Scorpion Hunt

The Tulsa Tribune's Nolen Bulloch is a canny, cool-headed reporter whose skill at unearthing stories of bootlegging, gambling and political corruption has earned him the title of "The Little Scorpion" among Oklahoma hoodlums. Last week Reporter Bulloch was indicted by a federal grand jury in Tulsa on the very charge that has jailed more than a dozen mobsters he has exposed in the Tribune. The charge: conspiracy to import liquor into bone-dry Oklahoma.

The Tribune, which promptly posted bond for Bulloch, told readers in a lead editorial that it had independently investigated the reporter's affairs and remains "confident of his integrity." Pointing out that Bulloch has "earned the undying enmity of scores'' of wrongdoers, the Tribune said: "The indictment seems to have been based on the statements of admitted law violators." Among the charges that Bulloch will face is the claim that he had been voted a 10% cut of their profits at a bootleggers' meeting which Bulloch did not attend.

Poser. Reporter Bulloch, 49, a wiry (5 ft. 6 in., 130 lbs.), Texas-born family man and Episcopal churchgoer, has faced hazards before. In 1947 he was threatened with death for writing a series that led to conviction of an out-of-state gang that had tried to take over Oklahoma's bootleg industry. Another Bulloch series ended with the biggest liquor and gambling raids in Oklahoma history. In 1952 Bulloch was warned again, and the Mayes County prosecutor was killed during a gambling investigation on which they had worked together. After he reported buying absentee ballots simply by posing as a candidate. Oklahoma's National Guard was called out to guard every precinct in five counties in the primary election.

Bulloch's biggest coup still has Oklahoma politicians in a dither. In the 1956 election he uncovered a brisk trade in absentee ballots which had given State Senator John Russell a narrow victory over Representative Tom Payne. The outcome: Payne was seated in the state senate while his opponent and several other state officials, including an aide to Democratic Governor Raymond Gary, were charged with conspiracy. Soon after this investigation, Bulloch was warned that disgruntled politicians were out to avenge the vote-fraud exposure.

Disturber. Then came the grand jury and its indictment of 20 Oklahomans. among them Tulsa's police chief and police commissioner as well as Newshawk Bulloch. The mass indictment was all the more disturbing since there is no question in Tulsa of the integrity or legal skill of the prosecutor, a hard-driving U.S. district attorney named B. Hayden Crawford. Readers who flooded the paper with letters supporting Bulloch last week could only assume, as the Tribune does, that some of the liquor runners and prostitutes who testified before the grand jury may have been more anxious to quash Bulloch than bootlegging.

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