Whitewash for Trujillo

New-Dealing New York Lawyer Morris Ernst, who has defended liberal causes ranging from James Joyce's Ulysses to the Sauerkraut Workers Union, this week finished a chore with a somewhat different aroma. After ten months on the payroll of Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo, Ernst declared in a 95-page report that he had not found one scrap of evidence to link his eminent employer to the unsolved Galindez-Murphy case (TIME, April 2, 1956 et seq.). He airily dismissed as a "canard" the strong circumstantial case that leads newsmen and the FBI to a single theory: that Trujillo Critic Jesus de Galindez was kidnaped on his way home from giving a Columbia University lecture on March 12, 1956, drugged, and flown to a small airport in the Dominican Republic by American Pilot Gerald Lester Murphy, 22, who was later silenced by murder in Trujilloland.

Murphy Waits. On a few facts the Ernst report, co-signed by ex-New York State Supreme Court Justice William Munson, saw eye-to-eye with a long-established story. On the evening of March 12, when Author (The Era of Trujillo) Galindez waved goodbye to a student in front of a New York subway entrance and then vanished, Gerry Murphy, a onetime Eagle Scout from Eugene, Ore., was waiting at out-of-the-way Zahns Airport near Amityville, L.I., his rented twin-engined Beechcraft D18 outfitted with extra gas tanks and ready to go. Ernst checked out Murphy's mysterious journey: take-off just before midnight, gassing in the early morning at Lantana Airport near West Palm Beach, followed by the crucial lapse of from seven to nine hours before he put down again at Tamiami Airport, Miami.

At Lantana, Murphy had told the plane attendant that he was carrying a sick man; the attendant saw one passenger in dark clothes, and on a cot or boards, "what looked like a person covered completely with a blanket or canvas." When Murphy landed back at Tamiami, he was apparently alone. Estimated round-trip air time for that type of plane from Florida to Monte Cristi Airport on the north coast of the Dominican Republic: 7 hr. 14 min.

Ernst finds this time margin so narrow that the flight was "extremely improbable," if not impossible. (Government investigators say Murphy was gone 8 1/2 to nine hours--plenty of time.) Ernst offers a theory of his own: Murphy was a freelance pilot, subject to big temptations "to smuggle nylons, drugs, guns . . . people"; the destination of his secret flight was rebellious Cuba, not the Dominican Republic. Ernst's proof came from "confidential sources" in Dictator Fulgencio Batista's Cuba. To back up Batista (who got five planeloads of arms in March from Trujillo), Ernst solemnly presented an affidavit from Trujillo's civil aviation chief that the Monte Cristi airstrip was closed at the time and, besides, had no facilities for refueling planes.

Key Witness. Because Ernst was openly working for Trujillo, many witnesses greeted him with suspicious silence. Among them: Air Force Sergeant Harold French, an old friend of Murphy's, who helped install the Beechcraft's extra gas tanks and was with Murphy at Zahns Airport until noon on the fatal day. Murphy told French about the trip in detail, and French told the FBI ("Gerry said that gasoline would be available to him at Monte Cristi in 5-gal. cans").

French timed a test run from Manhattan to Zahns Airport to see how long the car carrying Murphy's passenger would take (1 hr. 40 min.). A year later, in Rockefeller Center, French picked out Dominican Consul General Arturo Espaillat as the man he had seen talking to Murphy when he rented the plane. ("With FBI agents around me, I followed him into a candy store. I positively identified him, and my heart jumped clear up in my throat.") The clincher in the FBI files: Murphy's original flight chart to Monte Cristi, including his handwritten notes, left behind with French.

Ernst fell back on Dictator Trujillo's own offerings, e.g., 68 pages of Dominican stamps on Espaillat's passports, designed to prove that he was in Ciudad Trujillo when the whole thing happened. Ernst discounts, as the words of a habitual liar, Murphy's confessions to friends and his fiancee that he flew Galindez out.

The case stood exactly where it had before. Galindez is still listed as a missing person by New York police; Murphy is dead, and so is the Dominican pilot who admittedly killed him; the FBI still wants Espaillat to waive his diplomatic immunity for questioning. Sydney Baron, the ex-Tammany Hall pressagent who acted as go-between for Trujillo and Ernst, said that the inquiry was "very comprehensive and expensive," that both Ernst and Baron would probably get more than their original guarantees, boosting the cost past the first estimate of $160,000. Trujillo doubtless will cheerfully pay.

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