NEW YORK: Political Juice

When foxy young Lawyer Thomas Edmund Dewey was appointed New York’s special rackets prosecutor three years ago, he announced that his investigation would not be just another roundup of criminal small fry. He wanted to get “the real bosses.” Prosecutor Dewey jailed some small racketeers, some big ones, notably Charles (“Lucky”) Luciano, swart Sicilian kingpin of Manhattan’s prostitute trust. Elected District Attorney by grateful New Yorkers last year, Mr. Dewey has since been nosing into the hierarchy of Harlem’s numbers games (lotteries), a one-time $100,000,000-a-year racket ruled by the late No. 1 Racketeer Arthur (“Dutch Schultz”) Flegenheimer.

Behind Racketeer Flegenheimer, who was murdered in a Newark saloon, Mr. Dewey soon nosed out a notorious underworld lawyer, Julius Richard (“Dixie”) Davis. When relentless Tom Dewey announced that lurking behind Davis was the substantial figure of potent Tammany District Leader Jimmy Hines, whom he indicted as the policy racket’s real boss (TIME, June 6), he made a real stir in city politics.

Last week, bluff, ruddy Leader Hines (having complained that New York City was no fair place to try a Tammany man) stood with eight co-defendants before the bar of Justice Ferdinand Pecora. Sturdy little Justice Pecora, who made his own mark investigating Wall Street for the Senate in 1933, had followed the Dewey proceedings with an expert eye. He bristled when defense attorneys thrust on his attention that Defendant Davis, who had agreed to turn State’s evidence, had used the jail leaves (arranged by Mr. Dewey’s office to permit him to see his doctor) to call also on his redheaded actress friend Hope Dare (real name: Rose

Ricker), with whom he was arrested in bed last year in Philadelphia. Justice Pecora sharply ordered an end to Davis’ visits.

He also ordered Mr. Dewey, on the motion of Defense Attorney Lloyd Paul Stryker, to back up his indictment with names of all the political figures whom the State charged Hines with “influencing” on behalf of the numbers racket. Obediently Tom Dewey last week produced three names: Tammany Magistrate Hulon Capshaw, the late Tammany-appointed

Magistrate Francis J. Erwin, and Mr.

Dewey’s predecessor, Tammany’s ex-District Attorney William Copeland Dodge.

Exclaimed Defense Attorney Stryker: “What? Just those three?” Predecessor Dodge, a sandy-haired, bespectacled Democratic wheelhorse whose official inaction was the direct cause of Tom Dewey’s appointment as rackets investigator, issued a prompt, pompous denial of the charges. Equally prompt was Hulon Capshaw, an amiable, Tennessee-born Social Registerite who was a Hines heeler while still at Columbia Law School 25 years ago. Magistrate Capshaw was conveniently prepared with a statistical breakdown of his disposition of cases involving the numbers racket.

The political career of ambitious Mr.

Dewey, already considered as Republican candidate for Governor, and even talked of for President in 1940, looked up. He appeared to have the makings of the juiciest campaign year scandal New York has known since Franklin Roosevelt practically ran Tammany’s dapper little Mayor Jimmy Walker out of office in 1932.