At the end of November 1923, when the Veterans Bureau hearings were over and the Senate committee and John F. O’Ryan were writing their reports, the oil hearings came into their own. Witnesses revealed that while serving as interior secretary, Albert B. Fall had spent a suspiciously large amount of money on his ranch properties in New Mexico and paid long-overdue back taxes. Soon it was revealed that in 1922 he had quietly approved leases to oil millionaires and their corporations to drill for oil on government lands: notably, the lease of Naval Reserve No. 3 (Teapot Dome, Wyoming) to Mammoth Oil Company (Harry F. Sinclair), and Naval Reserve No. 1 (Elk Hills, California) to Edward L. Doheny.
Democratic, Progressive, and Republican senators seized on the conclusions of the Veterans Bureau hearings as proof of pervasive evils in the Harding administration, with the oil hearings promising more proof. The two Republicans on the Senate investigating committee, David Reed and Tasker Oddie, visited President Coolidge at the White House on December 1, 1923, accompanied by Frank Hines, the director of the Veterans Bureau. Attorney General Daugherty announced that criminal prosecutions would be brought and that he had lined up one of the “most vigorous prosecutors in the country,” Assistant Attorney General John W. H. Crim, a hard-driving legal crusader in his midforties with a reputation for fighting graft and corruption in antitrust cases, war frauds, and liquor and bootlegging conspiracies. In the summer of 1922, Crim had investigated allegations of fraud in the office of the Alien Property Custodian, Harding-appointee Thomas W. Miller, a former director of the Republican Campaign Committee. Crim had submitted his resignation from the Justice Department effective December 15 to return to private practice but agreed to take on the Forbes case at a “personal sacrifice.” General John F. O’Ryan and Major Davis Arnold of the Senate investigating team would work with him, providing a seamless transition from hearings to indictments.1
Crim saw his new assignment as a call to arms against a rabid band of nation-threatening monsters. He wanted the “most aggressive, personal cooperation at the very outset of the President and yourself,” he wrote Daugherty in a long memo, and expected to need the “aggressive cooperation” of other members of the cabinet: “The Reed Committee … saw such a disgusting situation, the entire gamut of the conduct of the lowest, commonest crooks imaginable. Grafting was relatively the most respectable thing they did. This rascality is not confined to the Veterans Bureau. … It is a much bigger thing than the rascality of Forbes. While his picturesqueness made him a conspicuous member of the ring, there are others not connected with the Veterans Bureau involved. Major Arnold feels that perhaps there will be 200 cases grow out of this.” Daugherty tried to moderate Crim’s saber-waving by reminding him that the entire resources of the Justice Department would not be his for the taking—“we must remember that there are other persons in the Department besides you and me”—but he clearly knew that under Crim no stone would be unturned.2
At the Department of Justice, Crim worked closely with Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who supervised the turncoat bootlegger Elias H. Mortimer, who was ready to reprise his role as star witness at the expected trial of Charles R. Forbes. Willebrandt was canny in selecting key targets and using informers, as well as getting good press. “She doesn’t give a hang for publicity yet gets it all the time,” a City Police Court defender wrote admiringly from Los Angeles, where she had worked. In a well-publicized raid against the “Savannah Rings” in Savannah, Georgia, in August 1923, eighty-four men had been arrested under the Volstead Act. Willebrandt supplemented inadequate resources at the Justice Department by getting help in the field wherever she could. Elias Mortimer, embedded in the illegal liquor business, was worth his weight in gold—both to her and to Crim. Mortimer’s prominence at the Senate hearings showed that he possessed skills that went beyond prohibition cases, though these continued to be his base, and that he was a believable, first-rate witness.3
Mortimer’s informal relationship with the Department of Justice was soon regularized. He became officially “on call” for the department on February 1, 1924. Soon he was acting openly as a paid government “agent.” In March, Willebrandt wrote to the commissioner of Internal Revenue asking for an extension for him in filing his federal tax return: “For several weeks, Mr. Mortimer has been continuously engaged in appearing before the grand juries at Chicago and Washington, DC, in connection with criminal prosecutions being handled by this Department.” Mortimer was assigned a federal agent, Gaspare J. “Mike” Allegra, ostensibly to protect him and keep him out of trouble, though from the record they seemed to function like partners. Allegra had come with his family from Sicily as a child. In 1924, Mortimer was living in New York, and Allegra was working as an undercover agent out of the FBI’s New York office.4
The well-publicized oil hearings, coming soon after the Veterans Bureau hearings, fed speculation that corruption in government departments was widespread during the Harding administration and that something had to be done. In the New Year of 1924, besides Fall, Sinclair, and Doheny, the hearings involved Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby, Assistant Navy Secretary, former Sinclair Oil director Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, who had allegedly “smoothed” legal action in order to allow government oil leases to be transferred to private corporations. The scandalous news in late January was that Fall had lied to Congress about accepting a loan of $100,000 from millionaire oilman Doheny—in cash, delivered in a black satchel by his son. President Coolidge informed the press that the Department of Justice had advised him to employ high-ranked special counsel to prosecute the oil cases. Congress passed a joint resolution that the president should appoint an investigating committee independent of that department—a slam against Attorney General Daugherty. In mid-February, Secretary Denby resigned under pressure from both Republicans and Democrats for his role in transferring naval oil leases to the Department of Interior. Daugherty kept his job until March 28, when he too resigned. Albert Fall was on a seven-year cavalcade of pain. In 1931, he became the first cabinet member convicted of a felony who went to prison.
“The shadow of a great scandal has fallen on the Republican administration,” wrote Arthur Sears Henning for the Chicago Tribune in January 1924. Congress was staking out the high ground against a corruption-ridden administrative bureaucracy. Self-righteous men howled for revenge. Journalist Mark Sullivan passed two gems along in February. First: “No propaganda coming out of Russia had done as much to undermine public confidence in government and big business as has the oil scandal.” Second, President Harding had been a man of integrity whose administration would be remembered for the betrayal of public trust by his friends, as indicated by this headline: “Harding’s Old Friends Seen as a Blight … Fall and Forbes Only Two in Point.”5
The Senate Committee on Investigation of the United States Veterans Bureau issued three separate “preliminary” reports and no final report. The first, introduced by Senator Reed and published at the end of January 1924, addressed needed changes in the laws dealing with veterans’ benefits and their administration, which were scattered across different pieces of legislation. The committee introduced a bill as a basis for immediate codification of the statutes and recommended twenty-two other changes. Codification was achieved under the World War Veterans’ Act, June 1924, together with extensions in veterans’ services. Senator David Walsh, the Democratic member of the committee, introduced the third preliminary report, which focused on improvements in hospital care. The hearings had positive aspects for the Veterans Bureau in stimulating revisions in the law, expanding services, and providing better management tools (and a higher salary, $12,000) for the director.6
The second report, from General John F. O’Ryan, focused on the manifold failures of Charles R. Forbes. News that the Veterans Bureau district offices were generally working satisfactorily was tucked away in small print in the appendix. Far-seeing recommendations for the “Betterment of Conditions” were included in the O’Ryan report. Its message, however, was one of condemnation: Forbes was “neither able nor honorable in the conduct of his office.” In O’Ryan’s view, changes in the laws were not enough: “No statute can supply character where character is lacking, or ability where it does not exist.” Among Forbes’s reported weaknesses was engagement in a “continuing round of social pleasure,” with “lavish entertainment.” O’Ryan presented Forbes’s criminality as proved, and Mortimer’s story of the $5,000 loan as fact: Ten $500 bills “were actually delivered to Forbes by Mortimer in the bathroom of Forbes’ suite at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, June 22, 1922.” It had been “conclusively established by the testimony of witnesses, by documentary evidence, and by the corroborative effect of numerous telltale circumstances that were brought out, that fraud and corruption existed in the bureau and that Director Forbes was a leading actor in the established conspiracy to defraud the Government.” O’Ryan made handwritten changes on a draft of the report to make his critique more powerful. The Perryville transaction became “more the work of buccaneers in the looting and scuttling of a ship than the mere negligence of trusted Government officials”; while new sheets “were run through and out the other side to the waiting cars of the contractor who carried them off as part of the booty.”7
In annihilating the reputation of a lieutenant colonel who had not come up to scratch, the general acted as judge and jury. There was a word for his method: “debunking.” As defined by a serious writer on public opinion and propaganda, Will Irwin (soon to be introduced): “The art of debunking, as old as the human race, consists mostly of massing the flaws, weaknesses, faults of your victim and telling them without recording his strengths, powers and virtues. Any mere man who ever lived could be deflated to a rag by this process.” Forbes was deflated to a rag.8
Initially, the three senators distanced themselves from the O’Ryan report, referring to it as “General O’Ryan’s report” and to his findings and recommendations as “his own” and “not those of the committee.” They endorsed his view of “the wretched incompetence, waste and dishonesty of the administration of the bureau under Director Forbes” but avoided naming Forbes as the sole culprit or as an out-and-out crook. But they soon fell into line. The public mood was to condemn. Senator Reed declared that the committee’s “non-partisan, unbiased policy” had been followed, and he had that in mind in appointing a “representative Democrat of New York” (O’Ryan) as counsel. Reed received the congratulations of his senatorial colleagues for a job well done. According to the New York Times, the Veterans Bureau scandal was more abhorrent and disheartening than the oil scandals. Teapot Dome had its princely oil millionaires—Doheny with his palatial estate in Pasadena; Sinclair with his Manhattan mansion and opulent railroad car. The Veterans Bureau scandal was an American morality tale in which officials cheated America’s distressed and wounded heroes, a story replete with influence peddling, drunken parties, dirty deals.9
An impressive amount of talent was focused on a dramatic “character” named Charles R. Forbes in the early months of 1924, over and above the considerable talent available to the Senate committee and Justice Department. Loring Pickering of the Northern American Newspaper Alliance, a syndicated feature service of the Associated Press, launched an important literary project when he asked fifty-year-old writer William Henry “Will” Irwin to create an exciting, readable narrative of the case out of the confusing transcripts of the Senate hearings. Pickering thought the Forbes case had more juice to squeeze out of it as a story. Irwin remembered his initial doubts. He was apparently being asked to do “muckraking” (digging up dirt), which was then out of style (“the novelists were assuming the task,” Irwin wrote). Also, the time to complete the expected series of articles was short, because the offer required the articles to be published before the grand jury handed down its indictments, and the Justice Department was steaming ahead. However, the timing would give the series thrilling relevance. Irwin had spent considerable time overseas during and after the war, national publicity would be welcome and the money was (presumably) good, and Pickering would provide him with two assistants. General O’Ryan would also be helpful. In January, O’Ryan sent a telegram to Senator Reed for photostatic copies of the committee’s original exhibits and then made them available to Irwin to copy as he wished.
Will Irwin was one of a new, twentieth-century breed of professional journalists. He majored in English at Stanford University, where he became a lasting friend of Herbert Hoover. Outgoing, well read, a jokester, he became a member of the “artistic bunch” of painters, poets, novelists, actors, and stage directors in San Francisco, where he worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle before moving east to work for the New York Sun. During World War I, he worked for the US government’s war propaganda machine, the Committee on Public Information, as did many writers of the time. Hence, his interest in the making of public opinion. He accepted Pickering’s offer and agreed to review the Senate hearings to take a look at the case, “and, if the facts were as he understood it, to stir it up.” And stir it up he did. He described his contribution later, writing about himself in the third person: “This man brought to light no unpublished facts. After a few interviews by way of getting the atmosphere, he buckled down to four large volumes of committee reports, already in print. From them and them alone he wrote a running story of the scandal in the Veterans Bureau. And for the first time the public understood the situation, felt the proper righteous indignation; and Forbes went to trial.” Irwin’s articles provided an accessible, racy narrative of the hearings, as seen from the O’Ryan and Mortimer points of view.10
Forbes’s perspective was noticeably absent from the series. For much of 1924, he was ill in the Brighton district of Boston, where he had sought comfort from the two women who had known and loved him longest: his widowed mother, Christina Forbes, and his married older sister, nurse Marie Forbes Judkins, with whom their mother lived. In New York, where Irwin lived, Elias H. Mortimer, however, was very much present. He spent “whole afternoons at my house, spilling what seemed elaborate romances,” Irwin wrote. Soon Mortimer found the key to Irwin’s imagination in the powerful narrative of love, betrayal, and revenge: Mortimer had an attractive wife, a “pretty and smart young woman very popular in one of several presidential sets.” Forbes had cheated him and wrecked his life, and Mortimer was after retribution at any cost. Years later Irwin wrote of Mortimer, “Whenever I pass a rosewood sofa in our living room, I seem to see him yet—a slight, youngish man, his dress correct to the last detail, his dark hair always in perfect order, his face handsome almost to prettiness, yet hard.” Suffering, he wrote, “had tied a permanent knot between his brows and in repose his dark eyes were somber.” He “followed one star—revenge.” After days and nights of agony, he had resolved to come clean—“‘even if I have to spend the rest of my life in jail.’” This was a great dramatic performance. Mortimer knew that as a vital witness for the prosecution he would not go to trial. According to Irwin’s friend Samuel Hopkins Adams, Irwin remembered Mortimer saying, “I’m going to get that bastard if I go up for life.”11
Negative descriptions of Forbes intermeshed with the competence of a well-oiled machine. Federal Judge George A. Carpenter summoned a special grand jury in Chicago on February 6, 1924, with Mortimer as a key witness. O’Ryan’s report for the Senate committee was officially published on February 7. Irwin’s seven-day series ran in major newspapers beginning February 11, with multipage episodes, photos, and exhibits. The grand jury handed down indictments against Forbes and Thompson on February 29. In short order, O’Ryan lambasted Forbes as a crook, Crim associated him with Mortimer’s account of crimes, and Irwin stirred up public opinion. Distinctive pictures of Forbes wove together. Crim used the words “rascality” and “picturesqueness” in his memo to Attorney General Daugherty. O’Ryan effectively called Forbes an immoral predator. Irwin described him as the “most picaresque figure in recent American life.” His Forbes had a mythical quality. He was a man imbued with disconcerting charm, the ability to make speeches, and sexually charged charisma. Crim’s Forbes was a criminal whose acts threatened the very fabric of democracy. O’Ryan’s Forbes was a military man who unscrupulously pilfered supplies and deserved court martial, but Irwin’s Forbes was a wayward rogue, with a bit of hucksterism thrown in: “Lively, vital, witty in a rough way, his mouth full of good stories and harmless gossip of the day, he had above everything the trick of personality.” Mortimer told Irwin that Forbes “could stand up before a thousand people and make ’em laugh and cry as he wanted.”12
Irwin retold Mortimer’s story that he had given Forbes a bribe of $5,000, described a conspiracy to rig hospital contracts, and emphasized the Senate investigating team’s finding that $225 million was thrown away in graft and waste (mostly attributed to the “waste which always accompanies graft”) in the Veterans Bureau in its first two years. Each of these became a lasting factoid of the “Forbes scandal.” The series came out under headlines that represented each paper’s editorial view. Samples from the Atlanta Constitution: “Forbes Pours Lives of Crippled Heroes into Pot of Graft … U.S. Army Deserter Betrays High Trust” (February 11, 1924); “Mortimer Fiddles His Golden Violin for Forbes’s Dance … Mortimer Pays All Bills after Forbes Promises Much Profit to Former’s Employers” (February 12); “‘Scotch Generals’ [Bottles of Scotch] Meet Col. Forbes on Pacific Coast … Grape Crop [at Livermore] Fails to Worry Forbes. ‘We’ll Get All the Wine We Want’” (February 13); “Frolic of Forbes Lands Juicy Plum in Lap of Builder … Chief of Vets’ Bureau with Lady Friend Leap Fully Clothed into Lake by Way of Prank” (February 14); “Delirium of Graft at Perryville Sale Seals Forbes’ Fate … Open Looting Draws Unwarranted Attention” (February 15); “Written Promise of Charles Forbes Only Paper Scrap. General Sawyer Gives President Harding First Intimation of Friend’s Betrayal of Trust” (February 16); “Mystery Shrouds Closing Chapter of Forbes’s Case … Sawyer Says Harding Demands Resignation. All Graft Not Money; Much of It Used as Political Trading Stock for Republicans” (February 17). The series fizzled out toward the end. In Atlanta, the first five articles began on page 1, and the last two on inside pages. But by then the job was done. With the momentum of a freight train gaining speed, the O’Ryan report, Irwin’s newspaper stories, the grand jury, and the indictments convicted Forbes in the court of public opinion before a trial date was set.13
Forbes waited in Washington while the grand jury was sitting in Chicago, expecting the worst. In poignant letters to his ex-wife, Kate (who was waiting for their divorce to be finalized), he described his ordeal as “awful and heartbreaking. … I have been framed and they are constantly trying to bring about more disgrace upon me” (February 15). “I am so tired and so sick of it all that I could just eat nails … the scoundrel behind it is that low hound Mortimer”; and fate had brought him to Washington to be a “[scape] goat” (February 21). “I have this awful stigma to live down. … It’s the worst thing that could happen to any man’s life”; nevertheless, he would “fight to the last ditch.” Under no circumstance, he wrote, would he betray his buddies in the war: “I loved those boys and gave everything in the world to help them and hold their comradeship, I was loyal to their cause and their interests” (February 25). Four days later the grand jury handed down its indictments. There were four indictments against Forbes and wealthy St. Louis businessman John W. Thompson, the two of the five alleged conspirators named by Mortimer who were still available for prosecution. (Cramer and Black were dead, and Mortimer had been granted immunity.) Forbes and Thompson were named jointly in two of the indictments: conspiracy (with “others unknown”) to commit bribery and offenses against the government and conspiracy to defraud the United States. In the third, Forbes was indicted for accepting a bribe (the $5,000 allegedly given to him by Mortimer), and in the fourth, Thompson was indicted for bribing Forbes.14
After his indictment, Forbes spent a day with James Easby-Smith, his attorney, preparing a statement for the press. Its main points were as follows: his acquaintance with John W. Thompson was slight and purely social; Thompson was “as completely innocent as myself”; he had been framed (“I am convinced that for the want of a more convenient political goat I was selected as a victim and a sacrifice”); a “puppeteer” pulled the strings (presumably O’Ryan), whose name his lawyer would not let him mention; and the three senators knew all the time that “the charges against me are as false as hell’s own brood.” Saying he welcomed a fair trial, with an implied emphasis on the word “fair,” on March 6 he pleaded “not guilty” before the United States commissioner in Washington to the charges handed down by the grand jury and posted a $10,000 bond.15
Well before a trial was scheduled, the public image of Charles R. Forbes (by this time often called “Charlie Forbes”) meshed into the larger narrative of corruption in the Harding administration. From the spring of 1924, one article after another across the country described Harding as the pawn of an “Ohio Gang” of whiskey-drinking, poker-playing, decadent, sordid, anti-American and treacherous cronies who surrounded a naïve but honest president. One critique compared Forbes with “jackals in human form who sneak across a battlefield after dark robbing the wounded.” Crim, the government prosecutor, hoped for an early resolution of the Forbes case with an expected trial date in April, before the national political conventions. Forbes and Easby-Smith took an express train to Chicago to confer with lawyers at the Chicago firm Sims, Welch, Godman and Stransky and to prepare for the trial. Forbes made a statement in mid-March: “I am confident of demonstrating the utter falsity of all the charges made by Mortimer, upon whose testimony, I believe, the government’s case is founded. … My opinion is that Mortimer is a character assassin of the worst type.” When asked what he thought about the Senate investigating committee, Forbes’s eyes flashed: “If I told you that, you couldn’t print it.”16
John W. H. Crim, however, had made a serious procedural error. Hot on the trail, he had contracted with a firm of private stenographers, Satterlee and Binns, to take notes at the grand jury proceedings, thereby breaching the theory of secrecy of the grand jury. The presence of the stenographers undermined the legitimacy of the proceedings. Another grand jury would have to be appointed and the process started again, with new indictments. Parallel pressures in February and March 1924 to push out Harry Daugherty as attorney general further complicated Crim’s life by threatening to remove the man who had appointed him. The next attorney general might take Crim off the case. Forbes and his attorneys would have to wait for months, as it turned out.
Crim was rescued from a potentially ruinous situation by a brilliant exercise of diversion and misdirection: Elias Mortimer and Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Crim’s former colleague at the Department of Justice (who supervised Mortimer), suddenly introduced a powerful but extraneous set of accusations that swamped press coverage of the Forbes case. Out of the blue, or so it seemed, Mortimer made startling charges of corruption against two unnamed members of Congress for crimes committed under the Volstead Act—charges that were unrelated to the Veterans Bureau, or to Forbes. Crim rushed to Washington, where he conferred with members of the Senate and House without giving the names of the two suspects. President Coolidge was said to be determined to get to the bottom of these “mysterious allusions of wrongdoing.” Stories ran “like wildfire” in congressional cloakrooms in Washington, rivaling the “choicest whispered stories of the oil scandal.” Seen from afar, as in Billings, Montana, the alarms were overdone: “Its sensibilities already overtaxed by the kaleidoscopic career of the oil scandal, the national capital is about to witness the further ordeal of a grand jury investigation into astonishing charges against several important public officials.” They were good copy. Crim and Mortimer were in the headlines.17
One of the accused was Congressman Frederick N. Zihlman of Maryland. Mortimer had cultivated Zihlman in his usual way and lent him and his wife money, and then allegedly tried to bribe him. Zihlman reportedly told Mortimer: “If you are that kind of a man, I want nothing more to do with you.” A federal grand jury looked into charges against the congressman but ignored Mortimer’s testimony referring to Zihlman and thus effectively exonerated him. The second, Congressman John Wesley Langley, sponsor of the Langley bills for veterans hospital construction, to whom Mortimer had lent a large amount of money, was not so fortunate (and may well have been guilty). Langley was indicted in Kentucky, his home state, on March 27, 1924, with Mortimer as star witness, and subsequently tried, convicted, and imprisoned. Assistant Attorney General Willebrandt took direct charge of this case. Mortimer had been part of a plan to remove a large quantity of whiskey from the Belle of Anderson distillery in Kentucky (which could be done legally with appropriate permits for medical use) without paying the necessary tax, and Langley was implicated. As noted (in chapter 6), Langley resigned from Congress in January 1926 after the Supreme Court declined to review his case.18
In the process, in the months between Forbes’s first indictment and his trial, Crim saved face thanks to Mortimer, Mortimer accumulated credit, and Crim accorded him respect. Crim was to describe Mortimer at the Forbes-Thompson trial as an “undercover man” employed by the Justice Department to “ferret out just such details as Forbes is alleged to have conspired in.” Elsewhere, Crim said Mortimer was a “paid informer of the government,” with a salary of $4,000 a year. In August 1924 (while Forbes was still awaiting a trial date), Willebrandt wrote US Attorney William Hayward in New York about the New York case in which Mortimer was still involved as a defendant, United States v. Clifton, Codina, Mortimer et al., suggesting he downplay Mortimer’s role and protect his participation as a witness in the Forbes case. In the Langley case, she argued, Mortimer’s accuracy “was a matter of astonishment to all of us with whom he worked.” Crim, too, was “outspoken in belief in his dependability in every dealing they have had.” Hayward reviewed the evidence, decided that Mortimer was “at best a passive conspirator,” and agreed that the case against him should not be pressed.19
Crim still had the prospect of new leadership at the Justice Department to face. On February 20, 1924, freshman Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a feisty and ambitious Democrat, had introduced a resolution in the Senate to a create a select committee to investigate Harry M. Daugherty for alleged failure to prosecute those accused in the oil scandal, among other issues; and the Senate approved, 66–1. Wheeler, not averse to what he called “bare-knuckle fights,” began to probe, and soon heard reports that Daugherty was “up to his neck in massive graft.” This was a promising agenda for Democrats as they geared up for the 1924 elections, but for Republicans, too, Daugherty, the supposed kingpin of the Ohio Gang, had become an unwanted burden. In mid-March, President Coolidge decided on Harlan Fiske Stone, a respected legal scholar, dean of Columbia University Law School, as Daugherty’s replacement, and, finally, after investigative hearings had begun, Daugherty resigned. On the stand and in newspaper reports on the hearings was Roxy Stinson, the ex-wife and widow of Daugherty’s associate Jess Smith, who had died by his own hand—her eyes soulful, ambitions large, bangles clinking as she gesticulated. There, too, was the infamous, overweight Gaston Means, an old-style detective of large presence and cocksure grin, who, by his own account, broke the law regularly and without compunction on special assignment for the government. While the Forbes case was on hold, the Daugherty scandal and the oil lease scandal were entertainments for the masses. Magazine writer Arthur Ruhl compared the Justice Department hearings to a small-town matinee or vaudeville transported to the capital: an “ironic comedy in disillusion.” Bands of sightseers crowded the chamber “to suffocation,” while many others overcrowded the “oil matinee” in another hearings room.20
Attorney General Stone reviewed Crim’s position, but after Stone questioned Crim he kept him on as prosecutor for the Forbes trial—and was eventually pleased with the result. In June 1924, a second grand jury took place quietly, out of the headlines, and returned new indictments. The trial was delayed until late November, after the national elections.
In a second case, in April 1924, a federal grand jury indicted Forbes in Baltimore, Maryland, for conspiracy to defraud the United States in disposing of government supplies at Perryville. The accused coconspirators were Naval Commander Charles O’Leary, former chief of supplies for the Veterans Bureau, and Nathan Thompson, president of the Boston firm Thompson and Kelly, to whom supplies were sold. Brigadier General Charles E. Sawyer testified before this grand jury. On April 25, Colonel Forbes appeared voluntarily at the Federal District Court in Baltimore to plead not guilty. Bail was set at $10,000. Forbes’s lawyer, Easby-Smith, pushed to keep to the initial trial date in November, but the government was granted extra time to collect evidence. General Sawyer, standing erect and projecting moral rectitude in court, might (or might not) have swayed a jury against Forbes, but had no chance to see. Sawyer died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Marion, Ohio, on September 23. The Maryland case was eventually dropped, partly because of Sawyer’s absence, partly because investigators were failing to find clear evidence of fraud, and partly because Forbes was convicted in Chicago and that seemed to be enough.21
Jostling candidates for the national political party conventions in 1924 (three of them, including Senator Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party) took spring and summer headlines. By early April, preelection speeches marked Forbes as a political target. In any review for or against Coolidge’s reappointment, somebody was sure to shout, “How about Forbes?” and “How about Daugherty?” In July, the sudden tragic death of President Coolidge’s younger son, Calvin, from sepsis caused by an infected blister on his foot after a tennis game, generated a wave of sympathy for the bereaved parents. Back on the stump in August, Coolidge formally accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency in the forthcoming elections. “The chief issue of this campaign,” he said, “is honest government.” The people of the United States “hate corruption.” Individuals charged with wrongdoing were being prosecuted. Coolidge won the election, keeping the presidency he had acquired through Harding’s death. Charles G. Dawes was elected vice president.22
Crim, the prosecuting attorney in the Forbes case, was a witness at the Brookhart-Wheeler hearings on the Department of Justice, testifying as an expert on the future organization of the department. He spoke up for Harry Daugherty, his former boss, attesting to his integrity. “He had his faults,” Crim said, “but I’ll have to judge the evidence myself before I’ll believe he prostituted his office. To me he never faltered.” Mortimer was subpoenaed to appear before the committee for his alleged role in whiskey deals and attempts to get a pardon for convicted bootlegger Charles Vincenti in return for $50,000 (the equivalent of $700,000 in twentieth-first-century terms). He was not put on the stand. His estranged wife Katherine Mortimer was called but only to testify that, yes, it was Mr. Mortimer’s signature on the contract for the Vincenti deal.23
As attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone brought university-based professionalism and belief in bureaucracy to a job previously held by a political deal-maker. Stone sought to modernize the Justice Department, as, in their different ways, Frank Hines was doing at the Veterans Bureau and Hubert Work at the Department of Interior. Stone fired old-style detective William J. Burns as head of the Bureau of Investigation in May, making J. Edgar Hoover the acting director. (Hoover became director of the bureau—the FBI—in December 1924 and held that position until his death in 1972.) Human relations within the organization needed improvement. Assistant to the Attorney General William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan wrestled with both Crim and J. Edgar Hoover, who controlled the work of special agents and the files they produced. Stone called a special meeting in Washington in September to iron out the various relationships and to address an altercation Crim had with Hoover on the number of special agents assigned to him—too few, Crim complained. Donovan ceded responsibility for prosecuting the criminal aspects of the Forbes case to Crim and agreed to help him in those efforts but retained responsibility for prosecution under civil law. Meanwhile, Hoover professionalized the FBI with admirable skill, holding his agents to required standards and procedures. Some basic animus remained: Donovan felt free to challenge Hoover’s decisions, while Hoover considered Donovan an “unimaginative civil servant” who engaged in meddling. Each kept files on the other.24
For Crim, putting together the Forbes-Thompson case in Chicago, Attorney General Stone’s questions about what he was doing and how he was doing it was unfair criticism. Crim needed sympathy, for facts were sparse and rumors roared. The cases are “essentially those of conspiracy,” he told Stone, but “two of the four conspirators are dead.” (Mortimer, the fifth, had done a deal with the prosecution.) After Crim offered his resignation, Stone backed down, promising to “do everything possible to hold up your hands so that the government’s case may proceed to a successful conclusion.” Whatever their doubts about each other, all concerned at the Department of Justice agreed that Forbes was guilty and should be indicted and convicted as a national example of government corruption. Crim referred to the “Forbes case,” not the Thompson-Forbes or Forbes-Thompson case, and left Thompson in the background as a prop: a shadowy figure whose role as a conspirator was simply assumed. John W. Thompson, up until then a successful, reputable businessman, did not testify in public at any point in the case, including the Senate hearings and the trial. Though well served by lawyers, he comes down through time as a wraithlike presence.25
Crim’s imperial orders were not appreciated by the long-suffering, quietly hostile Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as he mobilized agents around the country to drop everything, find people and evidence and send him immediate results. These orders continued even as the trial was taking place. Finding the witnesses was problem enough. Lila Cramer, the young widow of Veterans Bureau lawyer Charles Cramer, proved particularly elusive, even though the US Post Office was checking her mail in Washington, DC, and her father’s mail in Kansas City. Agents were still hoping (in vain) that she would produce a suicide letter that would incriminate the conspiracy as a whole. Forbes’s former government aide, Merle L. Sweet, was hard to find because after the Senate hearings ended in December 1923, he left the country on behalf of Forbes’s fledgling San Francisco business, Charles R. Forbes and Company, Exporters and Importers, for Soerabaja, Java, in what was then the Dutch East Indies, where he expected to stay for two or three years. Marguerite Sweet, Merle’s wife, had sold their furniture and was waiting for instructions to sail when she received an alarming telegram commanding her to appear before the first grand jury. “What does this mean?” she wrote Crim. Her husband returned in haste to the United States, arriving May 10, only to hear rumors that he had been bribed to leave the country, was a material witness against Forbes (when he was actually a strong supporter), and had fled the country without filing a tax return. (He had had to wait for the US tax forms to arrive in Java.) Sweet wrote wryly to the American consul in Soerabaja: “Who knows but that this suggestion of my being an important contributor to the Department of Infernal [sic] Revenue may prove to be a big ad for Yours truly M.L.S.” Humor was a necessary commodity. Forbes and Company was destroyed.26
Katherine Mortimer’s uncle, James Williams, and his wife were important prosecution witnesses. Mr. Williams was expected to testify that Forbes had discussed illegally transporting narcotics held by the Veterans Bureau via the Williams fleet of milk trucks, and Mrs. Williams was expected to agree with him. (Forbes said no such discussion took place.) Williams could also attest to the employment of his nephew, young George Tullidge, as a low-wage truck driver for his creamery company before Forbes employed him in an overpaid engineering job in the Veterans Bureau. Federal agents found Mr. Williams at home in Philadelphia, duly served him a subpoena, and ordered him to appear with his wife in Chicago. Mrs. Williams refused to go. She had been in Florida for six weeks and saw no reason to accompany her husband to a cold and windy city in February. Crim send an urgent telegram to the FBI office in Miami, causing Special Agent Leon Howe to check her presence “under the pretext of wishing to buy the house.” A separate subpoena was served on her; she demanded money for the trip, and the agent made her a train reservation to Chicago.27
False leads wasted the time of federal agents, such as a report to the FBI from Mortimer associate Henry Anchester that a Mrs. Forbes, supposedly a second cousin of Charles R. Forbes, lived in the Majestic Hotel in Philadelphia and knew that Forbes had “large sums of money in his possession … and that she knew of sums of money that he had received for ‘crooked deals that he had pulled while in Washington.’” Special agent E. E. Conroy took time out from his inquiries about the sales of surplus supplies at Perryville to interview her in Philadelphia. This Mrs. Forbes quite emphatically stated that she was not Forbes’s relative, had never seen him, never been employed by the Veterans Bureau, and knew nothing about him “except that she had heard Mortimer, who lived in a room opposite to hers in the Rittenhouse Hotel [in Philadelphia], make derogatory statements in regard to him; and that she had no knowledge of Forbes having any money or having received any for ‘crooked deals.’” Agent Conroy noted in his report that Anchester’s previous information had not proved reliable and concluded that this claim was also unreliable. Crim viewed the FBI as obstructive.28
At times, federal agents practically fell over one another. For example, Special Agent Y. O. Wilson embarked on an investigation for Assistant Attorney General Donovan of how Director Forbes paid for the impressive automobile he bought after his return from his western trip (during which Mortimer allegedly handed him $5,000), only to learn from a vice president of sales for the Hoffman Motor Company that numerous Department of Justice agents had been there seeking the same information. None of them came up with anything concrete. The car was expensive, a six-passenger vehicle selling for $3,585, plus extras. Forbes was allowed $1,400 as the trade-in price for his Cole automobile, paid $1,000 in cash, and signed a sixty-day note for the rest. None of this money (nor any deposits in Forbes’s bank accounts) could be traced back to Mortimer.29
The Baltimore indictment set off a parallel rush to find evidence, this time for phony contracts, kickbacks, and rigged bids in selling government supplies to a private corporation for twenty cents of their imputed dollar value. FBI agents were soon bogged down in hopelessly inadequate detail. How did you compare the cost of one bolt of blue Melton cloth with another, when they had come from different depots, from different suppliers, at different dates without accompanying paperwork? Thompson and Kelly, the firm that bought the Perryville consignment, was a reputable business in Boston, set up to buy surplus materials in large quantities and sell them at a small profit to firms such as Montgomery Ward for retail. There was no evidence that Forbes had profited in this, nor anyone else. Neither Forbes nor O’Leary (his accused coconspirator) had suspicious deposits in their bank accounts. FBI agents and special accountants started painstaking investigative work on the Perryville case in April 1924 and were still at it in June 1925, working through a scorching, un-air-conditioned summer and dismal winter days. Special Agent Conroy worked on the Boston end in April and May, accompanied by an agent from the Boston office. They could find no dirt on Nathan Thompson of Thompson and Kelly. Born in Covna, Russia, he became a naturalized US citizen, moved up from small enterprise to big, and prospered. Thompson and Kelly had been charged with improperly offering for sale pajama lots bearing the Red Cross insignia, but the firm stated they did not realize this was illegal and had vowed to remove such patches in the future; the investigation closed. Detail after detail piled up in Conroy’s report of more than forty pages, but nothing jumped out as incriminating with respect to the Perryville sale.30
The sick man at the center of all these efforts, Charles R. Forbes, endured. In Boston, in the middle of May 1924, Dr. John H. Cauley visited him every day for problems of vomiting and inability to sleep. Forbes continued to be confined to bed and unable to travel, “very much upset,” Cauley wrote Easby-Smith (Forbes’s lawyer), lest anyone should feel that he was feigning illness, and “is most anxious to be in court when necessary.” Forbes sounded desperate and despondent, threatening to “rip the innermost circles of Washington wide open.” He compared himself to “poor old Jess Smith,” who had also been framed, he said—and now “they’re trying to murder me.” Cauley rated Forbes’s ability to travel as “conservative” in mid-June. A consultant, Dr. John T. Bottomley of 165 Beacon Street, stated that it “would be entirely unsafe even to leave the hospital, not to speak of undertaking a railroad journey.” Crim reviewed Forbes’s case for Attorney General Stone at the beginning of July: “I am convinced from facts before me that he has been for several weeks in a dangerous physical condition, a great part of the time in a hospital. It may be several weeks before he will be physically able to go to Chicago to plead, and it is more than possible that he will never be tried for the reason that he is likely to linger a few months and die.”31
Katherine Mortimer was also in poor health in 1924. She had a heavy load to bear: Mortimer’s persecution of her, the dragging out of her divorce proceedings, the possibility that she might have to testify (and be roundly criticized) at a trial of national significance, and the absence and serious illness of Bob Forbes, whom she could not openly visit for fear of further scandal. Still in her twenties, she was wasting away. From Leavenworth, her incarcerated brother, Dr. Edward Tullidge, advised intravenous iron and mercurochrome by mouth. “Dearest Sweetheart,” he wrote “Kay” to cheer her up after the first grand jury in Chicago, “… you are all I have left … you know that you’re very ill and breakdown makes it harder for me knowing that you are so far away and so I cannot go to you.” Her parents recognized Mortimer as the prime cause of Katherine’s condition. Dr. George Tullidge, his eyes opened, hoped his son-in-law would overreach: “The dirty skunk has tried to put over something else which would astonish you if I could tell it to you,” he wrote Edward, whose mail was censored. “But he will shut up before long. In the latest scandal in Washington, of which he is the author, he has probably hung himself. I refer to the accusation against two congressmen which Crim so foolishly trumpeted over the country as a wonderful result of his genius for investigation and finding out frauds.” Katherine’s mother put the sentiment more graphically, pecking imperfectly on a manual typewriter: “can one Wicked person upset the world as this Mortim [sic] has well he will com [sic] to his end before long.” They were overoptimistic.32
In May 1924, Katherine Mortimer regained her health, only to be involved in a bizarre episode in Philadelphia. A certain Caesar Tata, a well-dressed tailor in his thirties, telephoned to tell her he had valuable information to impart if she would come down to the train station. Katherine persuaded him to meet her instead at her parents’ home in Overbrook and called the police. Detective Brannon and a policeman hurried to the house and hid behind a door with Katherine’s mother to listen in. Tata was oddly precise in his report: He had met Mortimer on October 13, 1922, in a restaurant at Eighth and Christian Streets in Philadelphia with three other men, “Codina,” “Fletcher,” and an unnamed elderly man. The group talked about liquor deals, a Philadelphia enforcement agent who had been “fixed,” and Mortimer’s plans to be the next prohibition agent in Philadelphia. The men offered Tata money to “hire men to do away with Forbes,” employing as many men as he wanted and paying any amount. Tata said he attended three other meetings in a hotel on Broad Street. At the last one, Mortimer was drunk, “the night of the Army-Navy game in this city.” Tata claimed he strung them along but never agreed. When he finished talking, the police revealed themselves and arrested him as a suspicious person. A preliminary hearing was held before Magistrate O’Brien the following day, at which Katherine Mortimer testified that Tata had been offered money to “do away with Forbes.” Almost immediately, Tata recanted: There was no murder plot, he said. The deal was only to get some “dope” on Mrs. Mortimer and Forbes, not to kill him, and Katherine misheard: “she in her excitement colored it to suit her own self.” Alternatively, Tata said: “Mrs. Mortimer is trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill.” Charges against Tata were dropped.33
This charade reads, even now, as almost unbelievable, but less so if one assumes Mortimer was its director, for the incident accomplished several goals: (1) It sent his wife a message of his control. (2) It fueled newspaper publicity of a love triangle. At least one newspaper published a triple photo of Colonel Forbes, Mr. Mortimer, and Mrs. Mortimer on its front page, headlined, “Three Involved in Alleged Murder Plot.” (3) Mortimer ended up with continuing FBI protection and government income that might otherwise have been lost. Crim had been considering relaxing his “close control” of Mortimer, including the need for continuing his assigned federal agent Mike Allegra, in favor of having Mortimer call in each day by telephone. The day of the incident, Allegra sent a wire to Crim in Chicago, citing the report in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. Allegra then “delivered” Mortimer to Assistant Attorney General Willebrandt in Washington. By a magnificent bending of the facts, Allegra told Willebrandt that the Tata story was Forbes’s propaganda and that Mortimer was scared and wanted continuing protection. Willebrandt agreed: the news from Philadelphia was a “frame-up” hostile to Mortimer. Other attempts on him might be made; he was in danger; he should not travel alone. The Justice Department needed him.34
Willebrandt warned her valuable asset to keep clean. His “frankness” to a jury was convincing, she told him, but he must not be discredited before the trial or make “wild and inconsistent statements.” Avoid the “personal things concerning your wife, which are naturally fraught with so much emotional stress for you,” and build up a “reliable and conservative business standing.” Her advice came with a sting: “Of course you know my word is at stake in the New York bond matter, but if you keep Mr. Allegra advised of your plans I shall be satisfied that I can keep my word in court.” Willebrandt reported all this to Crim. “I am watching the outcome of the Forbes case in Chicago with tremendous interest,” she wrote. “I certainly hope there will be a trial soon and a conviction. The man is guilty if anyone ever was.” The ends would justify the means.35
The components of the trial were coming together. Charles R. Forbes revived sufficiently to be on his feet in mid-October 1924. He had been ill more or less constantly, with short periods of recovery, since President Harding’s death. He was not in the best of health in November, when the trial finally began in Chicago. Nevertheless, Easby-Smith was optimistic that the facts were on their side. Neither of them fully appreciated—how could they?—that it was the fictional, devil-may-care, amoral “Charlie,” member of the Harding Gang, who was on trial, not the shattered, factual “Bob.”