After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  I guess my father wanted to hold on long enough to sell the place and recover his money. But things just got worse. One evening a particularly unpleasant group came in. Many of them had been drinking, even though this was during prohibition.

  I don’t think my father owned the place quite a year. He knew that a lot of gamblers and bootleggers came in, but he also knew that if he threw out all the undesirables, he’d be without enough customers to make any money at all. Men from the Government Printing Office, just down North Capitol Street, would come in from work, order a soft drink, and then mix in a little hard liquor from the pints in their pockets. The low point in that whole experience came one night when the city police, aware of the kinds of people who visited the establishment, made a search of the premises. Stashed in the men’s room, they found a small quantity of bootleg liquor, apparently left there by one of my father’s customers. The police took my dad to the police station and charged him with violation of the Volstead Act. He was not locked up, and the next day, when he appeared in police court with his lawyer, he explained that the liquor must have belonged to a customer and that he didn’t even know it was there. No charges were filed, but the incident embarrassed the whole family.

  There is perhaps no need to parse this account too thoroughly. How, having in the past, as we know, “failed each time,” did he have “savings” to spend “all of,” or “money” to have “sunk” into such a place? Why does Sirica find it necessary to point out that many of this unpleasant group “had been drinking, although this was during prohibition,” when his father, just five lines before, had “poured himself a drink” (without any comment from Sirica) in his “despair” over having, “as he had so often before . . . trusted someone only to be deceived”? What was the deceit?

  “He knew that a lot of bootleggers and gamblers came in”; also “men from the Government Printing Office,” who bought soft drinks (from the snack bar, presumably) and then mixed in “a little hard liquor from the pints in their pockets.” It seems almost unfair to go on. Even the elaborate formulation “one night . . . the city police, aware of the kinds of people who frequented the establishment, made a search of the premises.” One can understand not wanting to say aware of the nature of the establishment, but why put in a qualifying phrase at all? Why not just: “One night the police raided the premises”? Similarly, why a “small quantity of bootleg liquor, apparently left there by one of my father’s customers.” All these clauses and qualifiers. The next day, when his father, not having been locked up, “appeared in police court with his lawyer” and “explained that the liquor must have belonged to a customer and that he didn’t even know it was there,” any reader of ordinary intelligence and understanding realizes that the object of the story is—as it was in the McCarthy story—not to tell but to conceal something. How, as the Times editorial put it, this incident “relates to the judge himself” is not hard to fathom. Sirica was living in his father’s apartment above the poolroom, and he was employed “racking up balls for the pool players” and also as a bouncer there.

  To go back, however, to the career trajectory of John J. Sirica as he tells it. In 1926, on his third try, Sirica did manage to complete and graduate from law school. By this time, “I was tempted by the idea of becoming a professional boxer,” he writes, “since I felt more confident of my ability as a fighter than as a lawyer.”

  On the morning the bar exam was to be given I had breakfast with Morris Cafritz. I had pretty well decided to skip the bar exam and head for Florida to see my father and mother . . . .

  [Morris] knew that I was thinking about becoming a professional boxer. “Don’t be foolish,” he told me. “Even if you’re not prepared, take the exam.”

  He has already described Mr. Cafritz as a “man who advised and encouraged me a great deal,” while he was struggling through law school, and as “at the time becoming one of the most prominent and successful real-estate developers in Washington.” It is true that Morris Cafritz went on to become immensely successful in real estate in Washington—and a highly respected citizen and generous benefactor of charities of every kind. At the time he was advising, encouraging, and having breakfast with Sirica, however, he was already very wealthy. Again, one wonders, what can have been the basis of this friendship between the poor and unpromising young law student and this highly influential figure. What Sirica does not mention is that Cafritz, too, at the time he “took a liking” to young Sirica, had an establishment involved with liquor and, like Sirica’s father’s, bowling. In his early twenties (according to Leslie Milk, in an article in the Washington Magazine of October 1996), Cafritz had borrowed $1,400 from his father and, a few years later, “bought a saloon.”

  But not just any saloon: Cafritz’ was across from the Washington Navy Yard . . . . Saloonkeeping was a rough business . . . . Cafritz was his own bouncer. He slept over the bar and kept a gun under his pillow to protect the profits. Cafritz soon moved from barkeeping into a safer game. By 1915, he was known as the bowling king of Washington.

  All of this is a bit more raffish, and in some ways more appealing, than what Sirica describes. In the event, after his breakfast with Cafritz, Sirica, who has not even taken the bar review course, does take the bar exam, and goes on to visit his parents in Miami. While he is down there, he finds out, by telegram and to his surprise, that he has passed. He is unable to find work as a lawyer in Miami. He goes back to Washington, finds no legal work, goes back to his family in Miami. To earlier questions about his story is added another: Where, failing as he constantly does to find a job, does he get the money to keep traveling back and forth to Miami? And what was his family doing there?

  One source of income, for Sirica, has always been, although he never quite acknowledges it, professional boxing. In Washington, as early as 1921, we know, he has been boxing “almost every day” with local professionals, and “at local clubs in exhibition bouts with the professionals.” In 1926, in Miami, after “a local promoter needed someone to box in a semi-windup at Douglas Stadium,” Sirica prepares for the fight not just by weeks of sparring but by “running every day at a golf course in Miami Beach”—under whose sponsorship he does not say. Perhaps, in those days, Miami Beach had a public golf course. Sirica’s opponent, at Douglas Stadium, is “a six-foot-tall welterweight who was known for having fought one of the roughest bouts ever staged in Miami.” (“Back in Washington, I had fought about thirty exhibitions . . . but nothing I ever did worried me as much as that oncoming fight.”) Sirica beats him.

  The write-ups in the newspapers the next day were all good, even though they didn’t spell my name correctly. I was on my way as a professional boxer.

  His mother, he says, “heard about the fight,” and objected. He had, of course, as he has already told us (and as his mother must have known), been fighting professionally for years. He would also organize and promote professional boxing matches. What he does not mention, does not perhaps remember or think important, is that professional boxing in this country was at the time, and had been since at least 1903, controlled by organized crime.

  That professional boxers, and particularly organizers and promoters of professional boxing, had such ties was established, for example, in the Kefauver Hearings (U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime, May 1950 through August 1951). As the syndicated sportswriter Bob Kravitz recently put it:

  In the mid-fifties, a politician named Estes Kefauver chaired hearings on the sad state of the game, hoping to reform the sport and get it out of the hands of the Mob. When it was over, he realized the corruption was too deeply imbedded, too systemic.

  The only way to get rid of corruption in boxing is to get rid of boxing. At a meeting of Mob bosses and boxing managers in 1957, Mafia operative Binky Palermo worried about his boys losing their grip on it. Palermo had nothing to worry about.

  As for the boxers themselves, in Washington, D.C., as it happens, all professional boxing was illegal—not just in 1921 when Sirica began
but throughout the years he was boxing there—until 1934, when Congress finally legalized it in the District. Professional boxing in Washington, in other words, was a violation of the criminal statute. That Sirica knew this is beyond doubt. All the years he boxed professionally in the District before 1934 (including the years 1930 to 1934, when he was actually an assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s office), he used, although he does not mention this either, fictitious names. It is, of course, possible to be a criminal without ties to organized crime—a pickpocket, say, or a burglar. Illegal boxing, however, requires payoffs, for the arena, the police, the referee, the promoters, and so on. You simply cannot do it freelance or on your own. It requires a syndicate—notoriously hostile to encroachments on its turf. So that’s two sets of “clear ties to organized crime”: through professional boxing—as an organizer, boxer, and promoter in various cities at a time when mob control of the sport was essentially complete—and for more than thirteen years in the District, boxing professionally when it was still illegal there.

  Is that all? Well, no, it isn’t. But it is all I said. It was not I, but the Times and its acolytes, who made a sensation of this. I wrote a little sentence, in a specific context, which is all I meant to write. The documentation for it is ample. Ms. Barringer, her “sources,” and her colleagues could have found it, if her agenda had really been journalism: the gathering, that is, and publishing of firsthand information. Judge Sirica, as Ms. Barringer and the Times kept pointing out, is dead. But if he were alive and he sued for libel, as the Times in all its pieces seemed to suggest he might have done—imagine the preposterousness of a federal judge, even Judge Sirica, suing for libel—he would lose.

  And that is not all. To resume his own story, in 1926, after being turned down by law firms everywhere, he does get a job as a “sort of messenger” at a criminal law office on Fifth Street. “It wasn’t much, there was no regular pay, but it was a start.” Meanwhile, he has made another early, implausible, and apparently lifelong friendship with a rich and powerful man, Morris Kronheim, a wonderfully interesting figure—and later, like Cafritz, an extraordinary citizen and a generous benefactor of every sort. Kronheim became, through several administrations, one of the most influential and beloved figures in Washington. In 1903, at the age of fifteen, Kronheim, whose father owned a tavern, started his own liquor store. By 1985, he had the largest wholesale liquor distributorship in Washington and one of the largest in the country.

  During his three years at the Fifth Street criminal office, Sirica lost thirteen of fourteen felony cases assigned him by the court. The first case he was allowed to handle involved a “violation of the prohibition laws.” He lost. In 1930, however, Sirica was appointed (on what professional basis is unclear) to the U.S. Attorney’s office—whose major responsibilities, in those years, included prosecutions under the Volstead Act. Sirica says he got “valuable trial experience” as Assistant U.S. Attorney, but he mentions no specific prosecutions, certainly none of bootleggers, or of promoters of professional boxing. In fact, he devotes only a single sentence to the whole four years.

  In December 1933, Prohibition was repealed. Within two weeks, Sirica resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s office, “to start my own practice.” The practice was not a success. He entered what he calls “my starvation period,” from 1934 to 1949, fifteen years, when he says, “I really lived from hand to mouth,” it “seemed the phone never rang,” and “I nearly had to quit the law altogether.” He lived in his parents’ house in Washington, and “without that free lodging I would have gone under.”

  Sirica traveled, in those years, not just to Miami but to “New York for weekends,” to visit Jack Dempsey, whom he met in 1934. He does not explain how he paid for these travels. He says he earned a fee by “successfully defending Walter Winchell against a defamation case.” What? Walter Winchell? Who brought the case? He does not say. The case he means, at least according to his obituary in The New York Times, was brought by Eleanor (Cissy) Patterson, the Chicago publisher. But that didn’t sound quite right. I looked it up. It turned out that Cissy Patterson was in fact the owner of the Times-Herald, which published Winchell’s column. The lawsuit was part of a long feud between them. Cissy Patterson dropped the case. Sirica may have played some part in the defense; but Winchell’s attorney of record was Morris Ernst.

  According to Sirica, this period, “when I nearly had to quit the law altogether,” lasted “essentially until 1949, when I joined the firm of Hogan & Hartson.” He was not a success there either. On April 2, 1957 (again, it is unclear on what professional basis), he became a federal judge. By 1970, he had become the most reversed federal judge in Washington.

  In 1971, on the basis of seniority, he became chief judge of the circuit. In June of 1972, he read about the Watergate break-in and assigned himself the first of the Watergate cases. He ultimately tried the cases of both the break-in and the cover-up, with the results we know. Or thought we knew.

  But wait a minute. To return for just a moment to 1930, and Sirica’s situation at the time of his improbable appointment to the U.S. Attorney’s office. In 1930, Sirica writes.

  my parents had moved back to Washington from Florida. My dad was barbering again and his financial situation had improved somewhat. He had managed to buy a little house on Fourteenth Street, N.W., and I lived there during my years in the U.S. attorney’s office.

  The years of Fred Sirica’s apparently constant business failures, and Sirica’s own inability to find a job, had not been Depression years—only, beginning in 1920 throughout the country (three years earlier, in 1917, in Washington, D.C.), years of Prohibition. The 1930s, however, were Depression years—yet the “financial situation” of Sirica’s father, “barbering again,” had “improved somewhat,” to the degree in fact that “he had managed to buy a little house on Fourteenth Street.”

  Not such a little house. According to the Washington City Directory, the house at 6217 Fourteenth Street, N.W., was large enough so that both John J. Sirica and his brother, Andrew, had apartments there. The place where his father was “barbering again” (called, according to the directory, the Empire Barbershop) at 523 Ninth Street, N.W., was not small either. It held fourteen chairs. The reason Fred Sirica and his wife traveled so often to Miami was that they spent part of their winters there. The Siricas were buying property in Miami. Hard to account for, in the heart of the Depression, even with fourteen chairs, on the proceeds of haircuts at 25 cents per customer.

  According to William Emmons, Jr., the son of Fred Sirica’s partner in the Empire Barbershop, the barbers were salesmen, selling liquor to customers who could afford it. Packages were stored in both the backroom and the basement. Fred Sirica himself handled the whiskey, splitting the proceeds with his partner, William E. Emmons, Sr. Sirica, living in his father’s house and working in the U.S. Attorney’s office, can hardly have been entirely unaware of his father’s business. Ninth Street in the 1930s had five motion picture houses within a block and a half of the barbershop. The Gayety Theater was only three doors away. There was bookmaking in the back of the shoe store at 519 Ninth Street. The whole neighborhood, in other words, was not so far removed, in its look and its patronage, from the poolroom that had so seriously disillusioned the impecunious barber and his son the law student more than ten years before. Nowhere in his autobiography, To Set the Record Straight, does the author so much as mention the name of the barbershop or the address of the “little house” on Fourteenth Street. Both can be found under “Sirica, Fred” (and also under “Sirica, John J. atty” and “Emmons, William E.”) in the city directory for at least the years 1930 to 1934. There were no embarrassing misunderstandings, as there had been at the time of the poolhall, at any police station. According to Emmons, the police of the First Precinct were paid off—and there was whatever protection was implied by a son who had become an assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s office.

  Even 1934, when one thinks about it, was not just the year when Prohibition ended, and Siric
a quit the U.S. Attorney’s office—and Congress at last legalized professional boxing in Washington. It was also a year deep in the Depression, a particularly odd time for a young lawyer to leave a government job and start his own practice. It was the year as well when Sirica says he met Dempsey, and when he tried to start and promote a boxing arena with a “local prizefighter,” Goldie Ahearne. It goes by now almost without saying that Goldie Ahearne could not, any more than Sirica himself, legally have been a “local prizefighter” before 1934.

  There are countless peculiarities in Sirica’s story. His professions of patriotism, for example, coupled with his lack of military service, in any capacity whatever, in World War II. He was, after all, a bachelor. The whole war took place during what he called his “starvation period.” The Times, in its unusually fulsome obituary of August 15, 1992, which described Sirica as “indisputably . . . a hero,” “a great scholar” (and “by seemingly unanimous agreement, an honest man”), particularly stressed that he was “patriotic,” “unabashedly patriotic,” and added to its repeated characterizations of Sirica as “an authentic American hero” a military component.