In Illinois last week sign painters were at work expunging the words ELECT ORVILLE E. HODGE, YOUR REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE FOR STATE AUDITOR from a state Republican Party campaign billboard on a main road outside Springfield. In Springfield and Chicago, as the state budgetary commission began a thorough investigation of the state auditor's office, two grand juries, G-men, Internal Revenue men and representatives of half a dozen other county, state and federal agencies were interrogating witnesses, sifting evidence, and painstakingly piecing together a mosaic of one of the biggest financial scandals in Illinois history.
For free-spending Orville Enoch Hodge, 51, state auditor since 1952 and a comer in Illinois Republican politics, erasure had begun a fortnight before. It began when the Chicago Daily News broke the story of high-echelon finagling in the auditor's office (TIME, July 23). Reported the News, and other papers that gleefully waded in: 1) more than $500,000 in warrants (state checks) was missing from the auditor's office, and 2) more than $200,000 in suspicious state checks—some of them made out to men who denied ever having seen them—had been cashed on Hodge's signature by Chicago's Southmoor Bank. For days Hodge held firm, resisted Republican Governor William Stratton's efforts to get him to resign, and kept his mouth shut. Then Southmoor Bank's President Edward H. Hintz, who had suddenly quit his job, pointed his finger directly at his longtime crony, Hodge, for the benefit of the Chicago Tribune,
Easy Money. The deal, said Banker Hintz, worked thus: every once in a while Hodge would call up to say that Edward Epping, his office manager, was coming over with a bunch of state checks. "I would say, 'Is everything all right?' and Orv would say, 'Don't worry about a thing.'" Epping would then appear, cash the checks and take away some cash, leaving the rest in a brown envelope marked "Hodge." Ed Hintz, describing himself as "stupid but honest," said he never took a dime for his services, had gone along out of "friendship" and because he thought Hodge's dodge was "normal" among Illinois politicians.
With this development, Orville Hodge caved. Quitting as state auditor, candidate for reelection, and delegate to the G.O.P. national convention, he reportedly told Governor Stratton: "I just don't know why I did it. I didn't need the money." Epping, his office manager, was fired. All week, as news reports put the total haul at more than $1,000,000, Hodge, Epping and Banker Hintz were questioned by county and federal attorneys. The result was a jurisdictional tangle between Springfield and the federals over who would get the first indictments.