Washington Confidential 28 – Mortimer · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 28Part 2 · IT’S A CRIME
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 28
Part 2 · IT’S A CRIME
MortimerEnglish
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:
_Willie Pye was a regular guy,
He took the rap for you and I._
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:
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.
