The Waterbury Democrat., 1938-12-17

place.
 Frank Speicher, the star wit- ness, was first arrested in New York in 1884, but the proceedings involving him have been knock ing around in the courts ever since. They were liable to touch of too much dynamite in high places.
 Some of that dynamite was un- comfortably near the office of the Secretary of War. Some of it even had faint trail to an outer of- flee of the White House. eco Kit-Bags
 To get the real significance of the Army contract trial, it is ne- cessary to go back to the earliest days of the New Deal when the purchase of supplies was 8 free- and-easy matter of dinner table conversation, when Basil O'Con- nor, law partner of the president. walked in to see the late Louey Howe and sold him a quantity of toilette kit-bags for the CCC at a price considerably higher than that being paid by the Army.
 Naturally this annoyed Quar- termaster General John L. De- Witt, who called up Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, eX-Re- publican chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee and an old classmate of DeWitt's at Princeton. Dewitt told him what the Democrats were getting away with.
 Senator Reed thereupon leaked the story to the Republican New York Herald Tribune, following it with an investigation by the Mil- itary Affairs Committee.
 At this point there enters upon the scene Joe Silverlnan, 8 defendant at the present trial, and secondhand clothing deal- CT in more Army underpants, raincoats, shoes and tents than almost any man in the country. Two Apartments
 Joe Silverman had two apart ments at the Wardman Park Hotel, one of which he rented to Senator Carey of Wyoming, a Republican member of the Mil- itary Affairs Committee. And by listening at the closet door in the adjoining apartment, Joe over heard Senate strategy discussed by Senator Carey and Assistant Quartermaster General Gibbons, supplied this advance strategy to the Democrat and thus contribu- ted to the white-washing of the entire kit-bag deal.
 Silverman previously had pur- chased from the War Department 500,000 raincoats for $1.05 each and 100000 for 5 cents each. He had also purchased a large quan- tity of Army underwear, with the understanding it would be sold only in foreign countries. This was in the Hoover days of disarm- ament, when the Army was dumping its surplus supplies.
 But now under Roosevelt and the eco, the Army began to buy new supplies, including raincoats, for which it was pay ing as high as $2.47. So Silver man offered to sell back 5000 Army raincoats-which he had never token out of War Depart ment warehouses-fOr 67 cents each.
 General Dewitt, still irked, re- fused to buy them. He got an or- der from Harry Woodring, then Assistant Secretary of War, for bidding the repurchase of Army supplies except at their previous price.
 No Sale for Underwear
 Silverman also had tried to sell his Army underwear to Halle Se- lassie in Ethiopia and to Bolivia and Paraguay in the Chaco, but got nowhere. The world market for underwear was low. Mean while a Boston firm, equally stuck with Army underwear, had hired Bob Jackson, Democratic Nation al Committeeman from New Hampshire, also the secretary to Governor Curley of Massachu- setts. Working with Jimmy Roose- welt, they succeeded in lifting the ban against selling the underwear in the United States-for that particular firm.
 But Joe SiIverman, though he hired Huey Long and John Costello, Democratic Commit teeman from the District of Columbia, as his attorneys, could never get nowhere with