National Affairs: Boyle's Law

• Share

(4 of 8)

A big department store, for example, has to deal with some 20 federal agencies (not to mention a score of state and municipal ones). The Bureau of Internal Revenue checks its taxes, the alcohol tax unit approves its whisky labels, the Bureau of Customs stamps its imports, the Department of Labor's wages & hours division inspects its working conditions, the National Labor Relations Board hears its labor disputes, the Social Security Administration collects unemployment insurance, the Federal Reserve Board System administers credit regulations, the National Production Authority doles out scarce goods, the Securities & Exchange Commission patrols stock issues, the Federal Trade Commission scouts for mislabeling or deceptive advertising, the Post Office rules on parcel deliveries, the Selective Service Board makes passes at store executives and employees, the Interstate Commerce Commission rules on freight shipments, and—if the store is hard up for capital—the Reconstruction Finance Corporation has money to lend.

In most of these areas, Government agents have to make yes or no decisions on their own. The decisions often mean hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Government or to a corporation or an industry. If a pol has a few friends in the right places, who could ever draw the line between a legal and an illegal favor? It was symbolic of changing times that the Post Office, traditional haven for faithful politicos, was running along quietly under a career civil-service postmaster. Bill Boyle, for one, preferred to maintain his freedom outside of a Government job. It was significant, too, that a complex organization like the SEC still functioned without any apparent machine tooling. (Explained a Washington observer: "SEC is probably so complicated that they haven't found a way to milk it.") But by early 1949, it was clear that the pols were buzzing in & out of two principal areas of heavy sugar: the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the RFC.

War Horse & Friends. In far-off St. Louis, the buzzing was audible to an ambitious, fast-talking manufacturer of printing forms named Robert John Blauner. His business, the American Lithofold Corp., was in a bad postwar slump. Blauner decided he needed some professional advice and hired Jim Finnegan, U.S. Collector of Internal Revenue in St. Louis, an old Democratic war horse. (Over the next two years he paid Finnegan some $44,000 in commissions and expenses, while Finnegan held down his collector's job.) Finnegan's first advice was for Blauner to hire a Washington representative. He recommended Cecil Green.

For years Cecil Green had had a Pendergast garbage-collecting contract in Kansas City. In 1936 he bought a Kansas City saloon called the Irish Tavern from Bill Boyle's brother-in-law. When Bill opened his Washington law office, he hired Cecil Green as his investigator at $5,000 a year. On the side Cecil branched out into an export and beer sales agency and began to pick up out-of-town clients who wanted to meet people in government. Blauner hired him for Lithofold at $10,000 a year.