The "memo to the press" indicated that the Government was about to buy large quantities of lard for export. The memo had been put on a table with a pile of official releases, in the Department of Agriculture's Washington newsroom, one day last fall. But there was something phony about it: it had none of the usual headings or signatures. When newsmen questioned its authorship, the Department began investigating and finally traced it to a commodity trader named Ralph W. Moore, onetime lobbyist and crony of Oklahoma's Senator Elmer Thomas, who also likes to speculate in commodities.
Trader Moore frankly...