Oil On a Jury

The bricklayer, the two clerks, the telephone instructress, the electrician, the tire repair man, the auto salesman, the baker's delivery man, the floor walker, the ice salesman, the tailor and the leather worker who were empaneled three weeks ago in Washington D.C. to decide the guilt or innocence of the aged New Mexico politician (Albert Bacon Fall) and the opulent oilman (Harry Ford Sinclair) in their alleged conspiracy to defraud the U. S. ( TIME, Oct. 31), had listened for over a week to legalistic intricacies. Between court Sons they were free to go to their homes, their only instructions being to avoid discussing the case and making up their minds pre-judicially.

They were not a crap-shooting, Jazz-singing jury, like the one that tried Mr. Fall and Oilman Edward L. Doheny two years ago. Miss Bernice Heaton, the telephone instructress, for example, would ride home from court on a trolley car and go out for the evening with a girl friend. Edward K. Kidwell, the leather worker, would go off and kill time between sessions hanging around a soft-drink stand in Four-and-a-Half Street.

Juror Kidwell, a sallow youngish man, is not what Washingtonians would call a "drugstore cowboy" and certainly not a "street sheik" just a chinless young man with prominent eyes and ears Who rather en joyed his sudden importance His soft-drink cronies would ask him about the trial and he welcomed the opportunity to give what he considered dark hints of mysterious grandeur. He would say that Harry Sinclair was a "nice, democratic guy in spite of all his money" He would say that he, Edward Kidwell was a "pretty good yes-and-no-man" and that he was "just putting in his time" at $5 per day but not paying a whole lot of attention to the evidence. The soft-drink boys sarcastically asked him if he did not expect to get something more than $5 per day out of the trial-- perhaps a snappy automobile? Juror Kidwell hoped to tell them he expected an automobile. "If I don't have one as long as this block," he boasted, "I'll be kind of disappointed."

A street car conductor, one J. Ray Akers, was one of Juror Kidwell's audience. Conductor Akers had an idea that autos are not what jurors usually "get out of" criminal trials Conductor Akers timidly telephoned the local Hearst paper (the Washington Herald). Reporter Donald T. King went and heard Juror Kidwell hold forth at the soft-drink stand with conductor Akers for interlocutor. reporter king then told the us attorneys office what he had heard. that office forthwith took certain covert steps.

Three days later, just after the bricklayer, clerks, telephone instructress, Juror Kidwell, et al. had taken their jury-box seats for the day, Lawyer Atlee Pomerene of the U. S. prosecution counsel announced to the court that he had grave charges to make, that some one had been tampering with the jury.

The bricklayer, clerks, telephone instructress et al. looked scared and suspicious. Defendant Fall looked stunned. Defendant Sinclair, hitherto cocksure and alert, looked punctured and striken. Justice Frederick Lincoln Siddons was true to his histrionic lineage* as he announced that the court would hear secretly the prosecution's affidavits, which brought about next day a declaration of mistrial, the dismissal of the bricklayer, clerks, et al. as jurists, and a Grand Jury investigation of one more chapter, more sordid than ever, in the Fall-Sinclair oil mess.

The new chapter boiled down to this:

Sleuths. Acting on the "tip" from Reporter King of the Washington Herald, Assistant U. S. Attorneys Walter M. Shea and Neil Burkinshaw had instructed Federal sleuths to see if any of the Fall-Sinclair jurors were being followed or approached by anyone. The Federal sleuths soon reported that a band of private detectives was operating from headquarters in the Wardman Park Hotel. Assistant U. S. Attorney Burkinshaw got a search warrant and raided the Wardman Park Hotel. Papers seized there revealed that 16 operatives from the Burns International Detective Agency had been shadowing and investigating all but one of the twelve Fall-Sinclair jurors. The one juror let alone was Robert C. Flora, the ice salesman. He seemed to have been let alone because he was found to have "very pronounced prejudiced views regarding religious matters . . . very bull headed."

The Burns agents, under one Charles C. Ruddy and one G. H. Robbins, had been reporting their findings regularly to their chiefs in Manhattan and also to Henry Mason Day, vice president of the Sinclair Exploration Co. Mr. Day was staying at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. So was Harry F. Sinclair to whom the detectives' reports seemed to refer when they mentioned, as they often did, "the client."

The Sleuthing. Not only had Miss Heaton, the telephone instructress, been followed home by a Burns man; not only had the addresses, telephone numbers and acquaintances of the jurors been noted. There was evidence that the Burns men had tried to establish direct contact with the jurors. They had investigated the mortgage on the home of Juror John P. Kern and his ability to pay it off. Why should detectives hired by Mr. Sinclair or his friends try to discover the financial worries of a Fall-Sinclair jury?

Some notes made on the Fall-Sinclair jurors by the investigators:

(On Juror Kern) "... He is quite a sport. Will go to the races whenever he can do it. No Government connections."

(On the tire repair man) "... There is an old judgment of record of $20 due a physician since May, 1924. ... Is said to be easily swayed in his viewpoint."

(On the male clerk) "... An old frame shack, poor condition. . . . He is said to be a chap who takes the easy side of life and loves to fish and has no particular political or religious affiliations."

(On the auto salesman) "... A hail-fellow-well-met, well liked. Is easily termed a "sporting man." Has been called for jury service. Considered by corporations as a good juror."

(On Juror Kidwell) "... As a boy he was pretty wild. He has quieted down now but still a sport."

Action. The District of Columbia Grand Jury (23 members) foregathered. Mr. Sinclair's friend, Mr. Day, who looks "like a well-groomed football tackle," was asked to explain his connection with the Burns men. He refused to answer, on the paradoxical but wholly legal ground that in explaining he might incriminate himself. He was arrested and placed under a $25,000 bail.

Harry F. Sinclair, already under $15,000 bail on two other counts, was not rearrested though a fresh warrant was obtained for him by the U. S.

Sheldon Clark, Chicago sportsman, another Sinclair vice president, who had left Washington on the eve of the jury-tampering charges, turned up at home, protested his innocence, said he would return to Washington.

An inquiry proceeded which, if it found Harry F. Sinclair and his friends guilty of jury tampering, would add six years and $5,000, not to mention public condemnation for rat-in-the-corner tactics, to the list of penalties which Mr. Sinclair has for months & months been trying to evade.

Statements. Albert Bacon Fall, ill with lung congestion, again called attention to "my integrity and the complete rectitude of my every action in connection with the Teapot Dome lease." He disavowed any connection with any "jury-hanging" plot. Nevertheless, it was discovered that one of his counsel, Lawyer Mark Thompson, had telephoned a friend of Mr. Fall's at the U. S. Department of Justice to "look up the record" of a colleague who was being sleuthed by the Burns men.

P: Juror Kidwell announced that he recalled talking in front of Reporter King of the Washington Herald but said that what Reporter King had sworn to was "all pure lies."

P:Mrs. Annela Bailey, the prettier of the two women on the dismissed jury, unburdened herself: "Is it really a fact that the Supreme Court passed on a case exactly like this one, that it was a civil one, and found that a conspiracy did exist? Wouldn't we have looked foolish if we had given a verdict just the opposite of the Supreme Court's!... What do people like us know about such a case as this?" Mrs. Bailey said that Lawyer Martin W. Littleton of the defense looked "slick" to her, and "more like a teddy bear than any man I ever saw." For Mr. Fall she said she felt a little sorry. "He seemed so feeble and depressed."

The Burns International Detective Agency, the partners, of which William J. Burns and his son W. Sherman Burns, were summoned to show the complete records of their alleged "jury-hanging" job, issued a statement to the effect that the Burns operatives had in no way broken any law.

The William John Burns who was called to Washington last week was not the William John Burns of a few years ago, though he was the same man. Detective Burns was once a U. S. hero. In 1924, how ever, he had the misfortune to be come associated in the public mind with the "Ohio Gang" -- an association which has tinged many a man with villainy.

Hero Burns was the youth who solved his native Ohio's tally-sheet forgeries in 1885 and entered the U. S. Secret Service with a brilliant reputation which soon became international. Hero Burns was the detective who caught Charles Ulrich, the German counterfeiter; Taylor & Bredill, the Monroe-head $100 bill makers; Abe Ruef, corrupt boss of San Francisco, and many another. When James B. and John J. McNamara, the dynamiting brothers who from 1905 to 1910 blew up bridges, piers, hotels and finally the Los Angeles Times, were captured in Detroit in 1911, it was to Hero Burns that Theodore Roosevelt telegraphed: "All good American citizens feel that they owe you a debt of gratitude for some signal service to American citizenship."

"Villain" Burns emerged when, as Chief of the Bureau of Investigation in the Department of Justice under Harry Micajah Daugherty (1921-24), he was quizzed by Senate investigators about the use of one of the Bureau's codes-- in an alleged Teapot Dome crockery; about trying to get evidence to "smear" Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, one of the oil scandal investigators; and about an alleged conspiracy with Mr. Daugherty to permit illegal transport of Dempsey-Carpentier fight films. Nothing came of these investigation but "Villain" Burns resigned a few weeks after "Villain" Daugherty. The new Attorney General (Harlan Piske Stone, now of U. S. Supreme Court) thanked William John Burns for his services and wished him "all future success and happiness."

*He is a great-grandson of Actress Sarah Kemble Siddons (1755-1831).

*One of the messages between a Mr. & Mrs. Duckstein who were respectively confidential secretaries to Publisher Edward B. McLean of the Washington Post and "Villain" Burns, read as follows: "Cravingly in Dxewonx resurge lodgement ailment fastidious tuck skewered suckled scrage emerse vithouse punctators gob. . . ." This was translated: "According to Lambert's instructions the papers have been put in the safe deposit box belonging to you & Frazer in the Commercial Bank. . . ."