Washington Confidential

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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?

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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.

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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.

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The first thing a Congressional investigating committee gets, the sine qua non, is an appropriation. The next is a sheaf of time-tables. Then comes the joyful junketing-time to remote places—remote from the capital and remote from the subject.

The Kefauver committee made the grand tour—California and Florida, Chicago and New York, about everything but Yellowstone Park. Its golden fleece was gambling. They could have cleaned up their quest for about $1.60 on a taxi meter.

All the evidence, all the interstate involvements and local conditions which are the particular province of Congress, they could find in Washington. We did. All gambling in the capital is interstate because it is inseparable from its lines into and out of Maryland and Virginia.

We outlined the setup of the nationwide underworld Syndicate. We brought it to the District line. At that point the on-the-spot gamblers take over.

They have been mentioned as Emmitt Warring, king of Georgetown; Attilio Acalotti, “mayor” of Dupont Circle; Sam Beard and his partner Gary Quinn, and the Sussman brothers. Of money gouged from suckers, 90 per cent clears through them, and “Black Jack” Kelleher, Frank Erickson’s local observer.

A curious situation here is that “policy” or “numbers” gets a bigger play than bookmaking. The reverse is true almost everywhere else. The reason ascribed by the cognoscenti is that while everyone earns a fairly good living, few have enough surplus cash for important horse betting. But numbers tickets can be bought for from one cent up. That game is far more profitable for the operators, too. Bookmakers can’t do much better than putting a ceiling on track odds. They must follow the mutuels, though they stop at a 20-to-1 payoff. Bookies who can’t lay off enough often lose on a day.

The winning numbers pay only 600 to 1, whereas 999 numbers are drawn, and the draw can be fixed.

In most towns, the numbers play is predominantly by Negroes. In Washington it is general, with white government employes in the majority. The policy slips are usually sold by colored runners, often messengers and elevator boys in government buildings. The salesman withholds 25 per cent of the gross. Average booking is $50 a day.

The take from the numbers, in pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters, is deposited in the branch of the Hamilton Bank at 20th and Pennsylvania Avenue, in the Foggy Bottom section. The Congressional committee investigating local crime ascertained that this bank did not report the large deposits of small coins. The deposits are withdrawn each day and transferred to Maryland, where local representatives of the Syndicate divide the receipts and send its cut to the Mafia in New York.

The sale of numbers is so widespread, the police can make only token arrests. Invariably, when the peddler, usually a Negro, is locked up, a representative of a bonding outfit appears at once and posts bail. Next day a member of the Charlie Ford law firm appears in court. Several defendants testified the lawyers paid their fines. The operation will be described in detail later.

Numbers sellers are picked up all over the town, and they are not coy. For instance, police got a squeal that two men were selling policy slips from an auto parked in the 1200 block of 7th Street, NW. Cops questioned them and numbers slips “just rolled out of a paper bag on the car floor.” The prisoners were very “surprised,” the more so when 200 numbers books were found in the car’s trunk.

Vice squad dicks stopped in to get a shine at 209 K Street NW. They saw numbers lying on a chair next to two men. When they searched them they found many more in their possession.

Policy is a lottery. Under federal law, that is a felony. But the only way to cut in on the racket is to get tough. Twenty-five-dollar fines, paid by lawyers reimbursed by the bosses, are no deterrent. But Judge Thomas D. Quinn handcuffed the police even on that. He served notice on the U. S. Attorney’s office that he “will not tolerate” prosecutors delaying court action on gambling cases until they can get grand jury indictments.

According to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the government is within its rights requesting these continuances, but Curtis P. Mitchell, an attorney for some arrested as gamblers, alleged the civil rights of numbers suspects were being disregarded.

Judge Edward M. Curran spiked the government’s case when it attempted to clean up gambling in Thomas Circle. Though one defendant pleaded guilty to operation of a lottery, Judge Curran ruled police did not have enough “probable cause” to arrest the others, who were admittedly in possession of numbers slips.

Washington judges openly acknowledge the fact that the fines they impose are paid by the bosses.

Judge Henry A. Schweinhaut, of the United States District Court, frivolously presented a numbers operator named “Lemon” a chance to prove there is honor in Washington’s gaming fraternity.

He asked him to come forward and provide the $300 fine for an aged Negro who was convicted before him of taking numbers bets.

“Lemon put up bond for the defendant. Maybe Lemon will pay the fine,” said the District Solomon. “I’ll give him a chance to prove his loyalty to an old employe.”

Defense Attorney Mitchell, who has figured in these pages before, quickly disillusioned His Honor. “As a practical matter, a numbers backer wouldn’t be apt to pay a $300 fine for a man who only had a three-dollar-a-day numbers book,” he explained.

But the judge winked and said, “If Lemon doesn’t pay, it might get around that he will let one of his men stay in jail. It might reduce his prestige in the fraternity.”

Did we hear someone talking about legalized and licensed gambling? This is it, with a bow from the U. S. District Court.

In recent years the top rulers of the netherworld have disassociated themselves as much as possible from street-level vice and crime, preferring to remain on the sidelines, where their take comes in clean.

The situation in Washington is a pattern and example for the rest of the country, because, for obvious reasons, the tygoons have preferred to have no direct dealings with law-breaking in the nation’s capital.

The method whereby the take from policy, Washington’s chief form of gambling, goes upstairs is unique and ingenious, the product of brilliant legal scheming.

First of all, each local numbers bank is, for the records, completely independent. Its operator, who employs the runners who actually sell the lottery tickets, is supposed to be completely unaffiliated, and it would take a smarter guy than any government lawyer to prove him otherwise.

In the beginning, most of the local banks were really unaffiliated. Since then, on occasion, some have tried to remain that way. This is what happens when they do: The Big Mob sends in “customers” to bet a certain number; then, through its ability to control the daily winning number, that number comes up and the banker goes broke.

But if he wants to play ball, they sell him an “insurance policy” which guarantees him from undue loss—which is prevented by the control of the winning number. His daily premium is the payoff money.

The funniest one happened when a policy salesman asked police to lock him up because one of his clients had a $60 hit which the runner couldn’t pay off—having lost the money playing the numbers. It came about when a cop admonished Lawrence Fields, obviously drunk, to quiet down. Fields begged to be arrested on the numbers charge. The cop asked Fields whether he realized the seriousness of what he was saying. Fields replied, “Nothing will happen. My boss pays protection.”

The boss was identified in court as Sam Beard. Beard claims he is in the pickle business, but he once served 53 months in jail for gambling and 13 months for tax evasion. Fields got 90 days. His client is waiting outside the District jail.

But don’t think bookmaking is a peanut industry either. Local authorities estimate the take of bookmakers within the District at $100,000,000 a year—not gross business, but net profits.

Horse money goes to Prince Georges, Maryland, as already described. Snags Lewis, the wire service representative, transmits the payoff and profits to New York and New Jersey.

Though Bernice Franklin, former sweetheart of Attilio Acalotti, testified in federal court that at least three members of the Metropolitan Police were paid off by gamblers in her presence, Washington authorities never show any enthusiasm toward investigating charges of corruption against cops.

When District Commissioner John Russell Young testified recently before a special grand jury probing Washington gambling, he was not asked about the possibility of bribes being paid by the gamblers. Assistant U. S. Attorney John W. Fihelly, conducting the inquiry, left it flat and started on “several weeks vacation.”

You can freely make a bet on a horse in almost any place in Washington except a church—with elevator boys in government buildings, at corner cigar and drug stores, lunch stands and bellboys. If you still can’t find a place, the ingenuity of the Washington bookmaker will solve your problem. For instance, the police said they broke the biggest gambling brokerage ever operated in Washington with the arrest of two men in a “doctor’s office,” on California Avenue, N.W. Police said one of the men they arrested was a physician. He told them he could make more money with betting slips than with prescriptions.

“There wasn’t even a band-aid in the place.” But there were the following items:

Betting slips; a looseleaf notebook which appeared to be a gambling broker’s record, containing $75,000 in IOU’s from all over the country; two promissory notes totaling $35,000; $134 in cash, an expensive radio, and a clock with a sweep second-hand. While police went through the place the phone rang. A voice on the other end “started to give me hell for a bum steer, saying the odds had dropped to 8 to 5,” Sergt. James Roche said.

Police Lt. David McCutcheon told the District license board that a gambler paid the proprietors of Filo’s restaurant, 1700-A 9th Street, NW, $200 a month for the concession to take bets there. At this writing Filo’s is still in business.

During the seasons, Washington gamblers make book on baseball, football, basketball and hockey. Walter Lephfew and Skylar Wilson were arrested this year in what is described as a $2,000,000 football lottery.

We placed bets with bookies who hang out in the G & W Lunch Room, 17th and L.

Much of the local gambling is controlled by Greeks who operate in restaurants and private clubs.

We saw gambling going on openly on the second floor of a building on the northwest corner of 9th and H; also in the Greek restaurant on the second floor of 9th and G.

A dice and horse room was being operated over the Bazaar restaurant, at 17th and L. Say that Steve Akaris sent you. That’s how we got in.

You can find roulette in a place at 5th and G., also over a restaurant in the 100 block of Vermont Avenue.

Don’t think gambling doesn’t account for plenty of violence in the District.

On recommendation of the District license board, the commissioners turned down a police request that they revoke a billiard hall license of William G. Heflin. Earlier in the year, Joseph H. “Big Joe” Scheve, a convicted gambler, was fatally shot there. Before that, James T. Skeens shot Edward Ryan in the leg there. Police charged the billiard hall was frequented by criminals. We saw bookmakers taking bets there.

A 25-year-old fireman with twenty pairs of crooked dice in his pocket was found stabbed to death in an alley as an aftermath of a crap game in which 15 persons participated. Every die was without 1, 3 and 5, making it impossible to toss a 7. The dice were of all sizes and colors, “suitable for almost any occasion.”

One-armed bandits are banned by District and by the new Federal law. However, $100 federal stamps have been purchased for 50 such machines, operating at this writing in the city of Washington. Those in officers’ service clubs have since been removed, but many operated brazenly in places open to the public.

Pinball machines, illegal in most big cities, especially in New York, and not permitted in the Virginia counties across the Potomac, are a popular indoor sport in Washington. They are found in restaurants, drugstores, bottle clubs and playlands. Many are used as gambling devices. The federal tax of $10 on each has been paid for 1263.

Federal records show 15,000 one-armed bandits and gambling devices registered for Maryland, of which 5,000 are in the District suburbs.

Most slot machines are manufactured in Chicago. Those destined for areas in D.C. or nearby, where they are against the law, were shipped to wholesalers in Danville, Va., then distributed sub rosa to Washington and Baltimore.

Payoffs are pretty lousy.

The new Federal slot machine law is a laugh. It was dreamed up in an effort to stave off Kefauver’s investigation.

The only Senator who really fought it came from Nevada, where the one-armed bandits are legal, and into which, under the new Federal law, they can be imported freely. Nevada had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

The same Senator fought contempt citations against recalcitrant Kefauver witnesses, proving, to Estes’ surprise, what we had told him about Democratic-underworld alliances.

The joker in any statute forbidding the interstate transportation of slot machines is they are manufactured from standard and interchangeable parts which can be assembled anywhere by any competent mechanic. Instead of shipping the finished device, the Costello interests will merely send the parts to local distributors who will put them together—and save freight costs.

The underworld’s Washington representatives actually lobbied for the passage of the bill, figuring that its adoption would look like a solid accomplishment to the public, and take the “heat” off other monkey business.

Attorney General McGrath and the New Deal liberals who plugged for the measure had another reason. They hoped it would put the F.B.I. on the spot. Its enforcement being impossible, Hoover and his G-men would take the blame—either that or the F.B.I. would have to hire thousands of fly-cops and become a new, super Prohibition unit, exposed to wholesale graft and bribery, which would please the Reds and the crooks.

We don’t think gambling will ever be eliminated. We don’t think the public wants it to be. It is a human appetite, like sex and liquor, and no sumptuary legislation can wipe it out. But gambling corrupts law enforcement officers. While wagering is illegal and undercover, this is inevitable. When cops take bribes from bookmakers they feel they do no essential harm. But it’s a start and soon they will sell out to anyone.

As to the cure, no two agree. Even your authors have divided opinions. One believes in legalizing gambling, the other points out Nevada, where it is legal, as the horrible example. There the same mobsters control it and law enforcement officers are bought up as usual.

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No thanks is due United States Attorney George Morris Fay for the fact that figures and information regarding the local wave of crime are still available.

Shortly after he took office, in 1946, Fay rewrote the Constitution and closed off the court files from inspection by the press on felony cases. Not satisfied, last year he tightened up in Municipal Court, introducing a form of censorship for newsmen trying to check facts.

But we finagled some figures:

Per capita computations show Washington recorded one murder for every 25,555 persons in 1949. But Chicago, generally conceded the gunmen’s playground, had one murder for every 26,902. Washington jumped to one for every 11,000 in 1950.

On the basis of population, Washington led 16 cities of 500,000 or more in aggravated (felonious) assaults during the first six months of 1950; and it was second only to Chicago in the total number of such cases. Washington had 1,911, exceeded only by Chicago’s 2,184, and Chicago is five times as large as Washington!

Though crime in Washington decreased slightly in 1950, as compared to 1949, the District is high among the leaders, per capita and in total number of offenses, in every major classification.

Crime has always been a popular pastime here. It increased so alarmingly during the first years of the New Deal that a group of public-spirited citizens formed the Washington Criminal Justice Association in 1936 to help combat it.

The Attorney General in that year called Washington “the crime capital of the world.” The backers hoped for a virile, hard-hitting body, similar to the Chicago Crime Commission, which under Virgil Peterson, its executive director, has done so much to spotlight the workings of the underworld there, or like Danny Sullivan’s Greater Miami Commission.

The original organizers of the Washington association included a number of do-gooders, such as Eugene Meyer, who bars the identification of Negroes in his paper. The body soon found itself struggling without sufficient funds. It is now supported by the United Community Services, which allots it only enough to pay for a director, an assistant and a secretary. The able director, Edward J. Flynn, is a competent, imaginative individual, handcuffed by lack of funds and public disinterest. He can do little more than keep a record of crimes as they occur, compile statistics and offer recommendations. They are good, but no one wants them.

The situation has gotten worse rather than better since the Attorney General castigated the city. In 1936 there were only about 7,000 serious crimes. The number dropped to about 4,000 in 1944. But by last year it had skyrocketed to 13,000. It is now slightly lower.

Washington is still the crime capital.

In other chapters we touch briefly on the so-called “organized” crimes—prostitution, gambling, and narcotics. This chapter deals mainly with offenses of violence and those against property, which are usually regarded as unorganized.

But director Flynn agrees with your authors that, with the exception of private crimes of passion, occasional robberies by hungry men and juvenile delinquency, all crime is now organized to a degree. Flynn said:

“Highly organized criminal groups, carrying out skillfully planned operations, exist in Washington.”

The police disagree with him, naturally. But the record is clear for any observer who follows the entire procedure through, from commission to arrest, bail-bonding and arraignment. The combine appears in the fencing of the loot. Burglars in Washington have a union to which they contribute a percentage of their take in return for bail when arrested, legal representation and fixes where possible. No professional burglars operate until they make arrangements in advance for disposition of their stolen goods, and, thereafter, the other services. Non-members of the union cannot secure bail at any price and are denied the services of the top criminal lawyers.

Why has the nation’s capital more crime than other cities? Flynn says it is indicative of community lethargy. He thinks that is not unique in the District, but is equally true in every city. If that is so, there must be a special reason why Washington is more lawless.

Others blame it on the lack of home rule and local government. Yet every investigation and survey elsewhere shows that corrupt municipal city hall gangs are the protectors of vice and crime. The high rates in Washington cannot be blamed on the foreign-born, because only six percent of the population is non-native. As we showed earlier, Negroes commit most of the crime. But there are Negro criminals in other large cities, especially in New York and Chicago, where they do likewise. Why then are Washington’s Negroes even more felonious?

There is no doubt that Washington is a cesspool of iniquity and a Utopia for criminals. The setup of the local government and the calibre of the men who enforce its laws and sit on its benches are partly responsible. Archaic and often ridiculous laws and regulations are a contributing factor.

For instance, guns are easy to buy in second-hand stores. There is no law requiring a license to keep a gun in a home. That forbidding the carrying of one in a car is a dead letter. It is a felony to carry a concealed weapon on the person without a license, but there are few arrests and fewer convictions for this, because the District courts and prosecutor feel it is no offense to carry an unloaded weapon, even if a clip of cartridges is in the same pocket. An expert could load the gun without removing it from his pocket.

The fantastic interpretation of laws by the U. S. Attorney and the federal courts has handcuffed the cops in their efforts to clean the town.

Not long ago a Negro was arrested for kicking and assaulting another man in a bus station. Though police found an unlicensed pistol on the prisoner’s person, and bullets in another pocket, the U. S. Attorney refused to prosecute for either the assault or concealed weapon. When queried, a representative of his office said it was obvious the colored man was a nice guy, because he didn’t load his gun and shoot his victim, who lay helpless on the floor. The prisoner had a record. When asked at a later date whether, in view of all the circumstances since developed, the D.A.’s office would prosecute, the spokesman said, “No. No judge will convict a colored man here for a minor offense like that.”

The federal judges are lenient because they are federal judges. Of the 308 with life appointments throughout the United States, 224 are Democrats. During the first 17 years of the Roosevelt-Truman administrations, 289 judges were given such appointments, of whom 272 were Democrats. The same ratio shows up in the District of Columbia. The Democratic judges are the choices and flunkies of corrupt city machines or of unions, left-wingers and fellow-travelers’ organizations. The city bosses’ men are lenient to law-breakers because their masters order them to be so. The radicals’ nominees seldom throw the book at a defendant, because Commies, pinkos and phony progressives hate cops, refer to them as cossacks.

A captain of the Metropolitan Police told us that even honest Washington coppers seldom make arrests any more, because they know what will happen when they get in court. The judge will harass, bullyrag and humiliate them. It is not unusual for a District jurist to castigate the policemen, call them liars and framers, then discharge the prisoners without hearing defense evidence. When the defendant is a Negro, the cops know they are going to get a going-over from the bench.

In 1937, after four years of Democratic administration, 90 percent of all major crimes went unpunished. Since then, largely through the efforts of Flynn’s Washington Criminal Justice Association, and more recently of counsel Fischbach’s revelations, about which more later, judges have been afraid to be too raw, and are giving stiffer sentences and holding prisoners in higher bail.

However, out of 811 of those indicted for major offenses in the last report period who did not enter pleas of guilty, only 281, about one third, were found guilty. Of those found guilty, the largest number received light sentences, far less than the maximum authorized by law. Even among those who pleaded guilty, more than 20 percent were permitted to assume lesser offenses.

An example of the penalties meted out for serious offenses is seen in those convicted of first- and second-degree murder: of 22, only three got sentences of 15 years to life; one drew 80 months to 20 years; all the 18 others got less than 20 years, with terms tapering down to one of three-to-nine on a first-degree murder, and one of one-to-four on a second-degree murder. None got the chair.

Disposition records on cleaning up major crimes are made to look good through an ingenious invention known as “Willie Pye” arrests. Whenever anyone is pinched in Washington and decides to take a plea, the cops induce him to admit every other unsolved crime of the same nature which is still open on the books. If the accused agrees to take the rap for these unsolved felonies, thus getting the police off the hook, they do not present further evidence to the grand jury, and the felon is not tried for the other offenses. Thus many complaints are charged off and police take official credit for solving crimes where no solution has eventuated.

The practice grew to such an extent about a decade ago that a public stench arose. After a conference between law enforcement officials and prosecutors, it was agreed to end it. But it goes right on and the evidence of it appears every year in tabulations of “cleared by other means.” There were 667 so disposed of in 1949.

It is believed the term “Willie Pye arrest” first came into police parlance in Washington when a man so named lived there, about 50 years ago. His business was crime. Willie was indicted on two housebreakings and confessed to many more, which were then written off as closed.

An unnamed desk sergeant immortalized Willie by using his name for the practice of shutting numerous open cases by getting multiple pleas and choosing to proceed on only the last.

The blowup came when Leroy Mason, who was doing a stretch in Occuquan Work House for three robberies, was still being charged for crimes going on on the outside. A nameless Washington newspaperman composed a deathless ditty, as offensive to grammar as the sentiment is to decency:

Though the F.B.I. reported a six percent drop of crime in Washington this year, the local jail population reached a new high. The courts sent 21,062 to District jail in 1950, an all-time record. Meanwhile, the police had closed less than 60 percent of all cases involving serious felony, which by the way, was an improvement.

Arrests for the more serious crimes by race were as follows:

Offense	Total	White	Colored
Arson	34	13	21
Aggravated Assault	2956	342	2614
Embezzlement and Fraud	201	146	55
Forgery and Counterfeiting	100	72	28
Grand Larceny	1099	326	773
Housebreaking	2878	634	2244
Homicides	55	10	45
Incest	5	1	4
Rape and Carnal Knowledge	191	39	152
Receiving Stolen Property	59	31	28
Robbery	1033	230	803
TOTAL	8611	1844	6767

The high incidence of Negro and juvenile crime was dealt with in detail in previous chapters. One reason there are so many colored law-breakers in Washington is that many judges in nearby Southern communities order Negro defendants to get out of town, instead of holding them for trial, and these gravitate to Washington.

Tough guys of both races hang around on the streets and insult passers-by with impunity, snatch purses, stick up pedestrians and mug and yoke.

Most crimes in Washington are committed from Friday through Sunday. Almost everyone has a two-day weekend, and the drinking and celebrating begins Friday night.

The First, Second, Third and Thirteenth Police precincts account for 57 percent of all serious crimes. The First is “downtown,” with tourists, transients and night life. The others are predominantly Negro.

Among the more profitable of the organized crimes are these:

Housebreaking, comparatively easy because of the large number of private homes and two- and three-story detached apartment buildings. The stolen goods are fenced in East Baltimore Street, Baltimore.

Auto thefts, growing more serious.

Bank robberies, not uncommon.

Pickpockets and cold-finger men find easy loot at the countless cocktail parties and other functions constantly given by lobbyists, conventioneers and diplomats. It is a cinch to crash these. Jewel-thieves have rich pastures. Social climbers and ambassadors’ women are loaded with rocks and constantly display them. A big gem haul is sent to Holland for recutting, via reverse channels used by the Mafia to smuggle dope. The reset ice is smuggled back.

Because of the ease with which fixes are maneuvered, the lenient sentences, the failure of local courts to extra-penalize repeaters, Washington is indeed a picnic-pasture for crooks from all over the country. When other places get too hot to hold them, they hop a rattler for the capital.

The pickings are easy. The payoff is high. The risks are minimal. The burg is a pushover.

Sex is a crime, too; a statutory felony. The incidence of such offenses in the Nation’s capital is so great as to be startling. The nature of them nauseated even a couple of hardboiled reporters like us.

The figures are public property, compiled by the F.B.I., the local cops and the Davis committee. Howard Whitman, who has been doing a series of articles based largely on newspaper morgue material, printed the computations in Collier’s, later put them into a book on prurient misdemeanors.

Whitman slanted his findings to Collier’s special-pleading formula and found that “crime is a slum-connected characteristic.”

That is a laugh. Washington is freer of depressed living areas than any city in the country.

“And Negroes are ghettoized in these slums,” adds Whitman gratuitously.

Whitman quotes with approval the Committee for Racial Democracy which urged that “training in minority group problems be instituted immediately as a part of the regular in-service training of all policemen,” the non-sequitur supposition being that the colored folk out-rape, out-maim, out-steal and out-mugg whites eight to one because the coppers haven’t been trained in minority group relations.

Nor are sex-criminals, white or colored, permanently taken off the streets after once being caught. Washington is a recidivists’ paradise because of its ridiculous so-called “collateral rule” which takes the place of posting a bond.

A defendant could, and still can, despite a promise of the courts to tighten up, post a $25 collateral instead of a bond with a police captain. Thereupon if he does not appear in a court he is automatically found guilty and the collateral is forfeited as a fine. And that closes the case instead of the judge issuing a bench warrant as in other jurisdictions.

In the case of violent sex cases, the maximum collateral is $500 forfeit in the same way. A new judicial rule says all aggravated sex cases must be taken to court, but they are not.

Abortions are cheap and easy to obtain. Police are able to arrest only a few of the operators, and then only when complications arise. Even then, few are convicted. This racket is highly protected by an interstate ring allied with the Mafia. A ten million a year branch was uncovered in San Francisco, built around a prominent female Chinese physician, not publicly involved because of her high political and social connections. She is a close friend of Virginia Hill, gal friend of the late Bugsy Siegel.

Curiously, Washington is the nation-wide headquarters for the mail order sale of dirty pictures and post cards. Why this should be so is puzzling, though those who operate the business here face no tougher penalty than elsewhere because it is a Federal offense anyway.

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We mean the poor underpaid bulls, who enforce it—or, anyway, are supposed to.

Last year the Attorney General of the United States held a conference of mayors and other local law enforcement officers to try to figure out the causes of crime. When it was over, we button-holed a mayor of a Western city and asked him the following question:

“How come no one mentioned that hardly a crime or a vice violation is possible without the connivance of or the knowledge of local officials?”

The mayor replied, “That’s an easy one to answer. We are all local officials.”

We do not charge that the really terrible conditions in Washington are the fault of the Metropolitan Police. Most of the cops on that overworked force are honest. If given the opportunity they would love to do their duty. Most policemen all over the country are honest, too. They are slaves of a setup with the establishment of which they had nothing to do and which they are powerless to correct. Big payoffs are not made to men in the ranks. The orders go out from up above. Patrolmen follow orders. When they see others getting, they often ask what’s the use of being honest themselves? Why make pinches when the prisoners are always sprung from up above?

For many years strenuous efforts have been made to sell the idea that the federal government and everything connected with it is straight and efficient. The Metropolitan Police force is an agency of the United States government. Only Gilbert and Sullivan could do justice to it, as a comic opera. But the laughs are costly.

The boss of the force carries the complicated title of Major and Superintendent. His name is Robert J. Barrett and he got the job because he was related to the former chief.

A fantastic story made the front pages last year, then was hushed and forgotten. Police Captain Anthony Richitt charged under oath, before a Congressional investigating committee, that he had been ordered by Police Inspector Jeffreys to turn in a false report on a gambling complaint. He also swore that the District crime investigating sub-committee was worrying the police chief, who, he said, was on intimate terms with gambler Emmitt Warring; and further, that Warring delivered messages from the chief to precinct captains.

Such charges elsewhere would have popped up a seething scandal, at least a grand jury to-do, with the probability of new brass in the police department. It took a long time, but even in Chicago the police commissioner, the county chairman and the millionaire chief investigator for the State’s Attorney quit after publication of Chicago Confidential.

You think anything like that happened in Washington? In this home of laissez faire the grand jury wasn’t interested even to the extent of whitewashing the mud.

The incident was treated as a private feud. It was officially settled on the records when Richitt apologized to his boss, in a public apology, six words long:

“I regret the incident ever occurred.”

No explanation, no retraction, no withdrawal of the charges.

Barrett’s reply was nearly as short:

“Richitt has complied with the orders of the department as far as I am concerned.”

Thus was departmental satisfaction restored. But there was no satisfaction for the public. No determination was ever made as to whether the chief had ordered his subordinate to falsify arrest records. It was decided by all concerned that this was of no interest to the tax-payers, the grand jury included.

Barrett had forgotten he had told the press he had what he called “evidence tending to show perjury” on the subject of Captain Richitt. Chairman Davis of the House District Sub-Committee, before which the stink started, got into the act and announced he, too, had closed the book on the affair.

The terms of the deal apparently were such that neither Barrett nor Richitt are ever again to question the other’s activities. Some months before, evidence was brought forth that Richitt had bought seven autos in addition to the one he was driving during 27 post-war months, when civilians could get cars only in the black market. No explanation was volunteered by anyone, though Richitt had sold most of the cars as soon as he bought them.

Your authors know this is a common practice in police departments all over the country.

A sergeant of the Bridgeport, Connecticut, force was fired for similar activities. Many cops used their emergency priorities to order cars which they then transferred to dealers, without ever taking possession. The cops rarely handled the money. The dealer went with them to accept delivery and paid the purchase price, the cops chiseling from $500 to $1,000 on each transaction.

When we arrived in Washington to dig for this book, we asked: “Who makes the fixes?”

In other cities, contacts are closed with precinct, ward and district leaders of the political party in office. If you want to retail women, make book, land pickpocketing privileges or get a summons or a violation squared, you go to see this local boss.

If money is to be passed it goes through him. Many favors are granted in return for party loyalty, votes or campaign contributions. He takes care of those, too. The leader passes the word along to city hall, where it is relayed to the local police station. In some towns, Chicago for example, the channels are short-circuited in advance, so the leader can go direct to his police captain.

But what happens in Washington, where there are no voters, so there are no district leaders? How do you fix the cops? Who is the collector?

Some naive Washingtonians said there is no such thing. There is no collecting. There is no graft.

That is cockeyed. The payoff is through the local police captain, who acts as the collector for anyone in the District Government who is to be fixed. The captain retains his own percentage of the boodle, plus anything he can steal, then passes the balance up above, through the regularly established channels.

Such a system plays hell with the poor cops on the street. The guy who pays the captain for protection knows he doesn’t have to take care of underlings. The most the uniformed patrolman is good for is a meal, a cigar and an occasional five-spot. Vice squad men and detectives can sometimes do a little modest shaking, but not enough to get rich on.

A police captain told us this story: Two Chicago detectives came to Washington to pick up a wanted prisoner. It is the custom among all police departments to entertain cops visiting on business. Washington has no fund for such purposes. Its men are so poorly paid, they can’t treat. But the two assigned to keep the visitors happy had worked the bright-light belt, so they knew where they could cuff a few small night clubs. During the evening, one Chicago detective asked the Washington cop, “What is your job worth?”

The reply was, “I get $3,300 a year?”

“No, I don’t mean your salary; what’s it worth?”

The Washingtonian looked puzzled. The policemen from the Windy City said, “You can talk freely. We’re friends. No wise cop in Chicago would take the job unless he could pick up at least $10,000 a year on the side.”

Washington policemen who can average $20 a week extra consider themselves lucky. Not so many higher officers.

Internal Revenue agents, who never allow themselves to be quoted, told us some officers have safe deposit-vaults choked with big bills. But many others are honest, like chumps. They have to go along with the crooks to hold their jobs. They can’t squawk without implicating too many important higher-ups.

Salaries of Washington policemen range from a take-home pay of only $200 a month for the lowest-grade patrolman to about $10,000 a year gross for the chief. Military ranks are used. Private, sixth grade, the highest non-officer rank, pays $3,750 a year. A corporal gets $4,025, a sergeant $4,228, a lieutenant $4,600, and a captain $5,300. That’s the salary on which Captain Richitt bought eight cars in 27 months.

If the fix you’re after is of a nature which the local precinct captain can’t handle, you go through a certain District Commission employe who is the bagman for one of the three District Commissioners. The Commission is the immediate boss of the police department. Any commissioner can issue orders to the chief.

There are occasions, however, when a really strong in is needed. Washington is federal territory and is ruled nominally by the national administration. In such an instance, the guy who wants to call the cops off has to try other doors. The odds are, even if he is in business in Washington, he has his roots elsewhere. Many Washingtonians maintain voting addresses in the states from which they originally came. Others have friends, partners and relatives in various states.

The procedure is to make the connection through a Democratic county committeeman back home or through a member of Congress in the home state. Congress is the ruler of the District, and almost every Congressman is as busy as a Chicago alderman fixing everything from parking tags to felony warrants.

It is similar when a cop needs influence to square a rap or get an appointment or a promotion. Elsewhere we know that being a paid-up member of the local political club never hurt the career of a policeman. Here there are no political clubs, and most cops are not even Washingtonians. Their jobs are not confined to locals, but are open to all American citizens, regardless of residence. You can take a civil service test back home in Oskaloosa, then arrive in Washington a full-fledged policeman.

Most Washingtonians don’t even want to get on the force at the penny-ante salary. But $3,000 a year looks good to a cotton-picker in Mississippi, where the annual per capita income is $600. When he gets to Washington he finds the $600 back home goes further than $3,000 here.

So, what does a cop do when he needs help? He follows the procedure outlined above. If he comes from out of town he corresponds with his local ward-heeler or goes directly to his Congressman on Capitol Hill.

We asked one cop, “What do you do if you’re a native of Washington and have no vote?”

He replied, “You’re just out of luck.”

That is, unless you’re a Negro.

The Washington force had some fine colored cops and detectives, native-born men who decided to make a career of police work in the days before Washington was flooded with the displaced from the plantations in the Deep South. In those days Negroes got no special privileges in Washington. Now almost all of the 300 colored policemen are political appointees. The white applicant undergoes a rigid and rigorous investigation; Negroes are forced on the force even over the disapproval of the department’s intelligence squad.

Many colored policemen have rackets on the side, are gamblers, operate whore-houses or do a little pimping.

The frequency with which the following happens is too great to set it aside as a mere isolated example: White cops tell you colored ones often stop pretty white women drivers, bawl them out and threaten them with arrests until they cry, then offer to square it for some petting.

Testimony under oath, reported in a previous chapter, in which a former sweetheart of gambler Attilio Acalotti charged she had seen hush-money slipped to three cops, was not pursued by police brass, the District Attorney or the grand jury. Several defendants were convicted for trying to influence her to change her testimony, though Acalotti, “Snags” Lewis and Frank Billeci were granted new trials on the gambling charges.

Our indictment is not against Washington’s police. As we said, most of them are honest, conscientious, decent citizens, thwarted by something above their reach.

The culprit is the system. That is responsible for the childish, irresponsible atmosphere of everything in this dizziest of American cities.

Don’t think, despite the annual yaps for more assistance, the Washington police force is radically undermanned. Compared to numbers in other cities, it is not. The Metropolitan Police have the second highest manpower per capita of any large outfit in the country. It is not up to authorized strength, but that goes for most cities. That doesn’t tell the story, because, as we indicated, there are at least five other police forces operating in the city, with several hundred more cops on tap. Generally speaking, the jurisdiction of each force is limited to the particular area for which it was created. All Washington policemen have the right to make arrests for crimes committed in their presence in any part of the District. For purposes of convenience, deals are made between various forces, so sometimes one patrols a district which really belongs to another. For instance, if a small square or park is situated miles away from the next nearest park, the city police often relieve the National Park Police of the necessity of sending squad-cars far off their regular beats.

There is a reverse, too. The Metropolitan force has about 1,800 men for its 14 precincts and one harbor station, but men are continually called for and assigned to guard visiting diplomats and dignitaries, and for special duty at the White House, government establishments, and even as ushers at tea-parties. With days off, sick leaves and men on special assignments, the force is lucky when it can put 300 cops on the streets on any shift.

The police are used for many duties delegated to others in well-regulated cities. For instance, policemen must act as collection agents for wives with delinquent husbands. Any Congressman can call and ask for police protection, which means he may want a cop in front of his house as a parking attendant for his private parties.

Any time the President or an important official drives through Washington, special cops are strung along the route to clear traffic. Wives of Congressmen and expectant mothers with a drag rate a police escort to a hospital. Even the circus can call for a special detail of 22 men.

It is almost impossible to keep any foot patrolmen on the streets. The force is all-motorized, that being the only way it can get around the sprawling District. Meanwhile, there are no harness-bulls on beats to keep toughs and thugs in line. So serious is the shortage of personnel that the black marias attached to each of the 14 precincts roll the streets 24 hours a day instead of being in their garages. The patrol-wagons are equipped with two-way radios and respond to calls the same as do squad cars. This is a help for spot work, one up on most towns.

One chief trouble with the police department is that so few of its men are natives. They have no local civic pride. Another factor is the constant turnover in personnel, because of the lousy salaries and lean pickings down below. There is no adequate pension system. In New York they can retire on a minimum of half pay after 20 years, regardless of age, which means a man who goes on the force at 21 can get off at 41 with a life pension. But in Washington you cannot apply for retirement before age 55, with 25 years’ service. And even then there is no guarantee you will be allowed to quit, as retirement is not automatic, but at the pleasure of the board. Usually only one-third of those who apply are permitted to quit.

On the other hand, Washington cops work an eight-hour day on an authorized five-day week, and are not restrained from holding jobs on the outside which don’t conflict with their assigned duties. Many own or work in stores. Several are chauffeurs. Embassies hire them for body-guards. Some drive cabs. A few owned fleets of them, but this was forbidden when it was found they were using their police pull to get their drivers off for traffic violations.

One policeman, Private John U. Carroll, managed a chile parlor in the 700 block, 11th Street, SE. There was nothing wrong with that, according to regulations, but the police trial board nabbed him when he failed to report that he had been in a fist fight with some customers in his place. According to testimony, Danny Petro, a former professional pug, walked into the “parlor” and slugged Carroll’s pal. That brought on a four-man melee in which the cop was injured. The trial board fined him $75. After being restored to duty he retired, claiming a veteran’s disability.

Though the department lowered standards because of the difficulty of recruiting men, its record for solving crimes is still good. But convictions and sentences are far under the American averages. The present laws and regulations so hamper the police that even if all were honest and intelligent, which they aren’t, serious inroads into the crime situation would be impossible.

One of the most serious roadblocks is the fact that after they make an arrest and hold a prisoner for the magistrate, they cannot make their complaints to the court direct, or tell the judge what it is all about. Washington rules require policemen to go to the U.S. Attorney and plead with him to book a case. The prosecutor thus sits as practically a committing magistrate, as the defendant and his lawyers are heard at the same time, and they can bargain with him for a nolle pros or a lesser charge.

If the U.S. Attorney decides not to handle a case, the police are sunk. They cannot ask the municipal judge to hold or commit. In many other jurisdictions, New York for instance, the arresting officer acts for the state at the preliminary hearing, before a magistrate, and not only tells his story to the judge, but can question the prisoner.

The U.S. Attorney is usually reluctant to prosecute. Even if he decides to, the cops are due for a browbeating from the judge. This story is no isolated incident—it is typical of what constantly goes on in the local, politically appointed courts:

Many policemen told us the courts work against them. When they make arrests they have to go to trial on their own time and are usually kept sitting there all day at the pleasure of the defendant and his lawyer. The defendant may wander around, but the policeman is required to remain in the court until the case is called. He is not even permitted to go to the washroom. If he does, the eagle-eyed shysters call the case immediately, with court consent, and the defendant is discharged—for lack of prosecution!

Several policemen who went to the toilet were threatened with contempt citations.

From the time a policeman makes an arrest, until the final disposition of the case, the entire atmosphere of the District enforcement machinery is mined against him. The District Attorney’s office is skeptical of anything he says, and is inclined to side with the accused. The courts, frequently presided over by gangster-appointed judges or left-wingers whose constituents are rebels against the accepted code, bend backward. They make defendants of the cops instead of the prisoners. So most policemen shrug and forget about it. For instance, in the Black Belt, not one of every three known crimes is reported. The experienced cops take it easy, go to the ball games and dances.

The most absurd straitjacket in which the Washington police are confined is the law which forbids them to serve warrants. They may be served only by deputy U.S. marshals.

This completely screws up the orderly procedure, because District judges, who are hot hell to protect the civil rights of murderers, pimps, dope-peddlers and gamblers, refuse to hold a prisoner in most cases unless he is arrested on a warrant. And they never uphold a John Doe warrant.

For instance, on one occasion, two cops assigned to the vice squad at night, working undercover on prostitution, got into a house and nabbed several bottles of whiskey there. They called for a police car. When it arrived, further search turned up narcotics. Twenty-six were arrested without a warrant. The police knew the courts would not hold them for even disorderly conduct, because arresting officers could not specify which offense each and every one had committed. So the prisoners were not photographed or fingerprinted. All were allowed to post $5 collateral, which was, of course, forfeited.

A cop can arrest a man whom he sees in the process of house-breaking on burglary, but if he then fans him and finds a gun he cannot charge him with a concealed-weapon violation, because he had no warrant for the search. When police have information that a crime is being committed on a premise, they must first get in touch with the U.S. Commissioner or a judge, then locate a deputy marshal to come and serve the warrant.

But don’t you assume you can get away with anything in Washington. The cops are death on jay-walkers. If you cross against the light you’ll be jugged. That in Washington is more serious and more culpable than murder!

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These are the steps:

First you break the law.

Then you get pinched.

Then you hire Charlie Ford.

Who is he? Charles E. Ford is the “Fifth Street Cicero.”

Ford, a behemoth of 220 pounds, is 52. He has been practicing law in Washington for 28 years. His father, a New Jersey Democrat, was the public printer of the United States in 1913. Since then a lot has been printed about his son in the public records.

As noted, Ford was the late Jimmy La Fontaine’s lawyer and is a trustee of his estate. He appeared in Chicago to convince the Kefauver committee it couldn’t force Anna Fischetti to testify against her husband, Charles, the notorious Capone gangster. And he convinced it.

But not all Ford’s work is so aristocratic. He and his associates take them as they come. Hardly a day passes without defendants in criminal court being aided and comforted by Ford or someone from his office.

He is the darling of the gambling and prostitution fraternity. His clients seldom go to jail. The police don’t feel so bad when they lose to Ford as they do when other lawyers oppose them. For Ford is a great friend of the cops. Whenever a policeman gets in trouble, Ford takes his case, usually without fee.

Charlie is one of those big, brash, bluff guys everyone loves, especially the newspapermen. He feeds them plenty of copy—and liquor—and never hesitates to give them a lift when they need background material on gangsters and criminals, without violating his fiduciary ethics. He is a social guy who likes to entertain and who loves to eat. One of his clients was the late Tom O’Donnell, and under the terms of his will Charlie operates the two celebrated O’Donnell restaurants and patronizes them freely.

Whenever his waist gets out of bounds, he goes to Hot Springs, Arkansas, for the reducing baths and a few days of friendship and cheer with Owney “The Killer” Madden, retired gang chieftain, now Hot Springs’ most eminent elder statesman.

None of Charlie’s clients has ever gone to the electric chair. One was sentenced to death for murder, but saved Charlie’s record by considerately hanging himself in jail. So he is one up on Sam Leibowitz, whose lone mistake waited for the ministrations of the public executioner. But Ford is that kind of a guy. Everyone loves him. No one would embarrass him.

We have sworn testimony before us which shows the operations of Ford’s jail-thwarting apparatus. It usually works this way: The prisoner, who may be a numbers peddler, a bookmaker’s runner, or a street-walker, is booked at the police station. He or she puts in a phone call to a certain designated unofficial party. Thereupon one of a half-dozen bail-bond brokers gets a call, and within minutes a runner for the bondsman appears at the police station and puts up surety for the prisoner.

Among bailers-out utilized by the organization are James H. Conroy, Isaac P. Jones, William P. Ryan, and Leonard, Louis, Max and Meyer Weinstein.

The legal fee for a $500 bail bond in the District is $75. The foregoing bondsmen charge the combine only $37.50, half-price, for springing a protected person. The rules regarding their surety are sketchy. They may register a $25,000 piece of property, then lay a hundred or a thousand $25,000 bonds against it.

On release, the defendant may visit the law offices of Ford, on 5th Street, where he is interviewed by Ford or his associate, Clifford Allder since the resignation of James K. Hughes. But sometimes the defendant does not speak to his counsel until the case is actually called in court, when his lawyer—Ford or an associate—whom he has never seen before, stands up for him at arraignment. If the defendant has no previous convictions, Ford’s office often pleads him guilty; whereupon the judge imposes a fine of usually not more than $25. We have proof that the fines for many of these defendants are paid on the spot from the lawyer’s pocket.

The system is keenly organized. Not one in a hundred people arrested pays his own bail-bond fee or knows who contacted the bondsman or paid him. Records of the bondsmen are kept so cryptically that in the rare instances when they are queried under oath they can say all they remember is they got a call from someone who only gave his first name, to put up bail, and they have no record to show who paid them. The rules are being changed. They must obtain a full name—but not for public record. And they won’t ask for birth certificates, either.

The Ford office has been able to pass the buck between its members. They cannot remember who retained them, who paid the retainer, or who put up the money to pay the fines, if “they actually did it,” which they “doubt.”

Ford successfully defied a Congressional committee which tried to make him divulge the names of his clients, though he admitted Emmitt Warring was one. The others, he said, were known to the public only as respectable businessmen. They were “more powerful” than Warring or even the late Jimmy La Fontaine, who were only peanut-peddlers compared to them, he said.

When pressed, Ford remembered a man by the name of Bettis whom he represented; and Earl MacDonald and Attilio Acalotti. He said he thought he had represented another defendant, named “Washington—I think it was George Washington, and that’s all I can remember now.”

Ford’s business is not confined to the gambling and hustling fraternity. You see his name bob up in court on almost every kind of criminal case. One of his recent ones was the arrest of two men on charges of violating the alcohol tax laws.

“Did you have a warrant?” Ford thundered at the ATU agent. When he conceded he had not, Ford asked, “How did you know this is alcohol? Don’t you know it is illegal to arrest people without a warrant?” “I smelled the alcohol,” declared Agent Sweeney. “I’ve been in this business for 17 years and I’ve developed a keen sense of smell—especially for alcohol.”

Ford’s clients were accused of unloading a truck with 127 gallons of moonshine whiskey.

Ford’s office has practically a monopoly on the setting up of and organizing after-hour bottle-clubs. He is generally given credit by the local legal fraternity for being the genius who figured out the way to sidestep the 2 o’clock closing ordinance. His associate is defending the confessed killer in the recent Hideaway shooting; Ford himself secured the Hideaway’s after-hours charter.

Ford’s operations are not confined to the District, but lap over into nearby Maryland, where, as trustee for the multi-million-dollar estate of gambler La Fontaine, he finds plenty of activity. Many of the gamblers and other shady citizens whom he represents operate across state lines. The boundaries often come to the aid of his clients. For many offenses, especially most of those before the District Municipal Court, there is no method whereby authorities can extradite defendants from Maryland or Virginia, and vice versa. It is very much as if a law-breaker could take refuge in Brooklyn when wanted in Manhattan, both boroughs of New York City. There is no more physical difference between Prince Georges, Maryland, and the District than that.

This all-service Ford is chairman of the Criminal Law Committee of the District Bar Association.

Another lawyer who frequently appears in court for arrested hustlers is Ed Buckley.

Fifth Street, between Indiana and D, is called “The Fifth Street Lawyers’ Association,” because so many bondsmen, shysters and good lawyers have offices there.

We asked a friend to name the real sure shot mouthpiece who could spring you if you were arrested for murder and knew you were guilty.

He said William Leahy was the best trial lawyer in town and one of the most respected. James Laughlin, who himself was once arrested but not prosecuted after a reversal, is another successful practitioner.

Others who do considerable criminal defense work are Denny Hughes, Sol Littenberg and Milton Ehrlich.

Another interesting criminal lawyer is Robert I. Miller, who shot and killed a St. Elizabeth’s Hospital psychiatrist whom he suspected of playing with Mrs. Miller. The shooting took place at about noon one day, in the heart of the shopping section at 11th and G Streets. He was represented by H. Mason Welch, who sob-storied the jury into an acquittal on the “unwritten law.”

Miller is not the smartest lawyer in town, but he does a tremendous business defending Negroes and other superstitious criminals who engage him sometimes just to sit at the trial table for good luck, because he beat his own case. Miller, an ostentatious person, often wipes his glasses with a $100 bill while addressing a jury. He claimed close friendship to Roosevelt and Garner and decorates his office with photos of them. He ran a Republicans-for-Roosevelt club.

Some lawyers win their cases through merit, others through a fix. Still others, who weren’t envied by their colleagues, had to do it the hard way when a certain former bachelor-lady judge, who shall be nameless, rendered her verdicts in favor of clients of the mouthpieces whose persuasion grew between covers not on law books. She was an awful tomato, and many attorneys preferred to lose their cases.

Judge Hitz, the humorist of the local bench, got off a dilly when he discovered the plaintiff in a matrimonial action was still living with her husband, the whole divorce proceedings being a sham to swindle creditors. Said the judge, in dismissing the action, “You can’t litigate by day and fornicate by night.”

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The last orthodox political boss of Washington was Alexander Robey Shepherd. When he finished with the city treasury, Congress voted to end home rule and took back the government.

From the time of its incorporation as a city, in 1802, Washington was run by elected mayors and aldermen. In 1871, in President Grant’s administration, it was turned into a territory, similar to Alaska or Hawaii, with delegates in Congress and a large measure of home rule. Shepherd was a pal of General Grant, who had numerous smelly friends.

Shepherd’s stewardship was modern in every respect. He went in for a New Deal on a big scale. The town was torn up while Shepherd paved streets, installed sewers—sometimes two sets to one avenue—went in for slum clearance, built squares, parks, circles, gas-mains and sidewalks. Shepherd began life as a plumber, and showed partiality for anything with pipes.

Shepherd had built up a small Tammany to keep his boys in power. Votes were bartered, crimes were fixed, laws were perverted. When the end came, Shepherd skipped and hid out until the statute of limitations ran out. When he returned they greeted him with a brass band, like New York did Jimmy Walker, and built him a statue.

The Congress was more interested in the welfare of the District of Columbia 75 years ago than it is now. Unable to stomach the stench, it decided to exercise its Constitutional right to govern the District, and substituted the present commission-form of government in place of home rule and local suffrage.

Under the present setup, the executive is a three-man commission, appointed by the President for a three-year term. One must be from the Corps of Engineers of the Army. On the law books, these commissioners have no more power than a New York City Borough President They can do practically nothing without approval from Congress. But by virtue of the apathy that prevails in Washington, these men have become little czars. Congress, by statute, has empowered the commissioners to make building and plumbing regulations and to create and enforce all reasonable police and other city rules. But they do not levy taxes or make appropriations. That is done by Congress. And that’s the District’s chief squawk.

Every buck collected in Washington goes into the general funds of the U.S. Treasury; not earmarked for the District. All payments come out of the same general fund. The result is that, while Congress pays up to ten percent of the cost of local government, the citizens bear the other 90 percent. But 52 percent of all the property is tax-exempt. The government owns more than 40 percent, the rest belongs to embassies, tax-free organizations like the Red Cross, etc. So the residents complain that the rich U.S. government is riding along on a free pass, leaving local property to bear the cost of supporting the huge Federal establishment.

The present commissioners are John Russell Young, president of the Board; Guy Mason, and Brigadier General Gordon R. Young, the engineer commissioner. Mason’s term expired in February, 1951, but he is permitted to serve until another is appointed or he be reappointed.

Under them, the commissioners have a large staff of special assistants, private secretaries, administrative assistants and others who have access to their offices. We are just telling you this in case you are thinking of making a fix, for one of these persons is the guy to see.

One of the three commissioners is noted for his ability to bollix everything up after a big, bad night—which is almost every night. Even his enemies consider inebriation a valid excuse for his befuddled condition. A Congressman investigating the Commission said, “After all, the poor guy always has a hangover. You can’t blame him for what he does when he feels awful.”

Under the commissioners are such usual municipal executive officers as assessors, auditors, tax collectors, license commissioners and bureaus of public welfare, recreation, traffic, police, fire, health, corrections; and—oh, yes—the corporation counsel.

The observer who takes a gander at the judicial branch of the District government sometimes wonders if he followed Lewis Carroll’s Alice down into the rabbit hole.

The judicial powers are exercised by the District courts, which sit not only for federal cases, but for felonious breaches of the local law, too; and by municipal courts, judges of which are appointed for six years. They have jurisdiction over minor suits and unimportant law and ordinance violations.

Members of the federal judiciary for the District of Columbia need not be local residents. They may be appointed from anywhere in the country. Usually these plums go to deserving Democrats from elsewhere. At this writing there are 12 District judges and 10 municipal court judges, in addition to justices of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the Municipal Court of Appeals, and the Juvenile Court.

The District courts serve a two-fold function. They act both as federal courts and as superior state courts, handling civil and criminal matters. No judges of either court are elected by the local citizens or by their representatives. They have no interest in the community. They do not partake of a legacy of local common law and custom.

If any courts should be impartial, those of the District might be. But they are not. Some of the judges are venal, inefficient party hacks or militant propagandists for left-wing philosophies.

The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia has the most overworked office in the land. He not only functions as a local district attorney and as United States attorney, but triples in brass with a job corresponding to a state attorney general. But his budget and the number of assistants allotted him are on a per capita population basis, as though he had to prosecute only federal cases in any city the size of Washington.

In the prosecution of some minor cases in municipal court alone has he any assistance. The city Corporation Counsel’s office handles those. To demonstrate again what can happen when a bureaucracy turns dictator—the criminal division of his office has no law library. It does not have a secretary.

If he or his assistants want to check a law or a decision they have to buy their own books. He is given no fund to keep records, so no records are kept. It is almost impossible for him to find out the disposition of cases. He has only five low-paid assistants assigned to municipal criminal courts, and these are so overworked, sometimes they have to prosecute cases on an average of one every three minutes. Under District law, defendants are permitted jury trials in all cases where the penalty is in excess of ninety days or a $300 fine. It is no wonder the Corporation Counsel is usually willing to take a plea of disorderly conduct, instead. The maximum penalty for that is $25, no jail.

Persons accused of serious crimes under federal law must be booked immediately before a United States Commissioner, as all crimes in the District, even those like assault, robbery, drunken driving, gambling, homicide, and rape, which elsewhere belong exclusively to the state, are federal matters here.

We gave you a rough idea of the volume of such criminal activities in the District. If those defendants had been arrested for the same offenses in states, they would be booked before a magistrate, a police court or a justice of the peace. There are none such in Washington other than the judges. The chief committing magistrate is the United States Commissioner, and he has no assistants. He not only performs the federal duties that U.S. Commissioners in other towns assume, but he also acts as a committing magistrate on all local felony charges in the District.

A U.S. Commissioner is not a judge. He is chosen by the local Federal bench. He serves without salary on a fee basis, but is limited by statute to a maximum of $9,400 a year, out of which he is required to pay office rent and stenographic expenses. The law permits a U.S. Commissioner to practice law on the side, and many in other jurisdictions do, but, because the D.C. office is the busiest in the country, he has no time to handle outside cases. The Commissioner is on duty 24 hours a day. There is no night court. He is it. Police awaken him at any hour of the night when they make important arrests or require warrants, and he is busy at hearings, setting bail, and presiding at arraignments all day.

When you get into the U.S. Attorney’s office you really see how things are loused up here. The rich Federal government apparently has dough to toss away everywhere else, but not in its own home. Of course, there are no faithful voters to be placated here. District Attorney Fay has only 34 men on his staff; his office is required to do more work than the entire Second Judicial Circuit, which includes the entire states of Vermont, Connecticut and the four districts of New York. His budget is so limited, most of his assistants receive only about $4,000 a year, and so the turnover is terrific; young men just out of law school go to work for him for a couple of years, then go out to make a living.

His office is so understaffed, there are not enough employes around to handle all complaints. It is possible to walk in and rifle the files at will. Many shyster lawyers often do that, killing the cases against their clients.

With such a small, unseasoned staff, it is no wonder the complaint desk in the U.S. Attorney’s office has been compared to “a bargain grocery counter.” It looks very much like one. It’s a long wooden shelf behind which a deputy district attorney stands and does business with plaintiffs, defendants, cops and lawyers across it. We noted that police may not enter their own complaints. They must bring them to the complaint bureau of the U.S. Attorney, before the hearing in court. It is then up to the U.S. Attorney’s office alone to determine whether the complaint will be made.

What happens is that, every day, thousands of people mill around in this complaint room. An onlooker can’t tell who are cops, lawyers or prisoners. When the arresting officer speaks to the deputy D.A., he does so in this cut-rate counter atmosphere, before the defendant and his lawyer. There is no privacy. The cop has to spill his case to the opposition. The defense lawyer then sets up an argument for dropping the case or reducing the charge. The officials are so harassed, they try to dispense with as much work as possible, which accounts for a hefty proportion of pinches that never get past this bureau.

Sometimes a youngster just out of law school is the “grocery clerk.” He makes such grave rulings as deciding not to prosecute a homicide charge. These law clerks arrogate to themselves the rights and prerogatives of the courts. When the D.A. decides to go before the grand jury, he usually asks for an indictment for only one offense, even if the accused has been charged with twenty. Elsewhere the custom is to indict on each count and try on one or two, leaving the others hanging over the defendant. That does not happen in Washington. After a prisoner is discharged and commits a crime in some other jurisdiction there is no record for probation officers there of other outstanding charges against him. That’s another reason why the professionals like to practice their trades in Washington.

There’s another booby-trap for the law. The prosecuting and corrective branches of the government don’t take the cops into their confidence when a prisoner is paroled. Elsewhere the police are notified when a parolee is back on the streets, so they can keep an eye on him. In Washington this is considered an invasion of the convict’s Constitutional rights.

If the defendant cannot make a deal before the complaint bureau, his lawyer is entitled on demand to get possession of the file on his case. The place is so understaffed, with not enough stenographers, that the only notes in these files are brief pencilled memoranda jotted down by the Deputy District Attorney. There is never a complete record. It is simple for defense lawyers to sneak some of the notes out of a file; they’ll never be missed, because no carbon copies are made. The overworked deputies can seldom remember what they wrote.

When the trial is scheduled, the deputy prosecutor seldom has an opportunity to read the files, even if there were complete data. Felony cases are often ground out in District Court at the rate of one an hour, including time out for picking juries. When a U.S. Attorney finishes with one case, the clerk hands him a folder on the next. That is the first time he ever saw it. Add to this the fact that the prosecutors do not work with the police in preparing a case, and you can see what “confusion twice confounded” means.

One of the most unusual features in the setup of the District government is the office of the Coroner. Until recently, this functionary, who need not be a physician, had no laboratory. What he has now is incomplete. He has no medical examiner and only a few low-paid researchers.

But he has a swell job, with a ten-year tenure and a courtroom better than the U.S. Commissioner’s. The present Coroner has virtually set himself up as a judge, with no authority in law, and is said by his critics to work with a gavel instead of a scalpel. He is one of the town’s most powerful functionaries.

Among the many strange quirks of local law is one which requires the Coroner at times to serve as a constable and to make levies. When the Coroner acts as a coroner, he holds court like a judge. And he thinks he is one, too. He has frequently discharged from custody persons accused of homicide, who had been held without bail by a U.S. Commissioner. He often sets bail and discharges defendants on bail, though there are no statutes authorizing such procedure, and he has so admitted under oath.

There have been instances when the Coroner has ruled a death was justifiable homicide and released the prisoner. Though this is no bar to subsequent indictment, prisoners often flee the jurisdiction before the prosecuting attorney knows what has happened. The law does not permit the coroner to discharge any person.

Coroner’s juries are impaneled by that official to meet his own preconceived ideas and prejudices. There is no requirement that a coroner’s juror must even be able to read or write. The salary is $7 a day, and the Coroner has his favorites. Some men served as many as 31 times last year.

The Coroner frequently discharges the accused prisoners on grounds of justifiable homicide, despite evidence that they had committed other crimes at the same time, such as carrying concealed weapons or selling narcotics. The coroner then shrugs his shoulders and says those things are none of his business.

There have been known instances of jury fixing. Through the proper channels, a charge of a death caused by reckless driving has been reduced to an innocuous misdemeanor or dismissed completely. One of the coroner’s deputies was a notorious abortionist who performed the autopsies on his own victims.

Too bad Boss Shepherd isn’t around today. He could appreciate what the backroom boys have done to the District government.

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Since wood-cuts added to the native press the element of pictorial illustration, cartoonists have caricatured the American alderman. His heavy foot is on the bottom rung of the legislative ladder. The “gray wolves” of Chicago were known around the globe for venality, degradation and cold-blooded chicanery. The Tammany members of the board, the San Francisco, Kansas City, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Boston, Albany and St. Louis “city fathers” were in their most nefarious days gangsters, brothel-keepers and police court shysters, overlaid with a refined sprinkling of saloon-keepers.

That mixture does not reflect the complexion of our Congress. But when, twice a month, they sit as the Board of Aldermen of the city of Washington, they are about as dignified and statesmanlike as the city council of Peoria.

The Constitution says, “The Congress shall have power to exercise exclusive legislation over such District.”

The actual detail of city government is delegated on the committee system and for all practical purposes the rulers of everything within the Columbia confines are 13 Senators and 25 Representatives on the District committees. In an extremity they can be overruled by their chambers and the President could veto any of their acts, but no one remembers when such a thing happened.

There is a certain local prestige about being a D.C. committeeman. He probably could with impunity drive through a red light or spit on the sidewalk, or even jaywalk, which no unprivileged person this side of an ambassador may dare without at least a stiff bawling out. But the members of Congress assigned to weighty national and world problems shun the task of managing the municipality.

Of the 38 who are completely responsible for every law, appropriation and tax measure in this city of almost a million, only two in the 81st Congress came from communities as large as or larger. They were Congressmen Arthur G. Klein, of New York City, and John F. Kennedy, of Boston. Only three others in the last Congress came from cities with a population in excess of 100,000—Senator Estes Kefauver, of Chattanooga, Tenn., 130,000; Senator Harry Darby, of Kansas City, Kans., 130,000; and Congressman John J. Allan, of Oakland, Calif., 380,000. Darby is not in the 82nd Congress.

In other words, 33 of the 38 Senators and Representatives who ruled this metropolis in the 81st Congress were from farms, villages, and rural towns, that include Fairmont, W. Va.; Lander, Wyo.; Bristol, R.I.; Middleboro, Del.; Madison, S.D.; Skowhegan, Maine; Burley, Ida.; Florence, S.C.; Okolona, Miss.; College Station, Tex.; Scottsboro, Ala.; Stone Mountain, Ga.; Cedar City, Utah; Hammond, La.; Kennett, Mo.; Carrollton, Ill.; Frostburg, Md.; Glencoe, Minn.; Decorah, Ia.; Rosemont, Pa.; and Farrell, Pa. Even those who were sincere did not and could not understand the problems of a giant city.

In the current Congress there are a few more city slickers on the committee: Senators Butler, of Baltimore; Bennet of Salt Lake, and Pastore of Providence.

From time to time, about once every ten years, Congress gets appalled at its own reflection and decides to investigate its own municipal creation. After such probes a few anemic recommendations are submitted to the Congress, a few minor corrective bills are passed. Then the speakeasies and gambling houses reopen, the dope peddlers and murderers come out again, and once more life goes on, as Washington life goes.

The last time Congress got in a mood of righteous selfexamination was in 1950, when a sub-committee of five was appointed by the House District of Columbia Committee to investigate crime and law-enforcement in the capital. The sub-committee chairman was James C. Davis, of Georgia, a sober and sincere lawyer with a distinguished record as a crusading superior court judge and member of Congress. The Congress originally voted the handsome sum of $10,000 to this committee, with which it was expected to dig up the dirt on a billion-dollar-a-year vice establishment.

Davis determined not to get a political hack as counsel. If he had not chosen a dynamic attorney, this committee would have been as innocuous as most others. As it was, it uncovered plenty that should have rocked the nation and shocked the Congress. It was no fault of Davis or Hyman I. Fischbach, committee counsel, that it did not. But Congress, as expected, ignored the report and skipped the record. Davis and Fischbach came up with suggestions—some far-reaching—for a reorganization of the District police, court system and method of prosecution. But to guarantee that nothing would be done about it the Democratic leadership put road-blocks in the Committee’s path. Nevertheless it is now before the Congress. It will go the same route others have, or establish a precedent.

Fischbach, with many years’ experience conducting such investigations for other Congressional committees, turned out what a committee counsel should be—in happy contrast to the sad picture of the Kefauver group which was operating at the same time. No one could see him getting far with his beggarly budget. It hardly allowed for an office staff, let alone investigators. But Fischbach hired John Woog, a 27-year-old war veteran and member of the New York bar, as chief investigator and practically the whole staff. Working 18 to 20 hours a day they uncovered enough rottenness, funny business and stupidity to fill more than 1200 closely printed pages of terrifying testimony.

When Fischbach started stepping on some sacred toes the ceiling fell in. Rumors were whispered around the House Office Building that Fischbach would be canned. Plenty of Congressmen were a-tremble; Fischbach was getting too hot. One who tried to throw a barrier in his way was Representative Wayne L. Hays, a Democrat from Ohio, whose Congressional district includes tributary territory dominated by the Akron and Youngstown mob which is ruled by Frank and Tony Milano, cited before the Kefauver Committee as organizers of the infamous Mayfield Road gang, Ohio branch of the Mafia. Hays tried to hold up money for the committee unless Fischbach were fired. He was joined by Mrs. Mary Norton, who retired at the end of the 81st Congress, and who represented Hudson County, New Jersey, and was sent to Washington by the notorious Boss Hague. She did not stand for re-election after Hague was run out of Jersey politics.

Another who opposed Fischbach was Edna Flannery Kelly, of Brooklyn, who was chosen by the Democratic leadership to spearhead the campaign. Mrs. Kelly, who serves by grace of Irwin Steingut, minority leader of the New York State Assembly, has been an errand girl for the Brooklyn bosses ever since her election to Congress.

Mrs. Kelly’s reluctance to expose crime in the District may be understandable to New Yorkers who know that among her constituents are some of the most evil gangsters who ever slit a throat or lived off the proceeds of a prostitute.

These three button-holed other Democratic Congressmen and said they were opposed to Fischbach because, as a New Yorker, he should have been cleared through the New York County Democratic Committee. That Committee’s other name is Tammany Hall. To Davis the mere mention of Tammany Hall is like defaming the Stars and Bars. Lack of Tammany endorsement was the highest recommendation. On such little things is history made.

It still remains for the Congress to follow the Davis recommendations. Meanwhile, all the law-breakers who hid while he was probing slid back into business as soon as the “probe” was over.

Few solons really want home rule, not even Northern New Deal Congressmen who scream for it because the Negro press does.

Most of the members shirk the committee meetings, because while membership gives them great prestige locally, it means nothing nationally or to their constituents. The District Committee is a “minor” one, and membership on it does not count against the legislator’s allowed minimum of committee appointments.

Few remain on it for long, and assignment to it is, in a manner, in the way of punishment. First-timers, especially in the Senate, are hazed that way.

A typical majority member of the House District Committee is Representative Arthur G. Klein, of New York City’s 19th district. We give him to you not because he is the most active or prominent, but because he is closest to our home. His district begins a block away.

Klein, an exasperating and annoying pleader for left-wing causes, has been on the public payroll for 16 of his 46 years, the first six spent on the legal staff of the S.E.C. He has been in Congress since 1941.

Klein’s district, which runs between the Bowery and the East River, below 40th St., contains not only the worst slums in New York, but some of the newest and finest housing developments, as well as large hunks of the city’s financial district. He promoted the former for his constituents at the expense of the latter.

Also in it is Manhattan’s downtown Mafia stronghold—parts of Little Italy—whose voters sent him to Congress and demand favors in return.

Operating in his district is New York’s most evil and notorious fairy-haunt, the disgusting 181 Club, at that address on Second Ave., where every cabaret law and ordinance on the books is fractured nightly. This profitable venture is overseen by Alan Bono, a cousin of Joe Adonis, and a contributor to Klein’s campaign funds.

Former Congresswoman Norton served 10 of her 26 years in Washington on the District Committee. At this writing she has strong backing for the about-to-be vacant post of District Commissioner and may so be named before this reaches print.

Even when not a member of the committee, Mrs. Norton always had a soft spot in her heart for it, and frequently interested herself in District affairs, being given a respectful hearing because of “the woman’s angle.”

But Mrs. Norton was and is and always has been a creature of Boss Hague, one of the most corrupt and thievingest municipal overlords in the world. At this moment the Hudson County grand jury is working overtime grinding out indictments against ex-officials appointed by him.

Many Hague specialties were exported to Washington during her tenure as mayor ex officio, among them a high tax-rate, municipal corruption and official protection for gamblers.

Mrs. Norton’s home town, Jersey City, was, until last year, the national clearing house for the laying off of horse bets from all over the country.

While she was in Congress, Hague was the absentee chief magistrate of Washington.

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After you’ve exchanged conversation with a number of Washingtonians, you wonder what made them decidedly different from others. Then it dawns on you. They are whisperers.

They all seem consciously afraid that they may be overheard. That marks them even in casual conversations, and when they utter secrets they are theatrically overcautious. These are acquired habits, not without foundation. All mankind has a common weakness for spreading gossip. Most people can retail only minutiae. But in Washington, matters that may rock the world are entrusted, or pass through the hands of, those who otherwise would have little to tell beyond back-fence piddle. Furthermore, for one to say his wires are tapped is a mark of self importance.

The capital is overrun by snoops and spies, not only using every cloak-and-dagger device for foreign transmission, but assigned and trained to catch and report inter-bureau information, rumors included.

An observation at a dinner table by a member of Congress or an executive may cause an uproar in Moscow, London or Calcutta. Or it may bring a midnight huddle in a cabinet department or the President’s sound-proofed den.

You meet almost no one of any importance who converses at ease. The thinnest statement or flattest opinion can be amplified and multiplied. If it escapes an official listening post, it may reach a columnist, which is worse.

There has been considerable furor on the subject of Washington wiretapping.

That is a topic which every seasoned editor has learned to recognize as having extraordinary human interest appeal. The phone is such a common, yet tricky instrument, that kitchenmaids who have affairs with delivery boys shiver with horrible fears that their big secrets are being tapped. And this is not confined to small people. In Washington such suspicions are justified.

Many mentally connect wiretapping with the F.B.I. The two have been joined in recurrent publicity. Deliberate left-wing propaganda has exaggerated and exploited the notion. The F.B.I. uses this method, as does any other efficient police force. But emphasis thereon is disproportionate. The practice is widespread with only a modicum of use in criminal investigation. The F.B.I. itself makes a daily check against cut-ins on its own wires, including J. Edgar Hoover’s own private lines. He and his bureau are Enemy No. 1 to the Reds and all their sycophants and sympathizers, the only man in the country who called the shots on the Communist situation since the beginning. And as the eyes and ears of the Department of Justice, the G-men handle dynamite affecting interests from car thieves to disloyal U.S. employes to chairmen of the boards of trusts.

Tapping F.B.I. wires is not a profitable career. The bureau knows all the tricks. New electronic developments now make it possible to intrude on some communications without physical contact with the wire. No instruments can detect such espionage. This is a hazard beyond mechanical defense.

We said everyone in Washington lives in constant fear and dread of being overheard, even if the subject matter is of importance to no one. It becomes habit. Congressmen and officials are cagey when they talk on the phone, though after a few minutes of cryptic conversation they forget and loosen up. When you visit the average office holder in his sanctum he steers you away from the walls, then speaks in an undertone. In your hotel room his eyes wander around the walls, searching for “bugs” which can pick up and record every sound.

Wiretapping is a merry indoor sport in Washington, engaged in by dozens of agencies—public and private.

When the White House wants to know what’s going on it employs Secret Service experts. They ferret out information about the President’s political enemies, inside and outside the government. It is filed away for future reference to be used for retaliation or guidance. Some Democratic Senators and Congressmen use Congressional committee wiretappers. Investigators get the dope on political enemies in Washington and back home. Administration leaders tried desperately to “get” Senator McCarthy and no method was beneath them. Minority party members, deprived of the services of official wiretappers, hire private detective agencies. Kefauver complained his committee’s wires were being tapped.

Many cabinet officers and other high officials usually have their own intelligence services for spying on associates, the opposition, Hoover, and even on the President himself.

Foremost among these administrative intelligence sections are those of the Department of State, Treasury, Defense, and the Post Office, with its sureshot inspectors.

Oscar Chapman, Secretary of the Interior, has a fine intelligence, headed by Mike Reilly, former chief of the White House Secret Service.

The political cross currents are such that at any time five or six sets of wiretappers, each unaware of what the other is doing, may be listening in on a subject’s wires; while the subject may have his own dicks listening in on the principals whose agents are cutting in on his conversation.

Like lobbying, wiretapping is an insidious system used by everyone, acknowledged by no one, so Congress shrinks from delving deeply into it.

Communists recently forced the issue into the open, as they did with lobbying, both of which they use extravagantly. The Senate came up with a weak-kneed investigation of wiretapping. Senator Claude “Red” Pepper, of Florida, already a lame duck, was appointed to head the committee. Pepper tried to slant the hearings to make it appear the only wiretappers in Washington were Republican leaders. He named Senator Owen Brewster of Maine as the goat. About all the investigation brought out was that the Metropolitan Police Force is a chief offender.

Police Lieutenant Joseph W. Shimon, the cops’ expert, admitted he did some outside work on these lines for private clients and for Congressional committees. Senator Brewster said he paid Shimon’s expenses to investigate a man who, Brewster thought, was “shadowing” him. It turned out also that Shimon was paid to tap Howard Hughes’ wires when that eccentric nabob was probed in connection with his wartime airplane contracts.

After the Senate committee spent a lot of time and money investigating wiretapping, its counsel, Gerhard Van Arkel, who also wants to be District Commissioner, made a brilliant discovery. He said the group already had proved its chief point, namely, “There is a good deal of wiretapping going on in Washington and it is difficult to act against the practice under present law.”

Foreign government operatives compile volumes on the words of our officials, as well as from embassies and snoopers of other foreign countries. Wiretappers do not expect to garner much direct information, but they winnow a thousand talks for one bit that will compromise the object of the tap and make him vulnerable to power pressure.

Lobbyists and labor unions get the goods on people they need. And government wiretappers often listen in on them.

Add to all this private intrigue, suspicious husbands and wives, and you have an industry.

Because Washington is federal property, its telephone setup is governed by the Federal Communications Commission. FCC rules forbid unauthorized listening in on phone calls. U.S. law makes it a crime to divulge such information. Evidence secured by wiretapping may not be used in federal courts. Supreme Court Justice Holmes decreed it “a dirty business.” The strict rules hamper legitimate law enforcement officers, but do not hinder those snooping secrets for blackmail or political pressure.

In many other states, New York especially, any evidence, obtained legally or illegally, is admissible in court, though the detective who breaks the law to land it may be prosecuted, but never is. He’s decorated, instead.

New York law is liberal in extending the right to local peace officers to tap wires by judicial sanction, ex parte, for specific inquiries, never refused. Federal agents working on cases in New York and other such states usually tie up with local cops and prosecute in local courts, because the Feds are restrained in their own. In the District there is no local law, so the authorities are handcuffed.

Wiretapping is rarely used to procure actual evidence. Judges and juries don’t like it. But eavesdropping alerts officers and then they go after collateral evidence and don’t reveal where the tipoff originated.

Instead of developing more stringent legislation which is what the Communists, who break every law, want, the radical-sponsored Pepper investigation failed so miserably that many Congressmen agreed the government should have more power to protect itself by means of wiretapping. The Department of Justice is sponsoring a bill to permit, under some circumstances, the use of evidence in court so obtained; to be accepted after a Federal Judge issues an order on application of government intelligence agencies, and to sanction such agencies to engage in wiretapping directly, not for court evidence, subject to approval by the Attorney General.

Many sober observers feel that to forbid the F.B.I. any reasonable means for counteracting treason and espionage is childish prudery, and that its bitter opponents are not in good faith.

You hear a lot from pinks and phony progressives that the nation’s capital is a police state where no man is free to utter his thoughts. But most of the spying is done not for legitimate government sources, but is privately sponsored by politicians, office-holders or subversive and inimical interests. Washington is no OGPU camp. Most of the work done in the headquarters of federal investigative agencies is administrative. They decentralize their field work. The Washington offices of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Alcoholic Tax Unit and several others are branches of the Baltimore division and report to the superintendent there.

The Washington field office of the F.B.I. is as remote and as independent from the director as, for instance, the ones in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, and like them is run by an agent-in-charge, through regular channels like out-of-town offices, via Clyde A. Tolson, the skillful associate director, and brainy assistant directors Mickey Ladd, Hugh Clegg, Lou Nichols, Dick Glavin, Rolf Harbo, Al Rosen and Stan Tracy before Hoover handles any matter.

The agent-in-charge of the Washington field office has as much authority and autonomy and is as locally independent as Ed Scheidt and his assistant, Bill Whelan, in New York; George McSwain in Chicago, and Dick Hood in L.A., all solid and seasoned chiefs of ability, integrity and patriotism.

The same lefties who are moaning about Washington being a police state recently tried to slip a fast one over, to make it so, and at the expense of embarrassing and possibly destroying the F.B.I.

When the House Committee Investigating Crime and Law Enforcement in the District was drawing up its report, certain sources tried to sneak a sleeper into it, recommending that the F.B.I. be given final responsibility for policing the city of Washington.

We have determined that the suggestion was made to sub-committee Chairman Davis by District Attorney Fay who said he concurred in it with Peyton Ford, an Assistant Attorney General, with a long record of sympathy for “progressive” causes. Informed observers wonder if Ford, who helped whitewash Amerasia, was acting for higher-ups out to “get” J. Edgar Hoover.

The plan was to slip this through into legislation. That would mean the end of the F.B.I. as we know it. It would then become a city police force. Its organization would be disrupted, as was the Treasury during Prohibition. It would have to take on thousands of new agents, waste time with drunks, whores, policy-slip peddlers and punks, and meanwhile it would have to take the odium for the conditions portrayed in this book, which go deeper than mere failure of police.

In recent years it has become the fashion in the movie industry to produce whodunit pictures about detective agencies of the Federal government. The Hollywood geniuses think they have covered all but they missed plenty.

(Note: In all cases their duties are regulated and catalogued by statute. None, including the F.B.I., is a genuine and general secret police force—such as Scotland Yard.

Generally speaking, their powers and duties are in one of four categories.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation “investigates.”

The Postal Inspectors “inspect.”

The Treasury Agents “enforce.”

The Secret Service “protects”—the President and the currency.)

The Narcotics Bureau is covered elsewhere in some detail; but this is as good a place as any to assure you that Federal cops are human beings, not machines assembled to turn out convictions. A principal function of the Narcotics Bureau is to combat the dope evil, not to imprison its victims. This was demonstrated when a famed Hollywood movie star went on the junk. The Bureau, in checking prescriptions, found she was in the hands of a quack who was ruining her life. Commissioner Anslinger made a trip to Hollywood to plead with the head of her studio to give her a year off, so she could go to a sanitarium for a cure. She had two pictures in the works and the studio factotum demurred. He mentioned her contract, said the company had millions invested in the films. He “couldn’t possibly see my way clear.”

Anslinger warned him she would collapse and the company would lose an asset worth even more. The young woman was being kept alive during the day on benzedrine. Afternoons the doctor tapered her off on secanol. After work she was dosed with morphine. The inevitable eventuated. She blew up completely, tried suicide, was hospitalized and suspended. Then the government stepped in and gave her the cure. Now she is dehabituated and rehabilitated.

The Intelligence Unit uncovered the huge tax fraud that sent Henry Lustig, former owner of New York’s Longchamps Restaurant chain, to the pen. Many stories are told on how the prosecution began, including the apocryphal one that Henry Morgenthau, then Secretary of the Treasury, was forced to stand in line and wait for a table in a Miami cafe when Lustig was ushered in ahead of him; Morgenthau asked who the man was, exploded and ordered the Feds to get him.

But the real story is this: The New York hideaway office of the unit is at 253 Broadway. There’s a Longchamps Restaurant in the basement. Federal agents don’t earn enough to afford its fancy prices. They usually lunch in a counter-joint around the corner. But one day it rained. Some agents were tied up on a big case, didn’t have time to wait, so they ducked down in the elevator.

Many Wall Street financiers lunch there regularly, have tables reserved and waiting. The only empty one had a “reserved” sign, but the Intelligence boys grabbed it over the protest of the hostess. When the millionaires arrived they had to wait. They fumed. Lustig was there. He shouted, “Why did you let those bums take that table?”

Service to the “bums” was cut off. They wondered whether the imperious Lustig’s returns were clean, whether he wasn’t the sort of individualist who would probably steal. They checked. He had sequestered $5,000,000 in unreported hatcheck money.

When the Intelligence Unit, nicknamed “The U-Boats,” sent Atlantic City boss Nocky Johnson to the can, they got him by counting the towels sent to the laundry by the local cat-houses. This established the intake of the madames, and their kickbacks upstairs.

The Intelligence Unit has been working on the hidden holdings of the Mafia for years. When evidence in hand is collated, 30 of the most important hoodlums will trade in their tailor-mades for prison denim. There’s terrific pressure from higher-ups to stop the forthcoming prosecution. Only orders from the President or Attorney General will do it.

Sometimes Intelligence runs into amusing situations like the case of the rich Chinese and the blonde model. He was a wealthy importer, named Hsieh, in America on a diplomatic passport as the representative of the Bank of China. Nationalist Hsieh fell for Marion Saunders, a sensational slick chick with platinum hair, from Indiana. It became a terrific romance. Cafe socialites kidded that he bought her a new mink coat every day.

The Treasury heard about the dough he was lavishing on her. They looked him up, discovered that as a nonresident alien he was exempt from American income taxes. But Mr. Hsieh had forgotten gift taxes. Under the law the donor, not the recipient, is liable for payment—25 percent. The Feds tracked down gifts aggregating $1,000,000—the untraced value was far higher. Mr. Hsieh was soaked $540,000—tax plus fines. He was allowed to pay in three installments. He pulled out a roll of bills and peeled off 180 G-notes for the down payment.

Some months later, Hsieh and Marion were married. Ginmill habitués said he married her to get his dough back. That couldn’t be so, because one day, last year, the Queen Mary came in with $2,000,000 in gold consigned to him. It was landed under guard of six armed Chinese, toted off in steel-lined limousines.

Which reminds us of the story never told before, too good to keep.

One of the benches in Lafayette Square, gathering place of the faggots, across from the White House, is wired up. You ought to hear some of the gay conversations. We did. Then we squirted penicillin in our ears.

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Stir up your memory and try to think when and where you have read an “exposé” or any other study of Baltimore. You can recall pieces, kindly or vicious, about San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, and discussions of the peculiarities of Boston. But Baltimore, a main-line metropolis, with atmosphere and tradition and volume and character, is by-passed.

We were almost complete strangers there on field-work, though our tortuous delvings into the continental Mafia-managed Syndicate long ago fixed for us its place in the national network.

Baltimore is perhaps the perfect example of a Mafia-controlled city in action. For practical purposes it is a contraction of Chicago and an expansion of Galveston, extreme gangster-throttled cities with the same core of Sicilian manipulators who push the buttons and pull the levers.

Italians constitute one of the largest foreign elements in Baltimore and can always be depended on to vote in a bloc. Little Italy is centered around Albemarle and Fawn Sts., where much of the deviltry is hatched over “dago red” wine. Add to this the huge colored vote, which also is pretty solidly Democratic, and you have the makings of a perfect boss-run burg.

Our investigations into other American municipalities have shown where the Mafia dominates there is a disintegration of public morality and private conscience.

To this major seaport huge numbers of Italian and Sicilian immigrants have always been drawn. They formed the base for its underworld colony, made it a star on the Mafia map. It is a concentration point for illegally-entered Sicilians, stowed away on the freight steamers that ply between the Mediterranean and Chesapeake Bay, by a smuggling-ring. As these aliens become Americanized, grow rich and powerful in the rackets, they import new waves of Sicilians for the underworld’s menial tasks.

Baltimore is a favorite hide-out for Mafistas on the lam from other towns, especially New York, and is used interchangeably with Providence, R.I., for that. When one of your authors was assaulted by Sicilian hoodlums in the pay of Mafia tycoons last spring at Bill Miller’s Riviera in New Jersey, New York police investigating the crime were tipped off that the sluggers were being sheltered in Baltimore’s Little Italy, where they were feted as honored guests at a two-week wedding blowout for the daughter of one of the richest and most powerful Sicilians there. More recently, Tony Rotondo, a Brooklyn ex-convict wanted on suspicion of being the torpedo who slew Bill Drury, was found in Baltimore.

In recent years Baltimore has had an infiltration of Puerto Ricans. It is in handy sea communication with the Caribbean. It has also considerable air traffic with that area and at a cheaper rate than New York’s. The affinity between the Mafia underworld and the new Puerto Rican migrants quickly developed, as it did in East Harlem. Young Puerto Ricans are employed as dope-peddlers, pimps, and torpedoes. Their colony is not large as yet. What it lacks in size is made up for with Latin enthusiasm.

Baltimore’s Negro population is around 300,000. On the whole, the colored folk there are more orderly than their neighbors in the District of Columbia. Maryland is still a Southern state and its whites will stand for just so much. But Maryland’s Negroes have the right to vote and they have been taken in hand by the professional do-gooders, the New Dealers and other such ilk, who often work hand in hand with the underworld. The result is that the Negro, the Italian and the Puerto Rican votes are often enough to tip the balance in local elections and perpetuate the criminal rule.

This is expressed on all levels with “fixes” necessary and available for everything from a special license number which will exempt you from arrest to the go-ahead for a bagnio. (When you see a Maryland license ending in three zeros, you know the car is an untouchable.)

The town’s gambling czars are some Comi brothers, some Corbi brothers, all Italians, and George Goldberg, big in numbers.

Tom Shaw, original owner of the swank Club Charles, also was important in the gambling firmament until the Sicilians muscled in, taking a part of his night club as well. Nick Campofreda, a local radio sports announcer, was put in as permanent M.C.—not good either.

The Century Athletic Club on Baltimore St., was in the fight promoting business, as well as the central clearing house for bets. The Mafia had tried long and hard to declare itself in, always without success.

The deal was consummated three years ago, after a couple of swarthy boys from Brooklyn “stuck” it up. Every newspaper printed the story, but the cops denied it happened.

The Club has surrendered its fight charter, and is now simply a gambling place. Five leaders of the Sicilian colony are James Caranna, Frank Gattuso, Tom Lafata, John Maurice, and Joe Palozzolo. They control the potent minority votes—through threats and payoffs—and dictate to Baltimore’s political leaders.

The town’s top Democratic politicians are Bill “Boss” Curran, a lawyer, and Jack Pollack, former bootlegger, now in insurance. He runs the 4th District. Pollack was once arrested for murder but never indicted.

They split recently over patronage. Curran nominated his man for Governor, but Pollack threw his weight to the G.O.P. candidate, thus putting a Republican in the State House for the third time since 1864. He is expected to remember his political debt to Pollack.

The new Governor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, was the last Republican mayor of Baltimore. He had Pollack’s nod then, too.

The Governor can be a nuisance in Baltimore if he wants to, but never does. City police heads are appointed by him, not by the mayor. Beverly Ober, the incumbent commissioner, is “social,” and acceptable. Anyway Maryland law provides a set term for the top cop. McKeldin is expected to keep his snoot out of Baltimore—he needs it for re-election; and its Democratic legislators—who control the legislature—to pass his measures.

A powerful Democrat is Senator Herbert R. O’Conor. The R is for Romulus. O’Conor is a member of the Kefauver committee. Locally he works with whatever faction is in power.

George Muller, 4th ward boss and State Racing Commission Inspector is a local czar.

Juke-boxes, vending-devices, slot-machines and other Frank Costello monopolies are handled locally by Joseph Corbi, of the brothers, out on bail at this writing after being arrested by the F.B.I. as one of the chief operators of an international lottery ring.

Senator O’Conor is the sponsor of a new plan to bring in 36,000 Italian immigrants forthwith, mostly from Sicily. The Baltimore underworld hopes to route most of these to Maryland. But New York’s Republican Senator Ives has boosted the ante to 130,000. There are more Italian voters to appease in the Empire State.

The importation of Sicilians, legally and illegally, under the padrone system, is again growing. Huge numbers of aliens have been brought into the country and settled in certain key spots dominated by the Mafia, where they work off their fare and keep, usually by acting as dope-peddlers, numbers-runners or sluggers, or selling their daughters into white slavery.

Now let’s catch up with our mythical refugee from Washington, who comes to Baltimore for only one purpose—and that’s no good. You can be sure he finds what he wants in Baltimore. It’s got everything that’s no good.

The visitor’s first impression is of a dirty old town, with ancient, smoke-grimed structures and narrow, rambling streets, one-third of which are still illuminated by gas-lights—with Welsbach globes!

Baltimore is overrun by rubes. And the dress, manners and customs of most residents appear provincial. Washington is a city of hicks, too, but it is a yokel cosmopolis, with farmers drawn from all sections of the country, leavened with some civilized folk and foreigners.

Baltimore is the market for more chicken-farmers than any other of our cities. It is the place, therefore, where they come to raise the kind of hell a chicken-farmer would.

Washington women on the average seem smart and well-dressed compared to those in Baltimore. Yet Baltimore has some famous high-fashioned women’s shops which bring customers up from Washington. But the street types don’t patronize them, for they walk around in cheap house-dresses and shapeless coats of cloth, plush and phony fur.

This is the more surprising because Baltimoreans are the most finicky shoppers in the world. As we write this, the local department stores insert a pleading full-page ad in the papers:

“Gentle Reader.... Over 11,000 purchases daily are sent back to Baltimore stores. NO OTHER CITY EVEN COMES CLOSE to our percentage of returns.... Think how thousands of sales people lose productive time making over 3,000,000 sales a year that come back.”

Baltimore has a Skid Row that turns your stomach even in Baltimore, where so much of the burg looks like one Skid Row. Next door to and around the corner from some of the best hotels, cafes and department stores, you will find nude strippers, B-girls, hostesses and whores. Guttered drunks and street-walkers may be the badge of the Bowery elsewhere; here they are a common sight on every street.

The visitor heads for one of a half-dozen hotels, all but one of which are almost as ancient as the city itself. The newest, the Lord Baltimore, is almost a quarter-of-a-century old.

The hotels are cozy, but musty. The elderly Belvedere, once the class joint, is now part of the nation-wide Sheraton chain. Its cocktail lounge is the only social hangout left. The Emerson and the Southern are doddering old ladies. There is an air of laissez faire in Baltimore which extends to the inns. If you are quiet and gentlemanly about it, they probably won’t throw that broad out of your room. For it is a friendly town, as you will have many occasions to find out. Everyone talks to you, half the girls you meet want to go to bed with you. The name of its new airport is Friendship International.

When Judy Coplon worked for the Department of Justice she was considered the most amenable gal there, which made her the most popular. Harold Shapiro, a good-looking assistant attorney general, dated her frequently. It was testified at her first trial that they went together to Baltimore, where they spent a night in a room in the Southern Hotel.

Judy admitted that, but claimed she did not undress. Shapiro was an unhappy witness against her, because many thought he had acted for the government to lure her—kissed and told.

He moaned to friends in Baltimore, “It happens to lots of guys. But not everyone has a G-Man under the bed.”

The first item on the tourist’s agenda after he gets out of the hay is East Baltimore Street, part of the main commercial thoroughfare. From Gilford Avenue to Fallsway it is Hobo Heaven. You know when you are getting to what you want to find when you see a Salvation Army meeting on a street-corner, in front of a barker for a burlesque house. Other towns have honky-tonk lanes, too, but this is the only one where it is the main attraction.

Skid Row starts as soon as you walk past the Emerson and Southern hotels. You are right in the middle of it—a good half mile of avenue lined on both sides with burlesque theatres, cheap bars, low-class night clubs, novelty stores, shooting galleries, penny arcades, flop-houses and second-hand clothing stores. All burlesques and some saloons have hawkers who will pull you in by main force if you hesitate or stop to look at the pictures.

The most famous dump in town is a basement dive called the Oasis Club. Years ago, when we first visited it, it specialized in a rowdy floor-show, with a chorus of elderly relics, their drooping bosoms unencumbered by brassieres. It is now a strip-joint selling a parade of nudes, some “refined” with bubbles or fans, pretending to “tease.” Many peelers make $1,000 a week. But not these in Baltimore. The Oasis is non-union. The maximum salary is $35. They earn the rest of their living sitting out with male customers. We had seen crummy shows before, but nothing quite like the Oasis. Yet, when we stepped around, we found it tame for the course.

In Chicago, where nudes run wild, they never work at floor level. They are lewd on raised stages or on platforms behind bars. At the Oasis and a good many others in Baltimore, they work on the floor. If you are sitting at the ringside, you can reach out your hand and tap the babe on her bare behind. And she’ll love it.

One or two Oasis girls strip completely, without G-strings, plaster or anything on. The m.c. mouths continuous patter of dirty talk in which he encourages the customers to tickle the girls—anywhere. The girls talk back to the patrons, jump on their laps, stick their bare backsides in their faces, in the spirit of good clean fun.

Max Cohen sold the Oasis to Sam Levin. He agreed to get out of the strip business. But he immediately opened another room, around the corner, called the Miami. Levin sued for breach of contract and collected $50,000. The competition between these two sewers opened the town up wider than it had been in decades. Each tried to outdo the other in nudity. But a girl can’t take off more than all. Meanwhile, other strip dives found themselves outstripped and had to meet the new mode.

The Miami is around the corner from city hall and police headquarters. The mayor can turn at his desk and look into the Miami, and many other dives. This is one of the most vicious and lawless areas in the world. The mayor of Baltimore, whose present term expires in May, 1951, is Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., a Democrat. He was chosen Permanent President of the U.S. Attorney-General’s Continuing Conference on Crime and Corruption last winter.

Mayor D’Alesandro was, before his election as the city’s chief executive, the “Mayor of Little Italy.” His rise to the seats of the mighty, did not turn his head. He refused to move from the slums where he had always lived, at 245 Fawn St. Instead he rebuilt his home into a modernistic mansion, a show place surrounded by hovels.

Next door, and connected, is a new commercial building in which the Mayor operates his insurance business and his wife her home-beauty treatment supply company.

If the Mayor returns late from a banquet, political meeting or night session of the City Council, he will not be forced to travel through dark and deserted streets. For the immediate vicinity of his home is the bright light section of Little Italy, where neon-lighted restaurants run all night, and serve liquor in tea-cups, and some openly in orthodox set-ups.

Kid Julian runs one such place nearby, a mob hangout.

It is interesting how Baltimore’s Mayor was chosen to head the Conference on Crime over mob-fighting Mayors Bowron, of Los Angeles, and Morrison, of New Orleans. We know the inside. We covered the inaugural meeting in Washington at which all problems were solved in two hours, after President Truman opened it with a pep talk in which he said there’d be no crime if everyone read the Bible and stopped for traffic lights.

“Look at me,” he said. “I am the most important man in the world. Yet I instruct my chauffeur to stop at all red lights.”

That night the President’s car went through 17 en route to a banquet at the Statler.

Mayor D’Alesandro’s honor came after he read an intelligent paper to the delegates. It came as a surprise that D’Alesandro had such a fine grasp on the subject. It came to him that way, too.

You see, when he read it, it was the first time he had seen it. It was written for him by a Baltimore newspaperman.

The location of the deadfalls in Baltimore reminds us of Galveston, where the gambling and red-light districts, controlled by Syndicate-allied bosses Sam and Rosario Maceo, are also contiguous to the offices of the law enforcement authorities.

The Miami Club is on the main floor of a building which advertises “Rooms Upstairs.” It has some of the most disgusting acts we have ever seen. Girls in the show will sit out with you on request. Every time you pay for your round of drinks—they require you to pay after each round—the sitter asks you for a dollar tip. The girls who work in the show get no commission on these drinks. But if they don’t have a drink in front of them all the time they risk being fired. Their base pay, as “entertainers” runs from $20 to $35 a week. The rest they make from the tips and from deals arranged for after work. Some of the girls in the show aren’t bad lookers. We spoke to one young Puerto Rican, named Aida, who could have gone places in New York if she had any spunk or talent. Here all she did was walk around the floor without a stitch on. Off her it looked good.

The m.c. at the Miami, when we got nauseated there, was a fairy. Some of the older dames in the show are lesbians. Many fags frequent the place. The girls told us all that freely, though not free.

The rest of the customers are servicemen, riffraff, sight-seers and drunks. One seldom brings his wife or girl friend to this place. One of the nights we were there we saw two policemen and a lieutenant in uniform, sitting at a table drinking, surrounded by girls. At the next table was a wizened little old fellow tossing dough away on the broads. We figured him for a chump. But he turned out to be a retired Baltimore police captain who quit so rich that he can afford to spend $500 a night, that way.

Many of the lower-paid employes of the British and French embassies in Washington hang out at the Miami. Occasionally some of these girls are brought to Washington when low down high-jinks are wanted. The Miami advertises regularly in the Washington dailies.

The waitresses at the Miami seem to be independent contractors. Tables are not assigned. Customers are continuously solicited for orders by dozens of different ones. Each carries a purse and you settle with her after every round. She pays cash at the bar for it. It seems any girl who wants to can come in and hustle drinks this way without being hired. Some wear slacks, others street clothes, and a few sport cheap evening gowns. They will sit with you with no coaxing. One of our waitresses sat down and said, “My tables always buy me a drink.”

At the Miami Club we often saw men seated with girls from the show or waitresses and making obscene passes—not in booths, right out on the open floor.

But the ultimate in lowdown shows goes to Kay’s, on Frederick and Baltimore Sts., across from the Oasis. There is nothing like Kay’s anywhere, and we’ve seen them all. The dance-floor is about 15 feet square, all tables on the floor. Practically every girl in the show works naked and does raw routines within reaching distance of those at ringside. The women, with words and motions that wouldn’t be allowed in Fultah Fisher’s boarding-house, solicit men from the floor. One of the most startling dirty acts we’ve ever seen was done by a woman billed as Moana. She introduced it as her “Whore Dance.”

Here are some of the sights of East Baltimore Street:

At Number 116, a couple of doors from the Emerson Hotel, is an amusement arcade where the kid pick-ups come. Those who like them so can walk off with 13-year-olds.

The first thing you notice is the profusion of stores and shops and stands selling “sanitary rubber goods” and other immediate accessories. In the lobby of the Globe Burlesque Theatre is a sign reading, “SALAMI—RUBBER GOODS.”

A sign in the window of 424 East Baltimore reads “TRY OUR HAMBURGER—SANITARY RUBBER GOODS—SHOOTING GALLERY IN REAR.”

Most of these novelty stores and newsstands also sell dirty pictures, including series of snaps showing strips. In one we recognized a New York chorine we know. On sale are playing-cards with naked females on the faces.

In the window of the Maryland Gift Shop, in addition to a lavish display of “rubber goods” and salacious pictures, are switchblade knives. The newsstand at Gay and Baltimore Streets has “rubber goods” on display beside newspapers and the usual pictures. Gordon’s Novelty Shop, at 428 East Baltimore Street, hands out a business card with a drawing on the reverse side showing a short-skirted cutie standing next to a young soldier in a rainstorm, with the caption: “Don’t forget your rubbers.”

Though we saw “rubber goods” displayed in at least 40 store windows, not only on Baltimore Street, but in other parts of town, we can’t remember seeing so many pregnant women anywhere else. In New York one seldom sees such displays, even on the streets.

Many Baltimore Street joints are pointedly pick-up bars. One is the 408. Another is the Midway Bar, where the local hoodlum hot-shots hang out. Harry’s Bar has strippers and pick-ups. Katherine’s Bar goes in for a couple of cheap teasers and a lot of cheap whores working the tables. Next door to Katherine’s Bar is a sign, “Rooms one dollar a night.”

Down a couple of blocks in the Victoria Hotel, a tawdry assignation joint, is a dive called Bettye Mills Night Club. It was once known as the Stork Club, but Sherman Billingsley brought suit. It has a couple of long bars where soiled strippers work on platforms, above the bartenders. While you sit on the stools, dames come over and ask you to buy them drinks. This doesn’t surprise anyone, because they do it in every low joint in town. Such places have female bartenders, and many lean over and kiss customers. If not too busy, they come out and sit with the trade.

One bartender at Bettye Mills is a character known as Mitzie, a plump little broad, a retired stripper. She has a running line of patter. If you give her a dollar tip she will pull up her skirt, pull down her panties and stash the bill in full sight of the customer.

In the men’s room is an ad which reads: “Sanitubes for defense, protect our Army and Navy.”

Bettye is the town’s chief call girl madame, operating through the hotel switchboard.

The Village Bar, 12 Harrison Street, around the corner from Baltimore, is a pick-up dump with B girls, hustlers and barmaids who go through the customers, and we mean just that. Three of us saw a guy get rolled. He was a good-looking, well-dressed young fellow, obviously plastered. A whore in an evening gown sat next to him and pawed him with both her hands. Then she got up, went to the women’s room for a minute, then took a seat by herself at the far end of the bar. When the cluck woke up, he frisked his pockets for his poke. It was gone. Still in a daze, he wandered around the room looking for the dame. She didn’t give him a glance. He wandered off, befuddled.

Even the better places have circular bars. We figured that out—they are better for pick-ups. You can look at the girls from front, then motion them. But in most places you don’t have to motion. They practically attack you. Not even in Chicago are they so voracious. They don’t ask you to buy a drink. They move right in and order.

Few Baltimore B girls work on commission. Most of them live on their tips, which they solicit after they’ve bilked you for drinks. The procedure is for a girl to move in next to you, order without asking, then get ready to blow if not propositioned and demand a dollar tip for her “company.”

Some saloons which specialize in better-looking ones give them $5 a night and they keep their tips and anything they can make after hours. Entertainers must cadge drinks to keep their jobs. No commissions.

Baltimore has a 2 A.M. closing, which except in Little Italy is generally observed—one of the few laws that is. These easy hours give the girls plenty of time to pick up money after work. A strange sight is East Baltimore Street a few minutes before 2 A.M. It is lined with walls of men waiting for the frails to come out of the bars, strip dives and burlesque houses. These are not pimps or dates, but men on the hunt who saved drink-money and put a ceiling on the commodity. Hundreds of pick-ups are made this way every night, openly in front of the few cops there on patrol.

Streetwalkers pace in front of the filling-station at Baltimore and Fallsway. They are very low-grade stuff. Asking prices start at five bucks and waver to what they can get.

Parlor-houses have about disappeared from Baltimore, as from most cities, but there is a line of them in the 600 block, on West North Avenue. There’s one in the 1000 block of N. Charles, also one next door to the Blue Mirror.

Most of the dives are on Baltimore St. and in the vicinity, but there is no monopoly there. A store next to May’s department store, in the retail shopping district, has a window display of “sanitary rubber goods” and switch-blade knives. Ditto is a shop known as Blizzards, on Eutaw Street, which advertises a bargain, “Three dozen latex, one dollar.”

There’s a strip-dive, the Picadilly, around the corner from the Lord Baltimore Hotel, in the midst of the financial and retail district. It has pretty lowdown floor-shows and swarms with hustlers who work the bars. We saw one cute bartender there, calling herself Val, about 18, from some mountain town in Tennessee. For a dollar tip she’d let you play around and never slap your hands.

The joints on East Baltimore are bad—but on the outskirts of town, on the Pulaski Highway at Fayette Street, you find places not patronized by tourists, bums or sailors, but by local kids. You see nude floor-shows at the Ambassador, on Fayette, and at De Carlos, on the Highway, that would make Baltimore Street bums blush.

The Big Mob operates or protects the dives. It owns many of the good places, too. Every dump and purveyor of filthy pictures now has a sign in the window: “Re-elect D’Alesandro.”

The better region is along Charles Street, where the more expensive specialty and antique shops and the few better-class night clubs and lounges are. Among them is the Club Charles, part of the circuit which includes the Copacabana in New York, the Chez Paree in Chicago, and clubs in Saratoga, Miami, Las Vegas and New Orleans, which play such acts as Sophie Tucker and Joe E. Lewis. When the heat isn’t on, a game runs in the back room of the Charles.

Less elaborate is the Chanticleer, but far above deadfalls in the other part of town. It boasts good floor shows and “name strippers.” Among the good cocktail lounges in this district are the Coronet and the Blue Mirror. These are places where men take their own girls or their business associates. They provide no entertainment, but usually have a musical trio behind the bar.

As the 2 o’clock closing ordinance is generally obeyed, a problem in Baltimore after hours is to find a place to drink on the premises. But liquor package stores sell until 2 A.M., and most licensees are permitted to sell for off-premise consumption, too—a procedure practically unknown in other parts of the country. So, if you still want a drink at 2, you buy a bottle and take it with you.

Ask a cab-driver where you can get a drink after hours and he will know only of two spots—outside of Little Italy—Sue’s and Hector’s. Sue’s is a lowdown dump. Unless you are known, all you can buy there after the deadline is beer, which is also illegal. If they know you, they will sell you rotgut liquor.

Hector’s is not quite so bad, but it closes Saturdays.

The night after we were given a courtesy card to the Press Club, 100 West Fayette Street, it was raided for selling liquor at 3:30 A.M. to non-members.

There are many cheating private flats and remodeled homes, especially on Charles St., where chumps are steered from the Club Charles and the Chanticleer, for girls, booze and stud poker.

Bell-boys and hackies can steer you to anything. Baltimore cab-drivers have to scrabble for a living. The legal rates are about the lowest in the country. You can go almost anywhere in town for a quarter and tips are meagre.

Gambling is plentiful and easy of access. There are horserooms on Eutaw Street, across from the Public Market. Most of the rooms, however, are in the outlying sections of South Baltimore and Northeast Baltimore. We found three running in the 1900 block of Greenmount Avenue and others in the 2400 block, the 2500, 2700, 2800, and 3300 blocks of Greenmount Ave. There was wide open gambling in the 1800 block, the 2000, 4300, and 5500 blocks of Hartford Road, as well as the 5200 block of Bel Air Road.

Casinos and horserooms run openly across the County line in Anne Arundel, and a regular scheduled limousine service is maintained to transport suckers.

The cars leave at frequent intervals from Redwood and South Sts., and the Biltmore Hotel, Fayette and Paca.

Some of these suburban gaming hells are guarded by armed men stationed in pill boxes commanding the gates.

There are thousands of one-armed bandits and gambling devices in the city, where they are illegal even by local option. At this writing, the city itself was in the gambling business with a game room in the new Friendship International Airport, eight miles south of the city, in Anne Arundel County, where slot-machines are tolerated by illegal local option. But the airport is owned by the City of Baltimore, which is officially on record against slot-machines.

Into the game-room of the airport came something new in the way of trying your luck. It is a combination cigaret-vender and slot-machine. You can buy cigarets at the usual price, 20 cents. But if you want “action” you put in a nickel instead of the 20 cents, and hope to get up to 20 packages of your favorite brand—or nothing. The Frank Costello enterprises are giving the machine its first tryout under this blessing of legality.

The gambling payoff in Baltimore is made through the police. North Side cops get $10 a week for their services, those on the South Side only $7.50.

Sergeants rate $25 and lieutenants $50, with higher officers greased accordingly.

The cops collect the take from the numbers men and bookmakers and deliver it to their higher-ups, who then transmit the “documents” to the gang collector.

One reason for this complicated business is a shrewd point of law to get around the income tax laws. The government will not allow a deduction for graft to public officials but if the payoff is taken off the top before the mobsters get theirs, then all they need to pay on is what they receive, the net.

Baltimore is a way-station on the international underground railroad that transports narcotics. Considerable foreign stuff comes in through the port. It is also brought down from New York in quantity and stored in the Italian and Negro sections, awaiting transportation in smaller packages to the District of Columbia.

Local street sales of narcotics are concentrated on Pennsylvania Avenue in the Negro district, where individual caps of heroin, morphine and reefers are available cheap. Puerto Rican and Italian peddlers work the white dives in East Baltimore Street, where they sell to whores, strippers and B girls, many of whom use it and others sell it.

Baltimore’s Little Harlem—Pennsylvania Avenue—is more peaceful than the Negro section of any other large town we ever gandered.

The cops don’t let the colored places get away with anywhere near what they act blind to in the white spots on East Baltimore. Some of the cleanest and best night clubs in town are the black-and-tan resorts in the Pennsylvania Avenue district. Though whites are welcome, they seldom visit them.

Gamby’s is an orderly colored night club with fine Negro entertainment and a small but excellent line of tan chorines. There was no stripping here, though one pretty wench, billed as an exotic dancer, shook swiveled hips but took off nothing. It occurred to us that we had never seen a Negro stripper anywhere. The girls of that race refuse to vulgarize themselves in public to the extent that many white girls do. Not only was Gamby’s show clean and entertaining, but the customers, all colored, behaved well and were better dressed than the social sewage we saw in most of the white dives.

We saw no soliciting here. But there was a one-armed bandit in the bar. Willie Adams is the numbers boss of Darktown.

The Negro joints close on the dot, and then the streets fill up with thousands of laughing, shouting, usually sober merrymakers. White policemen patrol the streets in pairs, but at ease. We saw one buck pull a razor on his sugar in front of Gamby’s. Two white cops in a squad car drove off.

Baltimore has a large homosexual population, which is swelled by visiting fairies from Washington. On mild nights you can find them in Mt. Vernon Place, under the Washington monument, where they pick each other up and make liaisons. A favorite gathering place is the Plaza Bar, formerly Longfellows, at Madison and Charles. They also patronize Ball’s and the Harem, the latter a corny night club with two entrances, one leading to a stag bar with a sign on the door, “For Men Only,” and a place on Mulberry near Howard. The lesbians hang out at the Earl Club.

Baltimore follows the trend of most large cities, other than New York, in that its best people never go to cafes in town. When they feel the need of night life they come to New York. When they want to drink and dance in Baltimore, they do it at house parties or at country clubs. So most of the patrons of Baltimore liquor dispensaries are the lowest classes. The few better rooms, like the Club Charles, cater to the sporty set, big spenders, gamblers, buyers and salesmen and trippers up for the night from Washington.

When the Charles has a first-rate attraction it advertises in the Washington papers. For a couple of years the ancient Ford’s Theatre in Baltimore was the only house within 150 miles of the District offering legitimate shows. Ford’s gets top road companies and attracts show-lovers from Washington, who drive up for a sea-food dinner, for which Baltimore is famous, an evening at the theatre, then take in the cabaret at the Club Charles.

Baltimore’s big night life season begins when the races at Maryland’s famed tracks bring in loose money from all over the country. Then the town is brilliant, gambling is rampant and the whores cash in on bonanza.

The city is the center of the so-called “Minor League” racing circuit. There are five half-mile tracks in Maryland, which run almost all year, with unknown plugs and has-beens, raced by “Gypsy” horsemen. These are a unique breed. They own one or maybe two nags, which they may have picked up for dog-meat money. They train them themselves and often are their own jockeys. It is not uncommon for them to live in the stables with their horses and even travel from track to track on the horses’ backs. The entry fees at these tracks are as low as $10 and a $100 purse is something to shoot at. The shenanigans at these tracks, controlled by the gamblers in Baltimore, are atrocious.

This smudgy picture of the Baltimore that embraces the visitor brings up the question: How Come?

This city of H. L. Mencken has long prided itself upon rebellion against what most of its citizens believe to be an invasion of their private rights. Prudery was never profitable in Baltimore. The Prohibition Amendment was deported as an undesirable alien.

One old-timer said, “You think this is something? You should have been here 50 years ago!”

Baltimore, the mid-Continent seaport, is one of the most provincial of Eastern cities. In some of its set ways it is a backwash to the colonial days and the cavaliers.

Yet Baltimore is the “big city” to thousands of hillbillies from the nearby mountains of Western Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, and the poor white trash of Maryland’s Eastern shore counties on the seaboard, and Delaware. They are the folk who trade and settle in Baltimore.

It took us some time to figure out why there were so many pretty young girls whoring in Baltimore. If they left home to sell it, why didn’t they go on to New York? Research showed they came from the nearby hills and farms; even those with roots deeper in the South or in the reaches of West Virginia came to Baltimore because that was as far as their small savings or imagination could get them. Some planned to make the major league when they saved up a roll, but they were the exceptions.

One girl put it up to us frankly. All she had to offer was all she had. New York, the word has spread, is closed to hustling hucksters. New York’s market trades through switchboards for smartly turned-out call gals, models, chorines, pent-house patooties. A rosy-cheeked milkmaid in gingham dress, with no capital, would be pinched and jugged if she winked to a Sand Street sailor.

The hungry harlots on Baltimore’s streets and in its stinking saloons come there because the whisper back home is that it’s the place to go to. Often procurers have brought them and started them, or they are beckoned by bims who are there. “Bread of infamy” has more raisins than home-baked loaves.

After soliciting at the bars a while, some get ambition. They see strippers don’t even know how to walk across a stage, a requisite in even repellent Chicago. They need only take off clothes, and all gals know how to do that.

Few, if any strippers, except at a couple of places that import semi-names, were ever in show business before. Pretty soon they’re local celebrities, with a special following. These nude numbers are heart-breaking to Broadway-wise guys who’ve known the best. Few have looks, none have wit, and at $35 a week most of these stag-show strumpets are overpaid.

Like New York, New Orleans and San Francisco have flavor, Baltimore exceeds both as a ship port, yet it has little appeal for travelers.

Seafaring folk whose vessels bring them into Baltimore’s fine harbor are an unromantic lot. No important passenger ships call. Those that do carry steerage. Its freighters are cattle-ships and oil-tankers.

In the thousands of uniform flat-front red brick homes with the balustradeless white stoops, unique to Baltimore, live good, solid people, white and Negro.

The department of political skulduggery, though, in the Free State metropolis, is a streamlined model, oiled up and with all the gadgets.

Baltimore is exceeded in population only by New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Detroit. It has passed Boston, St. Louis and Cleveland, and is growing. It is a combination of an anachronism and a boom town. Labor is flocking in to work its mushrooming airplane factories, huge wholesale trading houses, needle-trade shops and ship works. These are mostly people without roots.

But Baltimore is getting the gravy that overflows from crowded Washington, the hot money out for the kind of fun not tolerated in the District. Baltimore is somewhat in the state of development Chicago knew four decades ago. That city’s political morality is still primitive. The same trend is manifest in Baltimore. Yet crimes of violence and serious felonies are not as pronounced as in either Washington or Chicago.

Most citizens are openly on the side of the law-breakers, too; the concepts of liberty and non-interference play into the hands of the hoodlums and the harpies.

At this writing, any and all forms of vice are tolerated and protected. There is a price for everything, and it’s not much. In fact, it costs only $500 to jump to the top of the police promotion list.

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Washington consumes four times as much hootch as the entire state of Maryland, including Baltimore, which alone has 200,000 more population. The most popular kind of liquor is bourbon, suh, with rye next. Only fairies, English diplomats, New Yorkers and spats-wearers drink Scotch.

The legal liquor closing for on-premises consumption in the District is 2 a.m. on weekdays and midnight on weekends. Only beer and light wine may be sold on Sundays. Baltimore sells until 2 a.m., seven nights a week, though some saloons which do not serve food and which pay a lower license fee must close their bars at one. (But you can sit there until 2 to finish anything you bought earlier.) Only beer and light wine may be sold for on-premises consumption in Virginia. The closing hour is midnight. Prince Georges, Md., has a law similar to Washington’s—seldom observed.

Legal boozing age in the three jurisdictions is 21, though minors over 18 may drink beer in Maryland and D.C.

But there’s something about the climate—everyone looks older than he is.

Most District area night clubs do three shows nightly, at 8, 10:30 and 12:30, and two on Saturdays and Sundays, at 8:30 and 12. The hotel grills do two, at 8:30 and 12.

The burlesque joints in Baltimore grind continuously until 2.

Few Washington night clubs impose a cover charge. All have minimums, usually a dollar or $1.50. The hotel cafes, when presenting expensive attractions, usually put on a couvert up to $2.

It’s agin the law and the rules of the American Guild of Variety Artists to permit female entertainers to sit at tables with male guests. The hotels and the better Washington night clubs enforce this. The others wink at it. There is no attempt at observance in the Maryland suburbs or in Baltimore.

When the cutie in the checkroom hands you back your hat, don’t think for a moment she keeps the tip you slip her. She works on a straight per diem for a concessionaire, who pays the restaurant or hotel by the year. But if she doesn’t turn in a tip for every hat, she loses her job on grounds she swiped the money or she is so stupid or icky that she gets stiffed. For many years, the minimum hat check in New York by habit has been two bits, but the hoosiers who come to Washington get lavish with a dime or sneak off ignoring the plate with the decoy coins entirely. The concessionaire figures 18 cents as the average tip and on that basis he checks his employes. The gals learn how to pinch part of the loot from liberal tippers, though their uniforms are made without pockets. Photo concession girls may keep their tips, but cigaret girls have to turn theirs in.

Beware of the invitation from the stranger you meet at the bar, who suggests you go to a friend’s place after hours for liquor and gals. There are at least 300 clip joints running in Washington, most of them in the colored neighborhoods, in private houses and flats, where you can get booze of a sort after-hours; but it may be spiked with knockout drops and you will wake up rolled and robbed—if you wake up at all. Baltimore clip-dives operate more closely to the orthodox custom. As soon as you sit down in a hideaway, a couple of bimbos rush to your table and order drinks. When you are ready to go, you get a bill that includes the month’s rent. If you don’t come across, you’ll be lucky to get out with a broken nose.

If your specialty is the rumba or samba, don’t expect to find a partner in Washington or Baltimore, They’ll do a shaky fox trot to that music. The codgers still do the old conservative dances. The youngsters are jive maniacs.

At this writing, there are no public dance halls in Washington where you can meet partners, but, though table hopping is supposed to be de trop, you won’t have any trouble getting dames on the loose to dance with you. As in Baltimore, they will solicit you for dances, even if that’s all they’re after.

All night clubs, but few hotels, present dancing on Sundays in Washington and Maryland.

For matinee and cocktail dancing consult the appendix or the daily papers.

If you still can’t get yourself a girl after having read this book, we don’t think you’re trying. But here are some easy ways:

Ask the bell captain.

Refer to appendix for a list of dance studios.

Call Clara Lane, Friendship Center, Republic 3504 (Washington), for personal interview.

Get a manicure.

Read the newspaper ads for dances run by the State Societies.

Join a church or the Y.

In the summer, go to any beach or take a ride on a Potomac steamer.

Strike up a “Haven’t I met you somewhere” with any girl you see in a cocktail lounge or a hotel lobby. For that matter, your chances are good with almost any girl you see anywhere in Washington. She may say no. We bet you five to three she won’t.

We will recommend no restaurants here. A list of best-known places in Washington and Baltimore will be found in the appendix. We guarantee none. But Baltimore goes in for good food in the good places, while Washington doesn’t know what fine cuisine is. Meals are cheaper in Washington than in New York. Baltimore, with some of the finest restaurants in the country, charges even less.

Most people dine early in both towns. Some of the best restaurants close for the night at 8 or 9. This is the Keokuk touch.

Washington politicians hang out at Harvey’s and the Occidental. They don’t mind the insults. Some of the better food is at Olmsted’s. The tax-payers foot the losses of the dining-rooms in the Senate and House of Representatives.

Baltimore politicians dine in the back room of the Emerson; the ward heelers eat at Bickford’s, called “No. 10 Downing Street.”

There are no swank dining places of the grade of El Morocco, the Colony or 21 in Washington or Baltimore. The elite in government service eat lunch in their own private dining-rooms and dinner at their clubs.

The divorce rate in the District, as well as in Maryland and Virginia, is considerably below the national average, though the grounds are not particularly oppressive. At this writing there are 4,000 divorced males in the District of Columbia and 8,000 divorced females.

All three jurisdictions require one year’s residence before beginning a divorce action, which eliminates them from competition with Nevada or Florida. If the grounds are out-of-state, it’s two years in D.C. You have to wait six months after a District decree before remarriage.

Grounds for divorce in the District are adultery, desertion for two years, conviction for felony, and living apart five years. Maryland adds impotence and insanity. Virginia also grants divorce for impotence, pregnancy of wife at time of marriage and wife’s unchastity, as well as all causes specified in the District.

Some smart lawyers know how to beat the residence provisions, but if you can afford that kind of a lawyer you’re much better off going to states that specialize in hot-cake divorces.

You require a license to carry a concealed weapon, but no one enforces the law if you keep a dozen machine-guns in your house. The courts have ruled you are not carrying a concealed weapon if you have a gun in the glove compartment of your car or if you have an unloaded one in your pocket, even if you have cartridges on you. Cops can’t pinch you without a search warrant.

The Federal Small Arms Act, enforced by the Alcoholic Tax Unit of the U.S. Treasury, imposes a $300 tax on transfer of certain firearms and forbids any felon to carry a pistol. But this is practically unenforceable in the District, because of the niggardly appropriations of Congress and the disinclination of federal judges to sentence anyone for anything.

In most towns we warn first-time visitors to beware of cab drivers who steer them to hotels they don’t want to go to. But Washington hotels are usually so crowded, you’re lucky to be steered. We have seen people sit in lobbies from early in the morning until midnight, while the clerks phoned all other hotels, trying to take care of the overflow.

Do not come to Washington unless you have made a reservation in advance. Be sure the reservation is confirmed. A few hotels are part of nationwide chains, among them the Mayflower (Hilton), the Hay-Adams (Manger) and the Statler. You can probably make your reservations and have them confirmed in your own home town.

Hotel rates are high. The cheapest single room in the first-class hotels is $8, and that faces the garbage cans. Modest suites are $20 a day, and you pay at least $25 for anything decent.

But Washington abounds with cheap assignation hotels, where you can take a broad for the night for three bucks, no baggage required. In Baltimore you can find this kind for as little as one dollar a night.

Few good Washington hotels have any qualms about your morals. If you are raided because that gal isn’t your wife, it is because the house dick and bell captain have their own stable of fillies and they get no cut-in from outside competition. The “security officer” (refined designation for a house dick) of one of the oldest and most famous hotels in Washington, near the White House, was recently fired because he ran a shakedown racket, putting the bite on guests who brought dames in.

(Inside stuff: Smart guys start charge accounts in hotels and have their bills mailed to their offices. That way, if they suddenly make a date, they can call and have a room prepared for them. Hotels do not like to cash checks for strangers, but will for those with charge accounts. It is a specific crime to defraud an inn-keeper.)

Washington and Baltimore hotels, unlike those in northern cities, are not required to serve or admit Negroes.

(Unless you are expecting a guest, do not open your door if someone raps on it. Many people have been robbed, raped or assaulted that way. When the girl with the nice voice phones and announces she’s from Harris & Ewing, the photographers, and read you were in town and wanted to take your picture, don’t think you are a celebrity. This firm goes through all registrations, plays for the chumps. After you pose for their photos, a glib salesman sells you a dozen. We wouldn’t have minded, but they phoned us at three in the afternoon, and we never get up until four.)

(Tips: And that’s the only way you’ll get along in any hotel—with tips, big ones. If you can’t get a room, slip the room clerk a sawbuck. Liberal handouts to the bellhops, doormen and elevator boys will help you get service, also pave the way for the things that hotels aren’t supposed to supply, but always do.)

We told you about the smooth con-men who travel in shiny chauffeur-driven limousines. The cars are easy to obtain. All smart travelers rent them wherever they go. They cost $5 an hour, which is usually cheaper than cabs for any considerable use. They are available at any hour. The chauffeurs are well-trained and in uniform. The cars are brand new Cadillacs or Packards, indistinguishable from a millionaire’s private car, except that the D.C. license plate begins with the letter “L.” Look in the phone book or ask the hotel porter to get you a car or phone Haines, HObart 8460, ask for James Conley, the best driver in town. Minimum tip one dollar an hour, unless you’re a skunk. In Baltimore, phone Belvedere, LE 8888.

It’s much cheaper and easier without rice and old shoes here, but you will always find a few old-fashioned people who like it the hard way. If you are one who has to be respectable, we will give you the lowdown on how to go about it in the area.

(Note: Common law marriages are valid in the District. They are not in Maryland and Virginia, though the former state, while prohibiting such marriages for its own residents, will recognize as binding any such entered into in the District.)

The marriageable ages in the three jurisdictions are 16 for girls and 18 for boys, with parents’ consent; 18 and 21 in D.C. and Maryland, without consent, and 21 and 21 in Virginia. Marriages between first cousins are permitted in all three.

Maryland and Virginia forbid marriages between whites and Negroes or Orientals. Virginia also proscribes American Indians. There are no racial restrictions in the District.

Maryland and Virginia require medical certificates before marriage, but Washington doesn’t. So, if you flunk your Wassermann, come to the District. The waiting time between issuance of license and ceremony is two days in Maryland, four in the District, and none in Virginia. Maryland requires that all marriages be solemnized by a clergyman, which is pretty prissy for that state, where you can get so much without marrying at all.

Both the District and Maryland permit one party of a proposed marriage to take out a license without the consent or knowledge of the other. Sometimes overly-eager ones take out these licenses (which are published) as a means of bringing final pressure on the other person. Recently a 21-year-old Marine shot himself to death after a minister refused to marry him and an unwilling maiden who had not been aware a license was issued.

Washington men are the choosiest in the country when it comes to picking wives. The marriage rate is falling yearly. In 1950, 10,729 licenses were taken out compared to 10,885 the year before and 12,156 in 1948. Meanwhile other cities are reporting increases. These figures are even worse than they read. Many transients come to wed in the District, to avoid blood tests elsewhere or to boast they were hitched in the nation’s capital.

Osteopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths and other such unorthodox healers are permitted both in the District and Maryland and are allowed to precede their names with the honorific “Dr.” Many Washington residents from Los Angeles, the Southwest and the moronic regions where faith healers, layer-oners-of-hands, herb doctors and other such quacks are common, are now living in Washington and provide a boom market for the irregular curers.

One of Washington’s biggest medical problems is V.D., because of the shifting, transient nature of the population and the unusual Negro percentage. Last year, more than 16,000 cases of gonorrhea were reported, and 507 new cases of syphilis. Fifteen people died of unchecked syphilis.

Both as a world capital and as an Eastern city, Washington’s manners and modes, on paper at least, could be supposed to resemble those of New York. But it is in a warmer belt and much of its resident population originated in other sections of the country, where habits are different, so some compromise of customs is common.

Washington women generally follow the New York style of not wearing hats. But the men wear lids all year around, even on the hottest days.

The women wear suits for daytime in winter and print dresses in summer. Men wear dark suits in winter, but, because of the deadly heat, don such tropical outfits as Palm Beach, seersucker, crash and linen in summer. Like most yokels, a sharp crease in the sleeve means a well-pressed suit.

A Washington woman never wears slacks on the street. When you see any dame so attired, you know she arrived by bus on a sight-seeing jaunt.

Few women wear hats at night. Those who do are visitors. Most men wear dark suits but compromise good taste with god-awful loud ties. Customers of the classier rooms, i.e., the hotel grills, are apt to overdress. You see more people wearing evening clothes than in New York, where such frummery is now worn only on occasions when required, like a formal ball or the opening of the opera.

All restaurants and night clubs, regardless of season, require men to wear coats, though some of the more popular-priced ones do not demand ties in the summer.

If you are a climber, or the wife of a government official, social precedence and correct social forms are more important in your life than the Sermon on the Mount. When in doubt about whether the governor of Nevada sits ahead of or in back of the minister of Costa Rica, you should consult Mrs. Carolyn Hagner Shaw, Wisconsin 3030.

The first thing that amazes the visitor is the terrific number of cabs on the streets. There is no limitation by law and, at this writing, there are 9,000. Cabs do not have meters, but operate on a zone system, the first charge 30 cents anywhere within the zone, or 20 cents a head for two or more passengers. They are asking for an extra dime a zone. The out-of-towner is always puzzled figuring out how the owner of the cab gets a fair shake from the driver, with no meter to check up on him. It was Congressman Tom Blanton who slipped riders into all bills to ban meters in the District.

What happens is that every hackman is an independent contractor. He rents his cab by the day, for which he pays $6, which includes insurance, tires and advertising. He buys his own gas and oil, which comes to another $3.50 a day. He keeps everything above that outlay. When business is bad, he swallows the loss himself. He can keep the cab 24 hours a day, and he usually drives it home at night and starts out in the morning in it. Some older cabs are rented for less, as low as $3.50 a day. These are used by men who hack in their spare time, such as policemen, chauffeurs, and government employes, who act as cabbies for four or five hours a day.

Washington law not only permits cabbies to double up passengers, but requires them to do so. Your taxi will not leave Union Station until it has a full load going in your direction. When Washington cabs go to the airport in Virginia or the suburbs of Maryland, they make a flat rate. They are not permitted to pick up return passengers outside the District. Maryland and Virginia cabs which come into Washington must return home empty.

Despite the huge number of cabs, it is almost impossible to get one at around five, when the government offices empty, or whenever it rains. The rates are so cheap, many Washingtonians find it costs them only a nickel more to go to their destination by cab than by bus or street-car. Few locals ever tip. Cab drivers fall all over out-of-towners.

If you are having trouble hailing a cab, the best place to get one is outside a hotel or a popular restaurant or night spot, for they will be driving up to these places with passengers. If you are caught at the Capitol and can’t get a cab, go over to the Congressional Hotel, across from the House Office Building, where the doorman can usually snag one for you. Don’t forget a tip. Our favorite cabbie is Harold Ramsburg, EM 2438, and you can hire him by the hour.

While on that subject, don’t act like a rube, a Southern cracker or a dope. Most hotel, restaurant and transportation employes are practically dependent for their livings on gratuities. Ten percent is no longer enough. Your waiter should get 20 percent, even more in a high class place where each waiter has only a few tables. Don’t forget the captains and headwaiters, especially if you want a good table.

We always got our parking and speeding tickets killed by Congressmen’s secretaries. That is one thing they are good for. Congressmen are the rulers of the District; when their secretaries call the District Commissioners or the Chief of Police, they get a respectful hearing.

Congressmen, themselves, are immune from arrest when Congress is in session. They are provided with special plates over their own license tags reading “Member, 82nd Congress.” Smart Congressmen seldom use the special plates. They say that when they do, traffic cops always bother them, then suddenly pretend they noticed the plates for the first time, after which they let the Congressman go, making it appear they are doing him a great favor. The next day they show up in his office asking for a favor—a promotion, probably.

You can get to Washington by train, plane, bus, auto, bike, or merely hitch-hiking. Train service, while frequent and fast, is generally lousy. From New York on the Pennsylvania there is only one first-class train, the Congressional Limited, which makes the 226 miles in 215 minutes, but it’s a shell of its old self, when it was all Pullman and extra fare. The Congressional is one of the few day trains in the country which runs complete cars of drawing rooms. These are always full, with lobbyists, officials and their dames, and other heavy drinking parties, spending the three and a half hours as pleasantly as possible. (Note: No liquor is served on trains in Pennsylvania on Sundays.)

The two best trains from the West are the B & O’s Capital Limited and the Pennsy’s Liberty Limited from Chicago. The Capital is an all-Pullman streamliner and carries a through car to Los Angeles, which connects with the Santa Fe’s Chief in Chicago.

Railroad and plane tickets to and from Washington are difficult to get, especially on key days of the week. Traffic moves to Washington on Sunday nights and Monday and away on weekends, beginning Thursday. At those times a little judicious tipping of hotel porters is advised. Railroad and plane employes are forbidden by law to take gratuities, but who’s going to do anything about it if they find a $10 bill neatly folded in their breast pockets?

The Washington Airport, though in Virginia, is only 15 minutes from the center of town. Baggage is unloaded considerably faster than in other airports. But the Union Station is a madhouse. Sometimes it takes a half-hour for your bags to get out to the taxi stand, if you can get a red cap at all. Then there is another wait for a cab going your way to fill up. (Note: The railroad exacts a 25-cent charge for each parcel carried by the red cap. He doesn’t keep that. You are expected to tip him on top.)

(Inside Stuff: There are special airplane and railroad ticket offices for members of Congress in the Capitol Building.)

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This and a sawbuck gets you an insult.

• AMBASSADOR HOTEL (NA-8510) Hi-Hat: Joe Brito
• CARLTON HOTEL (ME-2626) Congo Room: Stephen
• COLONY RESTAURANT (ST-8165): Orlando Connio
• MAYFLOWER HOTEL (DI-3000) Lounge: Alfred Leggett
• OLD NEW ORLEANS (RE-7284): Ivanhoe Wills
• OLMSTED RESTAURANT (ME-8055): Gus Kooles
• SHOREHAM HOTEL (AD-0700) Palladian Room: George and Alfred. Blue Room: Paul
• STATLER HOTEL (EX-1000) Embassy Room: Nick
• WARDMAN PARK HOTEL (CO-2000) Caribar Room: Leslie Matke

• CLUB CHARLES (VE-8020): Tommy McGee
• EMERSON HOTEL (MU-4400): Walter Katzli
• LORD BALTIMORE HOTEL (LE-8400) Oak Room: Mr. Cavalier
• SHERATON BELVEDERE HOTEL (MU-1000): Antone
• SOUTHERN HOTEL (SA-1600): Nick Brown

Listed, but not necessarily guaranteed.

FOR COCKTAILS:

• Anchor Room, 12th & H, NA-9220 (servicemen and pick-ups)
• Cafe Caprice, Roger Smith Hotel, NA-2740 (government workers’ hangout)
• Chelsea Room, Hotel Carlyle, N. Capitol & E, EX-7670 (gathering place for Southerners)
• Hay-Adams Lounge and English Tap Room, 800 16th St., NW, ME-2260 (respectable)
• Hi-Hat, Ambassador Hotel, NA-8510 (pretty babes)
• King Cole Room, 820 Conn. Ave., ME-3935 (flashy crowd)
• Mayflower Lounge, Conn. Ave. & De Sales, DI-3000 (political)
• Statler Hotel, 16th & K, EX-1000 (cosmopolitan)
• Washington Roof, 15th & Penn., ME-5900 (summer)
• Willard Hotel, Penn. & 14th, NA-4420 (pretty babes)

FOR DINING:

• Alfonso’s, 1403 L St., ME-7803 (excellent New York cuisine)
• Allies Inn, 1703 New York, NA-0523 (famous cafeteria, high prices, elderly ladies favorite)
• Allison’s Little Tea House, Arlington, Va., OT-7900 (popular suburban luncheon spot; government workers)
• Arbaugh’s, 2606 Conn., AD-8980 (spare ribs)
• Cannon’s Steak House, 1270 5th NE, LI-3-8685 (in the market place but high class)
• Ceres Grill, 1307 E, NA-9427 (government clerks like its good food at low prices)
• Colony, 1737 De Sales St., ST-8165 (elegant)
• Collingwood, On the Potomac, OV-1521 (suburbanites’ delight)
• Duke Zeibert’s, 1730 L, ST-1730 (new and popular steak house)
• Hall’s, 1000 7th St., SW, ME-8580 (sea food on the waterfront)
• Fan & Bill’s, 1132 Conn., RE-9856 (New York style)
• Harvey’s, 1107 Conn., NA-2860 (sometimes the best. Famous for sea food and celebrities)
• Hogate’s, 9th & Maine, SW, RE-3013 (tourists’ paradise)
• Hot Shoppes, all over (Washington’s most famous drive-ins)
• Louis, Ted, 2655 Conn., HO-3222 (local stand-by)
• Michel’s, 1020 Vermont, RE-1356 (Bohemian atmosphere)
• Mrs. K’s Toll House, Silver Spring, SH-3500 (bucolic atmosphere)
• Naylor’s, 951 Maine SW, NA-9659 (sea food where the boats come in)
• Normandy Farm, Potomac, Md, WI-9421 (delightful suburban atmosphere)
• Occidental, 1411 Penn., DI-6467 (hangout of five percenters and upper bracket officials. Too crowded for service)
• O’Donnell’s, 1207 E, RE-2102 (almost everyone comes for the sea food including Charlie Ford)
• Olmsted’s, 1336 G, DI-8235 (with that wonderful Luchow cuisine from New York)
• Pierre, Conn. & Q, DU-0666 (the ladies like this)
• States, 516 N. Capitol, FR-9443 (for tourists)
• Tally Ho, 810 17th St., ME-3218 (popular for luncheon)
• Water Gate Inn, On the Potomac, BI-9256 (government girls consider this a treat)

FOR DINING & DANCING:

• Caribar Bar, Wardman Park Hotel, Conn. Ave. & Woodley Rd., CO-2000
• Casino Royal, 14th & H, NW, NA-7700
• Congo Room, Carlton Hotel, 16th & K, ME-2626
• Lotus, 727 14th St., NW, NA-4766
• Lounge Riviera, Hotel 2400, 2400 16th NW, CO-7200
• Madrillon, 15th & New York, DI-4561
• Mayflower Lounge, Conn. & De Sales, DI-3000
• Old New Orleans, 1214 Conn. Ave., RE-7284
• Pall Mall Room, Raleigh Hotel, NA-3810
• Palladian Room, Shoreham Hotel, AD-0700
• Rainbow Room, Hamilton Hotel, DI-2580
• Shoreham Hotel Terrace, Conn. & Calvert, AD-0700
• Statler Hotel, 16th & K, EX-1000

FOR DINING IN BALTIMORE:

• Asia, 710 N. Howard, VE-8193 (Chinese)
• Baum’s, 320 W. Saratoga, SA-7196 (steak and sea food)
• Belvedere Hotel, MU-1000 (better hotel)
• Candle Light Lodge, Frederick & N. Rolling, CA-9754 (country dining)
• Cathay, 110 W. Saratoga, LE-7985 (Chinese)
• Chesapeake, 1707 N. Charles, VE-7711 (steaks)
• Dubner’s, 6427 Harfd Rd, CL-6459 (sea food)
• Emerson Hotel, MU-4400 (politicos’ hangout)
• Gannon’s, 3150 Frederick, GI-6147 (sea food)
• Haussner’s, Eastern & Clinton, EA-8365 (unique German with an art gallery)
• Hollander’s, 10 W. Oliver, LE-9869 (steaks)
• Marconi’s, 106 W. Saratoga, PL-9286 (French-Italian)
• Marling House, 20 E. Fayette, SA-4460 (steaks)
• Maria, 300 Albemarle, SA-9366 (Little Italy)
• Marty Welsh, 17 E. Fayette, SA-3639 (steaks)
• Miller Brothers, 119 W. Fayette, LE-2826 (the town’s biggest)
• Nate’s & Leon’s, 850 W. North Ave., MA-2400 (this is Baltimore’s Lindy’s. Hangout of show folk)
• Park Plaza, Charles & Madison, BE-4000 (hotel dining room)
• Pierre’s, 704 N. Howard, LE-3506 (high class French)
• Pizza’s, 300 S. High, MU-1327 (Little Italy)
• Roma, 900 Fawn, LE-8065 (Little Italy)
• Rossiter’s, 1001 S. Hanover, LE-9196 (sea food)
• Shellhase’s, 412 N. Howard, MU-6783 (H. L. Mencken’s favorite)
• Sussman and Lev, 923 E. Baltimore, MU-6321 (kosher)
• Walker-Hasslinger, 1701 N. Charles, VE-9410 (steaks, sea food)
• White Rice Inn, 320 Park Ave., MU-6790 (Chinese)

Chinese:

• Cathay, 624 H, RE-3330
• Chinese Lantern, 14 F, LI-9534
• Dragon, 1329 G, ME-3218
• Good Earth, 1609 K, NA-0441
• Gung Ho, 1406 G, ST-6339
• Orient, 1715 Wisconsin, AD-4700
• Ruby Foo’s Den, 728 13th St., NA-3565
• Peking, 5522 Conn., WO-8079
• Yet Ho Restaurant, 714 11th St., NA-9379

French:

• Aux Trois Mousquetaires, 820 Conn., RE-2619
• Bonat’s Cafe, 1022 Vermont, RE-3373
• La Salle du Bois, 1800 M, RE-1124
• Maxime’s, 1731 Conn., AD-9811
• Napoleon’s, 2649 Conn., CO-8955

German:

• Hammel’s, 416 10th St., ST-9301 (one of Washington’s best)
• Old Europe, 2434 Wisconsin, OR-7650

Greek:

• New Athens Restaurant, 1741 K, DI-4081
• Old Athens, 804 9th St., ME-9582

Italian:

• Aldo Cafe, 1143 New Hampshire, RE-9510
• Alfredo’s, 1724 Conn., HO-9729
• A-V, 607 New York, RE-0550
• Ciro’s, 1705 De Sales, ME-1434
• Gusti’s, 1837 M, RE-0895
• Roma, 3419 Conn., WO-9833 (dining under the stars)
• Villa Nova, 5 F, TR-8978

Mexican & Latin American:

• Copacabana, 1711 Eye St., RE-9668
• El Mexico, 2603 Conn., HO-4550

Yiddish:

• Holfberg’s, 7822 Eastern Ave., GE-5878
• Jones Delicatessen, 1123 S, CO-3786, NO-9862
• Pomerantz, 1782 Columbia Rd., CO-4413, CO-8738
• Randy’s, 1113 15th St., RE-0661 (the Rueben’s of Washington)
• S & L Kosher Delicatessen, 1205 7th St., NO-4633
• Uptown, 3500 Conn., OR-1040

Where to find ’em. Or where to keep away from ’em, which is harder.

• Kavakos, 8th & H
• The Players, 5th & K

• Chesapeake, 3804 Bladensburg Rd.
• Club La Conga, 9412 Baltimore Blvd.
• Crossroads, Bladensburg at Peace Cross
• Hilltop, 5211 Marlboro Pike
• Senate Inn, 5704 Marlboro Pike, SE
• Waldrops, 4318 Rhode Island Ave., NE

• Ambassador, Fayette & Washington (low)
• Bettye Mills, 704 E. Baltimore
• Chanticleer, Charles & Eager (high class)
• Copa, 21 W. Baltimore (ditto)
• Kathleen’s, 612 E. Baltimore
• Kay’s, Baltimore & Frederick
• Miami, Fayette & Frederick (low)
• Oasis, Baltimore & Frederick

Being some notes to file away where your wife won’t look.

• Backstage Phone No.: The Capitol Theatre, RE-7193. Star’s dressing room call RE-1000 and ask for extension 305
• Boy Meets Girl Dance: Every Saturday, Victor Roosevelt.
• District Age of Consent: 16.
• Lipstick Stains Removed (No Odor): Texas, phone MI-9301.
• Lonesome Gals: Friday and Saturday nights at the Officers’ Service Club, 1624 21st St.
• Florist, All Night: Charles Chisley, 603 4th St., ME-8709.
• Tourist Courts: On the Baltimore Highway.

These are extracts from a master list of 800 names submitted to the Kefauver Committee of the U.S. Senate by Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger in June 1950.

Since this list was compiled by Commissioner Anslinger some of the subjects on it changed their addresses—some to a much warmer climate.

(Many of the above were similarly mentioned in other testimony before the Kefauver Committee.)

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