The Man Who Pulled a Thread

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His favorite form of amusement, before he got so busy trapping rascals, was the practical joke. Once, when a neighbor invited the Williamses to share a watermelon, Williams slipped over ahead of time, took the heart out of the melon, filled it with newspapers, and replaced the end section of rind. Top officials of the Treasury Department, staring at their newspapers as Williams announced his findings, have sometimes felt like the host at the watermelon party.

"Cheap Politics." Williams has never accused Secretary of the Treasury Snyder of complicity in the tax scandals. But he resents the fact that Snyder and other Treasury officials don't seem to suspect the corruption or go after it.

The Treasury's Bureau of Internal Revenue was not always a hotbed of scandal. From 1933 to 1943, it was run by Guy Helvering, a man of spotless reputation who prided himself on being rude to politicians who asked the BIR for favors.

In 1943, Helvering was succeeded by Robert Hannegan of St. Louis, a close personal friend of Truman and a politician who prided himself on not being rude to other politicians. Hannegan was only in the office four months. (He went on to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Postmaster General of the U.S., and part owner of the St. Louis Cardinals; he died in 1949.) In those four months Hannegan picked James Finnegan, a political hack, as his successor in St. Louis. He also picked his successor as commissioner of Internal Revenue, Joe Nunan, a Tammany character who had been collector in Brooklyn. To succeed himself in Brooklyn, Nunan picked Joseph P. Marcelle, a ward boss.

Says Senator Williams: "I think there is too much politics in it, and I think you'll get cheap politics and corruption with any administration that has been in power as long as this one."

Williams' activities have led, directly or indirectly, to far-reaching exposures of what is known even to Democrats as "the mess in Washington." Among the key figures in recent messes:

¶ Denis Delaney, collector in Boston, was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $10,500 for accepting bribes to fix tax returns.

¶ In St. Louis, Old Pol Finnegan was indicted for misconduct in office (the principal charge: he sold his influence to help big taxpayers get RFC loans), was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison.

¶ James G. Smyth, collector in San Francisco, was indicted for backdating tax returns to save interest and penalty payments. A jury acquitted Smyth of conspiring to backdate some returns, but he remains under indictment in connection with two: his own and his wife's.

¶ Marcelle was fired as Brooklyn collector after investigators found that in seven years on the job he had $190,000 of outside income, that he filed his income-tax return for one year in his own office instead of sending it to Washington and made errors in his own favor totaling $32,834. He told investigators that he spent a lot of time at race tracks, to check up on his deputy collectors who were stationed there.

¶ James B. E. Olson, a Nunan appointee, supervisor of the New York alcohol tax unit, was forced out after he admitted that he had taken $5,900 from the American Lithofold Corp. to arrange printing business with liquor dealers.