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TI: After your graduated from law school, what happened then? So this is, again, about the same time, 1955.

CS: 1955, I graduated June 8th. I was offered a position as a law clerk for one of the Supreme Court Justices, Matthew W. Hill, and that was the beginning of my legal career. I was with Judge Hill for... from September 1955 until about May of 1956. And then I was retained as a deputy prosecuting attorney for King County, where I was for four years, until I went into private practice for a year, and then I went to Washington, D.C.

TI: Well, as a, a deputy prosecutor, you had -- we talked earlier -- a particular case. The Dave Beck, sort of, prosecution. Can you talk a little bit about that case?

CS: Right.

TI: And what, the significance of that?

CS: David D. Beck, Mr. Beck, was the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He had appeared before the old Senate Rackets Committee, when Bob Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy was legal counsel, that was the old McClellan Committee, and had taken the Fifth Amendment 157 times. Locally, the public was incensed over the fact that this person had taken the Fifth Amendment before the Senate Committee for 157 times, and "he must be a crook, therefore something should be done about it." The King County Superior Court judges decided to call a grand jury -- which we rarely use in the state system in King County -- with a direction to investigate possible crimes by Mr. Beck. I was a deputy prosecutor, the elected prosecutor, and one other deputy as chief criminal deputy and I were assigned to run the grand jury, and to come up with something. And quite by accident, we came up with the sudden disbursement of the title of Teamster-owned Cadillacs from the Teamsters union to named individuals. From that, our investigation led to the fact that these were Cadillacs owned by the union, assigned to Mr. Beck's son, Dave Beck, Jr., who would sell them to his friends, and they would write a check to cover the purchase, payable to, quote, "Mr. Dave Beck." The checks were deposited in a special account that David D. Beck, Sr. had, and it was one of those sort of throwaway accounts, where you deposit money and you never withdraw. So that when confronted with the fact that these checks had been written to him and deposited in his account for the automobiles that had suddenly moved from title to the Teamsters union to the named individuals, his response was he had paid the money back. He could not prove that he had paid the money back, so that was our case. [Laughs] So we had a grand larceny case against him and a grand larceny case against his son. So I was not the chief trial lawyer; I did the research and the brief-writing and the legal arguments. But somehow or the other, when the conviction occurred, the media gave me credit for getting the conviction. The same happened with Dave Beck, Jr., who was tried two weeks (earlier and convicted), and the media gave me credit for getting the conviction.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.