The Case of the Consul

When young (36) Mario Lasso was Mexican consul general in Chicago, by appointment of his uncle, Foreign Minister Ezequiel Padilla, he took personal care of tourist-card applications filed by particularly pretty girls. That was how he met his second and present wife, tiny, blonde Flora Dancy, 24, of Clinton, Ind., whom he brought back to Mexico last fall when he returned to run Uncle Ezequiel's presidential campaign. Says Flora of husband Mario: "Yes, a great wolf."

Last week the great wolf was in a political trap. The police announced, after he had been missing four days, that they held Lasso as a confessed conspirator in a plot to kill President-elect Miguel Aleman and his prospective chief minister, Colonel Carlos I. Serrano.

Their story: one day an army officer reported that he was approached by a man who wanted to buy two grenades for "well-digging." In no time the cops claimed to have caught him handing the grenades to two torpedoes. They said the torpedoes confessed they had been hired to use the grenades on Aleman and Serrano. Lasso, they said, also confessed after only a brief chat.

Then Ezequiel Padilla called in reporters. He showed them a penciled note allegedly smuggled out from the imprisoned Mario. In the note Mario repudiated the confession, and said it had been wrung from him only after he had been starved, threatened with a pistol, and "beaten up like in the time of the Inquisition." Said Padilla: "The darkest chapter in Mexico's history of iniquities." Said Secret Police sub-Chief Jesus Galindo of Mario's blast: ''Nothing but lies."

Padillistas cried that it was all a frame-up to take the public's mind off the vote-counting frauds of which the opposition have complained.

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