Real Lace

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  At the time, it was noted that the local press was showing a certain amount of favoritism to the Dohenys. Partly, it was because Mr. Doheny, as one of the town’s richest citizens, had become something of a local favorite son. (A Los Angeles street, cutting across Beverly Hills, would be named Doheny Drive.) But one reporter openly admitted that he had been instructed by his editor to write only nice things about the Doheny family because, the editor pointed out, the newspaper would not want Doheny’s oil companies to cancel any advertising. The press was further aided by Doheny’s chief lawyer, a shrewd little fellow Irishman named Frank J. Hogan, who saw to it that all pieces of evidence favorable to the Doheny side made their way promptly to the press table as soon as they were offered in court. Doheny’s appearance at his trial was also in his favor—that of a jovial, white-haired, bright-eyed, and distinguished-looking gentleman, the picture of merry innocence. Hogan’s large staff of lawyers was housed in suites of rooms at “Chester Place,” where they led an active after-hours social life and enjoyed such facilities as the Dohenys’ private gymnasium, bowling alley, and swimming pool, and where the members of the press were frequently asked to parties.

  After nine days of testimony, the government rested its case, and the Dohenys’ lawyers embarked on their defense, relying heavily upon pathos, patriotism, and even bringing in the Yellow Peril. Of Doheny’s oil tanks in Pearl Harbor, which had been built for the Navy as part of his deal with Fall, the defense made much of the fact that these provided a vital national force to protect the Pacific—including the California coastline—from America’s “enemies” in Asia (enemies who did not materialize until nearly twenty years later). In a ringing voice, one of the Doheny lawyers told the court, “America can sleep tonight secure from danger of being overrun by a Mongol country because of the patriotism of such men as E. L. Doheny, Edwin Denby, and Admiral John K. Robison and their work in establishing a great naval oil base in Hawaii. These men have been humiliated and vilified because they endeavored to save you and me and our country.” The trial lasted about two weeks and ended on November 12, 1924, after a five-day summation. Judge Paul J. McCormick retired to deliberate the case.

  The judge’s deliberations took him until the following May. In his 105-page decision, he decided that the leases to the Elk Hills land were null and void, and that the contract for the Hawaiian storage tanks was equally illegal, having been obtained through fraud. He also held that President Harding had exceeded his authority in turning over the Navy’s lands to Fall’s Department of the Interior. He held further that Doheny’s payment of $100,000 to Fall was “against good morals and public policy, and tainted with fraud.” He ordered Doheny’s company to pay the government for all the oil it had taken out of Elk Hills. It was a clear and unexpected setback for Ed Doheny, but there was some comfort in it. Judge McCormick ordered that the government had to repay Doheny for the storage tanks. The Doheny lawyers immediately appealed Judge McCormick’s decision, and this may have been a mistake. The Court of Appeals, in October, not only upheld McCormick but took away Doheny’s reimbursement for the tanks. Once more the lawyers appealed—this time to the United States Supreme Court.

  Doheny and Fall, meanwhile, would have to stand trial again, in Washington, on the bribery charge, which, since it was a criminal case, might end up not only costing them money but also sending them to jail. For his Washington trial, which opened in November, 1926, Mr. Doheny was even better prepared than he had been in Los Angeles. His lawyer, Mr. Hogan, marshaled an even larger staff of lawyers. A huge suite of rooms was leased on the third floor of the Columbia Building, opposite Judiciary Square, and this was fitted out as a private club for the Doheny legal aides as well as the press. A staff of waiters was hired and a chef, and the press were fed with a steady stream of releases—all taking, naturally, the Doheny side. A personal press agent accompanied Ed Doheny into the courtroom to facilitate this flow of laudatory news. A few days before the trial was to begin, several jurors complained of threatening and otherwise disturbing telephone calls from strangers. One juror, who was told that his caller was “the court,” was asked questions about his bank account, his real estate, his family, his social and religious affiliations, and his relations with women other than his wife. Because of this, the presiding justice, Adolph A. Hoehling, ordered that the jury be locked up during the entire lengthy proceedings. While Doheny and his lawyers partied in the Columbia Building, the jurors languished in locked hotel rooms, guarded by marshals. The jurors were not even permitted to join their families for Thanksgiving dinner, nor could they go to church on Sundays. Instead, they were given Bibles to read. At the time, someone in the press slyly remarked that the jurors were the only ones involved in the entire Teapot Dome mess who had thus far been placed behind bars.

  Ed Doheny was now seventy years old and, when he took the stand on December 9, it was for the first time noted that he looked shaken, exhausted, and ill. He had been suffering from an infection in his arm, was wearing a sling, and rested his arm on a cushion. Before her husband testified, Mrs. Doheny was called and repeated the story of the torn note with the missing signature. Edward Doheny, Jr. also went over the tale of the trip to Washington with the cash in the little black bag. Neither Mrs. Doheny nor her son was asked any questions by the prosecution.

  Once again, Doheny’s testimony, when he reached the stand, stressed his patriotic intentions. He was merely trying to “save” the Navy’s oil to keep America safe and strong. He insisted that he expected no profit whatever from his machinations with Fall, despite the fact that he had once announced that he assumed his profits would exceed $100 million. He explained that he had selected his son as the courier to deliver the cash to Fall because “I was endeavoring at that time to work him into every phase of the business of handling the fortune that I expected sometime or other he would handle all of.” Doheny was asked whether he considered his son’s rather simple mission to Washington an important part of the young man’s financial education. “Yes, sir,” Doheny replied. “Even if he had been held up on the way he would have learned something. He would have had something in experience.” Doheny’s was a mind that seemed frequently to contemplate disaster.

  After some three weeks of testimony, Frank J. Hogan was ready to sum up for his client and to demonstrate his particular mastery of the Irish gift for oratory. With flashing eyes and a voice that filled the courtroom, Hogan told the jury that what it had heard against Doheny amounted to “as wholesale and as vicious a vilification as ever polluted the atmosphere of a court of justice.” He asked the jury, “Do you think that a man who has left his home at the age of sixteen and followed the trails of the pioneer West, who dug in mother earth for the minerals hidden therein, who with pick and shovel sunk wells that he might bring out the gold and liquid that today mean safety for worlds, would, even if he himself could, stoop so low as to bribe an official of his government, the friend of his youth and his former days, would, if he could, stoop so low as to bribe a Cabinet officer of the United States of America in order that he might swindle and cheat the land that had given him plenty?”

  For more than five hours Hogan besieged the jury with his rhetoric, once becoming so overwrought with emotion that he had to pause and dry his eyes. He brought in the horrors of World War I and young Ned Doheny’s valiant service in it. Doheny, Sr. had not only given America its riches from underground but had also “offered that young man’s life upon the altar of patriotism. He went on the turbulent and submarine-infested oceans in his country’s service—the only son, the only child. And you are asked to believe that when Edward L. Doheny, near the end of his life, corruptly intended to bribe Albert B. Fall, a Secretary in the Cabinet of Warren G. Harding, he deliberately used as an instrument therefor his son, the pride of his youth, the hope of his maturity, the solace of his old age!” He invoked the memory of the dead President, calling Harding “as able and loving and as fine-hearted a President as we have ever had, or will have,” and saying that
“From his sacred tomb in Marion, Ohio, I stand his splendid figure before twelve of his fellow men.… He stands here today as the best silent witness in this case.” Before he was finished, Hogan had compared his client’s situation to the Crucifixion in Jerusalem, and Edward Doheny to Jesus Christ himself.

  After seven hours of deliberation, the jury had not reached an agreement and the jurors were locked up for the night. At ten-fifteen the following morning, they came in with their verdict: not guilty. Immediately, a wild demonstration broke out in the courtroom and chairs, tables, and desks were overturned. Lawyers, friends, and well-wishers rushed up to shake the defendants’ hands. Old man Doheny wept with joy. His daughter-in-law also wept, as did Fall, Mrs. Fall, and the Falls’ daughter, who had not yet got her trip to Mexico. In her hotel room, where she received the news, Ma D. burst into tears as well, and cried out, “My prayers have been answered!” The Doheny family returned in triumph to Los Angeles, where a welcoming throng of some four hundred people had gathered on the station platform to meet their train. Doheny was given a huge testimonial dinner by the city to celebrate his acquittal, and the principal speakers at the gala were the mayors of both Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Doheny’s victorious lawyer.

  Of course there were some observers who saw through the smoke screen of celebration and congratulation. Rollin Kirby, the topical cartoonist for the New York World, produced a cartoon which depicted a row of four prison cells, variously labeled “Rich Man,” “Poor Man,” “Beggarman,” and “Thief.” Three of the cells overflowed with prisoners. A fourth cell stood conspicuously empty.

  Chapter 11

  THE DECLINE OF MR. FALL

  In the long legal struggle to untangle the knotted web of Teapot Dome, and to get back the United States Government’s property, there would be more trials, more hearings, more testimony, more decisions. On February 8, 1927, the United States Supreme Court upheld the Los Angeles court’s decision against Doheny, ordering him to pay for all the oil he had extracted from Elk Hills and further declaring that he had no right to the $11 million which Doheny claimed the government owed him for the storage tanks his company had built at Pearl Harbor. The entire proceedings, the Court declared, had from the beginning been thoroughly stained with “fraud and corruption.” It was a scathing and unanimous opinion.

  Now it was Albert Fall’s turn to stand trial for accepting the bribe. He had taken the precaution of hiring Doheny’s lawyer, Mr. Hogan (Doheny had made Fall a gift of $5,000 to help him pay for his defense, and Doheny had also purchased Fall’s ranch from him for $168,250). Fall arrived at the District of Columbia Supreme Court building looking terrible. He still wore his wide-brimmed Western hat, but underneath it his face was gaunt and haggard. His color was bad, and he looked much older than his sixty-seven years. A heavy overcoat and baggy trousers hung on his emaciated frame, and he was in a wheelchair. A nurse and doctor were required to lift him, clutching a cane, from the wheelchair to a special leather easy chair that his doctor had ordered placed in the courtroom. The court proceedings had barely started when Fall slid from the leather chair and collapsed on the floor. He was helped out of the courtroom by the nurse, the doctor, his wife and daughter, and the senior Dohenys. It was discovered that he had suffered an internal hemorrhage.

  The next day, while his lawyers were in the process of obtaining a postponement of the trial due to Mr. Fall’s ill health, the doors to the courtroom suddenly opened and in wheeled Fall, looking even worse. With help, he staggered to the leather chair, where a nurse covered him with a blue lap robe. He insisted on going through with the trial because, as Hogan explained to the court, Fall wanted “vindication before he passes into the Great Beyond.” Implicit in the scene was the possibility that Hogan had staged the whole thing in order to obtain the jury’s sympathy for his sick and aging client.

  One of the many lurid details surrounding the whole Fall-Doheny oil scandal had been the murder, just a few months before Fall’s trial, of young Ned Doheny by his male secretary, Robert Plunkett. In the days that followed, it was whispered that it had been because Doheny had resisted a homosexual overture of Plunkett’s, but such rumors can never be corroborated because Plunkett, immediately after killing Doheny, shot and killed himself. In Fall’s trial, Hogan attempted to make emotional capital out of this tragedy when, in questioning the elder Doheny, he mentioned his dead son’s name. The old man broke down and wept on the stand, and the court had to be recessed until Mr. Doheny had sufficiently gathered himself together to go on. Hogan also, it seemed to many observers, made excessive use of Mr. Fall’s failing health in his remarks to the jury, and other theatrical elements were supplied by the fact that throughout his testimony Fall was solicitously hovered over by his wife, his daughter, both Mr. and Mrs. Doheny, his doctor, and his nurse. Hogan also brought up a number of Fall’s friends and neighbors from New Mexico to be character witnesses (significantly, no one in Washington could be persuaded to come forward and speak for Fall). On the day of Hogan’s summation, Mrs. Fall even brought Fall’s tiny granddaughter to the courtroom. The little girl seemed also to be able to cry on cue.

  In his summation to the jury, the prosecuting attorney reminded the panel that the state of Mr. Fall’s health was immaterial to the question at hand. “It is all simple,” he said. “There are four things of a controlling nature for you to remember. One is that Doheny wanted the lease of the Elk Hills. The second is, Fall wanted money. The third is, Doheny got the lease, and the fourth is, Fall got the money.” As for drainage of the oil lands, he said, “The only drainage in this case was from Doheny’s to Fall’s pocket.”

  In his summation for the defense, Mr. Hogan seemed not quite able to repeat his past performance for Doheny. Although he relied again on the twin themes of pathos and patriotism (“Patriotism,” the prosecution had told the jury, “is the last refuge of the scoundrel”), and talked emotionally of Doheny and Fall as two old pioneering and prospecting pals, he chose one unfortunate simile when he said, “National security runs like a thread of gold” through the Elk Hills and Pearl Harbor deals. In his charge to the jury, the judge said, “Counsel has urged you to send this man back to the sunshine of New Mexico. Neither you nor I have anything to do with sunshine. You are here to decide this case on the evidence and nothing else.”

  The jury was out for eleven hours without a verdict, before retiring for the night. This length of time was regarded as a heartening sign by the Falls and Dohenys and their lawyers. (Doheny had an important stake in this case: if Fall was found guilty of accepting the bribe, he would have to stand trial again for giving it, and might yet be sent to jail.) But when the jury came out at eleven the next morning, its verdict was: guilty. There was widespread weeping and sobbing. The Falls wept, and Doheny wept and then swore at the judge, saying something about “this damned court.” One of Fall’s many lawyers immediately fell to the floor unconscious, and was given a heart stimulant by Fall’s doctor. Frank Hogan lost his composure as completely as he had lost his first criminal case. He banged his fists on the table and shouted incoherencies at the judge. The judge sentenced Fall to a year in prison and a fine of $100,000. On July 18, 1931, after more than a year of unsuccessful legal maneuvers to keep him out, Fall was driven by police ambulance to the penitentiary at Santa Fe, where he became convict Number 6991 as well as the first Cabinet member in American history to be convicted of a felony, and to serve a prison sentence. In November of that year, he became eligible for parole. This was denied on the grounds that parole did not apply to a man who had committed “so grave an offense against the government and civilization.”

  Now, of course, it was necessary for Ed Doheny to stand trial again, again for bribery, his fourth and final court battle. Once again, Hogan was defending him, and was back in his old tear-jerking form. Reading from previous testimony of Doheny’s dead son (“a voice from the tomb”), he managed to imitate the young man’s speech. Hearing him, Mrs. Doheny collapsed in tears, sobbing, “It’s Ne
d … it’s Ned!” Mr. Doheny wept along with her. The testimony contained almost nothing that was new, and reiterated everything that had been said before, but Doheny did add one new touch to his explanation of the $100,000 loan to Fall. Once, Doheny said, in the year 1886, he had fallen down a mine shaft and broken both legs. His old friend Fall had loaned him some lawbooks so that he could study law while he was recuperating. That was one reason why, thirty-five years later, he had helped Fall out with $100,000.

  The trial lasted barely ten days, and Frank Hogan once more drew widespread weeping with his summation (“Ned Doheny says from the grave,” etc.). The jury was out for barely an hour before returning with its verdict: not guilty.

  The very same court, in the very same building, presided over by the very same justice, Mr. William Hitz, had declared Edward Doheny innocent of giving the very same bribe that Albert Fall had been found guilty of taking. It seemed, to some, all very queer—but not to those who had long regarded the ways of American jurisprudence with a cynical and jaundiced eye.

  Ill health or no, Albert Fall survived for twelve more years after his release from prison, and died in March, 1943, at the ripe old age of eighty-three. Edward L. Doheny had died nine years earlier, on September 8, 1935, at the age of seventy-nine, having been almost completely bedridden at “Chester Place” for three years. The last years of his life had involved a welter of stockholders’ suits as a result of his Elk Hills and Pearl Harbor activities and, in all, he had been required to pay back the United States Government $47,137,696.28 for oil he had taken out of Elk Hills, and more millions had to be paid in income taxes, interest, and penalties on the money had had made from Elk Hills. But he was still a very rich man. At Ma D.’s suggestion, he had divided up his fortune among his wife and relatives, giving his family $75 million in trusts and keeping $10 million for himself.