The Press: Scandal in Portland

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One night in Portland an alert police reporter for the Oregonian (circ. 230,238) noted that there were suddenly no detectives around police headquarters. Sniffing a story, he demanded an explanation from the police chief. The chief kept mum a secret that was being withheld even from the paper's night city desk: detectives were out guarding the Oregonian's Reporters Wallace Turner and William Lambert and their families while the pair were digging into one of the messiest official scandals in Northwest history.

The big story broke in April, and by last week it had state officials, from the governor down, involved in the uproar. The Oregonian's sensational accusations: top Western officials of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters were conspiring with Seattle gamblers to 1) control Portland's law-enforcement agencies, 2) organize all the city's rackets, from pinball machines to prostitution. The Page One story put S. I. Newhouse's staid Oregonian into a running fight not only with local officials but also with its opposition daily, the Oregon Journal (circ. 183,123).

SecurityMeasures.Gangling,sharp-nosed Reporter Wally Turner, 35, and his partner, thick-spectacled Bill Lambert, 36, are such familiar prowlers along Portland's corrupt trails that the underworld knows them as "Fishface and Bugeyes." The latest trail took them over thousands of feet of magnetic tape—70 hours of eavesdropped conversation—supplied by Underworld Kingpin James ("Big Jim") Elkins, an ex-convict who bankrolls Portland gambling and after-hours drinking joints.

The reporting team labored for three months transcribing the recordings, going to San Francisco and Seattle to check the information in the tapes. As security measures in Portland, they kept the recordings in a bank vault, worked in hotel rooms that they frequently changed, rode in rented cars that they switched almost daily.

"Moral Code." When the Seattle plotters approached Racketeer Elkins to join them, said the paper's account, the Portland underworldling fell in with the scheme to organize gambling and bootlegging but balked at prostitution ("It's against my moral code"). Fearing that they planned to freeze him out, Elkins took the precaution of "bugging" the Portland apartment of the Seattle emissaries with a microphone hooked to a tape recorder. On the playback he heard them plotting "to get rid of me." Elkins told the Seattle boys about his tapes and threatened to use the recordings to expose the plot unless the Teamsters and their underworld allies dropped it. They scoffed at such talk. But when the Oregonian staffers heard about the tapes, they persuaded him to make good his threat.