Evening Star Newspaper, January 19, 1930, Page 90

12 Pl A} THE SUNDAY STAR, WASH A Story of City Life and the Men Who Rule, Written by an Author Who Is New to the Readers of the Magazine of The Sunday Star—Another O. Henry Memorial Award Story Will Be Featured in The Star Magazine Next Sunday. OME say that it was Senator Matt McGlynn who gave Supreme Court Justice Ahearn his start, and some will tell you that it was Ahearn’s cousin, Michael Cronin, u;e ;:bon- ceper. Each of them had a hand in » l:;’le;lel Ahearn finished the sixth grade at St. Mary’s School on Pitt street, and then went to work for Claflin & Co. That much ap- pears to be certain. Some time thereafter, probably when he was about 16, he became a bartender. He continued his education at night, somewhat spasmodically as hls' duties permitted; studied law at Peter Cooper’s Uni- versity; was admitted to the bar at the age of 26 and hung up his white apron forever. There is a story that Cronin went to Senator McGlynn, who at this time was holding the city and the party in his fat white hand, and laid these facts before him, and that McGlynn sent Ahearn a few small cases, which he han- dled well enough. Then he sent him some- thing more important and more dubious, and Ahearn kicked his new clients out of his cheap littie office. So the Senator sent for him and inquired the cause of this discourtesy, and Counselor Ahearn told him in his unvarnished Third avenue dialect that he didn’t do that kind of business, see? AND the Senator intimated that he couldn't find uses for lawyers who were overpar- ticular, and Ahearn picked up his derby and delivered himself of a hot valedictory upon Senatcr McGlynn, his friends and the nature of their law cases, and stamped his way out of the office without pausing for reply. Now, it is well known that Senator Glynn had that love of buffoonery which character- izes licentious rulers. Virtue amused him al- ways, moral indignation amused him, and he had the voluptuary’s passion for naivete. Ahearn spent his first eight ‘months at the bar as most young lawyers spend them who have no family coffers upon which to draw, and one morning was aghast and astonished to find in his scanty mail an invitation to call upon the district attorney with a view to an appointment. He was courteously received, and by 12 oclock he was assistant district attorney for the county. It is known that he went breathlessly to Cronin, running down Columbia street, Brook- 1yn, to Cronin’s place and bursting in upon him panting and stammering his gratitude. Cronin listened to him in amazement and told him he had nothing to do with the matter—noth- ing. But Cronin also threw his arms around him and banged him on the back, uttering those profane ejaculations employed by the less urbane to indicate joy and grief. It was well for Ahearn that he had his moment of exultation, for the opposition news- papers evidently had not heard any such ex- planation of the reasons for his sudden dis- tinction. They imputed, as usual, the most sinister motives to the district attorney and to Senator McGlynn. There is a faded yellow editorial in the Herald files dealing with the appointment, and another in those of the ‘Tribune. Daniel Ahearn read the editorials dealing with his appointment time and time again, but it was a long time before they were anything but a blur to him, a red blur, with the word bartender legible at intervals. The Advertiser called him a bartender three times in a half & column. OW, there never was a Celt who took him- self more seriously than did Daniel Ahearn, never one with a fiercer, hotter pride in him- self and his lineage, never one with a more sensitive skin. Most of them hide it with a laugh or a jibe and some with a stupid, unsee- ing look. Daniel Ahearn hid his with a grim, tight, dour mouth, hoping all the while that nobody noticed him and his rage and his shame. A joke, he was, was he—a big joke? He that laughed at few jokes and made none. Bartender, bartender, bartender. He'd show them what sort of a man a bartender had to be. Of the two excellent ways to bring out the essential virtues within him the city had chosen one—ridicule. It laughed at him. He had a fine audience for his first few cases—young mttorneys with degrees from Columbia and Harvard, special writers from the newspapers, curiosity seekers. The district attorney, wheth- er acting under instructions or from a sense of fair play, which some district attorneys have wat least when they're young—give him every consideration. He didn’t have much to do and he did it well enough. His hearers laughed when they could, as a vaudeville audience does, and there were things to laugh at, if you'd never seen a bartender before or heard & man who had the patois of the East Side thick in his throat. But he showed no glaring igno- rance—and his voice was composed, if a little too Joud for cultured ears, and his mouth was set and he saw no discourtesy in any one or anything. He had made up his mind to that. In due course he had a casc against some silk thieves: People vs. Camagno, Hartzen- stein and Hickey. He had them convicted be- fore.he summed up, and he knew it; and in his triumph he let himself go a little: “Now, gentlemen of the jury. These watch- men. Theyre old fellahs, old broken-down fellahs. You see them comin’ into—uh—com- in’ into a saloon in the early mornin’ for a drink, all cold.” (Here. a giggle from a cidevant Phi Delt with nothing to do at the present except listen to another man’s case.) “They’re usually the remains of good men. They're honest men, men that have worked with their hands all their lives, that ain’t got the brains or the crookedness to do anything else. Well, Here they are, all night, walkin’ up an’' down a string-piece, tryin’ to keep warm, tryin’ to do their job. Fifty cents a night they get. “Along comes a lot of rats, lookin’ for some- thin’ they can swi—steal. What do these old fellahs do? There ain’'t one out of fifty of then won't put up his hands and jump at them. “Now listen to me. These watchmen is cops. Cops, see? You won't put enough cops on the water front. You say we ain’t got enough cops. All right! Alf'right! You got to stand behind your cops. You got to. You got to make this water front safe. It ain’t safe. I—I tell you, you got to clean up this water front or you're going to have trouble, trouble for every one of you. “What you gonna do, huh? What you gonna do? Here's grandpop with his back aganist the spiles, battlin’ against four rats. What you gonna do? Huh!” “I object,” said Mr. Goldfusz. “Nobody has said my clients attacked any watchmen.” “Objection overruled.” “Exception,” sald Mr. Goldfusz plaintively. WELL, as it happened, about a week after . that the first of the ripper murders oc- curred in the very district he was denouncing, and the terror-stricken city began to clamor for police action. Ahearn got plenty of work and he rejoiced in it. Few were laughing at him now, certainly not the prisoners at the bar. He was a bully, a torturer of witnesses, a thun- derer; he would hurl himself upon juries, rag- ing, panting, impatient of subtleties, beating against them. If it had been histrionic it would have been contemptible, and many a jeer was flung at him by opposing counsel, many a judi- cial reprimand, and not a few of his convictions were ultimately set aside. But he got convic- tions and heavy sentences. At the height of his career as public prose- cutor McGlynn sent for him. No strangers were present at that interview, which probably took place in McGlynn’s house in Chelsea, and no one else knows exactly what happened. Never thereafter was it prudent to criticize McGlynn to Daniel Ahearn. McGlynn was breaking up then pretty fast; he was drinking heavily, was almost never sober after 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Ahearn had the abstemiousness of his former business; he had the body of a roustabout; he lived vir- tuously. McGlynn was 58, a cynic and a van- dal, as every one knows, worn out by his pleas- ures. What did they find to say to each other —the Senator, weaving in his chair a little, slow-spoken from the drink, gravely cour- teous, peering up with his satyr’s eyes at the sweating barbarian opposite him? Perhaps he decided that the Behemoth of his creation was too awkward, too powerful for direction. Perhaps he felt that charity which great sin- ners have for the forthright virtuous. Perhaps he was storing up in his befuddled brain recol- lections to amuse him to frenzied laughter for all his time on earth to come, At all events Daniel Ahearn walked out of that house in Chelsea a supreme court judge Jjust as surely as if McGlynn had thrown the mantle about his shoulders. And he walked out his own man, too, without a pledge to bind him, without a promise, without a restriction. Events proved that, What a judge he was! “Don't fool with Ahearn,” cagey old attorneys whispered to the fledglings. “Particularly don’t fool with him in a fraud case or a criminal case. He'll make you feel like 30 cents. That old snoozer knows more ways of getting you in Dutch than you could count. Don't dig him up any new law. He doesn’'t like it. There's only one thing to do with Ahearn. You've got to prove to him that your man is a persecuted inno- cent. It doesn't make any difference how you do it. The next best thing is to make him believe that you think so yourself, Ever get him convinced, he'll plead your case for BATTERED ARMORI NN 1N A anan SRR e NNRIN RN - CNNAINNNRWMAN avaan ; NN, AN AN A you himself. Fact. He won't let the jury do a thing to you. If he gets the other idea, good night. And he usually has it. He doesn’t believe innocent men ever get tried for any- thing, Ahearn doesn't. You could have the best case in the world, absolutely airtight, and it wouldn't do you any good. Gosh, I've been in there fighting two men, him and the D. A, more than once. Law? That old buz- zard doesn't care abowt law. He makes up him mind; that’s all—" ND down in the underworld, the under- world that Ahearn saw moving from the water-front to Allen street, to Fourteenth street, to the Thirties, to the Fifties and that's still on the way uptown, they'd tell you about him. “Dat skate. Ooh! He don't know noth- ing but ‘five years,’ ‘10 years,’ ‘20 years.’ The Hot Seat. Dat’s him. Gees, when Whitey Warren was waitin’ to go troo de Little Green Door, for croakin’ a bull, his mother went to see Ahearn. Do you think he wouldn’'t see her? Huh! He saw her all right. ‘Gees, Judge, the kid's only 19, she says to him. ‘God help you,’ he says to her. ‘No, you, you, you help me,’ she says, and falls on her knees to him. ‘Judge, give him 20 years, give him life. Don’t—don’t—he’s all I got,’ she says to him. He give Whitey the chair all right. 1It's a wonder somebody don't bump him off. They say, when he was only a young guy, Kid Banger—you know, Kid Banger that got bumped off over in Hoboken in the chick- en-pullers’ strike, yeah—well, the Kid said he'd fix his clock for him. And this Ahearn, he goes around to the Kid's hang-out, the Tivoli —it was a dump like the Haymarket—Ilookin’ for him. The Kid goes up to him and says, ‘Howdy, Counselor,” and Ahearn don’t say nothin’, just looks at him, and by and by he turns his back on him and walks out. Oh, he ain't yella. He ain't got a heart the size of a louse, but he ain’'t yella.” And the jurymen, the conscientious, upright jurymen, too small or too virtuous to avoid their duty! The looks Judge Ahearn would give them if they came in five minutes late from lunch, or if they pleaded sickness or said they had objections to circumstantial evidence or to maximum penalties! They feared the judge, much, much more than they feared the friends of the man in the dock. What about the judge’s friends? Well, to tell the truth, he had almost no friends. Michael Cronin had asked him for a favor years before, a suspended sentence for some unfortunate, and Ahearn wouldn't grant it. Couldn't grant it, he said. “I've given him my word,” said Cronin. “You're asking me for something I can't give you,” said Ahearn. “I can't do it—that’s all.” “Suit yourself then,” sald Cronin, and turned on his heel. “Mike, Mike!” said Ahearn, starting after him; but Cronin never turned. There were any number of people to invite the judge to dinner, and he loathed dinners. He had the respect of the community and its impersonal friendship. It had become a com- monplace to re-elect him when his term ran out. Bipartite judiciary agreaments were never (A l One of the O. \\ A A\ LR \ “The Kid comes up to him and sa ‘Howdy, Counselor.” And Ahearn do say nothin’. Just looks at him.” needed for him. ‘“Ahearn,” said the Anawand Club. “Ahearn,” said the Union League. “Ahearn,” Ssaid the Citizens’ Union. e newspapers were for him. Once in a whild you'd see his name in the Outlook, or thd Nation or the New Republic “patting his red brawn,” as the old piece in the reader says “More judges like Ahearn. Get the law en-! forced. Get it enforced.” He wasn’t precisely the Ahearn of twenty-odd. years ago. It had galled him not to know the law or to be tripped up in it, so he had mkeg pains to learn it. It had hurt him to be re garded as an ignorant man, and he had spent| hours and hours trying to improve himself, ‘They say he read children’s text-books on English grammar and all sorts of writer's hand- books. History he loved, and he could read essays. Novels he couldn’t stand. But mos of all he read the law. AND yet he was no lawyer. Some of his decisions are classically blunt and terse, but most of them contain no new idea. He hadn’t the mind for a lawyer. He hadn't the admiration for subtlety. Subtlety and chicane} were synonymous to him. Contradictions in logic baffled him, left him raging. Authority: that was his watchword. “Stare decisis” ough to be written over his grave. There never wa a more devou! Roman Catholic than Jud Ahearn, . So at length he had a white head and big old house in Yorkville that defied the ap- proaching apartments and a wild, red head to run it for him. He'd never had a son, an his wife died when his daughter was 5 yea old. Catherine, the girl's name was, but X never called her that. He called her “Babe And she called him “Judge,” as her mothi had called him. “Not Papa—Judge,” she h said, and stamped her tiny foot. He'd laug} and humored her, and he'd never stopp humoring her; so she grew up to an obblig: of neighborly comments: “If she was daughter——" “What else could you expe an only child, and the judge so busy and al “A wild young one! Tch, tch—— If she Wi my daughter——" But she was the judge's daughter, and loved her with the sullen, hot love of & humadis less man, an uncompanionable, austere m: a man who had no ability to express his lo except with things. He hardly ever cares her, and his words of endearment were few than her birthdays. But she was as ho tempered and headstrong as he was, and afte a fashion they understood each other an worried each other as lovers do. He hated her young men and tried to bd polite to them. They'd see him eyeing the as if he were estimating contemptuously theg physical prowess, and it didn't make the comfortable. Finally, one of them carried her off. His first name was Knox. Imagine how the judge must have liked that, and the civil ceremony and all the rest of it. Knox was a polo player and a yachtsman and too old for matrimony, to the judge's way of thinking. That is to say, he was 33. His people were well-to-do, and he had a sort of job with an insurance company, which didn't iwnterfere a great deal with his spare time.