Crooked by Nathan Masters

Author:Nathan Masters [Masters, Nathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2023-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

EVEN AS MAL Daugherty stonewalled, denying the committee access to his brother’s financial secrets, the hearings chipped away at Harry Daugherty’s reputation.

Witnesses described an attorney general indifferent to corruption and protective of anyone he saw as a political ally. Most persuasive were the former Bureau of Investigation agents forced out after knocking on the wrong doors. One uncovered more than $7 million of fraud in the government’s wartime aviation contracts, only to have his findings ignored by higher-ups at the department. Another was fired after his inquiry into Prohibition violations along the US-Mexican border implicated a federal prosecutor. “The Department of Justice,” former special agent Hazel Scaife wrote to Daugherty in an angry resignation letter, “is functioning as a first aid to crooks.”

This drip-drop of damning testimony, day after day, sapped the strength of Daugherty’s staunchest defenders. His two counsel, Paul Howland and George Chamberlain, once alert for any opportunity to steer the proceedings in their client’s favor, now slumped resigned in their chairs. Even Republican senator George Moses, the committee’s designated critic of its progressive majority, found himself, one commentator wrote, “swept from his moorings by the astonishing evidence which has been offered. Today his air implies that he hardly knows what to do.”

Wheeler was winning over the skeptics—but he also let the success go to his head. Drunk on his own publicity, he became even more reckless in his accusations. Knowing that barrels of ink were spilled whenever he opened his mouth, he openly insinuated that Secretary of War John Weeks, hitherto above suspicion, was complicit in the Justice Department’s refusal to prosecute the war fraud cases. He asked aloud whether Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, another cabinet officer of sterling reputation, had conspired with Daugherty in liquor deals.

Republicans cried foul. “We demand,” wrote the editors of the Republican-leaning Chicago Daily Tribune, “that the process of wholesale dishonoring carried on by the man Wheeler, with the consent if not approval of the senate, be brought under some decent control.”

Even sympathetic commentators called out his carelessness. “It is quite true, of course, that not all of this mountain of evidence will stand critical analysis,” Bruce Bliven wrote in the liberal New Republic. “The Committee goes down some false trails; and a few of these lead to the doorsteps of innocent men.”

Assured of his own righteousness and oblivious to the consequences, Wheeler was leaving a trail of vengeful enemies in his wake—a fact that he would come to regret only much later.

One of these newly sworn enemies was George B. Hayes—not one of Bliven’s “innocent men,” to be sure, but someone who resented Wheeler’s presence on his doorstep nonetheless.

Hayes was a New York attorney who specialized in legal gray areas. Much to his embarrassment, his name got dragged into the hearings on March 21 when a former client, druggist John Gorini, testified about a bootlegging ring connected, tangentially, to Jess Smith.

Back in 1921, Hayes was hired to secure the return of 7,700 cases of Scotch whiskey seized by the government—and utterly failed.

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