Scandal in Portland

One night in Portland an alert police reporter for the Oregonian (circ. 230,238) noted that there were suddenly no detectives around police headquarters. Sniffing a story, he demanded an explanation from the police chief. The chief kept mum a secret that was being withheld even from the paper's night city desk: detectives were out guarding the Oregonian's Reporters Wallace Turner and William Lambert and their families while the pair were digging into one of the messiest official scandals in Northwest history.

The big story broke in April, and by last week it had state officials, from the governor down, involved in the uproar. The Oregonian's sensational accusations: top Western officials of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters were conspiring with Seattle gamblers to 1) control Portland's law-enforcement agencies, 2) organize all the city's rackets, from pinball machines to prostitution. The Page One story put S. I. Newhouse's staid Oregonian into a running fight not only with local officials but also with its opposition daily, the Oregon Journal (circ. 183,123).

SecurityMeasures.Gangling,sharp-nosed Reporter Wally Turner, 35, and his partner, thick-spectacled Bill Lambert, 36, are such familiar prowlers along Portland's corrupt trails that the underworld knows them as "Fishface and Bugeyes." The latest trail took them over thousands of feet of magnetic tape--70 hours of eavesdropped conversation--supplied by Underworld Kingpin James ("Big Jim") Elkins, an ex-convict who bankrolls Portland gambling and after-hours drinking joints.

The reporting team labored for three months transcribing the recordings, going to San Francisco and Seattle to check the information in the tapes. As security measures in Portland, they kept the recordings in a bank vault, worked in hotel rooms that they frequently changed, rode in rented cars that they switched almost daily.

"Moral Code." When the Seattle plotters approached Racketeer Elkins to join them, said the paper's account, the Portland underworldling fell in with the scheme to organize gambling and bootlegging but balked at prostitution ("It's against my moral code"). Fearing that they planned to freeze him out, Elkins took the precaution of "bugging" the Portland apartment of the Seattle emissaries with a microphone hooked to a tape recorder. On the playback he heard them plotting "to get rid of me." Elkins told the Seattle boys about his tapes and threatened to use the recordings to expose the plot unless the Teamsters and their underworld allies dropped it. They scoffed at such talk. But when the Oregonian staffers heard about the tapes, they persuaded him to make good his threat.

In one of the tapes a Teamster intimate scoffed: "The Oregonian or the Journal won't take the Teamsters on ... All the Oregonian's got to do is [fool] around with the Teamsters and the first thing you know, them guys will be up there wanting 10 or 15 cents an hour, and the Oregonian can't afford it." Day after day, naming names and quoting conversations, the Turner-Lambert series produced fresh sensations. The paper charged that two officials in Portland, Multnomah County District Attorney William M. Langley and Sheriff Terry Schrunk, were mixed up with the racketeers who were plotting to "open the town." Among other accusations, the Oregonian reported that the plotters had threatened Portland Mayor Fred Peterson with political reprisals by the Teamsters if he did not get rid of his police chief.

Mayor Peterson confirmed the charge. The Oregon Teamsters' representative, Clyde Crosby--whom the Oregonian revealed as an ex-convict--admitted that he had tried to get the mayor to fire Police Chief Jim Purcell, but only, he said, because the chief was in cahoots with Rack eteer Elkins. Cried District Attorney Langley, a Democrat elected in 1954 with strong Teamsters' support: "Reports that I have plotted with the Teamsters are a pack of lies." He charged that the tapes were doctored and spurious, accused Racketeer Elkins of trying to blackmail him with them.

On the Sports Page. Taking the offensive, District Attorney Langley called a grand jury investigation into Portland rackets. The first to be served with subpoenas were Reporters Turner and Lambert and the Oregonian's Editor Herbert Lundy. Before they could be called, Oregon Governor Elmo Smith summarily took the investigation out of Langley's hands and put Attorney General Robert Thornton and the state police in charge.

Langley, the D.A., was in no mood to wait for the state investigation. At that point the Oregon Journal--which had been left behind on the story except to play up denials and countercharges--leaped to the foreground. Langley sent official raiders, accompanied by Journal reporters (but no Oregonian staffers) to the home of an ex-policeman named Raymond F. Clark, who had made the tapes for Racketeer Elkins. They found some 30 more tapes, made at Elkins' bidding. The Journal splashed the story of the raid on its front page; the Oregonian buried it in the sports section. Last week, at Langley's urging, the county grand jury delivered its first indictments in the case. To the Journal's glee, the jury indicted the Oregonian's major sources, Elkins and Snooper Clark, for illegal wiretapping.

That was too much for Governor Smith. In the middle of the night he gave Attorney General Thornton sweeping powers to oust Langley immediately from control of the grand jury; the attorney general took it over next morning. At week's end, as the Oregonian and the Journal strained to follow the crooked trail uncovered by Reporters Turner and Lambert, they could agree at least that something was rotten in Portland.

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