Sniffer & Digger

As he sat down to breakfast one day last week, the New York Herald Tribune's Jack Steele was confronted by his six-year-old son waving a Washington Post. "Daddy," he asked, "what's this woman doing with a gun?" The woman on the front page was Flo Bratten, secretary to Veep Alben Barkley, dressed in her outfit as an honorary Kentucky deputy sheriff, and the gun she held was pointed straight at the reader. Steele grinned; Flo Bratten had reason to draw a bead on him. He had just broken the story of how Mrs. Bratten and Charles Shaver, counsel for the Senate small business committee, had lobbied for a $1,100,000 RFC loan to build a Miami hotel. After Steele's beat, Shaver quit his Senate job, and congressional investigators began to look into the latest RFC scandal (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

Cluttered Closets. Steele is an old hand at shaking skeletons from the Government's cluttered closets. The 37-year-old Hoosier had i) started the five-percenters investigation, 2) broken the story of the huge profits on surplus-ship sales (TIME, April 9), 3) revealed how ex-Democratic Chairman William Boyle had sold his profitable law practice, including cases concerning Government agencies.

Jack Steele, a deceptively jolly, roly-poly fellow, got his latest beat by his usual hard digging, plus a nose for news which sniffed something worth digging for. While skimming through the records of office calls of RFC officials, he ran across the names of Mrs. Bratten and Shaver. The references sounded harmless, but why were they mentioned at all? When Steele discovered that at the time of the visits, Shaver was listed as an associate in Chase & Williams, a Washington law firm, he thought he had something.

Evidence Found. He dredged up hints that Shaver and Mrs. Bratten had been interested in a hotel loan, followed the trail to Miami, Detroit and Minneapolis before clinching the fact that Chase & Williams represented the group seeking the loan. When Steele confronted Mrs. Bratten and Shaver with his evidence, they admitted they had tried to influence RFC. As usual, Steele did much of his news hounding by phone, a system he swears by. Says he: "People will tell you more over the telephone, sometimes, than they will when you're face to face with them."

A graduate of Columbia University's journalism school, Steele cub-reported in Manhattan for the Herald Trib, became its Chicago correspondent, moved to Washington in 1945. Now, as second in command of the Trib's 14-man bureau, he picks his own assignments, hotfoots it wherever he scents a beat (most of his sniffing the past year has been at RFC). He refuses to run with the press pack after stories or to mix business with pleasure at cocktail parties: "I can get more information by going up in a Senator's office and spending five minutes . . . than by spending four hours with him at a party the night before."

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