Book Review

A suitable subtitle for this optimistic book would have been, "How reformers used the crime issue to woo the public, tame the Tammany Tiger, and modernize American law enforcement." Like her protagonist, famed prosecutor and presidential near-miss Thomas Dewey, journalist Mary Stolberg knows how to pick her cases. Her history of "racket-busting" in Depression-era New York teems with memorable characters: in the black hats, gambling kingpins Charles "Lucky" Luciano and Arnold Rothstein, bootlegger Dutch Schultz, and Tammany fix-it-man James J. Hines; in the white hats, the Empire State's "Fusion" reformers, including Franklin Roosevelt, Democratic Governor Herbert Lehman, gentleman reformer Samuel Seabury, Republican upstart Dewey, and the irrepressible Fiorello La Guardia, who raced to crime scenes in a police sidecar and dumped slot machines into the East River. Setting her work apart from the overly anecdotal literature on organized crime, Stolberg ambitiously attempts to link the burst of crime-fighting initiatives in the thirties to the decline of machine politics and the emergence of the modern state. Her limited success in doing so stems from a problem all too common among criminal justice historians—their tendency to be captured by reformer rhetoric, in this case the dubious rhetoric of modernization.	1
The Fusion coalition of Republicans and reform Democrats that seized the crime issue and catapulted Dewey to power in the mid-thirties painted the crime problem as an evil pact between "modern" organized criminals and a "feudal" system of decentralized and politically entrenched local government. Though wildly inflated, the reformers' charges were not unfounded. Since the dawn of the twentieth century, certain fields of crime—particularly gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging—had been increasingly rationalized as sustainable, integrated enterprises protected by payoffs and deadly force. Take gambler Arnold Rothstein, whose managerial acumen so impressed his contemporaries that they (mistakenly) credited him with fixing the 1919 World Series. Rothstein not only operated a chain of gaming houses but owned the banks, employed his own tipsters, and furnished bail and legal representation to his employees. (His diversified operations also included supplying muscle to workers and employers during strikes.) Whether Rothstein and his "gangster" peers were organized and evil enough to merit the grandiose contemporary epithet "the underworld" is doubtful (Stolberg uses the term much too freely), but it is clear from her account that professional criminals controlled much of the city's vice economy and were vying for control over such legitimate industries as trucking and the restaurant business. Even more alarming to reformers was the complicity of local government. The famous Seabury investigation of 1930 revealed that professional criminals were aided and abetted by the Tammany-dominated magistrates' courts, which routinely discharged cases against protected defendants.	2
Stolberg provides a fascinating account of the runaway grand jury of 1935, whose revolt against New York District Attorney William Copeland Dodge triggered the reform frenzy of the mid-thirties. In our own day, when the conventional wisdom has it that the typical grand jury would gladly indict a ham sandwich if a prosecutor asked it to, it is interesting to learn that the businessmen who sat on New York's grand juries in the thirties were independent enough to publish their own reform journal (The Panel), publicly humiliate the DA, and successfully demand the appointment of a special prosecutor with freewheeling powers to investigate organized crime. Lehman offered the job to a thirty-three-year-old Young Republican from Owosso, Michigan, who had earned his crime-fighting stripes under U.S. Attorney George Medalie. Tom Dewey seized the opportunity.	3
Billed by Dewey and his Fusion patrons as a breakthrough in the modernization of law enforcement, his special prosecutor's office possessed extraordinary resources and discretionary power. Dewey had more than sixty police officers at his disposal and a staff that included "twenty assistants, ten investigators, four process servers, four clerks, two grand jury reporters, nineteen stenographers, two telephone operators, and four messengers" (86). Lehman authorized the creation of a special grand jury to hear Dewey's cases and appointed Philip J. McCook, a La Guardia ally and Dewey sympathizer, as judge. McCook gave the prosecutor wide latitude in building cases, picking jurors, and interrogating witnesses. During the celebrated investigation of "Lucky" Luciano, a previously little-known Sicilian gambler whom Dewey reinvented as the Henry Ford of New York prostitution, Dewey rounded up more than one hundred alleged prostitutes, gunmen, and drug peddlers, and detained them without charges—sometimes for months—until they agreed to testify against Luciano.	4
Even with such extraordinary resources and tactics at his disposal—and Lehman and Mayor La Guardia behind him—Dewey's triumphs during his three-year stint as special prosecutor are impressive. In the courtroom, he won lengthy sentences for Luciano, for the defendants in his 1937 racketeering case against the restaurant and waiters' union, and for Jimmy Hines, whose defeat was one of the most significant corruption convictions in New York history and a massive blow to Tammany Hall. Dewey also had a winning way with the media: newsreels, newspapers, and feature films lionized him as the nation's number-one "racket buster." Building upon this reputation and the support of his Republican sponsors, Dewey pursued a successful political career as a New York DA, governor, and two-time Republican presidential nominee.	5
Stolberg is sanguine about the Fusion reformers' long-term impact on urban governance and law enforcement. She applauds Dewey, Lehman, and La Guardia as effective modernizers who made the public see that Tammany was a corrupt relic of local governance and that "government could be run more effectively and cheaply without machine politics" (256). She also credits them with winning public support for such "real reforms" as Dewey's office and, at the state and federal level, "wiretapping, conspiracy laws, and more efficient extradition—and old ideas such as limiting Fifth Amendment privileges, instituting gun control, and revitalizing the grand jury system" (255-56).	6
Some readers are likely to disagree with Stolberg on the merits of some of these "reforms," but my complaint is more fundamental. Although Stolberg frequently invokes "the public" as a historical actor in criminal justice reform (e.g., "the public's patience was wearing thin" [95]), she never explains what "the public" is and how it acts upon the political process. Even if her point is simply that Fusion politicians manipulated public fears of crime to win elections, run crooks out of office, and pass bond issues, she needs more direct evidence than favorable press coverage of Dewey's prosecutions. But I suspect Stolberg is after something grander. And in the one wonderfully illuminating moment when the public appears in her story, she does not recognize it as such. Shortly after Dewey's office opened with much fanfare and public largesse, New Yorkers inundated his assistants with complaints about domestic disputes, tenant-landlord conflicts, and petty robberies—the sort of minor quasi-criminal matters that constituted the workaday caseload of urban justice in the early twentieth century. Stolberg seems to share Dewey's opinion of these people as "crackpots" who diverted energy from the more important "modern" business of busting "rackets" (91). Unfortunately, she is too absorbed in the reformers' modernization bluster to see that these people were making legitimate democratic demands upon an expensive new state institution—demands that were perfectly in keeping with the tradition of working-class Americans imposing their conflicts and needs upon criminal justice institutions. It is worth asking if the same political process of criminal justice "modernization" that stripped power from the Tammany sachems might also have taken some away from ordinary people, by denying their everyday grievances the status of "modern" crimes that needed to be "fought."	7
Notwithstanding these complaints, Fighting Organized Crime is a welcome addition to the historical literature on crime fighting in the thirties. It is a clearly written and engaging account of a significant episode in the development of American law and order, and one that raises provocative questions for future research.	8
Michael Willrich Rice University

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