Word: oregonian
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...Sports Page. Taking the offensive, District Attorney Langley called a grand jury investigation into Portland rackets. The first to be served with subpoenas were Reporters Turner and Lambert and the Oregonian's Editor Herbert Lundy. Before they could be called, Oregon Governor Elmo Smith summarily took the investigation out of Langley's hands and put Attorney General Robert Thornton and the state police in charge...
...tapes a Teamster intimate scoffed: "The Oregonian or the Journal won't take the Teamsters on ... All the Oregonian's got to do is [fool] around with the Teamsters and the first thing you know, them guys will be up there wanting 10 or 15 cents an hour, and the Oregonian can't afford it." Day after day, naming names and quoting conversations, the Turner-Lambert series produced fresh sensations. The paper charged that two officials in Portland, Multnomah County District Attorney William M. Langley and Sheriff Terry Schrunk, were mixed up with the racketeers who were...
Mayor Peterson confirmed the charge. The Oregon Teamsters' representative, Clyde Crosby-whom the Oregonian revealed as an ex-convict-admitted that he had tried to get the mayor to fire Police Chief Jim Purcell, but only, he said, because the chief was in cahoots with Rack eteer Elkins. Cried District Attorney Langley, a Democrat elected in 1954 with strong Teamsters' support: "Reports that I have plotted with the Teamsters are a pack of lies." He charged that the tapes were doctored and spurious, accused Racketeer Elkins of trying to blackmail him with them...
Langley, the D.A., was in no mood to wait for the state investigation. At that point the Oregon Journal-which had been left behind on the story except to play up denials and countercharges-leaped to the foreground. Langley sent official raiders, accompanied by Journal reporters (but no Oregonian staffers) to the home of an ex-policeman named Raymond F. Clark, who had made the tapes for Racketeer Elkins. They found some 30 more tapes, made at Elkins' bidding. The Journal splashed the story of the raid on its front page; the Oregonian buried it in the sports section...
That was too much for Governor Smith. In the middle of the night he gave Attorney General Thornton sweeping powers to oust Langley immediately from control of the grand jury; the attorney general took it over next morning. At week's end, as the Oregonian and the Journal strained to follow the crooked trail uncovered by Reporters Turner and Lambert, they could agree at least that something was rotten in Portland...