Comeuppance for the Pickens Kid

Robert Gene Baker had lain for months like a dead cat at the door of the U.S. Senate. Few inside seemed in any rush to kick him away. True, the sharp, ferret-eyed kid who had left his native Pickens, S.C., at 14 to become a Senate page had been charged with gross impropriety for using his post as a Senate aide to become Washington's No. 1 influence peddler. But he had survived two sideshow investigations by the Democrat-packed Rules Committee, which was not anxious to strike down the man who had been Lyndon Johnson's protege and top aide. And he still showed himself through Washington like an elegant boulevardier, his jowls freshly barbered, his darting eyes hidden behind a pair of grotesquely tinted sunglasses, each arm frequently sporting a giggling girl. Bobby Baker was writing his autobiography. He seemed, despite his setbacks, to be as safe as sin.

Last week a federal grand jury shattered Baker's complacent life. It produced a 30-page indictment charging him with nine counts of tax evasion, theft and conspiracy. The charges were the result of 15 months' work by a team of Justice Department lawyers and Internal Revenue Service and FBI agents, who had been digging deep into Bobby Baker's murky affairs, helping to supply the jury with some 10,000 pages of testimony in closed-door sessions in Washington's U.S. courthouse. If convicted, Bobby Baker could receive up to 48 years in jail and $47,000 in fines.

"101st Senator." The indictment offers a glimpse at how the onetime $19,612-a-year Senate employee was able to scrape together a fortune that ran up to $2,000,000. The specific charges involve devious transactions over 3 1/2 years that brought Bobby some $137,000 from clients who felt the need of his special talents as "the 101st Senator." None of the money, which he received largely in cash, was reported as taxable income. Furthermore, Baker not only deceived the Government but apparently never played quite foursquare with his cohorts.

One of them was Washington Attorney Wayne L. Bromley, 37, a Baker chum since the days when both were young Senate pages. The indictment charged that Bromley had been Bobby's tax screen, receiving as "legal fees" $37,000 from Baker clients in 1963-64. Most of this, the grand jury found, ended up as cash in Baker's pockets. The scheme became so routine, however, that Baker began ignoring his pal altogether and having "a person other than Wayne L. Bromley" endorse the checks. Bromley was one of the grand jury's key witnesses and, though he was named as a "conspirator" with Baker in the tax-evasion scheme, he was not named as a defendant.

Not so fortunate was Clifford Jones, former Nevada lieutenant governor (1947-54) and now a big gambling casino operator in Las Vegas and the Caribbean. Jones was charged with perjury for denying that he had paid Baker, through Bromley, $10,000 for services rendered in 1963-64.

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