"Vampires & Exploiters"

A bank for princes of the Church and great officers of the realm was the Banco Bombelli a few days ago. Its chairman, bland, steady-eyed, imposing Commendatore Jorio, inspired Cardinals with confidence, competitors with fear. He was rumored to sit spider-high in the Fascist web of Star Chamber courts which sentence men to exile and rot on 77 Duce's penal islands. Last week the Banco Bombelli, small but among the oldest and most select in Rome, failed for $1,000,000.

Where was Commendatore Jorio? Fascist police could not answer. So high had he sat in the spider web that he knew its every mesh, and was able to skitter out of Italy, even after the alarm was sounded, unchallenged by frontier guards. A thoroughgoing rascal, he had, it appeared, even cheated the Most Holy.

Rome told the story last week without naming the Cardinal concerned. On the afternoon before the crash His Eminence appeared with a cheque for 95,602 lira drawn on the account of His Holiness, and asked for the whole sum in clean, new banknotes, to be used in charitable distribution. Even Dictator Mussolini has not made many Italian banknotes clean. The Cardinal was not surprised when Commendatore Jorio asked him to leave the check (already endorsed) overnight, until the fresh bills required could be scrambled for and sorted out. Hastily, when the august robed figure of His Eminence was gone, godless Spider Jorio cashed the check into dirtiest tainted money, cashed two much larger checks also fraudulently obtained for a total of 461,534 lira, skittered.

In Vatican City it was feared that the loss to His Holiness would be much greater than the theft of Commendatore Jorio, due to the failure of Banco Bombelli immediately after his flight. Meantime even more distressing rumors spread. Miss Beatrice Baskerville, enterprising news ferret of the New York World heard in Vatican City that the Papal Treasury lost heavily in Wall Street's slump (TIME, Nov. 4). According to reports, verified from several sources, U. S. public utility and steel stocks were those held. Certain parcels were sold early in the slump and most of the remainder were sacrificed at even lower prices later in the slump week. At the time the Holy See gave no sign, unless an article in the Papal daily L'Osservatore Romano could be called such. In an article flaying "Market Vampires and , Exploiters," Editor Count Dalla Torte lamented that "the fate of the great world of investors is left to the caprice and enchanted power of a handful of men who caused the world to be shaken between 10 a. m. and noon." No libeller, the Count did not name any particular Wall Street operator as a vampire of enchanted power.