Investigations: Snakes in Adam's Eden

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"I'm just a poor, humble parish priest, baby." The speaker was Adam Clayton Powell, the Democratic Congressman from Harlem and the pastor of its Abyssinian Baptist Church.

Poor? Humble?

Adam Clayton Powell is no ordinary clergyman — or Congressman. He spends much of his time these days cavorting in a Bahamian hideaway with a beauty queen that he has put on his payroll. He is a fugitive from his own district, where he faces a year and four months in jail for defying a $164,000 libel judgment. He is seen only sporadically in Congress, where his absentee record (50% in 1966 on yea-nay roll-call votes) is one of the worst. His fellow House members have largely stripped him of his authority as chairman of the Education and Labor Committee; he even faces a challenge to his seating in the next Congress. As if all this were not enough, a House subcommittee last week conducted three days of closed hearings on "alleged irregularities" involving Powell's congressional committee.

Clerk to Cook. According to Subcommittee Chairman Wayne Hays of Ohio, the sessions revealed irregularities aplenty. There was, for example, the peculiar case of the 22 travel credit cards held by Powell-committee staffers. Mrs. Emma Swann, a committee receptionist whose name appeared on vouchers for 20 trips, testified that she had made only three of them — and that they were to Miami for "sightseeing and shopping." Russell Derrickson, staff director of Powell's panel, denied making any of the 26 trips charged to his name. Odell Clark, the committee's chief investigator, was unable to explain why his expense account showed him in Los Angeles on a day that travel credit vouchers recorded him as flying from New York to Miami. Evidence indicated, said Hays, that Powell's older son, Adam III, 20, a student at M.I.T., and two friends used committee-vouched tickets for a trip from New York to Washington.

All told, Hays reported, more than half of 150 Powell-committee trips charged to the taxpayers during the 89th Congress were made by persons other than those in whose names the tickets were bought. The subcommittee, which was authorized by the House three months ago to carry out its investigation, also heard Silvia Givens, 20, testify that she was hired by Powell last August as a clerk, but actually worked as a cookmaid at Powell's Bahamian retreat on South Bimini Island. Subpoenaed to appear this week is Powell's estranged wife, Yvette, who is on his payroll as a $20,578-a-year assistant, though she lives in Puerto Rico. Her checks had been going into Powell's personal account until last month, when she asked that they be sent to her.

"Invasion of Privacy." Powell, who was also requested to testify, denounced the probe as a "conspiratorial tarnishment of my name" and "an invasion of privacy," and consented to appear only if 1) the subcommittee would investigate spending by all House committees and 2) the panel inserted in its record three journalistic articles on congressional travels, including a 1960 LIFE story reporting that Hays himself once charged 47 trips from Washington to his home area to a taxpayer-paid congressional account.