Charity at Home

The flourishing enterprise began in the busy mind of Benjamin Kram, onetime numbers racketeer (in Pittsburgh) and taxi driver (in Miami) who decided that there must be better ways of going beyond his $17-a-month Government check for partial (10%) service disability. With his brothers Henry and Max he founded the Ex-G.I. Plastics Co., and soon they were going beyond at the startlingly successful rate of about $18,000 gross a week. Gimmick: the Krams crammed cheap plastic crucifixes into envelopes with letters asking $1 aid for a partially disabled vet, mailed them by the hundreds of thousands to Catholic-sounding names culled from phone books.

The law eventually clamped down on the Kram brothers (the Post Office persuaded Benjamin and Henry--Max had quit the firm--to sign an affidavit promising to go out of business). Meanwhile, back in Pittsburgh, young Murray Kram, Max's son and Uncle Ben's assiduous pupil, was keeping the family's tin-plated platinum cup clanking. A bat-eared young man with the mournful features of a card player who has aces wired, Murray could not ask alms as a disabled vet, since he had not been in service. Instead, with the customary request for $1, he made a frank pitch to the effect that the next-to-worthless crucifixes or rosary bracelets were "being sent to you by an enterprise that is owned and operated for the benefit of Murray Kram." Murray did not bother with Irish-sounding names ("I don't think more than 40% or 50% of the people with Irish names are Catholics"), filled his sucker lists with Italian and Slavic names. In 1955 Murray Kram's Religious Distributing Co. grossed $122,000.

Last year a federal court in Pittsburgh found Murray Kram guilty on ten counts of mail fraud, socked him with a $4,500 fine, three months in jail and five years' probation. Last week, ruling that there was "hardly a scintilla" of evidence that Murray had misled his customers, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision. Despite the court's action, Murray Kram, 28, felt that the mail business was getting too uncomfortable. But he already had a new, eminently legal career in mind: aiding churches as a professional fund raiser, at 15% of the gross take.

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