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Up to last week William Crapo Durant had lost three fortunes, been twice ousted as president of General Motors, seen his Durant car fail, his art treasures auctioned. Yet he remained spry and bright-eyed, an oldtimer who had played a losing but gallant game. Then came a sour tagline to his riches-to-rags story: he was cited by Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace for a measly commodity fraud Secretary Wallace charged 77-year-old Willie Durant, his wife and various associates including the brokerage houses of Alexander Eisemann & Co. and H. W. Armstrong & Co. with "having cheated " and defrauded persons for whom futures contracts were made... by the manner in which they promoted and operated a scheme sometimes called the Buchhalter plan of trading."

Joseph Buchhalter, who was also cited last week, is a onetime Denver commodity trader and real estate dealer who devised a scheme for profiting from Henry Wallace's "ever-normal granary" program. Ihe Buchhalter plan entailed simultaneously going short and long on wheat contracts (buying and selling at the same price). Then if the price rose 1-c-, the profit was immediately realized on the long side while the short was kept open until the price permitted it also to be closed out at a profit. Since the ever-normal-granary program was expected to stabilize wheat prices in a narrow range, the scheme visualized a steady realization of profits Apparently working all right until the wheat market broke a solid 30 points in 1938 the scheme, like Secretary Wallace's, proved something less than infallible.

Last week the Department of Agriculture announced that its Commodity Exchange Administration had found that of the 48 accounts operating under the scheme 42 had a closed profit aggregating $18,253 but all 48 had a total unrealized loss of $45,218. The owners of the accounts had been told only of the profitable deals. Indignant denials of fraud followed CEA's setting of hearings for March 29.

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