Day In, Burns Out

Harry Ford Sinclair, No. 10,520 in the Washington, D. C., jail, heard some bad news last week. Already incarcerated for contempt of the Senate, he heard that the U. S. Supreme Court had sustained his six-month sentence for contempt of court. He carried on with his duties in the prison pharmacy, certain in the knowledge that he would spend Christmas and New Year's behind bars.

There was little satisfaction for Convict Sinclair in the knowledge that, by simultaneous decision of the Supreme Court, he was to have a friend in the jail with him--Manhattan's Henry Mason Day, the friend who had tried to help him in his first oil scandal trial and received a four-month sentence as a result.

In November 1927, Sinclair went on trial in Washington for conspiracy to defraud the U. S. in the leasing of the Teapot Dome naval oil reserve. Secretly he hired a squad of 14 detectives from the agency of William J. Burns to "investigate" his jurors. Friend Day actually arranged for their employment and received their daily reports. Midway through the trial the government, through undercover men of its own, discovered Sinclair's method of shadowing justice. A mistrial was immediately declared.

Then followed an eleven-week hearing before the trial justice. Sinclair's defense was that he had had the jurors followed to protect them against federal influences; that in no case had the operatives made direct contact with the jurors. The trial justice sentenced Sinclair to six months in jail, Day to four months, William J. Burns to 15 days and son William Sherman Burns, to pay a $1,000 fine.

The Supreme Court upheld all sentences, except that of the elder Burns. As Chief of the Department of Justice's Bureau of Investigation, (1921-24) Detective Burns was once a Hero. During the court investigation he was pictured as a "villain." The Supreme decision clears him of "villiany" leaves unsullied his record as a world-famed sleuth.