CHICAGO -- Christopher G. Janus hoped to find the end of the rainbow in a foot locker of fossilized bones.
Instead, the genial Chicago stockbroker finds himself in federal court charged with defrauding friends and banks of $640,000.
The cultivated, engaging Janus told them he was on the trail of Peking Man and there was money in it. He spun a story of a worldwide search for bones 500,000 years old, priceless evidence of mankind's earliest beginnings.
The bones of Peking Man were lost when they were entrusted in 1941 to U.S. Marines hurrying to get out of China. It is known they were placed in a Marine foot locker. They have never been found.
Janus, now 70, told his friends -- and he has lots of them -- that the People's Republic of China had recruited him to find these relics, which he said were sacred to the Chinese.
He told of acquiring leads and clues through an enigmatic telephone communication to go to China, a mysterious Chinese who steered his path through Hong Kong and Macao, and a Marine's distraught widow whom he met by night at the top of the Empire State Building.
It was a great story and he told it in a book called 'The Search For Peking Man' which he wrote in collaboration with free-lancer William Brashler.
He even suggested the possibility of a mysterious figure reminiscent of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu lurking in the shadows, constantly thwarting his quest for the bones.
Janus speculated of 'one person, a person of immense intelligence and cunning ... who could manipulate people and control situations ... a mastermind.'
Still, he told his friends and associates, he would find Peking Man. In the meantime, he said, his adventure would make a great movie. With their help, he said, that movie would be made.
He invited his friends to help finance it as 'partnership investors.' The film would gross $10 to $25 million, he is reported to have estimated, and even if it did not the investment would provide a cushy tax shelter for anyone in on the deal.
None other than the distinguised Otto Preminger would direct the film, the government says Janus averred. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. was already producing a documentary television report of his search.
Indeed, a documentary film was produced. The 45-minute show, featuring Christopher G. Janus in action, is in existence but hardly on display.
What Janus was actually doing, the government and Chicago banks have charged, was raking in money under very false pretenses.
Briefly, the charges said:
--Janus had told lendors he and his wife were worth $1.6 million. Technically, they were. But that money was in trusts established by Mrs. Janus' parents in the Harris Trust and Savings Bank.
They were called 'spendthrift trusts,' meaning the principal could not be touched.
--He had said his existing debts were comparatively moderate and for the most part secured, while he and his wife actually owed more than $300,000.
--He went about Chicago signing his wife's name to various financial statements, according to her affidavit. When Beatrice Short Janus found out about it, her husband admitted he had been borrowing money over their joint names but said he would make it good through purchase of certain major coal deposits.
Janus represented himself as an 'investment banker' specializing in international business who, in his words, 'sold companies in Europe to others in South America ... traded machine tools to Turkey for figs and pistachio nuts, clothing to Greece for olive oil.'
This was news to the headquarters of Bache, Halsey, Stuart Shields Inc., with whom Janus was associated from 1957 to 1978.
Bache's records indicate Janus was a 'retail account executive,' or, as it is known in the trade, a customer's man. Such persons deal with the individual needs of individual persons on a retail basis.
He was a stockbroker working on commission, a Bache spokesman said, and one not often dealing with really big money.
Janus is, by most accounts, a quite likeable man married to a quite wealthy and socially prominent woman.
He attended Harvard and Oxford universities and was president of the Harvard Club of Chicago, in which he took great pride. He is a distinguished looking man of Greek origin who headed an organization called, among other names, the Greek Heritage Foundation.
As such, he organized and led tours to Greece and persuaded some of the upper crust of Chicago's North Shore to come along. They paid but no one complained. Janus was good company.
'He's a hell of a nice guy,' said a family friend, Timothy Lowry. 'I like him, I like his wife and I like his kids.
'He knew a lot about poetry and Greek history and conducted these trips to Greece. I went on one with my wife and we both enjoyed it. He's a likeable, charming, interesting, cultivated man.
'I can't imagine him deliberately trying to defraud. I just can't believe it. Perhaps he was overly optimistic. He loved optimism. Perhaps he confused hope with fact. A lot of people do that.'
Janus had a big house in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka and gave everybody, it seems, the impression of being the erudite, globe-spanning financial manipulator he said he was.
He offered this explanation of why the Chinese plucked him from Chicago's financial district to serve as their instrument in the search for Peking Man:
'They had decided I was rich enough, or had enough connections, or was intelligent enough or perhaps foolhardy enough.'
Leonard Gesas, Janus' former lawyer, indicated he agreed with the last analysis. 'It was like chasing ghosts,' he said of Janus' venture. 'Hardly worthy of an intelligent man.
'But he always liked to be in the limelight. That was one of his great motivations.'
This much is certain. There was a Peking Man. He was a five-foot, slope-shouldered, slope-headed creature who lived and hunted around Dragon Bone Hill about 30 miles south of Peking. He was probably a cannibal.
When archeolgists came upon his bones in the 1930s, they believed they had their hands on the missing link between man and the apes. In all, the fossils of about 40 persons were recovered from the Choukoutien digs.
They were carefully studied and analyzed at the Peking University Medical Center. Here the story becomes murky.
This is how Janus tells it:
After Pearl Harbor, the bones were no longer safe in China. The Marines who guarded the U.S. Embassy in Peking were clearing out before the Japanese could get to them. Peking Man was entrusted to the Marines and they failed.
The bones were put in a foot locker and the Marines were supposed to get them to the United States. In the hurly burly of their scramble out of China, the foot locker was lost. Or stolen.
More than 30 years later, Janus received a telephone call from a Chinese woman of his acquaintance named Mai Lai Wei. It was 1972 and Americans were being allowed into China for the first time in decades. She urged him to apply for a visa.
To all appearances, Janus knew little at that time of China or Peking Man. But he did apply and he got his visa, as Mai Lai Wei had told him he would.
In Hong Kong, a worldly and affable Chinese man who called himself Mr. Nine sidled up to him and made friends.
The same Mr. Nine showed up while Janus was playing the roulette tables in Macao. He told Janus which numbers to bet on. Janus followed directions, and won every time.
Janus proceeded to Peking, where he was urged to visit the museum at Choukoutien. There the director showed a compelling desire to tell him the full story and mystery of Peking Man and imply he should do something about it.
(A scholar who was with Janus on that trip is quoted by a colleague as remembering the Chinese were more mystified by Janus than intrigued. 'Who is this guy Janus?' he quoted them.)
Janus came out of China saying representatives of the government had commissioned him to find the sacred bones. As one of the first Americans to visit China in that era, reporters came to him and Janus talked.
He announced he would pay $50,000 for information leading to the Peking Man -- an offer later raised to $150,000. Back home in America, he got an answer.
A woman called him and said she was the widow of one of the Peking Marines. He had left a foot locker in their attic which, he said, was her heritage.
She wanted to meet Janus on the top of the Empire State Building.
Janus went there. A woman came. She showed him a photograph of a box full of bones, which Janus took. At that moment, a man appeared from the shadows and pointed a camera toward them. The woman fled.
Thereafter, there were more clues and he pursued them through Asia and elsewhere.
The records indicate he managed to get then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to help him and that the FBI was enlisted to track down the Peking Marines.
His travels were widely reported and he had a knack for getting his picture taken and published.
Co-author Brashler recalled Janus once told him, 'Making money is easy. Things like publicity and coverage and actually making a name for yourself, that's tough.'
The very reputable publishing firm of McMillan and Company published the Janus-Brashler book in 1975. The dustjacket blurb said it was 'soon to be a major motion picture.'
Janus took his Empire State picture of the box of bones to various experts. One of them was Dr. Glen Cole of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
'He came in with some pictures,' Cole said. 'There was a skull and some bones. I told him I didn't know. The skull could have been anything. You couldn't tell.
'The other times I saw him he was always with newspaper people so he could be photographed. I didn't particularly like the man. I tried to stay away from him.'
After the roof fell in, Janus pleaded innocent Feb. 9 to the federal charges.
He is free on bond, but he has had to give up his passport. So he cannot go searching in far places for Peking Man for the time being.
A man involved in the case speculated on what had happened to Christopher Janus:
'The thing to remember is nobody complained, nobody accused him, until the U.S. government came around and said, 'Look, you've been defrauded.'
'These people that he was supposed to have got money from -- they weren't afraid of losing their money. They knew they were going in on a gamble. The big thing was that they were looking for tax shelters.
'As for the banks, he had settled with them or made arrangemenets for settling. He sold his home and gave them $360,000 in principal and $100,000 in interest.
'Janus never made a dime out of this. He put in $50,000 of his own money and he lost it.
'Take this idea: Here is a man who had never made much of his life. Along comes this wonderful, romantic adventure.
'A motion picture can be made. He can be the center of it. He can go to the Harvard Club and someone will say, 'Hey, Chris, I saw you written up in the Wall Street Journal.' That's something. That may be it.'
Janus has abandoned his offices in Chicago's financial district. Telephone calls to him are handled by an answering service and he responds when he pleases.
He wrote his own conclusion to his own story:
'The fossils do indeed exist. I feel sure that they do. I'm certain that human passions -- whether patriotism or greed -- have protected the fossils from being destroyed or thrown away.
'One day I will meet Peking Man. His bones will stare at me with unseeing lifelessness.'
