Evening Star Newspaper, May 31, 1931, Page 71

PART 7. The %umlem Shar Magasine MAY 31, 1931. Bdoks Features FROM THUG TO MILLIONAIRE How Bootlegging Dwarfs All Other Criminal Professions and Now I the Great Racket. " How the Nation’s Police Are Handicapped in Their Efforts to Bring Order From Chaos. An Article by a Student of the Problem. HERE are old rackets and . new rackets. But the methods are the same and involve necessarily what is tantamount to 4 a partnership, a friendly understanding among police, poii- ticians and crocks. In the older days these partnerships dealt in crime. Nowadays there is not muci of this, the partnerships fattening off the proceeds of violations of our sumptuary laws—prohibition mainly, but also gambling and prostitution. The partnership with . crime died because public opinicn would not tolerate it. ‘The part- nership with all sorts of vice suc- ceeds because public opinion does tolerate it. Nearly a quarter of a century ago I became officially acquainted with & racket for the first time. I had just been made deputy police commissioner of New York City, b and was comparatively green. We Y had been receiving a lot of *squeals”—as the police term com- plaints—from passengers riding on the Twenty-third street crosstown “ cars. All made the same squeal. Their pockets had been picked " during the rush hours. ° When these squeals came to the attention of my chief, Gen. Bing- ham—a great commissioner—he sent for me. “This is singular,” he said. “We are having more squeals from peo- ple on this line than from all the others in the city put together. What do you think is wrong? The records showed that two particular policemen in plain clothes had for years been assigned to this line. “Let’s take off the d=- tectives now on this line and put en two new men,” I suggested. This was done. The picking of pockets on the Twenty-third street crosstown cars instantly ceased. id the detectives pick the pockets of. the squealers? No. Who, then? The pickpockets who were paying for the privilege of working the line. And they had to quit once the detectives, with whom they had made the deal, were no longer on the line. In those days the cream of the pickpockets were men from the West. But they were eventually driven out by our own East Side boys, who developed a technique so superior that they could pick the pockets of the Western dips. A dip, it should be noted paren- thetically, is a pickpocket. Gen. Bingham ordered that the lid be clamped down. The word went the rounds of the underworld that New York City was no longer a .paradise for pickpockets and other croocks, even though the cily was being ad- miniziered by a mayor and other officials elected on a Tammany ticket. in the days of Commissioner Bingham the detectives were particularly vigilant with refer- ence to thieves whom they knew and who might be coming to New York for no good purpose. One day there was brought to head- quacters by one of the old and experienced _detectives, who probably knew more thieves _by acquaintance and by sight than any other man in the country, a well known International thief, whom we shall call by his first name, Eddie . ie was always one of the best dressed of men. It is true that he was somewhat over- dressed, but the overdress was of super quality. On the occasion of this arrest—or, instead of arrcst, shall we call it this invitation to visit police headquarters, for he was charged with no crime—Eddie was brought to my office. He was clearly and volubly indignant. He stood upon his rights as a free.born American citizen to be unbothered by police interference. Prolonged conversation with Eddie brought the confession from him that he had been in the hands of the law before, but he had given up all that and didn’t want to be bothered. He would agree absolutely that he would commit no crime in New York if he. were allowed to stay here without being picked up on sus- picion from time to time according to the time- honored police custom. He would give his word for this, the word of a gentleman, which had never been broken. This was agreed to. Eddie was, so o speak, placed on parole to do no thieving in New York, and was to be allowed to go and come as he wished. Reassured by this treatment, he expatiated somewhat on his methods. There happened to be a copy of a New York newspaper lying en the d~sk, and Eddie remsrked that he suo- Drawings Harr‘vv Fisk. “T'he army of bootleg- gers maims and kills civilians and police alike.” BY ARTHUR WOODS, I-ormer Police posed few people knew that that was the best newspaper for a thief to read, because the top edge of the paper was rougher than that of other papers and could be used conveniently to slip under a gentleman’s scarfpin and raise it out of his tie. He was required to report every week, and at these weekly meetings would discuss further his sporting achievements. But I always had a feeling that Eddie was not playing fair, he was not quite able to conceive that these evil days were going to last. He was simply biding his time until the new unworkable system should break down, and he could again refurn to his profession under a protecting partner- ship agreement with the police. NO systematic form of pillage can thrive without police protection. And no. form of systematized professional lawbreaking, save one, can last 24 hours after an honest police commissioner, not fearful of the higher-ups, assured of long tenure of office and known to be so assured, passes out the word that the lid is on and must be clamped down. The lower East Side used to be known as one of the principal homes of the gangster, and the gangster had various ways of earning an honest living. One of the chief methods was levying tribute. In addition to blackmail- ing shopkeepers, committing assaults upon or nmiurdering citizens for hire—sometimes during labor troubles, sometimes on election day—or holding up citizens on the- street, they fre. quently received tribute from shopkeepers and - keepers of disorderly houses, each gang having its own domain and guaranteeing protection from other gangs within that sphere of- in- fluence. In all these forms of crime many of the gangs were highly trained and highly paid specialists. Strikers would approach = gang leaders and hire them to assault men who con- tinued to work in spite of warnings from the strikers to desist. Employers hired men of like - character, attached to so-called ‘“‘detective agencies,” who used sirongarm methods against Commissioner of New York City. the strikers. In various strikes almost every conceivable crime has been committed by guerrillas hired by one side or the other, in- cluding robbery, extortion, assault, arson, ‘riot and murder. One famous gang leader, who, by the way, is now “going straight,” approached a trades- man, denanding that he be employed to beat up certain employes who were on strike and were forcibly preventing others from taking their places. When the tradesman refused to deal with him he proceeded independently and had several strikers assaulted by his thugs. He then demanded $500 for services rendered. The tradesman could not pay. He was given two weeks to come to his senses, and the gang leader made the meaning of a continued re- fusal clear to him by putting his revolver to the tradesman’s stomach and explaining in his own way what would happen. He was in a panic and paid $150, but could not raise any more, and appealed to a friend, who immedi- ately brought him to see me. That afternoon at 5 o'clock a $50 installment was due, and a trap was laid. By the use of marked money and clever detective methods the detective in charge arrested the gang leader in the act of blackmail after obtaining such evidence as led to the conviction of the leader. This is what 1 known as a racket. But it was a racket that failed, because a racket can- not be successfully carried out when the police do not connive: . In the old days, before the advent of the Great Racket, the unholy alliances between the police and the underworld, through which the denizens of this realm of darkness were per- mitted to ply their professions for a price, might be grouped under four heads: 1. The vice racket, where poor unfortunate women were the victims and where the profits went to the police and higher-ups. ° 2. The gambling racket, under the ternms of which keepers of poker clubs and more pre- tentious gambling dens fleeced the unwary with the connivance of the police. 3. The crime rae v, whish urotected theives “aration of cases for the grand jury. period he submitted more than 1,000 cases of “riveted cases, every one. for a share of the profits. This form of racket was much more dif- ficult to maintain than the others, for public opinion which wouild wink at violaticns of the sumptuary laws would take an entirely dif- ferent attitude about crime. 4. This saloon“racket, which enabled sellers of liquor to serve drinks on Sundays and during other restricted hours. This last is our immediate eqn- cern; and, of course, when I say salocn, I mean the forerunner:of the speakeasy of prohibition days. Two or three years before pro- hibition was written upon the law books of the land I gave a lecture on crime prevention at Princeton University. I spoke frcm knowi- edge acquired at first-hand. I had had the oppertunities given me fo see the ravages of drink and its effect on crime. I had been a re- porter on a metropolitan journal; had studied crime abroad; had served for two years as.a deputy police commissioner of New York City, and subsequently I had been in charge of the department for four years, less a few weeks. In the lecture at Princetom I said: “It is not my province here’io go into a discussion of prohibition, although from a police poing of view it would be a godsend to amy community.” FTER giving this conclusion, which was shared generally by policemen in the country in the years before prohibition, I eon- tinued: “As”a cause of crime the habit of drink takes high rank. As a cause of want and misery and despair it ranks equally high, From the pclice point of view it is not germane to discuss what may be the best means of attaining temperance. We can say emphat- ically, however, that if intemper- ance in the use of hard liquors could be prevented the Police Courts would lose very much of their business. At a meeting of the police inspectors in New York, when the subject cf discussion was the cause of crime, one experienced inspector gave it as his judgment, which seemed to be generally con- curred in, that drink was the big- gest single cause of crime.” I have not changed my views. They have only been strengthened by the lapse of years. But I want to make it clear that what I had in mind was temperance, which I hoped would be achieved by a sys- tem of preohibition. We have not achieved temperance and we apparently are learning that we cannot achieve it through prohibition. To our sorrow we have learned further that prohibition has given birth to the Great Racket, a racket of undreamed proportions, a racket that has given wealth to the low elements of our communities, making & thug into a millionaire almost overnight, and enabling a lowly policeman to bank several hundred thousand dollars in the course of a few months., The recent police graft disclosures prove all this, In order to understand tne failure of pro- hibition we must go back to the days when the Volstead act and the eighteenth amend- “ment were things that only visionaries dreamed. This will bring us to a discussion of the saloon, which was a blot upon our civilization and an institution of evil that all sane men hoped to see eradicated. The saloon is gone. But let us return to the days when it was with us. In those days we had in the district attor- ney's office Charles A. Perkins, a hard-headed man of the best reformer type—not the im- practical, uncompromising, self-righteous sort. For more than 10 years he was head of the indictment ‘bureau of the office of the district attorney of New York County. He gave me figures covering a period of a few years while he was in charge of the prep- In this violations against the State law prohibiting the sale of liquor on Sunday. These were copper- I have forgotten the number of indictments, but they were unbe- lievably few, as is shown by the following faet, which is impressed®upon my memory and is supported by notes of a series of lectures I delivered at Yale University, in April, 1918, on the relations between the policeman and the public. Out of these thousand-odd cases there were ‘but three convictions by juries. Why were there only three convictions out of more than a thousand conclusive cases? The reason was that Sunday closing in the City