US Indicts Jack Benny, 12/14/38

US Indicts Jack Benny, 12/14/38

In 1928, with Hoover still in office, the Wall Street banks led by J.P. Morgan influenced the government to initiate a massive currency change with the aim of transferring as much of the U.S. gold reserves to the Bank of England and other allied central banks, including Schacht's Reichsbank, as possible. The dollar went into free fall, and huge amounts of gold were exported.
It is the winter of 1932-33, the darkest days of the Great Depression. In Germany, the London and New York axis, the banking houses of the City and Wall Street, are about to put Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the banker Hjalmar Schacht's protégé, into power and to set a certain course for a new world war. In Italy, the fascist Mussolini has been in power since 1921, placed in Rome by these same oligarchic interests.

In the United States, with unemployment rising and bread lines growing, with factories shut and banks collapsing at a record pace, the bankers' own candidate, Herbert Hoover, was sent to crushing defeat in the November presidential elections by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the former governor of New York.

So, to stabilize a number of problems, in 1933 FDR called back all gold and issued National Currency notes as paper money. So now what was Nazi Germany to do to fund their war plans?

In 1937 and ‘38 my father, Charles Williams, worked as a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, the third largest newspaper in New York. He was an investigative reporter on the Lindbergh so-called "kidnapping" case in New Jersey before he purchased his own newspaper. While employed by the Brooklyn Eagle, he was sent to Germany in September 1939 to interview and investigate individuals involved in selling gold bullion (taken and melted down from teeth and wedding rings of those who went into labor camps and/or somehow died as Hitler was in need of hard currency (as gold had been removed since 1933 from the export market). His notes state that there was an extensive politically based network set up to exchange high value materials acquired from citizens and their homes as well as melted down gold bullion, and that agents were indeed well situated in the United States to act as exchangers to approach those that had large amounts of hard currency, such as those in politics (as the wife of the New York Supreme Court Justice [Elma N. Lauer and her husband, Hon. Edgar J. Lauer] in this case), and, evidently, the Hollywood wealthy (see the FBI files on their investigations with numerous famous stars in the attached Freedom of Information file).

What came down was only a tip of an iceberg, as it was deemed against the interests of our national, and hopefully enthusiastic, spirit in light of the Second World War about to started some few months later.

Jack Benny (born Benjamin Kubelsky), George Burns (born Nathan Birnbaum) and many others agreed to do national patriotic work beyond the selling of war bonds. As the records show, that after guilty pleas to felonies and being sentenced to more than a year in prison, the sentences were, by a sealed understanding, completely suspended. One will note that the LA Times did an afterthought as to the liaison fellow (Paul Chaperau [born Sharpiro]) who went between Rosa Weber (the self proclaimed pro-Nazi housemaid) and George Burns/Gracie Allen and Jack Benny and his wife, Mary Livingston (born Sadye Marks). One might further note that another fence of smuggled diamonds from Germany is taken from the FBI file from a pictured newspaper clipping of the charged Pearl Weinberg, the amount of which was estimated in that one incident to be just under $300,000 in 1939 dollars.

Interestingly, from the FBI file notes it appears that the one who promoted the continued transactions was Jack Benny’s wife, Mary Livingston. From the attached file it can be seen that they uncovered many large sales of smuggled items, many in the tens of thousands of dollars to named (and some photographed) famous stars.
FDR thereafter immediately pardoned Chaperau (Shapiro) in exchange for his telling of other individuals, to wit: the wealthy purchasers who bought the bullion, gems, designer clothing and jewelry, as well as those that transported such items and transferred the cash back to Hitler for his war effort. However, after the pardon none of the particulars were ever heard about again, ...including what became of the maid who broke the story, Rosa Weber, who our government rewarded with $6,700 paid directly from George Burn's fine.
Many famous Hollywood stars who purchased such merchandise at a fraction of the value jumped forward in the immediate aftermath to help the war effort, many for purely patriotic reasons and not as part of prosecutorial proffers or plea bargains as with the principal convicts.