Silk-Shirt Collector

At a salary of $12,000 a year, a man with five children winds up with $10,500 after he pays his federal income tax. Normally, that would be hardly enough to send the children to expensive schools, maintain two homes, gamble extravagantly and buy such fancy items as $20 pajamas, $47.50 cuff links and $31.50 silk shirts. In fact, most men with five kids consider themselves lucky, even with a $12,000 salary, to be able to buy any shirts at all.

Cash in Small Bills. Daniel Bolich was a conspicuous exception. Witnesses testified before a House subcommittee last week that until he resigned last November as Assistant Commissioner of the Bureau of Internal Revenue in Washington, Bolich had a $12,000 salary and a much higher standard of living. Item: for 18 months in Washington, he had lived in a $20-a-day hotel suite.

In a financial statement made for Treasury investigators last fall, Bolich (rhymes with toe-kick) explained that his salary was supplemented a bit by "gifts" from friends. Carl F. Routzahn, an Ohio department-store executive, for example, contributed a $20,000 summer home, a $2,500 Chrysler and $400 a month in cash, delivered discreetly in small bills. And his hotel suite was paid for by Henry ("the Dutchman") Grunewald, the professional fixer who has turned up in several previous investigations.

Bolich conceded that his income during the last five years was $82,000, of which only $52,000 was salary. The investigators testified that he spent at least $115,000 during the period.

"Slanderous Implications." Next came evidence indicating how Bolich expressed his gratitude to some of his generous friends. He had a hand in dropping or easing numerous apparently legitimate tax claims, ranging from $50,000 to several million. When an Internal Revenue auditor began an investigation of the tax affairs of Bolich's friend Grunewald, for example, Bolich switched the case to another auditor and it was soon dropped. In 1949, at the request of Grunewald and another old friend, Bolich intervened in a $250,000 claim against Pattullo Modes, Inc., a Manhattan dress firm. Criminal proceedings against its owners were dropped and the case was settled for $100,000.

With pardonable curiosity, the committee invited Bolich to explain how he arranged all this. In the old days, when he was often the Bureau of Internal Revenue's official spokesman before congressional committees, he had always been a genial, cooperative witness. Not so this time. He appeared under protest, dourly complained of "slanderous implications" in the committee's evidence, then refused to testify further, "on the ground that it might tend to incriminate me." After an hour, the committee gave up; Bolich went back to his home in Brooklyn, where a grand jury has also been asking him some questions.

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