Record
Case file
1939-10-30
National Archives Catalog, Diaries of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
Bureau of Internal Revenue Intelligence Unit memorandum for the Secretary, 30 October 1939, naming "the William Bioff case" (Morgenthau Diaries, Book 220)
A Treasury memorandum stating that Joseph M. Schenck was "the dominating figure" in three tax cases, "his own individual case, the William Bioff case and the so-called Twentieth Century-Fox reorganization case," referred to the Justice Department in mid-1939 for criminal prosecution.
- Date
- 1939-10-30
- Kind
- case-file
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- NAID
- 28276256
- Rights
- A record of the United States Treasury Department, held in the Diaries of Henry Morgenthau, Jr. at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. Public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. The National Archives catalog marks access and use "Unrestricted."
Book 220 of the Morgenthau Diaries (October 30–31, 1939), read through the National Archives’ extracted text. On diary page 91 is a memorandum dated October 30, 1939 from the Office of the Chief, Intelligence Unit, Bureau of Internal Revenue, headed “MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY.”
It opens: “Joseph M. Schenck is the dominating figure in each of three cases involving alleged evasion of income taxes, namely, his own individual case, the William Bioff case and the so-called Twentieth Century-Fox reorganization case. These cases were referred to the Department of Justice in June and July, 1939, with recommendations for criminal prosecution.” Most of the memorandum concerns the reorganization case and the Treasury’s complaints about how the Justice Department conducted its conferences with the taxpayers. The research record for this item adds that, on diary page 93, the memorandum says the Attorney General later sent an attorney named Carr to Los Angeles to present the William Bioff case to the grand jury; the stored extract used for this page breaks off before that passage.
This page keeps to what the memorandum says about the Bioff case. Its statements about other taxpayers concern a separate tax matter and are allegations by the Treasury, not findings. It is a tax record and says nothing about the motion-picture extortion.