940 census. 915 Elsmere Place is near the corner of Daly Avenue, and many of us mistakenly believed that the census erroneously showed Harry living at 915 Daly Avenue. We knew that the Daly Avenue address was wrong because 915 Daly Avenue is a non-existent address, and one of the posters at The Fogbow finally figured out that the census actually had Harry at 915 Elsmere Place, although the enumerator misspelled his surname as “Bounel.”

Harry was born in Russia on September 15, 1886 to Isaak Boymel and Pearl Boymel. Harry did not know (or had forgotten) his mother’s maiden name. He checked off that he was married and he noted that his last full employment, as the proprietor of his own fruit & vegetable business, had ended ten days earlier.

Above his address he wrote “540,” which may have been his apartment number (the census page does not include apartment numbers).

His SSN was 080-18-6078, which of course bears no resemblance to Barack Obama’s SSN. It is likely that he did not apply for a Social Security Number earlier because he was self-employed and therefore not covered by Social Security. The fact that he applied for a number in 1941, ten days after his business shut down, suggests that he was anticipating going to work for someone else.

Here’s the Social Security Death Index record from Ancestry.com:

Here his naturalization record (click to see really big):