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¶ Posing as a veterinarian, he once collected $1,500 for doping a race horse, on other occasions bragged that while organizing carnival workers, he tipped over a bleacher and killed some people. Again, objecting to the size of his bill, he beat up the manager of a posh Chicago apartment hotel. Still again, he threatened to "put into concrete blocks" a Miami lawyer who failed to fix a manslaughter charge against his mistress (she got 15 years).
Woman Scorned. Most fascinating of all to the McClellan committee was testimony linking Barney Baker to New York's presidentially hopeful Democratic Governor Averell Harriman. Baker's former wife Mollie told how he became chairman of a 1952 Harriman-for-President labor committee, worked for Harriman against Estes Kefauver in the District of Columbia preferential primary. Testified Mollie Baker: Barney talked every Sunday morning to Harriman on the telephone, was invited to the Sun Valley resort run by the Harriman-controlled Union Pacific Railroad, proudly possessed a Harriman photograph signed, "To my dearest friend Barney." How dear was that friendship? Insisted Mollie in a statement later supported by Baker's man-slaughtering ex-mistress: "It was very close, very close, very close."
Next day thrice-married Barney Baker indignantly denied that he had seen or talked to Harriman more than three times, that each time he was just one of a crowd. Said he: This was "the vengeance of a woman scorned. I am not close, close, close." He pleaded with the committee not to let the testimony of his scorned women destroy "a man I honor and love." Equally indignant, Governor Harriman called a press conference to deny that he had known Baker well enough even to remember him.
At hearing's close John McClellan decided he knew who had done the lying. Said he to Baker: "You have committed perjury over and over." Added Counsel Kennedy: "The people you associate with are the scum of the United States, and you are a part of them." Indeed, by general agreement, the best thing that could be said about Jimmy Hoffa's friend Baker was that he had not crawled out from under a rock. It would have taken a boulder.