FOR J. RICHARD DAVIS, SON OF A TAILOR FROM ROMANIA and just plain Julius Davis when he was playing the violin in the village orchestra in upstate Tannersville to earn his tuition for the University of Syracuse, nothing came easy in the early days. He had to work as a bank clerk to pay for his night classes at the New York Law School and then scratch out a bare living as a law clerk when he got his degree in 1927. When he put together enough money to hang out his own shingle, no great clamor developed for his services. It was so bad, in fact, that he finally had to open an office opposite the Washington Heights Magistrates' Court in what was perilously close to an ambulance-chasing operation, except that he went after policy defendants, not accident cases. He started with a grand total of 10 to 15 cases a week, springing the hired hands of the racket for a cut-rate $15 fee. Small potatoes, but it turned out to be an excellent investment. Pretty soon the word got around Harlem that there was a kid around the courthouse who could get you the hell out of there about as fast as the cops dragged you in. This guy knew the legal ropes. He could get a runner off even if he had been bagged with armful of policy slips. He made the great oaken portals of the smelly old house of justice look like the revolving doors of the automat; it was a rare day when a Davis client had to lose any time behind bars.
And so by 1930 J. Richard Davis, still only 26, had a virtual lock on all the Harlem policy cases. By 1931, he was handling all the business of Big Joe Ison, then the biggest of the bankers because he had inherited the operations of both Wilfred Brunder and Henry Miro. And when the arm was put on Big Joe early in that year he was able to put his client in touch with the right people so he wouldn't get pushed around too much, or maybe even hurt. The right people, of course, turned out to be the same musclemen who set out to shake Big Joe in the first place. Coincidence? Let's be charitable here. It all worked out splendidly in any case, and pretty soon Mr. Davis, the smartly efficient intermediary, had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Dutch Schultz, who was the employer of all those roughnecks and seemed so much gentler. By 1932, J. Richard was wearing $165 suits and $190 overcoats and he wasn't hustling policy clients in the corridors of the courthouse anymore. He had a platoon of hired helpers handling the minions of the racket out of a lavish office on Broadway and he was working full time for his impressive new client, who liked him so much that he called him "Sonny Boy," presumably from the smash-hit Al Jolson ballad of that name.
Jimmy Hines had to find George a considerably more appealing--or let's say less repugnant--figure than the gun-toting Bo. The political boss listened intently as the earnest George explained that the worst trouble with the policy business was the damned honest cop who wouldn't take the ice and kept coming around and making the same pinches over and over again. George said it was awfully hard to keep a
bank operating efficiently when the little people who are its life blood--the runners and controllers--were being hauled off the streets and locked up. He told the ruddy, white-haired Hines that sometimes the honest cops, generally from outside the division, came in and busted a whole bank and threw everyone into paddy wagons even while the office help was still toting up the day's play and sorting out the winners. How'ya gonna payoff and keep your bank clean when things like that are happening? Hell, how'ya gonna get the bets in the house if your people are getting rousted on the streets before they can bring in the slips?
"I explained," George Weinberg recalled later when Jimmy Hines was on the first of his two trials and facing a possible sentence of 25 years in prison, "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 Magistrates' Court so that they wouldn't have to go downtown (that meant 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 Magistrates' 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."
Could Mr. Hines do anything about this problem?
The ex-blacksmith, brimming over with compassion for the struggling masses and happily endowed with lots of wallop both around the Police Department and the Magistrates' Courts, said sure, he could try to help.
You can imagine how much this pleased Dutch Schultz--not that he didn't have the word before this session. He was so pleased that he told the assembled executives, the way George Weinberg recalled it, "I will give him a thousand dollars down and you pay him $500 a week from now on and any extra amounts he asks for--any reasonable amounts he might ask for." George, a meticulous sort, asked what "reasonable" meant and the Chairman said, "anything up to a thousand."
The history books will never agree on the exact amount that flowed from this loose arrangement. George Weinberg, the guy Tom Dewey initially broke in order to nail Hines but a mute witness in the district leader's second trial because he pinched a gun from one of his keepers and killed himself on January 29, 1939, in the White Plains mansion where Dewey had stashed away his witnesses, was perhaps the most reliable source. He said the $500-a-week payoff went to $750 in no time at all. Dixie Davis, in the confessional that ran in Collier's while he was finishing the one-year term he got off with on his own policy rap (also a round 25 years) in exchange for his testimony against Hines, said the policy banks anted up $500 but that he tossed in another $500 himself "without even telling Schultz." And that wasn't all. The way the big spender told it, he also put up the loot for the Friday night fights and all that when Mr. Hines did the necessary entertaining--judges, officeholders, big businessmen--that
kept his political power mower oiled.
"I cultivated Jimmy Hines right from the beginning," said the modest barrister, who later retired to California and prospered in assorted selling ventures until he was 65, only to die of a heart attack on the last day of 1969 when he returned to his Bel Air home with his adopted son, Barkley, and found that two masked gunmen had terrorized Hope Dare in a holdup. "I soon learned that to run an organized mob you've got to have a politician. You have heard about the suspected link between organized crime and politics. Well, I became the missing link."
This was hardly an idle boast. New York's Appellate Division lifted the missing link's license in 1937 because of his wheeling and dealing for the criminal end of the chain in the good old days. The disbarment ruling established a precedent by holding that when an attorney knowingly lends advice and counsel to "a combination of persons engaged in a crime, he becomes, in effect, a member of the criminal organization and forfeits his right to membership in an honorable profession."
What it all came to for Hines, over the years, is a substantial amount, perhaps in excess of $100,000, whether you take Weinberg's $500-a-week figure or Davis's $1,000 or split it down the middle and then deduct the little pay cut the busy political boss had to suffer when the Dutchman was indicted for tax evasion and ran into heavy legal costs. The arrangement evidently lasted the better part of four years, if Weinberg and Davis are to be believed, because Hines was still supposed to be on the policy payroll a year after Schultz was assassinated. That was the year Davis remained the nominal head of the policy operation, the item Tom Dewey had him indicted for, although by then Lucky Luciano had moved in some Italian huskies, like Trigger Mike Coppola, to keep an eye on the take.
The time the payoffs started is easier to nail down with certainty because there was confirmation for it from the policy bankers, a band of rogues who for all their frailties did not possess the track record of a J. Richard Davis in the liars' sweepstakes, under oath or otherwise. Big Joe Ison traced it to the spring of 1932 because it was then that he found a fresh bite of $125 a week on his books. Struggling to make ends meet at the time so that a few dollars might show on the profit side of his bank to supplement that $200 paycheck, he asked Harry Schoellhaus about the new grunt. The bookkeeping wizard said he didn't know but he would try to find out from George and Dixie. "They said the $125 was going to Jimmy Hines' club," he reported back presently. And sure enough it turned out that the four banks then in the Combination--Ison, Pompez, Miro and Flores--were being touched for $125 apiece toward the little bundle George Weinberg was supposed to be parceling out to the district leader every Friday
night (including holidays).
Once again, the bankers, now nothing more than hired hands, would discover that anything as trifling as $125 (just "a dollar and a quarter" in underworld terminology) could only be for openers. The inflationary pressures on the Combination never seemed to slacken no matter what the general economic condition in the community was, so the tab had to go higher and higher as time wore on, especially with an election year around the corner. You could only measure it against the good it might be doing you, and there was plenty of testing room for that in the policy laboratories.
The fact is that the fruits of the new arrangement blossomed like hothouse flowers. The new man in the Combination, initially listed on the Schultz books as J. H., perish the thought, but then switched to "Jimmy" or "Pop" or "the Old Man," needed very little time to show what he could deliver for his money.
Right off the bat, the Sixth Division's token policy arrests, say 20 a day or so, dropped down to eight, and then to four. And anytime a little heat came on and the arrests started going back the other way George Weinberg just had to give the Old Man a tinkle and the cops would start to show some better manners again.
The larger problem with the police was "downtown"--and it turned out that Mr. Hines could do a thing or two about the outlanders as well. This is where the real muscle evidenced itself, where the man who in effect was licensing the policy racket earned his keep and more. Now the Dutchman's real craft showed; he had bought himself the bargain of the ages.
Let's see how it paid off:
Around Thanksgiving, the pesky young men of Chief Inspector John J. O'Brien's Confidential Squad, a 16-man force working out of Police Headquarters, a safe distance away from the Hines preserve, went in and busted the big $11,000-a-day Pompez bank. It was an eminently successful trip uptown for the shooflies. They picked up 200,000 policy slips and ten men and four women employees, among them George Weinberg himself, using the name of Klein for purposes of this particular pinch. Sergeant Thomas W. Gray led the raiding force and when he thought he heard too much lip from Weinberg he whacked him so hard on the left ear that the guy had trouble with it forever after. The blow did not take too much out of the Schultz executive, however. In the paddy wagon on the way downtown, he addressed himself rather severely to another one of the arresting officers, James Canavan.
"This pinch is a lot of horseshit," said Weinberg-Klein, dabbing the damaged ear with a silk handkerchief. "If you think you're going to get any medals for this, you better get it out of your head. We will have it thrown out and you might get yourself in a bit of trouble and find yourself back in uniform."
The formerly gentle George wasn't just angry at the plainclothesmen, by the way. He was even angrier at himself for not barring the bank's portal, in a Harlem tenement, when the strangers came calling. "I wish you would have broken that door down," he said to young Canavan. "I am going to get the shit bawled out of me for opening it up."
Canavan, needless to say, felt badly about that but not so badly as to find himself adequately stirred later in the clerk's room of the court when Weinberg-Klein asked could he please have those 200,000 slips back so he could sort out the winners and pay them, like any honest policy bank should. Canavan's "no" left no room for further discourse.
Still seething, the resident manager of the Pompez branch hauled J. Richard Davis out of a sick bed as soon as the Combination's handy bondsman got him out of the toils. The barrister, drawing from his vast experience in policy cases when he was poor, offered a rather glum curbstone view of the case. He said it was a sticky one because the cops had swept up so much evidence, like those 200,000 separate items which suggested that some people were playing the numbers and some other people were covering their bets. Withal, he said he would do the best he could once his health returned. And, lo, a few days later Weinberg-Klein found himself in an audience with Jimmy Hines in the political heavyweight's apartment at 444 Central Park West.
Mr. Hines listened to the first-person account of the unfortunate raid and, ill-trained in Blackstone, did not show any undue concern about that mountain of policy slips. He did observe that those fellows from the Confidential Squad could be damned tough to handle, and the way it registered in the good ear of Weinberg-Klein, he suggested that it might be well to get the case postponed. He said it would be better if it could come before Magistrate Hulon Capshaw.
And so the case came before His Honor Mr. Capshaw, who by great good chance had been a card-carrying member of Jimmy Hines' Monongahela Club way back in the days when he was taking his law degree at Columbia University. More than that, the Magistrate turned out to be a transplanted son of the Old South whose heart simply bled for the downtrodden blacks of the North, especially the ones slaving away in the Harlem policy banks. He tossed out the case that worried J. Richard Davis so much. How come? Well, the Magistrate found the evidence insufficient even though each and everyone of the prisoners before the bar had to admit that they were indeed toiling in the Pompez factory when the interlopers from the Confidential Squad dropped in. And all those slips vacuumed up off the table by the cops? The Magistrate found that there was no evidence of any physical possession--"constructive possession" is the legal term--of any of the slips. It was sort of like all those hapless defendants just happened to be in the same room where all those pieces of paper happened to be. The Magistrate said--this was later, under cross-examination in the Hines trial--that it would have violated his oath of office to convict anyone on the evidence before him in that case. He said that the oath required him to protect the innocent as well as the guilty.
Later on another interesting policy case came before the same jurist. Plainclothesmen Edward J. McCarthy and Robert L. Jones spotted Lulu Rosenkrantz picking up a large paper bag from a Negro outside a Harlem tenement and then driving off. Since the office work of the numbers banks had been removed to Mount Vernon in May 1933 because of the Confidential Squad's exertions, the cops had to assume that the bag contained policy slips and that Lulu was speeding them north to Westchester. So they gave chase. Lulu threw the bag out of the car before the shooflies caught up with him, still inside the jurisdiction, but the cops recovered it and found their worst suspicions confirmed. The treasure trove did indeed contain policy slips, causing them to detain Mr. Rosenkrantz.
George Weinberg turned up in due course, as an unofficial counsel for the defense, and McCarthy and Jones were assured that some suitable punishment would have to be devised for their impetuous behavior, like both of them would be back in harness in no time at all. Then Weinberg scurried around to Jimmy Hines' manse on Central Park West. In fairness, let it be noted here that this Schultz functionary also described some excursions to that sanctuary before Hines moved into the building, but that testimony involved some earlier history. In the visit at hand, in any case, Weinberg said the kindly district leader received him cordially and then took him to a beefsteak dinner at the Andrew B. Keating Democratic Club where, as luck would have it, they ran into Magistrate Hulon Capshaw on the very steps. The way Weinberg told it, Hines said, "I have a policy case, a very important one, coming up before you that I'd like you to take care of for me," and the Judge replied, "I haven't failed you yet. I'll take care of it."
While that hasty dialog rested on the bad ear of George Weinberg, Dixie Davis, who had all good ears, said that he also talked to Jimmy Hines about the case of Lulu Rosenkrantz--Louis Silverstein in this instance--and that the word he got was, "It will be OK." And that's the way it came out.
Hulon Capshaw found the plainclothesmen's story entirely deficient from a legal point of view--how could they show any connection between that paper bag full of policy slips and that fellow they were chasing in that car?--and Rosenkrantz-Silverstein walked out.
The Magistrate, eventually thrown off the bench by the Appellate Division over his handling of the two cases described here, compounded by the nature of his testimony in the second Hines trial before Judge Charles C. Nott Jr., always denied the stories told by Weinberg and Davis. He denied ever having seen Weinberg--the "Klein" of the Pompez raid--at the Andrew Keating club with the district leader. He denied any improper influence in the Pompez case itself. He would spend the rest of his life in a tireless losing battle to clear his name, supporting himself by doing legal chores--but not practicing law, of course--in his brother's law firm.
Be that as it may, Tom Dewey insisted in his bill of particulars in the case against Hines that Hulon Capshaw and at least one other Magistrate, Francis J. Erwin (deceased before the dirty linen was hung out), as well as the Honorable District Attorney, Bill Dodge, had been either "influenced, intimidated or bribed" by the district leader in the interests of Dutch Schultz. And the Hines trials were simply chock full of evidence that a policy defendant with any kind of know-how invariably made every effort to come before the bar when either Capshaw or Erwin happened to be wearing the black robes. Moreover, there was no shortage of testimony to suggest that the Dutchman's more highly placed toilers exhibited a king-sized contempt for the honest cops once the alliance between the Combination and Hines was sealed.
Take the time the Confidential Squad went back and busted the Pompez bank again after the big raid failed to pass Judge Capshaw's strict scrutiny. George Weinberg escaped the net on the second sweep but as he stood outside watching the fresh band of prisoners being led away he spotted Jim Callavall and said, sourly, "I see you're still at it."
"Yes," said Canavan, "and I'm not in uniform yet."
"You will be," said Weinberg, and it will be seen that he knew what he was talking about.
While nobody was going to jail in the continuing raids, with the plainclothesmen hitting all the banks impartially, even Big Joe Ison's $12,OOO-a-day operation, Schultz did have to switch the office operation to Westchester for a while to get the enemy cops off his back. Canavan ran into Abbadabba Berman outside of Dave's Blue Room on Broadway during this period--
ABBADABBA: I see you guys made the mob move to Mount Vernon.
CANAVAN: Yes. Now we've got nothing to worry about.
ABBADABBA: You have so got something to worry about. They're working on you to get you transferred. You know they can do it.
Similarly, when the raiders knocked over the numbers drops of the Maloney brothers sometime earlier and Plainclothesman Raymond R. Stilley encountered George Weinberg outside of court, this dialog ensued--
WEINBERG: Is there anything we can do in this case?
STILLEY: There's nothing you can do.
WEINBERG: Oh, you're one of those tough cops from downtown. We're going to have you transferred.
This must have sounded like so much blather, but the hoodlums' threats, as suggested, were hardly idle. The raids had proved awfully expensive. The two Pompez busts cost that bank $100,000 worth of action; the rule-of-thumb was that any numbers operation needed no less than two weeks to get its normal play back after being knocked out, however briefly, by the cops. On top of that, in long-range terms, the mob had to worry about the fractured morale of the bettors. How long would they stay with it after any of the banks stopped paying because the cops had made off with all them cherished dream book numbers?
Well, that was the sort of problem which had prompted the alliance between Dutch Schultz and Jimmy Hines in the first place, wasn't it? It was indeed--and come winter the bright young men of the Confidential Squad began to disappear from Harlem like so many policy slips blowing away in the wind. Sergeant Gray found himself pounding a beat. Canavan had to go dig his old blues out of the closet and take a $240-a-year pay cut in the process until Tom Dewey brought him over to his special staff so that he could help make the case against Hines. The captain of the squad, William P. Bennett, was transferred. And Stilley. And Jacob Katz, another one of Gray's troops. And Joe Terminello, who made some policy busts and found himself back in harness just 48 hours after running into George Weinberg one day and hearing this quiet lecture: "You cannot do this sort of thing to us. It will just harm you, Terminello." Julius Salke, the detective who had captured Dutch Schultz in the shootout on Fifth Avenue in 1931, had the very same experience with Bo Weinberg when he picked him up in 1933. "You will be wearing a bag [uniform] in Staten Island," said the prisoner. "It won't be long." Salke scoffed. "You are a lot of noise," he told the big gunman. " A lot of bull." Oh, yeah? Salke was busted in no time--on the orders of the Police Commissioner himself.
It turned out in the Hines trial that all the transfers stemmed from calls Jimmy Hines made to the man he had helped install as leader of Tammany Hall, John F. Curry. It was a simple triple play after that kind of call: Curry to his hand-picked Commissioner, James S. Bolan, to the head of the Confidential Squad, Inspector John O'Brien, and, presto, the heads rolled. This was very good for the Combination. Nobody ever had any occasion to squawk about Jimmy Hines or question his wallop with the high brass or the judges (hell, out of 278 gambling arrests in one of his own political clubs over a four-year period a total of three convictions had been racked up in the courts) or the D.A's. office. The fellow knew his way around. Dutch Schultz would always be indebted to Dixie Davis for that street-corner introduction.
The man who had one of the most trying experiences on the stand in the Hines trial was Commissioner Bolan. Small, gaunt and drawn, out of office by then, he appeared as the opening defense witness--and he would always regret that encounter with Tom Dewey. His first mistake was to insist that no politician ever would have had the unspeakable gall to call upon him for a favor of any kind, an item any alert juror might have questioned even if Dewey had elected to let it go unchallenged. Bolan, after all, succeeded Edward P . Mulrooney in that exalted office in 1933 in the wake of the celebrated press conference in which incoming Mayor John Patrick O'Brien, the ultimate in Tammany hacks, performed the greatest single act of candor in the city's political history when he was asked who was going to be his Police Commissioner. "I haven't had any word on that yet," said the rotund O'Brien.
Now here was Jim Bolan waxing wroth over a suggestion by the prosecutor that men like John Curry or Jimmy Hines, wired into the municipal government, had pulled some things in his office. The witness conceded that he knew the gentlemen but swore that he had never busted a single cop or either of them. Under Dewey's probing, this didn't hold. Bolan had to admit that, well, yes, come to think of it, he had passed some "requests" for transfers along to some cops' commanding officers on occasion. It took some squirming but the ex-Commissioner didn't have much choice.
The aging John Curry, long since fallen out with his pal Hines in some internecine warfare in the Tammany Wigwam, had testified that it was his practice to pass along 50 to 75 requests for police transfers every year. He said the requests generally came from district leaders--including James J. Hines--and he always transmitted them to the Police Commissioners (including Mr. Bolan) through Bert W. Stand, secretary of Tammany Hall. Lloyd Paul Stryker, the tall and distinguished defense attorney, fought the Curry testimony bitterly but Dewey had strong confirmation on the transfers from Inspector O'Brien himself. He swore that he had tossed Gray, Canavan and Stilley off the Confidential Squad on the orders--not request, orders--of Bolan.
Once this aspect of the policy story was all in the record, Dewey took the ex-Commissioner through a blistering intelligence test on the underworld of his time.
DEWEY: Did you ever hear of Dutch Schultz?
BOLAN: Yes.
DEWEY: When was the last time you heard of him?
BOLAN: Oh, I don't know.
DEWEY: Don't you know that Dutch Schultz rose to fame and power in the county over which you had command and in which you were personally responsible?
(Bolan was Deputy Chief Inspector, commanding the uniformed force, while the Dutchman was on the rise.)
BOLAN: I didn't know that. It has been said.
DEWEY: Have you any doubt about it?
BOLAN: I have.
DEWEY: What doubt?
BOLAN: Well, I get some information from the press.
DEWEY: Don't you know he was the biggest gangster in the city?
BOLAN: There was some newspaper talk about it.
DEWEY: Who did you think was the biggest gangster in the city?
BOLAN: I didn't think there was any.
The prosecutor then reeled off the names of some of the Schultz troops--Marty Krompier, the Weinbergs, Abe Landau, Lulu Rosenkrantz.
DEWEY: Did you know any of these?
BOLAN: I read of them in the newspapers.
DEWEY: What did you do about them when you read of them in the newspapers?
BOLAN: Why, nothing.
DEWEY: You thought they were just a lot of fiction the newspapers were printing to amuse their readers?
BOLAN: I don't know why they did it.
"Don't you know about the biggest mob of gangsters this country has ever seen?" Dewey demanded at another point, elevating Dutch Schultz to an eminence he never really quite enjoyed.
"Only what I read in the newspapers," said old Jim Bolan, a cop for 38 years.
Well, if the police themselves--even the Commissioner--had to find it out from the newspapers in the time of Arthur
Flegenheimer. . .
