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Elkins had backing for his story of Schrunk's bribe-taking: Elkins' bookkeeper told the McClellan committee that Cliff Bennett (who refused, without offering legal grounds, to answer questions) had come up $500 short in his accounts and had said, "Well, I gave it to Terry Schrunk." A hat-check girl in the 8212 Club recalled that Bennett, after talking to Schrunk on the night of the raid, asked her for a Manila envelope. Another club employee testified that he had seen Bennett count out "what I presumed was $500, and put it in a brown envelope."
Two Portland policemen standing outside the club during the raid said they had seen Bennett and Schrunk conferring. Then, they said, Bennett walked across the street and "put something down" behind a telephone pole. A few minutes later Schrunk went over to the same pole and "picked up a package." Still another witness, who had been hanging around the club seeking a job as bartender that night, said that what Schrunk picked up was a Manila envelope.
Top to Bottom. Pallid, tight-lipped Terry Schrunk, who was elected mayor of Portland in 1956 with the Teamsters' help, came to the McClellan committee's hearing room filled with indignation. "I am Astounded and amazed," he cried, "that a committee of the U.S. Senate is being used, without any knowledge on the part of you gentlemen certainly, for political purposes."
But under sharp questioning, Schrunk wilted perceptibly. He flatly denied having taken bribes from Clifford Bennett. But he did admit that his deputies had raided the 8212 Club, seen liquor being illegally served after hours, spotted gambling equipment all over the place—and that he had gone away without taking further action.
This week the McClellan committee planned to hear Jim Elkins' tape recordings and to take testimony from District Attorney William Langley and Teamsters' Bosses Clyde Crosby and Frank Brewster. Sure to be questioned soon is Teamsters' International President Dave Beck, who abruptly returned this week from Europe, after Labor Secretary James Mitchell had canceled Beck's nomination as U.S. delegate to an International Labor Organization meeting in West Germany.
In its nationwide probe of labor racketeering, the committee is scheduled to look into the situations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis and perhaps a dozen other cities. And if the carefully prepared Portland hearings are any standard, U.S. labor racketeering is in for a thorough, top-to-bottom airing.