Selling out Tino's bankrupt company, auctioneer A.C. Willner asks for bids on pumps, valves, office furniture and what few other assets remain.

Successive waves of panic then swept through Wall Street, in roughly this order: The banks, learning that Haupt had been misusing their loans, stopped payment on all Haupt's checks. The Produce Exchange finally took some firm action, closing down trading and settling all oil contracts at a compromise price. Haupt and Williston & Beane-which was in the hole for a comparatively paltry $600,000-were both suspended from trading on the stock exchange, and were deluged with frantic phone calls from their customers whose stock and money on deposit were now frozen. In Haupt's case, there was a good chance that innocent customers would be wiped out, a development that would deal a devastating blow to investors' confidence in Wall Street. Over the weekend, stock exchange officials drafted a liquidation plan, and eventually made up the shortage in Haupt's accounts by raising the sum of $9.5 million among other Wall Street firms. A phalanx of anxious creditors descended on the Bayonne tank farm, seeking vegetable oil. Two Haupt attorneys went over, only to be turned back at the gatehouse by guards posted by the courtappointed bankruptcy trustee in charge of Allied affairs. Bunge Corp. announced that 161 million pounds of its soybean oil supposedly held by Amex Warehousing to secure an Allied debt, was "missing." A group of London merchant banks hired a surveying team to find 21 million pounds of fish oil held for them by Harbor Tank Storage, but the surveyors couldn't even find the tanks. The bankruptcy examiner, soon aware that he was over his depth, notified the FBI. The legal tangle created by the collapse of Tino's empire has been monumental. Hundreds of lawyers and accountants have examined thousands of documents and asked thousands of questions. Tino himself has been on the stand a dozen times in bankruptcy hearings, sometimes taking the Fifth Amendment, sometimes acting as though the whole affair were caused by a misunderstanding. In all that time, none of the essential questions has been answered. The mysteries of (1) where the money went, (2) why Tino behaved the way he did and (3) how he got away with it for such a long time are as mysterious today as they were in November. Many of the victims, moreover, act as though they would like to keep it that way. Take the missing money, too huge a sum for Tino to have squandered it all on operating expenses or in the futures market. (Tino may have even made money in his futures spree, since he was putting up hardly any cash and, according to testimony by one of his aides, was getting cash kickbacks on commissions from brokers.) Tino finally did admit to having $500,000 in a Swiss bank account after telling the court he was penniless, and was convicted of contempt as a result. Authorities also learned that a woman friend of Tino visited her safedeposit box after the crack-up. But that is all they have learned. Accountants are now looking for clues in a mountain of Allied records in a Jersey City loft, but Allied's chaotic bookkeeping and Tino's propensity for distributing money in cash make it look hopeless.

The "business as usual" attitude explains the curious reluctance of any of the victims to explain how all this could have happened. Since the whole swindle depended on the tolerance of the victims, exploiting their desire for bigger commissions and more business on any terms, any probe that strikes too deep may upset things and even force some changes in procedure. Thus, the Chicago Board of Trade, which waited until midDecember before it bothered to suspend Tino as a "member in good standing," appointed a committee of its own members to look into the fiasco. The New York Produce Exchange conducted a similar investigation. Spokesmen for both exchanges have found no need to make any significant change in the rules governing the market. They blame the whole mess on the Government's failure to provide warning, but insist that there is no need for more government involvement in futures trading.

They may get a chance to explain this logic before congressional committees later this year. The Agriculture Department intends to ask Congress for power to set high margins on commodity trading and injunction powers to stop anyone from dominating the market as Tino did.

Today Tino seriously seems to believe that his biggest days are still ahead of him. He strides cockily from courtroom to courtroom, acting as if his only worry were his publicity image. He sucks in his paunch at the sight of a TV camera and keeps close track of reporters following him on his rounds. He still talks eagerly of his vast plans in the commodities business. "If I had anything to do with it," he tells anyone who'll listen, "you wouldn't have a surplus of anything. I'd sell it. I'd take the surplus of oil in this country and make particular products. I'd make ghee - that's spelled g-h-e-e - for the Pakistanis."