In Connecticut

Corruption

One of the wonders of the East is Connecticut's $25,000,000 Merritt Parkway, 32 miles (two lanes each way) of satinsmooth express motor roads winding through manicured countryside back of coastal towns from Stratford (near Bridgeport) to the New York line. Another wonder of the East, but for the omission of a compulsory clause in a recent Connecticut law, would have been the water closets in all Connecticut public buildings. That such wonders should have had graft attached to them was last week cause for grief and headlines in the thrifty State of Connecticut.

The Merritt Parkway scandal involved a real-estate man, G. LeRoy Kemp, who as the State's agent bought much of the land needed for right-of-way and who allegedly shared in some $86,000 of rakeoff commissions with two real-estate agents, Thomas N. Cooke of Greenwich and Samuel H. Silberman of Stamford. On the witness stand Mr. Cooke testified that Land Agent Kemp used to tip him off as to acreage the State wanted, that Cooke then arranged for the purchases and they split commissions of $32,814.92. Mr. Silberman testified to giving Kemp another $27,865. Mr. Kemp admitted receiving as much as $21,942 from the two men but said it was a gift. Found guilty last week, he was sentenced to three-to-seven years in jail, appealed.

The water-closet scandal was just one splash in a whirlpool of trouble which recently engulfed husky, ruddy Democrat T. Frank Hayes, who eight years ago became the biggest political frog in Waterbury. Mayor of Waterbury, he also became Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut and, though honest old Governor Wilbur Lucius ("Uncle Toby") Cross, onetime dean of Yale's Graduate School, was too spry ever to let him get his hand on the highest State controls, he presided over the Senate in a style which, his accusers said, was lucrative as well as lordly.

When some people came along with a high-powered new water closet,* Lieutenant Governor Hayes took an interest in the company and presided over sessions at which a bill calling for such equipment in all public places was passed. Mr. Hayes could easily see the merit of the fixture which, when a user rises, snaps its seat back into a recess, scours it with live steam and a scrubbing brush, cools it with a jet of water, snaps it out again for the next patron.

Several legislators who allegedly accepted stock in the water-closet company in return for pushing through a health bill for it were arrested with Lieutenant Governor Hayes on this and other counts. Last month when the trials began Mr. Hayes and 22 others pleaded not guilty. Two other defendants pleaded guilty, one of them Harry Mackenzie,/- longtime first lieutenant of Connecticut's late Republican dictator, hard-bitten John Henry Roraback.

Mayor T. Frank Hayes is a Democrat, one of the biggest and boldest ever seen in Connecticut. His arrest, along with his controller, Daniel J. Leary, his secretary, Thomas P. Kelley, and several other Waterbury officials, resulted from Mr. Leary's failure (by 33 votes) to get re-elected last year. The Republican who got in soon told the State's Attorney, who told the grand jury, that Hayes, Leary & Co., "a small but powerful, ruthless and corrupt group of men." had been running Waterbury's affairs "for personal financial gain and political advancement" at a cost of millions of dollars to the city. Mr. Hayes's widowed mother went on his $25,000 bond. Last week Mr. Hayes's lawyers fought tooth & nail to save him by querying prospective jurors so closely that, after three weeks, they had accepted only eight out of a venire panel of 200.

*Manufactured in Hartford in a factory owned by that upright city's social and financial elite.

/-Last week Mr. Mackenzie, who used to be a druggist in P. T. Barnum's home town of Bethel, Conn., was reported to have received $6,900 per year as lobbyist for McKesson & Robbins, the drug firm of Crook Philip Musica-Coster.

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