Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (35 page)

Walker’s ability to look the other way, for a time, was a big part of his charm. Prohibition necessitated having political leaders who were believed to be men of moral integrity without being moralists. Walker may have cultivated the image of a Broadway star, but, like so many other Irish American politicians, he maintained an almost mystical connection with the little guy. One of his biggest accomplishments was arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve the five-cent subway fare. Mostly, he appeared at public functions, made wisecracks to reporters, and provided a kind of gaiety that was infectious. He spent more time at prize fights and in speakeasies (his drink of choice was a Black Velvet, a mix of champagne and Guinness stout) than he did in his office. When a rival politician balked at raising Walker’s mayoral salary from $25,000 to $40,000, Walker quipped, “Why, that’s cheap. Imagine what it would cost if I worked full-time.”

In July 1930, Walker and Compton were present during a police raid of a gambling house in Montauk, Long Island. As the gambling patrons scattered like cockroaches, the mayor explained to the federal coppers who he was. They let him go, but his mistress was taken into custody and held for two hours before being released. For most politicians, this incident would have been a career-altering scandal. For Walker, it was in keeping with his rakish nature. The public tittered and looked the other way—for a time, anyway—until the various murders, shakedowns, and overall civic corruption began to give off a foul stench that seemed all the more unseemly during a time of food lines, soup kitchens, and makeshift Hoovervilles.

In early 1932, the mayor was called to appear before the Seabury panel, whose mandate had been broadened to encompass every department and official in the city. Walker had been served with a subpoena calling for all records of his personal financial transactions from January 1, 1926 to May 25, 1932. It was an astounding request. Jimmy ridiculed the investigation in the press, went on vacation, and made himself generally unavailable until the day of reckoning could not be forestalled any longer.

On May 25, the mayor—dapper as always, with a cigarette dangling from his lips—approached the county courthouse in lower Manhattan. A throng of spectators were gathered, many of them sympathetic to Walker. Voices called out, “Atta boy, Jimmy!” “You tell ’em, Jimmy!” “Good luck, boyo!” The mayor acknowledged the crowd by clasping his hands over his head like a jubilant prizefighter.

Inside, the courtroom was filled with seven hundred people in a space designed to hold half that many. When Walker entered, Judge Seabury and his aides were already seated at the counsel table. The two sides did not acknowledge each other. Applause and cheers broke out for the mayor.

Walker’s testimony, under questioning from Seabury himself, took place over two days. The mayor was feisty on the stand, and at one point said under his breath to the politically ambitious Seabury, “You and Frank Roosevelt are not going to hoist yourself to the presidency over my dead body.”

The various vice squad and magistrate scandals were embarrassing enough, but they could not be directly linked to Walker. More problematic for the mayor were his finances, which involved numerous beneficences (cash payments) from business interests that later won lucrative contracts with the city. Through cancelled checks, it was shown that some of the mayor’s side money made its way into the account of his mistress, Betty Compton. Another person who benefited from his relationship with Beau James was Dr. William H. Walker, the mayor’s older brother. In four years, Dr. Walker had deposited close to half a million dollars as a result of being given a virtual monopoly in treating patients with Workman’s Compensation matters before the city. Evidence showed that, in many cases, the bills had been padded and the government ripped off.

Although there was no “smoking gun,” the hearings were humiliating for the mayor, mostly because his mistress and brother had been dragged into the mess. When Jimmy’s brother passed away unexpectedly not long after Walker’s appearance before the Seabury committee, the mayor fell into an uncharacteristic funk. Seabury smelled blood and went for the jugular, delivering a detailed recommendation to Governor Roosevelt that Mayor Walker be removed from office for gross improprieties and other instances of political malfeasance. While FDR brooded over Seabury’s recommendation, weighing the political ramifications vis-à-vis his own ongoing campaign for the presidency (he hoped to be nominated at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, just weeks away), Mayor Walker beat everyone to the punch. On September 1, 1932, he resigned from office.

Ding dong, the mayor was dead.
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The forces of reform—growing in number as the economic woes of the Depression deepened—saw in Walker’s defeat the end of “bossism” and a blow to the dark forces of the underworld. Roosevelt, in particular, reaped tremendous political benefit heading into his party’s all-important national convention. Editorial writers nationwide gave him full credit for spearheading a tough and scrupulous examination of municipal corruption in his own home state. The kudos were not lost on the Goo Goos and Tammany-haters.

The Tiger had spawned many imitators. Now, bloodied and weakened, the Tiger was looking more and more like a seriously wounded animal. Ambitious prosecutors everywhere commenced to sharpen their knives.

Revenge of the Goo Goos

For many decades, the Machine had depended on men like Jimmy Walker, a public official who projected an image of viability while the world around him seethed and sizzled with moral turpitude. Walker was the smiley face out front, a figurehead who, like the Tin Pan Alley songwriter he had once been, was supposed to create an entertaining diversion while the organization’s lesser lights fleeced the city’s coffers. (Because of his high profile, a man like Walker could not be seen amassing huge amounts of money; he was not going to get rich.) It was the Night Mayor’s job not to get too deeply enmeshed in the dirty dealings of the ward system—enough to be compromised and forced into resignation, perhaps, but not so much that he might wind up dead or in jail.

Not all Tammany acolytes were so lucky.

Municipal corruption was an essential element of the underworld, and it was fueled by money, plain and simple. Somebody had to deliver that money from Point A to Point B. Furthermore, someone had to take the responsibility for seeing that services were rendered in exchange for these surreptitious cash payments. Whoever took the money was going to be held responsible. It was a dirty business, not to mention a dangerous one. Over the past decade, judges, corrupt cops, lawyers, and all kinds of ward officials had disappeared, their bodies found later or not at all. It was the price of doing business in the Irish American underworld.

One man who walked this tightrope with more skill than most was Jimmy Hines. Since the earliest days of Prohibition, and even before, Hines had fulfilled his duties as the city’s preeminent bag man, or emissary, between Tammany Hall and the mob. In many ways, his Monongahela Democratic Club on Manhattan’s West Side was the epicenter of the Irish Mob in New York. And everyone knew it. In fact, with his Spencer Tracy-like white hair and piercing, mercurial blue eyes, the longtime alderman from the 11th Assembly District became quite possibly the most revered man in the entire Tammany universe because of his willingness to take on the riskiest responsibilities. He was considered to be the person who made it possible for everyone to get over, which placed him in a rarified position.

In mid-1933, with Prohibition finished and Mayor Walker banished into exile, Hines was approached by perhaps the only major gangster in town with whom he hadn’t yet formed an alliance: Dutch Schultz. The Dutchman knew all about “the Old Man,” or “Mister Fix-It,” as Hines was variously known. Schultz knew that Hines had played a formative role in helping Owney Madden and Big Bill Dwyer establish the city’s first major bootlegging empire. He knew that Hines had also been paid by Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky to promote certain aldermen who were friendly to the Syndicate. And he knew that, in 1932, Hines had attended the Democratic convention in Chicago and shared a suite of rooms at the swanky Drake Hotel with another prominent underworld figure, Frank Costello. Schultz knew this because he, too, had attended the convention.

That was twelve months ago; much had changed in the past year, with prosecutors zeroing in on some of Prohibition’s most renowned former bootleggers. Most famously, Scarface Al Capone was nailed on tax evasion charges and sentenced to prison in 1933. Waxey Gordon, the Beer Baron of New Jersey, also got himself prosecuted on tax charges. During his trial, it was shown that in 1930, Gordon’s income from beer alone was $1,338,000; in 1931 he brought home $1,026,000. And that was documented income. Everyone knew his real net worth was much higher. For the first time, the public at large began to get a clear picture of just how much the bootleggers had taken in during the years of the Noble Experiment.

Dutch Schultz made a lot of money, too, but his payroll was sizable, and he had legal expenses. He’d been indicted for tax code violations of his own in Upstate New York; while he would eventually beat the charges, the lawyers’ fees and related costs were enormous. He’d been forced to come up with new revenue streams, which led him to muscle in on the lucrative policy rackets in Harlem.

Thanks to average working stiffs and grannies wagering untold dimes and nickels, the numbers game was enormously profitable, but it was also risky. Aggressive law enforcement could stop the racket in its tracks by disrupting or shutting down known policy banks—the warehouses, apartment rooms, and empty storefronts where betting slips were registered and proceeds tabulated. Thus the numbers racket could not function without political protection. That was where Jimmy Hines came in.
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The first place Hines and Schultz met was well outside the bounds of Hines’s uptown barony and a long way from Harlem. The district leader waited on a street corner on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, underneath the El tracks. The Dutchman drove up in a bulletproof Caddy with his right hand man, George Weinberg, and his lawyer. Hines climbed in the back seat. Schultz introduced everyone and, as they drove aimlessly around town, got right to the point. In his typically blunt manner, he made it clear to Hines that the biggest problem with his policy business was “the goddamned, no good honest cop” who wouldn’t take “the ice” and kept coming around making the same pinches over and over. It was hard to keep things running smoothly when the little people, the runners and controllers, were being hauled off the streets and locked up.

Years later, on a witness stand in county court, George Weinberg recalled this conversation between Schultz and Hines in the back of the Dutchman’s Caddy. It was Weinberg who explained to the district leader exactly what the Combination needed: “I told [Hines] 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 Magistrate’s Court so that they wouldn’t have to go downtown [a reference to 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 Magistrate’s 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.”

Hines’s reply to Weinberg and the Dutchman that day was, “Well, gentlemen, you’ve come to the right place.”

It was agreed that Weinberg would pay the Old Man fifteen hundred dollars a week. In addition, Schultz would give the district leader a down payment of one thousand dollars right there on the spot. From this point forward, James J. Hines was on the payroll; he was a key member of the Combination.

The district leader’s involvement paid dividends almost immediately. Policy arrests by the police department’s Sixth Division in Harlem dropped from twenty a day down to eight and then to four thanks to the clout of Jimmy Hines. If for any reason the heat came back on and arrests started going back up, George Weinberg picked up the phone and called Hines. Mister Fix-It then picked up the phone and called his friend, John F. Curry, Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, who had risen to the top with the backing of Hines’s Monongahela political club. Boss Curry picked up his phone and called James S. Bolan, his hand-picked police commissioner. Bolan called Inspector John O’Brien, head of the Confidential Squad. By the time all the calls were completed, the arresting officers in Harlem were reassigned to a precinct or unit based far out in goatsville. That was the power of the Irish Mob in a nutshell.

Hines didn’t stop with the police department. Many magistrate judges met the district leader at his spacious apartment at 444 Central Park West. The words he used with the magistrates, in general, were identical to the request he specifically made one afternoon to Judge Hulon Capshaw.

“I have a policy case, a very important one, coming up before you that I’d like you to take care of,” Hines said to the judge at his apartment.

Magistrate Capshaw replied, “Haven’t failed you yet, have I? Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”

Having political leaders, police commissioners, and judges in your back pocket might seem comprehensive, but Hines, a man whose long career was devoted to manipulating the levers of power within the System, left nothing to chance. Through George Weinberg, he funneled thirty thousand dollars directly from the Combination into the election fund of the prospective Manhattan District Attorney, a man Hines called “stupid, respectable, and my man.” Jimmy’s man was elected, and he made sure that no major organized crime prosecution went forward without first consulting the white-haired commissar from the 11th Assembly District.