Foshay Enterprises managed public utilities in twelve states, two Canadian provinces, Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras and Alaska. It featured additional executive offices in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Branch offices were located in Boston, Denver, Des Moines, Saint Paul, Hartford, Los Angeles, San Jose, San Diego, Portland, Seattle, Wichita, Houston and Dallas. The company’s slogan read, "All your money ... All the time ... On Time."
With an estimated wealth of twenty two million dollars, Foshay announced his plan to construct a 447-foot tower (607-feet to the top of the flag pole) modeled after the Washington monument. The thirty-two-floor Foshay Tower cost almost four million dollars to build and was the first skyscraper west of Chicago. Foshay’s personal office and living quarters were on the 27th and 28th floors and the building sported seven hundred and fifty bay windows and 163,000 square feet. Outside, on the roof of the building, sat ten-foot letters that read: FOSHAY.

Within a year, Wilbur Foshay was indicted back in Minnesota on seventeen counts and tried for devising a "scheme" to "defraud and to obtain money and property by means of false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises." At the time, it was the state’s most expensive criminal prosecution. Each day, huge crowds gathered in the streets just to get a glimpse of the defendants arriving at the court. It took a lot of "influence" to land an actual seat in the courtroom itself.
The first trial seemed to have been sunk by a hung jury. Then it was discovered that one of the jurors - the lone holdout - had worked for Foshay for ten days. The juror was prosecuted for perjury and convicted, but killed herself and her entire family before serving the six-month sentence. They were all found dead in a car, the victims of carbon monoxide poisoning.
The second trial was conducted in 1932 and lasted nine weeks. It featured eleven volumes of condensed testimony and almost fifteen hundred exhibits. Foshay and associate Henry H. Henley took the witness stand for several days throughout the course of the trial and entertained with insights into their various and crafty methods of bookkeeping. The two admitted, for example, that the companies' "surplus" and "earnings" figures (routinely highlighted in advertising materials) were actually the result of "write-ups" or "appreciations." The duo tried to label their bogus number productions as mere exercises in "creating value," but Henley also admitted company records would "certainly" indicate a deficit if the "write-ups" were eliminated.
On March 22, 1932, Foshay and Henley were convicted on four of the original seventeen counts, fined one thousand dollars and sentenced to fifteen years in Leavenworth prison. But the Houdini's of Bookkeeping were in slight disagreement with the verdict. So, they immediately filed an appeal and their lawyers produced briefs meticulously identifying what they perceived to be about five hundred “errors” in the conduct of the trial. The briefs (if you will) placed particular emphasis on the fact that there was much public interest in the case, so much that a fair trial may not have been possible, at least not in Minnesota. Foshay's lawyers also wondered how well the jurors (most of which were farmers, "unlearned in book") digested the fourteen hundred four hundred and eighty-nine exhibits. At the same time - with some irony - the briefs complained that certain exhibits were excluded by the court. Henley made a "bitter complaint" that his fourteen days on the witness stand were just not enough. The lawyers also complained that they did not get to ask enough questions.
Time magazine reported Foshay’s loyal friends back in Salida “didn’t forget him.” They signed petitions and “fought for his release.” And Franklin Roosevelt did in fact commute the sentence to a mere five-year term, on January 24, 1937. As a result, Foshay became immediately eligible for parole. The sentence of Foshay's trial testimony partner, Henley, was also commuted on the same day. Attorney General Homer Cummings told reporters hundred of persons had asked that Foshay’s sentence be reduced.
On June 27, 1947, fifteen years after the original sentence, and ten years after President Roosevelt's commutation, Harry S Truman granted Foshay a full, complete and unconditional pardon. Foshay died in relative obscurity in a Minneapolis nursing home in 1957.
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