Mr. Lev Goes to Washington

The U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations gets the best shows in the business. A year ago, while all the nation watched, the Army-McCarthy extravaganza played before it. Last week it had Harry Lev.

Lev is a millionaire businessman from Chicago--a capmaker. The Senators were trying to find out just what it was that caused his remarkable success in getting lush cap contracts from the Armed Services textile procurement office. Ohio's Senator George Bender suspected that the half-ton of smoked sturgeon that Lev had given to 38 procurement office employees might have helped--might, in fact, have been bribes. Astonished, Lev answered that the sturgeon could in no sense be considered a gift: "A gift is something a person wears." "

Strike Me Like a Ton." When Senator John McClellan of Arkansas tried to find out how Lev's Mid-City Uniform Cap Co. was able to cut its bid on military caps below competitors after all bids were supposedly in, Lev swore it was all news to him, insisting, "This is really strike me like a ton over my head." Suddenly, he leaped up and began passing around pictures of his plant, refusing to heed Senator McClellan's order to stop. "I'm proud of this plant," he cried, holding up the hearing while he distributed pictures to all the reporters.

Ohio's Bender wanted to know how Lev came to invent the foam-rubber rims he put in his caps. The capmaker said that the answer was not for ladies to hear. Bender insisted. Lev bent over the Senator and whispered loudly: "Made out of the same stuff they make falsies of." Standing jowl to jowl with Senator Bender, Lev put on an impromptu fashion show, whipping sample hats on and off his head. Bender was curious about Lev's "social" relationship with Mrs. Mella Hort, ex-contract administrator in the Defense Department who had testified that she had visited Lev's hotel room.

While admitting that they did not discuss the cap business in the hotel room, Lev growled indignantly: "A girl works for the Government for eight hours, and there is no U.S.A. stamp on her what she should do after that."

"You Think So?" After four days of this, Bender was exasperated. "You evade!" he bellowed at Lev. "You hesitate, you delay . . . You're a very clever man!" Lev softened. "You think so?" he asked. But his delight vanished when Bender accused him of making "shoddy" hats for the Navy. Lev replied angrily: "I deserve at least from the committee I should get a congressional medal. Never mind accusing my workmanship!" When the subcommittee produced letters from his competitors complaining about the favors Lev mysteriously won from Government employees, the capmaker brushed them aside: "My competitors, they love to see me being in the grave."

For years Harry Lev has been confounding his competitors as much as he confused the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He can speak seven languages (English, Polish, Hebrew, German, Yiddish, Arabic and Russian), but he can neither read nor write English. He organized his own capmaking firm with $500 capital in 1925, only two years after he arrived in the U.S. from Russia. He worked day and night, soon found out how to get contracts. Now he is worth more than $1,000,000.

Harry Lev lives with his wife of 27 years and their eleven-year-old daughter (their other two daughters are married) in a brick mansion near Lake Michigan. Mrs. Lev had her own explanation why the Senate subcommittee was more confused at week's end than it was at the beginning. Said she of her husband: "He is more ethical than the word implies . . . He is just too honest, too sincere for the people who've been questioning . . . He's a dope when it comes to English."

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