TAXATION: Sunshine

Twenty-four pounds lighter but scot free, Charles Edwin Mitchell took his wife off to the plutocratic quietude of Southampton, L. I. last week. Gone were the baggy grey suit, the patched shirt, the stained fedora which he wore through the six weeks of his Manhattan tax evasion trial, the last 25 hours of which the jury had spent locked in deliberation. “Sunshine Charlie” was now dressed to the nines in well-pressed, well-cut haberdashery and on his greying head rested a finely-woven Panama that swayed to the least puff of breeze. He “had nothing to say about the future,” Neither confirmed nor denied reports that he would later head the divorced securities affiliate of National City Bank, from whose chairmanship he had resigned.

Neither to Southampton nor anywhere else went the hero of the Mitchell case, Lawyer Max Steuer. It was he who had persuaded the jury that Banker Mitchell’s “dummy” stock sales had been perfectly legitimate, that the $666,666.67 which Mr. Mitchell had received from National City Co. was no taxable bonus but a loan, that his client was a financial martyr, not a tax slacker who had tried to defraud the Government of some $850,000. Well content, smart Lawyer Steuer was to be found at his office at No. 11 Broadway, working on more routine cases.