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Title: Washington Confidential

Author: Jack Lait
Lee Mortimer

Release date: October 16, 2020 [eBook #63469]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WASHINGTON
CONFIDENTIAL ***

Transcriber’s Note
Larger versions of the maps may be seen by right-
clicking them and selecting an option to view them
separately, or by double-tapping and/or stretching them.

Washington Northwest

District of Columbia and Vicinity

WASHINGTON CONFIDENTIAL

Previously Published
by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer

NEW YORK CONFIDENTIAL
CHICAGO CONFIDENTIAL

by Jack Lait

HELP WANTED (a play)
THE BIG HOUSE
BROADWAY MELODY
BEAST OF THE CITY
PUT ON THE SPOT
GANGSTER GIRL
BEEF, IRON AND WINE (short stories)
GUS THE BUS
OUR WILL ROGERS
WILL ROGERS’ WIT AND WISDOM
A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL WRITING

by Lee Mortimer

NEW YORK BEHIND THE SCENES

WASHINGTON
Confidential

BY JACK LAIT
AND
LEE MORTIMER

CROWN PUBLISHERS, INC.
NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1951, BY CROWN PUBLISHERS, INC.

Second Printing, February 1951

Printed in the United States of America
American Book—Knickerbocker Press, Inc., New York

The Confidential Contents

ix
Introduction: WASHINGTON CONFIDENTIAL

Part One—THE PLACES (Confidential!)
1. DISTRICT OF CONFUSION 1
Washington’s whys and wherefores,
guaranteed to mystify, amaze and amuse.
2. “GORGEOUS” GEORGETOWN 8
No relation to the wrestler, only sometimes he
makes more sense than the rich big domes and
fancy queers who reside in this made-to-order
Greenwich Village.
3. NW COULD MEAN NOWHERE 12
North West is the only section of Washington
which counts. On the other hand, what is there
in it you won’t find in Denver, Detroit or
Dubuque, except the White House?
4. NOT-SO-TENDER TENDERLOIN 21
Where the hustlers hustle.
5. HOBOS WITH NO HORIZONS 30
They can’t vote the bums in Washington’s
flophouses, otherwise these skidrows are like
your home-town Bowery, except there are
three.
6. GREEN PASTURES Here 34
the poor, downtrodden colored folk are not

equal, they’re superior. And there are more of
them. This is a Negro Heaven.
7. MIGHTY LIKE A ROSE 46
Where the blackest crimes are hatched.
8. CHINATOWN CHIPPIES 56
Washington’s Chinatown offers inducements
other than Chop Suey and Chow Mein.
9. THE OVERFLOW 62
A. The Free State—where anything goes for a
price.
B. The Policy of the Old Dominion is policy.
10. UNCLE SAM: LANDLORD 70
The government owns 40% of the land. Read
this and find out what happens on it.

Part Two—THE PEOPLE (Confidential!)
11. THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A DAME 74
You can say that again about those in
Washington.
12. G-GIRLS 77
They come in two grades: A. Government Gals
—they’re many and not so glamorous. B.
Glamour Gals—they’re few and not so
glamorous.
13. COMPANY GALS 83
Being a dissertation on a specialty known only
to Washington and how one finds same.
14. FOR IMMORAL PURPOSES 86
The capital was made for lupos. An elucidation
on how one goes about being one.
15. GARDEN OF PANSIES 90
The hand-on-hip set wins the battle of

Washington.
16. THE LITTLE RED HERRINGS 99
Agrarian reformers—that’s what the bright
State Department lads call them, in other
countries. We call those in Washington traitors.
17. KICKING THE GONG AROUND 107
When we speak of hopheads, we don’t mean
Congressmen.
18. THE YOUNG IN HEART 118
Until we read this book we liked children. In
Washington the little dears are devils.
19. BOOZE AND BOTTLES 123
Washingtonians imbibe three times as much as
you. Where they get it, how and why, with
pointers on what to do with your hollow leg.
20. CAFE AU CORN 131
That’s Washington’s Cafe Society.
21. CALL ME MADAME 134
With apologies to Irv Berlin. Being the story of
the Social Climbers who climbed in when
SOCIETY climbed out.
22. STRIPED PANTS 144
Elsewhere men who wear ’em bury the dead;
in Washington most who wear them are dead
but not buried. That’s the sad tale of what
happened to the once oh, so gay diplomatic
corps.
23. LOBBYIST’S LICENSE—THE RIGHT TO 155
PETITION
The population consists of so many five
percenters, lobbyists, fixers, lawyers, press
agents and men from Missouri, you’d think

everyone was taking advantage of the
Constitutional guarantee.
24. RACKETS BY REMOTE CONTROL 171
Washington’s underworld is operated by local
overseers for absentee landlords. This is how
the system works.
25. WHO’S WHO IN MOBOCRACY 177
The Blue Book of the silk-lined aristocracy
who own the works.
26. THE TERROR FROM TENNESSEE 194
Estes in Plunderland.
27. LUCKY NUMBERS 206
After all, politics is a gamble, so why
shouldn’t the citizens do it too?
28. IT’S A CRIME 213
Murder and mayhem, rape and robbery are
pastimes in Washington. Jail? Don’t be naïve.
29. THE LAW 220
The poor, underpaid coppers, who try to
enforce it.
30. HOW TO STAY OUT OF JAIL 229
Hire the right lawyer and bondsman. This will
name him.
31. THE BOSSES 234
They’re responsible for the works working.
Maybe that’s why they don’t.
32. THE MONARCHS OF THE METROPOLIS 240
The “Honorable” members of Congress.
33. WIRETAPPERS, SNOOPS AND SPIES 245
The only thing they can’t tap is sign language.

Part Three—THE ESCAPE (Confidential!)
34. THE TUESDAY TO THURSDAY SET 254
Where shall we go? Anywhere, but most head
north to New York, Philly and Atlantic City.
35. BALTIMORE CONFIDENTIAL 258
Baltimore is less than an hour away, but what a
difference! You’ll find things here they never
heard of even in Chicago.

Part Four—THE LOWDOWN (Confidential!)
36. INSIDE STUFF 276
What they don’t teach you in school.
37. TIPS ON THE TOWNS 281
Advice for the visitor with much that’s
unknown to the natives.
38. CONFIDENTIAL GUIDE TO 292
WASHINGTON AND BALTIMORE
Where to find what, when, including much you
should never want, but if you do—

Part Five—THE APPENDIX (Confidential!)
A. HEADWAITERS’ NAMES 298
This and a sawbuck will get you an insult.
B. GUSTATORY GUIDE 298
Where to find what food, when.
C. DINING AROUND THE WORLD 300
For those who don’t rate bids to embassies, but
want to eat foreign.

D. BARE BABES 301
Where to find ’em. Or where to keep away
from ’em, which is harder.
E. LUPO’S LOG BOOK 301
Being some notes to file away where your wife
won’t look.
F. THE INNER CIRCLE 302
Extracts from the list of 800.
307
INDEX

WASHINGTON CONFIDENTIAL

P-S-S-S-T!
Here we go again—Confidential.
We turned New York inside out; but we both live there. We turned
Chicago upside down; but we were both raised there. We descended on
Washington not quite like Stanley invaded Africa, because in our combined
75 years of newspaper work we had been in the capital hundreds of times. It
intrigued us because we never could understand it. So we decided brashly to
do a Lait-Mortimer operation on it from scratch. Our principal discovery
was that nobody understands Washington—the city, not the nation’s nerve-
center.
By the time we went through it—its avenues, its alleys, its cat-houses,
its dumps, its mansions, its hotels, its police stations, its jails, its courts, its
clubs, its closets, and its catacombs, we knew more about it than anyone
who lives in it, and finished the job which stymied Lincoln Steffens 40
years ago; for that classic muckraker who turned up the shame of the cities
recoiled in bafflement when he attempted to “do” Washington.
It was our toughest task of digging, but we turned up plenty. We think
we have X-rayed the dizziest—and this will amaze you, as it did us, the
dirtiest—community in America.
We are not reformers. We are reporters. As such we will take you with
us through a metropolitan area of 1,500,000, living in what should be a
utopia, but which is a cesspool of drunkenness, debauchery, whoring,
homosexuality, municipal corruption and public apathy, protected crime
under criminal protection, hoodlumism, racketeering, pandering and
plundering, among anomalous situations found nowhere else on earth.
Washington is a made-to-order architectural paradise with the political
status of an Indian reservation, inhabited by 800,000 economic parasites; no

industries but one, government, and the tradesmen and servants and loafers
and scum that feed on the highest average per capita income in the world,
where exist the soundest security, the mightiest power, and the most
superlative rates of crime, vice and juvenile delinquency anywhere. And
this in a seat of intelligence, the cross-section of the whole United States,
where women far outnumber men.
It leads the country in the percentage of the native-born. There are no
peasants, factory-workers or slums as they are known in every other city of
magnitude.
The paternal form of local administration in this disenfranchised and
politically castrated community should eliminate ward and district bosses,
vote-buyers, grafters and gangsters, all of whom elsewhere thrive primarily
on controlling votes. Yet in this magnificent planned city of majestic
proportions, the official heart of the richest and greatest and freest land in
the history of mankind, we found corruption and perversion, organized and
individual, that dazed a pair of hardened characters who considered
themselves shock-proof after their groundwork for the books that debunked
New York and deloused Chicago.
We spent many months in Washington. We made contacts in our own
surefire way, which opened up sources not usually available to the reporters
there, who regard affairs of their town as chickenfeed, and who dream of
becoming syndicated columnists who can pontificate on Congress, the
Cabinet and the White House.
We know plenty about those, too. But we will stick to the Lowdown on
the Big Town, which has become our trademark.
We will not even attempt to be comprehensive. We have no hope or aim
to make Washington a better place to live in. We don’t give a damn what
kind of a place it is to live in, except that the kind of place we found
furnished us with that sole commodity in which we deal—copy.
Everything interested us, but we will limit this to what we think will
interest you. This is no guide-book. This is no preachment and no appeal,
not even a lesson. As we said in the introduction to Chicago Confidential,
“We have nothing to sell except books.” And we sold plenty of them and
are still selling them.

This will be the stripped-down story of a queen who turned into a
street-walker.
That’s why we were born—to tell you what you couldn’t find out
without us—Confidential!

PART ONE

THE PLACES
(Confidential!)

1. DISTRICT OF CONFUSION

THE NATION’S CAPITAL is a bastard born of a compromise
and nurtured on a lottery.
The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution
and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that
government in a stinking, steaming swamp. This was a peace offering to
recalcitrant Southerners, who were that way then just as they are now.
The first funds to build and improve that city were raised by selling real
estate by lottery. With such ancestry, it is no wonder today that “numbers”
make one of the biggest businesses in Washington. The policy racket far
exceeds bookmaking, the Number 1 source of gambling revenue in all
others parts of the country.
Before the plane which brings the arriving traveler to Washington lands
at the National Airport, on the Virginia side, it swoops gracefully over the
city in a salute. The tall, needle-like Washington Monument and the familiar
dome of the Capitol arise through a sea of green, to dominate the landscape.
They and the other public structures, which alone form the skyline in a
city where buildings over 110 feet high are banned by law, are the symbols
of Washington. It is an old-fashioned, tree-shaded Southern town, delightful
and gracious, taken over by a gigantic governmental apparatus which,
though founded on Colonial Virginia’s tradition of personal freedom, has
mushroomed into the world’s greatest bureaucracy, humpbacked and bow-
legged under tons of laws and endless regulations.
The spacious avenues, the tree-shaded lawns, the green which one sees
wherever he looks, is a symbol too—that Washington is dominated by the
rural mind.

It is the only capital of any world power where there is no variety of
humanity. London, Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, these are great
commercial centers where national government is incidental. Washington is
inhabited by residents of every state in the union and representatives of
every country on the globe, yet it is as backwater and provincial as any
small inland one-plant town.
This most uncosmopolitan capital is overshadowed by that giant of
metropolises, New York, only minutes away by air, and by Baltimore, with
its wide open and blatant vice much nearer. The foreign trade
commissioners, the visiting bankers, and all the important public
personages go to Manhattan, where the United Nations is cutting into
Washington’s diplomatic monopoly. The lowlier links lam the 36 miles to
Baltimore to cut up.
Not that Washington has no vice and venery. It has more of it than the
escape havens. But, as in all ingrown towns, the “respectables” must go
away from home to prance and play. It is the story of the deacon from
Dubuque all over again, and what happens to him in the Big Burg. Only
here the deacon is a Congressman, or—
As we unfold the rates of crime, vice, sex irregularities, graft, cheap
gambling, drunkenness, rowdyism and rackets, you will get, thrown on a
large screen, a peep show of this stately concentration camp of cold
monuments and hot mammas where there are four women for every three
men. Murkier than the “smoke-filled room” so often used as a cliché to
typify a corral of politicos, it is a vast bedroom with a jumbo bottle of
bourbon beside the bed.
And yet its manners and morals are those of the barnyard and the
railroad-junction town rather than the romantic intrigue of the salon and the
scented boudoir.
Washington has a kind of glamor all its own. It is not the kind one finds
in New York, or Paris, or even Atlantic City. The Washington feeling comes
from being close to great events and to the memory of great people. It is, to
a certain extent, similar to the public appeal of Hollywood’s famed Forest
Lawn Cemetery, the place where the movie stars are interred. Forest Lawn
there is a must for tourists. There is no sacred peace about this graveyard.

Trippers photograph its ornate tombs and profane its dead. The tombs were
purposely designed by hams who craved publicity even in death.
Washington does remind one of a well-kept cemetery. Its gleaming
public buildings of white marble are like so many mausoleums. It is the
nation’s Forest Lawn, where is sunk its priceless heritage, killed by
countless generations of getters and gimme-ers.
Washington is a reflection of Los Angeles—a Los Angeles without
palm trees. Where it doesn’t look like a cemetery it resembles a movie set.
It has a feel of unreality. This is a designed city, the only important one in
America, and its streets are so straight, its architecture is so conforming,
and its sidewalks are so neat and clean, it might have been set up in papier-
mâché only today.
And it’s a dead heat which—Washington or Los Angeles—has more
yahoos from more dull places. New York gets its share, but its tourists
include many from fairly alive communities; the plowboys hail from New
England or other points not very far away. But the barbarians who inundate
Washington and Los Angeles would be conspicuous if they visited Little
Rock. Heaven knows where they come from. Their clothes, make-ups,
manners and expressions are of the cow-pasture.
We were sitting in the Senators’ Reception Room in the Capitol,
waiting for one solon to come off the floor. This rococo room is open to the
public. While we sat there, we idly contemplated the sight-seers who gaped
at the mid-Victorian gold and mosaic with which it is embellished. One
coatless yokel, with two dirty-nosed youngsters in tow and a dreary wife
toting a wailing babe bringing up the rear, figured we knew something
because we were wearing ties and sitting down.
“What room is this?” he humbly asked.
“This is the President’s private office,” we replied. “No visitors
allowed.”
You should have seen them scram!
The number of transients who enter and leave Washington annually is
in excess of 45 million. Most of them are peasants who shudder when they
ride in an elevator and gape at an escalator. The sessions of Congress find
them in the galleries of the noisy House and the sedate Senate. The men are

negligee with firemen’s suspenders, the women often suckle babes at their
breasts while some Demosthenes below debates a bill vital to the world.
But the residents of the Washington area are, on the whole, remarkably
well-dressed—not only the natives in Washington but the government
employes drawn from every corner of the map. It is surprising how quickly
they shed their corn-fed looks and begin to look like Easterners and try to
act like them.
One wonders where the hoards of ill-dressed, low-mannered visitors eat
and sleep.
Tourists may wander coatless through the White House and in the
legislative office buildings, but all of the better restaurants and hotels
require men to wear coats and ties at all times. This, of course, is universal
in New York, but in Chicago, horny-handed, wilted hoi polloi are seen in
lobbies of such swell hotels as the Ambassador and Drake in shirt-sleeves.
Washingtonians are completely white-collar. Its private business is
merchandising. The service trades, such as feeding and sleeping visitors,
form its chief non-governmental activity. Before the New Deal put a
premium on alphabet soup, federal employes got miserly wages.
Washington was a poor city. Now some secretaries make as much as $8,000
a year and Senators’ assistants drag down $10,000. We talked to one babe,
some kind of an expert in the Treasury, who draws $15,000 a year on a fee
basis. In her spare time she checks hats in a joint which sells liquor after
hours.
The average family income in Washington is the highest in any big city
in the land, despite its disproportionate Negro population. Colored folk
work for Uncle Sam at salaries equal to whites’, in many cases get
preferential treatment, and others draw liberal relief checks. Another reason
for high family income is that in so many families husband and wife work
for the government, and many who are grounded there also hold outside
jobs, after hours. This practice is permitted in many departments. Even
members of the Metropolitan Police are allowed to accept outside
employment after their eight-hour day. Many drive taxies or are chauffeurs.
The per capita income in Washington is $1820, compared with the
national average of $1330. Even rich New York is second to Washington

with $1758.
Washingtonians file more income-tax returns per capita than do any
other Americans. More than two-thirds of the homes in the District are
worth more than $12,000. The city has the highest retail sales per capita on
earth. Government employes are paid regularly by a boss who never goes
broke—though that isn’t the fault of the politicians.
Added wealth streams constantly into the city, from the cornucopias of
lobbyists with no-limit expense accounts, tourists and representatives of
foreign governments who let loose a few francs, shillings or lire before
tapping our tills.
Here we have a city which, if mental cripples who believe in planned
economies were correct, should be a happy place, free of crime and vice.
Washington is rich and almost everyone in it is insured against want for life.
Yet it has that apex rate of crime. The waterfront of Marseilles, the alleys of
Singapore’s Chinatown, the sailor’s deadfalls of Port Said have nothing on
it. Washington makes even Chicago look good. And that’s been going on
since Abigail Adams hung the family wash in the backyard of the then
unfinished White House—and shuddered lest the President’s drawers be
stolen.
In the early years of the Republic, grifters and grafters, highwaymen
and conmen, pimps and prostitutes flocked into the city. Instead of being a
community where women greatly outnumbered men, as they do today, early
Washington contained almost entirely males. The first Congressmen and
early office-holders were easy pickings for the fancy girls and their fancy
men, who arrived a jump ahead of the lobbyists. Lonesome men whiled
their time at cards and dice, and ever since then Washington has been a
gamblers’ garden.
Foreigners and many American political philosophers say one great
fault of our American system is our form of municipal government. They
point out the astounding crime, legal laxity and municipal deviltry in this
country where we elect our local governments directly and give them great
power, whereas most foreign countries are ruled from above, with cities and
provinces allowed minimum authority.

Well, Washington is ruled from above. It has no votes, no county
chairmen, no campaign funds to be raised, no favors to be returned. It is
policed by a constabulary appointed directly by the United States
government and paid from the public treasury of the United States. Its
judges are appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate, and all
but municipal court judges serve for life. Its District Attorney is chosen by
the President, as are its city commissioners, and through them all public
District officials.
There is no chance for a neighborhood gang boss to establish himself
through floaters and colonized flotsam. Yet there are neighborhood bosses.
There is influence. Judges and police are bought. Washington has the
blackest record of any city in the country on the F.B.I. ledger of reported
crimes. Black is the color of its crime, too, as will be shown. The proportion
of Negro crime to white is almost eight to one.
Another reason for Washington’s defiance of the law which is made in
Washington is that, except for ogling tourists, everyone who comes comes
to get. To get jobs, contracts, favors, pardons, commissions, and sometimes
social preferment. This acquisitive horde is not interested in the city.
Toward local public affairs there is lethargy of mind, spirit and body,
nothing conducive to enterprise or local pride.
This potpourri of human beings on the make remained within bounds
until the first World War. There was room for all. As every schoolboy
knows, the original grant of land from the states of Maryland and Virginia
for the national capital was a square, ten miles wide. This proved too big
and the Virginia part was receded more than a hundred years ago. The
remaining area, all in Maryland, was ample for the needs of the city until
overnight, in 1917, it changed from a country town to a madhouse in which
all the residents are inmates. There was some respite during the 1920’s, but
since the coming of the New Deal, Washington burst its pants and
overflowed back into Virginia and across into Maryland.
As with other large cities, the 1950 census returns found the rate of
growth of Washington suburbs far outstripping the parent. At this writing
there are about 800,000 people in the city limits and 750,000 in the satellite
suburbs of Virginia and Maryland. The percentage of Negroes is higher than
it is in Mississippi.

Seniority rules in the Congress, which permit one-party Southern
Senators and Representatives to control more than their share of
committees, account for continuance of its Dixie slant. So Washingtonians
talk like Southerners. Even the Oregonians and down-Easters fall into the
liquid drawl after a few years in the capital. With the dulcet Dixie dialect
comes the Southern attitude toward the Negro. Fiery FEPCers from New
York, after a couple of years’ indoctrination, wink in private over the
“tolerance” they sell in public. As Negroes move in the whites flee out.
As residents of Virginia and Maryland, these automatically gain the
votes they surrendered or never had. Though still employed in Washington,
they lose all interest in its municipal affairs. They live, vote, pay taxes, send
their children to school and join churches beyond the borders.
And, as the Negro immigrates and propagates, Washington’s chance of
ever getting the vote dwindles. Even Northern congressmen, with huge
Negro voting constituencies at home, won’t burn their hands with such
legislation. They declare for the principles of home rule, sign petitions to
withdraw bottled-up home-rule bills from committees, then secretly
withdraw their names.
As these pages unfold you will get a picture of how more than
1,500,000 people live. Few would stand for some of Washington’s
nauseating conditions in their own towns. Yet they take them here
complacently. Congressmen, the lords of the city, shrug at what would
throw them out of office if the good burghers in Beloit or Boonetown
suspected—and cared.
Washington has a heritage of “everybody’s business is nobody’s
business.” But the stimulation which sparks its evils is different, though the
result is the same.
Of old, Congress didn’t worry about local crime because all the people
could do about it was write letters to the papers. But now, since crime is
nationally syndicated, some legislators actively protect Washington crime,
because it means more funds back in their bailiwicks from the branches of
the swelling Syndicate of silk-lined racketeers who are allied with
Washington’s criminals.

So this is the nation’s capital: with its panderers and prostitutes;
gamblers and gunmen; conmen and Congressmen; lawmakers and law-
breakers; fairies and Fair Dealers.
It is a city of moods, even drearier when Congress is away
campaigning or vacationing; yet it turns electric when something big is
about to happen.
It is a city of the wistful little people with adding-machine minds.
Over all, a feeling of fear pervades it. People become conditioned to
talking in whispers. Senators will walk you to the middle of the room, then
mumble, even when what they have to say is inconsequential. The main
indoor sport is conspiracy.
We give you Washington: not the city of statesmen, but the stateless
city.

2. “GORGEOUS” GEORGETOWN

WE SHALL begin this catalog of places with Georgetown, by far
the oldest in the city.
Not all who reside in Georgetown are rich, red or queer, nor do all
Washington millionaires, Commies and/or fags dwell in Georgetown.
But if you know anyone who fulfills at least two of the foregoing three
qualifications don’t take odds he doesn’t prance behind Early American
shutters in a reconditioned stable or slave-pen in this unique city within a
city.
Georgetown was a thriving Colonial village when the rest of the
District was swampland. It was included in the District of Columbia from
the time of the original grant, but Georgetown remained an independent
municipality until 1895.
If you like that kind of stuff, Georgetown, which lies in the extreme
NW section of the city, has a charm all its own.
Some people like the smell of dead fish in Provincetown. Others like to
climb up four flights of stairs to ratty garrets in Greenwich Village.
Georgetown is quaint that way, too. Now all this is to be preserved for
posterity forever, through an act of Congress setting up a commission to
keep it looking the way it is under penalty of the law for modernizing
anything in the community without the permission of some bureaucrat.
Until twenty years ago, Georgetown was just another rundown
backwash in a great city. Most of its residents were Negroes. Most of its
real estate wasn’t even good enough for Southern Negroes, and don’t forget
that a Southern Negro is forced to live almost anywhere. New Dealers and
the bright young braintrusters from Harvard reversed what seems to be a
foreordained rule in every city in the country. In other words, the whites

drove the Negroes out—as many as they could—and took over for
themselves what was practically a blighted area.
This is how it came about: When Washington was suddenly flooded
with a horde of crackpots from the campuses, Communists, ballet-dancers
and economic planners, there was no place for them to live. They abhorred
the modern service apartments. These people were “intellectual.” The
women wore flat-heeled shoes and batik blouses, and went in for New
Thought. The men, if you could call some of them that, wore their hair
longer than we do, read advanced literature, and talked about the joys of
collectivism, though all of them were so individual they couldn’t bear to
live in skyscrapers.
Most of these people had dough. The others got good government jobs,
became “contact men” or spoke at meetings and wrote for publications
sponsored by rich left-wingers to provide automobiles and other luxuries
for the needier pinks.
Washington had nothing like New York’s Greenwich Village, but in the
early days of the New Deal Mrs. Roosevelt herself, during one of the
fleeting moments she was in Washington, “discovered” Georgetown and
conceived it as a genteel bohemian community where her sandal-shod
friends could find congenial company. She wouldn’t allow the WPA to alter
anything though sewage comes up from the river. Georgetown is overrun
with rats, which frequently chew up Negro infants.
Ancient wooden houses, much the worse for the wear of centuries,
which could have been bought lot-and-all for $2,500 in the ’20s,
skyrocketed as it became “smart” for society to move to Georgetown. Some
properties are now worth twenty times what they brought twenty years ago,
though terrible odors emanate from a nearby slaughter house.
Following the discovery of Georgetown, the truly gentle Negroes who
had lived there, some for a hundred years or more, were driven out. Few
owned their homes. Into rickety structures which had once housed as many
as ten Negro families—seventy-five people—moved one millionaire left-
wing carpetbagger and his wife. With improvements, naturally. Equality is
okay to talk about. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on some of
these homes, modernizing, beautifying, disinfecting and furnishing them.
Now they have house-and-garden tours for visiting Kiwanians.

Not all the Negroes could be ousted. Even today, Georgetown has a
considerable colored population, though it is the only part of Washington
where there are fewer Negroes than there were twenty years ago. Those
who remain live in shanties so undesirable that no rich white fairies can be
found who want to turn them into something gay. In fact, there’s a saying in
Georgetown now that you’re not “smart” unless darkies live next door to
you.
The sight-seeing buses point out historic Prospect House, now used by
the government for visiting notables, but they don’t show you the tumble-
down Negro shacks behind it.
One of Georgetown’s most distinguished residents is Dean Acheson.
Emmitt Warring, king of Washington’s gamblers, about whom more will be
found in succeeding chapters, is in business nearby.
Warring is the kingfish of Georgetown. He controls its local police
precinct as well as its local crime. As will be shown, he has direct
affiliations with the national underworld syndicate.
Eleanor Roosevelt gave Georgetown that first big impetus after her son,
Jimmy, who didn’t “got it” in California, moved across the street from the
old Imperial Russian Embassy, in the 3200 block of Q Street. It looked like
good business to build up the area.
Soon the section filled up with all manner of strange people. Many of
these were buddies of the First Lady. We have seen a letter she wrote to one
Ben Grey, in which she pats such types on the head.
One of the queerest sights visible anywhere is the one from a window
on the second floor of Dean Acheson’s quaint home at 2805 P Street. It
faces the 28th Street side over a back yard. The Secretary’s personal
lavatory faces that way. His mind apparently weighted by cosmos-shaking
affairs of state, the secretary forgets to draw down the shade.
It is on the second floor, and Acheson doesn’t know he can be seen.
This is to tip him off to what the whole neighborhood knows, first-hand and
not confidential.
In the next block lives Justice Frankfurter. He and Acheson, fresh air
fiends, walk to town every morning.

Another neighbor is Myrna Loy, out of films while on a special mission
for the State Department. She is developing a “new type propaganda
campaign.” Well, she played enough spy roles in the movies.
Georgetown is also the home of Georgetown University, oldest and
largest Catholic school in the country. The broad acres of its beautiful
campus were undoubtedly originally responsible for preserving the historic
buildings of the community from the onward rush of modernity which
swept over the rest of Washington.
But also in Georgetown is the Hideaway Club. It is known in local
parlance as a bottle club. A bottle club is a resort which gets around the law
which provides that all liquor dispensaries shall close at 2 a.m. Despite a
murder at the Hideaway and a recent Congressional investigation of such
enterprises and a flurry of activity by the United States Attorney, there are
still at least 500 of these unlicensed places, some say more, in the District, a
subject which will be covered in detail hereinafter.
The area’s favorite gathering place is Martin’s Bar on Wisconsin
Avenue where New Deal and Fair Deal policy is made. It was the hangout
of Tommy the Cork and Harry Hopkins, who changed the world over
bottles while Georgetown students roistered around them.
Georgetown is relatively free of street-walkers who plague every other
section. That is because there are no hotels and few transients. But what it
lacks in ambulent magdalens is more than made up for by homosexuals of
both indeterminate sexes. It seems that nonconformity in politics is often
the handmaiden of the same proclivities in sex. Among the thousands
known in the capital, a goodly proportion live in the storied ancient
dwellings of the area. The fun that goes on in some is beyond words and
was even worse when the staffs of the embassies of some of the Iron
Curtain countries still found it feasible to travel about in society.
Some Washington policemen will tell you with a shrug of despair of the
times the patrol wagons pulled up at particular homes as a result of
complaints from neighbors, only to find the prancing participants in the
unspeakable parties were Administration untouchables or diplomats sacred
from interference.

Which, when you consider that Emmitt Warring also seems to be
immune, makes Georgetown seem like a wonderful place to live in—
nobody ever gets pinched there.

3. NW COULD MEAN NOWHERE

THE FIRST question asked by members of the new Seventh
Congress, after taking the oath in the draughty and unfinished Capitol in
1801, was “where is a saloon with dames?” or the early 19th century
equivalent thereof.
The chief usher escorted them to the steps on the Hill, which
overlooked what there then was of the young city, a collection of boxes
resembling nothing so much as a rude Oklahoma oil-boom town on a rainy
day, and pointed northwest. “There,” he replied. Ever since that historic
moment, anything that matters and much that doesn’t is in that part of the
city known by its postal address as “NW.”
“North West” is the only section of Washington which counts. It is the
capital of the capital. NW is the works.
When Major Pierre L’Enfant accepted the commission to plan the
capital, he went Caesar’s Gaul one better and divided it into four parts.
These he laid out like spokes around a wheel, with the hub “The Hill,” on
which he built the Capitol. He named each section after compounded
cardinal points of the compass, NW, SW, NE and SE. The others you can
throw into the garbage-can—NW is the city.
Other municipalities have distinctive sectors. In Washington
everything, the rialto, marts of commerce, homes of the wealthy, are piled
into this one corner, where they rub shoulders with the lowly, the dirty and
the wicked, not to overlook Washington’s No. 1 problem, the colored.
Washington’s Main Drag is F St. if you could call it such. The crossing
at 14th Street is its Times Square, its State and Madison—an insult to both.
Most of the 1,500,000 who live in the District and environs, plus a half-
million tourists, pass it daily.

Here are the movie palaces, but its sole legit theatre is almost a mile
away. Its best-known restaurants are around the corner. Any night, Saturday
included, the heart of America’s heart is dark and quiet.
Washington’s Main Stem is somewhat more somnolent than those of
most villages. Don’t get us wrong—things do happen after dark. But—those
who do them don’t want them seen.
When one seeks the reason for the empty dreariness of Washington at
night, where trees swaying in the wind often are the only living things, he is
told what seems the obvious—Washington is a town of early-to-bedders
who do not go in for night life. That is not true. Washington has hundreds of
sneak-ins that remain open all night. Your hardy reporters almost collapsed
before they could complete this assignment—to visit every place openly or
surreptitiously breaking the law. Almost all are in NW, which should have
made it easier.
After-dark Washington is the way it is because it has the smalltown
mentality. People do their sinning in homes and hotels or in pseudo-private
“clubs.”
Now let’s get on with NW.
Most Congressmen live there. That’s a break for all except cab-drivers.
Hack rates are regulated by zones. Passengers pay the same fee regardless
of where they ride to in a zone, with a surcharge for each extra zone the cab
enters. The Congressmen, who make all the District’s laws, talked the
Public Utilities Commission into gerrymandering the zone map in such a
way it ended up allowing them and you and us to go almost anywhere from
the Capitol into NW for a minimum fee. No one wants to go elsewhere, so
it’s a fine deal for all but the cab-jockies.
All the big hotels are in NW. That includes everything from popular-
priced tourist fall-ins near the station to the luxury hostelries like the
Mayflower, Statler, Carlton and the residential ones in the outskirts, such as
the Shoreham and Wardman Park. And the assignation hotels are
downtown, smack in the middle of everything, very snug.
Perhaps the most famous hotel is the Willard, at F and 14th Streets.
They call it the New Willard now, though the new section was built during
Teddy Roosevelt’s first administration. For almost a century, VIP’s from all

over the world stayed here. Julia Ward Howe wrote the “Battle Hymn of the
Republic” in one of its rooms. Now its cocktail bar is a hangout for
lonesome government girls and other fancy-free women, best time after 5
p.m.

The new and modern Ambassador Hotel is at 14th and K, one of the
many holdings of Morris Cafritz, husband of Washington’s “first” hostess
since the elevation to the Diplomatic Corps of Mme. Mesta. The High Hat
Cocktail Lounge in the Ambassador is a gay drinking spot, much patronized
by the lonesome of either sex because of its informality. When we asked a
cab-driver where we could meet a “friend” he directed us to the
Ambassador. We sat there five minutes, not long enough to attract a waiter’s
eye. But the eyes of two blonde things, young and not bad-looking, were
quicker. One asked us to buy her a drink. We did.
Before long we were old friends. They told us they’d spend the evening
with us for $20 each. We said we had to catch a train. They thought we
meant the price was too high and reduced it to $10—“if we had a place to
take them.”
We returned to the Ambassador half a dozen times, and all except once
we were approached. That time it was too late, about 1 a.m., and all the
volunteers had already booked themselves. We also saw other stags talk to
girls with whom they hadn’t come in, but with whom they left.
Another cash-and-carry supermarket is the gracious old Peacock Alley
of the Willard Hotel, a broad indoor parade where once world statesmen sat
and sized up famed society beauties.
These hotels are not unique. All of Washington’s respectable inns and
cocktail bars are plagued with loose ladies; there’s nothing much can be
done about it, because the muddled situation of District law and law
enforcement makes it impossible for the managements to bounce that sort
of undesirables—if they are so regarded. The cops would refuse to eject
them for fear of suits; the hotels and saloon-keepers are subject to the same
liability. We saw hookers, or busy beavers that looked remarkably like
them, speak to strangers in the cocktail lounges of the Statler and Carlton,
and we were approached by one in the former place.

The hotel situation is never static. Comes war or emergency and the
town is always short on rooms. In times of depression or recession there are
too many rooms. When your authors began their regular trips to the city in
search of material for this book, Washington had not started to take on its
Sino-Korean war dress. We and our money were welcomed with open arms.
We spent lavishly throughout the summer at the Carlton, a haunt of New
Deal and Labor aristocracy, where John L. Lewis and White House assistant
David K. Niles maintain luxurious suites.
As the summer wore on, Washington filled up with hoards of
businessmen, manufacturers’ agents, lawyers, fixers and other finaglers.
They had unlimited expense accounts. Remembering what happened in
Washington during the years of World War II, some leased permanent
suites. Others slipped large and welcome tips to room clerks and executives.
Then reservations at the Carlton for mere confidential reporters were
bitched up. They were unceremoniously moved from room to room, given
second-class accommodations, notified they must get out; so better
spenders could get in—and our bills had been running to $100 a day.
The Shoreham asked permanent guests to leave. Included were many
Congressmen who had been living there for years. Some had voted against
rent control in the District. But now they were Displaced Persons.
It was no secret that among the permanents who were in danger of
being forced to go house-hunting were several statuesque blondes whose
rents were being paid by high officials, diplomats and senators. The swank
Shoreham, one of the most beautiful hotels anywhere, has figured
prominently in police court and divorce court news more than once.
Washingtonians smile when they wonder if the Shoreham’s managing
director, Harry Bralove, asked his pretty ex-wife to find other lodgings, too.
There was a lot of gossip when she and Bralove were divorced. Once, when
unable to meet an overdue $900 alimony bill, he convinced the court he no
longer had an interest in the hotel, merely worked for it. Meanwhile he and
his former spouse renewed their sentiments, but figured they’d be happier
as friends than as man and wife. So the former Mrs. Bralove moved into the
Shoreham.
A very pleasant exception to the general rule about kicking the guests
around is the Mayflower Hotel, after three decades, still the choice of

Washington’s smart set. In the wing devoted to private apartments are
housed some of the most prominent people in the nation and they haven’t
been moved to enable the management to snag profiteer revenue.
What there is of show business is in NW. That is little. Yet it was not
always so. In the early days Washington was a hell of a show town. There
was gaiety then. Long before the streets were paved, dignitaries attended
the theatres and dined sumptuously at famed eating spots.
The theatre figures prominently in Washington’s history. The martyred
Lincoln was slain in Ford’s Theatre, now a museum. President Wilson was
an incurable vaudeville fan with the real habit, attending the same theatre
every week on the same night. He used to slip out of the White House to
Keith’s, a block away, where the management held a seat in the back row,
where he tried to be unobserved. Washington had top vaudeville before the
demise of that medium. Today Keith’s is a grind movie house. The only
thing resembling variety is at Loew’s Capitol, where four or five modest
acts are sandwiched in between runs of a picture.
Washington’s sole remaining legit theatre was the National. Once
Washington was a hot road show town. Many New York hits-to-be had their
tryouts there. Successes played week stands after leaving Broadway.
Washington had minor population but supported many houses. Its residents
were avid show-goers. The National gave up the ghost and turned into a
movie house because of the race problem. Few Washington theatres permit
colored patronage, though Negro theatres allow whites.
The National was restricted against colored attendance in its lease. A
couple of years ago, a race-conscious Actor’s Equity Association, steamed
up by Eleanor Roosevelt and her “we’re-all-brothers” group resolved not to
permit its members to appear in any theatre in Washington while racial
discrimination was enforced. Equity did not issue the same edict against
theatres in the rest of the South, all of which are so restricted. The operators
of the National were bound by the terms of their lease and could not change
their policy. Rather than risk a long, costly fight, they converted the house
into a cinema. Meanwhile, for two years, the capital of the world’s most
literate nation was barren of all living drama.
Within the last few months, the owners of the Gayety Burlesque, on 9th
Street, which is Washington’s Skid Row, converted it into a legit house. The

Gayety had offered pretty low entertainment, because practically anything
is permitted. But trade wasn’t too good. The cagey operators, not hampered
by contractual restrictions, switched. To accent the fact that they were going
all out on this new line of race tolerance, they booked as their first attraction
a show with a mixed cast, “The Barrier” starring Lawrence Tibbett and
Muriel Rahn, who is a Negro. Its theme was miscegenation in the Deep
South.
The opening in the old home of burlesque, surrounded by shooting
galleries, tattoo artists and cheap sex movies for “adults only,” was attended
by the top layer of Washington New Deal and left-wing weepers and critics
for the Negro press and the Daily Worker. The show was panned by the
other reviewers. It closed prematurely, after five days. Producer Michael
Meyerberg said, “We shouldn’t have opened in Washington.”
After that, the theatre limped along, sometimes lighted, sometimes
dark. The Negroes showed no zeal to patronize it. The whites passed it up.
Now the Theatre Guild is sending shows there, subsidized by highbrow
subscribers.
Many who want to see good drama go to New York. There’s usually a
Broadway hit playing in Baltimore.
During the summer, attempts are made to present road shows of New
York companies on The Water Barge, in the Potomac, and in some
neighborhood playhouses. Regardless of the success of some individual
play, Washington can be written off as a theatre town.
Despite all the hardships, there are always optimists, especially when
they can get their names in the papers. One of these is Congressman Klein,
of New York, a screaming New Dealer, who represents one of Gotham’s
most poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Klein is trying to get the government
to spend $5,000,000 for a national theatre. Naturally it is to be named the
Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Theatre. Some of his constituents need
shoes, but F.D.R. needs another monument. His bill forbids barring any
person from appearing in it or attending it because of race, creed, color,
religion or national origin. It would be conducted by the Secretary of the
Interior, who at this writing is that well-known showman, Oscar L.
Chapman, of Denver, Colorado, who is a co-founder of the Spanish-

American League to Combat Exploitation of Mexican Workers in the
United States, an arty cause, no doubt.
For most of the area’s 1,500,000 permanents and 500,000 transients,
movies offer the big night out. How much longer, in the face of TV
competition, remains to be seen. At the present time, attendance runs
100,000 a day. Most film houses in white neighborhoods are restricted to
whites. Negroes have their own. One of the most famous is the Howard, in
the NW colored section, which often augments its shows with top-flight
Negro stage shows. At such times the place is apt to draw more white
customers than black. Washington has its hep-cats. Many of the younger
social and diplomatic sets get a bang out of hot licks. These people who
willingly sit next to dark folks in the Howard refuse to permit them in their
own theatres or restaurants. That’s typical Washington thinking.
The high-class shopping street—the Fifth Avenue—is Connecticut
Avenue, running from La Fayette Square, past the Mayflower Hotel, and
out into Cleveland Parkway, past residential hotels and swank apartments.
There are plenty of first-grade shops here, with chic imports, expensive
antiques and other gewgaws to lure the feminine dollar. Despite the great
wealth of the District and the presence of an international set, all is not
pheasant for these merchants. New York and the magnet of its style-
conscious stores is too near. Even Baltimore gets some of the trade which
can’t find enough smart things at home. But a curious reverse process has
been taking place in recent years. Whereas many Washingtonians travel to
New York to shop and to dine, a couple of Washington’s best-known
institutions have been reaching out and taking over some of the same places
in New York which Washingtonians travel 225 miles to patronize.
Garfinckel’s is Washington’s high-fashion department store. A couple
of years ago, its proprietors bought out the ancient and aristocratic New
York men’s furnishing house, Brooks Brothers. Within a few months, the
Garfinckel octopus reached out and gobbled up one of New York’s oldest
and best-known Fifth Avenue stores, de Pinna.
While this was going on, a couple of smart Swedes, who had made a
tremendous success at Olmsted’s Restaurant, a popular eatery with fine
food in the NW business section, bought New York’s oldest and most

famous restaurant, Luchow’s, on 14th Street, one of the last places left in
the country where dining is still a fine art.
Reference to the appendix will show many other Washington eating
places, some good, some bad and not all recommended, but most of them
are in NW.
One of the best-known and best is Harvey’s, on Connecticut Avenue,
near the Mayflower. This is J. Edgar Hoover’s nightly eating place when he
is in Washington. Like most Washington restaurants, Harvey’s has been in
business long. It specializes in sea food. The room does a sell-out business
and it’s almost impossible to get a table at the height of the dining hour.
Service by ancient Negro waiters is slow. Best time to eat is after 9, because
most Washingtonians dine early; 6 o’clock is the standard time. Many start
at 5. Those are the homely habits. Some restaurants close at 8, and a few at
7.
Julius Lully, who owns Harvey’s, is the butt of J. Edgar’s robust sense
of humor. Once Hoover had a batch of wanted-fugitive-identification
“fliers” made up showing Lully in his World War I private’s uniform. He
had them nailed up on posts for miles around Lully’s country place. When
the hick sheriff locked up the restaurateur, who sputtered and gave Hoover
as a reference, J. Edgar said he had never heard of him.
On another occasion Hoover sent a letter, purporting to be from Oscar
of the Waldorf, threatening to sue Harvey’s for appropriating his salad
dressing. Lully hired a lawyer and told him to offer the Waldorf $2,500, but
J. Edgar advised him it wouldn’t be enough.
The Occidental is hoary with age and legend. Pictures of presidents,
cabinet officers and generals cover the walls. This was our favorite, but the
Occidental has succumbed to the new boom. An officious head waiter, with
a typical Prussian attitude toward customers, lined us up like prisoners of
war, then heaped contemptuous abuse when we dared question his
excellency about the possible chances of being seated and served.
Washingtonians take it. They are used to being kicked around. Senators or
cabinet officers they may be, but at heart most are grass-rooters overawed
by the big city. We didn’t take it. We walked out. We are used to
consideration and hospitality, spoiled by the good manners of heartless
Manhattan.

When Major L’Enfant plotted the city, he provided that the streets
should run in three directions, north and south, east and west, and diagonal.
Where the diagonal avenues, which are named after states, cross the
rectangular streets, generally numbered or alphabetically lettered, there are
wide circles or broad squares. One of those is Lafayette Park, known to all
Americans because it is the square in front of the White House. Here, less
than a hundred yards from the President’s front door, is one of the most
sordid spots in the world. At night, under the heroic equestrian statue of
Andrew Jackson and in the shadow of the foliage of overhanging trees,
there is a constant and continuous soprano symphony of homosexual
twittering.
The President knows about it; he reads the papers. The police
superintendent knows about it. Congress, which governs the District, knows
about it. Recently, the secretary of a Senator was arrested there, charged
with indescribable misbehavior. He was acquitted by a jury. There are few
convictions.
Lafayette Park is one of the showplaces of NW. Another is Thomas
Circle. Years ago, the circle and all the streets leading into it were lined with
mansions. Now you can pull up in your car in front of a newsdealer there, at
any hour, day or night, and place a bet on a horse, buy a deck of junk or get
a girl—$10 asking price, $5 if you put up a struggle.
Another NW cynosure was Dupont Circle. It was social. There were the
homes of such as Princess Eleanor Patterson. Now they’ve been razed or
cut up because of taxes, death benefits, estate distributions and the high cost
of maintenance. Those that still stand have been turned into embassies,
headquarters of national organizations, and rooming-houses in between.
One triangular corner was torn down to make way for the Dupont Plaza, a
glassy and glossy apartment hotel, swell for lobbyists, flashy girls and 5-
percenters. What happened to Dupont Circle hit all the way out the length
of 16th Street, which runs off from the White House, and Massachusetts
Avenue. These two long, broad avenues run through all NW. They are the
“Ambassadors’ Rows.”
Of the sixty embassies, legations and chancelleries, almost all are on
one or the other. Both have a liberal sprinkling of organization
headquarters, such as unions, trade associations and eleemosynary

institutions, with the ever-present furnished-room coops and apartment
hotels.
The complexion of NW is changing, growing darker. The area always
had a large Negro section. There are no racial zoning laws. Restrictive
covenants cannot be enforced. There are no longer any racial boundary lines
and some people think that is dandy. They have been in the driver’s seat
since 1933.
You will find colored people living within a half a block of an embassy
or around the corner from a new luxury apartment house. There is no reason
why this should not be so, but the property-owners and the white residents
do not agree. As the process continues, NW grows less swank and less
desirable, while many of its rich residents move into Maryland suburbs
such as Chevy Chase and across the river into Virginia.
The Negroes and other specific phenomena of NW will be considered
in specialized chapters.

4. NOT-SO-TENDER TENDERLOIN

THE DISTRICT’S “red-light” region may be the largest on earth.
That is because almost all of it is such, neither restricted by law, custom nor
local habit to a particular part of town. But, more than any other, NW is the
Tenderloin, in some ways more blatantly open than ever was New York’s
infamous Satan’s Circus or Chicago’s 22nd Street.
Of all places, you would think Washington would be the last location a
practical, professional prostitute would pick to pitch her camp. With so
many more women than men, so many dames lonesome and far from home,
on the eager upbeat for a meal, a drink or even a kind word, you’d figure
mathematically, psychologically and pathologically that this would be a
ghost town for the trollops.
Part of such traffic is always supported by tourists and strays.
Washington has a large and constant visitation of these, but many other
places have more and have virtually expunged street-walkers and entirely
eradicated the sweatshops where such operators do homework. Yet in
Washington they flourish, though they are supposedly verboten, and the
Weary Winnies parade the pavements. It made a couple of graying Chicago
boys homesick for their childhood.
Lorelles—as the Parisians call them—are in the Washington tradition,
claim the capital by long-established squatters’ rights, almost by right of
discovery.
The same stagecoaches which carried the first Congressmen to
Washington 150 years ago brought also the first whores. They and their
descendants have been here ever since, an integral, important segment of
the population.
For the first 113 years they were protected by law. Segregation in the
District was expunged by act of Congress in 1913, in the first year of the

presidency of the school-teacher from Princeton.
In the early days of the Republic, whoring flourished as an essential
and honorable trade. Transportation facilities were so primitive, many
Congressmen and officials from backwoods sections had trouble getting to
Washington themselves and would have found it impossible to transport
their women. Trollops became an adjunct to legislation. Without them, it is
doubtful whether a quorum could have been maintained for transaction of
public business, which might not have been a bad idea sometimes.
The last compound of the trade was in what is now the Federal
Triangle, between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Mall, from 10th to 15th
Streets. The Willard Hotel, the Treasury and the White House are nearby—
which made it convenient for all concerned.
In the Civil War, General Joe Hooker’s division was encamped in
Washington to protect the President. It was bivouacked in what later
became the official restricted district. One story, accounting for the term
“hooker,” now worldwide, ascribes its origin to the habitat of local
prostitutes, who gathered near the camp to pick up soldiers and remained
after the soldiers left. When local blades went out for a night of hell-raising
they said, “Let’s go over to Hooker’s.”
Another version ascribes the origin of the word to the Hook, in
Baltimore, the town’s sailor section, where tarts picked up sea-faring men.
In the absence of a determination by H. L. Mencken, we will remain
neutral as to the competing claims of the two neighboring cities, except to
say that the residents of either ought to know what they’re talking about,
because there are so many hookers in both.
Leaving out all occasionals in Washington who do it for fun or because
of temporary monetary embarrassment, and counting only pros—those who
have no other form of livelihood, some say there are at least ten thousand
floozies actively in full-time business at this moment. We were solicited by
half that number.
Most of these girls work as loners on the streets or in the cocktail
lounges and bring their earnings back to their pimps. Some function
through call services, via a headquarters phone-number, a cocktail lounge
bartender, or a switchboard operator in a cheap hotel.

Many are tough and predatory. A 20-year old youth was stabbed and
slashed after he turned down a street-corner proposition at Third and E. He
fled when the woman drew a knife, but two colored men caught up to him
and gave him the business.
Until recently, Washington was loaded with whore-houses, was in fact
the last large city where this ancient and storied institution existed.
That’s because it was necessary to take care of the transients and the
male government employes and officials away from their wives. The war
and the post-war housing shortage virtually put the final kibosh on such
dives here as it had done a few years earlier in other towns. Property
became so valuable, landlords could do better by running it legitimately.
We spoke to a police captain who told us that obstacles were no longer
placed in the way of the vice squad when it came to raiding these premises;
but it is impossible to keep the girls off the streets and out of the hotel
lobbies and cocktail lounges where they had transferred their business
addresses.
Under the law of Washington, as well as all other municipalities, vice-
squad detectives are forbidden to partake personally of forbidden wares
while on raids. If they do, they have no case, for a prosecution then
becomes “entrapment” and they are agents provocateurs.
During a recent raid, an operational plan was drawn up in advance. One
of the cops, the handsomest, made the pick-up, and his confederates were
supposed to crash in five minutes after he entered the room, which would
give both time to disrobe, and that is enough evidence to make a collar.
But the raiders were late. The honest, hardworking cop went through
the motions of undressing. Finally he had to get in bed with the wench; 15,
20, 30 minutes passed, and still no raiding party. He couldn’t stall her off
any more.
By the time the doors were busted in, the evidence was null and void.
The figures in this chapter refer solely to white tarts. The black sisters
are mentioned in another one.
Health records indicate that 50 percent of Washington’s white street-
walkers are infected with venereal disease. With the colored ones, it goes up

to 99 percent.
Many of the white women who solicit on the streets are young; it takes
some time for these girls, fresh off the farms, to get the nerve to hustle in
high-class hotels. Police have arrested girls 14, 15 and 16 hawking their
bodies on the public highways. Many of these children, who should be
home doing their schoolwork, left the hills when they were 12, after first
having been raped by a local lout, usually a relative.
This story is not apocryphal. A very young street-walker was formally
charged by the arresting officer with “practicing prostitution.”
“That’s not so, your honor,” she piped up. “I don’t practice any more. I
know how now.”
The going rate for whores, the pick-up kind, is $20 and down. Pretty
fair ones will take $10, and many will come along for $5. These prices are
low compared with the current tariffs in other large cities, the reason being
the extraordinary amateur competition.
Many of the girls roll their customers, mugg them or use knockout
drops and then go through their pockets. But Washington’s prostitutes are
not so hard-hearted as the street sirens in New York, where it is
commonplace for one to be taken to a hotel-room and wake up doped and
robbed, but never loved.
Many Washington nymphs conscientiously give value received.
In other cities the cops take stern measures against the untrustworthy
whores. It is considered the lowest form of larceny to take advantage of a
man with his pants down. New York police recently sent a young married
woman to the penitentiary for five years for just such an outrage, but in
Washington the appointed judges, many unrealistic and some downright
dishonest, condone and encourage such unethical practices.
David L. Miller, 43, a resident of the Soldiers’ Home, picked up Alma
Lee Dugent and took her to a 16th Street, NW, room. He said the 33-year-
old woman robbed him of $2 in bills and a $30 wrist watch while he lay
asleep. The woman pleaded guilty of petty theft.
“This man is as guilty as the woman,” thundered the judge. He ordered
Miller to pay half of Mrs. Dugent’s $25 fine.

At this writing there are few really big madames operating in
Washington. One of the last big operators was Carmen Beach, deported to
Spain. But Nancy Pressler, who figured prominently in the conviction of
Charles “Lucky” Luciano, international Mafia overlord now in Italy, when
she turned state’s evidence against him in New York, is in business in the
capital.
Though many of the girls work as independent contractors, except for
the inevitable pimp, they are loosely organized for emergency purposes in
the event of arrest, through bail-bond brokers and lawyers who specialize in
underworld cases. The law staff of Charles Ford is frequently in court
defending intercepted prostitutes, who usually get off with a small fine or a
warning.
Many singed doves get their weekly check-ups from a physician in the
1700 block of K Street, who charges them $5 a visit. They learn about him
through their community of interests.
We have studied commercial vice in most large cities. It is as a rule
confined by public tolerance to certain streets or sections. When we wrote
about New York and Chicago we were able to name these thoroughfares
and state exactly what kind of merchandise was for sale in each. That is not
so in Washington, where the city seems to be one huge red-light range, with
tramps falling over themselves trying to grab unattached men.
We made a contact on the southeast corner of 14th and New York
Avenue, NW, in front of the cigar store, with a young pedestrian who told
us her name was Sue. She came originally from Florida and had been
hustling in Washington for four years. We asked how to get in touch with
her again and she said, “Just call the Astoria Hotel and ask the operator for
Sue.” When we inquired her last name she said she was the only Sue there.
The Astoria is a cheap hotel on 14th Street.
About two weeks later we were walking through the plush lobby of the
new Statler Hotel and saw Sue ensconced in one of the comfortable
armchairs. We stopped to watch. The slender blonde leaned over to a gent in
another chair and asked for a light. In a couple of minutes they struck up a
deal and walked into the elevator together. When she came down half an
hour later we asked her how much she got.

“Ten bucks,” she exclaimed, “and the tight-wad stiffed me out of luck
money.”
When we first came to Washington to work on this book almost
everyone we spoke to, except cops who knew better, said we wouldn’t find
any professional whores, because why should anyone pay when so many
government girls are easy?
We took some of these friends—government officials, members of
Congress, newspapermen and others, on our tours. And this is what we
showed them:
We were solicited by two girls at Jack’s Grill, 3rd and G Sts. Three
broads came up to us at 4th and G NW and asked us if we wanted company.
We also saw girls bracing strange men at the Purity Lunch and Grill, 3rd
and G NW, and at Mitchell Grill on the same corner. Mitchell’s is the
hangout for precinct cops who saved its license after charges.
A white prostitute tried to date us at the Mai Fong restaurant, in
Chinatown, and two other girls spoke to us at the China Clipper on 14th.
We could have made pick-ups—$10 asked, $5 bid—at the corner of
14th and R. We were approached by girls at the Casablanca Tavern, 421
11th St., NW, and the Covered Wagon, 14th and Rhode Island. The manager
of an all-night diner back of the Statler offered to get us a bed companion
for $15 if we bought a bottle of Seagrams for $8.50—cheap when you
consider it was after hours and he didn’t have a license.
Few if any restaurants and bars employ B-girls. These are women who
in Chicago circulate from table to table and hustle drinks on commission.
They are illegal in the District, though quite common in Maryland, near the
border and in Baltimore.
The femmes fatale who frequent Washington joints usually do so in
free-handed reciprocity. The management steers lonesome men to the gals
who hang around regularly. They, in turn, bring their customers in for
drinks or tell them that’s where they can find them. A saloon which gets a
reputation as the hangout for the best-looking dames finds its gross up.
When a girl closes a pitch, she usually has a place to take the guy, if he
can’t or won’t bring her to his own room. Most Washington hotels,
including the largest, are very broadminded about this, and if you don’t

make noise they don’t make trouble. But this situation is changing as the
hotels are getting more crowded and more independent.
Few small hotels, even if so inclined, properly police their guests.
Some of the girls take their clients to the New Colonial and the Fox.
A former madame named Jackie is now running a rooming-house at
703 Mt. Vernon, where some of the girls steer their customers. You can
usually find seven or eight girls hanging around Ivy House Inn, on New
York Avenue.
Among the most active hookers are Kay Saunders and Peggy Proctor,
both 29, who were once arrested while entertaining 15 male customers. At
this writing they are still in business on the second floor of a house in the
2300 block, Lincoln Road, NE.
One of Washington’s most famous characters is a toothless old hag
known only as Diane. She hangs around 14th and Florida. Diane reminds
old New Yorkers of the fabulous Broadway Rose, who used to panhandle in
front of Lindy’s until she was carted to the bug house.
But, unlike Rose, Diane is an out-and-out hustler. Once upon a time,
they say, she was a good-looker. But her main trouble seemed to be that she
liked her work too much to commercialize it.
We spoke to a man in his late 30’s who remembered her when he was a
school boy. He said the kids used to pick her up because she would take
“small change.” Now some of her old customers, matured and prosperous
men of the world, occasionally drive by her corner to stake her to a hand-
out.
All she can get now are colored men, “winos” and dregs. But she
refuses to retire.
We picked up a girl by the name of Doris who had just been discharged
from the Federal Hospital for narcotic addicts in Lexington, Kentucky. The
story she told us illustrates how girls are recruited for prostitution in the
District.
Doris said she lived in a small town in West Virginia. She and a girl
high-school mate occasionally did a little free-lance whoring on Saturday
nights, on call of a bell-boy in the local hotel. Once he sent them to a room

occupied by two men. One, whose name was Grigsby, tried to sell the girls
on coming to Washington. He said he’d put them in a swell house. The
teenagers were afraid of the big city. Grigsby told them the landlady of the
house was in the next room and called her in. She was a motherly sort. They
consented to come with her.
They found themselves in the house of a madame named Billie Cooper,
on 7th St., in the 1000 block. Doris told us she was an instantaneous success
in the Cooper menage. She was only 17, fresh, buxom and bucolic.
Madame Cooper’s clients were charmed. After she’d been in the house a
few weeks, the madame asked Doris if she’d like to get a “kick.” She
produced a hypodermic needle and gave the child a shot in the arm. Doris
liked the sensation, wanted more. This went on for several weeks, Doris
said, and every day Billie Cooper increased the frequency of the shots.
One day Doris woke up, nauseated and ill.
Billie Cooper exclaimed, “You’re hooked!”
She informed Doris she had become a dope fiend, that henceforth Doris
must pay for the shots.
The girl went into debt, though she was taking in up to $50 a day and,
no matter how much she made, the dope always cost more. She knew no
one else who sold it. She was truly hooked, which was Billie Cooper’s
original purpose, to keep the young girl in her joint and take her money
away from her.
Billie Cooper’s clientele was mostly Chinese. When U. S. narcotics
agents raided her establishment at 5 a.m., gaining entrance with a ladder
borrowed from a fire-house, so two T-men would get into Billie’s bedroom
before she had a chance to flush the narcotics down the drain, they found
several Chinese customers in the place. While the search was still on, 15
more came to the door and were admitted; of these two were officials of the
Chinese embassy.
In the trial it developed that Billie Cooper, who was sentenced for
violation of the narcotics laws, was charging Doris $7 a deck for heroin,
which she bought at half that price from Chinese peddlers. The F.B.I.
proceeded against Grigsby for white slavery violation and he, too, was
convicted.

Doris swore to us that she was off the stuff now. She said she was
living with a Chinaman who worked in a gambling house in Chinatown.
The glamorous brothels are no more. Not since the notorious Hopkins
Institute was closed by the F.B.I. some years ago has there been anything
operating on a lavish scale. Now there are some so-called masseurs who use
that classification as a blind, but nothing on the grand scale.
When F.B.I. men raided the Hopkins Institute, an innocuous-looking
massage parlor in the 2700 block on Connecticut Ave., they uncovered one
of the most sensational call-houses ever in Washington. Not only was the
clientele accommodated at the so-called Institute, but a phone call could
arrange a date on short notice almost anywhere in the District. The
establishment kept a detailed and up-to-date written record on each patron,
fees paid, dates of service, and eccentricities. Girls there said this list
contained entries that could flabbergast some very prominent persons, in
and out of Washington.
The proprietor of the Hopkins Institute was one George Francis
Whitehead, who lived in New York and seldom visited the place. Profits
were sent to him weekly by the “resident manager,” Diane Carter, who was
vice-president in charge of the operation. The Institute was established
originally by someone else and was bought by Whitehead in 1941. He ran it
for several months, then engaged Diane Carter to manage it at a salary out
of earnings. Her principal duties entailed accepting calls, arranging to send
girls to answer the calls, and to have girls available on the premises.
Whitehead left Washington in 1941, after the girls began to complain
that his presence was hurting business because of his excessive drinking,
untidy habits and uncouth deportment. He did not live up to the dignity and
spirit of an Institute. The girls threatened to strike.
The record system was originated by the first operator and passed on to
Whitehead. In addition to other entries, initials of each girl filling an
assignment and the amount of the fee were noted. For the fees a code was
used, to conceal the fact that some paid more than others. The word
“FITZGERALD” was the key to the code. Each letter stood for a digit, i.e.,
F was 1, I was 2, T was 3, etc. Thus the symbol “FD” beside the name of a
customer meant $10; “TD” meant $30, etc. This method was used also to
bamboozle Whitehead, if he checked on his share of the proceeds.

The U.S. Commissioner issued warrants for the arrests of Whitehead,
Diane Carter and 13 girls involved, on charges of violations of the White
Slave Traffic Act. Whitehead was arrested in New York and extradited. Two
indictments were returned against Whitehead, Diane and nine others.
Whitehead pleaded guilty to both and was sentenced to one to four years on
the Act and to eighteen months on conspiracy. But he was adjudged insane
and committed to a mental institution.
Diane Carter pleaded guilty to both indictments and was sentenced to
three to nine months on each, the sentences to run concurrently. Seven other
defendants were found guilty.
The Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the convictions of the seven,
held the violations were of legislation of the District of Columbia and not of
the White Slave Traffic Act.
But the racket was broken. The place never reopened. The F.B.I. seized
the files and never revealed a name, but hundreds of men still tremble when
they remember the Hopkins Institute. Some still attempt pressure to try to
get their names blacked out. They have no success with the F.B.I.

5. HOBOES WITH NO HORIZON

THE PRIDE of the bum, even when he has abandoned the virile
vitality to hold out his paw as a panhandler, is a terminal twinkle of
consciousness that he is only resting between Election Days, when he is a
man. These derelicts have swung cities and states. But in Washington even
that last link to a reason for being is lost.
No Hinky Dink, no Pendergast caters to him, gives him free beer and
rot-gut or a kip in the flop on the joint. No eager dirty duke stretches forth
to greet the floater and the repeater. He can do nothing for anyone.
So he is just a shade lower, lousier and grizzlier than the ones at whom
you shudder as you pass them in your own town. Agglomerations of
beachcombers vary little, even with differences of climate. Every city has
its Skid Row. But Washington has three of them. Like everything else here,
they are departmentalized. No alphabetical designations have yet been
allocated to them, but don’t despair.
One is for the general riffraff; the second is for old-timers; the third is
exclusively for sailors.
But first let us tell you about 9th Street—NW, natch—and specifically
where it crosses Pennsylvania Ave.
Stand on one side of the avenue and you are in the shadow of the great
marble structure which houses the forces of law and order. This is the
Department of Justice Building, and the corner we’re standing on is the
entrance to the F.B.I.
Cross Pennsylvania Avenue and walk into 9th Street, and you are an
intruder in the most publicized Skid Row of the three—they call it the
Bowery here, to distinguish it from the others. As such thoroughfares go,
this is pretty classy-looking. It is wide. All Washington streets are kept
clean, so neither rubbish nor drunks litter the pavements—anyway not by

day. By nightfall, topers rendered hors de combat on smoke and cheap wine
pile up in the doorways.
This part of 9th Street is packed solid with “play lands,” featuring pin-
ball machines, peep show movies and souvenir stands which sell
composition statuettes of the White House and Washington Monument, and
embroidered pillows tastefully lettered with “Love to Mom from the
Nation’s Capital.”
But this human dump lacks romance and legend. No songs are written
about it. There are no grisly tall tales, such as are told about the Barbary
Coast, Basin Street and Chicago, much near the Loop and most of the old
Levee. This is merely a street of convenience, moved up from around the
corner when Pennsylvania Avenue itself was flophouse lane and Al Jolson
and Bill Robinson performed on the sidewalk for pennies.
There’s no law agin’ stripping or peeling in Washington, but it doesn’t
pay off well enough to build a permanent industry around it. The old
Gayety Theatre, which ran pretty high-class traveling burleycue, is now,
probably only temporarily, a legit house. Meanwhile, the burlesque fans buy
their titillation in the cheap movie houses adjoining the Gayety. Sometimes
they amplify their celluloid bills with “living dolls,” at other times the
customers have to get their kicks out of sex movies advertised “For Adults
Only.” An ad before us, of the Leader Theatre, says, “Burlesque’s brightest
stars on screen.” The day’s program provided snake-charming Zorita in “I
Married a Savage”; body-peeling Ann Corio in “Call of the Jungle”; and
Maggie Hart, the stripper, in “Lure of the Isles,” plus “two more thrills.”
In and in front of cheap saloons, cocktail lounges and lunch rooms, are
tarts, reefer-peddlers and novelty salesmen whose chief stock in trade is
“sanitary rubber goods.” Pistols are on sale at $20. The local law isn’t tough
on gun-toters.
Though Washington’s legal liquor closing on weekdays is 2 a.m., this
street, like all in the city, is deserted early. Long before midnight its
habitués have already made sleeping arrangements or are snoring in the
alleys, cheap overnight lodgings or hallways, paralyzed by alky or cheap
domestic red wine.

Crossing 9th Street here, is D Street, known as Pawnbroker’s Row. But
get this—hockshops are against the law.
When you see a shop with a sign reading “Pawnbroker’s Exchange,”
don’t believe it. The window looks like any “Uncle’s” anywhere in the
world, with a profusion of new and used articles ranging from mink coats to
tin watches. But that’s the build-up. These exchanges are only second-hand
stores which buy and sell uncalled for articles pledged in other jurisdictions,
where the three balls of the De Medicis are legal.
The temporarily embarrassed visitor, in need of cash quickly, often gets
rooked in one of these pseudo-hock shops. Take the case of the stranger
who runs short of petty cash until he can wire home. Suppose he has a $200
watch which he wants to put up for security. Needing only perhaps $25,
that’s all he asks for, figuring when he redeems it in a few days he will pay
only that, plus accrued interest. Yet when he asks the pawnbroker’s
exchange man for $25, he is actually selling the $200 watch for that.
Some of the more legitimate shops get around the law by guaranteeing
to sell the article back to the owner at a specified rate after a specified
number of days. What usually happens to the unsophisticated is that they
have lost their security for a fraction of its value, because it has already
been sold.
Little effort is made to police the Bowery stretches of 9th St. The
armed forces maintain a few MPs, but practically anything goes, short of
mayhem, and even that is not uncommon.
The tomatoes who solicit the young and lonesome men in uniform in
this neighborhood are pretty low. The five bucks they ask, plus three dollars
for a room in a handy flea-bag, should be reported to the Better Business
Bureau, considering the quality of the merchandise and the strong
possibilities of picking up souvenirs of the sort they don’t display on
counters.
Interspersed between the shooting galleries, theatres and hamburger
hideaways are the usual bargain men’s clothing stores, army and navy
outfitters, etc. One of the clothing stores, visible from the windows of the
Department of Justice, was built by money inherited from a gangster who
isn’t around to enjoy it, due to a sit-down strike in an electric chair.

This street is a little too fast, flighty and noisy for the old-time bums
and stiffs. It is for younger men. The perennials, who know every flop-
house and smoke-joint in the country, and travel from town to town with the
seasons and the harvests, prefer the Skid Row at 3rd and G Streets, NW and
vicinity, around the corner from Chinatown. Come to think of it, Skid Rows
all over the continent are around the corner from Chinatown.
We call this Mission Row, because it’s where the mission stiffs hang
out. These are the hoboes, bums and tramps who get their morning’s coffee
and their night’s sleep on the benches of a gospel shop nearby on H Street,
in return for listening to a “Come to the Lord” sermon. Mission Row is the
best-looking Skid Row in the country. The streets are broad, with grass and
trees, and most of the set-back buildings are reconverted residences with
stoops and a surviving air of charm. We have been assured it is refreshing to
wake up in the gutter here with a smoke hangover.
You find no brassy newcomers in these quarters. Young tramps abhor
missions. They prefer 9th Street, with its zip and excitement. The mission
stiff, almost an extinct species, is on in years and no longer troubled by
dames. His animal needs are taken care of by a bowl of soup and as much
red-eye as he can drink. If only one of the two is available, the former can
be dispensed with. Some of these mission-moochers are junkies. But dope,
like everything else, is suffering from inflation, and the wherewithal is
forbidding.
The Greek colony, large for the size of the town, runs into this Bowery.
Many Hellenes are gamblers. Hecht’s Hotel, at 6th and G, where girls take
their men, was owned by a Greek arrested last month in New York on
narcotics charges. The Hellenic Social Club, next door, is a gambling house.
There’s one Skid Row no visitors and few Washingtonians ever see.
That’s Sailors’ Row. Unlike the other two, which are in NW, this is in SE—
8th Street, down near the Navy Yard. After Chicago we thought nothing
could make us blink. But some of the dives on 8th Street made it. At the
northern approach of this stretch of howling hell are a couple of Filipino
joints where bus-boys, house-boys and valets pick up white whores. Eighth
Street runs into Sailors’ Row proper, a line of groggeries and lunch-rooms
that hit bottom.

The undermanned Washington cops can do little to keep it orderly. The
Navy’s shore patrol takes over most of the policing. We saw Navy paddy-
wagons in front of Guy’s, the Ship’s Cafe and the Penguin. But the SP’s
seldom make a pinch unless there are fights. We visited four or five of the
bars—not alone, because hereabouts, even in the shadow of the Capitol’s
dome, outsiders who travel in parties of less than four are crazy.
We saw hustlers working in the Band Box, the Ship’s Cafe, Guy’s and
the Penguin. These were the frowsiest broads we have ever seen,
dilapidated, toothless, drunk, swinging the shabby badge of their shoddy
trade, long-looped handbags.
The worst and the cheapest were in the Ship’s Cafe, where two girls—
call them that in charity—offered themselves to us at $3. The going price in
the other places was $5. They circulated along the bar and from booth to
booth and from table to table. They do not work in these saloons as B girls
or house prostitutes. They use them as points of contact with their trade,
apparently with connivance of the management for the business they bring
in. In these Sailors’ Row joints we saw many amateurs, typical sailor-crazy
bobby-soxers, servant girls and Victory girls. These may ask for money but
can be talked out of it. There are many cheap hotels and rooming-houses
close by. But the dark streets or alleys are free and busy.

6. GREEN PASTURES

AGONIZED ORATORY through the decades has been banging
against the walls of the Capitol, demanding that Washingtonians be given
the precious privilege of the vote. It is as futile as spitting against the wind.
And we will tell you why there will be no vote—Confidential.
If Washington got home rule, its first mayor would be a gentleman
affectionately known to his constituency as Puddin’ Head Jones. And Mr.
Jones is a Negro.
We will tell you what no one else has dared to publish—there are more
Negroes than whites in Washington. We will prove it by incontrovertible
figures.
There is an amazing underground proclivity in all big cities, south,
north and everywhere, to fake the facts on Negro population. For some
distorted reason, both races conspire in this foolish flummery.
Census figures are off the beam. They always lag in summing up
minority races. Most of the migrant census-takers assume that they should
help to make the picture as light as possible. If a Negro is not unmistakably
black, he is encouraged, if he does not think of it himself, to be listed as a
Cuban, a Puerto Rican, a West Indian, a South American, Filipino, Indian,
Mexican or even Eskimo; the blood of all these is sprinkled through many
generations of admixture.
There is no way of calculating how many light-skinned citizens can and
do “pass.” Some Negroes sleep in shifts in crowded premises, so that a
count in the regular course would register about one-third of the true total.
Many are house servants and these do not go into the tally where they are
employed, nor are they home during the hours when enumerators call.

More Negroes than whites are police characters, as will be
demonstrated. And as a rule members of the race are wary and suspicious of
questioners from “the law.” Many census-takers deliberately duck more
than superficial duties in predominantly dark districts, because they are
confused and afraid after getting hostile receptions and responses.
But in Washington there is one indisputable check.
The District of Columbia has a single Jim Crow law, segregating
Negroes and whites—in schools. When pupils are enrolled they must reveal
their true race. There can be no tampering with these statistics.
And in the winter of 1950–51 there were registered the following in all
public schools through all grades from elementary to teachers’ college:
Negroes, 47,807; whites, 46,080.
Broken down, these figures are even more definitive. There are more
Negroes than is evidenced by the bare totals. Negroes, because of their
economic outlook, do not keep their children in school as long as do whites.
That is sharply proven by the enrollment in the senior high schools:
Negroes, 4,787; whites, 7,176.
But there are 10,146 colored children in junior high schools compared
to 9,270 whites.
The attendance at parochial and private schools is minor. Washington
has the largest per capita Negro Catholic population in the United States.
Even an excess of 10 per cent of whites in the grand total and allowing
for unmarried government workers would still indicate a Negro majority
over all, because of the earlier departure from school of Negro children, as
shown above.
This reveals a startling metamorphosis in a ten-year period. In 1940 the
school record showed 66,000 whites and 36,000 Negroes. Thus there has
since been a decline of 20,000 white children and a rise of 12,000 Negro
children. The over-all decline is due to removal of white families to
suburbs.
Negroes lived in Washington before the first President chose the rolling
land along the Potomac to bear his name. Slavery was legal in the capital

until the emancipation. The population of Washington about doubled
between 1860 and 1870. Much of this influx represented slaves who
escaped from plantations and got through the Union lines during the Civil
War. But the big swell came when thousands of ex-slaves, free and foot-
loose for the first time in their lives, left the destroyed and deserted Dixie
farms and headed for Washington, which was not only near Virginia and
Maryland and the Carolinas, but which exercised a fascination for them
because they felt safer near their savior and their demigod, Abraham
Lincoln.
Until the middle 70’s, Washingtonians of all colors had home rule,
elected their own officials under a territorial form of government similar to
that now practiced in Alaska and Hawaii, where mayors, legislators, judges
and other lower-level officials are elected. They sent a delegate to Congress.
Long before LaGuardia, Marcantonio, Ed Flynn and Ed Kelly found
the formula of organizing Negroes into blocs which could be voted en
masse to perpetuate control of left-wing and criminal political groups, that
was old stuff in D.C., where it was invented by one “Boss” Shepherd in
Washington, the first large city in the country where Negroes were allowed
to vote, and where there were enough of them to throw any weight as
citizens.
Washington had been a sewer of iniquity during the Civil War; when
Shepherd took over control it turned infinitely worse. The stench
asphyxiated the members of Congress, who were exposed to it so
intimately, and they exercised a forgotten constitutional prerogative, “to
exclusively govern the District.” The polling booths made swell bonfires.
As will be seen, however, under the unique voteless system, the
Negroes now exercise far more power, and Puddin’ Head Jones is by
common consent the “mayor” of Washington’s Black Belt. As we progress
you will be let in on how that could come about.
Despite the high enrollment of Negro children in public schools where
they enjoy facilities for education equal to white children, Negroes continue
to have an illiteracy far above the full population. In 1942, illiteracy in the
District was only 1 percent for all races, whereas the Negro group showed 4
percent. Weighing these figures against the proportions of population in

1942 would seem to indicate that the Negroes were about 15 times as
illiterate as whites.
Much later figures are available, however. Only 4 percent of
Washington’s white youths who took the Army’s mental tests in 1950 failed,
but nearly 29 percent of the prospective colored recruits were turned back.
New York’s Harlem is self-contained. Though Chicago’s Bronzeville
has gone over its borders and set up tributary colonies in other sections of
the city, it is still the center of Negro life there and contains most of its
colored population.
But Washington’s Black Belt is no belt at all. It is sprawled all over,
infiltrating every mile and almost every block in sections which for 150
years were lily white.
In New York, when you refer to Harlem, everyone knows what part of
town you’re talking about. Similarly, Bronzeville and Central Avenue have
definite meanings in Chicago and Los Angeles. In Washington, you have no
way of indicating Darktown, because the Negro section has no generic
name and it isn’t a section. It is all of Washington.
What is occurring in Washington is happening on a lesser scale in large
northern population centers, except probably Manhattan, where Harlem is
geographically restrained by Columbia University and Central Park, though
Puerto Ricans are generously overflowing its borders on both sides.
In Chicago, instead of being bound in black ghettos, Negroes have
preempted many sections, including former residences of millionaires. They
live along wide and vernal boulevards in once splendid apartments and
luxurious private homes with greeneries, and in palaces of packers and
pioneer pirates.
This process is being repeated in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit
and especially Philadelphia.
The South, with its restrictive practices against Negroes and its
underpayment of them, is gradually being denuded of its cheap labor, which
is drawn North.
The recent census showed the population of most metropolitan cities
remained stable. But their suburbs, beyond city limits, increased in many

from 50 to 100 percent or more. This growth of Suburbia was made by
whites who left as Negroes came. That kept city populations in status quo.
The words used to paint the picture in Chicago may be repeated in
Washington, but with emphasis and re-emphasis. Here they took mile after
mile of fine old dwellings on wide, tree-lined streets. And they also overran
the slums. But Washington, despite the anguished yelps of the do-gooders,
long was and now is practically slum-free.
Some rookery regions are on F St. and New Jersey Ave. near the Union
Station and Capitol. But there are poor whites living in hovels equally
depressed. On the other hand, 95 per cent of the Negroes live in lodgings as
good as and better than most white residents’. Negroes have taken over
most of the desirable blocks near the government offices and downtown.
We have before us an article on “The Negro in Washington,” in a recent
issue of Holiday magazine, a slick-paper, 50-cent pleader for leftist causes,
published, curiously enough, by the staid, rich and conservative house of
Curtis, owners of the Saturday Evening Post. This effusion is illustrated
with four pages purporting to show the Negro’s treatment in Democracy’s
capital, which the editors call a “democratic contradiction.” There are
photographs of Negro children at play in cluttered backyards which are
called typical of the city’s overcrowded Negro slums. Another picture
shows a Negro woman in an alley dwelling; another is captioned, “Capitol
Dome presents a contrast of obvious irony to the Negro slums which it
overshadows. Overcrowding, dirt and disease are all prevalent.”
Your authors traveled up and down 1,000 miles of streets and
boulevards, 404 of alleys, not once but a dozen times. They saw the slums
illustrated in Holiday magazine, but they saw few others, because there are
few others. At the most, 20,000, of a total of 400,000 Negroes, live in these
“slums,” which, even at their worst, are turreted castles compared to the
degraded dwellings in which Negroes and myriad whites are forced to live
in New York.
Holiday did not print one picture showing the thousands of fine homes
and small apartment buildings in which most of Washington’s Negroes live.
Cup your ear and we’ll let you into a little secret about these “slums.”
Whether you read Holiday or not, you’ve seen the pictures, because they

are the ones which are always used by Reds and Pinks to point up to the
world how gruesomely America treats its dark step-children. The reason
you’ve seen these pictures—always with the Capitol dome in the
background—is that there are no others available.
Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the chief propagandists who exploited
this “blot” on Washington. This particular slum, always photographed,
always on every sight-seeing itinerary, is only a couple of blocks long and
is surrounded on all sides by presentable Negro homes. But this slum is
permitted to remain behind the Capitol only so the lefties will have
something to breast-beat over. It remained there during the Roosevelt
administration, when public housing and public building projects were
reshaping the face of Washington, only because an official who was in Mrs.
Roosevelt’s confidence ordered it undisturbed—for propaganda purposes.
The headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People is in a ramshackle old house near the New Jersey Avenue
slums. These are the specious ones referred to elsewhere, which are kept
untouched and maintained to impress visitors with the shocking degradation
forced on Negroes in view of the Capitol dome.
The N.A.A.C.P. is rich and could locate in one of the prosperous, more
imposing Negro sections. But that would wipe out the psychological
advantage of bringing its visitors through the stage-managed slave-quarters
area.
Under Negro occupancy, some of the best dwellings in Washington,
once residences of ambassadors, cabinet officers and the hated capitalists,
now look like the slums the Fair Dealers decry.
In Washington, a Southern town with a Southern mentality, Negroes are
not popular, are not accepted as brothers except by a nagging and noisy
minority. The Negro is not Jim Crowed in street cars. There is no law
against a Negro’s attending a theatre with whites, eating in the same
restaurant or sleeping in the same hotel. But the law has upheld proprietors
who refuse to serve a Negro, though United States Supreme Court decisions
have gone otherwise elsewhere.
Yet there is considerable intermixture between the races. It is not
uncommon to see white girls with colored men, especially jazz band

musicians, who seem to exert a magnetic appeal for Caucasian women all
over the country. Many Negro madames and pimps employ white girls for
their colored trade. In some New Deal left-wing circles it is considered chi
chi to meet socially and even sexually with Negroes, though, because of
accepted restrictions against Negroes in the better spots, these contacts are
not evident in the better public gathering places.
White people frequent colored night spots. Most of the reputed 480
Negro after-hour bottle-clubs cater also to whites, though no white club
admits Negroes except possibly a prominent entertainer or band leader.
It is not uncommon to find white women living with colored men.
Practically no instance has come up in recent years of white men consorting
with colored women, except temporary pick-ups or in brothels.
A raid on the Logan Hotel, at 13th Street and Rhode Island Avenue,
disclosed a white girl living with a Negro. She was the daughter of a Texas
physician.
Police answered a trouble call at 17th and Q Streets and found a white
girl, employed by the Social Security Administration, visiting with a
colored janitor. He confessed that six other white girls from the same U. S.
agency visited him regularly for intercourse, one each night—and paid him
for it.
Another white girl employed by the Government was arrested at her
home in Alexandria, after having received marijuana from a colored
musician named Brisco. Brisco, well-known in Washington, mailed the
marijuana from New York. According to U.S. Narcotics Agents, two white
Washington girls under 18 admitted smoking marijuana with him and said
they had unnatural sex relations with him—they were afraid of pregnancy.
Due to determined efforts of local reformers, Jim Crow seems to be on
the way out in Washington, as it is everywhere and should be. Until 1949,
the city’s six public swimming pools were restricted, to either whites or
Negroes. In 1948, the last year of such rules, the total number of swimmers
was 415,000, of which only 69,000 were Negroes. Two pools were set aside
for colored and four for white. In 1949, when there were no racial bars, total
attendance dropped off to 332,000. One pool, Anacostia, was shut down for
most of the summer after disturbances started when colored swimmers first

attempted to use the pool. McKinley’s white patrons stopped using it
completely.
It was hoped that whites would have learned tolerance by 1950, and
toward the end of the season many of the loudest crack-pots brayed about
the success of the new policy. In the fall of 1950, Eleanor Roosevelt, in her
syndicated column, mumbled about how all friction was ended and the
millennium had arrived. As usual she was wrong. Official figures released a
few days later showed attendance had skidded another 33 percent, down to
a total of 220,000, of which—and get this—only one-third were Negroes. In
other words, whites had almost stopped using the pools; on the other hand,
there were barely more Negro patrons than when the pools were restricted.
Agitation was heard from tax-payers to shut the pools, now run at a heavy
loss to the city.
Only in public schools does legal Jim Crowism hold out. Recently a
performance of a tableau representing the Sesquicentennial of the founding
of the city was banned from the stage of a high school auditorium because it
had a mixed cast. The school board said: “Congress makes the law and we
enforce it.” There is a technical question about whether a colored member
of the board may visit white schools, and vice versa.
Adopting tactics employed by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People elsewhere, Washington Negroes and
whites who are trying to break down racial restrictions often picket
restaurants and other facilities which refuse to serve Negroes, and
sometimes stage sitdown strikes within them. After such an experiment in
the John R. Thompson chain, the demonstrators for racial equality were
arrested for disorderly conduct and sentenced by a judge who at this writing
has not been overruled.
But the lot of Negroes is enviable compared to that of their brethren
elsewhere. We called Chicago’s Bronzeville Black Paradise. But that was
before we saw Washington’s Negro Heaven.
The life of the Washington Negro is made pleasant by the force of
many circumstances. The odds are he is employed by the government,
which has raised salaries. If he doesn’t work for the government, he serves
government workers. He shares in the highest per capita earnings, yet the
cost of living in Washington is not so high as in New York and many other

large cities. All streets, in white sections or colored, are broad and tree-
lined.
No Negro is ever fired from a government job if it can possibly be
helped. When necessary to cut down a staff, the whites go first, reversing
the process of private business.
If they can’t do their work, whites are hired to do it over for them. An
instance, typical of thousands, occurred in the Bureau of the Census, where
five Negro women were so inefficient that their department head requested
permission to discharge them. His immediate superior almost had a stroke.
“If Eleanor hears about this,” he gasped, “there’ll be hell to pay.”
Eleanor no longer lives in the White House. But she is still a potent
force in Washington, where her kitchen cabinet continues to rule the nation
that President Truman thinks he rules.
The upshot of the matter was that the section head was told to keep the
five colored women and to hire five white girls to do the work over for
them, on the night shift.
The same sort of favoritism is shown Negro job-holders and applicants
throughout the whole governmental set-up in the District. When a white
man wants to become a cop he takes a stiff civil service test and is subject
to a searching investigation. Most of the Negroes who have been getting on
the force recently did it on political pull.
Kid-glove handling of Negroes is the rule in every phase of Washington
life, in addition to favoritism in appointments to the public payroll.
Apparently no effort is made by the police and other public authorities
to enforce the liquor laws in the dark sections. The local Alcoholic
Beverage Control code provides that no one may be served while standing.
Bar customers must be seated on stools, and even then may be served only
beer and wines. Hard liquor may be consumed only at tables. This is strictly
enforced in resorts catering to whites. But almost all colored saloons sell
liquor openly over the bar, where drinkers stand—as long as they can stand.
Few attempts are made to restrict gambling or policy-slip sales in the
colored sections.

Almost 500 Negro after-hour clubs are running, most of them not even
bothering to get club charters. Thousands of Negro flats are operated as
blind pigs, where liquor, mostly gin, is sold openly to all comers at all
hours. None has a license, naturally.
Occasionally hokum raids are made and sometimes the defendants are
fined $25. Next day they are in business as usual. Honest policemen are
afraid to make too many pinches in Negro neighborhoods for fear the
pinkos will list them as “nigger-haters” and send their names up above—
maybe even to the White House. One cop whose name we will not mention
told us that one night after he pulled in a colored after-hour spot, word came
directly from the White House to the 13th precinct station, in which the
arrest had been made, to lay off. F.D.R. was President then.
Despite the maudlin tears of reformers about the horrible conditions
existing in Washington’s “Negro Ghetto,” there are probably more new
Cadillac convertibles being driven from its doors than from any others.
Sleek, new, expensive convertibles of the flashier brands have become the
sine qua non of Negro policy-peddlers and reefer-pushers here, as well as in
all other major American cities. Respectable people are returning to the old-
fashioned closed models for fear their bankers will wonder what they’ve
been up to.
Yet, despite the flashy visible prosperity of Washington’s Negroes, a
disproportionate number are on public relief. Many draw dole and social
security checks under one name while gainfully employed at one or two
jobs under other names. This racket, invented for the residents of New
York’s Harlem and Little Puerto Rico, has been brought to its full flower in
Washington.
The humanitarians and the New Dealers, worrying about colored votes
in the northern states, help to put butterfat in the colored man’s milk in the
capital. If the colored man works it right, he can get a relief check the first
day he lands in Washington.
This story wasn’t published, but the federal agents who made the pinch
and compiled the record had carried it on their chests so long, they ached to
unburden it where it wouldn’t come back and bite them. When they broke
in on a Negro whom they suspected of selling narcotics, he indignantly
asserted, “You can’t arrest me. I am a friend of Mrs. Roosevelt.”

To prove it, he brought out a couple of letters from the First Lady, one
of which was addressed “Dear Jim,” or “Joe,” stating she was sorry to hear
that his relief check had not arrived on time, and she would see that he was
not pushed around in the future—he shouldn’t worry. The boys arrested him
and got a conviction.
Mrs. Roosevelt, while in the White House and out, sincerely sought to
improve the position of Negroes everywhere. But sometimes her efforts
went to such extremes she hurt the cause. Once she made a reservation for a
small banquet party of sixty at the swank Hay-Adams House, across the
street from the White House. When the managers discovered it was to be an
interracial affair they cancelled it. On September 14, 1950, Mrs. Roosevelt
tried to register three Negroes in her party into the Willard Hotel. She was
staying elsewhere, with friends. The Willard refused.
White property-owners tremble at the financial danger that would result
should Negroes crash white residential areas.
But entry is made through a tactic known as “block-busting,”
developed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People and utilized by it and by white real estate agents out to make a buck.
Government agents first heard about it when they arrested a Negro
woman on narcotics charges and asked her for her occupation. She replied
with dignity, “I’m a block-buster.” She explained to the mystified T-Men
that she was employed by a real estate shark and her duties were as follows:
When her employers had scouted an all-white neighborhood they
thought ripe for plucking, they would find a white property-owner who, for
a bonus, was willing to sell his property to a Negro. If the place was worth
$25,000 he would be bribed with as much as another $25,000 to sell out.
There are few neighborhoods where not one greedy white man could be
found after a searching survey by private detectives.
After the block-buster—in her own name—made the purchase, she and
her large Negro family moved in. Immediately, all other property in the
neighborhood sank in value and most of it was thrown on the market. The
far-sighted realtors then bought it up at greatly reduced values. Then they
resold it or rented it to Negroes at inflated prices, and started another Negro
island in the city.

When this was accomplished, the block-buster moved on to another
base and repeated the process.
You can sense a neighborhood in the process of being block-busted by
“For Sale” signs on porches or lawns, oddities in this otherwise
overpopulated, under-housed metropolis.
In cities where Negroes and whites live in separate and distinct
sections, opportunities for racial strife and violence are rare. In Washington,
where they live side by side all over, use the same street cars and buses,
patronize the same stores and constantly brush shoulders on the streets,
there is friction which sometimes flares high and hot. Some of their leaders
advise Negroes to be assertive, aggressive, to demonstrate their equality.
They pick fights and needle Caucasians, most of whom are afraid to make
complaints, because when they get into court the federally appointed
Yankee judge, whose robe was bestowed upon him by a “civic rights”
President, in many instances finds for the Negro and castigates the white
complainants, especially policemen.
Among Negroes on the national political level who most zealously
fight to assert prerogatives of their race in the capital are:
Congressman William Dawson, vice chairman of the Democratic
National Committee, chairman of the mighty House Committee on
Executive Expenditures. He represents Chicago’s vile Bronzeville and is a
patronage-dispenser for the malodorous Cook County Democratic Central
Committee. He is extremely friendly with big shots of the infamous Mafia,
which controls all crime and corruption in the United States. Before a
Congressional Committee, Dawson was charged with being the defender of
the rackets. The charge was made by the late Bill Drury, former Chicago
police captain, who was slain by assassins who ambushed him in an alley
after Drury tried to reach the Kefauver Committee in an effort to put the full
inside story of the underworld on the record.
Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Democrat from New York’s
Harlem, who usually voted hand-in-glove with Marcantonio. He is
supported in every election by the successors of “Dutch” Schultz, whose
policy-slip and murder ring had its headquarters in what is now Powell’s
district. He is married to Hazel Scott, Negro pianist, who has been
frequently cited by Congressional and Legislative committees as indicating

pro-Russian proclivities. She has denied it. He and his wife live in a swank
Long Island home, far from his bailiwick, and ride in a chauffeur-driven
$6,000 limousine.
William Hastie, former governor of the Virgin Islands, now the first
Negro on the exalted bench of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals.
In volume 17 of the published records of the Special Committee on Un-
American Activities of the House of Representatives, Judge Hastie was
cited as belonging to at least five Communist-front organizations. He was,
however, subsequently appointed to the Federal bench by President
Truman.
Wherever Negroes live, they have their own snobberies, castes and
social strata. Rich ones and light ones are contemptuous of the poor and the
black, and toward them they more often use the tabooed word “nigger” than
do most whites. And they add one extra prejudice, not found among whites
—resentment of the native-born Negro for the recent comer from the
Southern plantations.

7. MIGHTY LIKE A ROSE

THERE IS a daily in Washington (as there are others in principal
cities) which never identifies a Negro as such unless he wins a Nobel prize
or is selected the rookie of the year.
We protest. News cannot be honestly reported by arbitrarily slurring
facts. Of almost all other non-whites, many are marked by recognizable
names. Most Negroes have Anglo-Saxon names, many of them adopted
centuries ago from their slave-owners. For instance, Thompson’s Ebenezer
evolved into Ebenezer Thompson.
That same newspaper does not bar true and fair reports of misdeeds by
people named O’Rourke or Ginsberg or Dinkelspiel or Stanislawsky or
Protopulus or Garcia or Potapinsky or Napolitano. Concealment of the
identity as Negro distorts the truth, for the natural assumption then is that
the miscreants are white and we have an unjustified libel on the Caucasian
population.
The most rabid Negro papers publish the crimes of their own people
and then editorialize on the cruel inequalities which help to cause them.
That is the proper use of freedom of the press. Arbitrary withholding of
vital facts is an impertinence and a misuse of the common franchise.
Fancy if you can what this chapter could not tell were we to suppress
racial references.
Of every four felonies and other breaches of the law in the grades
where a defendant has the right of trial by jury more than three are
committed by Negroes. That is not confidential, but official. Arrests for Part
One felonies—the more serious—in 1949 were as follows:

Colored males, 7,715.
Colored females, 1,085.

Total colored, 8,800.
White male, 2,396.
White female, 309.
Total white, 2,705.

Here is a breakdown on some:

Murder, colored 40; white 8.
Manslaughter, colored 6; white 1.
Rape, colored 140; white 23.
Aggravated assault, colored 2,651; white 381.
Burglary, colored 2,322; white 640.

Negrophiles and impractical activists for brotherhood of all God’s
children campaign to force newspapers to omit racial identification of the
lawless and hide it with white lies. That is the foggy, unrealistic policy of
visionaries, sparked by the cold, hard practicality of Reds.
Arrests for Part Two felonies (less serious) and important
misdemeanors showed an even higher incidence of Negro crime.
Estimating the Negro population at 50 percent, this means half the
people commit 85 percent of all the crimes. As will be shown in a later
chapter, a large quota of the white crimes can be charged to transients.
The data on crimes by whites are incontrovertible. Those by Negroes in
Washington, as well as in all other northern cities, do not give the full
picture. Most police officers prefer not to arrest blacks, especially if there is
no white complainant. They have nothing to gain by such a pinch; they
merely invite an uproar for “persecuting the gentle Negro.”
Many colored law breakers are never arrested; many who are are not
booked, the officers often preferring to mete out summary punishment on
the back stairs, which they know is a better deterrent than the inevitable
discharge or suspended sentence by a timid, “seen” or left-wing judge.
If you doubt that, the following is from the record of a Congressional
hearing and there are plenty of other stories like it:

Private Hamilton was assigned with Detective Sergeant Clyde Rouse
for midnight cruising. They observed a stolen car parked on Q Street NW,
with two occupants.
Rouse and Hamilton walked up to the car. Rouse went to the left and
Hamilton to the right. Rouse recognized the driver as Charles W. Scott,
colored, 24, of 476 O Street NW, wanted for questioning in connection with
stolen auto hold-ups.
Rouse opened the door and tried to seize Scott, but only succeeded in
shoving the gear shift lever out of gear. Rouse was on his knees on the front
seat, practically on top of the other occupant of the car, a woman, who
proved to be Marian Holston, 20, colored, of 16 Q Street NW, who had
been picked up by Scott.
Rouse made a desperate effort to reach the key to cut off the motor but
the woman fought him, kicking, scratching, and biting. The Negro driver of
the stolen car shoved the gear lever in and with the accelerator down to the
floor board, rocketed the car into high speed. Hamilton, his head and
shoulders through the window, holding on to the wheel, attempted to steer.
It was impossible for either officer to jump or let go. The stolen car finally
collided with a barricade, ran over the sidewalk.
With Rouse still fighting to gain control, and Hamilton still struggling,
the car, without headlights and at a terrific speed collided with a tractor
trailer truck. The stolen auto was completely demolished.
Private Hamilton was killed.
Scott had a record which showed he had been committed eight times as
a juvenile delinquent on charges of larceny, and in 1943 was sentenced to
from two to five years for auto stealing. Thereafter he was involved in six
charges of robbery.
But the U.S. Attorney’s office refused to prosecute the Negroes and the
police were advised that if they insisted on going through with charges
before a judge, the DA’s office would nolle prosse the case, because they
did not believe “a conviction could be obtained” against colored people
who had so unfortunately become involved in the killing of a policeman.
But when a policeman kills a Negro in the line of duty, the politically

chosen District Attorney is frequently highpressured by the N.A.A.C.P. into
bringing murder charges.
We have pointed to the misguided tendency to minimize the size and
extent of the Negro population. If more than half of Washington’s
population is not black, the per capita crime rate is even more appalling.
Like white crime, Negro crime is organized and syndicated. This does
not mean every rapist, hold-up man and car-thief takes orders from above.
But it means that when he gets in trouble he does seek certain directed
sources for bail-bonds, lawyers and fixers.
Policy-sellers, bookmakers’ runners, reefer peddlers and junk salesmen
are employed by an organization which protects them also.
The process, as it works here, will be described in detail in the chapters
devoted to crime and law enforcement, as it is part of the general picture of
organized evil.
In Washington, as in other cities, Negro crime on the consumer and go-
between levels is operated and controlled by Negroes. They report to, kick
back to, and make their fixes at upper levels with, white criminals. The
topmost control rests in the hands of the international Syndicate, the Mafia,
the Unione Siciliano. The Washington Negro crime-ring has more
autonomy than usual, because there are few Sicilians and even fewer
interested in crude crime. The national Syndicate prefers not to show its
bloody hands openly in the capital, but lurks in the background—in New
York, principally.
The most powerful Washington Negro is the aforementioned Puddin’
Head Jones. Jim Yellow Roberts is the boss of dope and reefers. He makes
his buys in wholesale lots in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, direct
from the importers. While temporarily embarrassed by a jail sentence,
Roberts continued to run the Negro dope trade.
“Whitey” Simpkins is king of the Black Belt’s numbers racket. Johnny
W. Carter, who owns the Club Bali, a black-and-tan resort, is one of the
gamblers’ chiefs. Their payoff is a percentage which eventually reaches the
Syndicate through channels which will be set forth in detail in the chapter
devoted to dope and gambling in Washington.

One of Washington’s most important Negro underworld figures is
Lamarr (Polly) Brown who has been implicated in every form of illegality
from operating after-hour clubs to the sale of narcotics. Odessa Madre,
known as the “Queen of the Fences,” is just what her honorific implies.
Following the white pattern, the largest, gayest and most colorful
Negro section is also laid out in NW. This part of town abounds with
colored flats where a white man may take a white or colored woman. These
holes sell gin without licenses, provide bedroom accommodations for those
who want them, and girls for those who don’t have them.
Many Negro cab-drivers pimp for white girls, first getting acquainted
with them when they pick them up as passengers. They set them up in
apartments, most of which are in NW, and sell their services to white or
colored men. These cabbies also handle reefers and after-hour liquor.
If you rode with us in Washington, through the NW colored section,
these are some of the things we could have shown you:
First, we parked our car at the corner of 10th and B Sts., in front of the
Lincoln Barbeque. We waited five minutes, a colored man came out of the
restaurant and took our order for bootleg liquor. It happened after two,
when the bars were closed. His prices were moderate, no more than 50
cents to a dollar above the established tariff. But the stuff was moonshine
and cut.
Let’s go to 1919 14th Street NW. This house was formerly the Star
Dust Club, an after-hour drinking and gambling place. Now it’s a shoeshine
parlor. It’s owned by William J. “Foots” Edwards, a notorious Negro
gambler. If you want a game, you can find stud in the basement.
The dark corner of 5th and K looks quiet and serene. The colored
damsels who parade past here singly and by twos are not. Stop your car at
the corner and they will come over and solicit you. Business all night. If
you’re a Negro you’ll know where to take them. If you are a white man
they’ll go along in your car to an alley or steer you to a buggy rooming-
house. Another corner frequented by dusky hustlers in search of white trade
is 9th and Rhode Island.
At about this time, we’ll run through the 7th Street district, which is the
Broadway of the NW Negro section, with the chief shops, restaurants, night

clubs and theatres. You can make pick-ups anywhere around 7th, Georgia
and Florida Avenues, but these streets are brightly lighted, so most white
men who want to change their luck play the darker streets. And there it is
not unusual to see white girls brace black men.
In addition to sex on sale at the corner of 7th and Florida, you can buy
reefers or policy slips.
U Street, from 7th to 15th, is another bright light belt in the colored
section. The Dunbar Hotel and the Whitelaw are the swank Negro inns. The
Dunbar was once the aristocratic white Courtland Hotel. In its basement is
the 20-11 Club, one of the Nation’s best-known colored cabarets, which
caters to the cream of the colony and is patronized also by white novelty-
seekers. Rich and visiting Negro celebrities check in at the Dunbar. So do
Feds and cops, who have occasionally made pinches there for narcotics and
morals violations. In the 20-11 Club you can pick up girls of any race.
On the corner of 7th and T are three hot spots—the Off Beat Club, for
musicians, the Club Harlem, and the Seventh and T Club. We saw them
serve drinks after hours and cater to fairies of all shades, female white
thrill-chasers and Negro reefer addicts.
Washington, like Chicago, is a city of alleys in every block of
residential property and many business squares, bisected by the rear
passages. As in Chicago, they are conducive to crime, afford dark, narrow
lanes for rape, assault, robbery and the pleasanter crimes of crap shooting
and soliciting.
In some Negro sections where housing is at a premium, they live in
shacks in the alleys. These are some of the slums already referred to—not
many, but picturesque and odoriferous. One of the best-known is an alley
oddly named Temperance Court. If white people lived there it would be
fashionable at premium rents; it is similar to the aristocratic Washington
Mews in New York’s Greenwich Village. But it is inhabited by some of the
lowest members of the Negro race in Washington—and that means low.
Temperance Court is between 12th and 13th, T and U Streets, near the
13th precinct station. More dope peddlers and ginmill operators are
annually arrested in this block than on any other street of comparable size
anywhere in the world. You can buy anything you want there—girls,

bootleg whiskey, cocaine and marijuana, stolen property, guns and knives,
articles of perversion and sadism. Anything but a virgin past the age of
puberty.
A notorious dope peddler operated there until recently and may still be
there when this comes out. He is John Frye. He has so many children, some
sleep on the roof, four on a bed, and there is always a new baby in the
carriage. Narcotics agents said he hid junk in the baby’s diaper. A
competitor in the same block was Wilbur Kenny, known to the cokies
merely as “Y.”
Another byway in the NW Negro section, which is unpublicized in the
slick magazines, is Goat Alley, off 7th Street, near M. This is terribly tough,
with reefer peddlers, two-dollar wenches, a mugging a minute and murders
common. Close by the Negro sections of crime and perversion is Ledroit
Park, once surrounded by the mansions of aristocracy. This is back of
Griffith Stadium, which, like Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White
Sox, is engulfed in a sable sea. Baseball lovers must travel through miles of
dangerous streets to the stadium.
Nearby is Freedman’s Hospital, the world’s leading institution of its
kind for colored people, one of the outstanding institutions in the world. Its
internes are Howard University medical graduates, and among these are
great doctors. They get plenty of practice. The worst Negro assault cases go
to Freedman’s. On Friday and Saturday nights the floors of its emergency
wards look like slaughterhouses. Knifings are frequent; shootings run
second. Even on weekdays the place teems with police interviewing
victims.
Garfield Hospital, also near a large Negro community, is the second in
assault cases.
One of the largest Negro islands in NE has as its center Central Avenue
—same name as Los Angeles’ Harlem, though purely coincidental.
Gamblers in the NE section get action above the colored poolroom at
507 8th Street and E.
SW’s colored section is one of the largest in Washington and perhaps
the oldest. It begins within a thrown stone’s distance of the Capitol and runs
through to the Army War College. If you’ve read about this neighborhood in

some pinkish publication before seeing it for yourself you will be looking
for something awful. But you will drive through miles of wide avenues with
deep lawns. They’re littered with rubbish and junk, of course. This homey
residential section is reminiscent of God-fearing, law-abiding middle-class
sections in typical Southern towns.
But what goes on inside these cozy habitations is not sleepy. The
streets, so quiet by day, take on a sinister aspect at night. This whole section
is known as Bloodfield. It’s worth a white man’s or woman’s life to walk
there unaccompanied. Even respectable Negroes are not safe.
Young colored hoodlums of both sexes, adept at mugging and knifing,
prey on strangers. The white man who comes here for pastime will find his
luck all bad. The best he can hope for is a beating and maiming. But white
women who are known to be Negro lovers are given safe conduct by the
men, though they are attacked often by Negro women who resent the
intrusion. These streets are barely patrolled by police.
The main shopping and drinking boulevards of the SW Negro section
are 4th and 7th Streets. Around here the Negroes moved into and drove out
what there was of a Jewish ghetto. The street where Al Jolson lived as a
child and where his father practiced as a cantor is now all Negro.
The SW dope peddlers and whores make their hangout on 6½th Street.
The chief madames are “Mamma Liz” and “Big Tit” Flossie.
We have indicated that many white women—especially government
workers—are receptive to sexual attentions of Negro men. But the
comparative ease with which a black man can get a white girl, even a so-
called respectable one, does not seem to deter colored men from
committing rape on women of their own race and whites.
As these lines were being written, all Washington was shocked and
alerted when a 22-year-old South American girl, visiting with a diplomatic
family, was stalked, attacked and ravished in a park near Arlington
Cemetery by a Negro, who, Tarzan-like, leaped from a clump of trees
entirely naked.
The popular form of Negro attack is mugging, a process in which the
assailant comes up behind a man or woman and throws his arm around the

victim’s throat, closing it sharply with the elbow out, and jabbing a knee
into the small of the back.
But in Washington colored people call it “yoking,” derivation of the
word unknown. It includes all forms of street assault. One process consists
of sneaking up behind a lone passer-by, usually one who apparently has
been drinking, and tapping him on the shoulder. As he turns around, he is
hit square on the jaw with a stiff arm, then kicked in the groin when he falls.
Most victims are robbed. But many young and exuberant Negroes get up
yoking parties just for the joy and excitement.
Three young colored boxers, aged 14, 16, and 17, terrorized
Washington a few months ago, committing at least 19 yoke robberies,
netting more than $2,000. The 17-year-old was a semifinalist in the 160-
pound class in last year’s Golden Gloves tournament. The youngest boxed
at a boys’ club. The 16-year-old was a quarter finalist in the 135-pound
class. These activities are said to breed good citizens.
The three bet among themselves which would land the first punch on
the victim and whether it would be a knockout.
Police arrest hundreds of Negro yokers every year, most of them in
their teens. Thousands of yokings go unsolved. The yokers are usually
highly organized into juvenile gangs which fight also with home-made
pistols, sawed-off shotguns and switchblade knives.
Many of these young Negro gangs terrorize students, white and black,
in public schools, offering to sell them “protection” and punishing them
when they don’t pay up.
Startled public officials first heard about these gangs some months ago
after incidents at Banneker High. An 18-year-old colored boy was held for
the grand jury on a charge of robbing a 15-year-old Banneker schoolboy of
a wrist watch on the school playground. He threatened to whip the younger
boy if he talked. School officials were awakened to the fact that all the
schools in the city had this problem. According to the assistant
superintendent of schools G. C. Wilkenson, “the gangs are made up of boys
who aren’t in school and who aren’t working—mostly from 16 to 21 years
old.”

Officials try to minimize the situation, but there is a wave of terror in
every public elementary and high school. Young Negro gangsters lurk about
the schools, sell reefers, molest girls, and commit mayhem on children who
won’t pony up. Boys and girls thus forced to pay tribute are told to steal
from their parents or do a little shoplifting if they have no other means of
procuring the extortion money. Youngsters are put on heroin and morphine
by the youthful gangsters, and soon enter a life of serious crime.
Other yokers use a tactic borrowed from the dacoits, a murderous
religious gang of India, throwing a cord over the victim’s head from behind
and garroting him.
Some of these colored juvenile mobs have been in existence for 15 or
20 years. When boys and girls outgrow them and become adult criminals on
their own, they are replaced by new children on the way up. Among the
older and better-organized kid mobs are the Fastest Runners, the Forty
Thieves, the Purple Cross Gang and the Protective Association.
The Fastest Runners is composed of younger boys who fight with
switch-blade knives. When they grow up they graduate into adult gangs. All
these organizations have female auxiliaries, membership in which requires
the young colored girls to solicit on the streets and turn the proceeds over to
the boys. Girls as young as 11 participate and at 12 are “debs,” with full
standing.
Among offenses which are practically Negro monopolies in
Washington are the following:
Numbers and policy slips. Almost all numbers sellers, even in white
neighborhoods and in government office buildings, are colored men and
women. In other cities Sicilians, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos and Mexicans get
in on this activity, but there are no sizeable groups of such in Washington.
The modus operandi of numbers selling will be described in the chapter on
gambling.
Sale of reefers. Almost all marijuana retailers are colored, which also is
unique to Washington.
Theft and conversion of government checks at the lower level. The men,
because so many are janitors and elevator boys, have entree to apartment
buildings and tenement houses and access to mail-boxes. These thieves

strike at the middle or at the end of the month, when checks are sent out by
the Treasury for G.I. remunerations, Social Security benefits, pensions,
army subsistence and similar regular allotments. Those who do the manual
stealing seldom attempt to cash the checks, which are turned over to fences,
often white, including storekeepers and sometimes bankers.
Another Negro industry is the sale of bootleg booze. The rings operate
in many fashions. On some streets you find peddlers who sidle up beside
you, or come up to your car when you stop for traffic lights. Many
shoeshine “parlors” are moonshine dispensaries. Groceries and poolrooms
also sell, usually gin, but sometimes what is supposed to be bourbon—corn
for the Southern taste. The gin is mixed with cider to dilute the taste of raw
kerosene and the combination has a wallop.
That good old Negro money-raising institution, known as “the rent
party” elsewhere, has a specific, generic name in Washington, where it’s
called a “chitlin party.” Chitlins, hogs’ innards, are a delicacy in some
blacker parts of the South and are used here as a decoy to attract guests to
the homey brawls which are a regular part of Blacktown’s social life. In
New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville the paying guest at a rent
party gets nothing in exchange for his contribution except the right to bring
his woman, drink his gin, and get into the fracas.
We met a white fellow who has run Washington’s chitlin industry up
into a million-dollar-a-year class. He gets the stuff from the butchers for
nothing. They’re almost willing to pay him to cart it away. Then he
packages it in 10-gallon jars which he sells for $2.50, or two bits a gallon.
That means the capital’s Negroes consume 4,000,000 gallons a year.
These chapters were, of course, not in print when a young man known
as “The Sniper” was, for a few days, the most famous person in
Washington. If he were around now, our critics might have said we incited
him. The Sniper—a young white man—was a congenital Negro-hater. He
boiled up into an insane rage every time he saw a sable woman or man. He
hid in various sections and hit bullseyes from roofs, behind trees and
through open windows.
Before he was caught there was a wave of terror. For days Negroes
remained indoors. Crime sagged, because even the worst elements were
afraid to leave their homes.

Police Lieutenant Barrett, now Major and Superintendent of the
Metropolitan Force, got him after he had killed a half-dozen men and
wounded scores.
While the Sniper was in jail on suspicion, he met a drug addict, one
Richard Harlowe, and confided in him where he had hidden his gun, in
Baltimore. Barrett recovered it and came back to find his bird had escaped.
He was recaptured in Georgetown. Barrett’s fame helped him to become the
chief. His friends say it had nothing to do with the fact that he was related
to Major Edward Kelley, a previous chief.

8. CHINATOWN CHIPPIES

SAM WONG, an owner of the China Clipper, Quonsett Inn, the
Dragon and other popular restaurants, was indicted on a $250,000 tax fraud.
The government charged he gave most of it to two blondes—sisters—who
lived with him. The case was tried in Baltimore. (Note: Though Washington
is the nation’s capital, it is merely part of the Maryland Internal Revenue
collection district.)
When the case was called, the courtroom filled with poker-faced
orientals. The government called some, the defense called others, including
Wong, whom it put on the stand.
But not one Chinese witness testified coherently. They gave their
names, addresses, and so on, muttered and mumbled irrelevant replies.
Even the defendant remained mute after being put on the stand by his own
attorney.
The lawyers had read Chicago Confidential, in which these reporters
revealed that Chinese will have no truck with American courts or American
law. So they gave a copy to the court and D.A., hoping the judge and jury
would realize the impossible position in which the defense legal battery was
placed. It did no good. Wong got a year. The blondes weren’t Chinese—and
they convicted him.
Some go to Chinatown for chop suey and chow mein. We will write
about those who seek other delicacies.
Washington’s Chinatown is neither as large as Frisco’s, as colorful as
New York’s, nor as odoriferous as Boston’s. You will see no ancient,
pajama-clad women on its streets, and only a few young slant-eyed Sadies.
Chinatown is a mere three or four blocks on H Street, beginning in a
block about 8th and extending barely to 5th. It’s almost all neon-lighted

restaurants, with the shops of a few wholesale merchants and traders
sandwiched in between. H is a typical wide Washington street with set-back
buildings. If it weren’t for the garish Chinese characters on the illuminated
signs and windows, and the pale yellow-faced men with sad old almond
eyes sprawling on the stoops, you’d think you were anywhere but in a
Chinatown.
As in all Chinese quarters, various locations and various businesses are
divided between the tongs. Only two operate in the East, though there are
scores in California.
The On Leongs are dominant here, though not in the nation, through an
alliance with the Hip Sings, cemented many years ago, when they drove the
competing organizations back to the West Coast. Then they turned on their
ally. After a series of bloody wars, they established themselves as the top
dogs, with the Hip Sings the poor cousins.
The tongs are, primarily, trade and benevolent associations. Their
membership is comprised of certain families or immigrants from certain
villages in Canton. When the authorities clamped down on tong wars in the
1930’s, the tongs began to enforce their decrees and decisions by peaceful
means, which include trade and social boycott.
According to members of the Chinese colony in Washington, there are
only 500 of them, but these figures are far out of line with our count of at
least 7,500. There are hundreds of Chinese restaurants and laundries in the
town. Chinese always underestimate their population, as do Negroes. But
with them there are more concrete reasons. Three-fourths are entered
illegally, through many subterfuges, such as forged birth and marriage
certificates, as well as actual body-smuggling over the Mexican and
Canadian borders and from the West Indies. The price of entering a Chinese
now is $5,000, as against a modest $1,000 twenty years ago. The fee is paid
the smugglers by the Chinaman’s tong or family society, for whom he then
works to pay it off. Nowadays most of this illegal entry is by air.
Chinese are cagey at census time, because if the rolls show anywhere
near as many in the country as there are, the difference in numbers between
those here and the ones on record would be so startling, it would cause an
investigation and wholesale deportation. Another reason is that they are on
a gentlemen’s agreement quota basis with agents of the Federal Bureau of

Immigration and Naturalization. When an agent runs across a group of
illegally-entered Chinese, he gets practical about the whole matter.
If he turned them all up at once, he’d get a pat on the back from his
superior, then have to go on a new job next week. But if he reports only one
every two weeks, he doesn’t have to do another lick of work for months. So
the agent makes a deal with the head of the tong, who delivers the
unfortunate Chinese at set intervals, and thus everyone is happy: the
government because it gets the Chinese, the agent because he can loaf, and
the wealthy Chinese laundry and restaurant owners, who are not suddenly
faced with labor shortages.
Washington’s Chinatown is important beyond its numerical strength
because it acts as a lobby for Chinese all over the country, regardless of
tong affiliation, and for Chinese merchants and enterprises all over the
world. There are not enough Chinese voters in the country to enable them to
influence elections, but they make up for lack of numbers by intelligence,
ingenuity, wealth and Oriental cunning developed by centuries of intrigue
with no qualms of honor owed the white man.
Communists never overlook a trick. They quickly took advantage of the
Chinaman’s unique possibilities. Many Chinese are vulnerable because they
have relatives in the old country. Thus they are subject to pressure. Many
are technical law-breakers or illegal entrants, so the Reds, with their
influence in high places, can threaten effectively. Chinese societies make
swell “drops” for the transmission of messages and intelligence, and are
being used, an angle not yet brought out publicly.
They’ll tell you it isn’t so, but some of the recent tong fighting is a war
between Nationalists and Communists.
Chinatown, only a few blocks from the White House, the Capitol and
the center of the business and commercial life, is a focal point for all,
whites as well as Orientals, visitors and natives. In this town, where almost
everything shutters by midnight, the Chinese propensity for staying up all
night and sleeping most of the day has brought about several phenomena.
Unless you are welcome at a bottle club, there is no late place to go to in
Washington except Chinatown. Most of the restaurants there are open all
night, selling food. More than a few serve liquor after 2 a.m., if they know
you, in a tea-pot.

There is hectic activity all evening. Most of the white bag-swinging
street-hustlers work the neighborhood. Any cab-driver will direct you there
if you ask him, “Where can I get a girl?” These self-sellers usually ask $20,
but will take what they can get. They go on duty at around 8, and by 10
most have made arrangements. From 10 to about 1 or 2, the restaurants are
taken over by respectable people, mostly young couples who stop in for a
bite of exotic food after the movies. After 1, when the tarts have completed
their rounds, they come back again for more trade. At this time the drunks
who have been ejected from the cocktail lounges and night clubs are
transported wholesale by cab to Chinatown. Many of the drivers have deals
with certain girls and some of these girls have deals with the Chinese
restaurants they habitually visit.
Many of the hookers hang out at the Mai Fong.
We could find no Chinese whores in Washington. The proportion of
Chinese women to men is one to ten. Any Oriental girl, no matter how
homely, can make an attractive marriage. Many Chinese men are married to
white women. There are no Chinese waitresses in the Chinese restaurants,
except an occasional relative of the owner; they are whites. Few are for
sale, but many will help get you one who is.
When the tramps finish their second round with the guys they have
picked up at 2, they come back to Chinatown at 5 or 6 in the morning, by
which time the waiters, chefs and bartenders, all Chinese, are locking up for
the night and ready for a bit of shacking up themselves. Many of the
prostitutes live with Chinese men from the restaurants and the gambling
joints. These are useful to the Chinese colony, which entertains influential
white people lavishly. Many members of Congress, high government
officials and influential lobbyists are feted at private parties, where they are
served exotic twenty-course meals of raw octopus and lambs’ eyes, washed
down by shark’s fin soup. Police Chief Barrett, always accompanied by his
aide-de-camp, a lieutenant, is frequently entertained in these private rooms.
Amiable blondes are supplied by the hosts if wanted, and rooms are
available down the block, at the Eastern House, a cheap Chinese and white
hotel, where federal agents frequently pick up dope-peddlers.
Selling narcotics is another large Chinese industry. Unlike other cities,
it is not confined to selling to Chinese. In all other Eastern cities, opium, the

favorite Chinese dream-smoke, is peddled by members of the On Leong
Tong, who have the cream of everything, won through violence and
chicanery.
In other cities, Hip Singers must content themselves with the sale of
white stuff—heroin, morphine and cocaine—which is seldom used by
Chinese. In Washington, Chinese are among the main retail dope purveyors
for the white trade as well as their own people. There are few Puerto Rican
and Italian drug passers available. So both tongs sell everything. Junkies
cruise Chinatown at all hours of the day and night in search of dope, and
can make a buy without any trouble. If anyone stands on a corner and looks
sad for more than five minutes, he will be approached by a peddler.
The net result is that, with narcotics as with girls, the Chinese find a
potent weapon with which to further the interests of their fellow Orientals
all over the country. More than one high government official is on dope,
which he procures from Chinese dealers, who in turn have him at their
mercy because they control the source and because they have the power of
blackmail.
The Chinese import some, obtain the rest from the central Mafia
sources in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, or directly from abroad,
as will be described later. They frequently cooperate with the Mafia in
smuggling narcotics and other contraband. It is a matter of record that many
Chinese secret societies have worked with their ancient Sicilian counterpart,
the Mafia, over the centuries. Both Cantonese and Sicilians are widely
dispersed over the world, but each faction is bound together by a common
language and secret societies. Chinese societies are remarkable transmission
belts. And among Chinese are many natural-born gangsters—sly rather than
bold in white men’s countries.
Dope can be hidden in rice, vegetables and even wet-wash. The
Chinese societies also provide the Mafia with facilities for transporting
contraband money from country to country or from town to town.
There’s hardly a location in Chinatown without some form of gambling
going on, quite often open to the street. Almost every restaurant has a game
in the rear. Many stores are blinds for the huge wagering that goes on
behind. If you came in and asked to buy some article you saw in the
window, you’d be laughed at; they are usually dummy props. Huge sums

are won and lost in these games, and bankrolls of a hundred or two hundred
thousand dollars on the table are not unknown. This is always syndicate
money. Sometimes as many as 500 or 1,000 partners all over the country
are in the play. These games go on 24 hours a day, without pause. Each
syndicate’s players are chosen for their ability as gamblers. They play in
teams with others who relieve them.
We saw open gambling in the Fong Wah Co., in Eng Hon, in the On
Leong building, and at numbers 601, 603, 606, 607, 608 H Street, in
Chinatown.
The police know all about this gambling, but take no action unless
white men put in a beef. They explain you can’t make a pinch stick on
Chinese: the games they play are not understandable to whites, and it is
almost impossible to make an identification of an Oriental, or to get one to
testify, for or against.
When the Chinese hook a fat white sucker, the game moves every hour
to a different location.
Sixth Street, at H, is the dividing line between Hip Sing and On Leong
territory, with the Hip Sings below 6th, the less desirable part of town. The
division of businesses gives all restaurants to On Leongs and the laundries
to Hip Sings, therefore all chop suey parlors in Chinatown are above 6th
Street.
Kwon Seto is the local On Leong boss and one of the most powerful
men in Washington. George Moy, secretary of the On Leongs, is the
“mayor” of Chinatown. A man named Yee is the real boss. Moy owns the
Joy Inn, where an investigator for a crime committee was steered by a
District official, then “mickeyed.”

9. THE OVERFLOW

OF EVERY 100 residents of the metropolitan district, 45 live in the
suburbs—over the line in Maryland and across the Potomac in Virginia. The
take from these sections, in legitimate taxes and the proceeds of vice and
crime, is so attractive that the city fathers of Washington have their greedy
eyes on annexing this adjoining land onto the voteless District.
Almost everywhere else, unincorporated territory across city lines is a
world apart. These county sections usually look different, smell different
and are different from the city. They are bad or good, where people go to
get away from the law, or go to get away from the lawlessness of the big
city.
The border of D.C. is arbitrary. As the population of the capital grew, it
spread. For all practical purposes, nearby Maryland and Virginia are as
much a part of the city as any part of the city itself. Most of the residents of
the suburbs work in the capital.
The entire area is really one municipality, though those living in
Virginia and Maryland can vote.
There are no caste or social lines between the District and the suburbs.
Society people may live in Washington, Virginia or Maryland. Residences
of high government officials are spread over the three. The big wheels of
the underworld are likewise scattered. The same overlords control the
rackets in the entire metropolitan district.
The state lines provide gangsters with yet another safeguard.
Extradition warrants are required to move them from one area to another.
For some specific crimes, the authorities are hampered by the fact that no
extradition is authorized. Smart lawyers take advantage of these false
barriers. For instance, each day’s collection of lottery money in the District

is moved into Maryland. Conversely, much of Maryland’s bookmaking take
is deposited in District banks. That is all done on legal advice.
Technically, police officers in hot pursuit may cross state lines to make
arrests, even for traffic violations. But few crimes are committed in the
presence of a cop, and almost never any involving the upper echelons of
crime. The satellite regions are remarkably free of Negroes, who prefer the
city which they have all but taken over. That’s why the suburbs grew in size
to such extent that Silver Spring, Maryland, adjacent to the District, of
which outsiders seldom hear or read, is now the second largest city in the
state.
The suburbs run the scale from swank sections where only those of
great wealth reside to dingy squatters’ rows where moonshining, murder
and mayhem are daily dillies. Most of the ritzier suburbs are on the Virginia
side. Chain Bridge Way, Warrenton and Middleburg are peopled by the
horsey set, where there are great estates lived in by possessors of ancient,
honorable family names, as well as by the newly-made aristocrats of the
New Deal, union officers, left-wing lawyers, five-percenters and State
Department aides. Chevy Chase, partly in the District, but mostly in
Maryland, is tony, too. So is Bethesda, Maryland.
But the great mass of suburbanites in both states are middle-class
government employes who commute to and from work, play bridge, go to
the movies and propagate.
As will be seen here, you can find almost anything in the way of crime
or vice in Washington, but what you miss can usually be met in some of the
Maryland suburbs when the heat isn’t on, especially in Prince Georges
County, which, for its size, probably has more slot-machines, strip-teasers,
resident hoodlums and general deviltry than any other place in the world—
subject to a “clean-up” in progress at this writing.

A. Maryland

This is the Free State, where anything goes.
Chicago has Cicero, Washington has Prince Georges County.

The same cause which gives Washington the unenviable lead as the
Number 1 law-breaker among cities—public apathy—is what usually
makes Prince Georges County unique among county areas of the country.
Washington does not have the vote, the residents of Prince Georges do have
it. And they exercise it by usually voting Democratic and corrupt. Last
November they kicked over the traces for the first time since 1864. But the
Republican county commission won’t get far, even if it tries.
Without a dream of winning, the GOP nominated well-meaning
nonentities without a policy, organization or knowledge of the local
problems. Their victory was as surprising to themselves as to these
reporters.
The facts for this chapter were gathered shortly before the November
election. The new county government was sworn in on December 5. We
returned to Prince Georges in early February for a recheck and found little
changed. The new sheriff, Carlton Beall, made ten raids since New Year’s
Eve. But the strip-joints still ran, though not so blatantly. Instead of
featuring the nudies in their ads, they gave them second billing and
headlined the male M.C. instead. But the babes were just as bare.
The gambling was under wraps, too, but it still flourished. The big
gamblers took the precaution of moving their books and their bank accounts
back to the District, whence they had fled a decade ago.
The crime syndicate’s technique was to keep moving across county
lines from Anne Arundel to Howard to Prince Georges in the area near
Laurel, where the three join.
The militant Republicans fired the Chief of Police and appealed to
Senator Kefauver for aid. At this writing, the Senate Crime Investigating
Committee tossed the hot potato right back into Maryland. One of
Kefauver’s four colleagues on the Committee is Senator Herbert O’Conor,
Maryland Democrat, elected with the aid of the corrupt Democratic
machine so soundly trounced last November.
The second act of the new Republican commission was to hire another
Democrat to succeed the ousted Democratic Police Chief.
The Prince Georges border is a 15-minute drive from the heart of
Washington. Depending on the road you take out of town, you soon reach

Bladensburg or Colmar Manor. The latter is Rum Row, with several blocks
of dirty drinking-joints where wind-broken broads solicit drinks, roll drunks
and whore, often as a pastime when no dough is available.
If you go to Colmar Manor to spend money, Silver Spring in adjoining
Montgomery County is the place where you can get money. This is no gag.
The entire main street of Silver Spring and nearby Mount Rainier in Prince
Georges is lined on both sides from the District border for more than a
quarter of a mile with personal loan agencies. This is because D. C. law
makes it almost impossible for small loan firms, which lend you money on
your own signature or that of co-signers, to operate. It so limits the interest
rate as to make the business unprofitable, fixing it at one percent a month.
On the other hand, both Maryland and Virginia are much more liberal with
the loan companies. The former allows three percent monthly and the latter
two-and-a-half. The Washington wage-earner, working for the government
or privately employed, does his borrowing across the borderline. If he
should default, the loans are collectable in the District, though its courts are
increasingly looking into the conditions under which the loan was originally
granted and refusing to issue judgments where they believe the interest is
usurious.
Most Washingtonians know Prince Georges County as a place to go to
have fun. This is not because Maryland’s laws, or even their enforcement,
are more liberal than the District’s. With few exceptions, they are not.
The legal liquor closing on weekdays is 2 a.m. in both. No hard liquor
can be sold at all on Sundays. They cheat in Prince Georges.
Prince Georges County is lined with dumps that specialize in strip-
teasers. There are also many fag-joints. Peeling isn’t against the law in
Washington, either. It goes on in the 9th Street burlesque houses when they
operate, and at Kavakos’, near the navy yard. But Washingtonians prefer
not to patronize the nuders near home. Their feeling of delicacy is
overcome when they drive five miles.
Washington’s huge homosexual colony overflows up to the Baltimore
Highway and into a place called the Conga. Mike Young’s occasionally
specializes in fairy shows, too.

Prince Georges is a long strip predominantly devoted to gaiety, night
life, gambling and whoring. At this writing, one of its most famous places is
in a barnlike structure called the Crossroads. It has strippers and corny
shows. Its huge bar is loaded for a pick-up. In case you do, but are not
prepared, “sanitary rubber goods” are dispensed in slot-machines in the
men’s rooms. The night we were there, we saw three fancy one-armed
bandits whirring and swallowing. These were manufactured by Bell, which
means their take goes direct to Frank Costello, instead of reaching him
indirectly through other subsidiary companies, which sell machines to local
syndicates. The Crossroads is a hangout for hoodlums. We recognized some
well-known police characters there.
One of its owners is local gambling overlord Snags Lewis, about whom
more later. Last year there was a shooting in the room, but Prince Georges
County Patrolman Burgess made no report because his father had a piece of
the place. Burgess is now off the force.
The Dixie Pig is a few yards down the road from the Crossroads. This
barbecue bazaar is a hangout for prostitutes and gamblers. It is owned by
Earl Sheriff, who, strangely enough, was the sheriff of Prince Georges
before he went to Lewisburg penitentiary on an income tax charge, after
pleading nolo contendere to protect the top shots.
Sheriff, now out on parole, is still electioneering, fixing and collecting
campaign funds for the local Democratic machine. He worked hard for
defeated Senator Tydings.
While Sheriff was having his troubles, Ralph Brown, late chief of the
Prince Georges County Police, settled with the government out of court.
The Democratic leaders of Prince Georges who were unaware of the vice
there, or blind, are Congressmen Lansdale G. Sasscer, T. Howard Duckett,
and T. Hampton Magruder. The latter two are attorneys.
Prince Georges County has a police force of 41 men, plus its village
and town cops. But the county never asks for State Troopers. That is not
surprising, because while we were gathering information for this book the
Prince Georges grand jury said there was no gambling in the county. We
saw a lot of it with our own eyes. Maybe state cops could stumble on some
of it. Maybe.

Clean-up or no, there usually are more floating crap-games, illegal
bookies and after-hour spots in Prince Georges than there are in Reno,
where all such things are legal. The Republicans may temporarily drive
them under cover—or back to the District—but those boys never stop.
The local Democratic machine was so powerful that, in 1947, the
United States Department of Justice had to intervene directly with
Maryland’s then Governor Lane to close down some joints. State troopers
quickly shut all gambling houses—save one run by Mike Meyers, who was
too cantankerous even for them. They finally drove him out by stationing
police-cars around his joint every night, and taking the names of customers.
After the heat was off, however, the county reopened wide.
The Prince Georges underworld was ruled until his death last year by
Jimmy La Fontaine, who is known in gangland circles to have been a 20-
percent partner with Frank Costello, the Mafia boss in New York, who
handled the other 80 percent of the Prince Georges take. La Fontaine was a
big financial backer of the local Democratic machine, though his own plush
gambling casino across the street from the District line is now closed,
pending probate of his multi-million-dollar estate by Attorney Charlie Ford,
who gets the cream of all gambling, whoring and other organized criminal
cases in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia.
Now the underworld is run by lieutenants of those who operate as vice
overlords in Washington. Among them are Monk Seal, the bookmaker, who
also has a piece of the Crossroads, and the aforementioned Mike Meyers,
who handles the dice end. Snags Lewis is the local representative of the
nationwide horse wire service, owned by the heirs of the late Al Capone,
and is Frank Costello’s direct representative.
Policy-slip collections in the District are paid off to Pete Gianaris at
night at the close of business. Gianaris is an interesting character who ran a
$50,000 party in the ballroom of the Statler Hotel to celebrate the
christening of his young son. This was cheap, considering that he imported
such expensive Broadway stars as Buddy Lester to entertain the cream of
local society. He is a beloved, big-hearted citizen.
The Costello interests were operating hundreds of slot-machines in
Prince Georges. Some years ago, they were legalized by local option, but
they remained contrary to state law, which was not enforced. Some locals,

pushed out of the picture by Costello’s strongarm boys, started a tax-payers’
suit in the state courts and the Prince Georges local option law was thrown
out. But some of the officials apparently haven’t heard of the decision yet.
That is not so surprising, since the sheriff, who seldom finds time to
enforce the state laws, is busy applying the lash and cat-o’-nine-tails.
Archaic Maryland law provides for whipping some classes of prisoners, the
sheriff acting in person.
Among other joints in the county is one called the Hilltop, in Hillside.
It was formerly a barbecue pit, now is a snake pit—a noisy madhouse
catering to school and college kids who want to see what the well-
undressed peeler isn’t wearing. The Quonset Inn, also in Prince Georges, is
run by the Chinese syndicate of the District, which has established perfect
harmony with the white bosses. You can see naked women at the Senate
Inn, Waldrop’s, and occasionally at La Conga.
Meanwhile, the temporary exodus of Prince Georges gamblers has
stepped up wagering activities in other nearby Maryland counties.
Montgomery, mainly residential, with swank Chevy Chase and hard-
working middle-class Silver Spring, woke up to find its Elks’ Club the
victim of a police raid.
Then Sam Morgan, also of Silver Spring, described as one of the most
important gamblers in the area, was locked up by State Troopers when they
swooped down on “lay-off” establishments near Laurel Park and Ellicott
City. These were nerve-centers for the transmission of contraband money in
and out of the District. Morgan drew a suspended sentence. No one ever
goes to jail.
The Baltimore Highway houses many tourist cabins, where pleasure-
bound Washingtonians can drive and hire a room without baggage for $3, if
not using it all night. A big turnover is the gravy for these guesthouses. A
few cabin resorts are reserved for Negroes only.
The Negro population of this part of Maryland is comparatively small,
most of its members doing menial or service labor for the white folk.
However, the well-heeled boys of Washington’s colored set like to drive up
the road a bit with their dusky dames in their Cadillacs.

The nearest amusement park to the city of Washington is Glen Echo,
about seven miles away, in Maryland. This is the typical smalltown Coney
Island, with swimming-pools, crazy rides, dancehalls, hot dogs and the
inevitable pick-ups. Many professionals work the park in the summer, but
they are outnumbered by the forlorn femmes from Washington who come
there in pairs or even larger parties, looking and hoping.

B. Virginia

The Virginia suburbs present a more respectable exterior, though under
the surface there’s plenty going on. The policy of the Old Dominion is
policy.
Virginia’s laws do not permit the sale of hard liquor for on-premises
consumption. Only beer and wine may be drunk that way. Hard stuff must
be bought at liquor stores and taken out. This isn’t conducive to anything
like gay night life. Virginians go into the District or up to Maryland if they
want hi-jinks. Otherwise, most of their fun-making takes place at house
parties. There are a few dives. But the after-hour “bottle-clubs” which
plague Washington are to be found in Virginia too. One of these is the
Commonwealth at South Pitt and Wolfe, in Alexandria.
The average resident of Virginia’s suburbs is financially a step or two
above his Maryland neighbors. There are more fine homes and estates on
this side of the river. The Negro problem is not so incendiary, because this
is Virginia, where Jim Crow is king by statute, and colored people live in
restricted areas and behave, or else. This is one of the reasons why the
Negroes floated into the District, where they changed places with the
whites, who overflowed back into Virginia. Remarkable was Prince
Georges 64-percent population increase in the decade; but Arlington
County, Virginia, had 125 percent.
The absence of night life in the nearby Virginia suburbs has been noted.
This minimizes prostitution. Gambling is an important industry, as it is all
over the nation.
Virginia authorities are disturbed by an influx of bookmakers and
policy-sellers, white and black, from the District. Recently a Negro woman

was arrested in Arlington with $3,000 in a paper bag, which was picked up
that day in pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters—for numbers bets.
Sam Lano, who used to operate the Syndicate slot-machines in Prince
Georges, is president of the Arlington Music Corporation, which flooded
the county with pinball machines, many being used as gambling devices by
local merchants. Lano came here from New York two years ago. Over a
year ago he was convicted in Marlborough Circuit Court for having
threatened a Prince Georges tavern-owner with prosecution on a bad check
if he didn’t keep Lano’s machines in his place. He was sentenced to a year
and his conviction was upheld by the Maryland Court of Appeals. So far,
however, Lano hasn’t served one day in the cooler, and no effort was made
to detain him when he transferred his operations to Virginia. The police of
Bangor, Me., are looking for him for the removal and concealment of
mortgaged property.
Considerable moonshine liquor is available in the Virginia suburbs. It
comes from stills operated in the mountains in the western part of the state,
and from Georgia.
On the whole, you might compare this area to the best of Westchester,
or Chicago’s North Shore outskirts, or Beverly Hills. That doesn’t mean
there isn’t plenty of dirt. It does mean it has to be something special before
it hits print.
Meanwhile, considerable friction is developing as well-heeled
northerners flock in; a repetition of the carpetbag days.

10. UNCLE SAM: LANDLORD

THIS IS Washington’s largest segment—the federal domain. More
than 40 percent of the property in the District is owned by Uncle Sam.
(Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands is said to be the largest private
owner of real estate in the District. She owned the huge Westchester
apartments, but sold the property recently to Hilton.)
Though not contiguous, it has an entity of its own. It is immune from
local law. That is important, because some federal property oozes across
District borders, such as the Pentagon and the National Airport, both on the
Virginia side.
To complicate the confused problem of law enforcement, this federal
potpourri has its own local police—not one force, but several. The Capitol
Police have jurisdiction on the Capitol grounds and several blocks on either
side, as far as the Washington Union station. The Terminal Police police
that. The White House Police are the cops for the Executive Mansion and
surrounding areas. They are under supervision of the Secret Service, a
branch of the Treasury. The Capitol cops are under control of Congress
itself. The terminal, owned by the railroads and the government, picks its
own bulls.
The Park Police are part of the National Park Police, a division of the
Department of the Interior. They are the law in the parks and squares, on the
boulevards, and on the road in Virginia leading to the Pentagon and the
Airport.
All other government buildings are policed by the Public Buildings
Police, a Treasury unit. The National Airport, in Virginia, has exempt status.
Its own cops not only patrol the grounds, but the main road. The Pentagon,
Arlington Cemetery and other military establishments in the vicinity are
under jurisdiction of the Armed Services Police.

Hundreds of thousands are employed in this federal domain. Many
more use its facilities or live in its lee. This makes the task of policing
almost too complex to be figured out by any court.
Elsewhere, when there is a conflict of authority over the situs of a
crime, both jurisdictions fight for the right to arrest and try the accused. In
the District it works the other way around. If it’s a borderline case, both
sides duck.
For instance, if you’re pinched for anything on or along the road
leading to the National Airport there is a conflict between the National Park
Police, the Airport Police, the local Virginia Police, municipal and county
police, and possibly, the MP’s. No one wants any part of it. So there is
merry law-breaking in this federal domain.
At this writing, 27,000 people are employed in the Pentagon. It is a city
within a city. Like all cities, it has its peccadillos. Many elevator operators
are runners for bookies. Many colored messengers, male and female, sell
policy slips. Reefers can be had. The cops—all kinds—don’t know what to
do about it. The military police don’t like to arrest civilians, even those
employed by the Army. The Virginia police say they have no authority
because it’s federal property.
The same apathy that marks everything in Washington pervades the
Pentagon and other federal buildings. A high Army officer, highly placed
because his brother is close to the President, is a homosexual. He had
gathered 95 other officers of similar inclinations to form what was known
as the “Fairy Brigade.” Though scandalously abnormal acts have been
committed within the Pentagon walls, no consequences ensued. No one
knew how to go about it. Instead, the suspected fairies were transferred to
distant posts—separately, of course—in the hope that when they got into
trouble in their new stations their commanding officers would pick up the
buck.
More recently a Signal Corps captain in the Pentagon was apprehended
lurking in the stair wells, where he exposed himself to young women. The
Army took the easiest way—transferred him to Fort Monmouth, where he
was eventually chased out of the service.

The same situation applies in all government buildings in the District
and in the suburbs. No one wants to do anything about anything. There is
scarcely a government installation anywhere in Washington where you can’t
place a bet or buy a numbers slip. When elevator jockeys aren’t selling
them, clerks and typists, white and dark, are. Dates and assignations are
made on U. S. property by government girls looking for fun or extra
earnings, and by come-getters who barge in and solicit men for dates after
work—even sometimes for affairs right on overstuffed leather couches
which we own, you too.
Any punitive action in these cases is not by police officers. When
things get out of hand, department heads fire the culprits.
While the Kefauver Committee was investigating bookmaking, two
elevator operators in the Senate Office Building, in which the hearings were
conducted, were taking bets on horses with full knowledge of most
Senators, many of whom were placing wagers.
That guy you see at the corner of 1st and B, outside the House Office
Building, talking to a cop, is a bookmaker’s runner. That’s his station.
That’s where typists, messengers and other help in the House of
Representatives lay it on the line.
Many have fallen into debt because of the convenience with which they
can place bets all day. Hundreds are in the clutches of the loan-sharks in
Maryland and the shylocks, who work their trade right in the government
office buildings, exacting 100 percent interest for a one-month loan. Many
are in arrears on their income taxes for this reason; those who owe more
than what is withheld. This has posed a serious problem for the collecting
authorities, who are balked by a quirk in the law which forbids them to
garnishee tax delinquents among federal employes.
The indifference to rules that apply in private employment results in a
sort of Alice in Wonderland atmosphere throughout the unwieldy federal
domain.
Humorist George Dixon’s story about the two crews hard at work in the
Pentagon sums it up:
One crew puts up partitions. The other crew takes them down. The
paths of the two crews seldom cross, though there have been embarrassing

occasions when they arrived at the same office simultaneously on
conflicting missions. But that was the fault of “inefficiency” higher up, not
of the putters-up and the takers-down.
Retired brass which had come roaring back to the Pentagon found itself
assigned to broom-closets because many mere swivel-chair warmers had
commandeered enough office space for a bowling alley.
That’s why the Pentagon has two crews, working independently, day
and night. One makes offices bigger for new brass, the other makes them
smaller for the old.
The confusion is proving hard on fixed Pentagon employes. They suffer
severely from wet paint.

PART TWO

THE PEOPLE
(Confidential!)

11. THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A DAME

WOMEN are the same everywhere, except in Washington, where
they not only are different, but there are more of them.
Females generally fall into two categories, good and bad—the good
being so because they can’t get the necessary masculine cooperation to be
bad.
We have seen them all, all over the world, but nowhere else are they
like they are in Washington. This town has 100,000 more nubile women
than men. Forty-five percent of all its females earn their own livings. Most
of them are government employes, and thus have better security than is
provided by a husband. Many support husbands, or assist toward the
expenses of the mutual establishment. Being self-supporting, they are, on
the average, better dressed than you’ll find them anywhere else. That is on
the “average.” There is little “high-fashion” except in diplomatic and social
circles, because government salaries are average, not high.
Most Washington men are only fair wage earners, too, and that limits
the loot. It is not so easy to promote a mink coat in Washington as it is in
New York, though there are more minks per corpus in Washington than are
won, wangled or plain bought in Philadelphia, Chicago or Boston.
Our capital is a femmocracy, a community in which the women not
only outdo the men in numbers, but in importance. Males hold more exalted
positions, but such work as is accomplished could not go on without the
efficient, well-trained and permanent secretarial corps, almost all female.
Everything in Washington is slanted toward dames. The accent in the
stores is on things women do or buy for themselves, instead of on home-
furnishing and children’s clothes, which are the bedrocks of department
store trade in other cities.

Elsewhere, femmes are divided into specific classes. They are wives,
whores, glamor girls, home girls and office workers. Here none matches her
opposite number as you know her. The females in the capital defy
classification by other standards, and lap over into categories not laid out by
economic divisions or natural vicissitudes of physical appeal. Prim,
bespectacled bachelor-girl secretaries enlist as $10 call girls after hours or
on Saturdays and Sundays—not for the money, but for adventure,
substitution for romance. A friend of ours had to entertain visitors. He
phoned for three call girls. When they arrived he saw to his horror one was
his secretary.
Washington’s biggest she-group is made up of G-girls, government
girls, who will be taken apart in later paragraphs. Running a close second
are O-girls, those who work for organizations, such as unions, charity
groups, scientific societies, trade and mercantile bodies, and those who do
the paper work for lobbies which maintain permanent offices here.
Washington proves that the emancipation of women is baloney. See
what happens here. They have jobs and make as much as most men. They
have the freedom to live alone and like it, but they don’t. They have the
opportunity to do vital work, to carve out careers in the civil service, as
some do. But all, including most of the married ones, are desperately
unhappy. They are caught in the unreality of this huge farce. It can’t be a
home, it can’t be a place to live in and love, it’s just a rat race running the
same course every day.
Tens of thousands of young and ambitious girls flock into Washington
from every state, territory and dependency, and from foreign nations. There
are even two from Samoa, pretty Laida and Marion Kreuz, whose brother,
Peter Coleman, is a policeman in the House Office Bldg., and a night law
student. The mass migration is similar in number, but not in purpose, to that
which occurs in New York and Hollywood and to a lesser degree in
Chicago and San Francisco.
The girls that come from the farms, the inland cities and the tributary
towns to the other great metropolises come with stardust in their eyes.
Having discovered that what they have is too good for the local cow-
manicurists, soda jerks and grease station monkeys, they assume it can be
used to start them on the road to fame and fortune in the big city. Most fail

to find the golden pot at the end of the rainbow or even get anywhere near it
in New York and Hollywood. The disappointed fall by the wayside or return
home and marry the mailman.
The psychological urge which uproots girls from their native
environments to come to Washington is the same, but its manifestations are
different. The youngster who pulls strings to get a government job may be,
and quite often is, prettier than her neighbor who hitch-hiked to Broadway.
But apparently she hasn’t the same confidence in her charms as her brasher
sister, so she goes to Washington instead.
The young ones who come to the capital to work for Uncle Sam are on
the whole better educated than kids who want to make careers in show
business. Most of them must have graduated from high school and business
school to get a government job. There are some among the chorines who
stuck a toe in a college, but all they need for success is to know the
difference between the right and left leg, and remember when not to cross
them.
Not all girls who come to Washington come to work for the
government. Not all are high school graduates. Washington draws more
street-walkers, who are strictly out for business, than any other town. They
set out from the nearby hills of West Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas,
and they are purposeful as to their objectives. Many aren’t bad-looking. So
the question again arises, why didn’t they go to New York or Hollywood
and try for bigger stakes where flexible morals pay off better and the field
for a killing is bigger?
The answer again is—no confidence. They don’t feel important enough
to make good in the big league. They are afraid of the megapolis on the
Hudson. Washington has small-town ways and the whores are small-town
girls. Street-walking requires no influential connections, deals, financial
backlogs, tests, skills. They step off a bus and can be in business before
they pass a crossing.
The general belief is that when girls leave home they dream of going
on the stage. Washington proves that many leave home just to get away
from Home.

They have one commodity they can sell. And they don’t have to carry
samples in a briefcase. And they must go on the road for customers—too
many complications where they are well known, have families, church
connections, lovers or husbands.

12. G-GIRLS

A. Government Girls

ABOUT 200,000 women work five days a week for Uncle Sam.
They come from every corner of the nation. And no matter how long they
remain here, few of them ever really live here. They sleep in various kinds
of barracks, rooming-houses, rundown hotels, board with retired married
ones, and in all constitute a class so large and so displaced that the city
cannot absorb them as it does working-women in other communities.
They are not all physically repellant, nor do they behave generally like
spinsters are supposed to. The deadly monotony of their routine tasks and
their lonesome lives wears out their charm before it destroys their looks.
They are a hard, efficient lot, doing men’s work, thinking like men and
sometimes driven to take the place of men—in the proscribed zones of
desperate flings at love and sex. Lesbianism is scandalously rampant,
frequently an acquired dislocation rather than a pathological aberration.
The existence of the average G-girl revolves between routine grind and
physical frustration. She leaves her job at five. If she goes home, it is to her
tiny room or apartment to heat her dinner out of tin cans and ponder
whether to wash her panties or write letters home, or get drunk.
It isn’t all wrapped up in the fact of the female overflow. Left-over
women can learn to do with half their share of men. But strangely, where
every guy ostensibly could take his pick and date alternately, it doesn’t
work that way. The Washington male clerks and middle-class bureau
employes largely avoid their opposite numbers. They, too, are hall-room
habitués, and they fraternize by some unwritten rule with other men, usually
normal men. Propinquity does not work its magic here as the dominant
factor in the mingling of the sexes.

Thousands of visitors and thousands of servicemen from nearby
installations, most of them dame-hungry, don’t have to hunt; they are
hunted. Not only that, but often they are paid, and seldom are they allowed
to pick up checks without a struggle.
One of the sights of Washington is the outpouring of the janes at five
o’clock. Many of them dash for cocktail bars, where they compete with the
harlots, who violently resent them and call them “scabs.”
A favorite after-work guzzle-and-grab spot is the Cafe of All Nations,
in the Mayfair House, at 13th and F. Wise men in the mood are there
awaiting the stampede—not only for pleasure, but for the gigolo’s mite.
Men and women are paid the same for equal work. Therefore the income is
high for females and low for males as such things are usually adjusted. We
gave the place a play at the right time and sat at a table with a third man
who had come with us. A waitress shuffled up to us, and in voice and
manner characteristic of an old-timer doing a familiar task, said, “The
young ladies at the next table would like to buy you a drink.” We nodded,
the potables were delivered, our hosts raised their glasses, and soon they
joined us. We had another round, and when we insisted on taking the tab,
not only for our drinks but theirs, too, they left us; they knew we weren’t
“regular.”
A T-man in the course of a check turned up one instance where 12 G-
girls had banded together and were keeping one man, in an apartment on Q
Street.
Of course, among hundreds of thousands there are thousands not so
situated. Many are beautiful, their intelligence is beyond the average, and
even humdrum government work cannot make eunuchs of all men.
Desirable girls quickly find that they get preferential receptions and
promotions even in civil service examinations. There is a middle-aged
woman with a superior position in the General Accounting Office, who has
risen because she functions as the procurement officer for members of
Congress and other dignitaries. The G-gals hear about her specialty, get in
touch with her, and if they have appeal they find fun and get ahead.
Outstanding ones are sometimes invited to entertain legation attachés or
visiting celebrities.

Second-class lobbyists, who cannot finance dazzlers in the top
echelons, have lists of typists and file-clerks and secretaries who are happy
to be taken out, or taken in, and are not prissy over how an evening winds
up.
Beyond these escapes from a circumscribed daily existence, there is
nothing else. A couple of gals will walk the Mall on Sunday, hoping to get
picked up; or they join a church, or go to one of the countless dances held
during the winter season by state societies, where they find everyone else as
desolate as they are; or they scrimp and save all week for a thrilling
breakfast-lunch on Sunday at the Statler, where they find to their dismay
everyone else in the room is a government girl, too, and stranded for
company.
Many secretaries of Senators, Congressmen and executives are their
office wives. All Congressmen’s offices contain sofas paid for by the
Treasury.
These females, when they arrive, usually have accents, idiosyncrasies
and dress foibles peculiar to their regions of origin. They quickly fall into
the common mold. This is not surprising to your authors, who for years
have been writing about Broadway showgirls. Within six months after one
leaves the farm to join the chorus, she has acquired a new veneer which
covers all she brought with her. You can’t, in any one chorus-line, classify
the girls, except by their current hair shades. They are as uniform as if they
wore uniforms.
The government is like a chorus; instead of 20 girls there are 200,000,
and they all talk the same—mainly about favoritism shown to another by
the immediate superior whom they accuse of sleeping with her. They dress
the same—usually in suits. They eat the same—salads and dainty desserts.
They live the same—in spick and span tiny rooms, with intimate wash hung
on the line in the bathroom, which does triple duty as a kitchenette. They
drink the same—martinis.
Their sex-lives are remarkably alike, too. Some are afraid they will.
Others are afraid they won’t. And it all boils down to the same sustained
jitters, but in different wrappers.

The G-girl is in an unnatural vacuum. She has no time-limits; her
sentence is for life, usually. She isn’t home and she isn’t away. Her
marriage outlook is bleak. No family ties console her. She is more often
wooed by women than by men.
She makes a mockery of the theory that a woman’s first instinct is for
security.

B. Girls with Glamor

Let it not be surmised that government-girls are all the girls. There are
wives and fiancées, college co-eds, a sprinkling of debutantes and other
daughters of the rare society clans, smart saleswomen, even a few
presentable sob-sisters.
But the true glamorette, as she is known on Broadway and Fifth
Avenue, Vine Street and Sunset Boulevard, and even in such remote oases
of joy as Galveston, Texas, is virtually non-existent.
Chorines are but a memory of leg and lavender for the old inhabitants.
Except for a rare transitory line in a night club, there is no such thing.
Occasionally an imported single or sister-act plays the vaudeville house.
Some of the painted peelers who work in the suburban dives sleep in
Washington hotels. A movie celeb popping in for publicity, to attend a
birthday ball or be photographed smiling down on Truman from the top of a
piano, is an event. If there are any gorgeous, dangerous, slinky spies, we
didn’t find them. Judy Coplon, by the men who specialize in the field, was
called exceptionally lush for that trade. So we stopped looking.
The indigenous flora shape up about as they do in Brooklyn, except
that they are better dressed and have less sooty complexions. They do not
come downtown in slacks. Sloppy galoshes are de trop. Most girls at 16
appear and behave grown up.
But few can enter the accepted avenues where beauty may command a
respectable commercial return. In any ranking hierarchy of glamor the
model comes first, having long since passed the chorus girl, because of the
more stable rewards and higher standards brought about by the great

advertising demands. Washington has little need for animated manikins.
Some of the choicer shops employ them to demonstrate clothes. There is no
extensive advertising field.
The most lucrative and the steadiest calls for models come from
sources not seeking those who might be employed in industrial cities for
modeling. They hook on as hostesses, guides, ushers, and to decorate the
booths and exhibits at conventions and trade shows, which are numerous.
Those who are engaged sporadically earn a minimum of five dollars an
hour, plus indeterminate tips. Their morals vary with the personal equation.
The models who are willing to pose in the nude at stag-parties get fifty
dollars an evening. These register with surreptitious characters of the
middle-world between flesh-market procurers and shady promoters.
Among the better-known models’ agencies are Models Bureau, in the
Chastleton Hotel; Ralston, 711 14th Street, NW, and Phyllis Bell, 306 13th
Street NW.
The girl who sets out to be a model in Washington is usually one of
those rare creatures—the native. An out-of-towner with such ambitions
would naturally head to New York.
(Note: Most model agencies are schools instead of employment
agencies. They seek to sign job-seekers to contract to learn how to walk,
instead of sending them out to work. Some, billing themselves as agencies,
provide girls—but not for modeling.)
Another reason for the shortage of really high class cheesecake is that
there is almost always a displacement movement in effect.
The trains and planes to Hollywood are loaded with lookers, sent there
with entree obtained for them by such influential VIP’s as cabinet officers,
four-star generals, bureau heads, etc. When a prominent daddy gets fed up
with his dame, he can’t just brush her off; she might make trouble, and that
might get into print.
So the procedure is to phone Hollywood, where a liaison contact is
instructed to obtain a job at a studio for the chick. The big film companies
employ scores of so-called “contract” gals at $150 a week or so, who do
nothing but pose for publicity stills, date chosen visitors, like out-of-town

exhibitors, and otherwise make themselves useful and amiable around the
lots. One in a thousand rises and may become a star.
The movie industry is always skating on such thin ice, what with anti-
trust laws, etc., that a request from Washington is a command. So it’s a
happy out all around. Mr. Big gets rid of his discarded girl, she goes
willingly because no girl can turn down a film contract, and Hollywood
stores up a favor for the next time it needs one.
Many girls with talent originated here but they scrammed as soon as
they were old enough to know better. Among them were Helen Hayes, Kate
Smith and Mary Eaton, all members of the St. Patrick’s Players.
Washington has no clubs or theatres with lines of girls. The best a babe
with light feet can do is get in as a teacher at a dance studio, quite a
business in Washington. The local classified phone directory has four pages
of listings of dance instructors. That’s because dancing schools are a swell
way for lonesome people to meet each other, and that’s what Washington
has plenty of. The local Arthur Murray licensee, across the street from the
Mayflower Hotel, is the largest Arthur Murray studio in the world. At least
2,000 girls find full or part-time employment working as instructors in the
dozens of studios. Many of these girls are little more than taxi-dancers.
Pretty, personable ones can make up to $100 a week with tips. Those
who take dates after hours do even better.
The real Washington glamor girl is the kept woman. You’d be surprised
how many there are. All the bigger hotels and the glossier apartment houses
around Dupont Circle and out Connecticut Avenue are loaded with them.
They are the ones you most often see in mink coats, in expensive beauty
parlors and fine shops. They are maintained mainly by important
government officials, Senators, sports and millionaires from all over the
country who make their headquarters in Washington. Many an executive
who commutes to the capital keeps a cutie there full time.
All Washington giggled when it heard the story of the tall, stately
blonde whose bills were paid by a Cuban sugar millionaire, and who fell in
love with an assistant manager of the Shoreham Hotel, where she was living
in high style. Her Latin lover found her in flagrante delicto with the hotel
employe. The men squared off for a fist fight, but first locked the babe in a

clothes closet. They blacked each other’s eyes—but she fractured her ankle
trying to kick the door down.
To add to the embarrassment of the unhappy Cuban, his wife had been
spying on him and his love through high-powered binoculars from Rock
Creek Park, across the street. She sued him for divorce in New York.
A genuine glamor-gal does pop up now and then. One was Evelyn
Knight, the radio and record star, who warbled for $75 a week in
Washington hotels until a couple of years ago, then clicked in Manhattan
and is now dragging down thousands.
Bette Woodruff, another home-grown dish, seems to be on the upgrade.
A dress model, Bette had a yen to sing. One day, on a dare, she phoned
maestro Dick Williams to tell him she was available. He didn’t know her
from Eve, took her name to shut her up. Next day his vocalist got sick. He
phoned Bette in a hurry. That was less than a year ago. Now she’s thrushing
regularly, and well.
But Jan Du Mond, a five-foot-three night club canary, pianist and
composer, drives a cab by day.
“My little coupe broke down,” she told a reporter. “I couldn’t afford a
new car. Becoming a taxi-driver provided me with transportation at night to
get to my engagement—the company lets me take the car home.”
Besides, she meets the most interesting people!
Sometimes a government gal switches to a glamor gal. One was Sandra
Stahl, “Miss Washington,” in last fall’s Atlantic City beauty contest. Sandra
was a secretary for Air Force Intelligence, but she has a face, a figure, a
noodle and a voice. She was the dark horse when she sang before 3,000
people in Rock Creek Park, but 14 judges, including the Treasurer of the
United States, sent her to Atlantic City.
Sandra comes from Long Beach, California. In our “New York,
Confidential,” we noted that many of Gotham’s orchids on display come
from Southern California. Maybe Sandra got on the wrong train.

13. COMPANY GIRLS

THIS is a specialty known only to Washington.
With the procuring situation as it is, the business of getting girls for
fun, friendship, or what have you in mind is so commercialized, it’s
incredible.
In our excursions into life in New York and Chicago, we found that
girls you pay for an evening can be divided into two classes: party-girls and
call-girls.
You summon the former, but they are not necessarily whores. You
whistle for the others only when there’s to be a party.
If this seems contradictory, it’s because the dividing line is so tenuous,
it usually isn’t there. But for our purposes, we shall group them together
and call both “C-girls,” which stands for company girls, which is just what
the womanless men who call them want them to be.
There are as many kinds of C-girls as there are kinds of women. They
range from the lowest, who will come to your room for $5 for a quickie, to
the most ultra, who expects $100, plus expenses, as a fee for her company
for an evening, and nothing guaranteed. If it happens, it must be romanced
or financed with honorarium.
The C-girls include the cheapest cocottes and some of the smartest,
prettiest New York models. The only thing they have in common is you can
phone them or someone who acts as an agent to make a deal, sight unseen,
for their presence. The more they get the less they give. The true party-
pretty undertakes only to appear for the evening, maybe entertain an
important customer or that Congressman who’s going to investigate you or
that general who places the orders. The call-dames are cheaper and more
reliable.

They are available from all hotel bell-boys. A friend who lives in
Washington said they weren’t necessary, for you can find a street-walker on
any avenue or a hustler at almost any bar. We asked how about the transient,
who doesn’t know that, so doesn’t know where to look, or is afraid. The
bell-captain, who can get anything, including booze after hours, is the
functionary out-of-towners over the age of puberty call. Using his services
also means no raid from the hotel dick, who is an ally.
Lobbyists have lists of company-girls whose services they utilize as
required. They exchange names with each other, so most of them have a
master-list. In addition, there are agents, quite often apparently respectable,
middle-aged women, who run “secretarial bureaus” that supply company-
girls, often do contract businesses with large users, whom they bill by the
year.
The secretarial bureau is important in the blind date business in
Washington. Without much trouble, you can get the kind of girl you want
by calling almost any of them. The procedure is this: You phone for a
stenographer to be sent to your hotel room. She, however, is never the
“date.” After giving her a nominal amount of dictation, you remark you are
alone and friendless. She tells you one of her girl friends is lonesome, too,
and would consider a date. You wait in. She arrives.
A problem for those who must entertain men of class is the low quality
of the female commodity obtainable except from specializing agencies.
Government gals, many of whom are on call, are superior intellectually,
have better manners, though the professional predators run prettier. With the
short supply of charmers, those who maintain a superior standard import
them. Many big lobbyists and others who entertain frequently have lists of
New York models and showgirls who will come down to Washington for
fun, expense money, and maybe a mink.
There is a middle-aged woman in New York, who gives her name as
Mrs. Hansen, who makes regular monthly trips to such Eastern cities as
Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, where she meets prominent
businessmen and offers to introduce them, at a fee of $10 each, to any of a
hundred Powers and Conover models whose photos she has in a scrapbook
and whose names she has on a typewritten sheet. She guarantees to produce

any girl thereon in Washington within 24 hours, the girls to receive $100
and expenses for each day’s company.
But that is still run-of-the-mill. A babe named Teddie, with an
apartment in the building on the southwest corner of 16th Street, in the
1600 block, handles knockouts, some married, for as much as $250 a night.
Virginia Wall, who lives at 2500 Q Street (phone Hudson 8783) at this
writing, was chosen by those who know her as—“the most promising
younger company-girl in Washington.” She knows many other company
girls.
Florence Bowers, a Southerner who lives at 1716 Newton St., phone
Hobart 5634, is a well-known company girl who will get others when
needed.
Elizabeth Morley, 2124 P St., phone Hobart 7421, will get company-
girls.
Mary Lou Vane, 1205 Clifton St., NW, is a superior company girl.
Washington has its corned beef and cabbage, but don’t say we don’t
bring out its caviar.

14. FOR IMMORAL PURPOSES

IT MAY startle you, though not necessarily stop you, to know what very
few know—it is a felony to transport a female one step up or down or
sideways in the District of Columbia with what grandma used to call
“dishonorable intentions.”
The Mann Act was invented by a Chicago blue-nosed representative
named Mann, after a hophead parlor-whore in melodramatic mood threw a
note out of the window of the late Harry Guzik’s cathouse on which she had
written “I am a white slave.” A milkman found it and turned it in at the 22nd
Street police station. A puritanical young prosecutor named Clifford Roe,
instead of laughing, made it so scandalous that the term “white slave” became
the common synonym for a prostitute. Mona Marshall, the girl, was no slave at
all, and when she came out of her fog she proved it. Her case history showed
that she had been seduced in Wisconsin and brought to Chicago and placed in
the house, quite willingly, by a traveling man who thought it was wasteful to
give it away.
That came out in testimony and Congressman Mann fathered the law
making interstate transportation a penitentiary offense. Too many jokes about
crossing state lines have gone into the legend since then for anyone not to
understand the possible consequences of taking ’em in one state and making
’em in another. But what has been very sparsely advertised is a phrase in the
Mann Act which states, “or on federal territory.” Washington is federal
territory.
So, if you meet one in the lobby and take her up in the elevator, you’re a
candidate for Atlanta.
This clause has been enforced with ultimate results. But for many years,
by unwritten policy, the Department of Justice stopped paying attention to
private, non-commercial infractions. But in no way has the letter been
ameliorated, and at any time this statute could be applied, as the income tax
evasion law was used to convict murderous gangsters, if an Attorney General

so instructs. It can be used without even the technical provisions required to
substantiate an attempted rape. The language states, “for immoral purposes.”
Such purposes need not be successful. There is a mistaken notion that paying a
female’s fare has something to do with it. It has not, except as evidence of the
intent, which is the res gestae.
Let it not be assumed that this is a major deterrent for the Washington
wolf, before whom is spread a field alabaster with white lambs generously
interlarded with black sheep. Yet the fine art of subtle, sophisticated flirtation,
with skill, poise and aplomb, which has illuminated the finest works of the
masters through the ages in every form of expression, seems extinct here.
Those in residence are boors; the transients are in a hurry; and the distaff
defense being negligible, no true swordsman deigns to fence when he can hit a
broad on the head with the handle.
Chief among Washington ladies’ men is handsome Warren Magnuson,
bachelor Senator from the state of Washington, where some of his I.W.W.
constituents would probably kick over the traces if they saw the highfalutin’
fillies he runs with in Washington. The Senator is a man among men, with the
reputation of seldom wooing one girl at a time. He often entertains several in
one evening in his Shoreham apartment. We know. They talk.
Not all wolves are single. We will not divulge names, or tell how they
cover up. Your imagination will picture how easy it is in a town where so
many are seeking favors, to get a stooge to come along as the cutie’s alleged
“date,” while the principal apparently came along only for the ride.
Not all wolves, of course, are Senators or such with official immunity.
A simple way to get acquainted is to watch the papers for announcements
of State Society dances. Most lonesome G-gals belong to these societies,
composed of expatriates from their home states. Once every week, throughout
the year, one of these groups throws a party or a dance. Admission is open to
all. The Officers’ Service Club dances are swell, too.
At this writing there are no public ballrooms of the type of Roseland in
New York or the Aragon in Chicago, not because they’re illegal, but because
they have been unprofitable. In the summer this lack is filled by moonlight
cruises of the Wilson Steamship Line on the river. The boats leave from the 7th
Street wharf nightly, at 8:30, and the charge, including dancing, is one buck.
Plenty of unattached women go.

The Potomac is mighty important to wolves. Practically the last of the
night-boats in the country plies from Washington to Old Point Comfort and
Norfolk, Virginia, summer and winter.
In years gone by, the fabled Albany and Fall River boats to Boston could
have told such stories.
Steamers of the Old Bay Line charge $4.67 each way, with staterooms at
from $1.50 to $5.50.
Last fall, a couple of evangelists chartered a Wilson liner for an evening
prayer service on the Potomac. Many pious people showed up, but so did a
swarm of scarlet sisters.
With all the game flying low you’d scarcely think it worth while for
entrepreneurs to promote stag-parties. Yet many hotel ballrooms are engaged
for shows at which talent, imported from Baltimore, is seen and appropriately
appreciated. These nude nymphs perform also at Waldrops on Rhode Island
Avenue, across the Maryland line.
Lots of smooth, mysterious guys in Washington, not pimps, make livings
introducing lonesome men to pretty babes. One, named Al Walters, ran a series
of dances called the “UN Victory Girls.” He was investigated by the
Washington vice-squad, which found nothing illegal, though it did determine
that his net income from promoting these get-togethers was $325 a week.
Walters is still around town, always surrounded by eight or ten pretty bimbos,
usually blonde, and he can get to the right people because he is a great
introducer.
Young love gets a break in Washington, too, because the burg with its
environs is small-town in construction, with front and back porches, lawns and
alleys, and plenty of dark streets and nearby country nooks to drive to. Chief
among the lovers’ lanes are Hains Point and the Anacostia Flats, along the
Anacostia River, where the Bonus Army of ’32 made camp. Not all who court
Eros in these secluded spots are juveniles. Many adults take their occasionals
there, especially white men afraid or ashamed to check into free-for-all
assignation houses.
We got the following story from a cop who worked the case. A blonde
waitress at the Copacabana restaurant, a rendezvous for Latin-Americans, went
with a stranger in his car to the Anacostia Flats. A woman’s screams tore the
night air. Startled householders in the vicinity, rape-conscious because of the

front-page sex murder of a girl the day before, phoned police. The squad car
cops sped to a surprised girl and an embarrassed gent. “I always scream at a
time like that,” she elucidated, with indignation.

WISDOM OF A WASHINGTON WOLF

When you see someone waiting for a bus or streetcar, it’s considered polite
to offer a lift in your car. Washington gallants are very polite, especially if the
hitch-hiker is cute.

* * *
We noticed Washington wolves seldom ply their dates with flowers. This
may be because the girls are so anxious they’d give the guy orchids. Or maybe
because Washington is an Eastern city, and in the East—New York especially
—few well-dressed women wear corsages.

* * *
Most G-gals start work early in the morning. The wise Washington lupo
learns to date them for cocktails at five in the afternoon.

* * *
Some characters tap the female college alumnae lists for recent graduates
resident in Washington, then pick names at random and phone with an
invitation to a Yale or Princeton hop which never seems to come off.

* * *
HOTELS FOR WOMEN ONLY: Hattie M. Strong Hall, (YWCA) phone
ME 2100, Meridian Hill, CO 1000; All States (cooperatively owned) NA 2483.
(If the gal you’re phoning isn’t home, ask the switchboard operator if anyone
else wants a date. She could know one.)

* * *
The abortion racket is wide open in Washington, with illegal practitioners
protected from high-up. Prices run from $35 to $500 a job, depending on your

color and your bank-book. The lowest charge is for Negroes. Unmarried G-
gals can get by for $75. Married women with husbands who work are charged
$100. Single ones in a jam who have rich or important paramours are nailed
for as much as $500. (In New York $1,000 isn’t unusual.)

15. GARDEN OF PANSIES

IF YOU’RE wondering where your wandering semi-boy is tonight,
he’s probably in Washington.
The good people shook their heads in disbelief with the revelation that
more than 90 twisted twerps in trousers had been swished out of the State
Department. Fly commentators seized on it for gags about fags, whimsy
with overtones of Kinsey and the odor of lavender. We pursued the subject
and we found that there are at least 6,000 homosexuals on the government
payroll, most of them known, and these comprise only a fraction of the total
of their kind in the city.
The only way to get authoritative data on fairies is from other fairies.
They recognize each other by a fifth sense immediately, and they are
intensely gregarious. One cannot snoop at every desk and count people who
appear queer. Some are deceptive to the uninitiated. But they all know one
another and they have a grapevine of intercommunication as swift and sure
as that in a girls’ boarding school. Since they have no use for women in the
main, and are uneasy with masculine men, they have a fierce urge, even
beyond the call of the physical, for each other’s society. They have their
own hangouts, visit one another, and cling together in a tight union of
interests and behavior.
Not all are ashamed of the trick that nature played on them. They have
their leaders, unabashed, who are proud queens and who revel in their
realm. Your reporters, after years around show business, are familiar with
those of their breed, unembarrassed in their presence. But, with the
exception of crude male prostitutes whom they have encountered in police
courts and on the sidewalks of New York’s Lexington Avenue and in
Harlem, they still had a whisper of an illusion left: they got the idea,
because they had met so many with marked talent, that by a pathological
compensation many of them possessed artistic traits.

In Washington they found this false. The exceptional ones do drift to
Broadway and to Hollywood. But they are no more representative of their
numbers than are the gifted men and women who find their places in the
arts of the great mass of people from whom they become detached to follow
the livelier professions.
Now we have found out where the dull, dumb deviates go. We had
assumed that, as they grew up in small communities where they soon
became obvious and odious, they took flight for the stage, the screen,
interior decorating, exotic literature and other fields centered in the
metropolitan market-places. That is not true. Only a few can and do enter
the avenues where their talents make them equal, often superior.
So, what becomes of the marked twilight-sex, unwelcome at home,
pariahs afar? We might ask what becomes of the club-footed or pock-
marked girl similarly situated. She is in a panic about the present, still more
so about the future, and she searches for security. Where can that be
captured? Nowhere else as surely as in the civil service. There, in the
mediocrity and virtual anonymity of commonplace tasks, the sexes—all
four of them—are equal in the robot requirements and qualifications. There
is no color line, no social selectivity; not even citizenship is always a
prerequisite. Once the precious appointment is filed in a machine which
knows no discrimination, there it stays for life.
Like immigrants from foreign lands, for these people are aliens in their
own, they attract—more often send for and finance—those who speak their
language and live their kind of lives. Congressman A. L. Miller, of
Nebraska, a physician, author of the District’s new bill to regulate the
homos, enunciated with an oratorical flourish the deathless statement that,
“birds of a feather flock together.” William Jennings Bryan came from
Nebraska, too.
The 6,000 who made the perennial payroll drew many more thousands
who flunked it. Like pug-nosed, freckle-faced girls of no distinction, who
become waitresses and car-hops, these inverts who are washed in with the
tide and beached in the mud become clerks in shops, hairdressers, waiters,
bartenders, most often in the places habitually patronized by those of their
own stripe.

The Washington vice squad had listed 5,200 known deviates. Dr. Ben
Karpen, psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, believes they are in the tens
of thousands.
Their chief meeting place is in leafy Lafayette Square, across
Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. They make love under the
equestrian statue of rugged Andrew Jackson, who must be whirling on his
heavenly horse every time he sees what is going on around his monument.
Lafayette Square is no bohemian section, like Washington Square in New
York. The three sides not surrounded by the White House have such
buildings as the Cosmos Club, formerly the home of Dolly Madison; the
national headquarters of the League for Political Education of the American
Federation of Labor; the Hay-Adams House, one of Washington’s finer
hotels, and other dignified structures.
How the fairies happened to pick this place for their rendezvous, and
how the cops let them get away with it, no one can trace.
The police keep making arrests, but it does not deter the homos from
hanging out around the square. They make pick-ups there and quite often
engage in immoral acts practically under the eyes of the sparrow cops.
They also foregather in Franklin Park, a few blocks away, in the center
of the business district.
There is no geographic section where degenerates generally live. That
is part of the general picture, everything, everywhere, in Washington.
Many rich fairies and lesbians live in expensive remodeled Georgetown
homes, the nearest thing to a left-bank neighborhood. This is also a left-
wing center.
Some parties which take place in Washington pervert sets are orgies
beyond description and imagination. Every invention of Sacher-Masoch and
the Marquis de Sade has been added to and improved upon, and is in daily
use. Weekends find the pansies and lady-lovers on broad, baronial estates of
wealthy perverts in nearby Virginia and Maryland. Many of the third sex
journey regularly to New York, where they have friends in esoteric circles.
Washington has its transvestites, who get their thrills from appearing in
the clothes of the opposite sex. Some of the ritzier dress shops on
Connecticut Avenue couldn’t exist if it weren’t for the fairies who buy

French imports. Many dress in drag on Thanksgiving Day and mingle in the
holiday crowds with the costumed young folk.
While these lines were being typed, a member of the staff of
Democratic Senator Edwin C. Johnson, of Colorado, who recently made
front pages when he attacked the morals of the movie industry, was arrested
by two vice squad officers in the men’s room in Lafayette Square and
charged with committing indecent acts. Booked in $500 bail, he pleaded not
guilty. He and Senator Johnson, who appeared with him in the preliminary
hearing before the United States Attorney, made no statements. He was later
acquitted by a jury.
The same day, Assistant U. S. Attorney Warren Wilson asked for the
night closing of public comfort stations, calling them breeding places of
perversion. Commenting on the increase of such cases, Wilson said, “90
percent of these offenses are committed in men’s rooms operated by the
Federal government.”
Wilson mentioned Lafayette Square, Stanton Park, Dupont Circle and
Franklin Park. He recommended that all these comfort stations be closed as
soon after 4 p.m. as policemen on the 4–12 shift could do so, and be kept
closed until 8 a.m.
“These stations were constructed when there were no other facilities in
downtown Washington,” Wilson said. “Today, hundreds of restaurants are
required to have toilet facilities by law. Many hotels have been constructed
since the comfort stations.
“Public places are becoming cesspools of perversion.”
Many cocktail lounges and restaurants cater to irregulars. Most of them
are near the Mayflower Hotel. The most popular resort is the Jewel Box,
near 16th and L, NW, formerly known as the Maystat. It is a cocktail lounge
with entertainment by a piano-player, who sings semi-risqué lyrics.
The waiters are obviously fairies. Most customers seem to fit into the
pattern. The night we went there, a police car, with siren screaming, pulled
up. We figured it was a pinch. After the cop threw out two customers, a
waiter told us everything was o.k.
“Those boys got fresh,” he said. “They tried to flirt with those two
women sitting there. We don’t tolerate flirting—anyway not with women.”

Then he minced off, hand on hip.
Fags also like a restaurant known as Mickey’s, behind the Mayflower.
They patronize the second floor of a place in the 1700 block of H Street.
One night two Congressmen, a couple of army officers, and two young
servicemen were mixing beer and gin there, and kissing each other. They
also swish around the Sand Bar in Thomas Circle.
A favorite meeting-place for keeping appointments is the lobby of the
Franklin Park Hotel. The Riggs Turkish Bath, the only one in town, under
Keith’s Theatre, was closed up because these undesirables took it over. Its
license has since been restored.
Black Washington has its share of deviates, too.
There is free crossing of racial lines among fairies and lesbians. We
have seen aristocratic Southerners, on the bias, hunt down Negro men for
dalliance. We bumped into a gal in show business, who we know is queer,
sitting with two mannish-looking women at the Jewel Box. She invited us
to a party in Black Town, an inter-racial, inter-middle-sex mélange, with
long-haired, made-up Negro and white boys simpering while females of
both races mingled in unmistakable exaltation.
During the summer, groups of colored fairies make up “yachting”
parties and cruise the Potomac on the steamer Robert E. Lee. One Saturday
night, last summer, over 100 cops were dispatched to the docks when the
“Society of Female Impersonators” was to have a midnight sail. They found
1,700 Negro men, all dressed as women, on the boat, and as many more
trying to get on. A riot was in the making, but the cops busted it up and kept
it quiet when they hauled away two wagon-loads. The ship finally got off at
2 a.m.
Two weeks later, in another melee on the same boat, a colored man was
fatally shot by a police detective after he jumped into the water. Another
Negro, who pleaded guilty to having started the riot, was fined $200 for
having endangered the lives of 600 persons. Some months later,
Washingtonians were mystified by an ad in a daily paper which read as
follows: “S.S. Mt. Vernon—moonlight cruise—8:30 p.m.—beer—stag or
drag.”

No one knows how many lesbians there are, because the female—or is
it male—of the pervert species is seldom spoken about and is much less
obvious. Psychiatrists and sociologists who have made a study of the
problem in Washington think there are at least twice as many Sapphic
lovers as fairies. A large incidence of lesbianism is concomitant with the
shortage of men, where women work together, live together, play together,
so love together.
Some display themselves, strut around in fairy joints; all queers are in
rapport with all others. You will see them also in some of the late bottle-
clubs, on the make for the same girls the he-wolves are chasing.
The mannish women used to hang out at the Show Boat Bar, H and
13th, until the management drove them out. Now in David’s Grill, formerly
the Horseshoe, in back of the Mayflower Hotel, they outnumber the pansies
who haunted the place. Many lesbians frequent Kavakos’ Grill, in the SE
section, though this is not any joint so specializing. The club, owned by Bill
Kavakos, a rich Greek who likes to gamble, is near the Navy Yard. It caters
to sailors and slummers.
A breakdown of occupations in one group of 543 perverts who were
arrested showed some interesting sidelights. Among them was only one
actor, but 92 students. There were 58 army personnel and 28 from the navy.
Even the rugged Marines appeared. Among the deviates were one bartender,
one barber and one baker. There were four attorneys, only two doctors and
only one embalmer. This is the record:

Accountant 7
Actor 1
Airport employee 3
Army:
Commissioned 9
Noncommissioned 49
Attorney 4
Baker 1
Barber 1
Bartender 1

Businessman 7
Butcher 1
Cab driver 2
Clerk 48
Diplomat 1
Doctor 2
Embalmer 1
Embassy personnel 1
Government employee 57
Guard 9
Historian 1
Horse breeder 1
Interior decorator 3
Jeweler 1
Laundryman 6
Librarian 3
Marines, U. S. 2
Minister 3
Musician 5
Navy:
Commissioned 1
Noncommissioned 27
Page boy 1
Pharmacist 4
Porter 6
Radio personnel 3
Realtor 2
Reporter 2
Restaurant personnel 27
Salesman 10
Sculptor 2
Servant 10
Service-station operator 2
Skilled laborer 17

Stenographer and secretary 4
Student 92
Teacher and Professor 12
Technician 3
Unemployed 50
Unskilled laborer 31
Writer 2
Total 543

With more than 6,000 fairies in government offices, you may be
concerned about the security of the country. Fairies are no more disloyal
than the normal. But homosexuals are vulnerable, they can be blackmailed
or influenced by sex more deeply than conventional citizens; they are far
more intense about their love-life.
Foreign chancelleries long ago learned that homos were of value in
espionage work. The German Roehm, and later Goering, established
divisions of such in the Foreign Office. That was aped by Soviet Russia,
which has a flourishing desk now in Moscow. According to Congressman
Miller, who made a comprehensive study of the subject, young students are
indoctrinated and given a course in homosexuality, then taught to infiltrate
in perverted circles in other countries. Congressman Miller said:
“These espionage agents have found it rather easy to send their
homosexuals here and contact their kind in sensitive departments of our
Government. Blackmail and many other schemes are used to gather secret
information.
“The homosexual is often a man of considerable intellect and ability. It
is found that the cycle of these individuals’ homosexual desires follows the
cycle closely patterned to the menstrual period of women. There may be
three or four days in each month that the homosexual’s instincts break down
and drive the individual into abnormal fields of sexual practice. Under large
doses of sedatives during this sensitive cycle, he may escape such acts.
“The problems of sexual maladjustments are urgent and still far from a
solution. In the Army, several thousand were discharged. When caught in
the act, they were generally discharged without honor, which means loss of

citizenship. Many failed to survive rigors of warfare and intimate
association with men. The majority were unable to conceal their tendencies
and were eventually eliminated with disgrace.
“Never is the bond which unites two friends such that the acquisition of
a new friend by one is regarded angrily by the other; but quite otherwise is
the life among homosexuals. Here jealousy reigns supreme. Male
homosexuals will not share their fairy with anybody.
“The sexual attraction exercised by a male on another may be apparent
in many ways. The homosexual will become excited by the mere presence
of some man in a public place. They often approach that man, though he is
a stranger. A taxi-driver finds fares making indiscreet advances. The
homosexual has no sensation in the presence of the most beautiful and
seductive female. Her amorous advances may be repulsive.”
Until the recent purges in the State Department, there was a gag around
Washington you had to speak with a British accent, wear a homburg hat, or
have a queer quirk if you wanted to get by the guards at the door.
One high State Department official was a notorious homo who
preferred young Negro boys. He was detected in a Pullman car of the
Southern Railroad—on the funeral train to bury Speaker Bankhead, father
of Tallulah—making immoral advances to a porter. The story reached
newspaper offices, but before it could be printed the State Department sent
out an urgent appeal to editors to “kill,” because it might imperil the war
effort. When this official’s misdeeds were placed before President
Roosevelt, it was said he refused to replace him because they both “wore
the same school tie.” After resigning from the government, this official
almost died of exposure when a Negro farm hand, jealous because of his
attention to another, slugged him.
Aware of the seriousness of the problem, the State Department has a
highly hush-hush Homosexual Bureau, manned by trained investigators and
former counter-espionage agents, whose duties are to ferret out pansies in
Foggy Bottom.
But the department cannot free itself of boondoggling tendencies, for at
the same time it retains a personable and intelligent young lady to prepare a
treatise on homosexualism, the purpose being to see if it’s possible to cure

or contain the deviates who remain on the roles. Her assignment requires
her to visit faggot dives, observe the queers in action and ask them how
they got that way.
The following will be denied, but whenever possible the YMCA is
vetoing the use of its facilities, especially the swimming pool, to all State
Department employees, just to be on the safe side.
A man of almost cabinet rank in the Defense Department is also a
pervert, with bivalent tendencies, a two-way performer.
These are no isolated incidents. The government is honeycombed in
high places with people you wouldn’t let in your garbage-wagons.
David K. Eichler, a brilliant 37-year-old Harvard post-graduate who
was a top policy-maker in the State Department as Deputy Secretary
General of the Far Eastern Commission until a couple of months ago, was
arrested by Park Police on the Ellipse, charged with committing an
unspeakable act with a Negro man. He put up $25 “forfeit,” a Washington
variation of bail cash, about which more in another chapter. The next day, at
the hearing, the colored man pleaded guilty, but when Eichler didn’t appear
the judge told the prisoner he might change his plea, inasmuch as his co-
defendant wasn’t there.
The black fairy said, “Never mind, judge. I had a good time.”
Shortly after his arrest, Eichler went on a vacation trip to the South.
After learning about the pinch, security officials instituted a search for him
and summoned him back to Washington. Eichler admitted nothing, but
resigned his $9,000-a-year job. He wasn’t asked to stay.
On the other hand, the Grand Jury voted a no-bill when Eugene
Desvernine, 34, acting officer-in-charge of Caribbean affairs in the State
Department, was arrested for an alleged sex offense against a 13-year-old
boy. Desvernine, suspended from the department after his arrest in East
Potomac Park, has been restored to duty.
The original charges against fairies in the State Department listed only
91, but considerably more than a hundred have been discharged from it
since. More are asked to withdraw. And there are believed to be hundreds
not yet shown up.

Republicans who tried to get a special “pervert squad” formed were
voted down on straight party lines by Democrats, who found themselves
having to protect strange bed-fellows. When you read of a fag being fired or
quitting, don’t think Washington’s homosexual population is reduced that
much. It isn’t. Odds are the discharged degenerate is shifted up on some
other government payroll. At least eight were transferred from the State
Department to Agriculture. Hundreds of others driven from one department
minced into others.
At the end of 1950, State said they were all gone. But on the first day of
1951, the Washington papers carried this brief item under the heading:
“Two Men Face Sex Charges.”
“Alan A. Wakefield, 26, State Department employe, was released under
$300 bond pending a hearing on a disorderly conduct charge. Vice Squad
detectives arrested him in the men’s room of a downtown hotel.” He was
since convicted of disorderly conduct.
Dr. Kinsey wasn’t appalled by the 6,000 fags in government jobs.
According to his calculations, 56,787 Federal workers are congenital
homosexuals. He includes 21 Congressmen and says 192 others are bad
behavior risks.
We still favor the two-party system.

16. THE LITTLE RED HERRINGS

THE DISTRICT headquarters of the Communist Party—the local
setup, not the Washington nest of the national outfit—is only a block away
from the doorway of the F.B.I., on 9th near F Street. So close is the line of
battle drawn.
This Union Square of the District of Columbia is, appropriately, on
Skid Row. It is the apparatus that recruits government employes. And
sometimes 9th Street is more active and important than 16th Street—the
White House. The District chairman is Roy H. Wood.
This book does not bandy the right or wrong of Communism. It accepts
and proclaims it all wrong. But it will stay within its limitations of
discussing Washington, the city. So it will conduct you mostly through the
muck where crawl the punks in the ranks.
The State Department boys call foreign Reds “Agrarian reformers.” We
call them cobras. The real story of the extent of their infiltration into the
government will never be told. Hundreds of files have been impounded or
destroyed, and their subjects cleared.
The following tale is no exception. It is, rather, the rule. One night a
mysterious informant called on Constantine Brown, brilliant and patriotic
foreign news analyst of the Washington Star, with a photostatic copy of an
order from a Deputy Chief of Staff, directing the Army to destroy the
records on several thousand subversives.
Brown hurried to the home of Senator Styles Bridges with the
evidence. By 9 a.m., Bridges had called the Military Affairs Committee
together. An hour later it met and phoned the offices of the Secretary of War
with an ultimatum not to destroy any orders. When the officer who had
issued the order met with the committee, Bridges looked coldly at him and

said, “I can forgive an officer who makes a mistake or loses a battle, but an
officer who betrays the security of his country ought to be shot.”
Meanwhile, a similar order was given the Navy, but was not caught in
time to head off the destruction of the records. F.D.R. was President at the
time.
We are hopeful these things will come to an end, but do not expect too
much. That is because we know the C.I.A.—Central Intelligence Agency—
is loaded with Commies at the lower level, with some seeping right up into
the upper brackets.
A bright spot, however, is the advancement to the position of ranking
minority member of the House Un-American Activities Committee of
Harold Velde, young ex-F.B.I. agent, now representing Abraham Lincoln’s
old Illinois district in Congress. Velde, at 40, has been a G-man, a county
judge, and is in his second term in the House. His training under J. Edgar
Hoover sets him up as a canny spy-catcher; his hatred of subversives, left or
right, will make him a brake on Commie-coddling. His predecessor on the
committee was California’s new Senator Nixon, who nailed Alger Hiss, and
in Congress, Senator Dirksen, who beat Scott Lucas. The Senate’s own Red
probing committee is also good news.
Your authors delved into how the rank-and-file protectors and
comforters of Communists in Washington got that way. We know about the
over-educated Harvard prodigies, recommended to key spots by Felix
Frankfurter, but how does a $3,000-a-year file clerk in State, or Defense,
meet Reds in the first place? By what means is he wooed and won to betray
his country? Jim Walters of the Times-Herald exposed a lot. Here is more:
Red spies came here as soon as Lenin and Trotsky pulled their
successful November coup in 1917. But not until the late Roosevelt handed
diplomatic recognition to the enemies of civilization in 1933, did a sizeable
apparatus begin to build openly in Washington. In the early years of the
New Deal it became fashionable to be “liberal,” to love all radicals,
including revolutionaries.
The government was overloaded with Reds, pinks, fellow-travelers,
social planners, do-gooders, proletarians, boondogglers and Socialists. The

federal establishment is still up to its neck in conspirators and
collaborationists, despite a few publicized firings.
Let’s take the case of this humble clerk who is seduced by Reds.
Seduced is just that. We covered the modus operandi used by the Pervert
Sections of foreign chancelleries in the previous chapter. But not all
government employes are homos or susceptible. The normal must be
romanced with natural methods. Sex-starved government gals are enticed
by smooth, suave, good-looking men. Meek male clerks, in soporific jobs at
standardized sustenance-pay, are awakened with a sudden whiff of the
esoteric when fast-working, trained good-lookers make a play for them.
These happenings are not cribbed from E. Phillips Oppenheim novels. They
are planned that way and they come off.
Wealthy left-wingers with mansions in Georgetown cooperate avidly.
Humble government employes are invited to exotic, erotic parties. This
sudden entrance into a world of wealth, taste, refinement, liquor and libido
is irresistible to hoi polloi.
Smart Red undercover agents try to get a hold of some kind on their
victims, something insidious. Soviet agents press a systematic campaign to
bring women employes of the State Department under their control by
enticing them into acts of adultery and abnormality. Parties are staged in
rich surroundings with pornographic exhibitions, unlimited liquor and every
form of dope—and a hidden, talking moving picture camera recording it all.
As many as 65 or 70 attend these aphrodisiac get-togethers, where
many wear rich Oriental costumes and Arabian Nights music completes the
intoxication of all the senses. Not only potential friends are thus won and
hooked, but dangerous foes are silenced. One gossip writer, a feared
crusader, has within the last couple of years become a virtual transmission
belt for the Communist line. He was called into a secret projection room
and shown a devastating film of his behavior at a drunken, depraved orgy.
We have seen “stills” from it.
This use of sex as a means of recruiting is a basic tactic. It has been
developed to such an extent by the Reds, they now seek to convert children
thereby. Herbert J. Benjamin, long a key figure in the Communist Party in
the United States, was arrested recently by vice squad men for selling lewd

pictures and literature to Washington children, and convicted of violation of
the D.C. code.
Benjamin, a former secretary of the International Workers Order, long a
contributor to party magazines and periodicals, was mentioned in a memo
by Earl Browder, November 27, 1939, as an alternate to the tenth
convention of a national Communist Party committee. Later he was the
organization’s national press director and was in charge of the St. Louis
office of a Communist political association. He and his wife lived in the
Trenton Terrace apartments, on Mississippi Ave., SE, where other tenants
were Rob Hall, Washington correspondent for the Daily Worker, and Joseph
Forer, a veteran attorney for Reds. Benjamin’s wife was manager of the
apartment house.
The pinks are still working strenuously to grab off and bring up new
followers from the incubator stage. As these lines were written, three names
listed by the District Board of Education as speakers for its in-service-
training program were found to be also in the House Committee on Un-
American Activities’ files as left-wingers—Dr. Paul B. Cornely, Freedmen’s
Hospital medical director; Dr. Alice V. Keliher, of New York University;
and Dr. Dora B. Smith, of the University of Minnesota. Superintendent of
Schools Corning said, “The names were identical with names in the House
Un-American Committee records.” Since then Red and Socialist-slanted
text books have been found to be in use in Washington’s schools.
Until two years ago, there was considerable radical financial interest in
radio station WQQW. The stock has since been placed in a voting-trust with
a good American as trustee. For years this station refused to sign off with
“The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The Dupont Theatre specializes in interracial and foreign films, most of
them slanted left. Danny Weitzman, owner of the building, was active in the
Wallace presidential campaign.
The Reds and bleeding hearts play up their “love” for Negroes at every
opportunity. This often pays off big dividends because so many colored
people are employed in government offices. A few Negroes are dumb
enough to be misled by the Reds’ baloney about the brotherhood of man.
But to their eternal glory, the great mass of Negroes are among the most
patriotic citizens in the country. A few malcontents, who have been taken in

by the crocodile tears of the Eleanor Roosevelt brand of reformer,
occasionally indirectly render aid and comfort to the enemy.
To show how much they love the Negro, the white Communist brethren
hold their District powwows at Shilo Baptist Church, a Negro house of
worship in the NW section.
It is a Communist strategy to line Negroes into the party through white
gals who, to show their complete compliance and condition of servitude, are
urged to give themselves to colored men. Into this specialized service they
seem to wade with more than token application.
Mrs. Louise Branston Berman, millionaire radical who declines to state
if she’s a Communist on grounds of self-incrimination, spends much of her
time in Washington. She uses her great wealth to help the enrollment of left-
wing recruits through social contacts. Louts who never dined above a
cafeteria before are invited to sumptuous banquets in her homes in various
parts of the country. Visiting Negro dignitaries who can’t get
accommodations in hotels are her house guests. Mrs. Branston will learn for
the first time here that when she put up the Negro singer, Paul Robeson,
government agents had “bugs” in every room of her house from the parlor
to the boudoir—she ought to hear the recordings. We did. They’re neither
intellectual nor musical—but they are illuminating.
A principal Communist apparatus and recruiting ground for new Reds
on the lower levels was the late but unlamented UNRRA.
The organization was rotten with traitors during the time Mayor
LaGuardia was its director. Either he didn’t know what was going on,
because he attended meetings only a few times, or he didn’t care.
When UNRRA was disbanded, its Red membership was moved almost
en masse to the payroll of the United Nations secretariat. Many are now
stationed in New York, where they are sabotaging U.N. work as far as they
can. Others are attached to U.N. field offices in Washington.
If anyone doubts it was the policy of UNRRA to aid Communism and
that this had the approval of the present administration, which is bent on
fighting Communism, let him read the following excerpts from a memo
which we filched from the UNRRA files. It is an inter-office

communication, written in 1947, and addressed to Col. Katzin, a South
African, then an important UNRRA man and now top aide to Trygve Lie.
It follows: (The italics are ours.)
“It should be made clear that the administration, in pushing for
distribution to Communist areas and in requesting Edgerton to report on
such distribution, has in mind actual shipments into Communist areas and
not merely movements out of Shanghai with the expressed intention of
making such shipments.”
Another paragraph reads, “In reference to Shanghai 6404, it is
interesting to note the U.K. position that the program should be cut
proportionately if the (Chinese) Nationalist government does not meet its
obligations for Communist area distribution.”
In other words, we strengthened the Chinese Reds so they could kill
our boys three years later.
Another batch of Communists and Communist-lovers came into the
U.N. through its International Child Fund. This department is loaded with
ex-State Department employes fired on suspicion of subversive activities.
That is a common habit. If all the homos, spies and other undesirables
fired for cause were traced, hundreds would be found snugly ensconced in
other bureaus, ostensibly screened, actually given screens of protection and
falsification by the radicals in high places.
We are not indicting Eleanor Roosevelt or Supreme Court Justice
Frankfurter as Communists. Yet it is impossible to study the set-up of the
District of Columbia white collar Communist underground without finding
tie-lines from them to members of this group.
The man of mystery in Washington is wealthy, brilliant, daring Max
Lowenthal. He wrote the unwieldy book purporting to pulverize the F.B.I.
which sold only 6,000 copies. Almost as many were given away. Yet no one
knows much about him. He is a shadowy figure who thrives on obscurity,
though he has filled public posts of importance. Until Congressman
Dondero, of Michigan, investigated him, his name was obscure in
Washington. Today not ten people in the government know more about him
than the fact that he is frequently more powerful than the President and the
Congress of the United States. This is some of what Congressman Dondero

charged on the floor of the House of Representatives about Mr. Lowenthal
whom he referred to as sinister and surreptitious:
Like the Communist Party, whose cause he has served so well, he
operates on two levels. One is seemingly respectable; the other completely
underground. He is native-born. His name does not appear in Who’s Who.
To secure even a sketch of his biography has been a task.
Born in Minneapolis in 1888, like many other parlor pinks, fellow-
travelers, Communists and convicted perjurers, he attended Harvard Law
School. In those days he came under the influence of another man who
through the years has manipulated Charlie McCarthys in Government
office. There is a striking kinship between the master, Justice Felix
Frankfurter, and the pupil, Max Lowenthal.
He served as a secretary to Judge Julian M. Mack in New York, then
infiltrated the respectable law firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.
After a few years he founded his own firm, Lowenthal, Szold & Brandwen.
Later he secured an appointment as Assistant Secretary of the
President’s Mediation Board in 1917; in 1918 he was in the War
Department; in 1920 he was an Assistant Secretary to the President’s
Industrial Conference. He became executive secretary for the Wickersham
Commission on Law Enforcement, but when he found he could not run it he
resigned. He became research director of the Banking and Currency
Commission, was on the staff of the Senate Committee on Interstate
Commerce, also affiliated with the Board of Economic Welfare.
In Germany, known as general counsel to General Clay, he had as an
assistant George Shaw Wheeler, the American traitor, Communist and
renegade who shocked all America when he denounced the land of his birth
and asked Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia for asylum.
Evidence of his unswerving loyalty to Soviet Russia is clear and
unequivocal. There is an interesting sidelight. The California authorities
raided the office of the Russian-American Industrial Corp., whose head, the
late Sidney Hillman, had turned on Communism, but his general counsel
still follows the party line.
He was a member of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild, a member
of the National Committee of the International Juridical Association with

Lee Pressman.
Carol Weiss King, who represented more Communists than any other
lawyer, was a law clerk in Lowenthal’s office.
Lowenthal, living in New York, spent much of his time in Washington;
his influence is a menace to the best interests of America—so said
Congressman Dondero.
Don’t kid yourself. The Reds are not on the run in Washington. No
Communist control law means anything if the administration doesn’t want it
enforced. The anemic Security Board appointed by the President to apply
the McCarran Act, loaded down as it is with left-wing apologists, is the tip-
off.
One day after Senator Tydings, who became an ex because he “white-
washed” Owen Lattimore, returned to private life he joined the law firm of
his father-in-law, Joseph E. “Mission to Moscow” Davies. A senior partner
in that firm is Seth Richardson, appointed by Truman to head the Security
Board.
Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of Federal employment has forced the
government to forego the usual pre-job loyalty checks of tens of thousands
of new workers—hundreds of Communists are going on the payroll and
will be there for months, possibly years, until their backgrounds are delved
into.
With a green light, the F.B.I. could break the back of the Communists’
underground. But J. Edgar Hoover cannot make policies. He is just a cop
who has to follow orders. At this writing the orders have not come. The
traitors in Washington are safe. On the other hand, those who testify against
Reds are frequently harassed by Justice Department lawyers.
If this weren’t so ghastly serious, some phases of the great Communist
spy-hunt would be laughable. For instance, there’s the story of the
prominent woman lawyer from New York, retained to represent a left-
winger about to be questioned by a Congressional committee. This
Communist kept his full status well hidden. He couldn’t afford to hire a
lawyer who handled Communist cases. So this portly Portia was retained.
She had no known Red connections.

On her way to Washington she stopped in Baltimore, to confer with a
well-known Communist counsel there, to be briefed. It began as a business
confab. They arranged a follow-up rendezvous in Washington. The
Baltimore attorney’s wife suspected him, followed him to Washington and
caught him in the act with the lady lawyer from New York.
The wife sued for divorce. The co-respondent testified, admitted
intercourse but denied adultery.
“I was raped,” she cried.
Cross-examination:
Q.—Did you have intimate relations with the defendant?
A.—Yes.
Q.—Did you consent?
A.—Yes.
Q.—Then how do you make that out rape?
A.—I found out since that he is a damned Communist!

17. KICKING THE GONG AROUND

IT MAY be news that widespread addiction to narcotics is a
comparatively recent American manifestation. Long after the turn of the
century, a few trickles supplied pig-tailed Chinamen, despondent prostitutes,
ex-cons who had picked up the habit in stir and a few rich fools who would try
anything for a bang. Juvenile use was unheard of. Marijuana was unknown
outside pad-parties in the Harlem jungles and among a thin fringe of
Mexicans. The Harrison Narcotics Law, first federal recognition of the
existence of such an evil, is only 35 years old.
We are solemnly convinced that the great growth of this plague in the past
20 years has been parallel to the spread of Communism in our country. And it
has not been confined to our country.
Estimates by the Narcotic Control Section of the United Nations, that one
of every ten people on earth uses habit-forming drugs in some manner or form,
are borne out in this country, where the evil is prevalent in all sections. It is the
greatest tangible menace facing us. And dope addiction, on the rise, can be
traced definitely to Soviet Russia.
It has long been a tactic of nations bound on enslaving others to deaden
the ambitions and energies of their victims with dope.
Examples of this stretch back to the dawn of written history. In the last
century, British imperialists introduced the habit into China to control that
nation. Nazi Germany flooded Poland and Czechoslovakia. Japan built huge
narcotics factories in Manchuria to weaken the Chinese opposition. Russia is
doing more of it now. Raw stuff pours in from Mediterranean ports. It
originates in lands behind the Iron Curtain. Its importation into the United
States serves Russia twofold—prostrates a prospective enemy and gets its
hands on needed American exchange to be used for propaganda purposes and
payment of undercover agents here. International bank drafts could be traced.
One courier can carry $1,000,000 worth of uncut dope on his person.

There are many points of community interest between the Reds and that
other great international conspiracy, the Mafia, which controls the sale of drugs
in America. The Commies will team up with anyone who will promote civil
disorder or do their dirty work. The Mafia is interested in making a dishonest
dollar and will work with any partner.
The center of the narcotics industry in the United States is in the district of
former left-wing Congressman Vito Marcantonio, in East Harlem. During the
days of his ascendancy, American Labor Party district leaders were able to
supply police protection through alliances with both Tammany Hall and anti-
Tammany Mayor LaGuardia.
Generally untrumpeted was the fact that when the infamous Charles
“Lucky” Luciano was ordered deported from Cuba, the titular head of the
Cuban Communist Party offered him sanctuary and appeared as his counsel.
A study of the Congressional Record will show that most of the bills and
measures designed to weaken the enforcement of the Narcotics Act have been
introduced by left-wingers and fellow-travelers. Many pink lawyers represent
the underworld combine.
One of the most startling tieups was seen in the recent flooding of this
country with cocaine. The Bureau of Narcotics had all but eliminated this
devastating drug. There had been none here for 20 years. Cocaine for
American consumption comes from Peru, where the coca leaves grow. A
couple of years ago an Agrarian Communist group called the Apristas took
over that country briefly. Seventeen cocaine factories were constructed in
Lima, eleven licensed by the local Red government, and the others ran with the
knowledge and connivance of the authorities. Their entire produce was routed
to the United States. Coincident with saturation of this country with cocaine,
which sank in price to as low as $1.50 a capsule, America went through its
greatest crime wave.
When Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger traced the source of the deadly
narcotic to Peru, the New Deal State Department refused to intervene, as it was
required to do by the international treaties which outlawed the traffic. The
reason for this failure, amounting to criminal negligence, was that we could
not interfere in Latin American affairs. The cash for the cocaine was being
used to foster Communism in South America.
Last year the Reds were kicked out of Peru by what Washington pinkos
still refer to as “the oligarchy,” who immediately thereafter closed the coke

factories. Since then, this traffic has almost dried up in the United States.
Likewise the administration has failed to inform the American public that
the Permanent Central Opium Board in Geneva, Switzerland, has branded
Soviet Russia and several Iron Curtain countries as palpable violators of
international treaties and UN conventions regarding the control of narcotics.
You will probably learn here for the first time that the following
governments, in addition to Russia, were named as treaty-violators for failure
to meet their obligations: Red China, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
Among others who failed to cooperate were Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Oman
and Liberia, the African Negro republic in which Negro slavery is still
practiced.
Narcotic conditions in the capital are shameful. This is no fault of the U.S.
Bureau of Narcotics, whose fighting chief, Commissioner Anslinger, is
handcuffed by red tape, apathy and a penurious budget. The Bureau has a
personnel of less than 180 for office and field work throughout the world. Its
annual budget is less than $2,000,000. This is a drip in an ocean, yet Anslinger
must cope with the deadliest evil known to man, backed by a huge and wealthy
underworld organization controlling tens of thousands of peddlers, sluggers
and killers, and owning billions of dollars.
That the unsung agents of this Treasury bureau have done as well as they
have is a miracle. They could do better, especially in Washington, if they had
the cooperation of the judiciary. They haven’t.
You can buy reefers on any corner in Black Town or in front of any high
school in the District. You can purchase hard stuff at dozens of corners, of
which we can name many and will note some. This disgrace indicts judges in
the courts of the District of Columbia. All are federal, not elected, but
appointed by the President. This goes for the Municipal Court bench, which
sits for six years, as well as the District Court, appointed for life.
Every judge appointed in the last 18 years was put on the bench during a
Democratic administration. More than 95 per cent are Democrats. Few are
Washingtonians. With few exceptions, these judges are divided into two
classes: Those representing the big-city bosses and gangs, and radicals named
to appease bigger and redder radicals. The former, obviously, are expected to
be lenient to law-breakers protected by the organized underworld. The latter,
mostly fuzzy-minded intellectuals, do not believe in punishment, especially

when the evildoer is a Negro or of any minority race. They can’t find wrong in
any man. They believe criminals are mishandled wards of society.
The Washington field office of the Bureau of Narcotics—with only three
or four agents—arrests dope peddlers as fast as they can be found and turns up
enough evidence to secure convictions. But the courts almost uniformly issue
suspended sentences or small fines.
The stench was so bad, dope peddlers were selling the contraband across
the street from the White House, at the eastern end of Lafayette Square. The
great brains regarded the venomous situation without qualms. What’s a little
dope among dopes?
In desperation, Anslinger removed every agent—including one of his best
men, former agent-in-charge Roy Morrison—from the city of Washington. He
felt it was needless to risk his men’s lives to get evidence against junk peddlers
who were sure to keep out of jail because of a fix or muddle-headedness.
Thereafter, for a short time, no effort was made to enforce the narcotics laws in
the District. Conditions got so bad, even the judges knew they must cooperate
to avoid a national blow-up. After Anslinger restored the agents, the judges
began meting out stiff sentences. But the heat soon came off and they are back
at their old habits.
An example of what often happens when a dope peddler is arrested in the
District is the case of William Potts, indicted on 14 counts arising from the sale
and possession of heroin. On the day set for trial, an essential witness of the
government could not be found. The court was so informed. The judge turned
to the counsel for defense and asked if he was ready for the trial. Defense
counsel was, but the U.S. Attorney said he was not, because of the witness’s
absence. Thereupon the court asked if the defendant would waive a jury trial.
He did. Immediately and without the pretense of trial, the court ruled. “I find
the defendant not guilty.”
William P. Estoffery came into court with a record of ten specific narcotics
convictions, but the United States District Court gave him eight months to
three years, which meant he could be back on the street in three months. One
of his previous convictions was for possession of counterfeit prescription
blanks.
Here is another sample of the judicial road-blocks erected against
enforcement officers who arrest dope peddlers in the capital:

Constitutional rights to privacy also give a defendant protection from
illegal police raids on homes other than his own, the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia ruled recently.
The court made the ruling in reversing the conviction of Jesse W. Jeffers,
Jr., on narcotics dealing charges.
Jeffers, 27, Negro, was found guilty in Judge Alexander Holtzoff’s court
on testimony that police, without a search warrant, raided a room at the
Dunbar Hotel and found 19 bottles of cocaine he allegedly had hidden there.
Jeffers lived elsewhere in the hotel, but the room was rented by relatives
of his.
Setting a rare principle of law, the Appeals Court held evidence of the
cocaine cache should have been excluded from the case because the police raid
was illegal. It pointed out the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment specifically
bans illegal searches of a defendant’s home, and said the principle should be
enlarged to cover illegal raids on “premises that were not his.”
Judge E. Barrett Prettyman, in a dissent from the majority opinion, said “I
do not see how an individual’s rights can be invaded by Government seizure of
... unstamped narcotics, not on the individual’s person or premises.”
He emphasized the case “is important in the enforcement of the narcotics
laws.”
The curious part of the whole affair is that the defendant admitted the
untaxed, unstamped dope was his. In fact, he demanded its return from the
government.
In another of its feats of legal legerdemain, beyond the poor reasoning of a
couple of reporters who didn’t graduate from Harvard Law, the august court
said to the defendant in effect: “Possession of dope is illegal, so you can’t have
it back, though you didn’t commit any crime when you had it before.”
Try and figure that one out.
Shortly thereafter the Appeals Court again overruled the same judge in
another narcotics case and ordered a new trial for Clarence Butler on the
grounds that Holtzoff’s “facial expressions” were prejudicial.
An official memorandum of the United States Treasury Department sets
out facts as follows:

Since early in 1946, the Bureau has experienced repeated delay in
obtaining prosecution of its cases in the District of Columbia. In numerous
trials where out-of-town agents were witnesses the Bureau had to bear the
expense of bringing them to Washington for testimony. Repeatedly, after the
agents arrived, the hearings were continued. The Bureau could not stand this
gaff and had to “stop narcotic enforcement in the District of Columbia.”
Dope cannot be manufactured locally. The Washington wholesalers must
get their supplies from the international monopoly. The general practice in
other cities is for the organization to deliver the wholesale lots to localities
where they are to be consumed, but in the case of Washington the wholesale
jobbers go to the distribution depots in other cities and pick up carload lots.
All narcotics in the United States are controlled at the top by a tight ring of
evil men who, in turn, issue state and territorial rights to middlemen.
Washington merchants are ordered to make their purchases in New York,
Philadelphia and Baltimore, but mainly in New York.
Marijuana is brought up directly from Mexico, but much inferior quality
reefer seed is planted on farms between Washington and Baltimore and in
Virginia.
The local dope set-up is largely controlled by Negroes, though Chinese
also are active in the trade and have become more so since the Communists
took over China. The two tongs frequently import their own. At this writing
Red China has 500 tons of opium for sale abroad. This is equal to the world
requirements for medical and scientific needs for more than a year. Chiang
Kai-shek prohibited the production in China in 1934. The Communists have
revived Jehol and Manchurian opium cultivation, and are reopening Tientsin
dens. The tongs have not been adhering of late to the agreement which limited
them to noncompetitive sales. Both are selling pin yen (opium) and bok for
(heroin). Police believe the recent but short-lived tong wars on the West Coast
were attributable to breaches of the basic compromise, plus efforts of Chinese
Communists to take over the tong dope distribution machinery.
Occasionally, when sources of supply are temporarily cut off, or when the
Italians are able to offer a more favorable price, the Chinese Syndicates send a
man to buy directly from the Mafia. This dope is stored in a warehouse near
108th Street and 2nd Avenue, New York City, in Marcantonio’s bailiwick.
Another difficulty in narcotics enforcement, not even whispered about in
Washington, is the leakage from diplomatic sources. It is politic for the Bureau

to deny this is so, because nothing can be done about it. But huge amounts of
concentrated dope come in envoys’ sealed pouches. There is, as everyone in
Washington knows, a lively racket in the diplomatic corps in black market
money. No easier method of acquiring dollars is possible than through sale of
dope. Some of this contraband is used by members of the embassy staffs,
themselves. In some Near Eastern and Oriental countries, a daily intake of
narcotics is considered as normal as our use of coffee and tobacco. Many Latin
Americans are slaves to marijuana, especially in the eating form, not otherwise
available in the States. Some of this, which doesn’t find its way into the
channels of trade, is presented by the diplomats to their American friends.
This will be denied, too, but ranking members of the diplomatic corps who
are narcotic addicts and who can’t get the stuff from other sources have it
provided for them by the protocol boys in the State Department, who withdraw
it from official government sources.
We were offered reefers by peddlers in the alleys along 4th Street, SW;
also at the corner of 7th and T and 7th and O, NW.
In an all-night diner at Vermont and L, frequented by musicians and hep
kids, we were offered reefers also.
Hard stuff is obtainable with no trouble from street salesmen in Thomas
Circle. In this neighborhood, which is bossed by Attilio Acalotti, you can place
a bet on a horse, buy a numbers ticket or get a call girl. The service is
performed for you by sidewalk newsboys and pimps on the steps of the
National Christian Church.
In recent years, rich white racketeers have gone in for opium smoking
themselves. They get it in Chinatown, where a few poppy parlors are in
operation. As noted, members of the On Leong Tong deal mostly in opium and
the members of Hip Sing in heroin.
Heroin is sold openly on the corner of 5th and H, in the Hip Sing section
of Chinatown. To prove this, we became accessories to a violation of the law.
This is how simple the whole transaction was: We were steered to a
broken-down wreck named Joe, a well-known dope addict. Despite his habit,
Joe is an expert locksmith, a genius at his trade. He can’t work steadily, but so
talented is he, the police and other local law enforcement bodies and private
detective agencies frequently hire him to pick locks. That’s how he gets the
money to support his habit. We gave Joe $6 to buy a deck of heroin and left

him on the corner while we drove twenty feet up the block as Joe waited for
his contact, across the street from the Gospel Mission.
We walked back and passed Joe as he handed the $6 to a young Chinese,
who had appeared out of an area way. Joe said the Chinaman’s name was
Benny Wong. This is one of the commonest Chinese names, there may be 500
with it in Washington. While Benny went to get the stuff, Joe sat down on a
stoop and fell asleep. He had been loading himself with secanol, a synthetic, to
keep his nerve steady until he got the heroin, and he was in a pitiable
condition. While Joe slumbered, two metropolitan cops walked by. They
thought he was drunk. One went to get the wagon while we talked the other
out of pinching our decoy. A few minutes after the cops left, Benny returned
with the heroin. That’s all there was to it.
The “hooked” addict’s cost of supporting his “yen” runs from $35 a week
up, though if one “has a monkey on his back,” meaning the urge is desperate
and irresistible, he will be soaked from $50 to $100 a week. Those who can
afford the best stuff or who no longer get a bang out of cheap grades are bled
for as much as $500 a week.
When Hyman I. Fischbach, brilliant counsel of the Congressional
committee investigating crime and law enforcement in the District of
Columbia, queried Assistant Commissioner Harney of the Narcotics Bureau,
some startling facts about narcotic addiction were brought out, yet missed by
the press and the public. These hitherto unpublished excerpts make interesting
reading.
Mr. Harney. That also depends too on the cost of the drug and the amount
of his income. Addicts can get along—during the war we had lots of them who
had needle habits. Their intake was probably one-fourth grain or half a grain a
day of actual narcotic. The addict might develop until he gets as high as 20, 30,
or 40 grains a day, considered a lethal dose for a non-initiated person. They
build up resistance power. They get hoggish.
Congressman Davis. What is that term?
Mr. Harney. Use a lot of the drug. In days when drugs were freely
available that was one reason for institution of cocaine. A man would stupefy
himself with narcotics and with cocaine he would get an extra thrill and get out
of it and brighten up and keep from going to sleep. The addict may spend $5 or
$10 a day in addition to other expenses, and not being able, or disposed to
work, usually becomes a thief. He can be a prowler or he might be a

pickpocket. Some addicts are very good burglars. He might be a stick-up-man,
not often.
A woman will be a prostitute or shoplifter. A man might be a panderer.
Many addicts buy in decks, 8 ounces or 2 or 3 ounces. The preaddict would
use a few grains. It differs in different localities.
Mr. Davis. Does the price differ?
Mr. Harney. Expressed in terms of actual narcotic content for the
preaddict it may be $2 or $3 a grain.
Mr. Fischbach. Mr. Harney, is it your point that an individual otherwise
law abiding necessarily turns to petty crime in order to support the addiction?
Mr. Harney. I would not say necessarily, but it is often apparent. I want to
emphasize that addiction, particularly in the past, has been much among the
criminal element. A man was down in a dangerous environment before he
became addicted; he had to get in that sort of association in contrast to the
casual person who might become an addict from medical reasons, but the
ordinary addict becomes so by association.
Mr. Fischbach. Then your point is there is an epidemic effect to it?
Mr. Harney. We have a rather unusual and alarming situation which
developed since the war. It does not quite follow the pattern I set out. My
theory used to be that most addicts were old enough to be associated with
criminals and get into the underworld with addicts before they themselves
became addicts. Today, in certain localities, we have young people, some
minors, and the pattern seems to be experimentation in marijuana first. That
loses its thrill and those persons become addicts to heroin. Sometimes cocaine
comes into the picture.
Mr. Davis. Is marijuana used as a starter and later other narcotics are
used?
Mr. Harney. I would not say always, but frequently. Young people get
into the marijuana atmosphere and you have a field for the cocaine and heroin
addicts.
Mr. Davis. Are they induced to begin with marijuana by purveyors of
heroin, cocaine, morphine, and other drugs, to lead them into addiction?
Mr. Harney. That pattern follows. Later dealers sell all three
commodities. Youngsters come into the marijuana smoking atmosphere and

soon there is no kick in it, and someone will tell them, “Try this.”
Mr. Fischbach. Now who is that person?
Mr. Harney. The peddler, or a cocaine addict, or a heroin addict.
Mr. Fischbach. I would like to direct the attention of the committee to the
case of Charles M. Roberts, alias Jim Yellow, and ask if that case presents
some problems which your Bureau experienced in the District with regard to
the enforcement of the narcotics law. Present the facts in the case of Jim
Roberts, what kind of a person he was, how he lived, what quantity of drugs he
had when taken into custody.
Mr. Harney. Jim Roberts had two convictions for violation of the Federal
narcotics laws. He had convictions for other crimes, including charges of
assault. We used an agent in an undercover capacity. Roberts lived in a
luxuriously furnished apartment. Some of these figures I cite are on his own
statement and probably you will allow for bragging, but he had a beautifully
carved television set which he claimed cost him a couple thousand dollars, and
he drove a new Cadillac. While the officers were in his presence money was
handed to him in a paper grocery bag. Roberts referred to a hatchet and said he
was waiting to christen it in blood. When the car was seized the hatchet was
under the seat of the car. Roberts’ style of living represents big-shot narcotic
dealers. It makes a tremendous impression on others who might think of
entering the racket.

* * *
In addition to users of standard narcotics, many in Washington go in for
esoteric kicks. A growing fad in the Negro district is to inhale incense with
marijuana added.
Barbiturates are sold without prescription, because the D.C. law has no
teeth in it. Some become habituated to these drugs and, instead of being put to
sleep by them, get all the wallop out of them that others get from opium. Many
drug stores sell nembutals over the counter for 25 cents each. Nembutals are
the prostitutes’ favorite. Among initiates they are known as goof balls, or
nemies. They grew popular during World War II, when there was a scarcity of
narcotics. Most who prefer goof balls to marijuana usually end up on
morphine, heroin or cocaine.

Evelyn Walsh McLean’s daughter, who was married to Senator Reynolds,
died from an overdose of goof balls.
As elsewhere, reefers are the real menace. This product of the hemp plant
is easily available, can be grown anywhere, is cheap, and in some circles is in
good repute. There is no such thing as an innocent reefer smoker. Sooner or
later, anyone on “muggles” must become a law-breaker to some degree.
Peddlers put their heads together, know how badly any customer is hooked.
Then they jack up prices to beyond what most people can pay honestly.
All weed-heads are cop-haters. Even in reasonably normal condition they
carry a fierce resentment against conventional forces of society.
Reefer smoking is not habitual in the sense that the addict suffers
“withdrawal” symptoms, as when he is taken off other stuff. But neither is
cocaine habit-forming in that sense. Both work on the emotions. Their use
causes a physiological change in the brain. The reefer smoker who gives the
stuff up does not turn violently ill. But he doesn’t give it up. He likes its effect
and needs its lift to give him courage.
Sooner or later, all reefer smokers go on to cocaine, because the effect is
the same as from reefers, a hundredfold. When the bang of the hemp wears off,
cocaine is the only thing that can take its place. And because cocaine is so
expensive, one must become a criminal to afford its use. And the cocaine gives
one the courage to be a criminal.
The subject of tea-hounds brings us quite naturally to our next chapter,
juvenile delinquency, in which stimulants are a large factor.

18. THE YOUNG IN HEART

JUVENILE delinquency as a topic has become a bromide. You’d
think there was little left to add. But here we found not only more of it, but
conditions behind it were frequently the exact opposite of those obtaining in
other populous cities.
It is generally accepted as beyond dispute that youngsters go wrong
because of poverty, congestion, lack of play-space, exposure to the
tenement atmosphere, the saloon and miserable home life. But Washington,
with its top average of prosperity, nothing that could rightfully be called
slums, no tenements and no out-and-out saloons, has a more alarming per
capita of teen-age law-breakers than New York, Chicago, Detroit or Kansas
City.
Remarkable, moreover, is the discovery that white youth is more
delinquent proportionately to the total of all criminals of their race than
Negro youth. Over all, however, more colored children break laws than
whites. A study of records, talks with social workers and personal prying
into many cases make it evident that more young people go wrong because
of overprivilege than underprivilege.
Most kids who get into trouble are well fed, over the height and weight
scientifically charted for their age, are well dressed, and have superior
intelligence quotients. We checked on one, 15 years old, five feet nine
inches tall, weighing 140 pounds, the son of a government official who
earns $12,000 a year. He confessed to more than 100 larcenies, burglaries
and purse-snatches, and he had escaped from two postal inspectors who
arrested him for looting mail-boxes, searching for government checks on
which he intended to forge endorsements. He and a 12-year-old accomplice
had broken into 37 houses in the NW area in 20 months and had robbed
scores of cars. He said:
“Everybody here is on the make. We want money, too.”

Of 2,412 arrests of white males for Part 1 offenses, serious crimes
including homicide, rape, robbery, burglary, larceny, auto-theft and
aggravated assault, 564, almost 25 per cent, were committed by boys 15 and
under; 1,897 of the 2,412, or 75 per cent, were committed by boys 20 or
under.
The figures for Negroes are the reverse. There adults are in the
preponderant majority. During the time when white males of all ages
committed the 2,412 specific offenses for which they were arrested, 7,729
Negroes were apprehended. Of this large number, only 1,702 of the crimes
were committed by Negro boys 15 and under; of these the number charged
to males 20 years and under was 3,477, considerably less than half, whereas
white juveniles rolled up 75 per cent of the total for their race.
Also a departure from the usual big-town findings is the sex proportion.
Juvenile delinquency is almost a complete male monopoly, about the only
one in the female-heavy District. Harlem and Bronzeville, Hell’s Kitchen
and the dregs of Brooklyn have their “debs,” the feminine auxiliaries of the
boys’ gangs of muggers, street-fighters and thieves. The girls constitute a
good one-third of the problem children, engaged in picking pockets,
shoplifting and prostitution. But in Washington, in the period when the
2,412 serious crimes were charged to white males, only 309 were
committed by females, and of these only 19 were under the age of 15; 96
were 20 and under. Negro females of all ages were arrested for 1,091 Part 1
crimes, of which only 38 were girls up to 15 and only 161 were 20 and
under.
One reason for the huge incidence of juvenile delinquency, but by no
means the decisive one, was an idiosyncrasy of the population trend here,
topsy-turvy to every other in the country during the last 10 years. While the
mean age of Americans was growing to such an extent that it appeared we
were becoming a nation of old people, Washington’s population increased
26 per cent—but its child population, as of birth records, increased more
than 60 per cent. Nobody seems to know why.
If this has anything to do with the high influx of Negroes, the figures
above quoted challenge it as a delinquency cause. Our observations led us
to the conclusion that the principal influence is a system and habit of
coddling found nowhere else. By Act of Congress, none but the Juvenile

Court can take jurisdiction over offenders before they are 15; defendants
under 18 must be transferred to it on the court’s demand. This branch is
dominated by fat matrons and skinny old maids who make a profession or a
vocation of “child welfare.” To them that means no punishment; everybody
is innocent. In time the judges, New Deal appointees all, many from
crackpot groups with socialistic and other distorted tendencies, have been
conditioned to contempt of the law and slant toward paternalistic lectures
and acquittals. The result is an enormous rate of recidivists, and the figures
represent multiple arrests of such repeaters rather than of so many
individuals.
In the rare instances when the punks are sentenced to confinement, they
go to federal reformatories, where they get short terms and de luxe
treatment.
Statistics are cold; many people skip them or disbelieve them. But cops
are practical. And so appalling has moppet misbehavior become that an
extra detail of 30 officers has been assigned on duty around the clock to
watch and buzz the teensters, in an unprecedented campaign to ease
Washington’s biggest growing pain.
The vacuum in which federally appointed judges and officials
responsible only to Congress can place a community is well illustrated by
the juvenile delinquency procedure.
Judge Edith H. Cockrill, of the Juvenile Court, adjudicated in a star
chamber, concealed from the public. Nothing came out of her court but
rumors. One lawyer said her court is “a social worker’s dream and a
lawyer’s nightmare.” He said children and their parents are treated as
“patients,” none as offenders. The result is that about three-fourths of the
kids processed through Washington Juvenile Court grow up to be adult
criminals. Public pressure forced her to issue her first report last month,
after more than two years on the bench.
Judge Cockrill is a typical Fair Deal beneficiary. She graduated from
the University of Tennessee in 1939, then got her legal experience with the
OPA. Figure out how that qualifies her to sit as a juvenile judge. Before her
appointment, a couple of years ago, by President Truman, she had never
tried a case in juvenile court. Her present calendar calls for about 60 cases a
day, including bastardy, nonsupport and parental responsibility.

The previous incumbent on the bench was Faye L. Bentley, who
voluntarily committed herself to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital—for Mental
Disorders—for treatment in 1948. This is a course we recommend to some
other judges.
Convicted juvenile delinquents are sent to the National Training School
for Boys, the National Training School for Girls, and the Industrial Home
School.
The Department of Justice estimates three of every four graduates of
these reformatories become adult criminals. And this though the Training
School for Boys, known as “The Hill,” goes in for all modern techniques
and dodads, such as plastic surgery, psychotherapy and psychology. There
are church facilities, athletics, television, radio and musical instruments.
The boys are taught shoemaking, cooking, farming and other trades. The
school specializes in group therapy, which has its advantages and its
absurdities. Sometimes an entire group can be spoiled by one or two tough
young kids who become ringleaders.
Except in the Negro sections, Washington has been spared the scourge
of kid gangs. There are no major foreign-born settlements in town.
Therefore the white kids seldom organize into mobs. Juvenile delinquency
in other cities is often blamed on Italian, Irish, Jewish, Mexican and Puerto
Rican under-age gangs.
But organization seems to be coming into fashion. While these lines
were being typed, three local men were attacked and brutally beaten by a
gang of 12 teensters in the 700 block, 6th Street, NW, apparently for the fun
of it. The victims said the boys shouted insults at them from the sidewalk as
they drove past. The three stopped and got out of the car. The gang then
swarmed on them, beat them with bottles, belt-buckles, brass knuckles and
improvised blackjacks.
Wherever young white criminals work together they are more often
prone to choose school or college mates, or members of the same boys’
clubs as buddies. For instance, police broke up the exclusive “Weekend
Burglars” gang, whose activities had stirred up residents of an exclusive
NW residential section when they discovered that the criminals were home
on leave on weekend passes from a military academy in Maryland. The

three boys, the oldest 17, all came from wealthy families. Their method of
“cracking” a home was this:
They would ring a doorbell; if no one answered, they cut through the
screen and smashed the glass in the door. Inside the house, they ransacked it
for three articles, taking nothing else. Playfully they would toss furniture
helter-skelter and break china. The money they spent. The whiskey they
drank. The stolen guns they showed off with.
Kids of all ages and both sexes and races are smoking reefers in
prodigious quantities. These are easily obtainable from peddlers who work
outside the schools, and inside some schools, from students, themselves.
The current price for the weeds to school-children is 50 cents each,
sometimes three for a dollar.
The young dope-fiends are not confined to any neighborhood of the
city or to any economic class. One high school in the area, attended by
children whose parents are in the upper brackets, is reported to have 95 per
cent addiction. A major kid crime element is marijuana. Youngsters go on
from it to more potent narcotics, then commit petty crimes to obtain the
funds to buy the drugs. Reefers and other dope sharply bring out latent
lawlessness.
High school athletic events have become a scandal. Bootleggers purvey
liquor openly in the stands. Hundreds of stinking-drunk youngsters are
swept out of the stadiums after every game.
Professional gamblers attend these games and make book without any
pretense, taking bets from the kids of from 25 cents up and giving tickets in
return.
Neighborhood stores adjacent to schools also purvey bootleg liquor and
take bets from the juveniles, not only for their own school games, but on the
horses and numbers.
Juvenile delinquency is almost as bad in the suburbs. There kids have
cars, and “hot rod” races are common.
Youngsters ape their elders when they see the callousness of parents to
the processes of law. Laxity, favoritism, New Deal “liberalism,” a general
spirit of contempt for law enforcement are reflected in the growing
generation. The solid virtues are “old hat.” Youth is on a rampage.

Washington has no monopoly on young criminals, but it has more of
them per capita than any other city in the nation.
Lame-brains like to point out that only colored people are confined to
“slums” in Washington; that no whites live in ghettos in the capital. If so,
how come that juvenile delinquency among the whites is as startling as
among the blacks, more so, in fact? As reported elsewhere in this book,
Washington’s crime rate leads the nation. It is all the more startling to
discover how many of these crimes are committed by children.

19. BOOZE AND BOTTLES

WASHINGTONIANS imbibe three times as much as you do,
friend voter. Except for a few silly restrictions, no place in the country
offers as many inducements to the potential alcoholic. The answer is,
14,151 drunks last year created a jail “housing crisis.” The number more
than doubled in the last five years. Liquor consumption of the District is
three times the U. S. average. Every resident, including new-born infants,
soaked up almost four gallons of hooch last year.
Even allowing for thirsty tourists, conventioners, and Virginia and
Maryland commuters, Washington drinks more than any other U. S. city,
including dissolute New York and debauched Chicago.
This is the place where price control was invented, yet the District has
no peacetime minimum price law on bottled goods. You can buy standard
brands for a dollar less than anywhere else. Many unnamed whiskeys and
gins are cheap; it doesn’t pay to cook your own. Whiskey costs less than
$2.50 a fifth, and gin can be bought for $1.75. Yet the bootleg business is a
major industry. Millions of gallons sold in the District, on which no tax was
paid, swell the known figures.
The liquor control situation is an anomaly. Like the District of
Columbia, itself, the liquor laws were born of compromise, this between
Congressmen from the wet and bone-dry states.
You can drink hard liquor in restaurants and cocktail lounges, but only
when sitting at a table. Beer and wines may be dispensed over the bar, but
not to standees. You’ve got to find a stool. Some genius figured you can’t
get plastered sitting down, forgetting that many who drink and sit can’t
stand up again.
Hard liquor may not be sold on Sundays, though beer and wine can be.
Bars can remain open until 2 A.M. every night except Saturday and Sunday,

when they must shutter promptly at 12. You can’t line drinks on your table;
anything in your possession at the closing hour will be swept out of your
hand. Most places issue the last call 15 minutes before the limit and in that
final quarter-hour there are wild drinking scenes as customers try to get
drunk all at once.
Liquor for off-premise consumption is sold in bottle stores, of which
there are about 350. They close at nine on weekdays and at midnight on
Saturdays and all day Sundays. A package store license costs $815 a year,
but it will cost you $50,000 to buy one, as the ABC Board has frozen the
rolls.
Those who can’t get a bun on by closing time have no trouble locating
an oasis after the curfew. At this writing there are 613 so-called bottle-clubs
running in the District, in addition to hundreds of gin flats in Black Town,
where almost any cab driver will steer you. Bootleggers work certain street
corners, where you can buy bottle goods after hours.
The legal age minimum is 18 for beer and 21 for hard stuff, but this
law, like almost all other rules and regulations, is breached more often than
honored.
Citizens and Congressmen seek sporadically to rationalize local liquor
laws, in hope of cutting down violations. But the dry bloc buries the bills in
committees. Everyone was surprised when the House District Affairs
Committee managed to bring up a bill permitting sale until two on Saturday
nights. This turned out to be a piece of parliamentary jockeying in the fight
against the President’s FEPC Bill, of all things. That law, obnoxious to
Southerners, would have come up for a vote unless one with legislative
priority could be sent in ahead. And that bill, according to the calendar, was
a proposed law to liberalize drinking habits in the District. So the
Southerners brought it up, side-tracked the FEPC, and, a couple of weeks
later, when it came time to vote on the booze act, roundly routed it.
The thirsty visitor finds it easy to find a bottle-club and become a full-
fledged drinking member on the spot. The names, locations and owners of
these after-hour spots vary from day to day. Occasionally, after clean-ups,
all or most close for a couple of weeks or a couple of months. As these
words were written the District was recovering from its most painful

drought, brought on by revelations before the District Crime Investigating
Committee, headed by Attorney Fischbach.
The front-page stories forced the cops and U. S. Attorney Fay to close
some joints. Others lay low awhile. A murder in the Hideaway Club didn’t
help, either.
We made an intensive study of bottle-clubs. Of the score or more we
visited, we found only one apparently operating legitimately and according
to law. That was the Lyre’s Club, about which more later. Of the 600-plus
such clubs in Washington, it is possible that a few adhere to the book, but
we didn’t hear of them.
On paper, bottle-clubs are supposed to be membership organizations,
incorporated for social and benevolent purposes. Members bring their own
liquor, which is held for them, their names on the labels. The clubs sell
setups and food.
Charlie Ford, a Washington attorney to whom we will have occasion to
tip our hats in much more detail later, is the lawyer for a number of clubs.
He officiated at their births.
Here’s how most of them really work. Regular patrons, i.e.,
“members,” are supposed to pay annual dues of about $10, depending on
the club, but most regulars pay nothing. Transients, i.e., guests, are charged
a door-fee of one or two dollars, depending on the club.
Setups are sold, to those who bring their own liquor, at a nominal price
of 35 cents and up. If you haven’t your stuff parked or with you, most clubs
will sell it to you under the counter or advise you it can be had from a guy
seated in front of the entrance in a car.
These clubs are incorporated as non-profit private enterprises, not
required to pay Federal amusement taxes even when they provide floor
shows and dancing. Nor need they have ABC liquor licenses, because they
are supposed not to be selling.
Many of them operate as follows: The prospective owner or owners and
a couple of their friends or employes incorporate as a social or benevolent
organization. The real owner then rents and furnishes the premises, which
he in turn sublets to the so-called social club at a rent which will
approximate all the “take” from membership and door charges. The “club”

thereupon turns over the kitchen, the sale of setups and the hat-checking
and cigaret stand to the real proprietor, as a concession, in return for a token
payment, which in turn goes back to the proprietor with the rent.
In clubs that sell liquor illegally or provide gambling, records of such
activities are not kept. The proceeds go directly into the owner’s pocket. If
raided or threatened by cleanup drives, the clubs disband. The owner
organizes a new club under the same terms and repeats the process.
A new twist is being added since the Fischbach exposé. Some club
proprietors are making deals with units of legitimate bodies, such as veteran
groups, labor unions, etc., whereby the clubs share some of the profits. One,
the Amvets, closed after the Hideaway shooting, its Charter lifted by the
national organization.
Bottle-clubs find customers in a variety of ways. Some employes of
licensed night clubs and restaurants hand out guest-membership cards to
patrons who inquire where they can go after two. These steerers write their
names on the cards and draw a kickback for every customer, usually a
dollar a head.
Many cab drivers shill for the bottle-clubs, as well as for gin flats. Cab
drivers’ pay varies with the size of the party. They sometimes get as much
as $5 a haul. They are the chief source of prospective patronage for the
colored bottle-clubs. More than 500 after-hour spots in Washington are
operated by Negroes or in the Negro district. All cater to blacks and whites.
The twenty to thirty white bottle-clubs running are segregated as to Negro
musicians and actors. In one club we saw three pretty blonde girls with two
Negro men. They were all reefer-smokers, palpably.
Cabbies who hustle for the bottle-clubs not only do so in front of hotels
and licensed cabarets and restaurants, but try to pirate customers away from
opposition clubs. When they see a prospect waiting for the peephole to
open, they tout him away “to a better place, where you won’t have any
trouble.” The Hideaway, in Georgetown, depended almost entirely on such
maneuvers, as it is far out and off the beaten track.
The pirates were acting so brazenly, police stepped in to curb the
practice by giving tickets to drivers parked at strategic spots. The law

requires cabs to cruise at all times, except in posted hack-stands, which are
only outside major hotels.
Food, dancing, entertainment, and often dames are for sale at the clubs.
Sometimes waitresses are available, but they work until 6 in the morning,
by which time the average rounder has forgotten all about it. The price for a
$10 girl picked up in a club is $20.
Some provide craps, stud poker and other games. The night we were
there, a crap game ran on the top floor of the Atlas Club, on Pennsylvania
Avenue, two blocks from the White House, and at the Stage-crafters Club,
another hangout of General Harry Vaughan. The Atlas applied for a private
club liquor license, which would permit legal sales, but the application was
held up by the ABC Board until the club president, Sidney Brown, who was
abroad, could return for a personal appearance. It happened that Mr. Brown,
the sponsor of this after-hour spot, was abroad because he is an employe of
the State Department. Some months previously, gambler Gary Quinn said
he was the president of the Atlas. The license was denied, so it is still
running as a bottle-club.
Among the after-hour clubs operating at this writing are the Top Side,
501 12th Street, NW; the Guess Who, 811 L Street, NW; the Acropolis, 719
9th Street, NW (patronized by Greeks); the Culinary Arts, 307 M Street,
NE, and the Yamasee, 1214 U Street, NW. The last two are colored clubs.
The most notorious of the after-hour-spots speaks, the Gold Key, was
closed by Committee revelations. It has since reorganized as the Downtown
Club, with some of the same characters. Most of the others are patronized
by unimportant transients or night workers, such as musicians, waiters and
bartenders.
The Gold Key got the cream and they’re back again. Among its regular
patrons were local sports, including playboy Senators and officials.
Waitresses there made as much as $150 a week in tips, whereas they are
lucky to knock down $50 in other places. When lawyer Charlie Ford drew
up the papers for the Gold Key, its original organizers were Albert
Glickfield, alias Al Brown, Patsy Meserole, and Harry Conners, his brother-
in-law. Meserole is a former New York gangster, one of the last surviving
members of the late Legs Diamond mob. Glickfield is a gambler and
associate of Frank Erickson. The accountant for this after-hour club was

Henry W. Davis, a division head in the Accounting Division of the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an agency of the U. S. Government.
Meserole left the Gold Key to open the Stagecrafters, 433 3rd Street,
NW, and took a lot of the top political and theatrical business with him. His
partner is Dominic Ferone, another ex-New York mobster. General Vaughan
is a patron. It sells liquor openly and provides gambling, and waitresses will
get women for them as wants ’em. Meserole testified under oath that many
Congressmen and Senators were customers.
When Congressional investigations indicated the club was operated
illegally, it was shuttered until the heat was off. But so heavy was the
influence of its owners, through business ties with members of the New
York Syndicate and the exalted position of its patrons, that as soon as the
investigation shut down, the club reopened, not quietly, but brazenly.
We have before us an ad in a Washington daily which reads:

NOTICE....
Members and Their Guests
STAGECRAFTERS CLUB
NOW REOPENED
Same Place....
Same Policy....
Same Committees....
Same Benefits....
Membership Drive Now On
Help Get New Members!
EDWARD P. MESEROLE, Secretary

The Stagecrafters is the haunt of unsavory “introducers” who make
contacts with wealthy chumps there, offering girls and gambling. Police
recently arrested a lout, who, they charged, had become acquainted with
William H. Engelmann, a photo-lithographer from Baltimore, out for a fling
with friends in the Stagecrafters. The prisoner suggested a blackjack game
and took him to a room in the Ambassador Hotel, which is owned by Gwen
Cafritz’s husband. Engelmann was soon a $1,500 loser, and asked his host
to cash a check. He said he would, at the hotel cashier’s booth, and left with

Engelmann’s check. Engelmann became suspicious when the man didn’t
return after an hour. He found the man had checked out. When the fellow
was caught, police said, they found on him a deck of marked cards.
Another bottle-club that opened after the adjournment of the
Congressional investigation is on the site of the Palm Grill, at 14th and Q,
under a new name, the Sunrise.
The shuttered Turf-and-Grid was reborn as the aforementioned Amvets.
The Turf’s owner, Richard O’Connell, has been employed by the
government since the beginning of the New Deal, in such agencies as the
original NRA, the Department of the Interior (under “Honest Harold” Ickes)
and more recently in the Red-infested Wages and Hours Division of the
Department of Labor.
Another club that operates on and off is the United Nations Social
Club. When we visited it, its chief social activity was a crap game. Another
is the Crystal Cavern.
When George P. Harding, a 39-year-old gunman and underworld
fingerman, was shot to death by Joe Nesline, notorious Prohibition era
bootlegger, in the Hideaway—an aftermath of last year’s conquest of
Washington by the Mafia—Washington’s bottle-clubs took another
shellacking.
Congressmen beat their breasts, newspapers shrilled, the DA promised
action and the cops vowed to close all the joints. For a few days a couple of
clubs went easy; at this writing most were again in action.
The Hideaway, scene of the crime, was reported “closed for good” by
the precinct captain, but Joseph Horowitz, an owner, announced “business
as usual” while the cops were telling everyone the premises were empty. At
press time, the present and future status of the club was in doubt.
Legitimate clubs are a necessity until the District authorities amend the
outmoded liquor laws. One which we liked is the Lyre’s. Most members of
this club are night-workers whose hours are such that they could never get a
drink or relax if they had no place to go after 2 a.m. Among them are
musicians of the big hotels and night clubs, waiters, waitresses, hatcheck
gals, government swing-shift people and visiting entertainers. We spent
considerable time at the Lyre’s and noted everything was on the square. No

patrons were permitted to enter who weren’t members or their guests, and
no drinks were served except out of members’ bottles.
The Lyre’s is chummy. There’s a mainfloor bar and lounge and a
basement dining-room and dance floor. Most of the musicians in town hang
out there and put on jam sessions all night long. Its hosts are Vince and
Mildred Carr, former Baltimore and Philadelphia night club operators. They
have many friends in show business. The Carrs won’t tolerate hookers and
drunks, allow no soliciting, gambling or hoodlums. But unfortunately the
Lyre’s is unique.
Not all who want to drink late can afford to or can get into or know
about bottle-clubs. Those who spend an evening in a licensed cabaret and
find themselves still sober or out for fun at two, or at midnight on Saturday,
are up against it. Licensed clubs and cocktail lounges can’t sell for off-
premises consumption. If you tip your waiter liberally he will dig up an
empty Coca-Cola bottle and let you fill it with the remaining liquor at your
table.
Some people who run dry at midnight Saturdays drive to Maryland,
where bars and package-stores close at 2 a.m.
Washington is loaded with bootleggers and blind tigers. We have
already referred to the gin-flats in Black Town, where home-made gin—raw
ethyl alcohol flavored with juniper and sometimes diluted with apple cider
—is sold. Prices are reasonable, as low as 50 cents a drink and $3 a bottle.
The flats, usually five- or six-room affairs, have juke-boxes. Parlor floors
are cleared for dancing. Beds are handy. If cops come, it’s a private party.
But cops don’t come.
We pulled up in our cab to the NE corner of Popner and U Streets, and
waited five minutes. A colored man came over and asked us what we
wanted. He had gin, Scotch and corn. We bought gin, trade-marked, $2.50
for a pint.
David Douglas Davenport, self-styled “Union Station bootlegger,” has
been selling booze in the railroad terminal for years. He charges $5 for a
pint of whiskey, which he keeps stashed in an automatic coin locker.
Davenport has a record for court appearances, 115 in one year. He lost to
the law once, and did two years in the District jail. The day he got out of the

can he was in business in Union Station again and still was at this writing,
though arrested again and out on bail.
Many after-hour bootleggers sell legitimate stuff, which they buy at
Washington’s low prices, and retail at 100 or 200 per cent profit. Hundreds
of other bootleggers, especially Negroes, dispense moonshine. Most of this
is acquired from mob sources in Brooklyn and New Jersey, where the Mafia
operates gigantic stills capable of producing thousands of gallons a day.
According to Carroll Mealy, capable and efficient head of the Alcoholic Tax
Unit, the rum-runners take this stuff to Washington in 1940 Fords, with
Cadillac or racing motors in place of original power. This model is
preferred for its carrying capacity, maneuverability and inconspicuous
appearance. The souped-up motors can hit 120 miles an hour against
pursuit.
Much moonshine is made in Washington, though none of the raided
stills was found with a large capacity. The stuff is cooked at 2nd and G
Streets, NW. But legitimate Washington sources supply liquor to be run into
nearby dry and semi-dry states and counties.
Not all who buy from bootleggers get drunk. Some get robbed.
“The tough part about it was that I never got the whiskey,” Army Sgt.
Filmore M. Broom, 41, moaned to police.
He said a Negro offered to sell him a bottle, but when the sergeant
pulled out his wallet, containing $190, to pay, the Negro snatched it and ran
—with the whiskey, too. This happened at 5th and Neal Streets, NW, and
police are looking for a Negro with red suspenders and a white straw hat.
No winter description available.

20. CAFE AU CORN

FOREIGNERS who have never seen the United States dream of
beholding its wonders, of which the first two are New York and
Washington. They envision not the monuments or the Government Printing
Office, but a glittering world capital swirling with diplomats in colorful
costumes, officers in dress uniforms, and pageantry punctuated with
dazzling dames of the haute monde and the demi-monde. For this is the
capital of capitals, and it must have everything, including what none of the
others has—dough.
If there is any spectacular life in Washington, that is not for the eye of
the uninitiated stranger. The days are vapid and the nights are stupid.
Washington is dominated by elected and appointed functionaries who are
schooled to believe they must never be caught having fun. Therefore, after
dark it is more like Paducah than like Paris.
There are many hotel grills and lounges, which are night clubs after a
fashion, and some cafes; but their chief patronage depends on visitors and
government dependents. Both classes are drawn largely from farms and
villages, with only a minor proportion from centers of laughter and light.
Washington’s night life is a dull, dismal and dreary reflection of our Main
Streets, hard cider and juke-box roistering.
The few local sports and the free-fingered lobbyists seek their pleasure
at private parties and behind closed doors of hotel suites, or fly northward
to nearby New York with its El Morocco and the Stork Club.
The two principal night clubs in Washington are operated by Chinese,
with American shows and dance bands. They are the Lotus and the Casino
Royal.

Both are built for the mass-consumption trade, with popular prices and
acres of dance floors. Hicks and tourists are dance-bugs. Dick Lam, host at
the Lotus, is one of the town’s best-known and best-liked showmen. He was
one of the original founders of the China Doll, in New York, and has
uptown manners and know-how.
The Blue Mirror, around the corner, specializes in hot jive. Kavakos, as
mentioned, features nudes, as does the Players, opposite the Center Market.
Not only can and do some Washington cabarets get away with stuff that
would land their owners in the clink in New York, but there seems to be no
police control or regulation of acts.
For instance, Billie Holiday, the Negro singer who has served time on
narcotics and prostitution falls, is barred from New York night clubs
through the ukase of the Police License Bureau, which fingerprints all
entertainers and thumbs those with records out of town. But while this was
being written, Miss Holiday was starring in Washington’s Brown Derby.
Washington caters to visiting theatrical celebrities. Hollywood stars, to
whom the capital spells spotlight, are flattered by attentions of politicians
who, in return for free shows and broadcasts, flatter them. This racket was
invented by President Roosevelt, and, ever since, theatrical headliners have
been welcome luncheon and dinner guests at the White House. In
Washington they generally stay at one of the five leading hotels and may be
found dining or drinking in the lounges and restaurants of the Mayflower,
Carlton, Statler, Shoreham and Wardman Park. Autograph collecting is not
a highly developed hobby in Washington; but some juvenile half-wits plant
themselves outside the hotels when such celebs are in town.
There is nothing the equivalent of Morocco, 21, Colony, Stork, or Toots
Shor’s. The Mayflower lounge, nicknamed “The Snake Pit,” is that—the
mad gathering-place at cocktail time for the local celebs: the Senators,
lobbyists, army brass and blondest cuties.
Most Washington night-life is as flat as those who patronize it. The
headwaiters are off the beam. The major-domo of the Wardman Park’s
Caribar, typical of most of the town’s, is so provincial he doesn’t know he
could get rich trying to cater to the few spenders that stumble in. We
watched him a whole evening and didn’t see him snare a buck.

Patrons of Washington supper-clubs are lousy tippers. Most smalltown
Americans adhere to a strict ten percent. When they think they can get away
with it, they stiff even that. Captains, headwaiters, cigaret gals and retiring-
room attendants they ignore. Southerners are worse.
We were twitting one Senator from a border state about the free
haircuts the tax-payers provide for the members of the upper house in their
private barber shop. This Senator replied, in all seriousness, “It’s almost
cheaper to go outside. When you get it for nothing, you gotta tip the
barber.”
The best palm-warmers are South American diplomats, who apparently
have no regard for American money. Lobbyists, who like to flash big bills,
especially when they are entertaining impressionable legislators, run for
place.
Few Washington waiters deserve much. The service they give is as
terrible as the tips they don’t get.
Dance floors are crowded with jitterbugs. Rumbas never flowered in
Washington. When a band plays one, flabbergasted hoofers try to jive to it.
Few clubs or rooms have rules against parties of unescorted women or
stag men. If they did, they’d starve. It is not unusual to see half the tables in
any room surrounded by all males or all females. The larger popular-priced
clubs have signs on the tables reading, “Dancing permitted with your escort
only.” This is a dead letter, or there wouldn’t be any dancers.
Prices are cheap compared with Gotham’s. A few hotels impose cover
charges when they book expensive name acts.
No room has more than one band, which plays both for the show and
the dancing. During intermissions, the silence is broken by noisy drunks.
Like all towns with early closing, people get loaded early. In Washington
serious guzzling begins at cocktail time. Many of those who drink are oafs
who don’t know how to hold their hooch.
Most Washington saloon-goers are ill-mannered. On Saturday nights,
when the last round is announced at 11:45, many arise as one and walk out,
even in the middle of an act.

Washington has no cafe society. Its gathering places are utilitarian—for
foods and drinks. No warm camaraderie, no light good fellowship, no wit,
no animation. Corny commoners in stereotyped surroundings. Peoria on the
Potomac.

21. CALL ME MADAM

THIS IS a brief brush-off of the social parvenus who scrambled up
as Society scrammed out—through death and Democratic administration.
Faded and forgotten are the days and nights when Washington was
ablaze with social brilliance and the gossip behind the fans reflected the
sturdy foibles and feuds and infidelities of a class in superior strata of
lineage, wealth and those graces which cannot be acquired with sudden
fortune.
Society is always the shadow of one luminous, scintillant, predominant
woman, such as Mrs. Potter Palmer was in Chicago and the dowager
Vanderbilt remained until senility denatured her in New York. In
Washington that woman, even though she seldom entertains or permits
herself to be entertained, must be the wife of the President. She need not be
a Dolly Madison. She can be a recluse, a Quaker like Mrs. Herbert Hoover;
a New England villager, like Grace Coolidge; a grande dame like Mrs.
Benjamin Harrison or an Ohio hick like Mrs. Warren Harding. But she is
the undisputed ex officio queen bee of the social life of the capital. She sets
its tempo, she elevates with a nod and she extirpates with a frown.
Few Presidents’ wives would have won social preference had their
husbands not squirmed through the labyrinthian catacombs with that
miraculous luck which makes one man what they say any American boy
can become. But once he takes that oath, his lady assumes a crown.
Whether she chooses to wear it or not, she can and must exercise its power
over her realm, Society.
And Society withstood the hostesses of gentlemen, soldiers,
backwoodsmen, a sheriff, a tailor, a school-teacher, a rail-splitter and a
Buchanan. But it could not survive Eleanor Roosevelt.

Here came a woman of blood and millions, married to an equally high-
bred, landed manor squire, perhaps the most charming and dynamic and
handsome of all our Presidents. And the first tap of her flat heels across the
White House threshold led off the funeral march of Society in the capital.
It is unnecessary to review her attitude and behavior; no First Lady was
ever so unendingly publicized. That she became invested with certain
homely and all-wooly virtues by the worship of millions is precisely why
she choked the last breath out of social tradition with her Negro friends, her
boondoggling, sweaty indigents, her professional Socialists, her dedicated
slum-house guardians of gutter garbage, and her antics as the militant
apostle of democracy and equality. The bedrock of Society is inequality, the
existence and recognition of an aristocracy.
Whether it is good or not for fundamental Americanism, it was as lethal
to the remnants of a baronial stratum in Washington as the Emancipation
Proclamation was below the Mason and Dixon line.
No female in American history had ever been so despised in the
drawing-rooms and so venerated in the kitchens and furnished rooms. But
that hatred within the walls of the elegant was not enough to sustain even a
social underground. A few dauntless matrons held out. They tried to
continue executing the motions from memory, but they perished on the
inglorious field of futility. They were the last. There were no wounded and
no prisoners taken. A dynasty that had flourished for 150 years had been
wiped out as were the Romanoffs.
And, surely, Bess Truman was not sent from above for the Restoration.
From the founding of the city until the recent demise of Evelyn Walsh
McLean, who owned the Hope Diamond, Washington was celebrated for its
intrigue, romance and scandal in high Society.
Eleanor “Cissie” Patterson and Mrs. McLean were the last of the city’s
great hostesses. Mrs. Patterson retired from the tea-table wars when she
became active in newspaper work. With her death, and that of Mrs.
McLean, the Washington Society pages were taken over by the climbers.
One needs no long memory to remember when social leaders from
everywhere converged on this city. Dupont Circle was Fifth Avenue refined

and rarefied, the cream of established snobbery, wealth, officialdom and
diplomacy.
Ambitious minglers from the Middle West, such as the Pullmans, the
Leiters and others, bypassed New York’s fatuous 400 and came directly to
Washington.
Social history there begins with beauteous Elizabeth Patterson, of
Baltimore, who wed Napoleon’s younger brother. Its first tasty scandal was
whispered in Jefferson’s time, about the French Ambassador who was
reputed to have married his jailer’s daughter, who had saved him from the
guillotine.
Early Washington Society was titillated by duels among high
personages. The duel on the Hudson shore in which Alexander Hamilton
was killed by Aaron Burr, in 1804, was talked about for years, until 1820,
when a new gory sensation arose to take its place: the mortal wounding of
Commodore Stephen Decatur in an arranged meeting of gentlemen across
the District line in Maryland.
After a hundred years, Washington still talks about Peggy Eaton and
President Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet. But, today’s mundane morsels will
make no interesting reading, leave no spice for the raconteur.
Society is on the wane everywhere. Taxes, Communist and New Deal
propaganda, the high cost of living, make it virtually impossible to keep up
huge menages. Now only rich labor leaders, black marketeers, gangsters
and grafters can afford the expense.
There are a handful of rich dowagers like Mrs. Jay Borden Harriman
and Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, but they are out of the running.
Cornelia Pinchot only entertains the “intellectuals,” and they are legion
in Washington. Where you find an intellectual in the District you will
probably find a Red. Mrs. Pinchot does not know it, but the Commies have
taken the elderly hostess over and are making hay with her name.
She lives in a Gay Nineties mansion on Scott Circle, where she often
throws parties for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, attended by white and colored college professors, pansies and
political economists. Mrs. Pinchot looks her age, though her hair is dyed the
most amazing shade of carrot-red.

Mrs. Robert Low Bacon, the hostess of the Republican intellectuals,
rarely hits the gossip columns. Even Evie Robert and her mother, Mrs.
Helen Walker, have been dormant for years. Evie, the wife of “Chip”
Robert, a brilliant political wire-puller, does not and never did give parties
for social advantage. They were to advance the political prospects of her
husband.
Today’s Washington Society has no class levels. All you need is dough
and the urge and the energy to spend it on freeloaders. If you can snag more
important political people to your parties in any one calendar season, from
October to May, than your neighbor, you are Number 1 social leader,
regardless of whether you wore shoes before you were twenty.
Perle Mesta, a determined hostess who was lucky enough to have been
gracious to Harry Truman when he was a secondary Senator from Missouri,
is living proof of the potency of the Washington cocktail party. Her reward
was the appointment as Minister to Luxembourg.
But Mrs. Mesta is by no means the only social climber in Washington,
though she is and was the most publicized.
We would like to tell you about Mrs. Gussie (Gushie) Goodwin,
formerly a Chicagoan. She is the wife of Federal Judge Clarence Norton
Goodwin, who sentenced Harry Bridges in the Communist leader’s first
round before the courts. They were friends of the Woodrow Wilsons, which
gave them some kind of claim to social standing. Meanwhile, Judge
Goodwin started to go deaf, which handicapped him as a social figure.
Gussie’s star was setting.
Then came a turn to her fortunes. She met a charming Latin gentleman,
Ramon Ramos, at a cocktail melee. He was a professor of Spanish. Gussie
got an inspiration. She was going to cement Latin-American relations and
her own social relations. She started a private class. Her little study group
met once a week at her home. During the first year, there were eight women
in it, each of whom chipped in a buck towards the professor’s fee.
Gussie began calling the wives of the more important officials and
Senators, and invited them to join her group. She was very careful to see
that it was equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. One of the
ladies who gladly became a member was the wife of Senator Harry Truman.

After the Trumans succeeded to the White House, the Secret Service
wouldn’t allow Mrs. Truman to go to the lessons at Gussie’s house, so all
the meetings were moved to the White House, though Gussie continued to
be its leading spirit. Mrs. Goodwin was very offish. When Dean Acheson
resigned as Undersecretary of State, his wife was not asked back.
Meanwhile, Professor Ramos showed he had hidden talents. His hobby
is cooking. The ladies were charmed. So an extra feature was added. Each
week the program was expanded to include a luncheon, held at a different
woman’s house. The Professor masterminded the menu, while the ladies did
the cooking and waited on the others. Mrs. Truman came to these parties
and pitched in with the work. The luncheons were run on a Dutch treat
basis, and each woman continued to pay her dollar fee per lesson.
By this time there were sixty or seventy ladies in the group, including
good Queen Bess. Some took private Spanish lessons on the side. Mrs.
Truman was one of the few who was really serious and wanted to learn the
language. Most of the others apparently came to the meetings because the
Professor had the personality to hold “menopause Minnies.” Among the
students were a few who thought they should come along for the ride
without paying for lessons or the luncheon, because of their social position.
One was Mrs. Robert Patterson, wife of the then Secretary of War. Mrs.
Truman always paid.
When the Professor began to get too much publicity, Gussie busted it
up. After all, the whole purpose was to make Gussie a figure, not the
Professor. Gussie even went so far as to ask newspaper society writers to
use her name instead of his, saying Mrs. Truman had complained about the
Professor’s publicity, which was not accurate.
Anyway, no one learned much, but that wasn’t the Prof’s fault.
In the absence of Madame Mesta, Gwendolyn Cafritz is ballyhooed as
Washington’s leading hostess. She is a social climber who invites only those
in office or who she thinks are due to be in. She sadly misjudged the 1948
elections. She excommunicated the Democrats. So she had a hell of a time
recouping her position. She still has her eye on the Republicans in 1952.
Compared to Madame Mesta, Mrs. Cafritz is a good-looking woman, in
early middle age. She may have been a raving beauty when she was a slim,

black-haired girl.
Her husband, Morris Cafritz, is a millionaire Washington real estate
owner. His office, in the Ambassador Hotel, which he owns, is next door to
the hotel’s High Hat cocktail lounge, which is favored by the pick-up gals
as a hunting preserve. Gwen drives her husband slightly nuts with her
parties. He would prefer to play poker, at which he is adept. A lot of
hogwash has been written about the Cafritzes since they zoomed into
political and social prominence. Gwen was born in central Europe and may
or may not have been the daughter of a college professor or a nobleman, as
the stories go.
Cafritz’s father ran a grocery store in Washington. The son’s early days
were spent in a bowling alley which he owned and operated. Then he turned
to real estate in boomtime and found the Midas touch.
Gwen’s enemies spread catty stories about her. One says she was a
Broadway chorus-girl before she met her husband. If she was, she must’ve
been a beaut. The other is that she was employed in Cafritz’s bowling alley.
The researcher finds it difficult to separate the truth from the chaff. There
are no clippings about her early days in the Washington newspaper
morgues. Cissie Patterson was her close friend. It is reported she destroyed
the clippings in her own library and asked the publishers of Washington’s
other papers to do likewise.
Meanwhile, Mmes. Mesta and Cafritz had better look to their laurels,
because a new assault is being made on Washington’s social citadel, this
time by a bullet-proof princess—Tawhida Halim, a cousin of King Farouk
of Egypt, and immensely rich. She and Frank Rediker, a denizen of
Gotham’s cafe society set, were recently wed, repeat engagements for both.
The princess then acquired a mansion at 2339 Massachusetts Avenue,
in which she and her bridegroom began to give lavish parties, designed to
outdo any of the Cafritz woman’s, with the elan that goes only to those born
to the purple.
(INSIDE STUFF: The Redikers’ social campaign is being managed by
Leonard McBain, elegant publicist and society arbiter of New York’s plush
El Morocco, where the snootiest people on earth gather. Leonard has
steered royalty before. He could do marvels for Tawhida.)

Since the old aristocrats died or went into hiding, it is easier to get into
Washington’s society columns, if you care to horn in with inferior white
trash.
Almost anyone, including justices of the United States Supreme Court,
will go to any party to which they are invited. Many who aren’t invited will
also show up. The trick nowadays is to entertain lavishly and often, and
sooner or later the papers will have to write about you, because there is
nothing else to write about.
Ambitious hostesses buy the “Social List of Washington, D.C.,” and
invite names from it at random. The odds are 90 percent will show up, but
the odds are as high that 95 percent of the 90 per cent aren’t social. This list
competes with the standard “Social Register.” It contains most of the names
in the latter, plus an amplification consisting of prominent politicians and
diplomats. It is published by Carolyn Hagner Shaw. Mrs. Shaw told us a
“board” selects the candidates for entry in the book. The board, however, is
highly secret. One Washington newspaper insists it is as mythical as the
balanced budget. Mrs. Shaw claims no one ever tells her why a name is
added or dropped.
If you thought Maj. Gen. Harry Vaughan was part of the crème de la
crème of the Washington social whirl, you’d better change your mind. He
isn’t any more. Not if you take the word of Mrs. Shaw. She omits the
military aide to the President from her fancy green directory of the socially
prominent. Mrs. Shaw doesn’t know why General Vaughan isn’t socially
correct any more. She blamed it on the anonymous board.
About 200 who sought to make the list were turned down. Again no
reasons given. Many bought copies at 12 bucks, hoping to see their names
in. They didn’t.
However, Guy George Gabrielson and William Marshall Boyle,
respective chairmen of the Republican and Democratic National
Committees, were among the new names added this year. The book also has
the dernier cri on what to do about cards. They should not be left at Blair
House, but given to the guard at the northwest gate of the White House.
“A courtesy call should be made on the President and his family once a
year. This is a mark of respect that should not be neglected.” (This was

before two Puerto Rican enthusiasts tried it.)
Mrs. Shaw reminds her readers “During World War II, formal
observance of the conventional days set aside for leaving cards on various
officials was canceled. A return to formal recognition of these traditional
days has yet to take place, and it is doubtful that it will ever again become
obligatory to leave cards on certain days.”
As to protocol, it notes: “It is well to remember personal friendships do
not count. The rank of one’s guest must be the deciding factor.”
If you are not sure of the comparative ranking of any guest, it is better
not to invite him. Many of the biggest social wars were caused by such
things. Still remembered is the feud between Alice Roosevelt Longworth,
then wife of the Speaker of the House, and Dolly Gann, sister and hostess
of Vice-President Curtis, over their respective precedence.
Officials and embassies receive advice on protocol matter from the
State Department, but non-official hostesses are on their own. Mrs. Shaw
supplies a service which gives assistance in seating.
An important fixture in Washington is the debutante party. These have
almost disappeared in New York, where each year’s crop of young hopefuls
is introduced in a mass get-together. In Washington, the girl who doesn’t get
a dinner-dance on her own is a social slob. Washington’s Elsa Maxwell for
these parties is Mrs. Curt Hetzel, who succeeded Mrs. Merriam. Mr. Hetzel
is a pianist in a restaurant—Ted Lewis’. Mary Stuart Price, a young woman,
handles some debby parties as a sideline.
Club life is another sacred institution. Many important political
decisions are reached at such places as the Burning Tree Club, the Chevy
Chase Club, and the Sulgrave, famous for the McCarthy-Pearson battle of
the century—more maybe than in the Senate and the House cloakrooms.
The 1925 F Street Club, where ranking members of the Senate give parties,
was once the exclusive home of Mrs. Laura Curtis Gross, who lent her
house for parties. It is now a sanctuary for the whipped-cream of
Washington society. Its dining-room seats about 60 and the club’s
membership is strictly limited.
Washington’s newest aristocracy is evidenced by stone piles. The wife
of the man who can build the biggest and plushiest office building is the

reigning social leader.
Those currently with the highest batting average are Morris Cafritz, of
course, Gus Ring, Garfield Cass and Preston Wire, all with gleaming new
structures named after themselves. Much of the money of the real estate
nouveau riche came from wise investments in Black Belt housing, or from
refugee sources.
Until very recent years the august justices of the United States Supreme
Court remained aloof from social functions, but during the days of the New
Deal and Fair Deal, when the court was packed with soft-shirted politicians,
the custom changed. Judges like Douglas are avid party-goers. The late
Frank Murphy was a mixer with true CIO deportment, a hoofer and
Saturday night sport. The result is that the opening of the fall season is now
coincident with the convening of the Supreme Court. Then the jurists can
meet the typists and clink cocktails with mobsters’ mouthpieces.
The easiest way to get into what is called “society” is to be elected or
appointed into it. Every ex-cow-puncher, dirt-farmer, smalltown lawyer and
big-city ward-heeler who now has an “Honorable” in front of his name is as
social as those who were born into it, bought their way in, or got in through
a diplomatic passport.
All 96 Senators and 435 Representatives, nine cabinet officers,
countless under-secretaries, assistant secretaries, judges, department heads
and military brass are social, with a listing in the directory, though some
never wore ties or socks until they got to Washington. These ex-officio lions
became the life of the party in 1933.
Washington once thrived on dirt in high places. Grover Cleveland’s
bastard child didn’t interfere with his electoral or social standing. Nor was
Woodrow Wilson ruined when a certain lady was booted out of Washington
by the Secret Service. President Harding’s house on K Street is still
remembered. There’s nothing like it now. And his village sweetie and her
baby have vanished. President Truman’s poker games are penny-ante, not
the lusty ones of yore.
The late Roosevelt administration is credited with more snappy spice
than any other in history. Out-of-school tales were told about most of his

children. The President and his wife were not spared by gossipers. But
President Truman’s personal life is treated as dull and austere.
His advisers are farmers or aging professors. They were pirates in the
first Roosevelt decade. The sports, drinkers and rounders who held high
cabinet and military rank then are either gone or too old. Now most official
vice is grubby stuff, with call-girls supplied by a protected vice-ring, about
which nothing is ever heard, and which no Congressman or Senator will
admit he knows.
President Truman’s pal, General Harry Vaughan, is comparatively quiet
now, held to mama’s apron-strings. There’s gambling for him and the
President in the White House. There’s no liquor shortage, either. The
President likes his bourbon. He never smokes. He will not countenance
whoring in his official family, though he doesn’t put detectives on official
tails.
Probably the only real sport in town is Senator Warren Magnuson. The
others save their skylarking for New York. When they do it in Washington,
they are as frightened as schoolboys at it, and often as unimaginative.
What a change from the Roosevelt days, when sex was the prerogative
of all government officials, and usually paid for by the grateful tax-payers!
Uncle Sam even had to help Harry Hopkins do it. A monkey-gland doctor
grafted sex virility on Hopkins and two other aging administration
stalwarts, one of whom recently resigned from a little-cabinet post.
The doctor billed the wealthiest of the three $3,000 for each treatment.
He charged the other two $1,000. Hopkins had already stiffed the medico
for three operations when he asked for the fourth, in view of his pending
marriage to a young woman. The doctor’s verdict was no money, no
honeymoon. But Hopkins had a way out. He suggested the doctor needed a
vacation anyway, so he offered to get him an appointment to make an
inspection trip to army medical bases in the West Indies, with all expenses
paid for self and wife, plus $35 a day fee until the $3,000 was paid. The
doctor took the trip and Hopkins took the honeymoon.
High military brass is quiet today compared to the lusty generals and
admirals of the ’20s and ’30s. Washington is still talking about how General
Pershing, then chief of staff, ordered young General Douglas MacArthur to

the Philippines after MacArthur married Mrs. Louise Cromwell Brooks, of
the Philadelphia Stotesbury clan. Mrs. Brooks, after her divorce from her
first husband, met “Black Jack” Pershing abroad. When she returned to
America, she became his official hostess in Washington. She was 25 to his
60. Two months after their wedding, in 1922, the MacArthurs were shipped
to the Philippines. Washington cats said Pershing sent his successful young
rival into exile to get even. He had also exiled the captain of the Army polo
team, who was attentive to the rich, beautiful Louise. She is now Mrs. Alf
Heiberg, the proud owner of Washington’s only private atom-bomb shelter,
which she constructed under her Georgetown Mansion.
The late General of the Armies, a widower, was quite a man with the
women. He kept a Roumanian babe and her mother at the Shoreham Hotel
for 20 years.
“Thirty” was written to Washington Society when a local paper fired its
social editor because she refused to print the names of Negro hostesses!

22. STRIPED PANTS

ELSEWHERE, men who wear them bury the dead; here, most of
those who wear them are dead but not buried.
The decadence of the diplomats ran parallel with the fadeout of society,
though not for the same causes. Continental and cosmopolitan life on Embassy
Row was a war casualty.
The democratization and bolshevization of Europe turned their extra-
territorial domains here into tawdry outhouses reflecting monarchies and
empires riddled into busted republics and dictatorships, either scrabbling for
the necessities of life or committed to the political policy of shabby
proletarianism.
The kings are no longer king. The courts of Vienna, Berlin, Moscow,
Madrid, Rome, and of the giddy little Balkan states are now the headquarters
of Labor Parties and worse. The crowned heads of England, The Netherlands
and the Scandinavian kingdoms are kept figureheads. Diplomatic display is a
sin against poverty and the world rash for unilateral social and economic
status.
There is not an embassy in Washington which does not cost far more than
it did 20 years ago. That is because they have become workhouses where the
press of international business is sordid and tremendous. Gone are the
Thursday and Friday open-house hospitalities and grand balls in Technicolor,
animated by gowns and costumes and uniforms of galaxies of all nations.
“These are difficult and different days,” the deans of diplomacy sigh.
The old spirit has vanished not only from the governments, but from their
representatives, who are living close to the vest, hoarding precious American
dollars against revolution or overturn by popular vote of their countries.
Ambassadors and Ministers are salting away what they can skim off in Black
Belt real estate, farms and U. S. securities. Some go much further. They are

actual dealers in American goods which they can procure and can send home
free of import duty to their countries. At the same time they blackmarket
merchandise here, where they can buy liquor, cigarettes, cosmetics and other
excised products free of internal revenue tax. For the best whiskey and
champagne they pay $13 a case.
During Prohibition, a small Central American legation was actively in the
rum-running business, importing huge quantities under diplomatic immunity,
then reselling to Jack Cunningham, a local bootlegger. One day rival gangsters
caught up with Cunningham in an alley in I Street, and there he was knocked
off. The killing was hushed up. It would have involved too many untouchables.
These business opportunities and the degree of austerity which is still light
as compared with most of the globe—all of it except Canada and South
America—have made Washington the choice diplomatic plum, in place of
London and its Court of St. James’.
The diplomats here are timid, precise and industrious. They are fearful of a
false step which might mean recall, for here they are saving against eventual
retirement. But their caution cannot withstand their greed and some smuggle
dope in via their sealed and search-proof official pouches. They have
discovered the glories of the American installment plan and buy not only land
and houses, but cars and mechanical gadgets unobtainable at home. If they are
transferred they rent out their properties here, which, in the only currency still
reasonably dependable, makes them rich wherever they go, even into exile.
Another factor which helps reduce the gaiety and glamor of Washington
diplomatic life is the competing diplomatic corps accredited to the United
Nations, in New York. It is gradually getting the ace publicity breaks.
The question of sex looms big on the agenda of every ambassador. He
prefers all his aides married, with wives in residence, so they will create no
scandal. Many of the younger members of the various staffs, with modest jobs
and salaries, are bachelors. These men are usually forbidden, under pain of
being sent home, to fool around with women in Washington. Their chiefs, from
time to time, order them to go to New York “to have a party.”
If the press of business is too great to allow for long weekends, when the
ambassador notes that the young men on his staff are getting hot britches he
sends them to Baltimore, where they are unknown and nothing is barred.

Ambassadors, themselves, and senior diplomats with roving eyes, are
taken care of by the Protocol Division of the State Department, which also
handles the sex problems of visiting foreign brass. That’s a job for specialists.
There are so few girls in Washington glamorous enough to satisfy VIPs.
Sometimes it is not politic to have them associate with local talent anyway,
because of its tieups. So the State Department has compiled a list of amiable
New York models, willing to come to Washington to spend a night with a
foreign dignitary. They get $200 a night and expenses, from “contingent
funds” coming out of the pockets of the American tax-payers. They are
provided on an ancient reciprocity custom, in exchange for girls supplied to
American junketeers who flit abroad.
This privilege is avidly utilized by American Senators, Congressmen and
other officials, and is one reason why so many find it necessary so often to fly
to Europe, Asia and South America at government expense. One prominent
Republican solon, who never cheats in Washington, was shown such a good
time by a French babe supplied by the Quai d’Orsay, he ended up in a Paris
hospital for five days and has been a sick man ever since.
When the State Department procures women for foreign dignitaries, they
are given security and VD tests. It is easy to see how delicate diplomatic
relations might be ruptured by a microcosmic thunderclap.
Many embassies have their own “company- and party-girl” lists. They do
not always want the State Department to know what they are doing. There’s a
girl named Mary Karrica, 1471 M Street, NW, who furnishes them to the
diplomatic corps.
One of the major problems of such dialectics for the State Department’s
bright boys arises when a visiting notable plans to tour the country and doesn’t
plan to sleep alone. Protocol then makes contacts through local police
departments, which are expected to know the best call-house madames in their
own towns.
When the young Shah of Persia visited America a couple of years ago, the
State Department had no trouble furnishing desirable girls for him in
Hollywood and Chicago; but in New York, where he wanted a blonde that
night, they had to get him a Powers model. Apparently his majesty liked it,
because the next day he gave her an emerald worth $20,000. The guy from the
State Department who told us about this sighed, “But the bitch still took our
$200!”

Years ago, when Italo Balbo made his triumphal tour of the country, he
turned his nose up at showgals and screen stars. The Italian air ace insisted on
one from the Social Register. The Navy was in charge of entertaining him.
Some of its younger attachés dug up a semi-society babe from Chicago, who
was willing to take a fling with the Italian aviator. The Navy had no dough for
the purpose, so the young officers chipped in $300 to buy her a watch, and told
her it was from Balbo. Now a graying middle-aged woman, she still prizes the
watch “given to her by the dashing Italian.”
Most foreigners are discreet. Little rough stuff seeps out of the embassies.
The Washington newspapers cover Embassy Row—there are two—16th Street
and Massachusetts Avenue—but usually give their readers stories about
cocktail parties, dances and weddings, instead of snappy copy.
Being confidential reporters we did not go through the front doors. What
we know is mostly backstairs buzz, out of the kitchens and garages of the
following embassies:
ARGENTINA—The Embassy, at 1815 Q Street, provided Washington
with one of its liveliest tidbits. The real lowdown has not been divulged before.
We got this out of confidential Congressional files, where the information was
testified to under oath.
Nina Lund, niece of ex-Senator White, of Maine, was one of Washington’s
loveliest and most popular dishes. Her husband, Nathaniel Lautrelle, a local
department store executive, suspected her frequent absences from home were
not to go to the beauty parlor, so he and three men, whom he engaged,
followed her to 3030 O Street, NW. Those with Lautrelle were Lt. Joseph
Shimon, wire-tap expert of the Metropolitan Police who was recently under
Congressional investigation; Joseph Mercurio, a dope addict and locksmith,
and James Karas, former Pinkerton agent, who now operates the flower-shop
in the Mayflower Hotel. Mercurio sprung the lock on Apartment 2 and the four
entered. They found Nina and an Argentine Ambassador naked.
Shimon got five grand for his service. Lautrelle and Nina got a divorce.
The Ambassador, sent here originally because Eva Peron fancied him, went
back to Argentina for consultation.
But they have something else to occupy their minds these days. Many
employes and upper attachés of the Argentine Embassy are feathering their
futures by shipping electric refrigerators home, packed as personal household
furniture.

This is simple, as it is not unusual for diplomats to buy enough personal
furniture in the country of their station to furnish their homes. Hundreds of
refrigerators can be packed into such cases, and each so smuggled brings a
premium of $100 in American currency, worth ten times that in Argentine
currency black markets.
BRAZIL—Hospitality in the Embassy, at 3000 Massachusetts Avenue, is
in the best old-fashioned tradition. The Ambassador, Mauricio Nabuco, is a
bachelor. His hostess is his sister, Carolina.
The Ambassador is one of Washington’s best hosts. He constantly
entertains at large formal affairs and at intimate gatherings to which statesmen,
musicians and poets are invited. No scandal attaches to the Ambassador, but he
likes to have pretty women around him. Maybe that’s why he entertains so
much. One 18-year old cutie told us, “Oh, the old guy is harmless.”
CHINA—There’s little gaiety as we write, in the Embassy at 3225
Woodley Road. But things were not always so. As witness:
Congressman Hale, of Maine (Rep.), is a short, white-haired, pompous
gent, heavy with dignity. Not long ago he attended a formal affair at the
Chinese Embassy.
Suddenly a woman came up behind him and “goosed” him. The
legislator’s dignity exploded with a scream. He turned around to confront his
tormentor. The embarrassed lady apologized. “Oh—I’m sorry—I thought you
were someone else!”
A good-looking, well-knit young man, employed by one of the
government agencies, was showering in the bathroom of the YMCA, where he
lived, some years ago.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw another man in the room, but thought
nothing of it, as the bathroom is public.
When he came out of the shower the other was fixedly staring at him. Our
friend grew embarrassed, and was not especially put at ease by the other’s
appearance. He was an elderly Oriental.
Our friend inquired what was doing. The Oriental, in a singsong voice,
replied:
“You like go bed with rich Chinee lady?”

The chap was going to bop the guy, but first he tried to find out what it
was all about It developed that a high-placed woman in the Embassy liked
American boys, sent her servant to recruit them in places like the Y, after
having them looked over. What a switch on the oldie about “Is it true what
they say about Chinese women?”
The son of a famous Protestant clergyman worked for the Maritime
Commission, where he became friendly with the commercial attachés of many
countries. He found some would take loot. This troubled him. He discussed it
with an older man who had a desk in the same office.
This older fellow used to run errands for Lepke and Gurrah and their
famed Murder, Inc. After Bill O’Dwyer destroyed the ring, he got a job with
Uncle Sam.
He advised the young fellow to grab what he could while the grabbing was
good. So the minister’s son became the bagman for several embassies.
About this time the Chinese bought some gunboats and let out word they
were in the market for repairs in American shipyards. The yards were in a post-
war depression, needed business. Immediately, representatives called at the
Chinese embassy. An official there, who spoke better English than most of us,
mumbled in pidgin and routed all inquiries to “the young man in the Maritime
Commission, in whom we have implicit faith.”
The young fellow collected more than half a million in cash as the go-
between, then beat it with the loot.
DENMARK—Ambassador Henrick de Kauffman and his family are so
proper it hurts. The Embassy, at 2839 Woodland Drive, is like a morgue.
EGYPT—They are still laughing at this at 2301 Massachusetts Avenue.
An Egyptian officer came to Washington recently on a buying mission. His
embassy bespoke the American authorities to give him the A-1 treatment, the
best. The Navy boys took him to Charleston to see the ships and set him up in
style. The visitor wanted a blonde. But he was black, and Charleston is down
South. This posed a problem. They finally found a woman, but had to take her
in through the back door.
The Egyptian was insulted. He returned home without buying.
FRANCE—No Parisian spice about the Henri Bonnets; however, there is
no doubt the wife of a very exalted member of the staff is a Communist drop
and transmission belt.

Mme. Bonnet has family connections interested in the sale of Lanson
champagne. Important friends and guests pose with her, popping a bottle of the
labeled bubble-water.
Latest to fall for the publicity gag were Averell Harriman and his wife,
photographed with Mme. Bonnet while opening a bottle of the champagne. It
got into all the papers.
GREAT BRITAIN—The embassy, at 3100 Massachusetts Avenue, under
the Right Honorable Sir Oliver Shewell Franks, Knight Commander of the
Bath, C.B.E., and Lady Franks is as dull and austere as England itself. But a
former British Ambassador had as his lover his Russian valet.
ICELAND—Plenty of problems at the Icelandic legation. Lovely Margret
Thors, debutante daughter of Minister Thor Thors, got too friendly with thrice-
divorced Blaine Clark, Washington playboy, so Ma and Pa packed her off to
Iceland, where Clark couldn’t follow without a visa, which the old man
wouldn’t give. Margret promised to be a good girl and was permitted to return,
but has to behave.
IRAQ—As we write, Abdullah Ibraham Bakar, Iraqui minister, has a
headache. That’s because Cham Chum Sesi was arrested for murder in his
basement room of the Iraq Chancellory, 2205 Massachusetts Avenue. Muhmud
Rodani, chief janitor, had been stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife. Sesi
told police he killed the janitor because he had made repeated improper
advances to him. The diplomatic set talked about a lovers’ quarrel there when a
new homo came from Iraq.
NORWAY—The dean of the Washington Diplomatic Corps is Ambassador
Wilhelm Munthe de Morgenstierne. The Norwegian Embassy, 3401
Massachusetts Avenue, generates no gossip.
SAUDI ARABIA—This country is orthodox Mohammedan, goes in big
for polygamy. The Ambassador, Sheikh Asad Al-Faquih, had no desire to insult
America by bringing extra wives with him, was afraid to affront his wives by
choosing one and leaving the others at home. The result is there are no women
in the Embassy at 2800 Woodland Drive, or in the homes of any of the
attachés. When they want parties, they go to New York, or to the State
Department, where Protocol provides.
SPAIN—America and Spain long exchanged no ambassadors. Don
Eduardo Propper de Callejon, Spanish Minister, was nominally in charge of

the Embassy. The wily Spaniards got around having no ambassador here by
sending Don Jose de Lequerica, former Foreign Minister, as “Inspector
General of all Spanish Embassies in the Western Hemisphere.” However, the
farthest he got from Washington since 1947 was Cuba.
Lequerica is a personality kid and a lobby genius. He entertains lavishly.
His conniving paid off with the Spanish loan, and in time with full recognition.
Ambassador Lequerica had cultivated the law firm of Sullivan, Cromwell and
Dulles, until the 1948 election returns were in and Dulles was out—as
potential Secretary of State. He switched to Max Truitt, son-in-law of Vice
President Barkley. Smart guy.
Minister Propper de Callejon is married to an English Rothschild and is as
proper as his name.
SWEDEN—Ambassador and Mrs. Erik Boehman are no exception to the
rule that all Scandinavian embassies are tame and respectable. Theirs, at 3900
Nebraska Avenue, is.
TURKEY—The Turkish Ambassador, Feridun Cemal Erkin, insists on
decorum in his Embassy at 1606 23rd Street. Turks there put on gloves and are
fully clothed when they go to bed with their wives, an Orthodox Mohammedan
custom.
UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS—The Russians used to
be the big spenders. Parties in the great white Embassy at 1125 16th Street
were Washington’s most brilliant affairs. Invitations were eagerly sought after.
The Russian government paid all expenses of the Ambassador and his staff,
even bridge losses. The Russkies were terrific gamblers and few locals could
go along in games with them. Once when a Washington businessman was
asked to play bridge at 25 cents a point he pleaded, “I’m only a capitalist, not a
proletarian.”
There was always plenty of food and liquor in the Red retreat. All
members of the local press corps were remembered with presents, especially
beluga caviar. But now the Russians don’t go out except to official functions,
and that goes for their satellites, too. And they travel only in pairs, one to spy
on the other.
The Russians and their slave states bring their own females from abroad,
because they’re afraid to trust American women, Communist ones included,
any more. In the good old days, the consecrated American left-wingers used to

go to the Soviet Embassy, where they proved their party loyalty by getting in
the hay with the men from Moscow. After many frightened American Reds got
religion and betrayed the cause, Soviet diplomats were forbidden to Ostermoor
with American women. This did not cause too much hardship, because most
American Communist women are no dream-girls; even the Russians shrank
from them.
Almost every member of the embassy set has a wife or a concubine posing
as a wife with him. In Russian Naval Headquarters, a few handsome young
orderlies are being used. There are said to be few homosexuals in Russia,
where perversion is strictly punished, except for “Kremlin and world
revolution.”
As one humorist remarked, “There are no fags in Russia, because they like
goats; but where can they find goats in Washington?”
As a further check on their own people, members of the Soviet Embassy
staff are not permitted to live alone. Even couples must share apartments with
others.
The Russians have been getting special kid-gloving in Washington since
1933, when the Embassy became the fashionable place to go. At Teheran,
Stalin asked President Roosevelt for permission to set up a shortwave radio
transmitter in the U. S. to enable his boys to contact Moscow directly.
Roosevelt sent a memo to General Marshall, instructing him to cooperate.
Marshall wrote back that the law absolutely forbade any foreign government to
maintain a transmitter in this country. F. D. R. penciled across it, “Do it
anyway.”
Consequently, an entire wing of the Pentagon was turned over to the
Commies, where they sent over a million words a week. The President ordered
Military Intelligence not to try to break the Russian code, but some officers
took their oath to defend the Constitution literally, and overrode the President
without his knowledge. As these words are being written, thugs of the NKVD
are sitting 24 hours a day with ear-phones and transmitters in Russian Naval
and Military headquarters at Massachusetts Avenue and Kalorama Road.

* * *
When an embassy wife isn’t worrying about a change in government at
home, which may mean the recall of her husband, she’s worrying about getting
her daughter properly married. A lot of the debutantes of the embassy set are

beginning to get American ideas after attending American schools. The foreign
aristocrats don’t like it.
Embassy wives have rarely been known to fool around. On the whole,
embassy children behave themselves. When they don’t, they get packed off to
schools in their own countries.
With the exception of the Iron Curtain diplomatic slums, there is
considerable camaraderie among attachés of the various embassies, though
usually on equal strata. They go dancing in the hotels, visit at each other’s
homes, ride and play golf together. Some time ago, an attempt was made to
start a United Nations Club at R and 19th Streets, by Meredith Howard, who is
the twin sister of Mrs. Teddy Hays. Hays, a big Democrat and White House
intimate, is assistant to Federal Security Administrator Oscar Ewing, the
socialized-medicine man. The idea was to get younger members of the
embassies together, but it blew up when Miss Howard left town with no public
explanation.
When it comes to con games, the diplomats and foreign missions could
show Yellow Kid Weil something.
Washington and New York are constantly being dazzled by members of
foreign missions who come here talking about purchases in hundreds of
millions (the dough to be put up by Uncle Sam).
Salesmen, sure-thing boys and big executives turn on every tap to
entertain the foreigners and grab their business.
Girls are provided, expensive gifts are passed, and plenty of money
changes hands. Then, suddenly, the mission packs up, leaves without buying,
says it can’t find what it wants.
Cooks and butlers in every Washington embassy get kickbacks from the
merchants. Groceries, meats and other household goods are overpriced on a
regular scale for the embassies, with a rebate going monthly to the
aforementioned functionaries.
Lower-echelon foreigners have their wild parties in the Washington field
offices of the United Nations. There is no central installation of the
international body in the capital, but offices are spread out around the town.
One of the principal places for after-work revelry is in the U.N. offices in
the Longfellow Building, on Connecticut Avenue, where booze and babes are
available every day after five.

Employes of the embassies, foreign missions and the U.N. and such carry
special cards which exempt them from the payment of all U.S. taxes such as
DC sales, Federal amusement tax, etc. They are, of course, exempt from
income tax, too.
It’s a racket in Washington to borrow a friend’s card when making any
expensive purchase like a mink coat, where the sales and luxury tax swindle
comes to 22 per cent by this means.
A racket begun in UNRRA and now going on in other foreign aid
organizations is engaged in by top administration figures and important
diplomats:
Most of the durable goods aid sent abroad goes with the proviso that it
must be resold in the currency of the country to which it is consigned, and the
money must be used to provide local home relief, such as food, clothes, etc.
So the way it works is this: The embassy wangles a shipment of, shall we
say, locomotives. They arrive in the country of destination. They are then duly
and dutifully resold in the currency of the country. But the law doesn’t say for
how much.
Some locomotives were sold in Greece for 10 drachmas each. The
drachma runs about 1,000 to the dollar. The local poor get the ten drachmas.
The local political bosses, gangsters and crooked diplomats split the resale
profits with their opposite numbers in America.
That’s big racketeering. A couple of Washington sisters have a petty, but
profitable one. They operate a so-called Embassy social list and charge chumps
to get on it, dangling invites to diplomatic balls as the bait, which they obtain
from legation employes for a “cut.”
Some fall for it. Our confidential advice is, don’t pay. You can crash
almost any Embassy party—but who wants to?

23. THE RIGHT TO PETITION
“Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people
peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of
grievances”—First Amendment to the Constitution.

* * *

DON’T YOU believe it. Congress hamstrung lobbying by requiring
practitioners to register. Then it appointed a committee to investigate them.
Neither gesture got far. Lobbyists are among the most delightful people in
Washington. They are the friends of everybody, including the Congressmen
who are “probing” them.
Lobbying is like the Indian rope trick. Everyone talks about it, but no one
has ever seen it done. It’s one subject all Congressmen shy from, regardless of
party. That’s because there are lobbyists on both sides. You can hardly expect a
Congressman to insult a supporter.
Many ex-Congressmen, who can’t bear the thought of returning home
after their defeat, remain in Washington as lobbyists. They enjoy an advantage,
because, forever after, all ex-Senators and ex-Representatives have the
privileges of the floor and the cloak-rooms. They can collar the ones they need
while the legislators are in action. Thus, members, who are always aware of
the possibility of being lame ducks themselves, keep these pleasant prospects
of earning a generous living after retirement open and in good working order.
When you read about lobbying being a $100,000,000 business, don’t
believe that, either. Maybe they soak their clients that much, but most of it
goes on padded expense accounts. Lobbyists are their own best press-agents.
They are more responsible for the hue and cry against lobbying than are the
reformers. By making it look more difficult, they can load their take.

Lobbying is as old as Magna Charta, which first granted people the right
to petition their sovereign. Ever since, those who wanted something have hired
someone to speak up for them. Washington is full of these hucksters. They are
about the brightest spot on the glum scene. They spend, entertain, throw wild
parties with pretty gals as souvenirs, tip lavishly and keep the hotel and liquor
industries going. They are the only cream here in a welter of skimmed milk.
An Act of Congress, of doubtful legality, requires lobbyists to register and
divulge the amount and source of their income. Some do, many more don’t.
Those who comply are the technical lobbyists—in other words, they are errand
boys who merely transmit messages and appeals from their clients to the
Congress. Many have no physical contact with Congressmen at all, reaching
them through mimeographed propaganda mailed from a Washington office.
But most of those we consider lobbyists are the ones who feel they are not
required to register. When we mention anyone in this chapter, we are not
inferring that if he is not a registered lobbyist he is breaking the law. We group
together for purposes of posing a picture, every Washington lobbyist, fixer,
five-percenter, hot-shot lawyer, industrial press agent, and man from Missouri.
They are a multitude, especially men from Missouri.
When a really big fix is made, it usually is not handled in Washington at
all. The deal is consummated back home, as a quid pro quo for a large
campaign donation, after which the county or state chairman sends word
through channels to his men in Washington that the matter should be okayed.
Lobbying can be a delightful and well-paid occupation. The mouthpieces
of the industrial petitioners are usually charming gentlemen who know how to
entertain. Buying an uninstructed Congressman C.O.D. is obsolete. Giving him
a high time will do it, and the lobbyist can pocket the money earmarked for
bribing and tell his client he passed on the boodle.
Most solons are lonely uprooted rustics. Usually their wives are away,
holy frights they are glad to leave back home. These men want to talk and
drink with someone. You don’t even have to get them girls, just invite them to
a hotel and spend an evening with them. They’ll be so thankful, they’ll do
anything you want.
The average big lobbyist doesn’t bother with run-of-the-mill Senators and
Representatives, who are in the bag without much trouble. He sets his sights
on the key characters like committee chairmen and floor leaders, and even they
can be snared at little cost, though naturally to corral a chairman means an

even heftier bill to the employer. The procedure used in the case of VIPs is
simple and cheap. Each lobbyist is on friendly terms with some local hostess,
for whom he does favors or to whom he gives gifts. When he has an especially
important deal on, he asks her to invite his prospect to a party. During most of
the evening he keeps away from the man he wants to meet, until by a
fortuitous accident he is placed next to him at the table. Even then the
conversation is kept chatty and frothy. A couple of days later, the lobbyist
phones his erstwhile table companion and invites him to a rubber of bridge or a
game of golf, and from then on he’s on his own.
Administrative heads and assistants are much more sought after than
Senators. They are the ones who receive the deep freezes and their wives, the
expensive gifts. In the final analysis, the best contact is a clerk, not a division
head. The clerks do the work and make the decisions while their bosses drink
cocktails.
Much of the big-time fixing is done by law firms. Many New York outfits
maintain offices in Washington. These firms usually have partners belonging to
both parties, so they are prepared for any political eventuality.
We would like to introduce you to some of the boys in Washington who
can get things done:
First comes to mind an attorney, Charles Patrick Clark. Mr. Clark is a
wonder-worker. When others can’t score, Clark is called in. Even Max Truitt,
the Vice President’s son-in-law, had trouble getting Franco’s loan, so Clark hit
in the pinch and Congress voted it. It may be a coincidence, but Clark was a
counsel for the Senatorial Committee Investigating War Frauds when Harry
Truman was its chairman.
Part of Clark’s success can be ascribed to the majestic manner in which he
entertains. He used to project his parties in Georgetown, but now hosts it in a
palatial four-story building near the Mayflower Hotel. It set him back a
hundred grand to furnish its interior. The yard was landscaped at a cost of
$25,000 more. Clark can muster more pretty girls than anyone else in
Washington. You will always find enough of them at his parties. He has two
stunners in his office, a blonde and a brunette, who frequently are escorted by
his clients and his contacts.
Congressman Buchanan, Pennsylvania Democrat, chairman of the
committee investigating lobbying, fell for Clark’s charm. He and his wife
visited Clark’s play-place.

Clark is hot-tempered. He recently had a fist fight in the lobby of the
Mayflower Hotel with Charlie Rogers, handsome former counsel of the
committee that nailed John Maragon.
Dan Hanlon, a former law-partner of Democratic National Chairman Bill
Boyle, has an office at 1727 Massachusetts Ave., where he handles internal
revenue cases with much success. Hanlon is from Missouri. But as Boyle
seems to be on the way out so is Hanlon.
The business is intensively departmentalized. Different lawyers have ins in
different branches of the government. Persuasion on the Department of Justice
is handled by Laughlin Currie, a former Truman appointee, through Tommy
“The Cork” Corcoran, a Roosevelt favorite.
Treasury Department matters go through Joe Nunan, former
Commissioner of Internal Revenue, who does not practice personally before
the Treasury yet, because the law requires ex-employes to wait two years
before they may represent clients in bureaus to which they were attached. But
his associates are not so hobbled.
Former Senator Burton K. Wheeler is the man to see if you have any
trouble with the Interstate Commerce Commission. Wheeler can have anything
he wants in Washington. President Truman passed the word along. It was
Wheeler who advised Truman not to resign from the Senate at the time of the
Pendergast scandal. Harry has been eternally grateful ever since.
The law firm of Thurman Arnold, Abe Fortas and Paul A. Porter has
practically everything for its field. All three are prominent ex-New Dealers.
Porter’s contact is with the Federal Communications Commission. Arnold,
once a trust-buster, now defends trusts. Fortas, onetime stooge of Harold Ickes,
is the boy to see for anything in the Department of the Interior. Among the
clients of this firm is the Western Union Telegraph Company, for which they
are the registered lobbyists. During their plugging for the telegraph monopoly
it was brought out under oath that at least one block of 17 percent of its stock
was owned by underworld figures. Since then, Western Union was indicted
twice in New Jersey for engaging illegally in transmission of racing
information, which the Grand Jury investigation indicated was the company’s
main source of profit.
The Arnold firm secured $200,000,000 for the Puerto Rican government.
It also defended Owen Lattimore against Senator McCarthy’s charges. The

boys netted $600,000 last year. Drew Pearson’s daughter is married to Arnold’s
son.
Arnold is the playboy of the firm, congenial and convivial.
When Dean Acheson’s law firm swung the $90,000,000 Polish loan, its
fee from behind the Iron Curtain was $1,000,000, plus an equal sum for
expenses.
Leon Henderson, the social planner who admits he won World War II
single-handed, deserves an important place in this chapter. As one of the brain-
trust of the “progressive” Americans for Democratic Action, brother
Henderson throws the weight of that organization’s supposed voting strength
around Washington for the benefit of his private clients. That is, when he is not
too busy making a fool of himself with some young blonde on a New York
dance floor.
The A.D.A. pipeline into the White House is David Garrison Lloyd,
assistant general counsel to the President.
Robert Nathan, the CIO economist, who comes up with fantastic
suggestions such as that the cost of labor has nothing to do with the final price
of the commodity, helps support himself by “economizing” for capitalistic
clients trying to borrow dough from the RFC. If they hire him, they usually get
it.
Those who shed tears for Louis D. Johnson when he was fired as
Secretary of Defense need have no worries about how Louis is going to make a
living in the future. He is a partner in the firm of Stepto and Johnson, and he
has high connections.
Louis, who put the stigma on five-percenters, is one of the biggest
operators on government contracts in town. Incidentally, there’s nothing illegal
about five-percenting and the fee is now seven and a half percent—Truman
inflation.
Though out of the administration, Johnson is so potent and powerful that
failure to retain him is a death warrant on some deals. He specializes in alien
property work.
Once again, as during World War II, the lobbyists and five-percenters’
password is “Are You Protected?”

That goes for a lot of things. It means are you protected against the law,
against competition? But, mainly, are you protected from your clients?
Too many fixers found themselves double-crossed. After they had
delivered, they couldn’t collect.
Now the smart ones won’t unbutton a button until the cash is put up in
escrow. Fancy deals are worked out on paper to cover up the shady nature of
the real transaction.
One contact man whom it was a pleasure to have lobby you was Howard
Hughes’ fat errand boy, Johnny Meyer. Johnny is a prodigal entertainer and
check-picker-upper. During the Senatorial investigation into how come Hughes
got some government contracts, it was testified that Johnny supplied gifts and
gals lavishly. He introduced Brigadier General Elliott Roosevelt to his former
wife, Faye Emerson, and picked up the tab for the wedding expenses.
Elliott screamed at the hearing, “You are persecuting me because my name
happens to be Roosevelt.” The Republicans who conducted it immediately got
cold feet.
Their temerity in hounding Elliott and Johnny was not forgotten. Three
years later, the radical lame duck Senator, Claude Pepper, conducted an
investigation to try to prove that former committee chairman Brewster had
tapped Johnny Meyer’s wires.
If he did, he must have had a good time. We know. We were with Johnny
in his Statler suite, and he was with us in ours. His “in” is former Washington
Governor Mon Wallgren, who is an old drinking and poker-playing crony of
the President. Wallgren has entree at all times to the White House and now
holds a Government hand-out job so he can keep his lines and connections in
order.
While on the subject of lame ducks, we mustn’t forget Scott Lucas, former
Senate Majority leader. He is now ready, willing and able to handle such
Washington legal and contact matters as may be brought to the attention of
himself and partner, Charles A. Thomas.
Many of the lawyers, lobbyists, fixers, five-percenters, etc., with wires
into high places, do not actually practice in Washington, preferring to do their
work through correspondents or connections.
One of these is Jake Arvey, the Illinois Democratic boss and associate of
Mafia hoodlums, who operates through the Washington office of Louis

Johnson. Arvey is the kingpin of the wire-pullers.
Often the extent of a fixer’s ability is overrated. An intermediary needs
only to be seen with a big politician to have the word get out that he’s “in.”
Then, after spending thousands, a client sometimes gets the idea he’s got to
hire another lawyer to do the actual work. Sometimes the fixers themselves
turn the actual leg work over to capable attorneys, sit back, and take the credit.
There are many of these bread-and-butter lawyers who accomplish what
all the politicians and five-percenters can’t, because they really know the law.
For instance, one prominent politico told us that while few tax cases are
“fixed” at the Washington level, many a fearful and repentant chiseler has been
fleeced by smart operators who told him they were wonder-workers. For
results, he recommended two relatively unknown but very successful
practitioners, Bert B. Rand, Washington-wise attorney, and Nathan Wechsler,
hard-hitting, astute C.P.A., because they had the staff and experience to meet
the government on an equal basis.
Similarly, in the field of constitutional law and the intricacies of
corporation procedure, and claim work, they look up Loring Black, a former
Congressman from Brooklyn, who retired from the House in 1934.
One young fellow who can do more for you in Washington with less
fanfare doesn’t make it his business. He is Hal Korda, onetime newspaperman,
who has many powerful friends on both sides. When the Dems found out he
knew Republicans, and vice versa, they began to use him as a channel to
square things they didn’t want to talk about directly to each other, and he
secured campaign contributions for both.
Many members of Congress lobby, legitimately, for their own
communities, or the industries thereof, or for public organizations in which
they have a deep interest.
For instance, Joseph Rider Farrington, the delegate from the Territory of
Hawaii, who holds a seat in the House but no vote there, has been foremost in
the fight to secure statehood for the Islands. Farrington has labored mightily in
that cause, and could show the professionals a thing or two. If Hawaii ever
achieves statehood, Farrington can take the bow.
Incidental to that great libertarian campaign, Farrington also plugs the
produce and products of the Territory and is its chief booster for tourism. His

office in the Old House Building resembles a cross between a steamship
agency and a Chamber of Commerce.
On the other hand, Henry Latham, one of the three Republicans in the
House from the City of New York—if you count Javits a Republican—is a
strong and sincere booster for the Navy. Were it not for his “lobbying” in
committee, we would have no Marine Corps today.
Latham, a Navy officer in World War II, did not know he had been run for
Congress or elected until his ship went into a South Pacific coaling station two
months after the 1944 elections. He has been reelected ever since.
He spotted the joker which would have wiped out the Marine Corps in the
administration Defense reorganization measure and tied the bill up until the
Devil Dogs were assured of being more than a mere “police force.”
Acey Caraway, finance director of the Democratic National Committee
and longtime pillar of that body, is opening an office for “consultation” in the
LaSalle Building. Acey, often referred to as the “junior Jim Farley,” probably
knows more Democratic rank-and-filers than anyone else in the party.
Among the law firms which have had the most success in lucrative
immigration matters is the New York one in which Rep. Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Jr., is a partner.
Thomas Shoemaker, a former Commissioner of Immigration, also shows
remarkable results in such cases.
New York’s left-wing New Deal Republican Congressman Jacob K. Javits
is a partner in Javits and Javits, 1025 Connecticut Avenue. Several immigration
matters have been settled successfully by them.
Wholly apart from such legal practices, the current price for bringing in a
rich refugee who can’t make the quota or other entry requirements is $75,000.
This is split between three Senators and/or Representatives, to sponsor so-
called “private” bills.
These bills are always passed, because the three interested members
buttonhole other Congressmen, who themselves need support to pass their own
private bills. That is called “Congressional courtesy.”
An embarrassing incident happened recently when President Truman
vetoed one such bill, after the 75 Gs had been passed and spent.

The Vice President’s son-in-law, Max Truitt, lobbies for American flag
steamship lines, and has had conspicuous success in obtaining government
handouts. He is effective also for the Kansas City wheat pit, a favorite
whipping boy of the administration he’s married into.
Lobbying before the Maritime Administration is dream business. It had 17
billion dollars’ worth of ships to sell after the war.
Much of this government property found its way into the hands of the
right people, who floated their purchases, if not their ships, by borrowing from
the government, then immediately reselling at double or triple to corporations
they organized.
In addition, these purchasers charged off hundreds of thousands against
their income taxes for expenses, on transactions which they frequently went
into with no more than a few thousand dollars to start with.
Truitt is the most active in the ship field and is registered as a ship lobbyist
with Congress.
The firm of the late Secretary of State Stettinius also dabbled in Maritime
Administration work. His associate was handsome ex-Congressman Joe Casey,
of Massachusetts.
One of the most up-and-coming of the lawyers with “inside” connections
is Margaret Truman’s “date,” Marvin Braverman. It is doubtful whether he has
much influence, but people are beginning to credit him with it, and he is no
chump. He is taking advantage of the publicity.
Braverman is related to Harry Hershfield, the radio wit and cartoonist.
And if his small talk is anything like Harry’s, we don’t blame Margaret for
liking him. Because Harry is the funniest man alive.
Former Housing Administrator Wilson Wyatt, a roaring Fair Dealer, is
lobbying for big interests to repeal war-time taxes as well as for the Dominican
Republic dictatorship.
Clark Clifford, the President’s former legal adviser and ghost-writer, is not
starving in private practice, either.
Clifford says he “doesn’t need law books.” He uses the Mayflower Hotel
menu instead.
Another law firm with great influence is Fulton, Walter and Halley, with
offices over the Occidental Restaurant. Hugh Fulton was chief counsel for the

Truman Committee. Rudolph Halley was on the staff. The firm has done
handily representing Howard Hughes, owner of TWA. As special counsel for
the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, between New York City and suburban
New Jersey, they secured a 50-percent fare increase from the ICC. In our book
Chicago Confidential, we said that the underworld had large blocks of stock in
the Hudson and Manhattan. Since then Halley, who was the counsel of the
road, confirmed our statement, reluctantly, and we have affidavits to prove it.
A law degree is not always necessary to a successful contact man. Some of
the most prosperous in Washington bill themselves as press agents. There is,
for instance, a little man from Missouri, Victor Messall, who dresses like a
race-track follower and has his walls plastered with pictures of the President.
Messall was a beaver on the President’s Senatorial campaigns. Later he was on
his secretarial staff in the Senate. He has testified under oath that he has so
many clients he can’t remember them all. A witness charged before the
Kefauver Committee he had given Messall $1500 to help him to get sugar-
points illegally from the OPA during the war. The chairman of the committee
was a Democrat. The counsel was the aforementioned lawyer for the Truman
committee, Rudolph Halley. The subject was suddenly dropped.
Another who bills himself as a press agent and is blossoming into a power
which some call sinister because of his connections, is a former
newspaperman, Dave Charnay, who runs a publicity firm in New York and
Washington, Allied Syndicate. Charnay is a long-time friend of Frank Costello,
reputed king of the underworld, and has done public relations for Rep. F. D.
Roosevelt, Jr., and Manhattan Borough President Robert F. Wagner, Jr., son of
the author of the Labor Act.
During the administration of Mayor LaGuardia, when gangsters were
ordered out of New York night clubs, Charnay, then still employed as a
reporter for the New York News, was made “president” of the famous
Copacabana at a salary of $500 a week. Charnay was known as Costello’s
press agent.
Among other clients, his publicity firm represents John L. Lewis’ United
Mine Workers, at a reputed annual fee of $175,000. Those who may seem
mystified at his range of clients, may be surprised to learn that Lewis, though
he doesn’t know it, is a prisoner of the Mafia. It started many years ago, when
the United Mine Workers imported Sicilian sluggers from the big cities. With
this “in,” the mob bosses began to cast greedy eyes on the colossal fortune
owned by the mine union. The Mafia’s policy is never to replace present

management if it can take over a flourishing concern. The infiltration went on
under Lewis’ nose, yet the beetle-browed egomaniac does not know he no
longer is the boss of the United Mine Workers. The boys let him think he is.
Last year, the Mine Workers tried to take over New York’s taxi industry, with
an abortive strike in which Mafia associates took a part. Charnay’s firm
handled the strikers’ publicity.
Charnay now has a pipeline directly to the White House, through the close
personal friendship between John L. Lewis and Dr. John Steelman, assistant to
the President. Some months ago, on his retirement as Secretary of the Navy,
John L. Sullivan joined Charnay’s firm as chairman of the board, but he
resigned to practice law. Paul H. Griffith, assistant Secretary of Defense until
he was replaced by Anna Rosenberg a few months ago, is now a vice-president
of the company.
Charnay had a pleasant luncheon tête-à-tête with Kefauver counsel Halley,
before the crime committee began its hearings, and offered to work for it
without pay.
Another interesting lobbyist is Samuel Haines, whose contract with the
hotel and cafe industry to try to get a reduction in the 20 percent amusement-
tax was on a sliding scale, his fee to be determined by the degree of eventual
tax reduction. The tax wasn’t cut, but he got $46,000. Haines entertained
Senators and Representatives in a playroom at his home, where he had slot-
machines, reverse-rigged so the players always won.
A mysterious man about town is Dave Gordon, always seen with beautiful
dames. Gordon is a close friend of Nate Lichtauer. Lichtauer is a shadowy
enigma. Little is known about him. But this is to tell you he engineers the
juiciest deals. (“Juice” is the capital slang for political pull.) Lichtauer is a
collector for the Democratic National Committee. He makes the arrangements.
When the contributions come through, he passes the word to Dave Niles, in the
White House, who pulls the proper strings.
One of Lichtauer’s closest associates is Milton Kronheim, another mystery
man. He used to be in the bail-bond business in Washington and went surety
for gamblers. He is now the city’s biggest and richest wholesale liquor dealer.
He is in on everything. He once peeled off 250 bills—$1,000 bills—to pay an
OPA assessment, then put the balance of the still impressive roll back in his
pocket.

He is close to General Vaughan and John Maragon, and thick with Jake
Arvey, Chicago Democratic boss, friend and apologist for Al Capone’s cousin,
Charlie Fischetti, king of the Chicago underworld. Kronheim’s son was
recently made a Municipal Court judge in Washington. Truman nominated
Kronheim’s lawyer, “Jiggs” Donahue to be District Commissioner. And
Kronheim supplies the White House liquor.
One to watch as a power is a Boston lawyer, Paul T. Smith. He got that
way because he and Dave Niles ran a forum in Boston called Ford’s Lyceum, a
sort of left-wing Chatauqua in which Frankfurter had a powerful say. When
Police Chief Barrett was under Congressional pressure, Niles and Smith
interceded.
It was through the connections he made with dreamers and schemers like
Harry Hopkins, who used to lecture for him, that Niles moved himself into the
White House under Roosevelt and has remained under Truman, the only man
Harry dared not fire. Niles, whose hand turns up in everything, may be the real
ruler of the country.
Anyway, when attorney Smith gets a case with a Washington angle, he
phones the White House. He usually gets what he wants.
Niles still operates Ford’s, spends every weekend, from Thursday to
Monday, in Boston. Niles’ hatchet man is Donald Dawson, of Missouri,
formerly with the RFC, now White House Liaison Officer in charge of
personnel. He is the last word on all federal nominations and appointments, but
his word is Niles’.
A couple of weeks before this went to press we saw Dawson lunching at
the Statler with General Vaughan and Johnny Maragon.
If the impression was conveyed that after Maragon’s conviction and denial
on appeal that the pet five-percenter was out of action, you were so wrong. Up
to this writing, Maragon has never served a day in jail, and he probably never
will. News about Maragon is a scarce commodity in Washington, and bum
steers are handed newspapermen. It was publicly reported that Maragon was ill
and in the hospital of a Federal prison. The White House intimate had not
spent one minute in jail. Maragon, the crooked fixer, is still in business and
still has entree to the White House. The wise guys know that if he is ever
punished, it will be perfunctory, because Maragon took the rap for a lot of
way-ups and what he could tell would rock America. He is still being taken

care of so he will never need to shine shoes again. If he isn’t pardoned by the
time this comes out, it’s in the works.
From time to time, socialites and even foreign noblemen who need the
jack lobby for it. A successful contact man is Baron Constantine von
Stackelburg, once with the World Bank. He and his beautiful wife host lavish
at-homes for the benefit of such interests as the Florida citrus fruit industry.
Clients of lobbyists are divided into four groups. You may disregard the
inspired baloney that they all represent the capitalists. Only a small fraction do.
The others who employ lobbyists are (1) Labor unions, farm federations
and left-wing pressure groups; (2) nonprofit and nonpolitical organizations
such as the Red Cross, American Legion, Elks, Knights of Columbus, etc., and
(3) government bureaus.
The most powerful lobby in history was for the Anti-Saloon League.
By far the mightiest since then, at least until Senator Taft’s overwhelming
victory, were lobbies of the labor unions. By tradition and shaded reporting the
representatives of the money barons are villains; but the labor boys are more
vicious and intolerable. And they don’t spend or entertain, which is even more
heinous. The money charged against the unions for legislative purposes goes
mostly to supply dames and hootch for visiting union chiefs.
The American Federation of Labor crowd hangs out at the Hamilton
Hotel, where all the choice ringside tables in the supper club are reserved
nightly for them. A stable of fillies is available to send up to the rooms of the
dignitaries who dilute their champagne with the tears they spill for the sans-
culottes.
The United Mine Workers frequent the Carlton.
The CIO also played at the Carlton until a Negro delegate was barred.
Most of the boys quit in a huff, and moved across 16th St. to the equally tony
Hay-Adams, where Negroes are also barred.
Many labor unions are represented by female lobbyists, and some of these
will turn a trick in the hay if that helps the sacred cause. The labor broads still
don’t run as homely as some of the Congressmen’s wives. For unions and
other such pressure cookers do not usually offer money, call-girls or liquor.
They threaten to withhold votes back at home.

As soon as a freshman Congressman checks in, the union harpies make a
grab for him. One whom we know, a Republican elected to fill an unexpired
seat in a Democratic district, received a visit from a couple of union goons the
first day he moved into his office. They gave him orders how to vote on a
pending measure. Congressman John Saylor, who is six feet four, grabbed
them by the necks and walked them to the wall, where he showed them his
certificate of election.
“I thought I read my name here, not yours,” he said. Then he threw them
out.
One of the most indefatigable female lobbyists is the daughter of former
Senator Burt Wheeler. Though her father cleans up representing robber barons,
her client is the left-wing United Electrical Workers Union. Congressmen
report she’s a pest who coaxes with a smile, and if that doesn’t work, she
threatens.
Old-timers in Congress will tell you about the dame lobbyist who
represented some milk producers. She was a handsome woman, so
voluptuously built that they referred to her as “Elsie the Cow.” Her lobbying
career ended in 1937, when she was caught in a hotel room with a
Congressman.
For all practical purposes, lobbyists representing unions and minority
groups do not often buttonhole Congressmen directly. Dave Niles handles all
labor and left-wing angles, and arranges for the votes and rewards or
punishments.
Anna Rosenberg, friend of Niles, former New Dealer, practiced industrial
relations successfully until her appointment as Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Lobbyists for government bureaus often double as unpaid fixers for
pressure groups, using government funds. Entertainments of Congressmen by
State Department officials at cocktail parties are referred to as “smokers.”
Sometimes pressure group lobbyists receive government favors and
privileges denied the less favored. An intensive lobby was conducted against
the Mundt-Ferguson anti-Communist bill by a former senatorial employe who
was not registered as a lobbyist.
He is Palmer Webber, who was staff director in 1943 for Sen. Pepper (D)
of Florida, and chief economic adviser in 1944 to Sen. Kilgore (D) of West

Virginia. Webber bore down on his Senate contacts from a rent-free office in
the Library of Congress. How he got it free nobody knows.
For two years Webber held a job as “legislative correspondent” on Capitol
Hill for the Federation for World Government. Records in the office of the
secretary of the Senate show Webber was not registered as a lobbyist for the
federation and the organization is not registered to conduct a lobby. In addition
to his arduous efforts to defeat the anti-Communist measure and his work for
the federation, Webber was a demon, worked for votes for passage of the fair
employment practices bill.
Webber was transferred by the World Government Federation from
Washington to New York “to do research.” The shift was for “political
reasons.”
He is an errand boy for the Lawyers Guild, which the House Un-American
Activities Committee cited as a “front” organization. It has also been active in
another “cause” sponsored by Webber—the drive for an investigation of the
F.B.I.
In 1947, Webber, a Ph.D., conducted a class in political philosophy at the
King Smith school, where the democratic form of government was smeared to
GI and other students.
A reporter attended Webber’s class on May 27, 1947, when Senator
Pepper was a guest. A woman student referred to J. Edgar Hoover as the
American Gestapo head and declared the Catholic church was leading a
crusade for war.
A woman in the audience, a secretary to a Republican Senator from the
Midwest, jumped up and shouted, “Thank God for the F.B.I.”
Webber was arrested in Charlottesville, Va., for distributing Communist
Party literature. Police records show he paid a forfeit rather than fight the case.
He was at one time a research director for the CIO Political Action
Committee in Washington and in 1948 was a paid director in charge of
activities of the leftist Progressive party in 11 southern states.
Another who lobbies against anti-Communist bills, and is openly so
registered, is former Democratic Congressman Jerry J. O’Connell, of Montana.
Utilizing his privileges of the floor, as an ex-Representative, O’Connell
strides into the House and Senate while they are in session, and delivers

advice, orders and inspiration to left-wing Congressmen, and threats to others.
When the Senate was debating the Communist control bill in an all night
session last September, O’Connell took up a station at the Senate door with a
reporter from the Daily Worker, and without any pretense of disguise, dictated
the unsuccessful opposition’s floor strategy.
But listen to the hue and cry when a manufacturer’s lobbyist buys a Coca
Cola for a Congressman.
Being a government lobbyist can produce desirable advantages, especially
for a Marshall Plan press agent.
A survey reveals that the Economic Cooperation Administration
information office has been giving several of its employes free visits to Europe
and the Middle East. Robert Mullen, director of ECA information, toured
Europe. He mapped a $7,500 ’round-the-world trip, but postponed a visit to
the Orient when the bullets began to fly.
Mullen sent an heiress to the J. P. Morgan banking fortune to London for a
convention of clubwomen—to get new propaganda material on the Marshall
plan to influence American clubwomen. He sent an inexperienced youth, hired
as a “picture expert,” to Paris and London, to see the sights and get new
pictures for propaganda purposes here.
Though ECA has 73 American press employes in Paris alone, and 56 in 16
other Marshall Plan missions in Europe, plus 222 Europeans on these staffs,
ECA sent a former woman reporter to Paris to get “human interest” stories for
a clubwoman propaganda pamphlet.
The ECA press information office in Paris has a chief who gets about
$20,000 a year in salary and expense money, has highly paid former reporters
on his staff, but the ECA here sent a man from Washington to show a group of
editors about Europe. Several others went to Europe on similar assignments.
Mullen has 48 on his Washington staff, drawing a total of $280,000 a year.
Among these are the Morgan heiress, an ex-bullfighter, the daughter of a
symphony conductor and a score of graduates from defunct war agencies. He
separated a noted Negro Air Force pilot, who achieved some success as an
author, from his Washington staff and dispatched him to Formosa at $15,000 a
year to direct Marshall plan press information there.
The American press agents for ECA will draw $673,000 in salaries this
year.

Congress gets around sporadically to investigating the lobbying “evil.”
The latest “crusade” was conducted by leftish Congressman Frank Buchanan,
who muddled the issue so much, no one knows what happened, except that the
National Association of Manufacturers emerged the villain. Congressmen
don’t hanker to expose lobbies, even if they’re on the other side. When the
investigation was first voted by the House, Buchanan wanted to give the
appropriation back, an unprecedented departure where committee chairmen
always yell for more. Buchanan tried to handcuff the lawyers engaged to
conduct the investigation, though both were good Democrats and good Fair
Dealers. But they were also honest. Lou Little, of Pittsburgh, a co-counsel, quit
broken-hearted. Counsel Benedict Fitzgerald, of Greenfield, Mass., a whiz of a
prober, was not even allowed to write the report. Buchanan refused to swear in
some witnesses; if they lied it would not constitute perjury. When counsel
called attention to that, he angrily shut them up.
The real brains of the investigation into lobbying was Lucien Hilmer,
committee staff director. He is regarded as a left-wing lawyer. When George
Shaw Wheeler was fired from the government for consorting with
Communists, Hilmer appeared as his lawyer and beat the case. Two years later,
as an economist with the U. S. Army in Czechoslovakia, Wheeler vindicated
the Civil Service Commission when he moved in on Berlin Red headquarters.
He announced he was a Communist and always had been one. Hilmer shares a
law office with John F. Davis, who represented Alger Hiss before the House
Un-American Activities Committee. Hilmer had worked under Max Lowenthal
on the old Wheeler Committee.
And did we remember to tell you that the Kansas City Chamber of
Commerce has an office on 16th St., across the road from the Russian
Embassy? Both pressure groups have displayed amazing influence in
Washington.
INSIDE STUFF: The law requiring lobbyists to register is used as a racket
by some. They advertise in trade papers: “Lobbyist, registered with the
Congress of the United States,” then sell prospective chumps the idea they are
“licensed” to lobby. Anybody may file his name and set up his own “cause.”

24. RACKETS BY REMOTE CONTROL

OUR NEWSPAPER confreres, in the main, were willing to be
hospitable and helpful when we galloped in and made no secret of our aims.
We don’t expect them to write our books. But they often give us tips, which
saves work.
The first question we asked was, “Who is the Washington Mafia boss?”
The invariable answer was that the local underworld was unaffiliated
with the national setup, free and independent, self-contained.
All our experience made us reject that picture. We had traced and
charted organized crime through the gang wars of Prohibition to this day.
We had charged and it was being substantiated that no city of importance
was left out of the clutches of the Mafia, with its brains in New York and its
powerhouse in Chicago. It was inconceivable that a rich, large center on the
Atlantic seaboard, almost a suburb of Manhattan, could be bypassed. So we
found out for ourselves. This is the situation in Washington:
The National Syndicate, for reasons of prudence, has avoided first-hand
operations in the District. You find few important Sicilian names in the
police files. Vice, crime, gambling, narcotics and, to a smaller extent,
contraband liquor, are farmed out by franchise to a cohesive local mob
which deals with and pays tribute to national headquarters.
Despite tremendous influence, legal advice and guidance and the
constitutional immunity against self-incrimination, the Mafia has an almost
superstitious fear of Congressional committees. A city administration can be
bought or scared or rigged. But nobody can capture 96 Senators and 435
Representatives. And any one of these is one of the immediate bosses of
Washington; and any one of these can arise any day and demand a probe of
anything. On the rare occasions when important racketeers were dragged to

Washington on subpena, with all the assurances they got from many
members beholden to them and the shocking obeisance paid them openly,
they wet their pants in the witness chair.
Yet, these greedy gluttons can’t find it in their miserly souls to declare
it an open town, any more than they can force themselves to pay honest
income taxes, though they awaken in their silk pajamas screaming, from
nightmare dreams about Al Capone and Alcatraz.
District of Columbia is and was dominated by Emmitt Warring, Gary
Quinn, Sam Beard, the Sussman brothers and Attilio Acalotti. The chief
operation of these men is gambling, which will be traced in more detail
later. They staked out locations in Washington, worked together in harmony,
well aware that the capital would not go for Chicago-style assassinations.
But the national Syndicate did not hesitate to work openly in the
adjoining Maryland suburbs, where the late Jimmy La Fontaine, who died
in bed at the age of 81 in 1949, was the local front man. Fontaine’s rococo
gambling casino, across the street from the District line, was as far as the
Mafia cared to go openly. His chief lieutenants were Snags Lewis, Pete
Gianaris and Mike Meyers. Snags has pleaded guilty to a mild rap on a
bargain which will take the heat off others.
We have described the dope setup in the District, where local
wholesalers send to New York for supplies, so that the Mafia does not have
to deliver them in the capital. By a similar procedure, the gamblers and
other racketeers procure their wire service from representatives of the big
mob, across the border in Maryland. Snags Lewis was the local wire service
man.
When it came to such things as numbers, whoring, illicit liquor and
after-hour spots in the District, the local boys tried to hold on to as much as
they could. They didn’t want to divvy up with the Syndicate. The big mob
didn’t like that.
When the Mafia moves in, it gears its method to local situations. For
instance, Dallas, one of the last hold-outs, is being taken over at this writing
by strong-arm work and gunplay.
But when the beach-front bookmaking syndicate in Miami held out, it
was cut off from its wire service, then local cops did the gangsters’ work by

raiding the recalcitrants, to make way for the Syndicate’s own operators.
It was clear to Frank Costello in New York and Charlie Fischetti in
Chicago, the operating heads of the underworld, that gat-work would not be
tolerated in Washington. They knew the Metropolitan Police couldn’t be
counted on to cooperate, with J. Edgar Hoover on the grounds. Few
understand why the F.B.I. has not acted against the Mafia. Its jurisdiction is
circumscribed by Congress, and the black-handers have been smart enough
to keep out of fields in which Hoover may act.
The outside mobsters adopted a third procedure to tighten their hold on
the local underworld, one that had worked with great success in other
towns. It came through with flying colors in Washington. Last year there
was an epidemic of robberies of local underworld figures, and not by
accident or coincidence.
One victim was Emmitt Warring. Three men forced their way into his
home, at 3900 Macomb Street, and robbed it at gun-point. Insiders say the
amount of cash lifted from Warring’s safe was about $100,000. Warring told
newspapermen it was only $20,000. He refused to cooperate with the police
and would not admit or deny that the holdup had taken place. In the same
week, the same thugs held up Johnny Williams, a numbers racket boss.
Robert “Ryebread” Schulman and Theodore “Little Joe” Scheve also were
held up. Williams’ father-in-law is Dick Austin, a numbers king in Atlantic
City and Washington.
Chief of Police Barrett said, “I am alarmed by the crimes. We can’t
have this sort of thing going on here. Pretty soon somebody’s going to get
shot.” That was Scheve. But nobody got arrested. Then Washington
racketeers saw a great light. They made peace with the Big Mob, which
established its regency over the District, leaving the former operators in as
partners with nominal control.
George P. Harding, victim of the recent slaying in the Hideaway Club,
engineered the Warring robbery for the Mafia. Harding was born in Italy
and had a long and bloody career as a gunman and killer, before being slain
by his friend and associate, Joseph Nesline.
Nesline, who admitted the shooting, is a four-time loser. He told police
it was either “Harding or me.” His story was Harding had accused him of

running out with his share of the gravy in a gangster-operated oil well deal
in Texas, where Frank Costello and his boys are buying heavily into leases
and royalties. The dead man had been sitting with George A. Clainos,
white-slaver and member of the local Syndicate, who passed him a gun.
The actual cause of the killing, which we are telling you confidential, is
that it was ordered from Mafia headquarters in Brooklyn, because Harding,
who knew too much, was an intemperate drinker and was talking too much.
Harding had been warned “to be good or else” several months ago,
through word transmitted by Tony Ricci, alias Tony Goebels, who is the
message-center for the Unione Siciliano.
The formula of permitting local operators to retain management was
followed last year when the mob moved into Tampa and Jacksonville,
Florida, and was used also with much success in Newark, New Jersey,
where the non-Italian mob of Abner “Longy” Zwillman was absorbed into
the Mafia. The Cleveland branch, run chiefly by Jews and Irish, was given
the same modus operandi and absorbed.
The chain of command and remittance from the District to top
headquarters is through Prince Georges County, Maryland, where Gianaris
handles the numbers intake from the District and Lewis superintends
payments for horse wire service—which is utilized also as a clearing house
to transmit receipts from all other illegal activities, entered on the books as
payments for the services or as losses on bets.
La Fontaine’s organization is kept together by Lewis and Meyers.
Charlie Ford, Washington lawyer, who appears frequently in this book as
counsel for gamblers, vice-hucksters and bottle-clubs, is the trustee of La
Fontaine’s fabulous estate. In this connection some complicated
bookkeeping is required.
It develops La Fontaine was only a front man. Eighty percent of his
holdings belonged to the Big Mob. His death brought intricate mixups, and
what was his and what was the Mob’s had not been identified in full detail.
The situation is similar to that which followed the slaying of Edward J.
O’Hare, Chicago mobster, who operated race tracks for the Capone
syndicate. The stock of Sportsman’s Park, Chicago, and the Miami Beach
Kennel Club was in his name. He left it to his heirs and associates. It took

years for the accounts to be straightened out, and when they were, some
money was paid over in the form of a “loan” to Paul “The Waiter” Ricca, a
close associate of the late Capone, who is one of the ruling heads of the
secret Grand Council of the Mafia.
The La Fontaine payoff to the top was made through Nig Rosen of
Philadelphia to Meyer Lansky of New York. Lansky is a tributary of Frank
Costello and a gambling partner of Joe Adonis. Nig Rosen is a friend of
Washington Police Chief Barrett.
La Fontaine was one of the most colorful men Washington ever saw.
His legendary career as a gentleman gambler spanned half a century. This
last of the gas-lit era gamblers was one of five children of a poultry dealer.
He was apprenticed to his father’s trade and might have carved for himself
a similar career, except for a fatal flaw in his make-up: he could not bear to
kill a chicken, nor could he stand the thought of others killing chickens he
had raised. He hid his favorites in his father’s attic.
A three-cent strike Jimmy made on the old St. Louis lottery netted him
$12. With this he set up shop across the Potomac in Virginia. He then went
to work for the Heath brothers, old-time gambling combine. He soon had
his own card table and he prospered. Subsequently he opened the Mohican
Club, near Glen Echo, Maryland. Expanding, he purchased a large tract in
Prince Georges County and established “Jimmy’s Place.” Around it he built
a high green fence and within it men won and lost fortunes. Women never
got past the door and no man who couldn’t afford to lose was ever admitted
again. It was staffed by more than a hundred carefully chosen attendants, all
covered by social security. They made regular contributions to a retirement
fund.
The house limit was $200 on craps, $500 a card on blackjack, and $10
on numbers, with no-limit games in private rooms for certain customers
who could stand a tough tap. “Jimmy’s” catered to as many as 2,000
gamblers a night.
Oddly, La Fontaine never got out of the poultry business. His passion
was cock-fighting and he maintained a stable of 100 birds. Seeing them
killed in action did not affront him. He also made horse book and traveled
from track to track. La Fontaine bankrolled Tex Rickard, the fabulous fight

promoter, in his early days. After Rickard’s death he formed a silent
partnership with Herman Taylor, Philadelphia fight promoter.
Jimmy served a jail term for income tax evasion and paid a fine of
more than $200,000. The Big Mob had long cast covetous eyes on La
Fontaine, who by now not only had his own profitable gambling enterprise
on which he himself admitted paying off $100,000 a year for local
protection, but he controlled also the entire underworld in the lush
Maryland counties adjoining the District. About 20 years ago, emissaries
from Philadelphia came down to muscle him out. One representative of Nig
Rosen, a gunman named Milsie Henry, was mysteriously murdered, for
which La Fontaine was loudly but not officially mentioned. The case is still
unsolved. Shortly thereafter, La Fontaine was kidnaped by hoodlums from
New York and Philadelphia. Before he was returned his family had to come
up with $40,000 “expense money.” And the Mafia was declared in on his
enterprises.
Most naïve Washingtonians believe the appointment of attorney Charlie
Ford as the trustee of his estate was a logical sequence, as Ford is a
gamblers’ lawyer. He testified before a house committee that he represented
many gamblers, some of whom were such powers that they were unknown
to the police or public as gamblers. He refused to divulge their identities.
One is a liquor dealer and another, a local jeweler.
Ford has legal contacts with the topmost figures of the Mafia. When the
wife of Charlie Fischetti, one of the most powerful men in the national
underworld, the most powerful in Chicago, was subpoenaed before the
Kefauver Committee, Ford flew to Chicago to represent her, though the
Fischetti-Guzik gang has staffs of legal sharks who specialize in outwitting
the authorities.
Quite often there is legal jockeying following the death of important
gangsters like La Fontaine.
After Bugsy Siegel was slain in Beverly Hills, Morris Rosen showed up
from New York at Siegel’s ornate Flamingo and took over all of the
murdered man’s assets before his body was cold. They had never belonged
to him at all. They were Syndicate property. So was 80 per cent of La
Fontaine’s.

25. WHO’S WHO IN MOBOCRACY

FOR TWO BOOKS and for the hundreds of newspaper stories we
have done on American gangsters and their maze of intertwining
organization we got enough to be publicly proclaimed America’s top
experts in the field.
We have been offered lectures and speaking engagements before bodies
of bankers, merchants, criminologists, police conventions and on radio
programs. But we have saved some new names and some newly-discovered
secrets for this book, because a “confidential” without that factor would be
regarded as a gold brick; and because our publisher knows us and trusts us
and hasn’t the rabbit in him that the owners of other media display, when
they say:
“But you just can’t publish that kind of stuff. You’ll get us all killed!”
One magazine which paid for the rights to do a digest of Chicago
Confidential weakened and, instead, did a piece speculating on our chances
of surviving our tenure on the bestseller lists!
We have our own ways of getting this material, which so many think is
so dangerous. It comes from many sources, all confidential. Some of it is
right from the racketeers, themselves, for they have vendettas and jealousies
and hatreds on which they don’t dare to act in the open. The widow of a
murdered hoodlum drove hundreds of miles and met us in a car in Central
Park and gave us the tale of who rubbed him out and why. This was a
woman who had told the cops and the prosecutors that she knew nothing,
had no idea how her husband made a living, had never met any one who
was even “shady.”
Here and there a person who has been shaken down or shaken out, and
thus knows a small angle which may be valuable as a tip-off on one or two

people and authentic tactics gets to us and spills.
We don’t believe all we hear. But facts mesh up and patterns form and
truths evolve.
We have sketched for you the process whereby the pennies, dimes and
dollars of the numbers-players, horse-bettors, hookers and junkies are
harvested in Washington and funneled to the satraps who live in penthouses
and mansions in New York, Chicago, Beverly Hills and Rome. They are big
industry, our biggest. And while the principals hide in their drawing-rooms
even if they pass through Washington, to or from Florida, they must
maintain here high-powered lawyers, tax experts who study and report
every decision of the Treasury, lobbyists, press agents and spies. Many of
the vast legal businesses into which they channel their cash have branch
stores and offices here. The Syndicate is an international conspiracy, as
potent as that other international conspiracy, Communism, and as dirty and
dangerous, with its great wealth and the same policy—to conquer
everything and take over everything, with no scruples as to how.
This gigantic money trust has assets of billions, exceeding the
combined wealth of Morgan, Rockefeller and all the Wall Street freebooters
of old.
It owns, through legitimate sources of trade, incalculable commercial,
residential, hotel and investment real estate, surpassing the holdings of
insurance companies. Through its purchase of stocks and bonds it controls
some and is attempting to control other transportation companies, as well as
railroads, hotel chains, distilleries and breweries, department stores and
chain stores, clothing and dress manufacturers, steel and iron works,
franchised automobile distributors, trans-Atlantic steamship lines, a movie
producer, a radio chain, a big-league ball team, phonograph recording
companies, insurance corporations, banks, theatres, night clubs, laundries,
oil wells; it has been buying into even newspapers. This is only a condensed
catalog of its dishonest interests in once-honest enterprises.
A thief is always a thief. These modern pirates could not go straight. As
soon as they dip their sticky hands into something legitimate, it goes
crooked.

One of their favorite tactics is to buy in the open market enough stock
of a company, to create a nuisance value. They organize a minority
stockholders’ committee and dig up proxies. They have no real intention of
trying to get control, but some time before the stockholders’ meeting, they
approach the management and offer to sell at a premium, usually three or
four times above the market listing. This is cold blackmail.
Another tactic, employed when they secure control of a transportation
company, is to use their political connections to get a fare raise. That
enhances the stock on the market, then they unload.
They buy into some companies to get enough stock to rig the price, a
felony. In at least one instance with which we are familiar, the underworld
put a representative in as an officer of a transportation company. He then
sold company stock short on the securities exchanges. This is a violation of
SEC law. When a complaint was made by other stockholders to the SEC,
the man they talked to shrugged his shoulders and said, “Forget it. They
have a fix.”
Operators with such tremendous financial interests know their way
around Washington. One of their chief sources of contact is through
Democratic county, state and national committeemen, who are beholden for
campaign contributions. Sometimes cash is handed over to sweeten the
kitty. The committeemen and political bosses pass the orders along through
their Congressmen in Washington, or, when the fix is important enough,
directly to a specialist at such affairs right in the White House.
The Tammany and Flynn interests in New York and Jake Arvey’s tight
Chicago combine are powers. The Rhode Island organization of Senator
Pastore and Attorney General McGrath, the crooked Connecticut machine
that made Senator Brien McMahon, and the Maryland organization, about
which more later, get whatever they want. Senator Herbert O’Conor is the
godfather of the Maryland outfit, and he is a member of the Kefauver
Committee.
The Colorado machine handles the loot for the Mountain States. The
errand-boy for the West Coast gamblers, dope runners and procurers is the
California Democratic organization, of which at this writing, Jimmy
Roosevelt is the chairman, but the mobsters don’t stick long with losers.

In Chicago Confidential we gave an outline of the organization and
chain of command of the international underworld Syndicate.
The Mafia, an age-old institution, has existed in Sicily since before the
beginning of written history. Sicily always has been, and to this day is,
subject territory. It was owned by ancient Phoenicians, Greeks,
Carthaginians, Romans, Imperial France, Italy and even Britain. The
Sicilian peasants always worked for absentee owners.
In prehistoric times, the Mafia began as a patriotic terrorist society,
somewhat like the Irish Republican Army. Venal leaders sold out, offered
protection to some estates while they sacked others. They anticipated the
protection racket by centuries.
The Mafia and the dread Black Hand are the same thing. The black
hand was the sign over which the Mafia’s threats were delivered. During
several thousand years it came about that almost every native of Sicily had
to have some tie or connection with the Mafia. Some were members, others
were relatives of members, or partners, hired killers and spies. Others did
business with it; still others were the terrorized unattached who dared not
refuse its bidding.
Sicilians vie with Cantonese as the most migrating people in the world.
Sicily, like Canton, is overpopulated and poverty-ridden. Another, more
important factor, appears to be that at every change of government, Mafistas
were forced into flight and exile in droves. They settled and colonized all
over the earth. There are huge Sicilian colonies spread around Europe, in
England, South America, North Africa, the Orient and the United States.
Every Sicilian colony had a hard core of black-handers, who set up an
invisible government and preyed first on the other colonizers. The various
groups were in correspondence with each other, cooperated in business
deals, provided places for other fugitives and expatriates.
The first great influx arrived in this country exactly a hundred years
ago, about the time Napoleon 3rd extended his influence to Sicily.
Thereafter, every ten or twenty years found other large groups on their way
here, especially after such periods of uncertainty as the unification of Italy,
World War I, the Mussolini ascendancy, and after World War II. From time

to time the Italian government tried to wipe out the Mafia, and after each
attempt thousands more came to wink and leer at the Statue of Liberty.
Though the Italian government never could exterminate the Mafia, it
did wipe out similar terroristic societies on the mainland, such as the
Camorra, of Naples. The members of these other secret societies who could
escape fled to Sicily, where they were welcomed and integrated as brothers
by the Mafistas.
Their overseas affiliates were absorbed by local Mafia units. This
process took place also among outlawed Greek secret societies, and the
dread Black Hand of Serbia, which was akin in purpose to Sicily’s Black
Hand. Meanwhile, as Mafia bosses got fat and rich, they smuggled in new
killers, many from Cuba and Puerto Rico.
The American Black Hand was content to operate exclusively in Italian
circles for years. All Italians had to pay tribute, a tithe of their earnings,
from the dollar-a-week of the corner bootblack to five thousand a night of
Enrico Caruso. Failure to pay meant the Black Hand letter, and continued
failure, death. Now the Mafia is smoother. It “owns” acts on a ten-per cent
business deal. Frank Sinatra was discovered by Willie Moretti and is the pet
of the Fischettis. He gave a gold cigarette case to Charlie Luciano, inscribed
“To my friend.”
Recent developments in New York again demonstrate how this works.
A $4,000-a-year city fireman, an Italian who had changed his name,
testified he was operating a $200,000 talent agency, which, in theatrical
parlance, “stole” acts from other agencies. Two were “thefted” from agent
Lou Perry: Alan Dale, another Italian who is the hottest crooning find of the
year, and Toni Arden. The fireman, whose name is Gerry Purcell, booked
these two and another, Terri Stevens, into the Copacabana, where all three
“clicked” and started their climbs to fame.
In Chicago Confidential, we described how Big Jim Colosimo, then the
local Mafia leader, set up the organization which under Al Capone and
Johnny Torrio, was able to drive out of Chicago all the competing non-
Italian and sectional mobs. Prohibition made them fabulously rich and
potent.

The same thing happened in New York. While Colosimo was the head
of the Chicago chapter, Lupo “the Wolf” Saietta headed the New York
branch. After he went to prison, Joe “The Boss” Masseria took over, after a
lot of mayhem.
They began to call the Mafia the Unione Siciliano then. At times it tried
to pretend it was a respectable Italian-American benevolent society. Joe
“The Boss” reigned at the top of the Unione for nine years, until he was
murdered in 1931. His chief lieutenants were “Lucky” Luciano and Frank
Costello. When Masseria was killed they moved in.
The Irish and Jewish mobs were being driven to the wall. The same
thing happened in every important city. By the middle 1930s, the Unione
Siciliano was dominant in every racket. Wherever there were non-Italians
left, the only way they could do business was to accept the overlordship of
the Mafia. If they were good boys they were allowed to come in and get
rich. If they tried any monkey-business, they were assassinated, like Bugsy
Siegel, or turned over to the law, like Lepke and Gurrah.
No one knows whether the top Italian hoodlums like Capone, Luciano
and Costello took over the Mafia, or whether the Mafia took them over.
That is an academic conjecture, as they are now one and the same thing,
with the worldwide facilities of the Unione Siciliano the nucleus on which
all organized vice, crime and corruption, not only in the United States but
all over the world, has been built.
In Chicago Confidential, we stated in passing that since the exile of
Luciano in Italy the American “president” or executive head of the Unione
Siciliano is Frank Costello, and the vice-president is Capone’s cousin,
Charles Fischetti, in Chicago.
The worldwide Mafia is composed of a supreme head in Palermo,
Sicily, a Grand Council consisting of high-ranking executives, subordinate
officers, and a global membership.
Luciano, following his deportation in 1947, has been installed as the
Supreme Head of the International Mafia. Members are divided into two
distinct groups, inner circle and outer circle. The latter includes members of
ordinary rank and standards. The former consists of those who command
wealth, influence or proven underworld power. Membership in this group is

kept at a minimum, since it derives a major portion of all proceeds from its
general diverse illegal enterprises.
Members of the elite few are almost invariably, through ancestry or
direct birth, from Palermo and its adjoining areas. A very few non-Italians
have been taken into the ruling circle. According to the U.S. Bureau of
Narcotics, American members of the Mafia are necessarily members of the
over-all group, which therefore has continued to include former American
gangsters who left the U.S. by deportation or voluntary flight. Prominently
mentioned among these are John Schillochi (International List 298);
Dominic Petrelli (International List 259); and Nicola Gentile (International
List 133), all of whom were in Italy when last heard of, though informants
tell us they have since been seen around New York again.
Other important members of the Mafia, such as Francisco Paolo
Coppola and Sylvestro Carrolla, found their way to Mexico, where they
took over the local Mafia. Other lesser figures represent the fearsome
fraternity in Canada, Argentina, Brazil, France, and England.
The Bureau of Narcotics has compiled what is believed to be the only
master list of the inner circle of the Mafia. It is based on documentary
evidence in the form of address books, papers, interstate telephone calls,
police records, screened informants, etc. During the recent Kefauver
Committee hearings, Commissioner Anslinger supplied the document under
oath to the committee. Extracts from this list are printed in the back of the
book.
Even before the Mafia had organized the entire American underworld,
it had strong communication lines into Washington. These were first built
up during Prohibition, when the boys passed money back to the capital for
their own protection. They also made liberal contributions to the campaign
funds of dry Congressmen, without whose votes, for whatever cause, the
racket was worthless. During the insane days of Prohibition, the underworld
began the process of undermining the honesty and probity of federal
officials, which has since been carried to an extreme.
Until the 18th Amendment, law-breakers feared Uncle Whiskers. There
were few federal criminal laws. Most criminals didn’t want to tangle with
Washington. Only nuts got themselves mixed up with the postal inspectors

or the Secret Service. After the wholesale bribery and corruption of the
1920s, all respect for national law enforcement had gone into the ashcan.
Now, due largely to the example of the F.B.I., the Bureau of Narcotics
and the Treasury Intelligence, the public’s faith in federal law-enforcement
and investigative agencies has been revived, but the prosecuting and
judicial ends have never come back. Most felons would rather be arrested
by federal than state or city cops, because they know they can make a better
deal with the prosecutors, and if everything fails, federal sentences are light
and the prisons are soft.
Before the underworld was completely organized, Washington was a
“neutral” city, where mob meetings and conventions were held. In such
cities the delegates must not pack guns. Rough stuff is out by common
consent. Other such open cities are Saratoga, Hot Springs, Las Vegas,
Atlantic City and Miami. These were and are important resort centers, and
are kept neutral because machine-gunning might scare tourists away.
Washington was no-man’s-land for obvious reasons; they knew tommy-
guns wouldn’t be tolerated in the Capitol’s shadow.
Commissioner Anslinger recalls such a gangster convention in the
Shoreham Hotel, two decades ago. The Commissioner dropped into the
Blue Room for dinner and saw Luciano, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn,
Frank Nitti, “the Enforcer” of the Chicago mob, Izzie Bernstein of Detroit’s
Purple Gang, and three other hoods, each with a bejeweled blonde. They
were registered at the Shoreham under assumed names and spent a week
there holding meetings.
When Anslinger lamped the boys, he went to the lobby and had Lucky
called out. Luciano was offended, beefed about the interruption of his party.
He said, “You can’t do anything to me. We got Constitutional rights. We’re
only sight-seeing.”
Anslinger said, “That’s all you’d better do,” then glancing at the
blondes, he added, “remember the Mann Act.”
A few weeks later, Jack McGurn was knocked off. It developed that
this meeting was called for his trial. He had been getting out of line. So he
was summoned from Chicago to meet his peers from the other cities.

The organized underworld’s influence in official Washington is
incalculable. Its direct ties, even to the top, are so firm that in many
instances even a political revolution will not dislodge them. They succeeded
in doing that which the Communists failed to do; they infiltrated and took
over the government. They are the true subversives, though that never
comes out in Congress.
The Mafia’s power is built around these factors:
1) The underworld’s ownership of and contributions to local political
machines. The mob has no politics or ideology. It pays liberally to both
sides, so it will have a friend in court no matter who wins. Even the former
American Labor Party Congressman, Vito Marcantonio, was on intimate
terms with Mafia hoodlums, accepted campaign contributions from them,
associated with and fronted for their racketeers in New York and in
Washington, and welcomed them into his American Labor Party. He
appointed the son of the infamous “Three Finger Brown” Luchese to West
Point in 1946. Luchese was and is his contact in Tammany Hall.
2) The Mafia’s huge cache of currency, hidden in private safe deposit
vaults and in banks throughout the world. Its earnings from illicit sources
are so great, and come in so fast, the boys cannot invest it fast enough. They
must hide most of the money because they failed to pay income tax on the
major portion of it. It is no exaggeration to say they have billions of dollars
in U.S. bills. With this bankroll they can bribe at will, elect many officials,
and swing public opinion to incredible degrees.
3) The Syndicate’s interests in countless large legitimate businesses and
industries give it a responsible, respectable voice in Washington through
trade associations, lobbyists, law firms, banks, Congressmen who would do
a favor for a local businessman but would not be seen dead with a gangster,
and a considerable segment of the press, daily and periodical, and the radio.
4) The hoodlums’ tie-up with some labor, which came about when
unions needed sluggers, or when tough guys muscled in to grab union
treasurers, or used them as part of their extortion rackets. Lobbyists
representing the unions are feared and toadied to.
5) The Italian voting bloc now controls some of the largest cities in the
country. It is the largest single unit in New York, where all three candidates

for mayor in 1950 were Italians. Too many of their men in office have ties
to the Mafia. They can count on the votes of their countrymen in
nominations and elections. The mass votes of Italians are bartered back and
forth and usually can be delivered, by Black Hand threats in Italian
neighborhoods, by appeal to blood relationship and national pride, or
through the pages of powerful Italian language newspapers.
During his recent campaign, New York’s Mayor Impellitteri charged
that Gene Pope, publisher of Il Progresso Italiano-Americano, the biggest
Italian daily in the country, was an intimate of Frank Costello. We have seen
them dining together on intimate terms.
No book could comprehensively cover the mob’s facets in Washington,
but here are a few, at random:
The President’s military aide and poker pal, Major General Harry
Vaughan, has associated with Frank Costello. They were brought together
through his stooge, the convict John Maragon, who was a pal of the late Bill
Helis, Greek millionaire and partner in Costello’s New York and Louisiana
enterprises—as well as in a Scotch distillery.
Joe Adonis, New York mobster and lieutenant of Costello, had financial
dealings with Harold F. Ambrose, former special assistant to the Postmaster
General. Ambrose pleaded guilty to charges of operating a $600,000
fraudulent stamp-selling scheme. Adonis was questioned by the D.C. grand
jury, but refused to talk, after which the United States had amnesia about his
connection with the case. Ambrose is related to Democratic Senator
O’Mahoney. His failure to go to trial protected his underworld associates.
Attorney General McGrath, who may be a U.S. Supreme Court Justice
before this appears in print, was a Senator from Rhode Island and an
important member of Rhode Island’s Democratic machine. That outfit has
tight ties with the underworld. Within days after McGrath was pushed
upstairs to the Attorney Generalship, to make way for Bill Boyle as
Democratic National Chairman, McGrath made a trip to New York City.
There he or his double had dinner at the Copacabana night club with Joe
Nunan, former Commissioner of Internal Revenue, and Julie Podell,
manager of the cafe. It has been frequently charged in New York that
Costello has an interest in the corporation. The late Mayor La Guardia
ordered police to cancel the club’s license if Podell, long an associate of

Costello, was ever found on its premises again. Podell, while giddy, told
one of your reporters that Costello had advanced $50,000 to open the club.
At the time of the dinner party there, the Copa was a possible defendant
in a tax-action growing out of an investigation into the charges that it was
owned by Costello. Since then, Podell was in Hot Springs with Costello and
several other mobsters from all parts of the country, in an annual
convention. McGrath has since stated there is no organized crime or vice in
the country.
Former Attorney General Tom Clark, now a Justice of the United States
Supreme Court, was closely associated with attorneys who represented
underworld figures. There were no major underworld prosecutions during
his term of office. A Congressional investigation elicited the startling
information that Clark’s boyhood pal, Maury Hughes, a Dallas attorney,
was retained by five members of the old Capone mob, who had been
convicted of extorting millions from the movie industry, to induce the
federal authorities to nol-pros outstanding indictments against them and
secure premature paroles.
Hughes, with other lawyers close to the administration, worked this feat
of legal legerdemain. While these pages were being written, the same
Maury Hughes secretly succeeded in keeping Alan Smiley, a notorious West
Coast gangster who had been ordered deported, in the country. Smiley was
Bugsy Siegel’s buddy, and was seated next to him on a love-seat in Virginia
Hill’s Beverly Hills mansion when Siegel was ambushed and assassinated,
in the only spot in the room visible to the torpedoes hidden outside, in
bushes.
Until recently, Smiley had been passing himself off as an oil broker and
real estate man in Houston, Texas, where he lived with his wife, a former
movie starlet, in Glen McCarthy’s swank Shamrock Hotel. Smiley took up
with a Texas oilman, Lenoire Josey, who liked to gamble. Smiley said he
liked that, too. He knew some good places.
He and Josey went to Sam Maceo’s ornate casino, the Balinese Room,
in Galveston. Then they went to the Mounds Club, in Cleveland. After that
they went to the Flamingo, in Las Vegas. A trip to Phil Kastel’s (and
Costello’s) beautiful Beverly, outside New Orleans, followed. When Josey
counted up he had lost $500,000. Smiley “admitted to being a big loser,

too.” If so, he got some back, because he owns a bit of stock in the
Flamingo.
While these lines were being written, the California Crime
Commission, headed by Admiral William H. Standley, Retired, castigated
government aides for their ties with criminals. He said the relationship
between the underworld elements and certain officials “must of necessity
make it embarrassing for Federal officials to undertake prosecutions.”
A specific example was Sam Termini, described as a godson of the late
Charlie Binaggio, who would have had to earn $900,000 income last year to
be able to afford the cash payments made on his mansion in San Mateo
County. He paid income tax on no such sum.
It cited the case of Dorothy A. McCreedy as a specific example of
tieups between criminals and government officials, stating:
“The McCreedy woman is a convicted madame, a major figure in the
prostitution racket in California for years and operator of two large whore-
houses in Honolulu.”
She was reported to the Income Tax Bureau as a suspected evader, but
“she is also a partner in a business called Safety Step Sales Co., and one of
her partners is Ernest M. Schino, chief field deputy in the Office of the
Collector of Internal Revenue.”
They tell a spicy story about Dorothy, whom we know well—
personally, not professionally. When F. D. Roosevelt made his first trip to
Hawaii, the Secret Service failed to send ahead a black open touring-car of
expensive make, familiar and standard for the President on open display.
Honolulu was winnowed. Only one such car was found in the Territory. It
was owned by Dorothy, who used to drive her gals through town, to show
them off, for promotion.
Dorothy pridefully lent the car. Everyone in Honolulu recognized it on
sight, but the President didn’t know that. He flashed his historic grin, waved
his hat, but couldn’t understand why the cheers were accompanied by an
obbligato of guffaws.
It was charged, and never refuted in the 1950 campaign, by both
Governor Dewey and Mayor Impellitteri that Ed Flynn, New York political
boss and intimate of the late President Roosevelt, is Frank Costello’s

contact in New York State. Flynn, who has, and retained after the debacle,
the national patronage in the state, used it frequently to procure
appointments in high places, including the federal district bench, the New
York State Supreme Court and some prosecutors, of men known to be
friendly to associates of Costello. His defeated choice for governor of New
York, former Congressman Walter J. Lynch, of the Bronx, had, while he
was in Congress, introduced a “sleeper” which would have permitted the
underworld kings, notorious for such frauds, to evade prison sentences for
tax delinquency.
A report, in the possession of the Los Angeles Police Department,
which we have seen, states that Flynn or someone who looked remarkably
like him—with Frank Costello, Phil Kastel and others—was in Mexico City
in December, 1948. Costello was in conferences that contemplated taking
over the Mexican National Lottery. The group was partied by A. C.
Blumenthal, expatriate New York showman.
Lynch, like his boss Ed Flynn, was a never-deviating New Deal-Fair
Deal Democrat. He never voted against an administration measure. In the
last Congress there was a mighty affinity between New Dealers and
crooked dealers. For instance, former Senator Lucas, of Illinois, the
majority leader, was beholden to the Nash-Kelly-Arvey machine.
Appointments of shady figures to federal positions in Illinois cleared
through him, the senior Senator, as all must.
Left-wing Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey, of Minnesota, is a
pal of ex-convict Charles Ward, millionaire calendar printer. Ward has many
ties with the underworld all over the country, and was one of the financial
backers of Anna Roosevelt’s attempt to start a daily newspaper in Phoenix,
Arizona. This was once he was outsmarted in a money deal. As is not
unknown in the Roosevelt tradition, he got one cent on the dollar back. Bill
O’Dwyer said he found a direct tie between Ward and Brooklyn’s Murder,
Inc.
Under such auspices, the underworld is establishing a firm grip on
Minnesota. Its attempt to take over the Minneapolis and St. Paul traction
systems is a part of the general picture across the land and was exposed by
Lait last summer in his Daily Mirror column. It resulted in the indictment of

one of the mobsters, Kid Cann, so called because of his many
incarcerations.
The New Dealers have been kind to the underworld ever since their
victorious election in 1932, after Costello and Jimmy Hines, with Ed Kelly,
had successfully managed the convention fight in Chicago. While Frank
Murphy was Attorney-General he saw to it that prosecuting attorneys laid
off the boys. Internal Revenue agents prepared a tax case against Costello
and Frank Erickson, but the U.S. Attorney was ordered to pigeonhole it.
Following Frank Erickson’s conviction in New York on gambling
charges, District Attorney’s investigators seized his books and papers.
Among them was a memo reading, “Phone Daddy Long Legs.”
The sleuths jumped on this. They figured it was a code or nickname for
one of the mob aces. That is one of the toughest problems encountered by
racket-busters, i.e., breaking down the aliases used by the kings of the
underworld on their books and in their records.
The gumshoes rushed over to the Island and interviewed Erickson in
his cell.
“Who is Daddy Long Legs?” they asked. “And what did you want to
call him for?”
Erickson laughed uproariously. “Why shouldn’t I phone him?” he
inquired. “After all, I’m related to him by marriage and he’s the Vice
President.”
After the investigators had recovered from their shocks, this is what
Erickson told them:
“An in-law of mine is an in-law of Barkley’s. Barkley visited me in my
Long Island home. My grand-kids are crazy about him. They nicknamed
him ‘Daddy Long Legs.’”
The story of the Binaggio killing in Kansas City, anticipated in Chicago
Confidential, is recent, but the full background of the case has never been
aired before.
President Truman is and was a loyal member of his county Democratic
organization. And as such—a party man who never split his ticket—he was

forced to go along, though unwillingly, when the Chicago hoodlums put
Binaggio in as the leader.
When the President first went into politics, the Mafia was just one of
the mobs. It had not organized the country. In the 1920s, most of the big
city machines were owned by Irish bosses, who were tied up with the local
Irish underworld gangs. Each city was independent of all other cities.
On the surface, the conviction of Tom Pendergast by U.S. Attorney
Maurice Milligan was a smashing victory for law and order. But it was, at
the same time, a greater victory for the Capone and Costello mob. There are
high government cops—not friends of the administration, either—who have
the wild idea that the only effect of Pendergast’s conviction was to permit
Charley Fischetti’s ambassador to Kansas City, Tony Gizzo, to put in his
own man, Binaggio, as county leader. Milligan’s brother Tuck was counsel
for Joe de Luca, a Mafia boss and convicted dope smuggler, during and
after his brother’s term as United States attorney. Milligan prosecuted few
Sicilian hoodlums. T-men demanded 20 years for De Luca. Milligan’s office
asked for only 3 for his brother’s client; he was sprung shortly thereafter
and the stool pigeon who convicted him was murdered. We looked up the
official record and that is so.
As new Democratic leader of the President’s home county, Binaggio
had great influence. Naturally, the President wanted to carry his own state
in local and federal elections, so he had to work through his home
organization. The presence in it of people like Binaggio and Gizzo may
have turned his stomach, but that was politics.
We have explained that the Big Mob does not operate directly in
Washington on the street and sewer levels, such enterprises being
franchised out to locals. The Syndicate does do business in the District in
connection with its legitimate affairs and some of its larger sub-rosa
undertakings. In the latter category are black-marketing, the sale and resale
of government surplus, padding of war contracts, etc. The boys had an
office in the Thomas Circle Building during World War II, in which they
dished out war contracts. One day a man was killed there, but so great was
their influence that no record was made on the police blotter. The
newspapers still know nothing about it.

A couple of hotels in Washington are owned by interests known to be
backed by underworld coin. Many chain stores owned by mob money have
branches there. Money of “Lepke” Buchalter, executed head of Murder,
Inc., is in Jarwood’s men’s clothing store, across the street from the
Department of Justice. The history of this chain makes a human interest
story.
When Lepke surrendered, to be turned over to J. Edgar Hoover, he
understood the boys put in a “fix” so he would be tried on federal charges
and not turned over to Brooklyn’s crusading District Attorney, Bill
O’Dwyer, on the Murder, Inc., rap, which meant the chair in Sing Sing.
But Hoover would have nothing to do with such a deal, and gave him
up to New York State. Lepke was convicted of first-degree murder. He
knew he had been railroaded by the Mafia, which had wanted to get rid of
its Jewish partner. He threatened to blow the whistle, and was promised
leniency if he would talk. His wife, an attractive brunette, went to see him
in his cell and told him her life had been threatened, she would be croaked
if he spilled. That was not so. Lepke loved her, so he went to the hot seat
with his lips sealed to protect her.
Most of his illegal profits had been stashed away in secret safe deposit
vaults. He told her where they were. While Lepke was in the death-
chamber, his wife was often seen with Arthur Jawitz, a slick-looking young
guy, who had attracted the attention of the Feds when they were looking for
Lepke, whose bed he was keeping warm.
Shortly after Lepke’s electrocution, his widow married the black-haired
young man, and set him up in the men’s clothing business. They changed
their name to Jarwood. The underworld says Lepke left her $20,000,000 in
U.S. currency. A former wife of Jawitz showed up, charged he had married
Betty Buchalter bigamously. She said Betty was “keeping” Jawitz while her
gangster husband was still alive.
After the Kefauver Committee quizzed Lou Wolfson, head of the
Capital Transit Company, which owns the street-cars and buses in
Washington, seeking gangster-ties, it went no further. There was no
evidence. Wolfson, who lives in Jacksonville, Florida, says he is a
legitimate businessman. We have no knowledge to the contrary. But it was
developed under oath at a Senatorial hearing that Wolfson and one William

B. Johnston had, between them, raised a fund of half-a-million dollars for
the campaign of Florida’s governor, Fuller Warren. Wolfson and Johnston
each put $154,000 into this private, special campaign kitty, and were
intimately associated during the campaign. Johnston is president of
Sportsman’s Park racetrack in Chicago, and several dog-tracks in Florida,
which were owned by the late Al Capone. Johnston makes frequent
payments to Capone associates as “loans.” He admitted he had been
associated with mob-owned enterprises.
Another witness, Leo J. Carroll, testified that it was general knowledge
in 1948, that with the election of Governor Warren, one-third of whose
campaign Wolfson financed, “the Mob would take over Florida.” It did.
A few months after Wolfson secured control of the Washington transit
system, he was permitted to raise the fare to 15 cents a ride, on the plea of
extreme poverty. Right after that, the company doubled its quarterly
dividends from 50 cents to $1 a share. Company stock scored a sensational
advance, reaching $39. When Wolfson landed control he bought 109,000
shares at $20.
Wolfson’s campaign to buy the local transit system was authorized by
the ICC and the Securities Exchange after an adverse recommendation of
the examiner and over opposition of minority stockholders. In less than ten
months, the Wolfson group succeeded in dominating the board of directors
and placing its own men in strategic executive spots, one of whom is Frank
E. Weakly, president of the Wardman Park Hotel.
Now the SEC has granted Wolfson permission to sell some of his stock
at the inflated price, which gives him the company and his money back. At
this writing, he is negotiating to buy the Washington Redskins from George
Marshall.
You can feel the presence of the mob in Washington. You can see
evidence in many directions that it is there. John L. Laskey, immediate past
president of the District Bar Association, resigned the chairmanship of its
law enforcement committee because he had represented three witnesses
called before the Senate Crime Investigating Committee in connection with
Florida gambling. He was a former U.S. attorney.

When Frank Costello testified briefly last year before the Senate
Interstate Commerce Committee investigating the transportation of slot-
machines across state lines, the photo of a Senate attache calling a cab for
him while Capitol policemen pushed nosy spectators away, was widely
published. But what hasn’t been printed is that a table was reserved for him
in advance in the Senators’ private dining-room in the Capitol, and while
the great Costello dined with his staff of lawyers, a couple of U.S. Senators
humbly waited for seats. The Senate dining-room is operated on a
concession basis by the son-in-law of a Chicago vending-machine
manufacturer.
It could be some of the Senators are on Costello’s payroll. The law
firms of at least 40 Senators and Congressmen regularly represent the wire
service and local gamblers in their home towns.
Now let’s gander the Kefauver Committee.

26. TERROR FROM TENNESSEE

THE HOUSE and the Senate have unlimited power and initiative in
one function only—they can investigate anything.
No President can veto a resolution for an investigation or by law curb
its activities or its scope. Theoretically, the purpose is to acquire facts on
which to base future legislation. Some of the mightiest of our historical
moves have sprung from such inquiries. Giants have risen in the course of
them. Harry Truman would probably have remained an obscure little
nonentity were it not that he became chairman of a comparatively
inconsequential Senate body which got to asking questions.
One of the surest ways to grab public attention is for a legislator to
propose a resolution for a special investigation. If it passes it is not
submitted to a standing committee, but its author is by established custom
chosen as its chairman.
This is the story of a special Senatorial investigating committee. In
many ways it is typical of such things under the Fair Deal, where politics
can strangle this last independent prerogative of Congress.
The central character of this tale is Estes Kefauver, who sprung a
Senate motion to investigate crime. Your authors have a personal property
right in this venture. For Senator Kefauver had read Chicago Confidential,
and what he found there made his hair stand on end. This is no conjecture.
His resolution was prompted by what we had discovered and published.
He was sincere, impulsive and ambitious—if you can call a yen to be
Vice-President an ambition. He is our friend, and as such we wish him well
and, as Americans who know a little more than most of their fellow-citizens
about what is going on, we cheered the possibilities of an untrammeled
turning of the turf that would show up officially any important portion of
the staggering facts for which we risked our lives.

Kefauver began bravely. He realized that he had lightning bolts in both
hands; that he not only could become one of the foremost men of his time,
but that he could accomplish priceless service to his country. With the
infinite power that was his, he could expose and perhaps destroy the
Syndicate and the Mafia which rules it, and save us from the creeping,
leaping conspiracy of criminals which already in many elements of our life
has superseded constituted government.
But he wants to be Vice-President.
At this writing, he is 47; Barkley is 73. Political wisdom would dictate
that the second man on the next national Democratic ticket should come
from a border state. Kefauver is from Tennessee. He became a headliner
when he licked boss Ed Crump. He is of Dutch-American stock and a
Protestant.
He has four years more on his Senate term and could be re-elected. But
for a national nomination one needs a majority of the delegates at a
convention. Delegates are party men, designated by the party.
He had no more than taken his first bold steps when the party went to
work on him. No Democrat can fight the Mafia and get anything from most
Democrats except obstruction. They are so intimately and intricately
interwoven with the underworld plunderworld through all political strata
that they must protect it.
Kefauver was too naive to foresee this. He comes from one of the few
states where there is no gangsterism except in picayune city and county
affairs, and in those the Republicans share the chicken-feed rewards.
Kefauver campaigned in a coonskin cap and unhorsed the Memphis
machine, which had no great state-wide strength from within and no tie-ups
to bring it help from without. But the explosion that followed when his bill
passed rocked the whole national party.
Kefauver, in his innocence, had read our book of disclosures, but like
thousands of others, he failed to grasp the significance of the political forces
which have become integrated with the system, without which it could not
have spread, and to which it has contributed and does contribute
incalculable money, leadership and votes. It was inconceivable to him that
mayors and governors he knew and many of the statesmanlike Senators

with whom he mingled, could be beholden to, not to say slaves of, swarthy,
sinister men, many of them ex-convicts, who traffic in bodies of women,
making and supplying dope-fiends, dealing in extortion, smuggling,
bootlegging, hijacking, bribing and murdering in the principal cities and
states of the union; that these hyenas were a controlling influence in
nominations and elections; that they owned vast commercial and industrial
enterprises, labor unions, even some newspapers, and that their pirate hands
gripped the steering wheels of enormous financial fleets.
He read it. But he couldn’t believe it. And what he did believe of it he
couldn’t digest.
Now he finds himself in the middle of a giant whitewash. He is the
chump whose good name is used to shield the key figures of the Mafia and
obfuscate their tie-up with the big city Democratic machines. He does not
admit it publicly but he is heartbroken.
Senate Republicans, seeking an issue, jumped in to support the
proposed investigation. Kefauver’s bill at once became a hot potato the
Democrats couldn’t drop.
Dave Niles, Bill Boyle, J. Howard McGrath, and Scott Lucas huddled.
They found it was too late to sidetrack the proposed investigation; it had to
go on, but with “sensible” safeguards. Suggestions that the probe be
transferred to other committees were waved aside as impractical; it was
necessary to have a front for this and Kefauver was perfect for the job. He
is a man of personal honesty, with no embarrassing machine or underworld
connections.
The committee was voted, but with the surprising proviso that the Vice
President should name the minority party members. This was
unprecedented. Minority leaders always choose their own committee
members. The purpose of this tactic was to deal Michigan Senator Homer
Ferguson, the Republican’s top investigator, out. Membership was limited
to five, three Democrats and two Republicans. Thereupon Vice President
Barkley followed orders, named two GOPers, one harmless. Both were in
the middle of violent primary campaigns, fighting for political survival. It
was known they could not spend much time with the committee. Wiley, a
good man, is a ranking minority member of the Foreign Relations
Committee. He was kept close to that post by the Korean mess. Julius Cahn,

Wiley’s intelligent aide, was rendered impotent. And Tobey is more a New
Dealer than most Democrats. He got campaign support from the
administration, and in payment gratuitously but muddle-headedly blamed
gambling in New York on Dewey.
The motor of a Senatorial investigating committee is its counsel and the
staff. The members have other duties, must attend other committee
meetings, must be on the floor for roll-calls. And they are not usually
professional prosecutors. They are at the mercy of their staffs.
That’s when the shenanigans began. Kefauver had no experience with
such shenanigans. He didn’t know whom to retain. Tom Murphy, Alger
Hiss’ nemesis and later Police Commissioner of New York, was
recommended. But Murphy was persona non grata in Washington because
he had guts enough not to throw the Hiss prosecution, after he had learned
that would please the Attorney General’s office.
Dave Niles told Kefauver to ask Ferdinand Pecora for advice. Pecora,
then a Justice of the New York State Supreme Court, was getting by on the
reputation of having exposed the money barons of Wall Street in the early
1930’s. Pecora is a thoroughgoing New Dealer and Kefauver is one of the
faithful. They failed to tell the man from Tennessee that Pecora is Bronx
boss Ed Flynn’s man. Flynn is head of the machine in which Frank Costello
is a power. Pecora attended Costello’s celebrated party at the Copacabana
nightclub, with half the local bench, a number of jurists who owed their
robes to Costello.
Pecora recommended his protégé, Rudolph Halley, of the law firm of
Fulton, Walter and Halley, for counsel and Felix Frankfurter phoned to
confirm it. Halley had been on the staff of the Truman Committee when
Fulton was its chief counsel, so he looked good to Estes as an experienced
prober. But Halley had been an attorney for the Hudson & Manhattan
Railroad, in which it was alleged underworld characters owned stock.
Kefauver told your reporters he had heard a rumor Halley might have
represented them, and had asked him about it before hiring him. Kefauver
looked us in the eyes and stated, “Halley said it wasn’t so. Naturally, I took
his word for it.”
After the Kefauver Committee had been functioning some months,
Halley admitted to your reporters before witnesses, that he knew there were

large underworld holdings in that company, which had been his client. We
have a sworn affidavit which reads as follows:
“Mr. Halley stated that the statement in the book Chicago Confidential,
to the effect that the underworld syndicate has bundles of stock in the
Hudson & Manhattan tubes, was substantially correct; that it was his own
personal knowledge, as former counsel for the Hudson & Manhattan
Railroad, that the underworld owned large blocks of stock in that
company.”
After a change in management, Halley was dismissed from the H & M,
and went to work for the Kefauver Committee at $120 a week. The new
management of the railroad said it had virtually eliminated suspicious
stockholders and emasculated shady directors who could not be fired.
Among the investigators hired by the committee were ex-cops,
disappointed lawyers and the usual Washington hanger-on-ers,
recommended for jobs by influential friends.
Kefauver’s principal source of information about the underworld was
what he had read in Chicago Confidential, He knew no more. He asked
Mortimer to take a leave of absence from his newspaper and act as paid
adviser to the committee. Mortimer accepted, but said that he would take no
compensation. Over the weekend, Kefauver withdrew his offer in a
telegram in which he blamed other Senators. He said they feared other
newspapermen would be offended. That was an alibi, quickly arranged
when influential Democrats vetoed the idea. But he took advice from Nat
Perlow, editor of the Police Gazette!
At the first open hearing of the committee, subpenaed gamblers were
represented by Morris Shenker, St. Louis lawyer, formerly on the Missouri
Democratic committee. As a result of his good work in obtaining campaign
donations, Shenker was named by Bill Boyle to the Democratic finance
committee. He hastily resigned after the deal was exposed in Lait’s column.
Every effort was made to keep Kefauver concentrated on gambling.
Syndicate heads know the nation is not shocked over bookmaking.
Whenever witnesses or informers got hot on narcotics, the spine of the
Syndicate system, or began to talk about the huge investments of the
underworld in legitimate business, they were brushed off. There were

rumors of fixes, payoffs and other such skulduggery, though Kefauver was
absolutely in the clear. But whenever he was warned such things were
happening, Kefauver, a softie at heart, who believes evil of no one, said it
was impossible.
Though he promised your reporters his committee would hold open
hearings in New York and Chicago before election, at which no punches
would be pulled, he folded up like a frightened puppy. After one day in
New York, at which no one of importance was questioned, the committee
adjourned until after the election, with the statement that Joe Adonis, who
had been allegedly sought for 90 days, was unavailable. Your reporters saw
Adonis every night at the corner of 50th Street and Broadway while
committee investigators were supposed to be searching for him. While the
great man-hunt was supposed to be on, Adonis voluntarily surrendered
himself to New Jersey authorities who wanted to prosecute him for
gambling.
When asked why Costello hadn’t been called before election, a
committee spokesman stated “We have nothing to ask Mr. Costello.”
Similar wariness was shown in Chicago. When former police captain
Dan Gilbert, who was Jake Arvey’s hand-picked candidate for sheriff of
Cook County, was on the stand at a secret hearing, he was questioned about
his wealth. Your authors had exposed him as the richest cop in the world, a
millionaire. Gilbert’s salary had never topped $9,000 a year, yet he admitted
at the closed hearing he owned more than $350,000—which he said he had
acquired through “speculation.” The committee dropped it then. Senator
Kefauver, in an interview, said, “Captain Gilbert was a forthright witness.”
When the Chicago Sun Times, a Democratic New Deal newspaper, got hold
of the minutes of the secret hearing and splashed the text on Page 1 a few
days before election, Kefauver threatened to hold someone in contempt for
the leak. Yet the committee did not explain why this information of public
interest had been bottled up before election, and why Gilbert’s bank
accounts and securities had not been scrutinized.
Later, Kefauver imperiously “directed” Eugene C. Pulliam, publisher of
the Indianapolis Star and News, “to discontinue” publication of a series
exposing gambling as revealed by previous committee investigations, under
penalty of a contempt citation.

While Estes was threatening other newspapermen with jail, columnist
Drew Pearson, his fervent supporter, was permitted to obtain access to
secret committee records, including highly confidential income tax returns.
Wherever the committee held hearings, its staff tried to pick on the
little guys, fingered as the goats. The procedure in Miami was to put six
local Jewish bookmakers out of business. The Mafia was muscling in on
them anyway. The dispossessed were scheduled to be closed up so the
Chicago Sicilian mob would have clear sailing in Miami as soon as the
hullabaloo about the crime investigation blew over next year.
Only half-hearted efforts were made to locate important figures. Where,
at any time, any were questioned or threatened with contempt, it was
because the situation was so wide open that no cover-up could be attempted
without bringing the newspapers down.
At this writing, Harry Russell, Chicago hoodlum, is the only
recalcitrant witness brought to trial. He’s a small potato, a Jew taking the
rap for the Mafia.
The position of the Committee has been that witnesses could refuse to
incriminate themselves only on federal offenses, but that if it was state
prosecution they feared, they had no immunity—tenuous reasoning any
way you look at it, though many lawyers say it’s legal.
But Kefauver has been letting his enthusiasm get the better of him, and
recently stated at an open hearing, “Don’t think we’re going to let you get
away with this. We are working closely with local prosecutors and will turn
our records over, particularly where anyone defies this committee.”
Though no comment appeared in the papers, the mob lawyers knew he
had played into their hands. He might have made the contempt stick before;
now, however, since he himself has stated he’s acting as an agent for the
states—though unofficial—it’s a million to one not one recalcitrant witness
will be convicted.
The only state in which the committee got tough before election was
Pennsylvania, where the municipal machines are Republican. In New York,
boss Flynn and Tammany were unmolested, and the onus was put on
Dewey for having tolerated gambling in Saratoga. There was no mention

that when Lehman, F.D.R.’s “good right arm,” was governor, gambling was
just as wide open there, and more so.
One of your reporters remembers seeing a limousine with New York
State license Number 1 parked under the portico of Piping Rock, a
notorious and expensive Saratoga gambling joint run by Luciano. That was
Governor Lehman’s car. It is possible his chauffeur was inside playing
dominoes.
But the strategy of the Democratic brain-trust miscarried. People in
New York knew Costello was running the town and trying to get control of
the state, even when the Senate committee, with all its power and money,
fiddled and twiddled. Chicagoans knew the Fischettis and Capones, Boss
Arvey, Dan Gilbert and Senator Scott Lucas were political bedfellows,
which charge was aired daily in the papers during the 1950 campaign.
Wherever the committee gave the Democrats a clean bill, the people
rebelled and kicked them out, most frequently on just that issue. But, where
the committee had tried to show the underworld is tied up with
Republicans, as in Pennsylvania, the GOP scored a great victory.
The two Democratic members of the committee, in addition to
Kefauver, are Lester Hunt, of Wyoming, and Herbert O’Conor of Maryland.
Where Hunt comes from, “crime” means cattle-rustling and claim-jumping.
O’Conor, however, is the Democratic leader of the Maryland organization,
which is in cahoots with one of the tightest and biggest Mafia
concentrations in the country. Not only were no hearings held in Maryland
before election, but Kefauver refused to send investigators into Prince
Georges County, described heretofore as one of the most vicious crime
spots of the country, even when citizens implored him to.
Instead of cracking down on murderers, procurers and dope-peddlers,
the committee wasted time, money and effort on an investigation of comics.
An effort was made to label the strips as the chief cause of America’s
crimes.
The Senate investigating committee has, through ignorance or by
design, been playing directly into the hands of the Mafia. Most Syndicate
key figures no longer have anything personally to do with gambling, except
as bankers and protectors. Gambling is a seasonal business and

investigations and clean-ups are discounted in advance, like rain in baseball
economy and warm weather in Sun Valley. These catastrophes are averaged
off over a long period. The computations contemplate temporary droughts
at the street level. Except for a few who will go to the can for a few months
and be paid for their time, nothing is disturbed. Bookmakers still take bets
right outside the Senate committee room.
If no gambling casinos run in Miami this winter they will next winter.
Meanwhile, those who want to gamble will fly to Havana, where the same
mob operates the wheels and crap games. Anyway, you can still bet on the
nags in Miami, clean-up or no. At this writing, at least two fully equipped
casinos are operating in the area.
But while the committee was grabbing front pages with its gambling
exposures, the big boys were immune in the affairs that really matter to
them, like manipulation of the stock market, black marketing, smuggling,
counterfeiting, dope and other forms of profitable deviltry, the proceeds of
which they invest in real estate and securities, so that as of now, the crime
cartel is more potent in the money marts of the world than all the
highbinders so long hissed at, the “international bankers.”
After Col. George White, Commr. Anslinger’s ace investigator, on loan
to the Committee, was withdrawn, Scott Lucas high-pressured Truman to
penalize White. White had turned up evidence that beat Lucas in Illinois.
Purposely or not, Halley even helped the giggling gangsters get rid of
the few rivals who remained. Few Sicilians got a going-over; but the heat
was turned on the handful of Jewish and Irish cheaters who survived.
Personally, Kefauver is a delightful and appealing personage, tall, a
former football-player with the charm of an F.D.R. and the fine, delicate
features of a Woodrow Wilson. He may well be your next Vice President.
After that—well, any American boy with no such start could be. His friends
kid him and accuse him of saying “Good morning, Mr. President” every
morning when he looks in the mirror as he shaves. Kefauver frowns at this.
He says, “The Chief in the White House will get sore.”
Kefauver’s main weakness is that he is a Don Quixote for “causes”
(except FEPC), has too much energy and tries to do too many things. He is
on almost every regular and special committee it is possible for a Senator to

make, so hasn’t time to do justice to any. He is in modest circumstances,
cannot be bought or bribed, though he could have had millions to throw the
investigation—as it is being thrown anyway. Many believe some of that
money went elsewhere, without his knowledge.
An employe of the committee, whose name will not be divulged by us,
disgusted by what went on, unburdened himself. He said “a fix was made in
Miami” to relieve a certain wanted hoodlum from testifying; and that
another deal was put over in Chicago to protect some of the most important
Mafistas. A fund was raised in Hollywood to choke off disclosures.
One investigator had as a chief recommendation, other than brief
service with the F.B.I., that he had been a cop in a mid-Western city. With
this background he was sent in to “bust” the mob in New York, a job that
many District Attorneys couldn’t do. He knew so little of New York that he
had to ask how to get to Times Square.
This investigator, “unable” to find Joe Adonis during a 90-day search,
was very diligent when it came to finding himself a new, high-paying job.
During the course of an investigation into mob control of legitimate
business, it was testified that one Bill Giglio, now under indictment on a tax
rap, had “muscled” into a sugar and candy company during the last war, and
that as a result of such activities he now owned a research and development
laboratory, the entire output of which was being sold to a large and
respected chemical corporation.
While going over Giglio’s books the Kefauver man naturally had
occasion to call on the large corporation, and he ingratiated himself with its
officers, who were not called to testify in Washington. The result was that,
right smack in the middle of the Kefauver investigations, this dick quit to
head up the plant-security set-up of the big corporation, which now has a lot
of war contracts.
But the payoff is that, a couple of years ago, before the Kefauver
Committee was thought of, the same fellow was in charge of security at a
Long Island plant making restricted military products. There it was
discovered that the future Kefauver agent was protecting the bookmakers in
the plant, and he was booted out after the F.B.I. was tipped off. The book at
this plant was operated by Joe Adonis. Kefauver was so informed, but did
not fire his agent.

Federal and state enforcement agencies are squawking that the mob is
getting access to confidential files through leaks in the committee.
But if the committee had wanted to probe, the goods were in reach.
Individuals all over the country sought to put facts in its hands. Whenever
possible, those who managed the investigations looked the other way.
Bill Drury, the honest Chicago ex-police captain, who was slain by
gunmen last September, might have been alive now were it not for this
committee. We were in constant communication with Drury, in fact Jack
Lait received a letter from him in New York the morning after he was
assassinated. Almost his last act was mailing it. When the committee first
got under way, your authors suggested to Kefauver that he hire Drury and
his partner, Captain Tom Connelly, as investigators. These men knew more
first-hand about the underworld than almost anyone alive. Counsel Halley
interposed. He told us the men were not “reliable,” because they had been
fired from the Chicago police force. That was their chief recommendation
to us. They had been rooked out of the crookedest force in the country
because they were fearless, honest and untouchable.
We told Kefauver the only way he could convince us his investigation
was on the up-and-up was to hire these men. He promised us he would.
That was in July, 1950.
Meanwhile, Drury and Connelly sought to contact Kefauver, failing
which they tried to get in touch with Halley and the chief investigator of the
committee. They hated the mob so hotly, they offered to work for nothing,
though they were poor men. Had Drury been retained as an investigator,
he’d still be living. No cop has ever been killed except in actual combat.
The underworld never murders a policeman who is going about his
business. But an ex-cop—yoho.
A lot of misinformation has been published about what preceded the
actual assassination, last September 25. After his death, committee
employes realized they would have to explain Drury’s frequent phone calls.
A story was dreamed up in Chicago to the effect that Drury was seeking
“protection” and that Halley, after a couple of weeks’ consideration, had
agreed to arrange for it. That runs for the end book. Drury never asked
anyone for protection. He was the bravest man we ever knew. He often
traveled without a gun, but the mobsters feared his fists more than bullets.

We spoke to him a few days before he died. He was not frightened. He was
angry. He told us he had been trying to contact committee investigators for
weeks to give them information. He said that ever since he had outlined to
them what he was prepared to prove he got brushed off when he called
again.
The Democratic Chicago Sun-Times charged categorically that Drury
was rubbed out because someone on the Kefauver Committee “leaked” to
the mobsters what Drury said he had the goods on. He told us his
investigations implicated someone on the committee’s staff.
A few days after the murder, Kefauver phoned us long distance to tell
us to get all our records and correspondence concerning Drury together as
he was going to subpena us at once, in an effort to solve the cowardly
crime. That was October 1, 1950. As these words were being typed in
February, 1951, the subpena remained unserved and the assassination
unpunished.
On the other hand, Lait and Mortimer were under considerable pressure
from important personages, Republicans as well as Democrats, “to lay off
Halley,” and place the blame for the miscarriage of the Kefauver committee
on the chairman instead of on his staff. We refused to be bought, bribed,
threatened or intimidated.
By resolution, the original life of the committee was until February 28,
but it is probable that additional hearings will be authorized for March.
The plan, as this went to press, was to save all the fireworks for a final
blow-out in New York, at which the glamor pusses of the underworld, such
as Virginia Hill, dubbed by us “Mafia Rose,” would be called for the
publicity value. Virginia was served with much hullabaloo in September,
but was saved six months to hypo the last act. Frank Costello was also
slated to be called if he “cared to talk.”
The big boys have brazenly stood on their “constitutional rights” on the
advice of high-priced counsel who assured them their chances against
conviction on contempt, which is a misdemeanor punishable by a year in a
Federal “country club,” were about a hundred to one.
It was decided by the Mafia Grand Council that if things got too hot,
Costello would have to be the goat. He has been getting too much publicity

for the conservative rulers of the Unione, who still live in cold-water
tenements with fat old-country wives.
They resent the airs put on by the glamor-boy hoods, who, they feel,
and with some justification, are putting the finger of the law on the
syndicate.
One Mafia faction is for going further. In the event the spotlight hits
Costello his number is up. He has so been told by Tony Ricci, alias
Goebels, who manages many such things.
We have not seen it, nor have we any confidential information about
the contents of the committee’s final report, but we are willing to bet it will
be along these lines:

1) There is crime.
2) No political party has the monopoly on it.
3) There seems to be a Mafia.
4) Gamblers should pay their income tax.
5) Kids should go to Sunday school.
6) Communities should appoint Crime Prevention Societies.
7) Because of the international situation, let’s forget it and call the
whole thing off.

The plight of honest Senator Kefauver is not unique. Wherever
possible, the underworld uses such characters to do their dirty work. They
fall for it, probably because dreamers and social planners are gullible, not
practical like their more conservative brethren. That’s why political bosses
frequently back them and surprise semi-suspicious suckers who think they
know things.
For instance, when the late Boss Kelly of Chicago, one of the most
ruthless thieves who ever lived, thought he saw the handwriting on the wall,
he nominated good men to run for Governor and Senator. At no time after
Adlai Stevenson went to Springfield and Professor Paul Douglas got to
Washington did these Utopians ever open their mouths or do anything, or
even complain about the iniquities in Chicago, though we told plenty and a
lot of other dirt wasn’t confidential.