Washington Confidential 7 – Mortimer · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 7Part 1 · MIGHTY LIKE A ROSE
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 7
Part 1 · MIGHTY LIKE A ROSE
MortimerEnglish
There is a daily in Washington (as there are others in principal cities) which never identifies a Negro as such unless he wins a Nobel prize or is selected the rookie of the year.
We protest. News cannot be honestly reported by arbitrarily slurring facts. Of almost all other non-whites, many are marked by recognizable names. Most Negroes have Anglo-Saxon names, many of them adopted centuries ago from their slave-owners. For instance, Thompson’s Ebenezer evolved into Ebenezer Thompson.
That same newspaper does not bar true and fair reports of misdeeds by people named O’Rourke or Ginsberg or Dinkelspiel or Stanislawsky or Protopulus or Garcia or Potapinsky or Napolitano. Concealment of the identity as Negro distorts the truth, for the natural assumption then is that the miscreants are white and we have an unjustified libel on the Caucasian population.
The most rabid Negro papers publish the crimes of their own people and then editorialize on the cruel inequalities which help to cause them. That is the proper use of freedom of the press. Arbitrary withholding of vital facts is an impertinence and a misuse of the common franchise.
Fancy if you can what this chapter could not tell were we to suppress racial references.
Of every four felonies and other breaches of the law in the grades where a defendant has the right of trial by jury more than three are committed by Negroes. That is not confidential, but official. Arrests for Part One felonies--the more serious--in 1949 were as follows:
Colored males, 7,715.
Colored females, 1,085.
Total colored, 8,800.
White male, 2,396.
White female, 309.
Total white, 2,705.
Here is a breakdown on some:
Murder, colored 40; white 8.
Manslaughter, colored 6; white 1.
Rape, colored 140; white 23.
Aggravated assault, colored 2,651; white 381.
Burglary, colored 2,322; white 640.
Negrophiles and impractical activists for brotherhood of all God’s children campaign to force newspapers to omit racial identification of the lawless and hide it with white lies. That is the foggy, unrealistic policy of visionaries, sparked by the cold, hard practicality of Reds.
Arrests for Part Two felonies (less serious) and important misdemeanors showed an even higher incidence of Negro crime.
Estimating the Negro population at 50 percent, this means half the people commit 85 percent of all the crimes. As will be shown in a later chapter, a large quota of the white crimes can be charged to transients.
The data on crimes by whites are incontrovertible. Those by Negroes in Washington, as well as in all other northern cities, do not give the full picture. Most police officers prefer not to arrest blacks, especially if there is no white complainant. They have nothing to gain by such a pinch; they merely invite an uproar for “persecuting the gentle Negro.”
Many colored law breakers are never arrested; many who are are not booked, the officers often preferring to mete out summary punishment on the back stairs, which they know is a better deterrent than the inevitable discharge or suspended sentence by a timid, “seen” or left-wing judge.
If you doubt that, the following is from the record of a Congressional hearing and there are plenty of other stories like it:
Private Hamilton was assigned with Detective Sergeant Clyde Rouse for midnight cruising. They observed a stolen car parked on Q Street NW, with two occupants.
Rouse and Hamilton walked up to the car. Rouse went to the left and Hamilton to the right. Rouse recognized the driver as Charles W. Scott, colored, 24, of 476 O Street NW, wanted for questioning in connection with stolen auto hold-ups.
Rouse opened the door and tried to seize Scott, but only succeeded in shoving the gear shift lever out of gear. Rouse was on his knees on the front seat, practically on top of the other occupant of the car, a woman, who proved to be Marian Holston, 20, colored, of 16 Q Street NW, who had been picked up by Scott.
Rouse made a desperate effort to reach the key to cut off the motor but the woman fought him, kicking, scratching, and biting. The Negro driver of the stolen car shoved the gear lever in and with the accelerator down to the floor board, rocketed the car into high speed. Hamilton, his head and shoulders through the window, holding on to the wheel, attempted to steer. It was impossible for either officer to jump or let go. The stolen car finally collided with a barricade, ran over the sidewalk.
With Rouse still fighting to gain control, and Hamilton still struggling, the car, without headlights and at a terrific speed collided with a tractor trailer truck. The stolen auto was completely demolished.
Private Hamilton was killed.
Scott had a record which showed he had been committed eight times as a juvenile delinquent on charges of larceny, and in 1943 was sentenced to from two to five years for auto stealing. Thereafter he was involved in six charges of robbery.
But the U.S. Attorney’s office refused to prosecute the Negroes and the police were advised that if they insisted on going through with charges before a judge, the DA’s office would nolle prosse the case, because they did not believe “a conviction could be obtained” against colored people who had so unfortunately become involved in the killing of a policeman. But when a policeman kills a Negro in the line of duty, the politically chosen District Attorney is frequently highpressured by the N.A.A.C.P. into bringing murder charges.
We have pointed to the misguided tendency to minimize the size and extent of the Negro population. If more than half of Washington’s population is not black, the per capita crime rate is even more appalling.
Like white crime, Negro crime is organized and syndicated. This does not mean every rapist, hold-up man and car-thief takes orders from above. But it means that when he gets in trouble he does seek certain directed sources for bail-bonds, lawyers and fixers.
Policy-sellers, bookmakers’ runners, reefer peddlers and junk salesmen are employed by an organization which protects them also.
The process, as it works here, will be described in detail in the chapters devoted to crime and law enforcement, as it is part of the general picture of organized evil.
In Washington, as in other cities, Negro crime on the consumer and go-between levels is operated and controlled by Negroes. They report to, kick back to, and make their fixes at upper levels with, white criminals. The topmost control rests in the hands of the international Syndicate, the Mafia, the Unione Siciliano. The Washington Negro crime-ring has more autonomy than usual, because there are few Sicilians and even fewer interested in crude crime. The national Syndicate prefers not to show its bloody hands openly in the capital, but lurks in the background--in New York, principally.
The most powerful Washington Negro is the aforementioned Puddin’ Head Jones. Jim Yellow Roberts is the boss of dope and reefers. He makes his buys in wholesale lots in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, direct from the importers. While temporarily embarrassed by a jail sentence, Roberts continued to run the Negro dope trade.
“Whitey” Simpkins is king of the Black Belt’s numbers racket. Johnny W. Carter, who owns the Club Bali, a black-and-tan resort, is one of the gamblers’ chiefs. Their payoff is a percentage which eventually reaches the Syndicate through channels which will be set forth in detail in the chapter devoted to dope and gambling in Washington.
One of Washington’s most important Negro underworld figures is Lamarr (Polly) Brown who has been implicated in every form of illegality from operating after-hour clubs to the sale of narcotics. Odessa Madre, known as the “Queen of the Fences,” is just what her honorific implies.
Following the white pattern, the largest, gayest and most colorful Negro section is also laid out in NW. This part of town abounds with colored flats where a white man may take a white or colored woman. These holes sell gin without licenses, provide bedroom accommodations for those who want them, and girls for those who don’t have them.
Many Negro cab-drivers pimp for white girls, first getting acquainted with them when they pick them up as passengers. They set them up in apartments, most of which are in NW, and sell their services to white or colored men. These cabbies also handle reefers and after-hour liquor.
If you rode with us in Washington, through the NW colored section, these are some of the things we could have shown you:
First, we parked our car at the corner of 10th and B Sts., in front of the Lincoln Barbeque. We waited five minutes, a colored man came out of the restaurant and took our order for bootleg liquor. It happened after two, when the bars were closed. His prices were moderate, no more than 50 cents to a dollar above the established tariff. But the stuff was moonshine and cut.
Let’s go to 1919 14th Street NW. This house was formerly the Star Dust Club, an after-hour drinking and gambling place. Now it’s a shoeshine parlor. It’s owned by William J. “Foots” Edwards, a notorious Negro gambler. If you want a game, you can find stud in the basement.
The dark corner of 5th and K looks quiet and serene. The colored damsels who parade past here singly and by twos are not. Stop your car at the corner and they will come over and solicit you. Business all night. If you’re a Negro you’ll know where to take them. If you are a white man they’ll go along in your car to an alley or steer you to a buggy rooming-house. Another corner frequented by dusky hustlers in search of white trade is 9th and Rhode Island.
At about this time, we’ll run through the 7th Street district, which is the Broadway of the NW Negro section, with the chief shops, restaurants, night clubs and theatres. You can make pick-ups anywhere around 7th, Georgia and Florida Avenues, but these streets are brightly lighted, so most white men who want to change their luck play the darker streets. And there it is not unusual to see white girls brace black men.
In addition to sex on sale at the corner of 7th and Florida, you can buy reefers or policy slips.
U Street, from 7th to 15th, is another bright light belt in the colored section. The Dunbar Hotel and the Whitelaw are the swank Negro inns. The Dunbar was once the aristocratic white Courtland Hotel. In its basement is the 20-11 Club, one of the Nation’s best-known colored cabarets, which caters to the cream of the colony and is patronized also by white novelty-seekers. Rich and visiting Negro celebrities check in at the Dunbar. So do Feds and cops, who have occasionally made pinches there for narcotics and morals violations. In the 20-11 Club you can pick up girls of any race.
On the corner of 7th and T are three hot spots--the Off Beat Club, for musicians, the Club Harlem, and the Seventh and T Club. We saw them serve drinks after hours and cater to fairies of all shades, female white thrill-chasers and Negro reefer addicts.
Washington, like Chicago, is a city of alleys in every block of residential property and many business squares, bisected by the rear passages. As in Chicago, they are conducive to crime, afford dark, narrow lanes for rape, assault, robbery and the pleasanter crimes of crap shooting and soliciting.
In some Negro sections where housing is at a premium, they live in shacks in the alleys. These are some of the slums already referred to--not many, but picturesque and odoriferous. One of the best-known is an alley oddly named Temperance Court. If white people lived there it would be fashionable at premium rents; it is similar to the aristocratic Washington Mews in New York’s Greenwich Village. But it is inhabited by some of the lowest members of the Negro race in Washington--and that means low.
Temperance Court is between 12th and 13th, T and U Streets, near the 13th precinct station. More dope peddlers and ginmill operators are annually arrested in this block than on any other street of comparable size anywhere in the world. You can buy anything you want there--girls, bootleg whiskey, cocaine and marijuana, stolen property, guns and knives, articles of perversion and sadism. Anything but a virgin past the age of puberty.
A notorious dope peddler operated there until recently and may still be there when this comes out. He is John Frye. He has so many children, some sleep on the roof, four on a bed, and there is always a new baby in the carriage. Narcotics agents said he hid junk in the baby’s diaper. A competitor in the same block was Wilbur Kenny, known to the cokies merely as “Y.”
Another byway in the NW Negro section, which is unpublicized in the slick magazines, is Goat Alley, off 7th Street, near M. This is terribly tough, with reefer peddlers, two-dollar wenches, a mugging a minute and murders common. Close by the Negro sections of crime and perversion is Ledroit Park, once surrounded by the mansions of aristocracy. This is back of Griffith Stadium, which, like Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, is engulfed in a sable sea. Baseball lovers must travel through miles of dangerous streets to the stadium.
Nearby is Freedman’s Hospital, the world’s leading institution of its kind for colored people, one of the outstanding institutions in the world. Its internes are Howard University medical graduates, and among these are great doctors. They get plenty of practice. The worst Negro assault cases go to Freedman’s. On Friday and Saturday nights the floors of its emergency wards look like slaughterhouses. Knifings are frequent; shootings run second. Even on weekdays the place teems with police interviewing victims.
Garfield Hospital, also near a large Negro community, is the second in assault cases.
One of the largest Negro islands in NE has as its center Central Avenue--same name as Los Angeles’ Harlem, though purely coincidental.
Gamblers in the NE section get action above the colored poolroom at 507 8th Street and E.
SW’s colored section is one of the largest in Washington and perhaps the oldest. It begins within a thrown stone’s distance of the Capitol and runs through to the Army War College. If you’ve read about this neighborhood in some pinkish publication before seeing it for yourself you will be looking for something awful. But you will drive through miles of wide avenues with deep lawns. They’re littered with rubbish and junk, of course. This homey residential section is reminiscent of God-fearing, law-abiding middle-class sections in typical Southern towns.
But what goes on inside these cozy habitations is not sleepy. The streets, so quiet by day, take on a sinister aspect at night. This whole section is known as Bloodfield. It’s worth a white man’s or woman’s life to walk there unaccompanied. Even respectable Negroes are not safe.
Young colored hoodlums of both sexes, adept at mugging and knifing, prey on strangers. The white man who comes here for pastime will find his luck all bad. The best he can hope for is a beating and maiming. But white women who are known to be Negro lovers are given safe conduct by the men, though they are attacked often by Negro women who resent the intrusion. These streets are barely patrolled by police.
The main shopping and drinking boulevards of the SW Negro section are 4th and 7th Streets. Around here the Negroes moved into and drove out what there was of a Jewish ghetto. The street where Al Jolson lived as a child and where his father practiced as a cantor is now all Negro.
The SW dope peddlers and whores make their hangout on 6½th Street. The chief madames are “Mamma Liz” and “Big Tit” Flossie.
We have indicated that many white women--especially government workers--are receptive to sexual attentions of Negro men. But the comparative ease with which a black man can get a white girl, even a so-called respectable one, does not seem to deter colored men from committing rape on women of their own race and whites.
As these lines were being written, all Washington was shocked and alerted when a 22-year-old South American girl, visiting with a diplomatic family, was stalked, attacked and ravished in a park near Arlington Cemetery by a Negro, who, Tarzan-like, leaped from a clump of trees entirely naked.
The popular form of Negro attack is mugging, a process in which the assailant comes up behind a man or woman and throws his arm around the victim’s throat, closing it sharply with the elbow out, and jabbing a knee into the small of the back.
But in Washington colored people call it “yoking,” derivation of the word unknown. It includes all forms of street assault. One process consists of sneaking up behind a lone passer-by, usually one who apparently has been drinking, and tapping him on the shoulder. As he turns around, he is hit square on the jaw with a stiff arm, then kicked in the groin when he falls. Most victims are robbed. But many young and exuberant Negroes get up yoking parties just for the joy and excitement.
Three young colored boxers, aged 14, 16, and 17, terrorized Washington a few months ago, committing at least 19 yoke robberies, netting more than $2,000. The 17-year-old was a semifinalist in the 160-pound class in last year’s Golden Gloves tournament. The youngest boxed at a boys’ club. The 16-year-old was a quarter finalist in the 135-pound class. These activities are said to breed good citizens.
The three bet among themselves which would land the first punch on the victim and whether it would be a knockout.
Police arrest hundreds of Negro yokers every year, most of them in their teens. Thousands of yokings go unsolved. The yokers are usually highly organized into juvenile gangs which fight also with home-made pistols, sawed-off shotguns and switchblade knives.
Many of these young Negro gangs terrorize students, white and black, in public schools, offering to sell them “protection” and punishing them when they don’t pay up.
Startled public officials first heard about these gangs some months ago after incidents at Banneker High. An 18-year-old colored boy was held for the grand jury on a charge of robbing a 15-year-old Banneker schoolboy of a wrist watch on the school playground. He threatened to whip the younger boy if he talked. School officials were awakened to the fact that all the schools in the city had this problem. According to the assistant superintendent of schools G. C. Wilkenson, “the gangs are made up of boys who aren’t in school and who aren’t working--mostly from 16 to 21 years old.”
Officials try to minimize the situation, but there is a wave of terror in every public elementary and high school. Young Negro gangsters lurk about the schools, sell reefers, molest girls, and commit mayhem on children who won’t pony up. Boys and girls thus forced to pay tribute are told to steal from their parents or do a little shoplifting if they have no other means of procuring the extortion money. Youngsters are put on heroin and morphine by the youthful gangsters, and soon enter a life of serious crime.
Other yokers use a tactic borrowed from the dacoits, a murderous religious gang of India, throwing a cord over the victim’s head from behind and garroting him.
Some of these colored juvenile mobs have been in existence for 15 or 20 years. When boys and girls outgrow them and become adult criminals on their own, they are replaced by new children on the way up. Among the older and better-organized kid mobs are the Fastest Runners, the Forty Thieves, the Purple Cross Gang and the Protective Association.
The Fastest Runners is composed of younger boys who fight with switch-blade knives. When they grow up they graduate into adult gangs. All these organizations have female auxiliaries, membership in which requires the young colored girls to solicit on the streets and turn the proceeds over to the boys. Girls as young as 11 participate and at 12 are “debs,” with full standing.
Among offenses which are practically Negro monopolies in Washington are the following:
Numbers and policy slips. Almost all numbers sellers, even in white neighborhoods and in government office buildings, are colored men and women. In other cities Sicilians, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos and Mexicans get in on this activity, but there are no sizeable groups of such in Washington. The modus operandi of numbers selling will be described in the chapter on gambling.
Sale of reefers. Almost all marijuana retailers are colored, which also is unique to Washington.
Theft and conversion of government checks at the lower level. The men, because so many are janitors and elevator boys, have entree to apartment buildings and tenement houses and access to mail-boxes. These thieves strike at the middle or at the end of the month, when checks are sent out by the Treasury for G.I. remunerations, Social Security benefits, pensions, army subsistence and similar regular allotments. Those who do the manual stealing seldom attempt to cash the checks, which are turned over to fences, often white, including storekeepers and sometimes bankers.
Another Negro industry is the sale of bootleg booze. The rings operate in many fashions. On some streets you find peddlers who sidle up beside you, or come up to your car when you stop for traffic lights. Many shoeshine “parlors” are moonshine dispensaries. Groceries and poolrooms also sell, usually gin, but sometimes what is supposed to be bourbon--corn for the Southern taste. The gin is mixed with cider to dilute the taste of raw kerosene and the combination has a wallop.
That good old Negro money-raising institution, known as “the rent party” elsewhere, has a specific, generic name in Washington, where it’s called a “chitlin party.” Chitlins, hogs’ innards, are a delicacy in some blacker parts of the South and are used here as a decoy to attract guests to the homey brawls which are a regular part of Blacktown’s social life. In New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville the paying guest at a rent party gets nothing in exchange for his contribution except the right to bring his woman, drink his gin, and get into the fracas.
We met a white fellow who has run Washington’s chitlin industry up into a million-dollar-a-year class. He gets the stuff from the butchers for nothing. They’re almost willing to pay him to cart it away. Then he packages it in 10-gallon jars which he sells for $2.50, or two bits a gallon. That means the capital’s Negroes consume 4,000,000 gallons a year.
These chapters were, of course, not in print when a young man known as “The Sniper” was, for a few days, the most famous person in Washington. If he were around now, our critics might have said we incited him. The Sniper--a young white man--was a congenital Negro-hater. He boiled up into an insane rage every time he saw a sable woman or man. He hid in various sections and hit bullseyes from roofs, behind trees and through open windows.
Before he was caught there was a wave of terror. For days Negroes remained indoors. Crime sagged, because even the worst elements were afraid to leave their homes.
Police Lieutenant Barrett, now Major and Superintendent of the Metropolitan Force, got him after he had killed a half-dozen men and wounded scores.
While the Sniper was in jail on suspicion, he met a drug addict, one Richard Harlowe, and confided in him where he had hidden his gun, in Baltimore. Barrett recovered it and came back to find his bird had escaped. He was recaptured in Georgetown. Barrett’s fame helped him to become the chief. His friends say it had nothing to do with the fact that he was related to Major Edward Kelley, a previous chief.
