Raising the Count

The roses had faded from his chubby cheeks, and Billie Sol Estes looked like a beaten man when he appeared before a federal grand jury in El Paso last week. Estes showed up toting neatly tied bundles of magazines and newspapers to serve as props for the plea of Attorney John Cofer, who argued that the reams of unfavorable publicity about his client made a fair hearing impossible. Unmoved, the grand jury handed down a new indictment against Estes, which raised the total number of his pending charges to 16 counts of mail fraud, twelve counts of illegally transporting securities in interstate commerce, and one count of conspiracy in faking the existence of scores of fictitious anhydrous ammonia tanks. Other developments in the Estes scandal:

> As the five-member Senate Investigations subcommittee considered calling Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, South Dakota's Karl E. Mundt and Nebraska's Carl T. Curtis, the only Republican members, issued a joint statement charging that Freeman was trying to "thwart" the hearings. Mundt and Curtis produced signed affidavits from Freeman aides declaring that a special search had been made of the correspondence between the Senators and the department going back to 1953. No such examination was made of the files on the three subcommittee Democrats. Thomas R. Hughes, Freeman's executive assistant, admitted ordering the search, but insisted that it was only to review points of the grain-storage program of particular interest to the Senators. But Mundt and Curtis hinted at darker motives: "It was most unusual and reprehensible that the two Republican members were singled out in an effort to try to find some correspondence that might be twisted or distorted to create implications not substantiated by the facts." Cried Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen: "This smacks a little of a Gestapo technique."

> A grand jury in Franklin, Texas, was discharged after five fruitless weeks of investigating the 1961 shooting of Agriculture Department Official Henry H. Marshall, who had been investigating some of Estes' manipulations. Although Marshall was shot five times by a bolt-action rifle, the grand jury said the evidence it had heard was "inconclusive to substantiate a different decision at this time or to override any decision heretofore made." That meant, improbable as it might seem, that the suicide finding by a local justice of the peace would stand.

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