INVESTIGATIONS: Rotten Apple

The U.S. people last week watched an extraordinary and absorbing spectacle—the public disgrace of a U.S. Army general. Never in modern times had a high officer suffered such dishonor, seldom had one brought more upon himself and his service than did stiff-backed, sharp-eyed Major General Bennett E. Meyers.

During the war, General Meyers (retired in 1945) was regarded, in & out of the Air Forces, as one of its ablest men. He had risen from private. As second in command of A.A.F. procurement, he had had much to do with the spending of $60 billion; he had been praised for getting airplanes when they were needed. He was a Big Man. On the sordid evidence presented before Senator Homer Ferguson’s War Investigating subcommittee last week, Benny Meyers was something else. He was a man of cheap little schemes who hid behind cheaply bought dupes while he enriched himself.

Tools & Stooges. He had a cozy set-up for the cozy war he fought in Washington and at Dayton’s Wright Field. Despite the warnings of superiors that he must have no interest in companies which might be doing business with the Army, Meyers got his fingers into a metal-tooling factory. It was the Aviation Electric Corp., a few miles from his office at Wright. It wasn’t much— a 190-ft. by 140-ft. one-story building with no more than 30 machines, at its peak. Benny put about $54,000 in it. He needed one more tool—a stooge behind whom he could hide his ownership of Aviation Electric.

He found what he wanted in a mild young man named Bleriot H. Lamarre, a $28-a-week bookkeeper married to a handsome brunette named Mildred Readnower. Mildred had been Benny Meyers’ secretary at Wright Field. Bookkeeper Lamarre became Aviation Electric’s new president. But he was boss on the letterheads only; Meyers told him what to do and how much to pay himself ($38 a week).

Soon the money began to roll in. Meyers recommended the firm to Bell Aircraft, as being owned by “some friends”; Bell farmed out some minor jobs to Aviation Electric. The first was for fuse boxes. Lamarre figured that they could be profitably made for $11 each. Meyers upped that to $44.58 each, and got it. In five years, Aviation Electric collected $1,053,000 from the Bell account (and about $375,000 from others).

Love & Gifts. Hiding and taking the profits became a problem. Benny rigged the books to show Lamarre’s salary as $31,000 a year (meantime Lamarre got an actual raise to $51.51 a week). There had to be another stooge. In came Mrs. Lamarre’s brother, Thomas Readnower, who was listed on the books as a vice president at $18,600 a year, but got an actual salary of $25 a week. The kickback to the general of the difference between the real and fictitious salaries also got to be a problem. At first it was handled in cashier’s checks, but they were too easily traced. Then it was paid in $1,000 bills—but soon the Treasury began eying all big bills suspiciously. Then it was transferred in smaller bills.

Soon after the U.S. got into the war, the general fell in love—with a statuesque blonde from Oklahoma who, as Ila Rhodes, had once been a B-picture starlet in Hollywood (among her movies: Secret Service in the Air). A few months before their marriage, Ila’s father, Ray Curnutt, who had been a bus driver for 16 years, went on the payroll at $12,000 a year as “production manager.” He spent several months just walking through the plant. When he quit, he got a $26,000 contract severance settlement, $19,000 of which bobbed up in his daughter’s bank account.

Soon there were new ways to spend the company’s swelling profits: a $10,000 decorating job on the Meyers’ Washington apartment, an air-conditioning outfit at $825, a $700 radio, a $3,000 Cadillac. By these and other devices, Homer Ferguson’s investigators figured that the general got at least $140,000 in four years.

Lies & Gallantry. While this evidence of his profiteering piled up against him, the general chomped on a cigar and scowled. But he sweated when Bleriot Lamarre took the stand. Lamarre meekly recited a self-incriminating accusation. He told of a visit by the general to the Lamarres’ white frame bungalow in Dayton five months ago, when he felt the committee’s hot breath on his neck. There, he related, General Meyers “sat in my favorite chair” and “concocted” a story to tell the investigators. The main theme was to be that Lamarre had taken large sums from the company and wasted it “in gambling and reckless living.” Calmly, Lamarre admitted that he had twice perjured himself by telling this cooked-up story before the subcommittee’s secret hearings.

That was enough to make up Senator Ferguson’s mind to send the whole case to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.* But the general had to have his final say. His last confession was the ugliest. He said that Mrs. Lamarre had been his mistress—”with Mr. Lamarre’s knowledge, approval and acquiescence.” He had merely wanted the Lamarres to “live in the manner they wanted” and he wanted to keep Mrs. Lamarre near him; that was the whole reason for setting up Aviation Electric Corp. Cried Senator Ferguson: “Isn’t it a greater disgrace . . . to do what you say you did . . . than what they say you did?” Hissed Bleriot Lamarre: “Snake!” (Mrs. Lamarre, in Dayton, said that “a suit for slander seems the only answer.”)

This was too much for the officers who had once held Benny Meyers in high regard. Into the hearing stomped his wartime commander, General Hap Arnold, who let Meyers have it on the chin: “Disgraced his uniform and his rank. … If, to our regret, we of the Air Force did not find a rotten apple in our barrel, we are grateful that others have done so.”

This week the Air Force made the dishonoring of General Meyers almost complete. It stopped his pay ($550 a month), stripped him of his decorations and prepared to haul him before a court-martial.

* This week the Department of Justice prepared an income-tax evasion case against Meyers. It also got all the subcommittee’s evidence, with a reminder from Senator Ferguson to look into “the question of perjury.”