by Alice Arlen
Then, late Sunday morning, with the weekend winding down, with Harry, his voice hoarse from giving interviews, though still giving more interviews—on his way back to Cain Hoy, Patterson took a plane north, to New York, Falaise, and Newsday.
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A NOTE HERE about the DeKoning story, which was about to reoccupy the attentions of Newsday’s staff and returning editor, with such consequential results; “reoccupy” for the reason that this would be the second go-round between the newspaper and Nassau County’s current hiding-in-plain-sight gangster.
In fact Nassau County, almost an hour’s distance by rail or road from the fleshpots of the big city, with its population mix of residential and small business, might seem like an unlikely venue for crime and criminals of any substance, which presumably was why, in the late 1940s, William DeKoning had begun setting up shop, right there in Greater Hempstead, far from the prying eyes of the FBI and the interest of New York’s newspapers; his “shop” in this instance being the rapidly growing body of union labor in the construction trades on eastern Long Island. As one of the nation’s less visible labor bosses, riding the wave of the postwar boom as well as a surge in union membership, the bullet-headed, bespectacled, notoriously violent Bill DeKoning (his favored form of keeping people in line was having acid thrown at them), duly elected president of Local 138 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Engineers, soon controlled thousands of dues-paying members in the Long Island building trades, gradually broadening his reach by taking over union labor at the popular harness-racing tracks springing up outside New York.
Newsday was well aware of DeKoning’s emerging presence on the local scene, but the paper’s first responses had been fairly muted, even docile, befitting a regional daily with no crime “desk,” no experienced crime or labor-racketeering staff. When, in April 1949, with much municipal fanfare, DeKoning personally inaugurated a huge, newly constructed, bar-restaurant-entertainment complex, nicely called the Labor Lyceum, financed by union dues and supposedly owned by union workers, Newsday had cheerfully joined in the fanfare, approvingly reporting on the “labor leader’s” charitable activities, and his sponsorship of community youth organizations, with a fairly straight face. One of DeKoning’s leading local supporters for a while was none other than Newsday’s eccentric, obstreperous managing editor, Alan Hathway, among whose numerous, almost Dickensian defects was a disposition to chronic indebtedness, mainly a result of excessive drinking, leading him to gamble away his salary (usually more than his salary), leaving him continually on the lookout for a quick fix, a deal, any deal—even a deal with someone he knew to be as crooked as DeKoning, who smoothly offered him a paid position on the board of the Labor Lyceum.
Hathway was about to accept the offer, would have accepted it but for his own boss, Patterson, who said no: How could Newsday’s managing editor be on the board of an outfit such as the Labor Lyceum, whether legal or not, which the paper was bound to cover, supposedly dispassionately? Hathway’s next move was to join a “private investing group” about to begin construction on a rival attraction, a sports arena; this edifice, the Hempstead Garden, was eventually built, but with so much interference and active obstruction by DeKoning’s union troublemakers, with so much consequent loss of time, money, and personal aggravation to investor Hathway that the editor decided it was time to go after DeKoning in the paper.
In April 1950 Hathway, who normally drank his lunch late in the afternoon at the nearby Anchor Inn, asked his boss, “Miss P.,” as he and many of the staff referred to her, to take a proper lunch meeting with him for a discussion of business. As described in Robert F. Keeler’s fine book Newsday, the two met at the also nearby, more-or-less Italian restaurant Chez Nino, Alicia’s favorite place in Garden City; Patterson at her usual round table in the far corner, her spaniel at her feet, eyeglasses perched atop her head, puffing on Lucky Strikes. Hathway said he wanted to go after DeKoning, run an exposé. Patterson asked him—not was it personal, since everything with Hathway was somehow personal—but how much of it was personal. A bit, but not all, not even most, Hathway replied. DeKoning was a crook, he told her, a huge crook; he cheated his own people, he cheated everyone. If he didn’t get his way, his goons beat you up; if he really didn’t like you, there was that acid thing. Then Hathway told her, as she remembered it: “This could be the big one for us.” Patterson had the background, if not the hands-on experience, to know what he meant, that the DeKoning story, wherever it led, might have the heft, the serious journalistic dimensions to put Newsday on the map as a big-story newspaper. On the other hand there was no shortage of risks and caveats, not least among them that Bill DeKoning controlled most of the union labor in Newsday’s territory, a nest it might be unwise and actually dangerous to disturb. In the end the deciding factor was probably that both Patterson and Hathway shared the love of a good fight. “Are you tretching me?” she asked him at one point (“tretching” was one of Joe Patterson’s old-timey slang words for being treacherous, a sneak, a low-down rat, and so on). Hathway said no, in fact gave her his word, literally his word; the two of them were like that. Then they shook hands on it.
Even so, Newsday’s investigation of DeKoning had a slow start and modest beginnings, given that Hathway’s putative anticrime task force consisted of no more than a single novice reporter: Helen Dudar, a twenty-three-year-old Columbia University night-school graduate, whose journalism experience was limited to a few months covering petty crime arraignments at the nearby county courthouse. But Hathway, for all his wayward personal habits, had an old-fashioned news editor’s gift for making do with what the Lord provided. In the case of earnest, hardworking young Helen Dudar, he took her seriously, encouraged her, and—more important—gave her the tip that set the coverage in motion. Go back to the courthouse, he suggested, check through the real estate title records, and see who really owns the Labor Lyceum. After many days grubbing through the haystack of the county’s filing cabinets, Dudar eventually found the right needle: proof that DeKoning’s grandiose Lyceum was owned, not as claimed by the members of Local 138, International Brotherhood of Engineers, but instead by one Rose Mary DeKoning, the labor boss’s wife.
Dudar’s first piece, which appeared on May 11, 1950, opened on a fine combative note (with doubtless a stylistic assist or two from Hathway): “From the lavish Uniondale estate he publicly dedicated to labor and privately dedicated to his wife, pugnacious Bill DeKoning rules a kingdom rich in the unnatural resources of the strong arm and the double-barreled threat.” The article then went on to delineate the far-flung reach of DeKoning’s empire, which controlled not only several large Long Island construction unions but also workers at the popular Roosevelt Raceway. Two weeks later a second Newsday piece spelled out DeKoning’s ties to another notoriously corrupt and brutal labor leader, Joey Fay. This was followed by three more full-length stories, including first-person accounts by members of DeKoning’s racetrack union, which told how DeKoning shortchanged and exploited his workers, had them beaten and worse when they complained. “Bill DeKoning is a hated man, but the hatred simmers in dark and silent corners,” was how Dudar’s five-piece series concluded, though it was a series without a byline, since (at a time when labor reporters were being set on fire, doused with acid, and blown up in their cars) Patterson and Hathway wished to protect their young reporter from retribution.
In many ways Newsday’s DeKoning exposé was impressive, certainly for a midmarket newspaper; it was well promoted across eastern Long Island, widely read and talked about for a while, and even prompted a number of tips to the newsroom about other DeKoning crimes and misdemeanors. But the series wasn’t really a game changer for the newspaper; its impact was general, almost impressionistic. DeKoning was obviously a thug, a bully, a bad guy, but after five separate articles nothing new had been turned up that could be made to stick, nothing substantial enough to get a rise out of law enforcement; even the momentarily satisfying revelation as to the true ownership of the Labor
Lyceum didn’t “have legs”; it might be shady, shabby, possibly contemptible, but it wasn’t illegal. The day after the series concluded, Patterson published an editorial describing it as “a preliminary series of reports that have only begun to scratch the surface of DeKoning’s corroding influence,” confidently announcing that “additional chapters about the public and private life of Long Island’s labor czar are in preparation, and will shortly appear in early issues of this newspaper.” But none did, at least not as advertised. Newsday continued to cover DeKoning, though mainly as a background figure in periodic labor dustups, and of course as patron of those local youth charities; there were no major news breaks, no more big crime stories, no “additional chapters.” After two years of press quietude or inattention, in fact, it looked as if Long Island’s tough-guy labor racketeer had managed to slip back into the shadows, or at least out of range of the only newspaper that had been trying to nail him; while Newsday for its part seemed to have let the DeKoning ball drop, the moment slip by.
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WE’RE NOW BACK IN MAY 1953, with Patterson returned to her desk after a nearly four-month absence. By coincidence or luck, the first week she was back a piece of DeKoning-related news came in over the proverbial transom. A young investigator on the New York State Crime Commission had noticed, in the jumble of state prison visitation records, an interesting anomaly: One of the “regulars,” who paid a monthly visit to the convicted gangster Joey Fay at Attica, was none other than William DeKoning, whose consistent mantra over the years had been a pious disavowal of any personal connection to organized crime. Since nobody on the State Crime Commission seemed interested in DeKoning, the investigator, Bob Greene, funneled the material over to Newsday, which remained the only news organization to date that had ever questioned the union boss’s legitimacy. Greene’s file landed on Hathway’s desk, who told Patterson about it. The two of them then invited the investigator out to Garden City for a meeting, after which Greene spent three afternoons dictating the contents of his DeKoning notebooks to Patterson’s secretary, Dottie Holdsworth. One week later Newsday broke its new DeKoning story, a carefully documented account of DeKoning’s extensive, month-after-month, time-consuming, unmistakable involvement with one of the country’s most notorious criminals. It was the big story Patterson had blithely promised two years before; Newsday then followed up with two related stories, tying DeKoning even closer to Joey Fay’s operations. But then, once again as before, DeKoning seemed to slip out of the spotlight, literally escape, by announcing his retirement and relocation to Florida, just another working-class guy moving south to the sunshine, though leaving his son back home in charge of union business. On August 12, however, a classic big-city shootout took place, though not in New York but thirty miles north, far beyond the city limits, at suburban Yonkers Raceway, another of the new trotting tracks. As first reported by the Associated Press, a hitman by the name of “Snakes” Lewis had apparently gunned down another powerful labor leader, Tommy Allen, and was then himself killed in the proverbial hail of bullets by state troopers. Newsday picked up the AP story and then started digging further, finding all sorts of links and parallels, in union negotiating patterns, strongarm tactics, and so on, between the faraway Yonkers track and nearby Roosevelt Raceway. At Patterson’s and Hathway’s instigation, Newsday reporter Stan Brooks began looking into the tangled and covert records of ownership of the two trotting tracks, and soon found DeKoning clearly involved with both of them, not only as union organizer but as a stockholder. On a tip Patterson herself interviewed Long Island Republican congressman J. Russell Sprague, who, after initial denials, was also revealed to be a secret shareholder in the profitable racetracks.
For much of late summer and early fall, Newsday pounded away at Bill DeKoning’s “web of thuggery and corruption,” and this time the stories seemed to have the requisite heft, the reporting finally had traction. What ultimately changed the game was that the New York newspapers woke up to the fact of their being scooped, on the kind of story they were supposed to do best, and started to pay attention. In fact, the city’s big afternoon paper, the World-Telegram did more than pay attention; it came out with a dramatic banner headline: “$345,000 Track Extortion Mulcts Roosevelt Workers” over a story that basically recycled material from Newsday’s original 1951 series, adding some guesswork arithmetic of its own. Newsday then countered with three more freshly reported stories, which finally prompted the Nassau County district attorney to announce an investigation. On October 7, six weeks after the Snakes Lewis murder, a grand jury in Mineola indicted William DeKoning and nine of his aides for extortion and conspiracy. The next day Governor Thomas Dewey of New York announced the appointment of a special commission to investigate DeKoning, whom he described as “the wealthiest labor leader in the world.”
When Newsday reported these satisfying developments to its Long Island readers, it also made sure to remind them, as well as the newspaper rajas over in Manhattan, that it was Newsday that had been first with the story. Accordingly its promotions often repeated a quote from DeKoning’s own lawyer, about how the big-city papers had discovered the DeKoning scandal: “They must have read it in Newsday, they’ve been printing these things for years.” But to make certain that there were no mistakes or misunderstandings on that score, in other words to prevent the late-to-the-party New York papers from grabbing the credit, Patterson asked Hathway to contact Richard Clurman, the young Time editor who had earlier written the “Press” piece on Newsday, and make sure he knew of Newsday’s long history with the DeKoning story. Hathway sent Clurman a three-page letter outlining in detail, and with relevant dates, Newsday’s four-year history of pursuing DeKoning, and Time’s subsequent piece was a major vindication for the Long Island paper. “Newsday knew what it was talking about,” Time declared in its influential “Press” section. “Unheeded by other papers or by state officials, Newsday had been loudly hammering away for more than three years at corruption at the Long Island track in Nassau County. Last week Newsday’s long campaign finally paid off with a blaze of Page One stories in the Manhattan dailies on one of the biggest state scandals in years.”
The governor’s State Commission on Crime began its hearings later in the fall, and before the end of the year a grand jury had issued major criminal indictments against DeKoning, his son, and five associates. The DeKoning regime was effectively kaput, as Patterson would say. Not one to be shy about her paper’s role in the affair, on January 20, 1954, Patterson signed and sent a letter to the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, accompanying a massive file of Newsday news-clippings going all the way back to Helen Dudar’s original series, submitting the paper’s DeKoning coverage for a Pulitzer Prize.
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THE PULITZER PRIZES were announced later in the year, in May, and Newsday did indeed win one of the coveted awards: the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service, one of five important journalism prizes handed out by the twelve-man jury, which included some of the nation’s most august editors as well as Joseph Pulitzer’s son: a jury, it might be added, operating at such a lofty level of discrimination that it didn’t deign to give an award for fiction that year.
Then as now, the Pulitzers were not one of the showier ceremonies: letters went out in the mail to the winners, followed by a press release and later by a lunch at the Columbia University Faculty Club. On the other hand this was a different, decidedly quieter time in the matter of public awards ceremonies; which is to say there were precious few of them, almost none: no Emmys, Grammys, Tonys, Golden Globes, country music medalists, and so on; Hollywood’s Academy Awards existed but weren’t yet familiarly called the Oscars, and were usually handed out in a hotel dining room, with only West Coast television coverage, often too late to make the East Coast morning papers. Thus the Pulitzer awards made a fairly large splash in a far smaller pool. Patterson tried to be a nongrandstanding boss, sending Hathway and a handful of reporters to pick up the award at the offici
al lunch, signing an editorial giving credit to her managing editor and “the team.” But there was no hiding her unmistakable pride of place in the proceedings. Much as she thought of Newsday as intrinsically hers, despite Harry’s owning the extra 2 percent that made it legally his, so she came to regard it as her Pulitzer, no matter how often she reminded herself in public to say ours, the team’s, the staff’s, the paper’s.
Then, as if a Pulitzer Prize wasn’t enough of a step up in the great world, came word from Rockefeller Center, headquarters of the Time-Life empire, that Time was considering her—not the team, not Harry Guggenheim with her—her, as a potential subject for a cover story. Only fifty-two covers every year, each one with an artist-commissioned, full-face portrait on the cover, and each subject—with rare exceptions such as Hitler and Stalin—an exemplar of the best and brightest in the nation or in the world. Of course almost always men: prime ministers, senators, generals, important scientists, executives who ran the big car companies, occasionally a writer, especially if he had just won a Nobel Prize. Soon came a formal letter from Time’s editor: Would Alicia Patterson be a consenting subject? Would she be willing to furnish a list of people who knew her, old school roommates, distant relatives, friends, acquaintances anywhere in the world, whom Time’s vast network of reporters and researchers could then seek out and interview? She would.
Not surprisingly the impetus for the profile had come from Dick Clurman, the twenty-nine-year-old editor of Time’s “Press” department, who had authored the magazine’s first piece on Newsday and its editor, and whose help Patterson had lately sought on the DeKoning story. In those days of the great magazines, a Time cover story inevitably meant a full-court press for the cover subject, often lasting many months. First among the numerous Time representatives to appear in Patterson’s life was a distinguished Hungarian photographer, with several assistants, who spent the better part of a week at Falaise shooting dozens of rolls of film, which were then turned into hundreds of prints, which were then sent off to the cover artist, in this case the distinguished realist Boris Chaliapin, for a portrait that might well take months to complete. As soon as the photographer left, a tall, gaunt, scholarly female researcher arrived (a graduate of both Bryn Mawr and the Sorbonne), who dogged Patterson from Falaise to Garden City and back again until she had extracted roughly sixty names of contacts for Time’s national and foreign correspondents to interview.