Bert Testifies

Of Elsie and a cow named Spot

Wearing a blue suit and a basset-hound expression, the burly man sat calmly last week in the witness chair of Atlanta's federal district court, facing the jammed courtroom. "My name is Thomas Bertram Lance," he boomed out. Thus, 2 1/2 years after he was forced to resign as Jimmy Carter's Budget Director, eleven months after he was indicted for bank fraud and three months after his trial began, Bert Lance finally got his day in court.

Alternately folksy and businesslike, he denied the Government's charges that he had misapplied bank funds and filed misleading financial records to obtain about $1.3 million in loans. He stoutly defended his banking practices, reminiscing about the lesson he had learned in his first banking job, as a $90-a-month teller at the Calhoun (Ga.) First National Bank. One of his customers, Elsie Goforth, regularly put up a Guernsey cow named Spot as collateral on $100 loans. Once she defaulted and, to Lance's horror, showed up at the bank to surrender Spot.

Said Lance to the laughing jurors: "I learned that collateral is not all it's cracked up to be." He kept that lesson in mind, he explained, as he rose in the banking world to president of the Calhoun Bank and later to president of Atlanta's National Bank of Georgia. He made many unsecured loans, figuring that "the borrower's character means more than anything else." The loans cited in the indictment include one for $45,000 to his wife LaBelle and another for the same amount to his son David, then 19. Under cross-examination by Prosecutor Edwin Tomko, Lance insisted that since both LaBelle and David were good credit risks, there was nothing improper about the loans, nor, he said, was there anything wrong with any of the other unsecured loans that he made to relatives, friends and associates. Lance's defense was buttressed by testimony from a series of character witnesses. The first was his best friend's mother: Lillian Carter, 81, who told the court that the defendant had a reputation for "honesty, integrity and truthfulness." In addition, Judge Charles A. Moye Jr. dismissed 13 of the 33 counts against Lance and his three codefendants, including the most serious charge of conspiracy. This raised the ex-banker's hopes of acquittal. Of that, said Lance, "I'm as confident as the day I walked into this courtroom."

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