COLUMN ONE : What Sort of Clip Job Was This? : Connie Arvidson is a checkout-line legend. But officials say the queen of coupons has been passing fakes. It’s a scandal on both sides of the aisle.

BOCA RATON, Fla. —  In her prime, Coupon Connie could bring home $300 worth of groceries for a measly $8 and change. She’d move purposefully through the supermarket, hauling two shopping carts through the aisles--one pushed and one pulled--navigating the corners like a hook-and-ladder truck.

Her transactions at the checkout counter were sometimes as complicated as a leveraged buyout. She’d unload 12 bottles of Mazola and 20 boxes of Uncle Ben’s and 80 cans of Beefaroni. Then she’d hand over a great wad of cents-off coupons, enough to nearly match the total on the register.

“I’ve got 60 boxes of Tylenol at $1.99 each,” she’d explain. “My coupons are for $1 off; the store doubles the coupons, that’s your policy. So I’ll just pay sales tax.”

“That’s amazing,” the clerk would say grudgingly.

“No, it’s simply good refunding,” Connie would reply with a smile wide as a checkbook. “And just you wait, the manufacturer always offers rebates on Tylenol. I’ll get money back for every empty box.”

To her, rebate offers were even better than coupons, all cash and no carry. Why buy anything at all? She’d pick through dumpsters, tearing the proofs-of-purchase off cartons. Sure, the manufacturers usually paid off on only one per customer. But she could trade the rest around the country.

There are about 100,000 serious “refunders” such as Connie Arvidson, sea to shining sea. They subscribe to refund bulletins and swap paper at coupon conventions: box tops and labels and offer blanks. It is a penny-wise world, made up of smart-shopping housewives. And retirees. And church groups.

And, on occasion, crooks. Lately, in fact, Coupon Connie herself--a legend in the checkout lines of Boca Raton--has been thinking not so much about 50 cents off the list price as time off for good behavior.

Next month, proclaiming innocence, she goes on trial in federal court, charged with nine others in a scheme to allegedly buy and sell thousands of counterfeit rebate coupons. Phony deals for free White Cloud. Phony deals for free Maxwell House. Phony deals for free Luvs.

There has never been a scandal like it among coupon swappers. “This awful woman has given a bad name to all the thoroughly wonderful people who refund as a hobby,” says Jean Kwiatkowski, editor of Moneytalk, one of the 20 or so bulletins that keep up with the latest coupon lowdown.

Michele Easter, editor of Refunding Makes Cents, says, “Good old-fashioned coupon clippers now are afraid they’ve traded for something counterfeit and they’re going to be sent off to jail.”

In truth, a little fear along the road to redemption may be a good thing, or at least that is what the manufacturers say. Big money is involved.

There are no cumulative totals for money-back rebates, but redeemed cents-off coupons amounted to $2.9 billion in 1988, according to the A.C. Nielsen Clearing House, which keeps track of the bookkeeping for dozens of companies.

Fraud seems inevitable with so much at stake. It is estimated at up to $500 million a year and more. Much of the chicanery is the work of merchants--real or fake--who send in coupons for reimbursement without ever making the sale.

Other swindles are peculiar to consumers--little piggies gone to market, people who feel entitled to some extra ethical elbow room so long as the amount in question is small and the corporation involved is big.

One scheme is to swap for as many “complete deals” as possible--labels, refund forms, everything it takes to get a rebate--and turn them in without buying the products.

“Some offers require receipts, and some people go so far as to have their own cash register to print them up,” says Len Perkins, a Nielsen lawyer.

Many rebates are limited to one per customer, so people try to get around that by using multiple post office boxes. They jumble their names into anagrams and fudge the digits in their address, hoping the postman will figure it out.

“You’d be surprised at the variations you can create out of a single name and address,” says coupon expert Judith Farrell, also with Nielsen. “It sounds like a lot of trouble for a few bucks, but it adds up fast.”

Counterfeiting coupons is the latest scam--and one of the most elaborate. “They print them as good as we do,” says Hank Goodson, coupon control manager for Procter & Gamble Co.

Since June, 1988, more than 600,000 phony coupons have been printed, copying the actual rebate offers of 47 manufacturers, federal investigators say.

Each coupon is valued between $1 and $10.89: free batteries from Eveready and free Doritos from Frito-Lay. People bought and sold the coupons in bulk, then redeemed them at stores, sometimes reselling the goods at flea markets.

That this new scheme allegedly involved Connie Arvidson was no great surprise to some clearing house sleuths. Their computers had spit out her name several times as a chronic coupon rule-breaker.

Around South Florida, however, the indictment this summer was a shock. Here, Coupon Connie was thought to be a bona fide shopping phenomenon. Local papers had written features. Radio talk shows had sat her down at the mike.

By Connie’s telling, some years she earned $20,000 on rebates alone. Every day, checks stuffed her mailbox full as a pinata. “I can’t begin to tell you how good Procter & Gamble is to me,” she said. “I just love P&G.;”

What a story she tells! She is a 34-year-old Portuguese immigrant, raised poor in Connecticut, once manacled to a bad marriage and dreary factory job. In 1982, she gave birth to a daughter whom she longed to care for at home.

A friend recommended that she read a book about refunding, and those few pages “opened the way to a better life”: There it was--America, the land of milk and honey, free with any purchase of corn flakes.

To Connie, coupon clipping was a cottage industry. She quit her job and enlisted relatives to save refund offers. From the paper boy she received additional supermarket inserts. From the garbage men she got extra trash.

In no time, all the store managers knew her. Connie was not much trouble. “A good refunder is organized,” she says. She always had the right coupons for the right size of product.

Another thing, she was not greedy. If a refrigerator case of Jones sausages was there for the taking, she still left some for others. “A good refunder never empties the shelf, unless the offer is about to expire,” she says.

And a good refunder is not picky. Colgate is just as good as Crest. And a balanced diet, however praiseworthy, is not a biblical command. A family can do nicely for months with beef stew and Eggos and Duncan Hines cakes.

Why don’t people understand this, she sometimes complained. After all, America is a free country, and free means you don’t pay.

“Once, I grabbed a man in a store,” she says. “I couldn’t believe he was actually buying the Clorox. I had 50 coupons for Vivid, 75 cents off.

“I told him, ‘Here, buy the smallest size of Vivid. It’s just as good as Clorox; you can use it on colored fabrics. At the counter, they double your coupon and it’s practically free.

“ ‘Then you go home and hold on to the label. Vivid is made by a very generous company. They’re always running some kind of rebate offer.’ ”

Oh, rebates! Like scholarships, they require work but also pay well. To take advantage of all she could, Coupon Connie subscribed to several refund bulletins, such as Moneytalk and Refund Express.

These publications tell crafty refunders about every offer: where to send away, when it must be done, how much the check will be. Most of all, they print ads for people who want to buy or sell or swap.

Let’s say a person somehow obtains dozens of proofs-of-purchase for cases of Exxon motor oil, each POP worth $5. That person legally is limited to a single rebate. They will need to trade or sell the rest.

Some may wonder: How does a person obtain dozens of these valuable POPs in the first place? “The answer to the money problems of the poor is in the trash,” Connie says. “Billions of rebate coupons are just thrown away.”

By 1983, she had moved to Florida and rented a house. She established her own trash-picking route along Federal Highway, a busy road of gas stations, restaurants and bars, each with a dumpster around the side.

Blech, it was often disgusting, Connie boosting herself above the metal rims and casting about bare-handed amid the half-eaten food. There were roaches the size of her thumb and fire ants crazed as banshees.

Her specialties were the POPs pulled off oily Exxon boxes and the labels from liquor bottles. At home, she’d soak 100 bottles in the bathtub, then dry the peeled-off labels on waxed paper spread across the living room floor.

Kevin Arvidson, Connie’s second husband, would often pitch in and help. “It was a mess and all, but I couldn’t argue with the money it brought in, and I suppose it was better than having her on a 9 to 5 job,” he says.

Indeed, the money piled up like a store display of Pepsi cans. Connie could afford toys and furniture, a nose job and a breast implant, even the down payment on a BMW. “There are no limits to this,” she says proudly.

And certainly the profitability took a high bounce last year after Connie beheld a tantalizing ad from some fellow in Texas: coupons for free food, take your pick, any 10 products for just $7.50.

The items on his list included Nestea, Planters nuts and Peter Pan peanut butter. That’s good stuff--and worth plenty more than $7.50.

Right away, Connie mailed off for an initial 30 coupons. When those arrived and were redeemed by the stores, she sent off for thousands more at a special rate.

She knew plenty of folks who’d welcome the bargain. “I was buying the coupons for 25 cents and reselling them for double that,” she says.

One early morning, however, this lucrative new enterprise led to a visit from two grumpy postal inspectors. “Are you Connie Arvidson?” they asked.

At this point, the entire story of Coupon Connie breaks apart and two versions dash down separate paths--Connie’s and the investigators’.

While both accounts allege that one David George Rackmill of Stamford, Tex., is the mastermind, they differ on a vital question: Could Connie Arvidson, refunding whiz, not have known she was peddling counterfeits?

“Is it normal for a housewife to buy 5,000 to 10,000 coupons at a price of $200 or $300, when they are actually worth $2,000 or $3,000?” asks postal inspector Sam Prose. “Wouldn’t she obviously know something is wrong?”

So far, seven of the 10 defendants in the case have pleaded guilty, and a few have bartered evidence against the rest much the same way they used to swap coupons.

Did Connie really know what was going on? “Are you kidding? She’s the one who sucked me into all of this,” says defendant James Caprose of New Castle, Pa., one of Arvidson’s favorite trading partners.

When Connie hears of such statements, she gets so angry she could squeeze a roll of Charmin down to the size of a spitball. “The ad was in the magazines; I trusted the damn magazines,” she says.

“And why should I think there was something wrong about a man with 1,000 free coupons to sell. I could pick that much out of the dumpsters in a day!”

These are dreary times for her, no doubt. Connie faces a possible 20 years in prison and fines of $1 million. This whole thing has hit her across the face like the grill of a shopping cart.

“I’m in the pits of my life,” she says wearily; and in fact, in recent weeks the coupons in the newspaper have gone unclipped and the rebate offers stack up unredeemed.

There is no vigor in her step as she moves through the grocery aisles. Oh, Joy is on sale? She did not know. And Dole will refund $1.50 for the POPs off four 46-ounce juice cans? So what.

Coupon Connie rolls toward the checkout counter, chastened and dispirited now, most often paying--ugh, the thought of it--full price.