U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [571]
datemerchant devoted herself to his comfort. When
the first effort at extradition failed, the old gentleman declared in the courtroom, as he struggled out from the embraces of his four lawyers: Greece is a small but great country. The idyl was interrupted when the Roosevelt Ad-ministration began to put the heat on the Greek foreign office. Government lawyers in Chicago were accumu-lating truckloads of evidence and chalking up more and more drastic indictments.
Final y after many a postponement (he had hired
physicians as wel as lawyers, they cried to high heaven that it would kil him to leave the genial climate of the Attic plain),
he was ordered to leave Greece as an undesirable
alien to the great indignation of Balkan society and of Mme. Kouryoumdjouglou. He hired the Maiotis a smal and grubby Greek freighter and panicked the foreignnews services by
slipping off for an unknown destination.
-530-It was rumored that the new Odysseus was bound for Aden, for the islands of the South Seas, that he'd been invited to Persia. After a few days he turned up rather seasick in the Bosporus on his way, it was said, to Rumania where Madame Kouryoumdjouglou had advised him to put himself under the protection of her friend la Lupescu.
At the request of the American ambassador the
Turks were delighted to drag him off the Greek
freighter and place him in a not at al comfortable jail. Again money had been mysteriously wafted from Eng-land, the healing balm began to flow, lawyers were hired, interpreters expostulated, doctors made diag-noses; but Angora was boss and Insul was shipped off to Smyrna to be turned
over to the assistant federal districtattorney who had come al that way to arrest him. The Turks wouldn't even let Mme. Kouryoumd-
jouglou, on her way back from making arrangements in Bucharest, go ashore to speak to him. In a scuffle with the officials on the steamboat the poor lady was pushed overboard
and with difficulty fished out of the Bosporus.
Once he was cornered the old man let himself
tamely be taken home on the Exilona, started writing his memoirs, made himself agreeable to his fel ow pas-sengers, was taken off at Sandy Hook and rushed to Chicago to be arraigned.
In Chicago the government spiteful y kept him a
couple of nights in jail; men he'd never known, so the newspapers said, stepped forward to go on his two
hundredandfiftythousanddollar bail. He was moved to a hospital that he himself had endowed. Solidarity. The leading businessmen in Chicago were photographed visiting him there. Henry Ford paid a cal .
-531-The trial was very beautiful. The prosecution got bogged in finance technicalities. The judge was not un-friendly. The Insul s stole the show. They were folks, they smiled at reporters, they
posed for photographers, they went down to the court-room by bus. Investors might have been ruined but so, they al owed it to be known, were the Insul s; the captain had gone down with the ship.
Old Samuel Insul rambled amiably on the stand,
told his lifestory: from officeboy to powermagnate, his struggle to make good, his love for his home and the kiddies. He didn't deny he'd made mistakes; who
hadn't, but they were honest errors. Samuel Insul
wept. Brother Martin wept. The lawyers wept.
With voices choked with emotion headliners of Chicago business told from the witnessstand how much Insul had done for business in Chicago. There wasn't a dry eye in the jury.
Final y driven to the wal by the prosecutingattor-ney Samuel Insul blurted out that yes, he had made an error of some ten mil ion dol ars in accounting but that it had been an honest error.
Verdict: Not Guilty.
Smiling through their tears the happy Insul