Joker's Heritage

On or about May 1, Harold Giles Hoffman, 58, banker, former governor and one of the most popular men in New Jersey, sent his eldest daughter a sealed envelope marked: "To be opened only in the event of my death. To be read, considered and destroyed." Last week Hoffman's scandalous secret became known. "It is a sad heritage I leave," he had written.

The Funeral. Hoffman was a wisecracking, openhanded, glad-handing politician who became governor at 39 (in 1935). He lost the next two times he tried (1940 and 1946), and clung to an appointive job as $13,500-a-year director of New Jersey's employment security offices and funds ($600 million). He loved elaborate practical jokes, such as rigging up a phone to sprinkle water on an unsuspecting caller. He was generous toward needy voters and toward himself; he lived well and rode around in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. He seemed indignant last March when he was suspended, with little explanation, for "misconduct in office." He huffed, "Everybody knows that all I've got out of a lifetime of public service is a mortgage and $150 in the bank." When he died on June 4, some 10,000 mourners showed up for his funeral at South Amboy, the New Jersey shore town where he was born, grew up, went into banking (South Amboy Trust Co.) and politics (as mayor and Congressman).

Two U.S. Senators and six governors, past and present, were honorary pallbearers. Flowers crammed the largest hall in town, the high-school auditorium, where his body lay in state.

In the state capitol, with flags at half-staff, Democrats and Republicans alike arose to defend Hoffman's memory and attack the man who suspended him: Governor Robert B. Meyner. Mrs. Ada Leonard, 33, Hoffman's oldest daughter, demanded that his name be cleared "unconditionally." Later, in her home, she opened the sealed envelope, read the contents, and cried for a long time. She destroyed the letter and then, on her lawyer's advice, told Governor Meyner what it said.

The Letter. Last week Meyner, a Democrat, now certain of his case against ex-Governor Hoffman, a Republican, released the notes which Mrs. Leonard had made of her father's last letter. It was an extraordinary document: "There is one thing, hon, which I have done that cannot be condoned, although I always had the highest intentions . . .

"I first became involved in monetary difficulties when, as a very young man and a very poor man, I ran for Congress ... I 'temporarily' covered by drawing from inactive accounts at the South Amboy Trust Company. What with the high cost of Washington living, the maintenance of two homes, and what I can only label as the expensive naivete of a newcomer Congressman, things, instead of bettering, only got worse . . .

"I suffered further disappointments at the hands of friends who promised to pay election expenses but, it subsequently developed, only at the price of state favors which I considered it impossible to grant. Things got deeper and deeper until, in 1938, I found myself involved to the extent of $300,000 ... I was obliged to go to a certain state official, unnamed but dead, explain my whole situation and plead for his help ... He blackmailed me into giving him something like $150,000.

"For these many years, as you may well imagine, I have lived in constant fear . . . Now I must leave it, dear, to you to do what you know must be done . . . Mother also is a very honorable woman and I know she will want to contribute everything she possibly can above her actual subsistence needs, to see this thing through for me."

The Spreading Circle. The treasurer of the South Amboy Trust Co., which Hoffman helped to found and direct and which thrived on state funds, claimed that certificates of a $300,000 state deposit were forged. Apparently Hoffman had embezzled $300,000 in state funds to cover his takings, but that was not all. Governor Meyner suspended four state officials, released 44 pages of detailed charges indicating that the scandal spread far into Jersey politics. Sample charges: P: Hoffman deposited $3,427,000 of state money without interest in the Trenton Trust Co., run by his friend and. fellow Republican, Mrs. Mary Gindhart Roebling (whose late husband's family built the Brooklyn Bridge). This enabled her bank to earn about $300,000 in the last five years. The Trenton Trust Co., in turn deposited $150,000 last year in a non-interest account in Hoffman's South Amboy Bank.

P: He gave a friendly state employee $1,000 a year in overtime for no work. P: He leased or bought for the state eight buildings at "exorbitant" prices, arranging to pay one builder $931,000 for property valued at less than $300,000. P: He gave 50 or so favored companies low unemployment-insurance rates that saved them "hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Investigation of the charges seemed likely to involve dozens of politicians and endanger G.O.P. ticket chances in November. Hoffman's daughter Ada called on her father's friends (she said that he had at least 300,000 of them) for contributions to make up the missing funds, but the response was not overwhelming. "He could never say no," she said sorrowfully. "That was his trouble."

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