Paddy Whacked

by T. J. English

  For the upper echelon mobsters, or the masters of Prohibition, the end of illegal liquor as a source of revenue required a shift in focus, certainly, but money was not the primary concern. Most of them had amassed fortunes bigger than anything they had expected to see in two or three lifetimes. The biggest problem for these scions of crime was what to do with the proceeds. Bank accounts and safe deposit boxes were no good; they left a paper trail. Money laundering was not yet the sophisticated racket it would become in later decades.

  The smartest of the mobsters, men like Owney Madden, had foreseen Prohibition’s end and funneled their criminal proceeds into a wide variety of “legitimate” ventures. Along with his many nightclubs and trucking and taxi rackets, Madden had money in laundries, milk delivery, and real estate. He owned racehorses and prizefighters, including Primo Carnera, an Italian-born heavyweight who toured the country like a carnival act scoring knockouts in set up bouts before finally winning the championship on June 29, 1933. Carnera was quickly dethroned by Max Baer; Madden owned a piece of him, too. From the late 1920s through the 1930s, Owney had a financial interest in five straight heavyweight champions.

  Of all the ways for a mobster to disperse funds and utilize profits, however, the best way had always been and still was politics. The manner by which dirty money from gangsters had for years infiltrated and compromised the inner workings of government probably had more to do with the repeal of Prohibition than any other single factor. By the early 1930s, American democracy was in a shambles, and everyone knew it. Whole police departments, federal agents, judges, prosecutors—the entire electoral process had been implicated to one degree or another. The roots of this criminal alliance ran deep, starting at least with the earliest machinations of the Tweed Ring, where honest graft was not a privilege but a right. This philosophy, which became deeply entrenched in many municipal governments throughout the land over roughly a seventy-year period, had been turned on its head during Prohibition. Because of the ungodly amounts of money involved and the violent extremes to which bootleggers were willing to go in order to protect their interests, the gangster had superseded the politician.

  The underworld, it appeared, could not be eliminated; the more law enforcement tried, the more lucrative these illegal activities became (the price of illicit whiskey rose by an average of 520 percent during the thirteen years of Prohibition). What could be stopped, however—or at least regulated—were those aspects of the upperworld that were in cahoots with the gangsters.

  Implicit in Prohibition’s repeal was an unwritten directive. “All right,” the government said to its people, “you can have your booze. But the graft, corruption, and criminal subjugation of the System must come to an end.”

  Thus began an assault on the alliance between the gangster and the politician—a relationship that was at the heart of the Irish American underworld. The battle had been initiated even before Prohibition was repealed, back in 1928, following the murder of Arnold Rothstein. Most mob hits were usually professional contract jobs, conducted in such a way that there would be no serious investigation. The Rothstein murder was different. He’d been shot during a card game; many believed it had been some kind of weird accident. In any event, because no one in the underworld had authorized Rothstein’s killing, no one stood in the way of a formal investigation.

  Even a cursory examination of Rothstein’s life was bound to lead in a number of incriminating directions. Like Big Tim Sullivan and King Mike McDonald, Rothstein’s criminal authority was based on a basic principle: The man who gets criminals out of jail in a time of need is the man who controls criminals. Rothstein’s role as a bail bondsman, more than anything else, was the source of his power. It was said that he owned virtually every judge in the magistrate’s court. After his murder, this fact was prominently reported in practically every newspaper in town, embarrassing many judges who were named, and led to a statewide investigation.

  Franklin Roosevelt, then governor of New York, was the first to establish a panel to investigate corruption in the magistrate’s court. To oversee the investigation, Roosevelt approved the appointment of retired judge Samuel Seabury, an upright, patrician, septuagenarian who was no friend of Tammany Hall. An Episcopalian by birth, he was the son of a professor of canon law at the General Theological Seminary. Seabury insisted on still being referred to as Judge, even though he left the Court of Appeals in 1916. With his pince-nez spectacles, white hair parted in the middle, and aloof, superior air, Seabury epitomized the WASP crusader who carried a banner of righteousness as his main weapon.

  Roosevelt knew exactly what he was doing. Though he had not yet formally announced his candidacy for president, it was common knowledge that he was running. His biggest rival for the Democratic nomination, also as yet unannounced, was Al Smith, who had run in 1928 as the first Catholic candidate for president in the nation’s history and lost to Herbert Hoover. A Manhattanite of Irish descent, Smith was Tammany Hall’s choice to run again in 1932. Through the Seabury Investigation, as the magistrate’s probe became known, Roosevelt held Al Smith’s viability as an opponent in the palm of his hands. If Tammany’s criminal underpinnings were exposed, Smith would be tarnished and forced out of the race.

  Roosevelt was smart enough to stay out of the picture. Safely ensconced in Albany, he merely set Seabury loose, allowing him free reign in his investigations, which soon led the judge and his panel to an inevitable target: the NYPD. Everyone knew many cops were on the take to one degree or another. Even so, ears perked up when a low-life criminal named “Chile” Acuna took the stand during public hearings and admitted that he and others worked regularly with plain-clothes officers to set up innocent women on prostitution charges—in order to shake them down for money.

  “This is how it worked,” the diminutive, Chilean-born stool pigeon told a packed courtroom. “I went into a whorehouse. The vice cops and I set our watches together. They would give me a five or ten dollar bill in marked money, whatever it cost. I went into the house and had a woman or girl, whoever was available. I’d go into a room so that when the officers came in I would be in a compromising position with the girl. I would also see if she had any marks on her body, so that if the officers arrived late, and we were already dressed, they could identify her in court and say that they had seen her undressed and that they had seen those marks on her body. Then they arrested her, shook down the house [for a cash payment], and brought the girl to court the next day. The magistrate asked me if I gave her any money. I said ‘five dollars, your Honor, marked. I found the money under her pillow.’”

  In a slightly more sophisticated operation, which the witness called “the doctor’s racket,” Acuna, posing as a patient, entered an office while the doctor was out and demanded immediate treatment for some fictitious ailment. Over the nurse’s protests, he placed money in a conspicuous place in the office and began to undress. Just as he dropped his pants, the cops would burst in and arrest the nurse for prostitution. This was followed by the suggestion that a cash payment might make the phony case go away.

  There was another scam called the “landlady racket,” where innocent landladies were falsely arrested for running a house of prostitution. But when all else failed, the vice squad would simply swoop down on Harlem, break into people’s apartments, and make random arrests of women. The magistrates, who in some cases were in on the scam, chose to believe the cops rather than the innocent women charged as prostitutes. If a woman refused or was unable to make a payoff, she might languish in jail for up to a hundred days. Sometimes, testified Acuna, these false arrests were made to meet a precinct house quota. If the vice squad members didn’t maintain cash flow, their supervisors would reduce them in rank or have them transferred to an undesirable precinct.

  Acuna named names—fifty policemen and vice detectives in all. He was ridiculed in the press as “Chili Acuna the Human Spittoona,” but his testimony was a revelation. Some of the houses of prostitution who paid money were connected to saloons. Acuna
collected thousands of dollars a month from speakeasy owners. He shared these payoffs with high-ranking officers from the West Sixty-eighth Street precinct station in Manhattan. It wasn’t long before Seabury’s investigation ensnared a number of these officers. By the fall of 1931, a parade of vice sergeants, captains, and inspectors had been called to explain how they had accumulated so much money—in some cases six-figure bank accounts on salaries ranging from $3,000 to $10,000 a year. The most enlightening of these witnesses was Thomas M. Farley, sheriff of New York County, president of the Thomas M. Farley Association, boss of the 14th Assembly District, and Tammany Hall sachem. During Farley’s testimony it was revealed that, in 1929, he had deposited $83,000 in cash on a salary of $8,500.

  “Where did you keep these monies that you had saved?” asked Judge Seabury.

  Farley answered that he kept his cash in a tin box, which he kept in a safe in his house. He had occasionally removed the cash and deposited it in increments in three different banks.

  “Now, in 1930,” asked the Judge, “where did the extra cash come from, Sheriff?”

  “Well, that is—my salary check is in there.”

  “No, Sheriff, your salary checks are exclusive of the cash deposits which during the year you deposited in those three banks.”

  Farley chuckled, “Well, that came from the good box I had.”

  “Kind of a magic box,” said Seabury.

  “It was a wonderful box.”

  “A wonderful box,” agreed the Judge. “What did you have to do—rub the lock with a little gold and open it to find more money?”

  “I wish I could,” said Farley.

  The testimony of “Tin Box” Farley was underscored by a half dozen other police officials who admitted to having similar magic boxes filled with cash at home hidden in safes, in closets, or under their beds. The momentary levity provided by the tin box brigade was abruptly shattered when, in the midst of the hearings, the body of an important witness, Vivian Gordon, was discovered in Van Cortland Park in the Bronx. The red-haired, thirty-one-year-old divorcee had been strangled with a clothesline. Only a few days before, the woman had been questioned in private by Seabury investigators; she had testified that she’d been framed by a member of the police department’s vice squad. Gordon was scheduled to appear again and provide even more damaging evidence about the police who had falsely arrested her for prostitution. After her body was discovered, Vivian Gordon’s distraught sixteen-year-old-daughter committed suicide.

  Chief among the suspects in the Gordon murder was Andrew G. McLaughlin, the vice cop who had arrested her for soliciting and caused her to be convicted of prostitution. At first, McLaughlin could not be reached because he was all too conveniently on vacation in Bermuda. When he returned, the cocky McLaughlin smugly told reporters that “this whole Seabury mess” was a farce; he would willingly take the stand and defend the actions of the vice squad.

  When called before Judge Seabury, McLaughlin came down with a sudden case of policeman’s amnesia. He couldn’t recall his arrest of any woman named Gordon or even whether she was black or white.

  “Well,” said Seabury, “can you tell me this: How is it that you managed to bank $35,800.51 in two years despite the fact your salary as a member of the vice squad is exactly $3,000 per annum?”

  To this and all remaining questions, the vice cop took the Fifth.

  After a departmental trial, McLaughlin was fired for making false arrests and refusing to answer questions at the Seabury hearings. But there was never any evidence linking him directly to the Vivian Gordon murder, and the crime went unsolved.

  Dirty cops and dead witnesses were only the beginning. As the Seabury investigation dragged on over two years and three public sessions, bail bondsmen, judges, and assistant district attorneys were implicated. It seemed as if the proverbial rock had been lifted, and the ground below was crawling with maggots. It was only a matter of time before the trail led to the top.

  During his term and a half in office, Jimmy Walker, the Night Mayor of New York, had mostly led a charmed existence. A whirling dervish of the Jazz Age, he seemed to embody the times in which he lived. He had a mistress, Betty Compton, a vivacious, uninhibited, brown-eyed dancer twenty-three years his junior. His wife, Allie, was aware of the affair; her husband and his paramour were a regular item in the gossip columns, sighted in nightclubs and restaurants all over town. Allie remained the dutiful wife, spending most of her time alone in the mayor’s mansion, until events finally overwhelmed her talents for self-abnegation.

  Beau James was a creation of Tammany Hall, designated for the job of mayor by Grand Sachem Charles Murphy. Boss Murphy would die before Walker was elected, but he recognized in the charming, witty, and politically undistinguished state senator from Greenwich Village a man who would preserve the status quo while waltzing above the fray. Walker himself memorialized this philosophy with one of his many critiques of the Goo Goos, or Good Government reformers who were the bane of Tammany Hall. “A reformer,” said Walker, “is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass bottom boat”—implying that, in the real world, a politician must know how to look the other way when circumstances required it.

  Walker’s ability to look the other way, for a time, was a big part of his charm. Prohibition necessitated having political leaders who were believed to be men of moral integrity without being moralists. Walker may have cultivated the image of a Broadway star, but, like so many other Irish American politicians, he maintained an almost mystical connection with the little guy. One of his biggest accomplishments was arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve the five-cent subway fare. Mostly, he appeared at public functions, made wisecracks to reporters, and provided a kind of gaiety that was infectious. He spent more time at prize fights and in speakeasies (his drink of choice was a Black Velvet, a mix of champagne and Guinness stout) than he did in his office. When a rival politician balked at raising Walker’s mayoral salary from $25,000 to $40,000, Walker quipped, “Why, that’s cheap. Imagine what it would cost if I worked full-time.”

  In July 1930, Walker and Compton were present during a police raid of a gambling house in Montauk, Long Island. As the gambling patrons scattered like cockroaches, the mayor explained to the federal coppers who he was. They let him go, but his mistress was taken into custody and held for two hours before being released. For most politicians, this incident would have been a career-altering scandal. For Walker, it was in keeping with his rakish nature. The public tittered and looked the other way—for a time, anyway—until the various murders, shakedowns, and overall civic corruption began to give off a foul stench that seemed all the more unseemly during a time of food lines, soup kitchens, and makeshift Hoovervilles.

  In early 1932, the mayor was called to appear before the Seabury panel, whose mandate had been broadened to encompass every department and official in the city. Walker had been served with a subpoena calling for all records of his personal financial transactions from January 1, 1926 to May 25, 1932. It was an astounding request. Jimmy ridiculed the investigation in the press, went on vacation, and made himself generally unavailable until the day of reckoning could not be forestalled any longer.

  On May 25, the mayor—dapper as always, with a cigarette dangling from his lips—approached the county courthouse in lower Manhattan. A throng of spectators were gathered, many of them sympathetic to Walker. Voices called out, “Atta boy, Jimmy!” “You tell ’em, Jimmy!” “Good luck, boyo!” The mayor acknowledged the crowd by clasping his hands over his head like a jubilant prizefighter.

  Inside, the courtroom was filled with seven hundred people in a space designed to hold half that many. When Walker entered, Judge Seabury and his aides were already seated at the counsel table. The two sides did not acknowledge each other. Applause and cheers broke out for the mayor.

  Walker’s testimony, under questioning from Seabury himself, took place over two days. The mayor was feisty on the stand, and at one point said under his breath to the polit
ically ambitious Seabury, “You and Frank Roosevelt are not going to hoist yourself to the presidency over my dead body.”

  The various vice squad and magistrate scandals were embarrassing enough, but they could not be directly linked to Walker. More problematic for the mayor were his finances, which involved numerous beneficences (cash payments) from business interests that later won lucrative contracts with the city. Through cancelled checks, it was shown that some of the mayor’s side money made its way into the account of his mistress, Betty Compton. Another person who benefited from his relationship with Beau James was Dr. William H. Walker, the mayor’s older brother. In four years, Dr. Walker had deposited close to half a million dollars as a result of being given a virtual monopoly in treating patients with Workman’s Compensation matters before the city. Evidence showed that, in many cases, the bills had been padded and the government ripped off.

  Although there was no “smoking gun,” the hearings were humiliating for the mayor, mostly because his mistress and brother had been dragged into the mess. When Jimmy’s brother passed away unexpectedly not long after Walker’s appearance before the Seabury committee, the mayor fell into an uncharacteristic funk. Seabury smelled blood and went for the jugular, delivering a detailed recommendation to Governor Roosevelt that Mayor Walker be removed from office for gross improprieties and other instances of political malfeasance. While FDR brooded over Seabury’s recommendation, weighing the political ramifications vis-à-vis his own ongoing campaign for the presidency (he hoped to be nominated at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, just weeks away), Mayor Walker beat everyone to the punch. On September 1, 1932, he resigned from office.

  Ding dong, the mayor was dead.1

  The forces of reform—growing in number as the economic woes of the Depression deepened—saw in Walker’s defeat the end of “bossism” and a blow to the dark forces of the underworld. Roosevelt, in particular, reaped tremendous political benefit heading into his party’s all-important national convention. Editorial writers nationwide gave him full credit for spearheading a tough and scrupulous examination of municipal corruption in his own home state. The kudos were not lost on the Goo Goos and Tammany-haters.