Free Seven Silent Men by Noel; Behn Page A

inside the vault except Brewmeister’s face staring up through a hole in the bottom … how Brewmeister was swept from sight.
    Attention shifted to the true reason for the conference call: determining the FBI’s legal right to enter the investigation. The robbery of any bank that was federally chartered, as most were, afforded the Bureau automatic jurisdiction to investigate the felony. So did the theft of any bank funds guaranteed under FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. So did, when all else failed, suspicion that the perpetrators had fled across state lines to avoid arrest. Ed Grafton’s liberal use of this last federal statute, both for bank theft and other violations, had prompted vehement media and civic condemnation from Prairie Port and other large Midwestern cities in which Wilkie Jarrel held sway. Jarrel was Grafton’s white whale. Grafton was Jarrel’s bête noire .
    Wilkie Jarrel headed the all-powerful Grange Association, a multibillion-dollar agricultural combine, as well as its subsidiary, the Prairie Farmer Association, both of which Grafton never stopped investigating. Grafton was forever amassing evidence to prove Jarrel had misappropriated funds for the singular purpose of corrupting elected officials. A. R. Roland had to deal with many of these officials on Capitol Hill in Washington and, more often than not, had to soothe their Jarrel-ordered wrath against Grafton and his ongoing investigation of the Grange Association’s top man.
    Roland had been the Bureau higher-up who instructed Grafton never to invoke catchall statutes, such as crossing-state-lines, without receiving his prior approval. Now, learning via the conference call the difficulties resident agents were having in determining whether federal laws governing bank theft and FDIC guarantees had been violated, the Grafton-Jarrel feud loomed ever larger in the consciousness of the assistant to the Director of the FBI.
    Thirty-one-year-old Donald Bracken explained to Roland, over the speaker box, that Mormon State National Bank did not officially open “until the day after tomorrow,” Tuesday, August 24. This in itself, Bracken estimated, created somewhat shaky grounds for citing violation of FDIC statutes in claiming jurisdiction to investigate the robbery of Mormon State. A strong case might be made proving an investor’s deposit could not be insured until such a deposit had been made and that it was physically impossible to deposit funds before a bank was open … that, therefore, FDIC statutes were both invalid and nonapplicable in the Mormon State situation. As if this were not enough, Bracken went on to say his talks with bank officials revealed the FDIC papers had not been signed or made out by the bank’s president.
    Portly, forty-seven-year-old Madden “Happy” de Camp provided Roland, and most other men in the room, with the dourest information of all … that a strong argument could be, and might be, made against the federal bank statute itself having been violated. Happy related that his cursory institutional check showed that Mormon State National Bank had obtained a state charter under which to operate rather than a federal charter. And federal bank robbery laws applied only to federally chartered enterprises. What was more, the bank premises, as well as the entire River Rise project, stood on a strip of unincorporated state park land that was exempt from federal taxation … and possibly federal bank statutes legislation.
    Happy de Camp saved the worst news for last. He had found, he told his listeners, that Mormon State National Bank was owned by Old City State Bank of Prairie Port and that Old City was owned by the Platte River Bank of North Platte, Nebraska, which in turn was a subsidiary of Rapaho Investments Incorporated. Rapaho Investments, Happy pointed out for those who didn’t know, had been purchased three months before by the Grange Association,