Smokeout

From the Senate crime committee last week, veteran (49) Chicago Daily Newsman Ed Lahey got a hot tip. The July payroll of the Chicago Downs Race Track Association, furnished under subpoena, disclosed a string of names remarkably like those of certain Illinois legislators. Lahey, well knowing that the race track's harness races had been legalized by a special bill which the 1949 legislature approved unanimously, relayed his tip to the city desk in Chicago.

Chain Reaction. Reporter Charles (Chuck) Roberts* got the job of checking up. One Theodore A. Swinarski was listed on the payroll. Roberts called at the home of State Representative Theodore Anthony Swinarski, boldly fired a shot in the dark: "Is it true that you make $50 a night working at Chicago Downs as a mutuel inspector?" Taken aback, Swinarski cried: "Why, it was only $25 a night." Moreover, he demanded, why did Roberts pick on him when at least seven other state legislators were doing the same thing? Reporter Roberts clucked sympathetically as he noted down the names given him by indignant Representative Swinarski.

Digging further, Roberts managed to spade up a list of the Chicago Downs stockholders. Among them was many a newsworthy name: Ex-Sun Managing Editor James Mulroy,** now executive assistant to Governor Adlai Stevenson; the wife of House Minority Leader Paul Powell, who was speaker of the 1949 legislature that passed the race-track bill; Democratic Ward Boss Tom Nash, and a covey of lesser politicians.

All of them, Roberts found, had made minor killings; they had bought their stock at 10-c- a share, in 1949 got dividends of $1 a share, last year got 75-c-. For example, on his $100 investment Mulroy had taken back $1,750 in dividends; Ex-Speaker Powell's wife had drawn a total of $29,575 on the stock for which she laid down only $1,690.

Pained Cries. Nobody was more embarrassed than ex-Newspaperman Mulroy, who protested that he only bought the stock as a "flyer," long after the 1949 bill was passed. "I wish the damned thing hadn't turned out to be so successful," he lamented. Snapped his old employer, the Sun-Times: "Racetrack operators don't cut people into their profits without a reason . . . if Mulroy doesn't understand this he's not smart enough to be an assistant to the governor."

As for Governor Stevenson, he thought Mulroy was guilty only of bad judgment, expressed his continued confidence in him. But at week's end Chicago was ahum with investigations by Federal Internal Revenue agents, the Trotting Association, and the promise of a third one by the legislature itself. Said the Daily News's City Editor Clem Lane: "I suppose public officials will go on operating on the sordid principle that 'if it's legal, it's honest.' But at least we've been able to let the public in on what's going on."

*Whose name was used by his World War II Navy shipmate, the late Thomas Heggen, as the title for his famed Mr. Roberts.

**As a Daily News reporter himself, Mulroy along with Alvin Goldstein, won a 1925 Pulitzer Prize for digging up the evidence convicting Loeb and Leopold of the murder of Bobby Franks.

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