Washington Confidential 30 – Mortimer · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 30Part 2 · HOW TO STAY OUT OF JAIL
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 30
Part 2 · HOW TO STAY OUT OF JAIL
MortimerEnglish
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.”
