-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- an excerpt from: The Last of The Big-Time Bosses Warren Moscow�1971 All Rights Reserved Stein and Day New York, N.Y. ISBN 0-8128-1400-2 227 pps. - First/only Edition - Out-of-print ----- The revelance here is that Bill O'Dwyer�if I remember all this right�was the military Governor of Italy after WWII and helped develop a huge blackmarket with Mafia help and I believe this alliance was used to "dispose" of the narcotics that Dulles got from the SS stores in Germany after Dulles against orders accepted terms of surrender from SS and italian forces a day before the Official surrender and helped to usher in the alliance of the mob, intel, bureaucrats and drugs. These "monies' were then used to fund "ops" and other slushy things with Skorsky[sp?], Ghelen, Barbie, Mengle, Ricord, the ACL's among others. MHO Om K ----- THREE THE JUNGLE In George Washington's first administration as President there came into being an organization which dubbed itself the Society of Tammany or the Columbian Order. It was set up as the poor man's answer to the patrician Society of the Cincinnati, a group of Washington's army officers who hoped for upper-crust rule of the new republic. Both organizations were supposedly national in scope, but the Cincinnati died off in short order, and the Society of Tammany flourished only in New York. By the Jacksonian era the patriotic order, as Tammany chose to regard itself, was synonymous with the Democratic Party of the city of New York. The Society of Tammany had a permanent headquarters, a "hall," where the sachems and the wiskinkis donned their fraternal regalia every Fourth of July and, through district clubs with Indian names, operated the Democratic political machine the other 364 days of the year. To the people and press the machine became known as Tammany Hall, after the edifice it used to house both branches. In the first part of the current century the headquarters, or Wigwam, was a genteelly shabby structure on 14th Street east of Union Square, where Charles F. Murphy sat behind a desk and quietly issued the orders that made or broke politicians of the day. In the late 1920s Tammany's wealth was such that it could afford a handsome, neo-Colonial brick building, tailored architecturally to its needs, at the southeast corner of 17th Street and Fourth Avenue; to house both the political and fraternal wings, with even an assembly hall -for large meetings. By 1943, when the thirty-five-year-old Carmine De Sapio first took his seat as a member of Tammany's ruling body, the executive committee, the organization was bankrupt of cash and its hall was gone, foreclosed and sold because there was no money to meet the mortgage payments. So for his first meeting, De Sapio went to a three-room suite in an office building at 331 Madison Avenue, at 43rd Street, which provided just enough space for a waiting room, a conference room, and a private office for the boss. The only political lore attached to the edifice was the fact that on a lower floor, a decade before, Louis McHenry Howe and James A. Farley had maintained the private headquarters of their drive to win delegates for the first nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt for President. There was no room in the new quarters for the Society of Tammany, with its banners, trophies, and souvenirs, so the "patriotic" branch of Tammany, shifting for itself for the first time, found rooms in the National Democratic Club, and later expired quietly, without even a public announcement of its dissolution. The immediate reason for Tammany's bankruptcy in 1943 lay in La Guardia's long tenure in City Hall. His original election in 1933 had hurt Tammany, his reelections in 1937 and 1941 had ruined it. The continued hold of the fiery little mayor meant, for example, that by, 1943 every city magistrate, whose term ran for ten years at most, owed his appointment to the mayor, not to Tammany Hall. The control of these police courts had been of tremendous value to Tammany in the past: favors could be done there, without fanfare or publicity, for both honest citizens down on their luck and for professional criminals who paid for protection. The mayor had also sponsored the adoption of a new city charter, which curtailed the power of departments Tammany had always controlled. He was in the process of wiping out the county office sinecures, such as the sheriff's office and the 150 no-show jobs that went with it. There was no state patronage either, for a Republican governor, Tom Dewey, sat in Albany. There was plenty of job and favor patronage being handed out of Washington by the third-term Roosevelt administration, but the bulk of it went to the Democratic organizations in Brooklyn and the Bronx, in return for their steadfast support of Roosevelt's policies, compared with Tammany's opposition or sulky acceptance of them. The Bronx and Brooklyn, which once had followed Tammany's leadership for better or worse, now treated it as an errant teenager, not to be mentioned in public if possible. All Tammany had left as a source of income and patronage were the judgeships of the elected courts, such as the Supreme, City, and Municipal benches, and the two elected Surrogates of New York County. From 1927 to 1943 it lived off these alone, staffing the courts with district leaders whose predecessors once had run whole city departments and selling nominations to the bench itself. The public knew little of this, but nominations to the Supreme Court sold for $100,000�in untraceable cash. (The fee was reduced to $75,000 in 1939, when for the first time the court salaries came under the federal income-tax laws.) The author recalls chatting one day with the late Bert Stand, longtime secretary of Tammany and the man who knew where the bodies were buried. Using the judicial section of the city directory, known as the "Little Green Book," as a guide, the author picked off the names of the judges who he believed had bought their nominations, since they possessed no record of party or public service to otherwise justify their high rank. Stand nodded agreement with every name offered, and then added three others, to whom the author had been willing to give the benefit of the doubt. But the income from these judicial sales-at a reduced price for the lower courts-did not go to the Tammany organization. It went to groups within the Tammany wolf pack, in temporary alliance for the duration of the judicial sale. What was even less generally known at the time was that Tammany's bankruptcy-of funds and leadership-had resulted in the passing of control of the ancient organization into the hands of the underworld, or at least that branch of the Mafia headed by Frank Costello. And no one foresaw that only two years ahead still another Mafioso, Thomas Luchese, would be able to use Tammany to set a protege on a course that would end in his election as mayor of the greatest city of the Western world. Like any other big-city machine, Democratic or Republican, Tammany had always made money by protecting organized crime. It had always had its "arrangement" with professional gamblers. It once had protected organized vice as well, until leader Murphy cracked down on the practice. It furnished protection to racketeers in return for cash�a percentage of the take-plus strong-arm work at the polls on primary and election days. But the 1943 arrangement was brand-new, and it stemmed from roots planted during Prohibition. The dry law, in effect from 1920 through 1933, had vastly expanded the area in which lawbreakers and politicians could team up profitably. It also multiplied the number of participants on both sides, since the demand for liquor rose sharply and there was little chance of an aroused public resenting those who made their liquor supply possible. Men who drank before Prohibition continued to do so, and their concern was not with law violation, but with locating a reliable supply. Women who had never drunk, at least in public, started to in the semiprivacy and pseudo-glamour of the speakeasy. The younger generation toted hip flasks and flaunted them at college proms and football games. The illegal liquor business, operating with a vastly inflated price scale, produced greater revenue than the legal trade ever had. The "noble experiment"�as it had been termed by President Herbert Hoover-turned out to be the nation's gift to corruptionists. In the beginning, competition for markets between rival gangs of rumrunners brought a spate of murders and created an atmosphere of violence. But by the late 1920s the trade had been organized on a big-business, noncompetitive basis. The gang chiefs parceled out territories for monopoly operation as though they were heads of big steel or electric-generator combines. Repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in December 1933 left the underworld unemployed, but not for long. It turned its organizational skills and manpower to racketeering. Its procedure was to demand "protection money" from businesses, small or large, just to be left unmolested. The corner vegetable store that did not pay had kerosene poured on its produce; the dry-cleaning shop was set afire; the movie theater was plagued by stinkbombs. The big manufacturer was. struck, not by a legitimate labor union, but by a racket union set up to collect and then disappear. Later the racketeers moved in on the numbers game, originally a Harlem pastime, and turned it into the city-wide policy racket. Loan sharking followed, as did drug distribution. In Manhattan, a prime area for any and all rackets, the underworld counted on the same protection by Tammany that it had enjoyed during Prohibition, and got it, for a time. The key figures in furnishing the protection and running the rackets were James J. Hines and Lucky Luciano. Jimmy Hines was the most powerful district leader in Tammany. His own district was at the north end of Central Park, but he did not confine his operations there. He selected stooges to be leaders of the West Side and Broadway districts, which furnished most of the action, and took from them the lion's share of the protection money. Hines's power was startlingly illustrated in 1933 when Tammany came to pick its candidate for district attorney. Tammany was under attack from all sides as a result of the Seabury investigations. It faced the loss of City Hall to LaGuardia. Yet it was Hines, who made a business of protecting lawbreakers against the law, who picked Tammany's candidate for public prosecutor. With the assistance of Luciano's gorillas operating in the slum areas, Tammany stole enough votes on election day to elect Hines's man by the tiny margin of 11,000 votes in a three-way contest. The police looked the other way while gunmen took over ghetto polls and rang up illegal votes. The rackets became a public stench, but Hines's district attorney somehow could never gather any evidence. Four years later, with La Guardia in control of the police and with the anti-Tammany forces united for a change, Tammany lost the district attorneyship to Dewey. Tom Dewey then was an ambitious young Republican who had already served two years as a special rackets prosecutor, a post to which he had been named by Governor Lehman. As special prosecutor and as district attorney, Dewey dug up plenty of evidence. He exposed Tammany's role as protector. He sent Hines and Luciano to jail. His work had the peripheral effect of creating a power vacuum within Tammany Hall. No strong district chief emerged as Hines's successor. It was a void that continued to exist until De Sapio consolidated his hold many years later. However, the vacancy in the underworld leadership was filled without fanfare and with dispatch. A gambler and former bootlegger named Frank Costello emerged as Luciano's successor. Years later the Appalachia crime convention, broken up by a state-police raid, was to bring the underworld network into the public eye. And still later a Mafioso named Joe Valachi, in jail and terrified of being assassinated there by his own people, was to give the FBI the full story of the Mafia family system as he had learned it from the inside. But in 1939 and 1940 it was not clear that Costello, taking over control of the underworld from Luciano, was beneficiary of any foreordained system of succession. In that era there was no single name commonly used for the organized underworld. Those who knew of its existence at all referred to it simply as "the mob." Dewey's district attorneyship made it impossible for Tammany to furnish protection for Costello and his crew. By 1941 the mob was restless enough to make a move to change the pattern. They abandoned the time-honored system of furnishing manpower and cash to support the non-Mafia men who were Tammany district leaders and decided to elect their own: it would be cheaper and more reliable. In some districts they just made a show of force to get leaders to quit. In others they moved in on vacancies that had occurred naturally. At local meetings of county committeemen where new leaders were to be picked, groups of hard-looking characters appeared for the first time. Wearing the clothing and tools of their profession, they monitored the sessions to make sure that the "right man" was selected. It all took place as a series of isolated events, unconnected in the press and not comprehended at all by the great body of enrolled Democrats. But it amounted to a great breakthrough of the underworld into the business of politics. By midwinter of 1941-42 the mob controlled six full votes of the Tammany executive committee out of the twelve then needed for a majority. And it was spurred to assert itself county-wide as the result of what it deemed "unfriendly" action taken by Christy Sullivan, who still hung on as leader of Tammany Hall. LaGuardia was running for a third term as mayor in 1941 and was still a formidable candidate. The reform trend which had first elected him, and which normally would have waned and died over the years, had been rejuvenated by the racket revelations. In midsummer Christy Sullivan decided it would help to lick La Guardia if he could remove the crime tag from Tammany's neck. One way to do that was for the organization to endorse the anti-racket drive by nominating for district attorney someone who had played an important part in it. His first choice was Dewey himself. Sullivan sent two eminently respectable General Sessions Court judges to begin secret negotiations with Dewey, who by then was top boss of the GOP as well as DA. Sullivan's first offer was to give Dewey the Tammany nomination, leaving him unopposed for a second term as prosecutor. Dewey had other ideas, far beyond local office�a race for governor in 1942 to be followed by a presidential bid in 1944. He declined to run again for DA no matter how many parties nominated him. Sullivan, undeterred, sent back word that he would accept any Dewey assistant whom Dewey suggested. Dewey named three, all Republicans. Sullivan sent the judges back to ask if Dewey did not have a Democrat on his staff who filled the bill, which would make it easier for Sullivan to get his "coup" past a probably reluctant Tammany executive committee. Dewey replied with the name of Frank S. Hogan, an independent Democrat, up to then his administrative assistant. Sullivan accepted Hogan. The executive committee went along, grumbling. The Republicans and *the American Labor Party also endorsed Hogan. While the details remained secret, the author, reporting on Sullivan's gambit of 194 1, was able to write in The New York Times: "The political effect of the nomination of Mr. Hogan will be to weaken Mayor La Guardia and his associates on the city-wide ticket. In other words, Tammany is willing to take a plea of guilty in all of the political trials of the past six years if it can remove Mayor La Guardia from City Hall." Sullivan's ploy failed. La Guardia was reelected, and the only consolation for his opponents was that his 133,000-vote margin of victory was the smallest since the turn of the century. In New York County, Tammany, having conceded the district attorneyship, could not even elect a borough president. The underworld, watching from the sidelines, felt that Sullivan had thrown the ball game when he nominated a reform DA. This was the office they cared most about. There was anti-Sullivan pressure also from respectable Democrats who felt that Sullivan was a hopeless and hapless party liability. So out he went as Tammany leader, a lone figure who had lived too long politically. When it came to picking Sullivan's successor, early tests of strength (secret and unreported) showed that the shadowy Costello owned the largest bloc of votes. These he eventually swung to Michael J. Kennedy, Jr., a young and personable congressman who was also the leader of a tiny West Side district, which entitled him to cast only one-third of a vote in the executive committee. But Costello's support elevated Kennedy to the post of principal contender. As Bert Stand later quipped to the author: "Kennedy went from one-third of a vote to six and one-third on one quick handshake." The Costello power base within the committee acted as a magnet for otherwise unaffiliated Tammany district leaders. It attracted enough additional support from East Side and Harlem districts to put over Kennedy as leader and entrench Costello as the power behind the throne. The original six Costello votes grew into a working majority that over the years was able successively to elect Kennedy, Edward V. Loughlin, Frank Sampson, Hugo Rogers, and Carmine De Sapio as leaders of Tammany Hall. And Costello, in the years preceding De Sapio's election as leader of the Hall, had no hesitation in exercising his power. In the fall of 1943, just as De Sapio was taking his seat as a district leader, the public got its first peek at the underworld iceberg and gasped at what it saw. The underworld's control was revealed in connection with a judicial nomination-not one that was being sold for cash, but one that was being given away. District attorney Hogan had put a court-sanctioned wiretap on Costello's home telephone. The day after the September 1943 judicial nominating convention an agitated detective working for Hogan's office read to the DA the notes he had taken that morning of a conversation between city magistrate Thomas A. Aurelio and Frank Costello. Aurelio, relatively unknown then, had been nominated the night before for the state Supreme Court, an always coveted post especially valuable in 1943 because the Democrats and Republicans had agreed in advance on a bipartisan division of the vacancies. Two Democrats and one Republican, whoever they turned out to be and regardless of their qualifications, were assured of election by being nominated on both tickets. In the tapped phone call, Aurelio pledged Costello his "undying gratitude" and "loyalty" for his help in securing the nomination. Costello replied, "When I tell you something is in the bag, you can rest assured." Aurelio had not paid Costello or anyone else a cent. Crassly, his potential value to Costello as a judge would have been greater on the Criminal Court, in which he sat as a magistrate, than on the Supreme Court, which tried only civil cases. It was an example-one of a few, it developed years later-of Costello using his power to promote a friendly though respectable fellow Italian. His role vis-a-vis Aurelio was like the "godfather" in Mario Puzo's later novel, and Costello enjoyed playing it. The public did not feel that way about it. When Hogan released he transcript of the conversation to the press, the reaction was completely condemnatory. The public had evidence for the first time that an underworld king could select members of the judiciary. The fine distinction between civil and criminal court was not even discussed. The howl from all directions was so loud that Mike Kennedy and his Republican counterpart, Tom Curran, publicly disowned the nomination, but it was too late for the bipartisan slate to be legally withdrawn or amended. The Bar Association hastily fielded an independent opponent, but Aurelio remained the official candidate of both major parties, and won easily in November. In fairness it should be said that he served his full fourteen-year term on the Supreme Court with credit and was reelected unopposed on the basis of an unchallengeable record of probity. But it did add up to woe for Mike Kennedy. Costello waited impatiently until right after the election, and then lowered the boom. His Tammany executive committee majority ousted Kennedy as leader to remind everybody that nobody ran out on Costello. The nominal new leader was Edward V. Loughlin, a young lawyer from the Yorkville section of Manhattan. But the real job of running the executive committee in tandem with Costello for the next three years was in the hands of Bert Stand and Clarence Neal. Stand was a lower East Side Jew, Neal a Harlem Irishman, and both originally were members of the old Ahearn crowd. Neither was a member of "the mob," but as political pragmatists they accepted the mob's power as a fact of life. This was the political world into which Carmine De Sapio came in 1943 as a fledgling district leader and in which he was to live for a whole decade. And he did not fight it. He voted for Loughlin, Sampson, and Rogers, supporting all of Costello's decisions until he himself became leader of Tammany Hall. His own rise could not have happened without Costello's blessing. Many of the reservations about De Sapio's later reform tendencies were based on his record in the pre-leadership stage. For most of that period he remained a minor figure. Two far better known political animals shared with Costello the kingship of the jungle. One was Vito Marcantonio, who first dominated Spanish Harlem and then all of Harlem. The second was William O'Dwyer, first as mayor-to-be and then as mayor. Both played ball with the underworld. Marcantonio was the New York equivalent of the old Southern Populist, a man of the people, a fighter against the "interests," a hardworking and tireless champion of the social underdog; he was also the hard-bitten dispenser of political protection to the worst elements in the community, regardless of party. He lived simply and took no money from anyone except his $10,000 a year from Congress as a member of the House. He had virtually no government allowance for staff, but managed to maintain the biggest in New York to service his all-ghetto constituency. He traded favors with the mob, not for money for himself, but for the political support that would keep him in office as the leading representative of the oppressed. He took Tammany, Republican, and Communist assistance in the same spirit. Vito Marcantonio had entered politics as the protege of La Guardia, who had handpicked him to be his successor in Congress when he himself became mayor. La Guardia treated him as a son, promoting his career with affection, tolerance, and even more, the practical wherewithal to support a political organization. The last consisted of instruction to the police brass that in Harlem whatever Marc said was law. In other parts of the city the police, under La Guardia's direction, played no favorites in striking at vice and crime. In Harlem the police protected or wiped them out as Marc saw fit. There are two possible explanations for La Gua rdia's Harlem policy. The first is that the existence of the underworld did not shock him. He had grown up with it on the streets of the lower East Side and then in Harlem. He had used the underworld when he needed it and denounced and warred on it when he did not. He expected Marc to do the same. The second is that by the time Marc's operation was in high gear, the winning of World War 11 was La Guardia's principal interest in life and he paid little attention to local problems. In following in La Guardia's footsteps, Marcantonio had first won election to Congress in the early 1930s as a Republican, from La Guardia's own Harlem district. Then he followed his mentor into the American Labor Party when it was created by the garment-trades unions in 1936. Communist infiltration into the ALP followed rapidly, and when the party-line followers gained control of the New York County branch in 1938 Marc joined forces with the Reds and became their hero and pet. By 1942 Marc's ability to furnish protection against police interference with Harlem gamblers and loan sharks intrigued the Harlem Tammany leaders. They gave him the Democratic nomination for Congress on top of the GOP and ALP endorsements which were regularly his. The system was in full effect. He paid off the Democratic and Republican leaders alike by assuring protection for whatever rackets their "friends" wanted to run. The ALP settled for Marc's full support of the Communist party line, in or out of Congress. Marc's alliances made his control of Harlem absolute. One Tammany district leader was once brash enough to threaten to split with him and go his own way. Marc put him in his place. "I'll run my janitor against you and beat you right in your own Democratic primary," he boasted. And he kept his word. He selected the custodian of his own clubhouse, a black man named Jim Pemberton, and elected him the Tammany district leader. No other Democrat challenged Marc for a long time. In 1944 there was friction on the Republican side of Marc's political fence. T om Curran appealed to his district leaders to deny Marc the Republican endorsement for Congress. He did so at the behest of the Republican high command in the state and nation, to whom Marc's Republican label and Communist party line were an embarrassing mixture. The local leaders who operated the primary-election machinery just laughed at Curran. Marc could give them more in the way of practical political rewards than the county, state, and national committees combined. Now for the second force, William O'Dwyer. O'Dwyer was a political charmer. He had come to this country as a youth, without money, but loaded with ability and blarney. As soon as he was old enough he joined the police force and went to law school in his off hours. He practiced law in Brooklyn with little financial success, but attracted the attention of Mrs. William Randolph Hearst with work he did for her pet charity, the Milk Fund. Her influence as the wife of the important newspaper publisher got him an appointment as a city magistrate in 1932. Thereafter he went up the ladder on his own, first to Kings County judge and then to district attorney. For a time O'Dwyer rivaled Dewey for space in the newspapers as a racket-busting DA. His most-publicized success was in convicting "Murder, Inc.," the newspaper name for a group of killers for hire. In 1941 he was the unanimous choice of the five Democratic county leaders to run for mayor against La Guardia. He lost, but his race was creditable enough for them to keep him in mind for a second try in 1945. With that in mind, O'Dwyer took leave from his DA duties and spent World War II as a brigadier general, with duties in the field of procurement for the Army. One of those duties supplied the excuse he used when he was questioned about his first meeting with Frank Costello, in Costello's Manhattan penthouse apartment in 1942. O'Dwyer's story to investigators years later was that he had conferred with Costello to obtain his help in straightening out some Army Air Force labor problems at Wright Field, Ohio. The political grapevine carried the story at the time it occurred, though the newspapers did not. Many of the politicians who heard it held to the belief that the meeting had not involved a conference about Wright Field or any other field. To them it was a cocktail party, and they named other underworld characters they said were present. It was their theory that O'Dwyer, who knew his Brooklyn underworld, was at least curious about the gunmen who had taken over Tammany Hall and had accepted someone's casual invitation to "come up and have a drink with Frank." The cocktail-party version was supported years later by testimony that among those presentnot in any way connected with Wright Field or the Army Air Forcehad been Mike Kennedy, leader of Tammany Hall; Bert Stand, its secretary, and Irving Sherman. O'Dwyer described Sherman as a close friend. J. Edgar Hoover called him "one of the most prominent criminals in the country." O'Dwyer's record as a prosecutor of the underworld was spotty. On the plus sid e was his early and spectacular breaking up of the organized murder ring. On the minus side was his handling of Abe Reles. Reles was a key witness in a case involving the killing of a gangland boss, Albert Anastasia. O'Dwyer had Reles in protective custody, under twenty-four-hour guard in a fourteenth-story suite of a Coney Island hotel. Reles was found dead on the ground, killed by a fall from an open window. It was never settled whether he jumped, fell accidentally, or was pushed, but many argued that he was not the suicidal type. Another minus involved the records of a racket- dominated Brooklyn waterfront union. John Harlan Amen, a special prosecutor of waterfront rackets, won a lengthy court battle to obtain the documents. Before he had a chance to inspect them, O'Dwyer used his superior position as the regular DA to subpoena them for himself. He admitted years later that once he had them he just sat on them, in effect suppressing the evidence. However, that expose came years after he was out of public office, and it never handicapped him as a candidate. O'Dwyer was remarkably astute politically. He was also well informed on city affairs and knew the problems of each of the boroughs and the neighborhoods which constituted them. His renomination in 1945 by the Democrats, plus his endorsement by Marcantonio's ALP, assured his election as mayor. Frank V. Kelly, the leader of Brooklyn, O'Dwyer's home borough, was dubious by then of O'Dwyer's reliability or stability, and his thinking influenced Ed Flynn of the Bronx, but both finally went along with O'Dwyer's supporters, James A. Roe of Queens, Loughlin of Tammany, and Jeremiah Sullivan of Richmond. La Guardia meanwhile was furious at the Republicans and the labor leaders who had just formed the Liberal Party out of what had been the right wing of the ALP, because they made it clear that they would not support him for a fourth term. The Republicans resented La Guardia's 100 percent support of the Roosevelt New Deal, the Liberals his refusal to repudiate Marcantonio and the Communistdominated ALP. The Republicans and Liberals coalesced for mayor on Jonah J. Goldstein, a Tammany judge with a personal following. To make sure that they could not win with Goldstein, La Guardia deliberately divided the anti-Tammany forces by putting Newbold Morris into the race as an independent. O'Dwyer's own, winning ticket required more explanation than was available at the time. But even then he gave a sign of the volatility of his politics that was to mark the whole five years he was in City Hall. First, he sat down with the five Democratic county leaders and came up with a city-wide ticket that was perfect as far as geographic and ethnic balance were concerned. To match O'Dwyer, the Brooklyn Irishman, the ticket included Lawrence Gerosa, a Bronx Italian, for controller and Irwin Davidson, a Manhattan Jew, for president of the City Council. All was arranged, then suddenly all was confusion. O'Dwyer announced that the ticket he had assembled was not satisfactory, and that he would not run on it. Marcantonio backed him up, saying that the ALP would refuse to endorse it. O'Dwyer then produced, and the county leaders accepted, a substitute slate. This time the Jew on the ticket, Lazarus Joseph, came from the Bronx and was the candidate for controller, and the nominee for the City Council presidency was an Italian, Vincent Impellitteri, from Manhattan. Impellitteri's nomination staggered even the most imaginative among political reporters. A complete unknown, whose highest job had been secretary to a Supreme Court judge, was being promoted to the position of succession to the mayoralty. Bert Stand was asked how the organization had dug him up. The Tammany secretary responded with his usual wit, but less than his usual frankness. He said that they had needed a Manhattan Italian to balance the ticket and had hunted through the city directory, the "Little Green Book," until they found one. Stand knew better then, and others did later. The switch to a Manhattan Italian for Council president-which required a change in the controllership nominee as well, to preserve both geographic and ethnic balance-had been engineered by O'Dwyer as a favor to Marcantonio. Marc, for his part, had used his influence as a favor to another friend, Luchese. To the public Luchese was still a respectable businessman. Privately he was known to the underworld as Three Finger Brown. Under both names, he acted as though Impellitteri was his protege. Years later Charles Buckley, the Bronx boss, told the author exactly what had happened. At the time, Buckley was a congressman and deputy leader of the Bronx, under Flynn. Marcantonio, a fellow congressman, picked up the telephone in Buckley's congressional office in Washington, and in Buckley's presence called O'Dwyer in New York. Using the name by which O'Dwyer was familiarly known, Marcantonio said, "Bill-o, you've got to rearrange the ticket. I've got my own ginzo [vernacular for Italian] from Manhattan, Vince Impellitteri." If Buckley knew the call had been made by Marcantonio at the request of Luchese, he did not say so. But at the time he told the author the story, in 1953, it was already a matter of record, in testimony before the State Crime Commission, that Marcantonio and Luchese were warm friends and had been so since childhood. The fact that the outsider Luchese had the leverage to swing the deal that put Impellitteri on the city-wide ticket presaged a later fight with Costello for the overlordship of Tammany. It was also to cost the Democratic Party its whole state ticket in 1950 and to plague De Sapio in his early years as leader of Tammany Hall. But that is part of a later story. The important thing to the Democratic leaders was to elect O'Dwyer and get the patronage they had been deprived of in the twelve long years of La Guardia. They elected O'Dwyer and his revamped ticket, and from the patronage point of view of the leaders, O'Dwyer started out 100 percent correct. On the afternoon of New Year's Eve, 1945, the five county leaders met with him in a private session at the Metropolitan Club, and brought their selections for the top city jobs along with them. The posts had previously been allocated by counties, and O'Dwyer was meeting for the first time the men he had already committed himself to appoint and would swear in to office the following day. In the gay Metropolitan Club crowd was thirty-six-year-old Robert F. Wagner, Jr., about to leave the state assembly to accept membership on the city Tax Commission. O'Dwyer had volunteered the appointment as a gesture of goodwill to Wagner's father, the distinguished and powerful United States senator. It struck young Wagner wrong that O'Dwyer was entrusting the administration of the city's business-and his own future record-to men he did not even know. Wagner made a mental resolve that if he should ever be mayor he would make sure he knew whom he was appointing before he swore them in. Neither Wagner nor anybody else realized he was seeing O'Dwyer at his craftiest. He was giving the patronage-starved county leaders everything they wanted, for the moment. Later, if it became necessary to threaten them to gain a point of his own, they would be more vulnerable than if they had never had the jobs in the first place. It was the beginning of a game of political cat and mouse that O'Dwyer was to play for the next five years. pps. 49-64 --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! 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