Friends of Judge Crater

Like those who know where to lay hands on Ambrose Bierce, Charley Ross or Judge Crater, there are people who turn up at irregular intervals with grandiose and intricate claims to large chunks of the U.S. Lawyers make money out of these things, and everybody else laughs. On the stage of Madrid's Teatro Martin one night recently, everybody laughed at "Lepe," Spain's favorite clown.

After getting whacked across his seamed, mustached face by his partner, Lepe postured pompously. Said he: "How dare you? I'll bring this up at U.N. Maybe you don't know I am Mr. Truman's landlord." The audience slapped its thighs and roared. But Lepe wasn't kidding.

Only the day before, in an oldfashioned, gaudily wallpapered room in one of Madrid's shabbier neighborhoods, a soberly attentive Lepe had attended a reunion of 16 members of the Altoguirre and Jaudenes families (his real name is Alvarez Jaudenes). They had come from all over Spain, to claim title not to a castle in Spain, but to a castle in America. All were armed with "proof" that they were descendants of an 18th Century Spanish diplomat and his English wife who left a U.S. fortune estimated at $300 million--part of which included the land on which the White House stands.

Their story went like this: in 1791,

Charles IV sent Jose Jaudenes Nebot, a comisario de los ejercitos, or army quartermaster, to Washington on a diplomatic mission. There he met and married British Aristocrat Mathilde Stoughton Fletcher. They returned to Spain in 1812, and Jose died that year. Mathilde followed 24 years later. To their children they left an enormous U.S. estate. Remittances were sent from the States for 25 years, then stopped. Why, no one quite knew.

In Washington, Lorenzo Winslow, White House architect and historian, snorted. The land on which the White House was built, said he, was purchased by the U.S. Government about 1790 from one David Burns. Its title is free & clear. Nevertheless, a representative for the Spanish families will shortly depart for Washington with a load of aged document, to hire a lawyer and put in a claim.

Said Lepe, with thumbs hooked importantly in his vest: "Mr. Truman had better start paying rent or he will have to look for other lodgings." But Lepe's chances of turning out the President were not as good as his chances of finding the missing Ambrose Bierce, or Charley Ross or Judge Crater.

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