Return of Mitchell

Up to the sixth floor of No. 41 Broad Street, Manhattan, one day last week trooped a delegation of newshawks looking for an office door on which was freshly stenciled the name "C. E. Mitchell, Inc." Admitted by a solitary office boy, the reporters found Charles Edwin Mitchell seated behind a small desk, nervously puffing cigarets. In his own words the bankless banker was a "poor fellow going back into business."

Only two short years had passed since Charles Edwin Mitchell had been driven from his tall temple by Ferdinand Pecora, whose persistent questioning before the Senate Banking & Currency Committee had forced from the banker's own lips the admissions that had damned him. Promptly indicted for Federal income tax fraud, Mr. Mitchell had fought through a harrowing six-week trial which lost him 24 Ib. in weight but won him an acquittal (TIME, July 3, 1933). In a later income tax action his counsel had declared that his client was "millions in the red."

"That's truer than Gospel," said the onetime National City Bank chairman last week. "Like every one else, I presume, I have cut down on club memberships very markedly.'' Lately he has been living at his mansion in Tuxedo, N. Y., and staying a few nights a week in Manhattan at the Hotel Plaza with his daughter. "I've said right along--and I honestly mean it --that if I could go on and attend to my own living with my name never in the Press again, it would be Santa Claus to me."

But when the brisk, tough-thewed, iron-haired ex-banker began to talk business, it was clear that he had by no means lost the spirit which once prompted him to defy the Federal Reserve Board. With a gardenia in his lapel, faultlessly dressed in a dark grey suit, starched collar and pepper-&-salt cravat, he displayed the same earnest optimism which helped make his bank for a few years the biggest in the U. S. Cried he:

"The end of the profit system? Bunk! I still continue to believe that individual endeavor will find its incentive in rewards that will come to it, and without the possibility of such rewards our economy will be stultified. It will be impossible for us to take our place in the cosmos of the nations. The expectation that we're going into a state of innocuous desuetude in this country is so silly to me that I just can't be a subscriber to it."

Asked his opinion of the New Deal, its first victim could only make a wry face and helplessly wave his big paw in the air.

Just what "Sunshine Charlie" Mitchell plans to do remained a mystery except for the fact that he will be "concerned with investment finance and organization of one kind or another." On one point, however, Mr. Mitchell was definite: "It will not be public investments. There is no such thing in my thoughts as service to the investing public."

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