INVESTIGATIONS: The Man Who Pulled a Thread

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"We used to get a lot of complaints in the mail, every Senator gets them, and usually you just regard them as routine. Late in 1947, I was getting a lot of complaints from Delaware that something was wrong in the Wilmington tax collector's office. I didn't pay too much attention to it." Williams turned his complaints over to a subcommittee of the House of Representatives that was investigating discrepancies in another Internal Revenue office. Among the "delinquent accounts" sent in by the Wilmington tax office was that of John J. Williams of Millsboro. The committee members, says Williams, "were in the embarrassing position of checking with me." Williams proved by his canceled checks that he had paid his taxes, $15,000 for himself, $7,500 for his wife.

Williams' payment, it turned out, had been credited to another man, and the money embezzled by an assistant cashier in the tax office. What burned Williams up most of all was the discovery that the Treasury had known about the embezzlement for six months and done nothing about it. He made a speech demanding that the Wilmington collector and another official be fired. They had been promoted. But a $2,000-a-year bookkeeper who helped the investigators got no promotion.

Williams began to suspect that there was something rotten in the Bureau of Internal Revenue. His suspicions deepened when secret tips began to come to him as a result of his Senate speech.

He began to follow up reports of skulduggery in the New York (Third District) collector's office. He wouldn't tell where he got the reports, but he told the Senate Finance Committee what he suspected. Treasury officials were called and pooh-poohed the story. The committee dropped the case. "I said nothing," said Williams, "but I had sources in the Treasury, and after the denial, there were individuals who resented it. I was contacted by individuals and my story was confirmed." But Williams refused to act without the records to prove that there had been tax-fixing in New York. His sources got the records. "For the next three weeks we photostated records," he says. "Each time you ask them about the files they deny they exist. You have to know the answers before you ask the questions."

Williams' detractors say now that he gets the Treasury to do all his investigating for him. And Williams admits that this is true—in a way. In the New York case it finally turned out that the Treasury, months before Williams voiced his suspicions, had received reports from its own investigators giving the facts that Williams later alleged. But Treasury officials had taken no action.

On the Senate floor, Williams demanded the removal of the New York collector. Nothing happened. Then he got into the St. Louis and San Francisco cases, which followed the same pattern. By that time, the House investigating subcommittee, headed by California's Cecil King, was hot on the trail, and heads began to roll in the Bureau of Internal Revenue.