Christopher Janus; Colorful Chicagoan's Biggest Stunt, Detective Mission to Find Peking Man, Led to Fraud Plea (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
FEBRUARY 28, 2009
CHRISTOPHER JANUS 1911-2009
Colorful Chicagoan's Biggest Stunt, Detective Mission to Find Peking
Man, Led to Fraud Plea
By STEPHEN MILLER
(WSJ)
A glad-handing force of nature to some and a press-savvy con artist to
others, Christopher Janus cut a legendary swath through Chicago's art
and business communities.
Mr. Janus, who died Feb. 19 at age 97, brought to booing (but paying)
crowds a 10,000-lb. armored Mercedes-Benz that was alleged to be
"Hitler's limousine." In a case that the papers wouldn't let die, he
"inherited" a string of Egyptian dancing girls, along with a giant
plantation outside Alexandria.
In his perhaps most famous exploit, he undertook a globe-trotting
detective mission to discover the whereabouts of Peking Man, fossils of
primitive man discovered in China in the 1920s and 1930s. The fossils
disappeared in mysterious circumstances during World War II, and Mr.
Janus seemed hot on the trail. That was shortly before he was convicted
of fraud for the loans he took out to finance the venture. The fossils
remain at large.
Along the way, Mr. Janus studied at Harvard and Oxford and traveled to
Rome to visit George Santayana, who taught him to appreciate fine silver
place settings and told him "the beginning of wisdom is to be interested
by everything and awed by nothing."
A big-picture guy in culture as in business, he led delegations of
noteworthy Chicagoans to Athens for democracy conferences, to Persepolis
in 1971 for the 2,500th anniversary of Iran's monarchy and to China
shortly after it reopened to the West. Yet many detected something not
quite straight about the Bache & Co. broker.
"We never knew what kind of stockbroker he was -- maybe he never
actually was one. That would figure, too," says Universal Press
Syndicate columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, a longtime friend. "I have
myself always mistrusted people who don't have a touch of larceny."
The son of an immigrant Greek chemist who perished in the 1918 influenza
epidemic, Mr. Janus was raised by a wealthy West Virginia family but
retained a lifelong interest in Greek culture. After college, he worked
briefly as a reporter in Chicago and then at the New York Times, where
he reported on the centennial of the Pony Express and the excavations at
Plato's Academy in Athens -- where the chief archaeologist happened to
be a relative, his rich uncle Pan Aristophron. He spent World War II
working with Balkan refugees at the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration, and was posted for a time to Egypt.
After the war, Mr. Janus became an import-exporter in Chicago. One of
his first deals was a shipment of about $40,000 worth of ball bearings
bound for Sweden. While the Swedes were short of cash, they offered Mr.
Janus an armored car Hitler had given to Field Marshall Carl Gustav
Mannerheim of Finland.
Back in Chicago, Mr. Janus orchestrated exhibitions of the car, which
drew crowds in Times Square and across the nation who hissed and booed
at what they took to be Hitler's actual limo. The car was used in Air
Force recruiting drives, and money raised was used for war orphans and
the like, after first covering his expenses. "I felt the more good it
did, the worse Hitler would have liked it," he told the Associated Press
in 1949.
Meanwhile, the car, license plate HITLER XX, became Mr. Janus's family
car, taking up a whole two-car garage and driving his wife crazy because
of the abuse the family took for it, says Christopher Janus Jr. It also
was expensive to operate, both in repairs and gas mileage, just
three-and-a-half miles per gallon. The on-board siren was useful in
traffic, though. Mr. Janus eventually sold the car to a collector.
In 1950, Mr. Janus inherited the dancing girls and a cotton plantation
from his uncle Aristophron. Photographed in exotic gowns, they were a
sensation for a few months, when an exasperated Egyptian embassy
explained that slavery had been outlawed in Egypt. Meanwhile, Mr. Janus
kept the story alive, contemplating importing them as a vaudeville act
while complaining that his wife wouldn't allow it.
He later made the papers for scouting Brazilian gold and manganese
mines, and survived a plane crash in the jungle. He revealed to the
Washington Post in 1951 that zealous customs officials confiscated a
shrunken head he'd purchased.
Later, he helped found Chicago's Poetry Day, and his novel about growing
up in a racist south, "Miss 4th of July, Goodbye," was made into a
television movie. He was also publisher of Greek Heritage, a glossy
magazine he imagined as a counterpart to American Heritage but which
flopped.
In 1972, while leading a tour group to China, he was approached by the
curator at the Peking Man Museum, who asked him to look into the fate of
a cache of hominid fossils dug up at Zhoukoudian in the 1920s and 1930s.
The bones, now classified as Homo erectus, had disappeared while being
evacuated to safety in the U.S. in 1941, ahead of Japanese invaders,
when a contingent of U.S. soldiers was captured by the enemy.
Back stateside, he offered a reward and garnered massive publicity for
the search, which culminated in a meeting atop the Empire State Building
with a vaguely foreign-accented woman who said she'd found the bones in
her attic, in the footlocker of her deceased former POW husband. She
subsequently disappeared. In 1975, Mr. Janus published a book about his
search and raised money for a documentary.
"He'd say, 'I see Harrison Ford as me,'" recalls William Brashler, the
book's co-author and author of "The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and
Motor Kings." "He immediately hit me up to invest in the movie. It was
hard not to like him, but he had one arm around your shoulder and the
other in your wallet."
After the movie project came to naught, Mr. Janus pleaded guilty to two
counts of fraud in connection to bank loans for the project. "He never
should have been in business," sighs his son, Christopher, who says his
mother's name was forged on documents that nearly bankrupted the family.
Mr. Janus continued his deal-making ways, unsuccessfully pursuing a
documentary about Troy archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. He continued
to write, including most recently a series of memoirs for the online
Hellenic Communications Service. In 1989, he declined the Chicago
Library's Carl Sandburg Award for fiction for a collection of short
stories when it emerged that he had appointed the judges.
"He was the greatest of the rascals, and the rascal lives the longest,"
says Christopher Jr.
Email rememb...@wsj.com