In November 1976, a few days after Jimmy Carter was elected president, I received a large envelope in the mail from a cousin who shared my interest in family history. Inside was a microfilm copy of the front page of the New York Times, dated Aug. 13, 1946, which featured a story about a New York family accused by the Army Criminal Investigation Division of operating an international, multimillion-dollar black-market ring with branches in Paris, Berlin and Shanghai. The headline read: “Army CID Breaks World-Wide Ring For Illicit Sales.’’

Sharing the spotlight on the front page were stories about a British crackdown on Jewish immigration to Palestine, a dispute between the U.S. and Soviet Union at a postwar peace conference in Paris, a strike by bakery workers near Philadelphia, and ties between the Ku Klux Klan and a group of Nazi sympathizers in the U.S. Next to the black-market story my cousin had written: “Do you recognize this family?’’

Indeed, I did, because the accused family was my own. The alleged masterminds of this global conspiracy were my father, Al Warner; his three brothers (Oscar, Bob and Lew); and their father, Dave. My three uncles were all military veterans who had served during World War II and had recently been discharged from active duty. According to the lengthy United Press story carried in the Times, Oscar was running an import-export business in Paris, Lew was working as a meteorologist in Berlin, and Bob was an administrator for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Shanghai.

My father, who had been discharged from the Army just before Pearl Harbor because of a bad back, was a traveling jewelry salesman who lived with his father in a Manhattan apartment. He was on a business trip in Texas when the story broke and first learned of the accusations when he read about them in a Houston newspaper.

I can only imagine how shocked by father was to see his respectable Jewish family portrayed like a bunch of Mafia gangsters in newspapers from New York to California. (A group picture of the five Warners, splashed across the front page of New York’s Daily Mirror tabloid, looked like it was taken at “The Godfather’’ wedding.) After reading the story in the Times, you could easily picture my grandfather as the sage patriarch of a vast criminal empire.

Relying largely on letters and cables intercepted by military censors and seized by investigators, the CID outlined its case at a press conference in Berlin. According to the wire-service story, agents said the black-market operation involved “almost every form of goods salable under post-war conditions at high prices — diamonds, cigarettes, rugs, silks, penicillin, currency, perfumes, watches and clothing.’’ The CID said the operation was so profitable that, in a “Dear All’’ letter to his brothers and father, Bob claimed he was making $10,000 a week in China.

The story also said Lew hoped to rent the 20-room, lakeside mansion of former Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich for 1,800 marks a month, “the price, the letter specified, of a carton and a half of cigarettes.’’ The Army made it sound like an open-and-shut case. Agents said Lew and Oscar had given written confessions, and that after Lew was placed under house arrest, “he violated his parole, hastened to a cable office and flashed to the rest of the family: `The jig is up.’’’ During Oscar’s arrest, the story said, he begged the CID agents to “shoot him because he was terrified as to his fate.’’

The CID said the operation was coordinated through “round robin’’ letters circulated among the five Warners. According to the Times story, business was “conducted on such an efficient basis that an almost daily account, detailing operations, was distributed among members of the family.’’ Army investigators cited several of the neatly typewritten letters, including one in which Bob warned that a Navy officer had opened his mail and “now they think I am a big crook here, which certainly is a bad name to have.’’

Lew also worried that the CID was “cracking down’’ on black-market sales. “They have men everywhere, and one can hardly move without being trailed by them,’’ he wrote on June 29, 1946. “Being suspected by the CID is not worthwhile. They are after the big-time operators. That is why I wish to stay small.’’ On the same day, the CID said, Bob wrote a letter chastising Oscar for sending him a cable about their black-market sales through official Navy channels. “Never send me a cable through the Navy concerning business, even if it means making a million-dollar profit, because making a million dollars is not worth spending six months in jail,’’ he said.

The following month, according to the CID, Bob bragged about all the black-market goods he was peddling. “My room has become something like a market place,’’ he wrote. “I have been selling nylons like mad.’’ Another letter said my father, Al, was on a “100,000-mile buying trip around the United States gathering shipments for members of the family overseas.’’ He was reportedly carrying $35,000 in cash and merchandise. My grandfather told reporters he was a legitimate businessman who was currently importing rugs from Belgium. “I don’t know anything about all this,’’ he said. “I’m so provoked I’m speechless.’’

I was 24 years old when I first read the story and working as a newspaper reporter in Greenville, South Carolina. I came from a tight-knit family and was close to my uncles, but until that Bicentennial year I had never heard a single word about this scandalous secret, which my cousin had heard about from his mother. At family gatherings, I later learned, it was always referred to as The Case. It was rarely discussed, and then only in whispered tones.

Naturally, as a young reporter, I was determined to investigate. But when I asked my father and uncles about The Case, they stonewalled me. Despite persistent questioning, all I could get from them was a blanket denial of the most serious charges and complaints that it was all the result of a misguided investigation and overblown press coverage. They admitted to selling items such as watches and nylons on the black market, but claimed they were small-time operators and that illegal sales of scarce goods were rampant in postwar Europe. Though they insisted none of them went to prison, they wouldn’t tell me what, if any, punishment they received.

Some older relatives recalled that my uncles Lew and Bob were court-martialed, but said they didn’t know the outcome of their military trials. I also heard rumors that Bob was held for a year on a Navy ship at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay and that my great aunt Edna, an eccentric card-carrying Communist, rushed to the War Department in Washington to demand justice for her nephews. I couldn’t verify either tale, so I filed them under urban legends.

Over the next few years I did some more research on The Case and continued to pester my dad and uncles for more information. I didn’t get far. The newspaper coverage petered out after a few days, I couldn’t find any official records, and my family remained mum. My uncles wouldn’t talk at all, my dad denied any involvement, and my grandfather wasn’t available, having died shortly before I heard about The Case. The only new gossip I gathered came from my mother, who mentioned that shortly after she met my dad in 1948 he told her that the investigation was prompted by a tip from “someone who was out to get the Warner family.’’

Several decades later, after my father had died, I persuaded my uncles to sit down for tape-recorded interviews. Though I learned a few more details, they didn’t change their contention that the affair was a gigantic screw-up by the Army CID, compounded by a headline-hungry press. “In my wildest dreams I could never imagine it would ever warrant the kind of publicity that it engendered,’’ Oscar told me in his taped interview.

I was skeptical. While I loved my father and uncles and wanted to believe them, my journalistic instincts told me there had to be more to the story. Surely, there was some evidence besides the family letters seized by investigators. Would the Army really hold a major press conference to announce the discovery of an international black-market ring without more solid proof? Still, there were puzzling questions that raised doubts about The Case. Why did the story fade away after just a few days? Why were only three of the Warners arrested –- my father and grandfather were questioned by authorities but never charged with any crime — even though the Army had accused them all of participating in the operation? And where was all the money they allegedly made?

The day after the story broke, the Times ran a follow-up, “Warner `Ring’ Case Remains A Puzzle,’’ which said the War Department in Washington had received no request for action against the brothers living overseas and that federal investigators in New York had no orders to “do anything about the two Warners in the city.’’ The story included denials of any wrongdoing by my father and grandfather. The next day, in an Associated Press dispatch from Berlin, Lew said the Army’s claim that the family’s black-market operation could have made $2 million in a year was a “deliberate exaggeration to make a sensational story.’’

The New York World-Telegram ran a story that focused on my grandfather’s reaction to the scandal. The paper described his two-room apartment as “sumptuous’’ — relatives told me it was a crowded, nondescript residence in an apartment-hotel on the Upper West Side — and referred to him as a “short, graying man in his early 60’s’’ though he was actually 59 at the time. Dave said he moved from Newark, New Jersey, to New York after his wife, Blanche, died in 1943. He also told the World-Telegram that he used to own a home-improvement company, but was now involved in a “small brokerage business’’ along with his rug-importing venture. In a separate interview, with the Daily Mirror, he admitted that Bob and Lew were involved in black-marketing overseas but that it was “peanuts stuff – the mistakes of young men who found themselves in corrupt, foreign cities.’’

The Newark Evening News pursued the local angle with a front-page story headlined, “Warners Are Recalled Here,’’ which informed readers that the four brothers had grown up in New Jersey’s largest city and that all except my father were college graduates. The principal of Weequahic High School, which Al, Bob and Lew had attended, called them all “fine young men.’’ (Weequahic’s most famous student, Philip Roth, graduated in 1950.) My grandfather, who squandered a fortune in the 1920s and lost his home in the Great Depression, was remembered as a “struggling workman trying to take care of his family.’’

My grandfather, whose original surname was Warshawsky, was born in Russia in 1887 and came to the U.S. 10 years later, along with his parents and eight siblings. They settled in Newark, where they lived with Dave’s paternal grandparents, two of his married uncles and their families. Dave’s mother had two more children in America (she gave birth 14 times, but only 11 survived past infancy), making it a very crowded household. A genealogist who did a family history estimated that, at one point, at least 20 people were living under one roof.

Dave worked in the family grocery business. After his father Selig died in 1912, he and his brothers took over the company. But they squabbled and eventually liquidated the business for a substantial windfall that made them all wealthy. In 1916 Dave married Blanche Rabbino, the beautiful, raven-haired daughter of an itinerant rabbi who, like Dave, was a Russian immigrant. (Blanche’s father, Bernhard, later became a lawyer and founded New York’s Domestic Relations Court.)

The swanky wedding took place at The Lexington hotel on East 116th Street in Upper Manhattan, then a predominantly Italian neighborhood that, following a new wave of immigration after World War II, became known as Spanish Harlem. A photo of the dinner reception shows about 100 guests, outfitted in their finest formal wear, staring into the camera after dining on a sumptuous meal of Kennebec salmon, Parisienne potatoes, royal squabs with water cresses, roast capon with green peas, beef tongue, chicken consommé with vermicelli, asparagus sauce remoulade and, for dessert, assorted tarts, pies, candies and fruits.

Dave and Blanche had four sons, who grew up in the mostly Jewish Weequahic section of Newark that served as the backdrop for many of Roth’s novels. Dave, who was an ardent baseball fan, had enough disposable income in the early 1920s to buy a share of the Newark Bears, a popular minor-league team later managed by Hall-of-Famers Walter Johnson and Tris Speaker. The two eldest Warner sons, Al and Oscar, remembered a pampered childhood with maids and servants. By the time the two youngest sons, Bob and Lew, came along, the family’s economic and social status had drastically changed.

Dave lost almost all of his money through a bad investment in an electric company, and he struggled to make a living the rest of his life. The family lived in a three-story home with a coal pit in the basement that provided heat and a pole-vault pit in the side yard, which became a favorite playground for kids in the neighborhood. To help pay the mortgage, the family took in two boarders. But it wasn’t enough and, during the Depression, the mortgage company foreclosed on the house and the family was forced to move a block away to a cramped home where they rented the second and third floors. When they couldn’t afford to pay their bills, Blanche would bake a cake and give it to the creditor in lieu of money.

The Warner boys, as they were known in family circles, were always hustling to make a buck. They worked at a wealthy uncle’s auto parts store and as waiters at a Pennsylvania summer camp owned by another relative. While waiting tables at a different summer camp in 1942, Bob and Lew moonlighted as labor organizers and persuaded the staff to threaten a strike if the tight-fisted camp owner didn’t start paying the required minimum wage of $1 per day. The owner relented, but refused to make the pay retroactive. When Bob went to college at Michigan, he got a job as a waiter at a fraternity house. One day he dropped a tray of glasses and broke them. The strict housemother fired him on the spot. Bob pleaded with her, saying he would have to drop out of school without the income from the job. Only after the cook begged her to give Bob a break did she let him stay.

The Warner brothers, all born within a 6½-year span, were exceptionally close and adored their mother, who kept the family going during tough times. (When she died of cancer during World War II, Oscar couldn’t attend the funeral because he was stationed aboard a ship in the Mediterranean.) Despite their limited means, all four sons went to college. Bob and Lew graduated from the University of Michigan and Oscar from New York University.

My dad attended the University of Illinois for one year before getting drafted into the Army. After getting discharged with a balky back in the fall of 1941 he briefly worked in a munitions factory where, I was told, he nearly beat a coworker to death for calling him a kike. (My dad was a lover, as well as a fighter. When he met my mother at a ski resort in Lake Placid, New York, he was staying in a cabin with his brother Oscar and their friend Jake Krumholz. Legend has it that they put notches on the wall to mark their sexual conquests.)

Lew joined the Army Air Forces in 1943 and spent most of the war in the U.S. before getting sent to Berlin as a meteorology officer. Bob’s Navy service included stops in Cuba, the Panama Canal, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Los Angeles, where Bob Hope and other celebrities turned out to welcome the newly commissioned USS Los Angeles. Every officer got to go out with a Hollywood star. “I had a date with Teresa Wright. She was beautiful and lovely,’’ Bob recalled in one of several books about the Warner family that he wrote and privately published. He said his relationship with the Oscar-winning actress who played Lou Gehrig’s wife in “The Pride of the Yankees’’ lasted “for one date.’’

Oscar was the only Warner boy who saw combat in the war. He served on a submarine chaser that took part in the invasions of North Africa and Italy, including the bloody battle at Anzio. All my uncles survived the war unscathed, and by August 1946 they were veterans just starting to establish civilian careers. Then The Case turned their lives upside down.

After the initial burst of coverage, the story quickly fizzled. The Times carried a few brief items on Oscar’s case, including a Sept. 12 report that it was settled with a “heavy fine.’’ The story said charges that Oscar had illegal dealings in foreign currencies were dropped by a French court after an agreement was reached with the Ministry of Finances. In November, the AP reported that Lew had pleaded innocent to charges of black-marketing and unlicensed trading at an Army court martial in Berlin.

On Dec. 1, the Newark Evening News (citing the AP) reported that Lew was convicted at his court martial and fined $2,500 for “trading with the enemy for profit, buying American currency with occupation marks and conspiring with members of his family to conduct unlicensed export-import business.’’ The story said Lew was given 10 months to pay the fine in four installments. If he failed to due so, the story said, he would be subject to a “six-month sentence at hard labor.’’ At this point, I didn’t know if Lew had paid the fine or gone to prison.

I searched dozens of newspaper archives, but couldn’t find any stories about what happened to my father, my grandfather or my uncle Bob. So the mystery endured. As far as I could tell, the perpetrators of what the Army alleged was a worldwide black-market ring never served a day in prison. Two of them got off with a fine and I couldn’t tell whether any of the others were even officially charged with a crime. I still didn’t know the whole story.

In 2003, a genealogist hired by my cousin Peggy found several documents that chronicled her father’s case, including a handwritten statement Oscar gave to authorities following his arrest in Paris in 1946, a six-page typewritten account he sent to a Navy official in 1947 and his resignation from the U.S. Naval Reserve “under honorable conditions’’ in 1948. In interviews and written statements Oscar claimed he was just trying to make a little money to pay off a debt. He said he bought 200 watches in Paris and gave them to Lew so his brother could sell them for a profit in Berlin. Oscar also said that while on terminal leave in the U.S. he had bought 400 gold rings for $3,500, which he brought to France and ended up selling at a loss.

Ultimately, he said, he was only guilty of minor currency and customs violations. The French court apparently concurred because all criminal charges were dropped when Oscar agreed to pay a fine equivalent to $840. (He was tried in a French court, rather than court-martialed, because he was no longer on active duty in the Navy and therefore not subject to a military trial.)

Unfortunately, the genealogist couldn’t find any official records pertaining to the other Warner cases. And that’s where things stood until January 2015, when I decided to resume my investigation. While transferring some old tape recordings to a digital format, I came across the interviews I had done with my uncles back in 2000. Listening to them talk about The Case renewed my interest and spurred me to seek some definitive answers. I was now semi-retired after a 38-year career in journalism and had time to dig. It was an intriguing cold case, and I was determined to solve it. I could no longer ask my uncles about the scandal since the last survivor, Bob, had died in 2012. So I started by requesting copies of everyone’s military records and filing a Freedom of Information request for any government documents on the criminal investigation.

While waiting for a response, I did some research on the black market in Europe following World War II. With a quick Google search I found a series of illuminating articles written by a CIA historian, Kevin Conley Ruffner, that focused on the black market in postwar Berlin. According to Ruffner, a shortage of basic goods, coupled with unreliable local currencies, led to widespread black-market activities throughout Europe after the war. It was especially rampant in Berlin, which had been virtually destroyed by Allied forces and was split into four occupied zones after Germany surrendered, divided among the U.S., France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union.

A large chunk of the black market was controlled by U.S. military men, who could buy sought-after items such as cigarettes, chocolate and liquor at the post exchange and then sell them for inflated prices to local citizens and newly arrived refugees from elsewhere in Europe. American G.I.’s also had enough money to buy watches and cameras, which were particularly prized by Soviet soldiers.

Ruffner quotes Frank Howley, then the commandant of Berlin’s American sector, on the Soviet passion for watches. “They always have been associated in the Muscovite mind with affluence and an established, even exalted, position in life,’’ Howley wrote. “Watches soon became a universal commodity because troops had no confidence in Russian currency. Also, a soldier could send a watch home and his wife could barter it for a cow.’’ Howley said some Russian soldiers “wore a half-dozen watches’’ and even a “Mickey Mouse watch was worth more than a jewel-studded trinket from Cartier.’’ Some Russians paid $1,000 for a single watch, and 10 packs of cigarettes that cost 50 cents at the military base could fetch $100 on the black market.

American soldiers and officers were forbidden from selling goods in the underground marketplace, but many ignored the ban. The practice was so pervasive that it led to several congressional investigations, which also looked into allegations that U.S. military personnel in Berlin were guilty of looting and sexual assaults.

Ruffner tells a couple of stories that highlight the extent and profitability of the black market in postwar Germany. He writes that in October 1945, while en route to the Berlin headquarters of the Secret Intelligence branch of the Office of Strategic Services, S.I. official (and future CIA director) Richard Helms told Captain M.F. Sichel that their driver had made several hundred thousand dollars on the black market. When Sichel arrived at headquarters, where he was taking over a special S.I. unit, his new deputy offered to buy his watch for $1,500. Sichel rejected the offer, according to Ruffner, and “made it clear that any member carrying out such deals would be court-martialed.’’

Ruffner also writes about a black-market case involving O.S.S. officers Andrew Haensel and Gustave Mueller, who were caught smuggling 138 watches from Switzerland to Germany in September 1945. Though charges were eventually dropped after a military judge decided there wasn’t enough evidence to convict them, the case triggered an investigation into black-market operations by the O.S.S., the forerunner of the CIA. Even though black marketing by U.S. military personnel in Berlin was an open secret, Ruffner told me in a phone conversation that the practice was rarely punished and few people were court-martialed or jailed. “Most cases lingered, then ran out of steam,’’ he said. “By the time the Army got wind of them, the soldiers were already back in the U.S. and out of the military. ‘’

A few weeks after I made my initial request for government documents, I heard back from the U.S. Army Crime Records Center in Quantico, Virginia, which informed me that no files could be found. I was told that the center only kept records for 40 years, which meant that any paperwork on The Case would have been discarded in 1986. My request for individual military records also appeared to be futile. A major fire in 1973 at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis destroyed most Army personnel records from the World War II era, which was the likely reason that no files could be found for my father or uncle Lew, who served in the Air Force when it was still part of the Army.

Bob and Oscar were Navy veterans, so their records weren’t affected by the fire. But Oscar’s file couldn’t be found, and months passed without any word on Bob’s records. Then, in May, came a surprising breakthrough. I received a letter from the National Personnel Records Center telling me that Bob’s military file had been located. All I had to do was pay $70 and they would send me a copy.

A month later, a thick package arrived at my New Jersey home. It contained a 225-page dossier on Bob’s military career, including routine papers such as his promotion to lieutenant, a beneficiary form, a request to be reimbursed $100 to cover the cost of his Navy uniform, a copy of his birth certificate, and reference letters supporting his application to join the Naval Reserve. But the bulk of the file pertained to Bob’s involvement in The Case, and it included stunning and salacious details straight from a pulp crime novel. There were references to an obscene letter, a wild party, a shipboard visit from a mysterious French woman, a plea on behalf of a sick, grieving father, and harsh solitary confinement. All that was missing was Captain Queeg.

Bob had, as I long suspected, been court martialed. However, it was far from a simple, straightforward trial. For starters, his lawyers questioned the Navy’s right to conduct the court martial because Bob wasn’t on active duty at the time. (He was on terminal leave, meaning he was using his accrued leave time before his final discharge from the Navy.) Bob’s lawyer also raised questions about the size and scope of his black-market activity, portraying it as a small-time operation that netted a few thousand dollars, rather than millions.

Furthermore, his counsel argued that black-market sales were common in Shanghai and rarely, if ever, resulted in criminal charges. In fact, in a letter to a Navy admiral, the lawyer claimed nylon stockings and cosmetics banned from importation into Shanghai were openly sold by “all of the best and most reputable’’ stores in the city. “The fantastic newspaper stories about a multimillion dollar worldwide black market ring is all nonsense,’’ the lawyer wrote. “I am sure the Navy investigators realize this, after their careful examination of the case.’’

The Navy also piled on several charges that had nothing to do with black-marketing, including an allegation that while Bob was being held aboard the USS Jason in Shanghai he disobeyed orders not to have any visitors and met with a Madame Chevrier. None of the documents I saw specified who she was or why she was visiting my uncle, though the CID earlier said a “French woman partner of the Shanghai branch’’ was being sought for questioning. Of course, you could hardly blame my uncle for seeking female companionship when, according to his lawyer, he was being held in solitary confinement in a sweltering 5×10-foot room and not even allowed to open the door.

“Even a convicted murderer is permitted visitors, movies and a certain amount of freedom,’’ the lawyer wrote. (Strangely, during this time, Bob wrote a cheerful letter to his grandmother that never mentioned The Case. I found the letter in one of the books he wrote about his family. The books contained hundreds of letters written by the four Warner brothers and other relatives, but not a word about The Case. Of all the brothers, Bob was always the most reluctant to talk about the scandal. Now, I understand why.)

The most peculiar charge against Bob was “depositing an obscene letter in the mail.’’ While combing through Bob’s letters, investigators found one that he had sent to a group of enlisted men who had served under him in China. The whole letter had a joking tone, including a mock threat to shoot them if they didn’t help get his mail delivered. What really got him into hot water was a proposed reunion in which he would provide “the girls, the liquor and the place.’’ Then came the troublesome phrase: “Come along suckers and get fucked.’’ My uncle admitted it was an “indiscreet letter,’’ but claimed he was kidding around and just wanted to get together with some old friends. Naval authorities didn’t see it that way. They accused him of mailing an “obscene, lewd and lascivious letter of an indecent character.’’

While the documents I received didn’t include the transcript of Bob’s court martial — I was told the file no longer existed — they did contain details on his case and the outcome of the trial. According to an official review of his Navy discharge in March 1949, Bob was found guilty of smuggling goods into China without paying customs fees, depositing an obscene letter in the mail and inviting enlisted men to an “immoral party.’’ He was acquitted of the charge that he disobeyed the order of a superior officer not to have any visitors when he was being held aboard the ship in Shanghai. Bob was sentenced to six months in prison at hard labor, but the seven-member jury unanimously recommended clemency due to his “youth, previous good record, and good character.’’ Maybe they also felt Bob had already been punished enough by being held in solitary confinement for six weeks following his arrest. Whatever the reason, his sentence was rescinded.

Bob wasn’t the only member of his family who suffered from the scandal. In January 1947 Oscar wrote a letter to a Navy official claiming that his father’s health had steadily deteriorated since Bob’s arrest. Oscar asked that Bob, then at the Naval Receiving Station on Treasure Island, be sent to New York so he could be near his father. “All of us at home feel confident that if my brother could be transferred to New York, pending the final outcome of his case, he could greatly help my father to recover his health.’’ The request was denied.

It was unclear from the documents I reviewed exactly how long Bob was detained by the Navy. He was court martialed aboard the USS Helena in Shanghai in November 1946, but had to wait several months for a verdict. A letter written by his lawyer in early October said Bob was held in solitary confinement aboard a Navy ship for six weeks after his arrest. The restriction was then lifted, allowing him to move freely around the ship, but he still wasn’t permitted to go ashore at the time the letter was written. At some point between his court martial and the announcement of the verdict in January 1947, Bob was transferred to the Naval station at Treasure Island. None of the documents specified his status during that time. I don’t know whether he was jailed, detained or free while awaiting the verdict.

I do know that after Bob’s sentence was voided, there was a lot of back and forth between his lawyer and the Navy about the terms of his departure from the service. In the end, he was discharged “under honorable conditions’’ but without a certificate of satisfactory service. Following an appeal, his discharge papers were modified to remove the phrase “for the good of the service,’’ which implied serious misconduct. The Navy decided that leaving under honorable conditions for the good of the service was an oxymoron, the kind of military doublespeak World War II vet Joseph Heller later made famous in “Catch-22.’’

Bob’s general discharge “under honorable conditions’’ didn’t mean he had a clean slate. In military nomenclature, that type of discharge falls somewhere between an honorable and dishonorable discharge, suggesting a mixed service record and making the veteran ineligible for some benefits. When Bob applied for a job at Macy’s in the summer of 1948, the company did a background check and asked the Navy for Bob’s service history. Fortunately for Bob, the Navy said his records were confidential and could only be obtained with his consent. Bob got the job, so I guess that he nixed the request.

Shortly after I received a copy of Bob’s military records, I was notified that Lew’s court-martial file had been found at the National Archives in St. Louis, part of the same complex that houses the National Personnel Records Center. Unbeknownst to me, the Army’s court-martial records from that era were kept in a different storage area than the personnel files, which were destroyed in the 1973 fire. I paid $98 to have the documents copied and anxiously waited for their delivery.

In late June – six months after I had started my latest records search and almost 40 years after I first learned of The Case – the mother lode arrived. Stuffed in my mailbox was a bulging package filled with about 600 pages of Lew’s court-martial records, including a 200-page section with the trial transcript and supporting documents. As I suspected, the crux of the Army’s case were dozens of incriminating letters written by and distributed among the five Warners. They discussed, in remarkable detail, proposed and actual transactions involving almost every kind of black-market item imaginable. While the letters also mentioned their efforts to establish a legal import-export business, most of the talk was about smuggling and selling products that were still regulated under wartime conditions.

My father and grandfather, who were living together in New York, were constantly on the lookout for goods that they could buy cheaply and then send to my uncles overseas, where they could be sold at a huge profit. Nylon stockings, watches, liquor and diamonds were popular, but the most prized product was cigarettes because they were easy to import and sell for inflated prices. In one letter Lew talked about possibly buying a German car for 10 cartons of cigarettes. In another “Dear All’’ letter Lew said he and four friends were planning to rent Heydrich’s mansion on Berlin’s Lake Wannsee. It has “beautiful grounds and has not been touched from the bombings here,’’ he wrote.

To avoid customs payments and other regulations, the U.S.-based Warners would sometimes go to LaGuardia Airport and drop off packages at American Overseas Airlines, Lew’s employer at the time, and have them shipped directly to him in Berlin. In one case, my dad wrote in a letter, Dave brought a laundry bag containing 48 cartons of cigarettes. He put a lock on the bag and sent the key to Lew in a separate envelope. “They asked him if there were cigarettes in the bag and naturally Dad had to say no,’’ my father wrote. “I just hope that you get them all right and they do not discover what is in there.’’

Judging from the letters, it’s impossible to determine how much money the Warners were making from their black-market operation. There’s more discussion of potential deals than consummated ones, and the mixture of marks, francs and U.S. dollars is confusing. It’s clear, however, that the Warners talked a bigger game than they played. When Oscar was arrested at his Paris apartment, authorities found about 70,000 Allied marks ($7,000), a diamond bracelet watch and 44 diamond rings in a padlocked trunk.

When Lew was arrested in Berlin, he had $968 in cash and travelers checks in his room, along with 24 pairs of nylon stockings, 95 watches, two cameras, a telephoto lens, two pen-and-pencil sets and 17 cartons of Chesterfield cigarettes. Bob was accused of smuggling into China 1,992 pairs of nylon stockings worth $8,964, 419 tubes of lipstick valued at $209, 100 vials of penicillin ($70), 21 vials of perfume ($42), 34 pen-and-pencil sets ($680) and five ampules of neoarsphenamine ($10), a drug that was once used to treat syphilis. And when investigators checked my grandfather’s bank account in New York, they found it contained all of $3,500 — not exactly what you’d expect from the senior member of a global black-market ring.

Earlier, Lew had warned his brothers and father to lower their expectations. “I never had big illusions about making 100,000 bucks this year,’’ he wrote in a letter dated July 26, 1946. Lew said it was hard to make a killing operating on “the shady side’’ and that he preferred to save a modest amount — “at least 25-30 thousand dollars in the course of a year’’ – in order to run a legitimate import-export business.

While the trove of family letters I read dealt mainly with business, other subjects were discussed as well. All the brothers were healthy, single heterosexuals in their twenties, so women were of obvious interest. Lew wrote that it was ridiculously easy for American soldiers to find female companionship in devastated postwar Berlin, where so many war widows and other local women were in desperate need of the food, shelter and clothing that G.I.’s could provide.

“I just don’t believe there is a girl here who won’t go to bed with a guy – and here it’s all free,’’ Lew said. In another letter he wrote about a date he had with a German woman who had been married to a Luftwaffe pilot during the war: “She was pretty nice and willing as hell — as are all of them, but the setup with her and her apartment aren’t just what it should be, so I figure I will be forced to pack her in.’’ My dad wrote to Oscar and Bob about going out with a family acquaintance in New York. “The only trouble is that she is a little too old for me since she will be 18 in about a month,’’ he declared in what may or may not have been jest.

Lew occasionally delved into politics, particularly his opinion of the Russian troops who were occupying part of Berlin. “Every German hates the Russian like poison,’’ he wrote. He said one of his German girlfriends told him she was raped by Russian soldiers, who were accused of widespread sexual assaults during their occupation. “All the Russians here in Berlin go around like a bunch of monkies [sic] afraid of their noses,’’ he wrote. “They all are heavily armed and (from) the little I have seen do not welcome Americans at all.’’

His court martial took place in November 1946 at Tempelhof Air Base, where he had been living in Berlin. His residence was an issue at the trial. The Army contended that, even though he was a civilian employee of American Overseas Airlines, he was under military jurisdiction because he lived at the base and worked at a weather station that provided services for the Army. The prosecution also claimed that when Lew was officially discharged from the Army in late June 1946, he was already engaged in illegal business activities in Berlin.

Lew’s lawyer said the Army had no right to court martial him since he was a working for a private company. Assuming he was under military control at the time of his arrest, the lawyer said, the jurisdiction ended soon afterward when he was fired by American Overseas Airlines and all connections with the Army were severed. The court dismissed the defense objections and allowed the trial to proceed.

The defense then challenged the prosecution on several other fronts. First, his attorney claimed an incriminating statement Lew signed after being questioned by authorities was obtained under duress. Lew testified that a CID agent threatened to jail him if he didn’t confess. The agent denied this under oath, and the judge allowed the statement to be admitted as evidence. Lew’s defense also argued he wasn’t aware of the trading and currency rules he was accused of violating. The regulations were posted at the base where Lew was living, but he said he never read them and wasn’t aware he was breaking any laws.

The prosecution countered by pointing out that Lew, in his own letters, had expressed concerns about getting in trouble by operating on the “shady side.’’ The defense tried to prevent the family letters from being used at the trial, saying they were inadmissible because they were illegally seized and the prosecution had not proved there was a conspiracy involving the five Warners. But once again, the judge sided with the prosecution and the letters were introduced as evidence.

Since Lew’s business activities were inextricably intertwined with his brothers and father, the trial was truly a family affair. One embarrassing revelation involved Oscar’s arrest in Paris. A CID agent who went to Oscar’s apartment to question him testified that my uncle “became very nervous’’ and tried to jump out a fifth-floor window. The agent said Oscar was worried about disgracing his family and “didn’t want his father to know anything about this.’’

Following his trial, which spanned 11 days, Lew was convicted of violating four trading and currency regulations that barred black-market sales and importing or circulating American, British or French money in occupied areas of Europe. Specifically, he was found guilty of selling 100 watches that Oscar gave him in Paris for 135,000 marks ($13,500); helping Oscar convert about 50,000 marks into French francs; possessing $518 in U.S. cash; and conspiring to violate a ban on for-profit business transactions in occupied Europe.

Lew was fined $2,500 and threatened with up to 18 months in prison if he didn’t pay his fine installments on time. The prison provision was eventually rescinded, which was fortunate because it’s unclear from the records whether Lew ever paid the fine. In his 16-page review of the trial, issued in February 1947, Staff Judge Advocate William Parker called Lew an “unscrupulous’’ young man who was looking for opportunities to make a quick buck.

Lew didn’t hang around Berlin to await the final review, in which Parker upheld the verdict and sentence. In his recorded interview with me, my uncle said he disobeyed orders and skipped town. He flew to London, where he sold his camera and used the proceeds to buy a plane ticket home. Lew told me the Army tried to force him to return to Germany, but his Newark lawyer negotiated an agreement allowing him to stay in the U.S. He never mentioned whether he paid the fine.

Like his brothers, Lew chastised the CID for making a big deal out of a small operation. “I never had one moment of feeling guilt that I was doing something immoral,’’ he said. Lew said even some members of his court-martial panel were engaged in black marketing. “The rules were that you weren’t supposed to be doing it, but everybody and his brother was doing it,’’ he said. “It was just a joke. They had to make an example of somebody.’’

Oscar said his experience with the CID made him suspicious of other highly publicized allegations of smuggling and spying, including the case against Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-American scientist accused of stealing U.S. nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

When I interviewed Oscar in October 2000, Lee had just been released from prison after spending nine months in solitary confinement while awaiting trial on a 59-count federal indictment. The evidence was so flimsy that Lee pleaded guilty to just one count of illegally retaining national security information, and the judge apologized for the way he was treated. In 2006, Lee received $1.6 million from the federal government and five media organizations to settle a lawsuit he filed over privacy violations. “I’m sensitive to these things when they happen to other people,’’ Oscar told me. “This Chinese affair, for example, was so farfetched that I just related to what happened 50 years ago.’’

Just when I thought I had reached the end of the paper trail, I was notified that Oscar’s military file had finally been found. It was at the National Archives in St. Louis, where personnel records for veterans discharged more than 62 years ago are stored. So now I had another big batch of documents to sort through. Somewhere in that pile, I hoped, would be the Rosetta stone that solved The Case once and for all. I had no such luck. While the file contained some curious tidbits – Oscar’s college transcript from NYU showed he got A’s in most of his business courses, but C’s in Shakespeare, sociology and math – there was no smoking gun.

The most relevant papers concerned Oscar’s discharge from the Naval Reserve in 1948. The Navy couldn’t court martial Oscar for his black-market activities since he wasn’t on active duty at the time, but it did try to force his resignation from the Naval Reserve. In a letter to Oscar in December 1947, the head of Navy personnel recommended that my uncle be discharged from the Reserve “under other than honorable conditions.’’

In addition to citing Oscar’s black-market case, the personnel chief claimed that my uncle lied to get a free ride from New York to Paris on a Navy ship while he was on terminal leave. According to the Navy, Oscar said he was going to France to study at the University of Paris using his veterans’ benefits. However, the Navy said Oscar never registered or enrolled at the university after arriving in Paris. In a written response, Oscar said he arrived too late in the school term and was advised to wait until the next semester to enroll. By the time that date arrived in September, Oscar wrote, he had already been arrested by the CID.

There was also a dispute over Oscar’s departure from France. Oscar said he left Paris before the final resolution of his black-market case because he was told the negotiations could last several months and French authorities gave him permission to go home while the matter was pending, as long as he forfeited his bail. The Navy gave a different version of events. In his letter, the personnel chief said that in May 1947 a Paris court sentenced Oscar in absentia to six months in prison and a fine of 3.8 million francs, or about $32,000, for leaving the country without authorization.

For years afterward Oscar was afraid to visit France, fearing that he might be jailed. I don’t know exactly how the matter was resolved, but eventually Oscar felt safe enough to return to Paris and tour the Louvre and Eiffel Tower without worrying about ending up in a prison cell.

Oscar reached a compromise with the Navy and was allowed to resign from the Naval Reserve under honorable conditions. But The Case continued to haunt him. In 1947 he applied for membership in The Veterans Club in New York. The club heard about the black-market allegations and asked the Navy for details before deciding whether to admit Oscar. Like his brother Bob, Oscar benefitted from the Navy’s privacy policy. Just as the Navy declined to provide Macy’s with Bob’s military file for a background check, the service told The Veterans Club that it wouldn’t release any of Oscar’s records without his permission. I never did find out if Oscar was admitted to The Veterans Club.

Despite the skeletons in their closets, the four Warner brothers went on to have productive and fulfilling lives. They all married, had children and became successful businessmen. Bob went to Harvard Business School, became a retail executive who once was general manager of Macy’s flagship store in New York and later ran his own consulting firm. Lew owned a company that made aluminum extrusions and was a dedicated philanthropist who created a college scholarship program to honor his firstborn child, Kenny, who was killed by a drunk driver at the age of 22. Oscar co-owned and managed a couple of chic women’s clothing stores in Virginia, and my father owned a home-improvement business before becoming a smooth-talking furniture salesman. To the best of my knowledge, they were all law-abiding citizens whose transgressions never went beyond speeding tickets or an occasional sports wager.

Their children also fared well. One of my cousins became the president of CBS Television, and another won an Oscar and an Emmy for inventing the Avid digital editing system, which revolutionized the editing of movies and television programs. My generation of Warners also includes a collage artist, a Wall Street analyst, a hospital executive, a speech pathologist, a marketing professor and the owner of a company that sells presidential souvenirs. My own career was eclectic. I was a reporter, editor, columnist and critic for major media outlets, including Bloomberg News, the Associated Press and the Miami Herald, before retiring from daily journalism in 2012. I then taught a sports-writing course at Rutgers University before spending a year in China, where I taught college students rudimentary English and tried to explain the wonders of baseball, milkshakes and Donald Trump. I even told them about The Case, though I think my tales of black marketing and family dynamics may have gotten lost in translation.

The Warner brothers agreed the scandal was an embarrassing blemish that should be airbrushed from the family portrait. I, on the other hand, considered it a source of endless fascination. Reading that Times story for the first time was akin to discovering my wife had been a call girl or my mother had been a German spy. The more I learned about it, the more confusing it got and the more questions I had. It was like trying to open a giant puzzle box.

In the end, the truth was as murky as the London fog. Clearly, my uncles were trading in the black market with help from my father and grandfather, who were sending them goods to sell. But it’s also quite obvious that the Warner boys were dreamers whose grandiose plans were never realized. Were they amateur operators trying to make a few bucks, or highly organized kingpins making a fortune from illegal sales? Judging from the evidence and the outcome, the former seems more likely. Their get-rich schemes seem more like Ralph Kramden’s than Vito Corleone’s. Investigators found no evidence that any of the Warners had secret stashes of cash. “The plans of the conspirators were rather ambitious, but their profits somewhat ephemeral,’’ the staff judge advocate said in his report.

When I showed an early draft of this story to my cousins, most of whom knew little about the scandal, their reactions ranged from shock to amusement. Bob’s youngest son, Steve, remembered that the elusive Madame Chevrier was Bob’s girlfriend in China and that her first name was Arianne. His dad also told him that he fought hard to avoid a dishonorable discharge because that might have prevented him from attending Harvard Business School and derailed his budding business career. Peggy, one of Oscar’s three children, was astounded by her dad’s reaction to his arrest: “I can’t believe my father tried to jump out of a 5th floor window!’’ Lew’s daughter Kat couldn’t believe that a judge described him as “unscrupulous’’ because, like me, she considered him one of the most decent, honest men she had ever known. (We both thought Gary Cooper would have been the perfect actor to play Lew in a movie.)

Kat’s brother, Bill, told me that his dad always blamed the scandal on his own father. “He said the black-market thing was Dave’s idea and the sons just went along with it.’’ The story upset Bill because it sullied his heroic view of his father. I disagreed. Nothing I discovered in my investigation altered my opinion of my father or my uncles. As I saw it, they were simply young men who grew up poor and saw a chance to make some easy money in a chaotic postwar environment where the rules were blurry. What they did was wrong, but it didn’t define their characters.

My wife Pat, who is a clinical psychologist, has heard me talk about The Case for more than 20 years. Given my checkered past – in my younger days, I had my drug dealer and bookie on speed dial — she wasn’t surprised to learn that I may have inherited a wayward gene or two. But she knew all my uncles and was convinced they didn’t have an evil bone in their bodies. From my vantage point, they were loving, kind and extremely generous men. In the Warner family, there was always a scrum to pick up the dinner check. More importantly, all the brothers could rely on each other in a pinch. When my dad got tuberculosis in the early 1960s and had to spend a year recuperating in a Denver hospital, his brothers gave my mom a check for $5,000 (a lot of money at the time), and Lew picked up the tab when my mother, my sister and I flew to Colorado to visit.

Sometimes, the generosity was more spiritual than financial. After Lew’s son Kenny was killed by a drunk driver in 1971, the driver was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to three years’ probation. Seven months later, he asked the court to lift his probation so he could obtain a business loan. Lew and his wife Lynn didn’t object and the probation was cut short. In a letter to the judge, their attorney wrote that Lew and Lynn “bore no malice’’ toward their son’s killer and didn’t think that “justice would be better served by continuing him on probation.’’

The hyperbolic press coverage of The Case wasn’t as compassionate. It surely wasn’t the first, or last, time newspapers sensationalized a story to lure readers. The Berlin press conference in which the CID announced its allegations against the Warners generated banner headlines in newspapers across the country. “World Black Mart Smashed By Army,’’ blared the World-Telegram. “World-Wide Black Market Broken,’’ trumpeted the Oxnard Press-Courier. “Global Black Market Ring Crushed,’’ proclaimed the Sandusky Register Star-News.

Amidst the flood of eye-popping headlines I found a revealing anecdote in a story carried by the New York Post on Aug. 13, 1946, the day after the allegations were announced. “ABC Correspondent Ed Johnson reported today from Berlin that the CID called correspondents together last night and kept them for an hour and a half telling about a huge international black market ring that had been discovered,’’ the story said. “It was great `cops and robbers’ stuff, but by the time the evidence was sifted down, said Johnson, it turned out to be so flimsy that many correspondents refused to touch it at all.’’