Word: pecora
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Showman. The real showman of the Morgan investigation, however, was not a circus pressagent. nor a Senator but the kinky-haired, olive-skinned, jut-jawed lawyer from Manhattan named Ferdinand ("Pick") Pecora. Because Senator Fletcher, who at 74 looks like a wealthy Yankee visitor to his own Florida, is not another "Tom"' Walsh with the mental capacity to prosecute his own investigations, Lawyer Pecora was hired last January as the committee's counsel at $255 per month. He had spent weeks ransacking the records of the House of Morgan for material for this trial of a lifetime...
Ferdinand Pecora was born in Nicosia, Sicily 51 years ago. His grandfather trooped with Garibaldi. His father, a cobbler, took him to the U. S. when he was 5. He attended public school, started to study for the Episcopal ministry, turned aside to the law. In 1912 he campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt. In 1916 he voted for Wilson. Two years later Tammany gave him a job as deputy assistant district attorney. Until 1930 when he retired, his brains really ran that office where he was the principal courtroom prosecutor. He put more than a hundred "bucket shops" out of business...
...Pecora left the District Attorney's office to return to private practice with only $525 in the world. Married, father of one son, he lives on Riverside Drive, likes to play pinocle, does his best work late at night, takes regular sun-lamp treatments. As a prosecutor, he has a remarkable memory for oral evidence. Yet he can be blandly forgetful when out to trip a witness. Persistent, he will ask a witness the same question in 20 different forms until he gets an answer. Because he dogged Mr. Morgan about his income taxes until that witness...
...Roland for an Untermyer, or a Walsh or a Davis, Inquisitor Pecora did a much better job of establishing substantial information about private banking on which to base legislation. With time to search and prepare, he never dropped a question until he got his answer. Yet it was not Banker Morgan who supplied him with most of his facts but Partner George Whitney, tall, handsome, slick-haired brother of President Richard Whitney of the New York Stock Exchange. Mr. Whitney (known on Wall Street as "Icicle") gave the committee the impression that he knew more about the House of Morgan...
...When Counsel Pecora called Junior Partner Thomas Stillwell Lament to the stand and began to quiz him on personal year-end stock sales, presumably for tax deduction purposes, Lawyer Davis came to his feet in protest, forced the question of personal stock transactions into executive session...