Lafayette's three owners
Sometimes when you look closely at a company, a surprise pops up. Such was the case with Lafayette. The change in corporate names in 1939-40 and the separate catalogs in 1942 as well as the sudden and permanent disappearance of Lafayette from Atlanta and Chicago in 1951 triggered the question of why. Was there a rift among partners?
Searching on the names of the three owners as stated in the Federal Trade Commission action against Wholesale Radio in 1935 turned up nothing until... A search on the correctly-spelled names of Samuel J. Novick and Max H. Krantzberg came up with Krantzberg as the Executive Vice President of Lafayette with stock holdings just a bit less than President and Chairman Abraham Pletman in a Securities and Exchange Commission report in 1961. Each owned roughly a third of the outstanding shares... The communist connection
Novick was not actually the author of "A Plan for America at Peace" but his company sponsored and paid for the publication. He had immigrated to the US from Czarist Russia in 1914 at age 17. One of his early jobs in the US was radio telegrapher. He became an excellent business man. He was also an avowed communist who allegedly paid the bills for radio commentators from the American Communist Party on the Blue radio network. He supported a variety of organizations later deemed to be underground communist groups according to FBI reports. Some labor unions at the time were also controlled by communists allegedly including the one that had honored him. Of course, in free speech America, this was allowed.
Spies and Lies
However, it was after the FBI uncovered a Russian spy that Samuel Novick came to their attention.
Arthur Adams was a high-ranking undercover GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) operative under the code named "Achilles" and was assigned along with others in the NKVD (forerunner of the Russian KGB) to obtain US corporate and military technology secrets.
In 1937 Novick had written a letter to the US Immigration and Naturalization Service vouching that Adams was a highly skilled radio engineer who had worked for him for 10 years at Wholesale Radio as its Canadian representative and was needed in the US. It was a lie. more
Extra Credit: Explore old Lafayette catalogues here, and later ones here. Old issues of Monitoring Times may be obtained here.
