GANGSTERS’ RULE

Evening Star, Issue 20486, 17 May 1930, Page 20

GANGSTERS’ RULE

CRIME AND POLITICS i SOME STARTLING CLAIMS “We are ruled by the criminals in CW great cities in alliance with the corrupt politicians,” declared Mr Frank Loescb, at the close of a four-day conference at Princeton University, when politics and crime were under discussion, “You cannot to-day secure the conviction of any noted criminal who has money or any politician high in the organisation. The police are under political control, and such control involves, the failure to arrest and prosecute criminals or their release if arrested.” The concensus of opinion was expressed by Mr Loesch, who was a member of President Hoover’s Crime Commission and head of the Chicago Crime Commission, who made the 1928 election, as he described it, , “ the first honest one in Chicago in forty-five years.” “ One of the principal sources of corruption,” Mr Loesch continued, “ is the practice of lawyers who seek _to bribe Jurors; cajole, terrorise, or drive away witnesses, or induce them not to testify on the false excuse that it might tend to incriminate them; threaten jurors’ families, and otherwise attempt to defeat the ends of justice.” “ The present corrupt alliance between crime and politics,” he said, “makes it difficult to insure immediate reforms, but I believe that an honestlj informed public will respond. Two, years ago, for instance, there could have been no such thing as happened within the past two days to A 1 Capone in Chicago when the police told him to get out of the town or ho would be arrested. When I was preparing the Chicago situation for the election two years ago, I told Capone either the gunmen or the law would get him eventually, and that I didn’t want it to be the gunmen. I wanted the law to get him so that the majesty of the law may be triumphant.” After telling of a 1928 election conspiracy trial in which ■be prosecuted an array of prisoners whom he listed as Irish, Polish, and Italian, Mr Loesch provoked a succession of protests when he said : “ The American people are not a lawless people. It’s the foreigners and the first generation of Americans who are loaded oh us.” Mr Loesch restored quiet by adding that he was a first generation American himself, and admitted that Mayor William i Hale Thompson, under whom Chicago saw most of its criminal abuses, was of old American stock. The recent investigation into the conduct of Magistrate Vitale in New York was used by Charles Edwin Fox, lawyer, sociologist, and former assistant district attorney of Philadelphia, to explain the experience of his own city. “The Philadelphia politicians are astute enough to let the district attorney’s office and the higher courts alone,” he said “The contact between professional crime and professional politics occurs right at thd beginning when the offender is arrested. Eighty per cent, of the arrests never go higher than the Magistrate's Court. It is in the minor judiciary that the divorce of politics from crime mua* effected.”

Joseph M’GomriCk, of Columbia University, to’u the conference the detailed story of the Vitale investigation, and pointed out that the New York magistrates are all active in politics, generally officers of district political clubs, and that the district leaders always have their ear. Ho said, however, that the clerks of the Magistrates’ Courts are “ the worst fibers and agenta of corruption.” The experience of Cleveland was reviewed in similar terms by James P. Kirby, of the ‘ Cleveland Press,’ who gave it, as his judgment that_ politics does more to corrupt the, than crime Recently, ho said, the price of an appointment as police sergeant _ in Cleveland was quoted by local politicians

at 700dol, no matter .what were the qualifications of the appointee. . Professor Walter Whittlesey, associate in the Department of Political Science at Princeton, said the American public seems to behave “ like the greatest aggregation of fools ever assembled in one generation.” .. . , . * Professor Whittlesey criticised what ho described as “ the ethical and moral tyranny of women, who have come to the front in politics and also in our schools and in the formation of our national attitude toward public duties.” He also deprecated the “ miraculous pretensions of the new barbarism of science.”