INVESTIGATIONS: The Old Familiar Faces

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Senator John J. Williams, the Delaware Republican who touched off the scandals in the Bureau of Internal Revenue, fired another salvo last week. His target was Joseph D. Nunan Jr., Commissioner of Internal Revenue from 1944 until he resigned in 1947, with a warm letter of thanks from Harry Truman, to become a Manhattan tax attorney. Many of the officials whom the tax scandals have forced out of office were his close associates, but Nunan himself had appeared only on the edges of the investigations. Senator Williams now fitted him into a gallery of old familiar faces.

In 1949, said Williams, Nunan represented an Indianapolis brewery that was fighting a Government tax claim for $636,000. Nunan somehow got a settlement for a piffling $4,500. The Washington officials who so generously okayed the reduction were none other than T. Lamar Caudle of the Justice Department and BIR's Charles Oliphant, both of whom figured conspicuously in the Washington housecleaning. The brewery case, Williams continued, covered years when Nunan was boss of the BIR. Ex-BIR officials are forbidden by law to act in such cases, he said, but "it appears that this section of the law has not been strictly enforced." Nunan got around it through a waiver from the Treasury Department; Williams produced a photostat copy.

None of this was necessarily wrong, Williams conceded, but a Government tax-collection error of such suspicious proportions, plus the notorious names involved, plus the Treasury's apparent indifference, was certainly "most interesting."

In New York, Nunan denied any wrongdoing, and specifically that he had represented the Indianapolis brewery; he refused to discuss the charges further with newsmen. The Treasury hastily announced that waivers to ex-officials were "routine" and revealed that nine had been issued to Nunan alone and 87 to his partner John P. Wenchel.

In Indianapolis, newsmen discovered that one of the owners of the brewery was one Lawrence Bardin, an ex-convict (for falsifying beer labels) currently facing criminal charges of income-tax evasion; one of his lawyers is Joe Nunan. Next came the titillating news that when Bardin and his brothers bought the brewery in 1945, the deal was arranged by Frank McHale, Democratic National Committeeman for Indiana. And some of the capital, said one of the brothers, was put up by a bank headed by none other than Frank McKinney, Democratic National Chairman—who vigorously denied it.

At week's end, to nobody's surprise, a House subcommittee investigating the tax scandals subpoenaed Joe Nunan to come to Washington next week, to answer a few questions.