With no clue to the new depository to which the contents of this vault had been transferred, the search for it was as prolonged as it was bootless. Every key on the ring turned over to Mrs. Long by the Lady of the Lake Sanitarium after her husband’s demise was examined. Only one of them proved to have any possible relation to safety-deposit boxes. On August 11, 1936, Earle Christenberry made a tracing or rubbing of this key, and sent it to the Yale and Towne Company at Stamford, Connecticut.
Four days later W. W. Herrgen of that firm replied: “The key which you sent to me ... is for one of our No. 3401-C safety deposit locks, and a search of our files shows that this key could be for use in a lock at the Whitney National Bank of New Orleans.”
The Whitney, largest and most independent bank in New Orleans at the time, was for that very reason the last one Huey Long would have been likely to select. In any case, its officials reported that the key in question was not for any of the boxes in their vault. Of the money, aggregating what may well have been several million dollars—enough to finance an entire presidential campaign on the lavish scale to which Huey Long was accustomed—no trace has ever been found.
Even the sale of My First Days in the White House was pitifully small compared to what it would have been had its author lived to issue it as a campaign document.
Up to this day no one has been able to hazard a guess as to what was done with this accumulation of currency. Long had always levied a political tribute of two per cent on the salaries of all state employees. No effort was made to conceal this. Indeed, the Kingfish boasted that his support came from the people in small, regular individual contributions, and not in huge individual gifts from the swollen corporations, the money barons, and something called “the interests.”
From 1919 to 1946 Elmer L. Irey was chief of the Treasury Department’s Intelligence and Enforcement Division. Among other and perhaps lesser achievements, he had directed the investigation that finally landed Al Capone behind bars for income-tax evasion. In a 1948 book by Irey, “as told to William J. Slocum,” one chapter deals with the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to secure a thorough investigation of the income-tax returns filed (or not filed) by Huey Long, his top aides, and even some of their subordinates.
“We decided that the technique that had put Al Capone and his gang in jail would be reasonably applicable to Huey Long and his gang,” the Irey book avers in telling of the investigation that Treasury Secretary Morgenthau ordered within three days after he took office.
Evidence was gathered against the smaller fry first, and with former Governor Dan Moody of Texas as counsel for the Treasury Department, one of these lesser lights was convicted and sentenced to Atlanta in April 1935.
By autumn more evidence had been gathered against Long himself. According to Irey’s memoir, it “convinced Moody. ‘I will go before the grand jury when it meets next month and ask for an indictment against Long,’ Moody told us.... That conversation was held on September 7.”
This was the very day on which, in the course of a round of golf, Huey Long confided to Seymour Weiss not only that enough cash and other campaign material was in hand to finance his presidential race, but that all this accumulation had been removed from the safety-deposit box he—Long—had rented under his own name in the Riggs National Bank in Washington.