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Occupation: Deals. There were immediate and indignant denials from everyone named in Teitelbaum's saga of shakedown. "Ridiculous," said Joseph D. Nunan Jr., former commissioner of Internal Revenue. "Utterly ridiculous," said George J. Schoeneman, who recently resigned from the same post. Jug-eared Frank Nathan, the key man in the story, was summoned before the committee. He admitted that his chief occupation has been "just trying to find different deals" in Washington. He is "sixty or seventy thousand dollars or maybe more" in debt, he said, but he stops at the Waldorf in New York, at the Mayflower in Washington and plays the horses. He once made a $57,000 commission on sale of a war-assets aluminum plant. But he screamed with rage at what Mr. Teitelbaum and Mrs. Menkin said. "That man is such a vicious liar, and she too, that it ain't nowhere in the world a thing like that," he said. "I couldn't dream in a million years why this man is doing this . . . They're both such good friends of my family." Theron Caudle was his good friend, too, he said, but "I never asked Mr. Caudle for no help about no tax case at no time."
Caudle admitted that he heard four months ago that he had been used in a shakedown threat against Teitelbaum. Because he did not know whether the story was true, he did nothing about it, Caudle said. He admitted that he was a good friend of Nathan and had visited Nathan's family in Florida. "Many people have spoken highly of this family to me," he said righteously. Teitelbaum's Mrs. Menkin had testified that, in Nathan's Florida home, she saw Caudle throw an arm around Nathan and say: "Frank, you know there is nothing I wouldn't do for you."
Hide the Phone. General Services Administrator Jess Larson asked for and got an opportunity to come before the subcommittee to deny the Teitelbaum story. He finished with the Chicagoan quickly, then turned his fire on Nathan. The Larson name was on that oil lease, Larson said, along with Caudle's and 85 others. But he sold his interest when he found that Nathan was involved.
Larson had tried desperately to fend off Nathan's blatant name-selling and influence-peddling and was "chagrined" to hear that Nathan had made money on war-assets deals. "He's the kind of a fellow that when he comes in your office you have to put the telephone under the desk," said Larson. "If you don't, he will pick it up and call somebody and say he is calling from your office."
"Howaya Podner?" After the Teitelbaum act ended, there was a rousing performance by a haughty ex-convict named Larry Knohl. Millionaire Knohl has offices in California, Kansas, New York and Washington, dabbles in oil, real estate, restaurants and race horses. Icily, Knohl let the committee know that he was too big a man to keep small details in his head. Did he report as much as $100,000 a year income from gambling?