Shady characters are often involved in shady deals which get them into the press. And many a libel suit is brought against newspapers by shady characters hopeful of windfalls. So some big newspapers, like the New York Herald Tribune, have libel reporters. Virtually a private detective, a libel reporter has to be a good sleuth because his job is to penetrate the respectable disguises of shady characters and prove that they have not been maligned.
The Herald Tribune's, libel reporter is tense, grizzled, fun-loving Jay Racusin. Inquisitive Newsman Racusin, now 47, has been with the Herald Tribune since 1918. As a cub he was the first (and only) newspaperman to interview J. P. Morgan after World War I. Reporter Racusin (known as "Rack") gets plenty of other assignments that call for a passionate curiosity about the lives of his fellow men, a plain-clothes man's eye for significant details. Six weeks ago the Herald Tribune's lanky City Editor Lessing Engelking called Rack and gave him a special assignment. By last week it had turned into a first-class detective story, with complications that set the U. S. on its ear.
Nazi Agent. The job assigned Reporter Racusin was to investigate Gerhardt Alois Westrick, suave German lawyer who once represented many U. S. firms in Germany and who went to the U. S. last April in a new role (officially commercial counselor to the German Embassy), to preach Nazi trade propaganda to his U. S. business friends (TIME, July 3).
Rack went to the Waldorf-Astoria where Dr. Westrick had a three-room suite. There he discovered that Dr. Westrick rarely used it, kept it simply as an office in charge of a handsome young German woman, Baroness Irmingard von Wagenheim. So Rack tried to learn where most of Dr. Westrick's phone calls came from, found that they were coming from a telephone in Scarsdale, N. Y. Up went Rack to suburban Scarsdale and did some more undercover work.
He took down license numbers of cars that called at the house where Dr. Westrick lived with his wife and children, looked up their owners, bit by bit pieced together Dr. Westrick's movements—and incidentally a lot of miscellaneous information about Dr. Westrick's guests. One day last week the Herald Tribune broke Rack's story. According to Sleuth Racusin, since May Dr. Westrick had:
¶Taken pains to conceal his identity from his neighbors in Scarsdale, and on some occasions had used the name of Webster.
¶Entertained for such friends and business associates as Captain Torkild Rieber, chairman of Texas Corp.
¶Temporarily borrowed a car from Texas Corp., and applied for a driver's license, giving a Texas Corp. engineer as his employer, and denying that he had any physical disability although he had "lost one of his legs in the World War."
¶Been visited by a succession of unexplained men, including officials of Underwood Elliott Fisher Co., an employe of an ironworks in Buffalo, a young German who works for Eastman Kodak Co.