Leas to Jail

It took six minutes one afternoon last week for the warden of the North Carolina State Penitentiary at Raleigh to receive the commitment papers of burly Luke Lea and his tall, high-strung son Luke Jr., to change their names to Nos. 29,409 and 29,408, to make them Class B prisoners in vertically striped suits and to clank barred doors on their still jaunty backs.

It had taken two days to drive the Leas from Nashville, Tenn., where they had once been rich and powerful and where Luke Sr. fancied himself as "a maker of Governors," across the State avoiding Knoxville, where they had once owned the Journal, up the Smoky Mountains to Asheville, N. C., where they had defrauded defunct Central Bank & Trust Co. of $1,300,000, and down the other side to Raleigh and to prison.

It had taken North Carolina two years and nine months to lay legal hands on the slippery-pair. Week before the U. S. Supreme Court had for the fourth time refused to review their case, finally ordering Tennessee to give up the Leas to North Carolina and end a 33-month marathon against justice.

Precocity runs in the Lea family. When he was 27, Luke Sr. jumped up and seized the gavel at a Democratic State convention, hammered his candidate into the nomination and subsequent election as Governor. The Tennessee Legislature was in his pocket in 1911 when he, aged 31, was elected to the U. S. Senate. The Constitutional Amendment for the direct election of Senators cost him his seat in 1916, but two years later impulsive Luke Lea was piling up an impressive War record in France as colonel of field artillery in the 30th ("Old Hickory") Division of Tennessee and Carolina boys. He fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, won a Distinguished Service Medal and in December 1918 led a party of hotheads into neutral Holland, in a fantastic but futile attempt to kidnap Kaiser William II for "a Christmas present for President Wilson."

When Colonel Lea came home he got into the newspaper and general promotion business. He became Banker Rogers Caldwell's political right arm and arranged to have Luke Jr., at the age of 18, legally come into his majority and take his place in his father's enterprises. Caldwell & Co. ("We Bank On The South") crashed four years ago (TIME, Nov. 24, 1930). Banker Caldwell managed to escape from the tangled financial wreckage but the Leas did not fare so well. Charges against them were filed in Nashville, Knoxville, Asheville. The Asheville charge took. For borrowing $825,000 on worthless collateral from Central Bank & Trust Co., for keeping $214,000 of the bank's bonds without making settlement, for depriving the bank of $45,000 proceeds from an Asheville municipal note issue, for fraudulently obtaining $300,000 worth of the institution's certificates of deposit, a Buncombe County judge sentenced Luke Sr. to from six to ten years in prison, Luke Jr. to from two to six years or a $25,000 fine. Still loudly protesting their innocence the Leas fled over the mountains to Clarksville, in their native Tennessee. There they directed their Nashville Tennessean by telephone, played golf, maintained that "if a crime had been committed, they were not in North Carolina at the time."

One by one their papers had to be sold, including the Memphis Commercial Appeal and Evening Appeal. For the past year they have been living modestly with Mrs. Lea, another son and two small daughters in their mansion in Belle Meade, the country club section of Nashville. There was some talk of starting a Nashville Free Press to further the Leas' desperate defensive backfire that they were being "persecuted" by Nashville Banker Paul Maclin Davis and his brother, Ambassador-at-Large Norman Hezekiah Davis. The Free Press never materialized, but anonymous stories from the Leas about the Davis brothers did. Last week the once mighty Leas were so strapped that 26-year-old Luke Jr.'s $25,000 fine could not be paid. First man they met in prison at Raleigh was Wallace B. Davis, onetime president of Central Bank & Trust. He has been doing time for his part in the bank's failure since 1932. Fourth member of the Lea bank-wrecking team, Ridley Edward Donnell, president of defunct Liberty Bank & Trust Co. of Nashville, could not be present at the gathering. He had shot himself.

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