INVESTIGATIONS: Possum

In all his years of pursuing the fast buck around the national capital, weedy Little John Maragon never seemed to be getting anywhere. He was an anxious glad-hander of big men, a hanger-on at the White House, a willing errand-runner and a great fellow for cadging free rides in official trains and limousines. But he lived in a middlebrow house in the suburbs, moaned about the cost of groceries, and looked like a part-time shoe clerk. Most of the capital was inclined to agree when his fellow countryman, Greek-born Promoter William G. Helis, said:

“John’s not a bad boy. He just doesn’t know what in the hell he’s doing.”

But last week, in the Senate investigation of Washington five-percenters (TIME, Aug. 22 et seq.) it became plain that John had been playing possum the whole time. While posing as a harmless and furtive hero-worshiper, he had been engaged in all kinds of rakish and profitable enterprise, often with the enthusiastic assistance of the Government itself.

Presidential Priorities. It developed that John’s old friend, Major General Harry Vaughan, the presidential military aide, had dashed off wads of letters on White House stationery to get John and his business associates transportation, visas, and help from U.S. officers abroad. Before one wartime perfume-buying trip just after V-E day, Harry Vaughan informed the State Department that the President himself was “personally interested” in Pal John’s travels—a suggestion which enabled John to go to Europe with a top priority I-D rating.

On another occasion, Reparations Commissioner Ed Pauley described him as “not only a good friend of mine but also the President’s . . .” The letters got him a $5,600-a-year job with the State Department and free transportation to Greece with a U.S. mission at a time when he was also drawing $1,000 a month from Albert Verley & Co., Chicago perfume importers.

Though John had stoutly denied accepting money for negotiating any purchase of Government surpluses, witnesses testified that he had acted as an agent in a deal involving more than $40,000 worth of electrical equipment from the War Assets Administration. A Washington lawyer named George A. Chadwick Jr. announced that John had been paid $13,000—although he felt that John was not entitled to $8,032.50 of it. Chadwick complained that this sum represented 1,700,000 francs which Maragon had simply pocketed after his employers “entrusted” him with it in France.

Entertaining Accounts. The biggest surprise concerned money. John has been raking it in with both hands. His Verley

Co. expense accounts were masterpieces; they listed such items as $635 for entertainment over a three-day period, $137 for two days’ meals, and added up to $9,500 for three months. And though he had reported an average of $6,000 a year for the last five years on his income-tax returns, the Senate subcommittee discovered that he had deposited $119,608.61 in three banks.

When the Senators called John back to grill him last week, he turned up with a lawyer. “The attorney laid a piece of paper before his client. Whenever he was asked an embrrassing question the lawyer tapped the paper and John looked down and read aloud from it: “I refuse to answer that question on advice of counsel, on the ground that my answer might tend to incriminate me.”

Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Joe McCarthy hoped aloud that perjury charges would be brought against John as soon as the subcommittee’s hearings ended. It looked as though John had played possum once too often.