CORRUPTION: First Felon

Twelve tired-eyed jurors, taut and nervous, filed solemnly into the District of Columbia Supreme Court room one morning last week after a day and a night's deliberation. A young bank teller, as foreman, cleared his throat huskily, read from a blue paper in his shaky hand: "Guilty, with a recommendation to the mercy of the court."

That statement convicted Albert Bacon Fall, onetime (1921-23) Secretary of the Interior, of bribery. It branded him as the first felon in a President's Cabinet in U. S. history. It made him liable to a three-year prison sentence, a $300,000 fine.* It changed the $100,000 in cash sent Fall in a little black bag by Oilman Edward Laurence Doheny from an innocent "loan" between old friends to a corrupt and criminal payment to influence the Secretary of the Interior to lease U. S. Naval Oil Reserve No. 1 at Elk Hills. Cal., to Doheny's Pan-American Petroleum Co. It insured the trial of Doheny.

The conviction of Fall as a bribe-taker, the first conviction to be obtained by the U. S. on direct evidence of the naval oil scandals (1921-23), produced a strange courtroom scene. Defendant Fall, seriously ill with bronchial pneumonia, sat in a green Morris chair, wrapped in an automobile robe, his black New Mexican sombrero in his lap. His eyes were stunned, blankly staring at the verdict. Down his white, sunken cheek rolled a teardrop, to be kissed away by his sobbing wife. Other women present moaned and groaned hysterically. Robust cowpunchers and ranchers bent their heads in sorrow for their friend. Oilman Doheny, crimson with rage and chagrin, shook his fist at the bench and screamed: "That damned court—." Mark Thompson, Fall attorney, went white and limp, slumped to the floor, lay there unconscious for ten minutes before physicians could revive him. Bending over him was Frank Hogan, chief defense counsel, ashy white with disappointment. Cried Lawyer Hogan: "Tell that damned jury to come back here and smile at this, too." The wife of one of the jurors had followed the case as a Fall sympathizer. After the verdict she chased violently after her husband to a public park where he was being photographed. "You miserable rat!" she screamed.

"Come here where I can get my hands on you!"

The facts on which Fall was tried were agreed on both sides. Fall and Doheny, gold prospectors together in the old West, had been friends for 43 years. Doheny had approached Fall, as Secretary of the Interior, for an oil lease. At the peak of negotiations—Nov. 30, 1921—he had sent Fall $100,000 in cash by his son. Four months later Doheny's oil company had the Elk Hills lease from which it expected to make $100,000,000. Two years ago a jury tried Fall and Doheny on practically the same evidence for conspiracy to defraud the U. S. That jury acquitted them. This time the jury had to judge, independent of Doheny, Fall's intent in receiving this cash. It found his intent criminal, the cash a bribe.

For a fortnight the jury of eight men and four women had heard evidence, listened to argument. Fall had collapsed at the beginning of the trial, had been pronounced a dangerously ill man by impartial doctors but, at his insistence, the trial had gone on (TIME, Oct. 21).