Missing Man

The simmering mystery over the Manhattan disappearance of Jesus de Galindez, scholar, author and bitter enemy of Dominican Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, boiled up suddenly last week and scalded the political future of Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who gets $30,000 a year for representing Dictator Trujillo in New York.

Trujillo became a Roosevelt client March i, just eleven days before Galindez, a Basque-born teacher of Latin American politics at Columbia University, finished an evening class, started home, and vanished. Lawyer Roosevelt doggedly ignored the ever louder suspicion, held by the press and even the New York police, that Client Trujillo was responsible for kidnaping Galindez. "I never heard of Galindez!" Roosevelt complained on the night of April 12, when anti-Trujillo exiles in Manhattan threatened to picket a Democratic fund-raising dinner for which he was toastmaster.* In the Dominican Republic, Dictator Trujillo's kept press played up Frank Roosevelt so favorably as to suggest that Trujillo wanted association with a famed liberal name at least as much as legal advice.

By mid-May Roosevelt, who was defeated when he ran for Attorney General of New York State in 1954 but now hopes for a comeback, could well worry about the political effects of the Galindez case. As a "citizen who is deeply concerned," he wrote a letter urging the Republican Administration's Justice Department to "exhaust every effort" to solve the mystery; F.D.R. Jr. thus joined with the many anti-Trujillo organizations that had asked the FBI to look into the case. But the answer he got last week from Assistant Attorney General Warren Olney III gave him no political comfort. "I am sure it would assist in the investigation of this matter," wrote Olney blandly, "to know whether you have addressed any such appeal to the government of the Dominican Republic, for which you are a registered agent, and, if so, the nature of the response."

Officially, the FBI says the Galindez case is a local New York police matter; unofficially, it has kept abreast of the investigation. At his press conference three weeks-ago President Eisenhower reported: "The Attorney General went after the case as quickly as it arose, went into New York City." Manhattan police, meanwhile, have sifted what one tired cop called "a million" clues. A sample last week was the testimony given a Havana judge by one Rafael ("The Corpse") Soler, who is under indictment for the murder of an anti-Trujillo Dominican exile in Havana last summer. Gangster Soler said that in 1953 a "Trujillo agent" offered him $100,000 to kill Galindez, but he found the job "too risky." The New York police sent for a transcript and prepared to delve into the background of the incident, hoping to find a solid lead, but the final solution to the Galindez mystery still seems as distant as ever.

* He had, in fact, met Galindez personally a year before at Hyde Park, when the teacher placed a wreath on F.D.R.'s tomb (see cut).

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