Once Upon a Time in New York

by Herbert Mitgang

  Defending Crain, Samuel Untermyer immediately mounted an attack against Seabury. He called the City Club’s charges “preposterous,” demanded a bill of particulars, and said that Seabury was too full of “bias and prejudice” to serve as commissioner. People in the political know were aware why Untermyer was so stalwart in his defense of the sleepy D.A. and, by implication, of his good friend Jimmy Walker: the year before, Untermyer’s son, Irwin, had been elected a Supreme Court justice.

  While Manhattan’s D.A. was being examined during that Depression summer of 1931, and New York’s millions cooled off at Coney Island and the other crowded beaches on the fringes of the concrete city, Jimmy Walker also decided it was time to get away from the burdensome heat He went to Monte Carlo.

  Accompanied by Maurice Chevalier, the French film star and boulevardier, Mayor Walker attended a boxing match in Monaco for the featherweight championship of Europe. Jose Girones of Spain, the reigning champ, scored a technical knockout over Guy Bonagure of France in the eighth round. The challenger’s seconds threw in a sponge when they saw their man was outclassed. As the crowd cheered, Walker congratulated the winner.

  There was a flurry among members of the principality’s police force when it was rumored that the mayor had lost some of his personal jewelry. A hurried investigation disclosed that one of the members of the Walker party had dropped some of her jewelry on the beach as she stepped from the speedboat that brought them from Cannes. A private detective employed by the casino recovered it.

  By “special cable,” The New York Times reported this breathless international news: “Mayor Walker appeared to enjoy himself very much.” Perhaps one reason is that he was a nonpaying guest of the new Monte Carlo casino management.

  After a few days at the gambling resort, the junketing Mayor departed for Paris.

  The investigation of District Attorney Crain’s office led to the discovery of unprosecuted or poorly prosecuted “racketeering” cases in a score of businesses, including garment manufacturers, florists, funeral parlor owners, kosher butchers, milliners, master barbers, paper box makers, window cleaners, launderers, furriers, and wholesalers in the Fulton Fish Market—touching almost every aspect of life in the city.

  To manufacture, sell or move anything in New York during the 1920s and early 1930s, somebody had to be paid off.

  On the witness stand, Crain admitted that racketeering had him bewildered. The frail, thin-faced D.A. seemed more pathetic than villainous. By contrast, Mr. Untermyer, his defender, appeared to be trying out for the role of a busker outside a Broadway theater. Sitting at the counsel table, Untermyer continually mumbled at witnesses, “Louder, please!” Nearly every day, he came into the courtroom bedecked in a new tailor’s creation, with an orchid in his lapel to match his tie. It was a sartorial effect that would not be matched until Beau James himself took the witness stand.

  The D.A. testified that his method of combating crime was to form a Committee on Public Safety made up of seventy influential citizens to “wage a war on racketeering.” He even provided them with a room where they could receive complaints from merchants who had been shaken down. “I had an appropriate sign made and directed that it be placed outside the room,” he said. Judge Seabury asked Crain if any merchants appeared, knowing that they might risk their lives by coming forward and going public. Crain couldn’t understand why nobody had showed up.

  SEABURY: Then the net result of your committee was nothing, wasn’t it?

  CRAIN: That is a fair statement.

  One of the centerpieces of Seabury’s investigation was the D A’s failure to stop the shakedowns in the Fulton Fish Market. (More than a half-century later, efforts were still being made to eliminate payoffs to racketeers there.) The Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan supplied seafood to most New Yorkers and to many towns along the Atlantic seaboard. It was the underworld domain of Joseph “Socks” Lanza, the muscleman in charge of protection for the fish dealers and truckers; unsurprisingly, the protection paid to Socks was to protect the merchants against Socks himself.

  Street legend had it that Socks got his nickname not because of his sharp clothing but because he was so good with his fists. Socks, who was born on the Lower East Side, had spent his early life as a juvenile delinquent, a fish handler, and a political worker for Tammany. He was a friend and contemporary of Lucky Luciano, Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello, the Italo-American dons who ruled the rackets in the Northeast. His brother-in-law was Prosper Viggiano, secretary to a Supreme Court judge and a Tammany district leader.

  Socks Lanza was the official delegate representing Local 16975 of the United Sea Food Workers. He also had held interests in a waste-fish rendering plant and in a can factory. Lanza was shaking down the Middle Atlantic Fisheries Association. When a management representative told Lanza that the employers couldn’t afford to pay steeper wages, he suggested that an under-the-table payment be made to him to ensure a sweetheart contract. Thus he undercut his own union.

  “I guess we can fix it,” said Socks.

  Certain fish firms made annual payments to Lanza to keep their plants nonunion. The six hundred retailers trading in the Fulton Fish Market each paid a “tax” to Lanza or one of the other gangsters in Local 16975 to get their deliveries. Socks was a racketeer who worked both sides of the street. As a result, fish prices were kept artificially high.

  None of these facts came from D.A. Crain or his assistants; they were uncovered by Seabury and his boys.

  One of Crain’s deputies, Charles C. Pilatsky, was asked what he did to investigate racketeering in the Fulton Fish Market and in other businesses.

  “Well, we had an office on the same floor that was almost as big as the D A’s and we had a sign painted on the door,” the deputy replied. “The sign read: RACKETEERING COMPLAINTS HERE. I investigated 150 complaints.”

  “How many indictments came out of your investigation?”

  “Two.”

  “And how many of those were dismissed without trial?”

  “I understand both of them.”

  Looking at racketeering in the millinery trade in New York, Seabury’s investigators exposed a pair of underworld characters—“Little Augie,” who was gunned down after extorting money to prevent unionization, and “Tough Jake” Kurzman, his successor in the same anti-union racket. When a warrant was issued for his arrest, Tough Jake fled the jurisdiction, but during his career he had received $10,000 a year from various hat manufacturers. They carried the payoffs on their books as “protection.”

  Similarly, in the cloth-shrinking trade, a racketeer named Joseph Mezzacapo dissolved the Cloth Shrinkers Union and set up his own union to replace it. No one could work who was not a member of Mezzacapo’s personal union. He levied tribute on the cloth-shrinking industry, getting money both from union members and from the manufacturers. The investigators found that Mezzacapo had made deposits in excess of $332,000 in a single account with the Federation Bank and Trust Company.

  Sounding like a premature New Dealer, the Seabury of old, not the wealthy lawyer serving as a state commissioner, reported to Governor Roosevelt:

  “The trade union accomplishes a useful and necessary purpose when it is honestly administered. The system by which a blackleg labor leader is permitted to extort money as the price of non-enforcement of union requirements not only strikes a direct blow at the whole trade union movement, but is clearly illegal. Furthermore, it permits employers to buy immunity and subjects them to the necessity of entering into contracts, the terms of which are not prescribed by market conditions but are fixed and determined by the amount which may be extorted from them by an unscrupulous labor union delegate.”

  Surprisingly, when Commissioner Seabury filed his final report to Governor Roosevelt on August 31, 1931, he recommended that the City Club’s charges against D.A. Crain be dismissed, despite all the evidence that he and his staff had turned up revealing the old Tammany Sachem’s incompetence:

  “Truth compels the conclusion th
at in many instances he busied himself ineffectively, and that he did not grasp or act upon opportunities for high public service which some of the matters referred to presented to him,” Seabury reported to Roosevelt “I am satisfied that wherever he failed, and I think he did fail in many cases to do all that he should have done, his failure was not due to any lack of personal effort or any ignoble motive.”

  Governor Roosevelt agreed, and dropped the charges.

  In the view of the citizenry, both Commissioner Seabury and Governor Roosevelt behaved like gentlemen toward District Attorney Crain. To be sure, some disappointed reformers said under their breaths that what saved the D.A. from a reprimand and dismissal is that he was a prominent Episcopalian; he shared this religious affiliation with Roosevelt and Seabury. Yet even so prominent a reformer-in-opposition as Norman Thomas agreed with Seabury’s dismissal of the charges against Crain. “I believe the decision is warranted,” he told The New York Times. “In a democracy, you have to lean over backwards not to remove an elected official short of clearly proven corruption or gross incompetency. I do think that Crain’s inquiry into the magistrates’ courts was incompetent in such a way as to protect Tammany, but not so grossly incompetent as to warrant removal. The trouble is not with one particular district attorney but with the system.”

  Long afterward, a more sophisticated political interpretation was given by George Trosk, Seabury’s chief of staff. He said that there was no question that the investigators could have gone the other way and recommended that the D.A. be thrown out of office. But Seabury and his aides realized that Tammany’s leaders were going to nominate Crain for the office again, no matter what the report recommended, and in Tammany-controlled Manhattan he was sure to win.

  “We knew we would be left looking silly—that it would look like a repudiation of our efforts,” Trosk said. “So we decided to do the practical thing, set out all the damaging evidence that we uncovered but not recommend removal. We knew that there was much more to be gained by continuing the investigation into the whole city’s affairs.”

  With the district attorney remaining in office, many New Yorkers heaved a sigh of relief, hoping that the turmoil in their city would quiet down. Although Jimmy Walker was still popular, and his D.A. was regarded as a nice old gentleman, a growing number of New York businessmen began to realize that they stood to gain from the elimination of municipal corruption. The investigative machine was running on sixteen cylinders and the engine couldn’t be suddenly turned off.

  First, Judge Seabury had been named referee to examine the Magistrates’ Courts; next, commissioner to look into the district attorney’s conduct; now, he received a third mandate with a new title: counsel for “the investigation of the departments of the government of the City of New York.” At last, by a joint resolution of the New York State Senate and Assembly, on March 23, 1931, Seabury was given carte blanche to look into every office and every official in the city—including Jimmy Walker’s mayoralty. Albany had unsheathed all its daggers and given Seabury license to flail in any direction he chose. His mission was to investigate in order to bring charges where warranted. Once charges were brought, then normal due process would begin.

  It was a prosecutorial opportunity that no single individual had ever been handed in the history of New York, not even in the Tweed Ring years. Fresh evidence of corruption was emerging nearly every day, yet the resolution authorizing a citywide investigation appeared to be a direct assault by the Republican-dominated state legislature upon the Democrats who ran the city.

  As a Democrat who was already campaigning for the presidential nomination in 1932, where did Governor Roosevelt stand? How would he handle the touchy issue of investigating his own party? If the Republicans had thought that the third stage of investigation would help F.D.R.’s run for the presidency, perhaps they would have been content to let New York City fester quietly.

  A year before, Roosevelt had opposed a broad-gauged investigation, declaring that it would set a precedent for future governors to meddle in the affairs of every city and county. But now the heat was on from various constituencies whose help he would need to gain national support. On behalf of the City Affairs Committee, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the Free Synagogue and John Haynes Holmes of the Community Church brought charges against Mayor Walker, questioning his ethics.

  Tammany and its subalterns cried foul. “Stop this criminal waste of funds,” said the Tammany minority on the legislative investigative committee, which was chaired by Senator Samuel Hofstadter, a Manhattan Republican. “Mr. Seabury has only succeeded in besmirching the character of 130,000 city employes by innuendoes and undermining the goodwill and financial standing of the City of New York.”

  For Governor Roosevelt, the investigation was both a caution and an opportunity. He approved a $250,000 appropriation for the legislative committee. Seabury’s official title was that of counsel, yet in all practical respects he was now exercising the duties of a “special prosecutor.”

  The citywide investigation—eventually, it cost half a million dollars—ran from April 8, 1931, until the end of December 8, 1932, a month after Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to his first term as president of the United States. Seabury’s staff examined 2,260 persons in private; this testimony covered 47,000 pages. Another 175 witnessses appeared in public hearings; their testimony added 5,000 mimeographed pages to the record.

  Once again, the tabloids had a field day. They first went to town with a certain gentleman known as Horse Doctor Doyle. Dr. William F. Doyle, who represented private businessmen before the Board of Standards and Appeals, was indeed a doctor—a veterinarian. The board handled not horses but two-legged real estate operators with lots of cash. In its discretion, the board could permit variances in the height of buildings, setbacks, the location of garages and gasoline stations, and the occupancy of homes and factories. Five men sat on this board—four appointed by Mayor Walker and one by the fire commissioner, himself a Walker appointee.

  Horse Doctor Doyle got into the lucrative rackets in the early 1900s, when he was named chief veterinarian of the fire department in the days of horse-drawn wagons. The records failed to show any complaints from his first patients, the fire horses. But then Doyle was named chief of the bureau of fire prevention; he was indicted for malfeasance when a building he failed to check went up in flames.

  Forced to retire, he began a private practice before the board, representing landlords, builders, and contractors. In one good year during Walker’s first term, Horse Doctor Doyle put over $243,000 into his bank accounts, which held a total of a million dollars.

  “Doctor,” Judge Seabury said, “there’s only one thing I would like you to tell me. Would you kindly tell me with whom you split your fees?”

  “I’d like to but my lawyer tells me that to do so would incriminate me,” Dr. Doyle replied.

  “When you appeared before the board, wasn’t it your practice to take part of your fee in cash and part by check?”

  “I refuse to answer that question because it might tend to incriminate me.”

  “Did you ever bribe any political leader in the County of New York?”

  Again Doyle refused to answer on grounds of possible self-incrimination.

  Chairman Hofstader cited Horse Doctor Doyle for contempt and he was sentenced to thirty days in jail by Justice William H. Black. Boss Curry, Tammany’s Chief Sachem, immediately put through a call to a more sympathetic judge, Henry L. Sherman of the Appellate Division, who granted a stay of the order jailing Dr. Doyle. When Seabury learned that Boss Curry had interfered in the case, he called upon the Tammany boss to explain his actions on the witness stand before the Hofstadter committee.

  SEABURY: Is it fair and accurate to say that you reached Judge Sherman?

  CURRY: Wait a minute, I don’t like that word reach.

  SEABURY, smiling: Very well, Mr. Curry, I don’t want to injure your sensibilities.

  Curry frowned at the sarcasm.

  SEABURY: Wh
at was the purpose of your interfering in a judicial proceeding?

  CURRY: I wanted to have the powers of the committee tested with regard to the immunity clause. I want to tell you, Judge Seabury, I did not try to influence justice. I tried to get a judge to hear a case.

  SEABURY: You thought it was part of your political duty as leader of the Democratic organization of this city to interfere in a case. Did you do it as a personal favor?

  CURRY: Yes, but that was only secondary. I resent Judge Seabury’s statements about obstruction. I, as representative of the Democratic organization of the City of New York, was expecting someone to test the constitutionality of this committee’s powers to grant immunity, and therefore when the request came for my aid, I was glad to be of service.

  Seabury again demanded to know why Boss Curry telephoned the appellate justice. Curry replied, “Because this is a crucification, if it can be done, of the Democratic party of the City of New York.”

  Praising Boss Curry, Jimmy Walker compared him to such previous Tammany Hall leaders as Boss Murphy, Boss Kelly, and Boss Croker. Curry gratefully responded, “It is fiction, this so-called New Tammany. I will carry out the politics in which I grew up.”

  Horse Doctor Doyle’s refusal to rat, which was based on his fear of being convicted, threatened to undermine the investigators’ tried-and-true tactic of turning little targets against bigger ones. But the Hofstadter committee was made up of legislators, and Seabury was only a temporary commissioner. Could they protect the Doyles they needed?

  The question of immunity for witnesses went up to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. None other than Benjamin N. Cardozo, who would later be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Hoover, delivered the opinion that the legislative committee did not have the power to grant such immunity, except by statute, which he recommended. Judge Seabury then drafted a bill giving the committee that power, the legislature enacted the bill, and Governor Roosevelt signed it.