Paddy Whacked

by T. J. English

  The Tiger had spawned many imitators. Now, bloodied and weakened, the Tiger was looking more and more like a seriously wounded animal. Ambitious prosecutors everywhere commenced to sharpen their knives.

  Revenge of the Goo Goos

  For many decades, the Machine had depended on men like Jimmy Walker, a public official who projected an image of viability while the world around him seethed and sizzled with moral turpitude. Walker was the smiley face out front, a figurehead who, like the Tin Pan Alley songwriter he had once been, was supposed to create an entertaining diversion while the organization’s lesser lights fleeced the city’s coffers. (Because of his high profile, a man like Walker could not be seen amassing huge amounts of money; he was not going to get rich.) It was the Night Mayor’s job not to get too deeply enmeshed in the dirty dealings of the ward system—enough to be compromised and forced into resignation, perhaps, but not so much that he might wind up dead or in jail.

  Not all Tammany acolytes were so lucky.

  Municipal corruption was an essential element of the underworld, and it was fueled by money, plain and simple. Somebody had to deliver that money from Point A to Point B. Furthermore, someone had to take the responsibility for seeing that services were rendered in exchange for these surreptitious cash payments. Whoever took the money was going to be held responsible. It was a dirty business, not to mention a dangerous one. Over the past decade, judges, corrupt cops, lawyers, and all kinds of ward officials had disappeared, their bodies found later or not at all. It was the price of doing business in the Irish American underworld.

  One man who walked this tightrope with more skill than most was Jimmy Hines. Since the earliest days of Prohibition, and even before, Hines had fulfilled his duties as the city’s preeminent bag man, or emissary, between Tammany Hall and the mob. In many ways, his Monongahela Democratic Club on Manhattan’s West Side was the epicenter of the Irish Mob in New York. And everyone knew it. In fact, with his Spencer Tracy-like white hair and piercing, mercurial blue eyes, the longtime alderman from the 11th Assembly District became quite possibly the most revered man in the entire Tammany universe because of his willingness to take on the riskiest responsibilities. He was considered to be the person who made it possible for everyone to get over, which placed him in a rarified position.

  In mid-1933, with Prohibition finished and Mayor Walker banished into exile, Hines was approached by perhaps the only major gangster in town with whom he hadn’t yet formed an alliance: Dutch Schultz. The Dutchman knew all about “the Old Man,” or “Mister Fix-It,” as Hines was variously known. Schultz knew that Hines had played a formative role in helping Owney Madden and Big Bill Dwyer establish the city’s first major bootlegging empire. He knew that Hines had also been paid by Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky to promote certain aldermen who were friendly to the Syndicate. And he knew that, in 1932, Hines had attended the Democratic convention in Chicago and shared a suite of rooms at the swanky Drake Hotel with another prominent underworld figure, Frank Costello. Schultz knew this because he, too, had attended the convention.

  That was twelve months ago; much had changed in the past year, with prosecutors zeroing in on some of Prohibition’s most renowned former bootleggers. Most famously, Scarface Al Capone was nailed on tax evasion charges and sentenced to prison in 1933. Waxey Gordon, the Beer Baron of New Jersey, also got himself prosecuted on tax charges. During his trial, it was shown that in 1930, Gordon’s income from beer alone was $1,338,000; in 1931 he brought home $1,026,000. And that was documented income. Everyone knew his real net worth was much higher. For the first time, the public at large began to get a clear picture of just how much the bootleggers had taken in during the years of the Noble Experiment.

  Dutch Schultz made a lot of money, too, but his payroll was sizable, and he had legal expenses. He’d been indicted for tax code violations of his own in Upstate New York; while he would eventually beat the charges, the lawyers’ fees and related costs were enormous. He’d been forced to come up with new revenue streams, which led him to muscle in on the lucrative policy rackets in Harlem.

  Thanks to average working stiffs and grannies wagering untold dimes and nickels, the numbers game was enormously profitable, but it was also risky. Aggressive law enforcement could stop the racket in its tracks by disrupting or shutting down known policy banks—the warehouses, apartment rooms, and empty storefronts where betting slips were registered and proceeds tabulated. Thus the numbers racket could not function without political protection. That was where Jimmy Hines came in.2

  The first place Hines and Schultz met was well outside the bounds of Hines’s uptown barony and a long way from Harlem. The district leader waited on a street corner on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, underneath the El tracks. The Dutchman drove up in a bulletproof Caddy with his right hand man, George Weinberg, and his lawyer. Hines climbed in the back seat. Schultz introduced everyone and, as they drove aimlessly around town, got right to the point. In his typically blunt manner, he made it clear to Hines that the biggest problem with his policy business was “the goddamned, no good honest cop” who wouldn’t take “the ice” and kept coming around making the same pinches over and over. It was hard to keep things running smoothly when the little people, the runners and controllers, were being hauled off the streets and locked up.

  Years later, on a witness stand in county court, George Weinberg recalled this conversation between Schultz and Hines in the back of the Dutchman’s Caddy. It was Weinberg who explained to the district leader exactly what the Combination needed: “I told [Hines] that in order to be able to run our business and bring it up the right way, we would have to protect the controllers that are working for us. We would have to protect them from going to jail. And if we got any big arrests that would hurt our business, we would want them dismissed in Magistrate’s Court so that they wouldn’t have to go downtown [a reference to the sometimes tougher three-judge Court of Special Sessions]. I explained to him that we did not mind the small arrests but if we got any large arrests we would want them dismissed in Magistrate’s Court to show the people in Harlem that are working for us that we had the right kind of protection up there, and that we would want to protect them from going to jail.”

  Hines’s reply to Weinberg and the Dutchman that day was, “Well, gentlemen, you’ve come to the right place.”

  It was agreed that Weinberg would pay the Old Man fifteen hundred dollars a week. In addition, Schultz would give the district leader a down payment of one thousand dollars right there on the spot. From this point forward, James J. Hines was on the payroll; he was a key member of the Combination.

  The district leader’s involvement paid dividends almost immediately. Policy arrests by the police department’s Sixth Division in Harlem dropped from twenty a day down to eight and then to four thanks to the clout of Jimmy Hines. If for any reason the heat came back on and arrests started going back up, George Weinberg picked up the phone and called Hines. Mister Fix-It then picked up the phone and called his friend, John F. Curry, Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, who had risen to the top with the backing of Hines’s Monongahela political club. Boss Curry picked up his phone and called James S. Bolan, his hand-picked police commissioner. Bolan called Inspector John O’Brien, head of the Confidential Squad. By the time all the calls were completed, the arresting officers in Harlem were reassigned to a precinct or unit based far out in goatsville. That was the power of the Irish Mob in a nutshell.

  Hines didn’t stop with the police department. Many magistrate judges met the district leader at his spacious apartment at 444 Central Park West. The words he used with the magistrates, in general, were identical to the request he specifically made one afternoon to Judge Hulon Capshaw.

  “I have a policy case, a very important one, coming up before you that I’d like you to take care of,” Hines said to the judge at his apartment.

  Magistrate Capshaw replied, “Haven’t failed you yet, have I? Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”

 
Having political leaders, police commissioners, and judges in your back pocket might seem comprehensive, but Hines, a man whose long career was devoted to manipulating the levers of power within the System, left nothing to chance. Through George Weinberg, he funneled thirty thousand dollars directly from the Combination into the election fund of the prospective Manhattan District Attorney, a man Hines called “stupid, respectable, and my man.” Jimmy’s man was elected, and he made sure that no major organized crime prosecution went forward without first consulting the white-haired commissar from the 11th Assembly District.

  That might have been the whole story, with Hines getting wealthy by facilitating underworld activities with Schultz the same way he had with Madden, Dwyer, Rothstein, and others. But with the Dutchman, for some reason, the Old Man crossed the line. He socialized with Schultz to a greater degree than he would have with his other gangster associates during the halcyon days of Prohibition. Over many months, Hines and Schultz were often seen together at the swanky Embassy Club on West Fifty-seventh Street, where they dined with their wives. The two men went to boxing matches and the racetrack together. Hines was a frequent visitor to the Dutchman’s riding stables in Connecticut, while Schultz and his associates were regulars at the Monongahela club, where cash payments were exchanged. All of this made it exceedingly easy for prosecutors to link Schultz with the district leader when the inevitable heat came down from above.

  The man who came after Hines was Thomas E. Dewey. A professional mob buster who had been a U.S. attorney, special prosecutor, and district attorney, Dewey first set his sights on Hines’s benefactor, the Dutchman. Hot off his conviction of Waxey Gordon and an indictment that would soon lead to the prosecution and conviction of Lucky Luciano, Dewey saw Schultz as his ticket to a career in electoral politics (Dewey eventually became governor of New York and, in 1948, the Republican Party nominee for president). In early 1935, he indicted Schultz on charges relating to his control of the numbers racket. The Dutchman was livid, and he began complaining loudly to high-ranking members of the Syndicate that Dewey must be taken out. The Syndicate would not sanction such a hit, fearing that the murder of someone as visible as Dewey might bring down on them the wrath of the entire U.S. government.

  “Fuck you,” was Schultz’s response. “Maybe I’ll remove the cocksucker my own damn self.”

  The Dutchman’s temper and loud mouth got him killed; on October 23, 1935, a team of gunmen entered the Palace Steak House in Newark, New Jersey and filled him with an assortment of high-caliber bullets. Schultz lingered for two days, mumbling a series of delusional nonsequiturs (“A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kin….” “Mother is the best bet, and don’t let Satan draw you too fast….”) before dying in his hospital bed.

  Unfortunately for Jimmy Hines, the gangland elimination of his business partner and friend did not lessen his own problems. In fact, Dewey, the crusading and ambitious district attorney, merely shifted his prosecutorial focus from Schultz to Hines, whom he identified as “a coconspirator and indispensable functionary of the Schultz organization.” Dewey had the goods. In the wake of the Dutchman’s murder, his sidekick, George Weinberg, turned state’s evidence. Weinberg had been the primary go-between for the Schultz organization and Hines, often meeting the district leader at his Central Park West apartment and political clubhouse.

  The case against Hines was unprecedented, the first in which a prominent political leader was prosecuted for being a high-ranking member of a criminal organization. Dewey was not just saying that Jimmy Hines was a politician who had committed crimes; he was saying, clearly and unequivocally, that Jimmy Hines was every bit as much a gangster as Dutch Schultz.

  After many long delays, the People v. James J. Hines got underway in August 1938. George Weinberg took the stand and spilled the beans on Pops, as Weinberg referred to Hines. Four days into the trial, the judge declared a mistrial on a technicality. Dewey was not deterred. He reindicted Hines on the exact same charges. In January 1939, a second trial got underway, with one major difference. On the eve of his testimony in the second trial, George Weinberg, feeling depressed and remorseful, blew his brains out with a revolver. The dramatic suicide was a potential disaster for the prosecution, but their case was saved when the judge ruled that Weinberg’s testimony from the first trial could be entered into the record.

  Hines was cooked. Not only was Weinberg’s devastating testimony used, but a host of witnesses—including John Curry, the Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, police commissioner Bolan, and even Hines’s hand-picked district attorney—took the stand and gave details on how Hines had gone about establishing the most corrupt political/criminal network since the earliest days of the Tweed Ring.

  Throughout the proceedings, Hines rarely spoke. Unlike Jimmy Walker, who was the public face of the Machine, Hines was the ultimate man behind the man. He rarely gave speeches or talked to the press. He did not sponsor legislation; that was not his function. He was a money man who remained behind the scenes. Therefore, he did not take the stand and testify on his own behalf. As noted by a news service reporter covering the trial: “[Hines] sits in the well of the court and listens closely. And he looks like a paternal father who is watching his kids cut up. His tiny mouth is drawn into a line, his button of a nose supports his spectacles. Sometimes he bites his lip…. When things get hot, Hines rubs his big, thick fingers across his thumb. During a lull, he looks around at gray-haired, patient, well-preserved Mrs. Hines. ‘Tired?’ he asks, and he comes over.”

  When Hines was finally found guilty on all thirteen counts of the indictment, he made a rare comment to the press. Asked by a reporter how he felt, the district leader replied, “How would you feel if you were kicked in the belly?”3

  The dramatic fall of the two Jimmys—Walker and Hines—seemed to suggest that the world had been turned upside down (they not only got the man, they got the man behind the man). For decades, the Tammany Tiger had been a force of nature that powered the Irish American underworld—in New York and beyond. The Tammany model had been copied and adapted to cities large and small. Now, with Franklin Roosevelt in the White House looking to institute a New Deal for America, a strong wind swept across the land, gaining in intensity as it went. Political reform was no longer a pipe dream to be derided and laughed at by powerful ward bosses. The Goo Goos were in charge now, and they would make the scoundrels pay.

  Kansas City Stomp

  Of all the Irish American political organizations to be dismantled during the Age of Roosevelt, none had seemed more indestructible than the Pendergast Machine of Kansas City. Located far from the urban centers of the Northeast where the Irish had first settled, the political framework that helped to transform Kansas City from a nondescript cow pasture into a bustling midwestern metropolis was remarkably similar in tone and temperament to Tammany Hall. Although it had a miniscule immigrant population (less than six percent) and an overall Irish population that never exceeded two or three percent, Kansas City was controlled by an organization that looked, sounded, and acted as if it had been hatched in South Boston or in Manhattan’s notorious Five Points. One writer analyzing Kansas City’s government noted that the names of local politicians read like the roster of a unit of the Irish Republican Army.

  For many decades, the town was run in the classic Irish American style for one reason: That was how its citizens wanted it. Kansas City had sprung up relatively late, well after the Civil War. The city’s business leaders and founding fathers were anxious to establish their town as a thriving economic outpost in the Midwest. They looked to the country’s most vibrant and rapidly growing metropolitan areas—New York, Chicago, and New Orleans—and copied what they saw as a political and economic system that delivered.

  Vice was always part of the equation. Flat, industrial, and somewhat drab, the town and surrounding area was not known for its physical beauty. If Kansas City was going to lure traveling salesmen and big spenders from Chicago, Denver, Galveston, and Minnesota—not to mention
laborers and migrant workers from the South—it needed a draw. From at least the early 1880s, that draw consisted largely of gambling parlors, dance halls, prostitution, and other forms of vice. Much of this activity was centered in a section of the city known as West Bottom, an industrial area along the banks of the Missouri River that became Kansas City’s version of the Levee District in Chicago, the French Quarter in New Orleans, or the Bowery in New York.

  By the turn of the century, West Bottom was renowned as the best vice district west of Chicago, a favored stomping ground for cowboys, travelers, transients, and townspeople alike. The area was clustered with saloons, bawdy houses, and honky tonks. Bunco and floating craps tables were everywhere, especially in the blocks around Union Station, which became the center of Kansas City’s red light tenderloin district. The American House, a multipurpose saloon that featured gambling tables and rooms upstairs for quick assignations, became the virtual City Hall for West Bottom. It was owned by Jim Pendergast, a former factory worker who became a Democratic party committeeman from the First Ward in 1887.

  Big Jim dispensed favors in the classic style, extending loans to packinghouse workers and distributing welfare to the poor, primarily in the form of bags of coal and—that old Tammany standby—holiday turkeys. His machine was built along the same lines as those in New York, Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere; the block system, as Pendergast called it, was a constellation of block captains, precinct captains, ward heelers, and aldermen, all of them on friendly terms with the boss. “That’s all there is to this ‘boss’ business—friends,” said Jim. “You can’t coerce people into doing things for you. You can’t make them vote for you. I never coerced anybody in my life…. All there is to it is having friends, doing things for people, and then later on they’ll do things for you.” This statement was standard boss fare and gave little indication that the Pendergast Machine would be described in later decades as “a state within a state, a virtual invisible government.”