Trial of the Popes

Fortune and Anthony Pope are among Manhattan's richest men. Sons of the late Generoso Pope, who arrived from Italy with $4 and turned it into millions before he died at 59 in 1950, they have faithfully carried on their father's habit of making money. They control New York's Colonial Sand & Stone Co., which gets a lot of city contracts, and a whole spate of smaller corporations. Powerful in civic and political affairs, they own two radio stations and two foreign-language newspapers--New York's Spanish La Prensa and Il Progresso Italo-Americano, the nation's oldest and most influential Italian-language newspaper. (Another brother, Generoso Jr., publishes the weekly sex-and-scandal tabloid, National Enquirer.) Since the death of A. P. Giannini, founder and chairman of the Bank of America, Fortune Pope, 43, has been sometimes spoken of as the outstanding figure in the huge (more than 4,000,000) U.S. Italian-American community. Yet last week, standing before a New York federal judge, Fortune and Anthony Pope were branded "incredibly stupid," fined $25,000 each and given a year's suspended jail sentence.

The Popes had pleaded guilty to violating Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, were sentenced for giving false and misleading information in soliciting proxies from 1,000 stockholders of Colonial Sand & Stone, which their father founded. The registration statements failed to mention that the Pope brothers had transferred $379,000 from Colonial, of which they control two-thirds, into other corporations, which they own wholly. The money was profit from trucking rock salt for New York City, which recently disqualified the Popes as rock salt suppliers. The state charged that the Popes, who bought much of their salt from Dominican Dictator Trujillo, provided inferior salt and sometimes overcharged the city.

What made the judge call the Popes stupid was an odd situation. The brothers were transferring funds between companies that were two-thirds or wholly owned by them and their families. Since they have enough shares to control Colonial, they did not have to solicit proxies, thus could have avoided making a false proxy statement. Whatever mysterious reasons the Popes had for the transfer (they have since returned $405,817 to Colonial), the judge chided the freewheeling brothers for ignoring their "definite responsibility to public stockholders."

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