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By Robert H. Williams Washington Post/Outlook WASHINGTON—On Jan. 21 , federal grand jury surpri sed the people of Washington and shocked their police de partment by handing down in dictments accusing eight vice squad cops of hanky-panky in the Third Police District. The indictments came a lit tle more than a week after Rep. Claude Pepper, D-Fla. chairman of the House select Committee on Crime, said that a three-month investiga tion by the committee's staff had turned up “concrete evi dence of police corruption’’ in the nation's capital and scared the wits out of chief Jerry Wilson, who saw visions of a quasi-public body like New York City's Knapp Com mission hearing witnesses, taking testimony and making judgments as the Tv cameras churn. That early storm quickly abated, however, as President Nixon announced that he'd like to see the police depart ment have the opportunity to clean itself up and as Pepper agreed to turn over what he had to the police chief and let it go at that. The department then Iredged up those eight poor ice cops and tossed them to the wolves. Six of them were suspended, two resigned, and the story of their indictment made Page 1 of all the news papers. At another time, per haps, these men’s cases would have been handled in depart mental proceedings, possibly without criminal proceedings, because, after all, there are 5,000 men on the force,and eight out of 5,000 isn't statisti cally important whether you're counting cops who in dulge in improper practices or mercury in swordfish. (It looked for a couple of days there, though, as if there was to be a real shakeup in the department, and handicap pers who follow the form of police departments had every reason to expect many heads to roll: exactly 20 years ago (a full generation) an eight month Senate subcommittee investigation turned up evi dence of graft in the depart ment and hastened the retire ment of Commissioner John Russell Young and Chief Rob ert J. Barrett and led to the suspension of four officers. POLICE CORRUPTION, or, rather, exposes of police cor ruption, seems to be of a cycl ic nature, generally coinciding with the generations: a police force will be more or less clean for three to five years; for the next decade corruption will flourish as the police re fine methods of protection and collection and come to terms with society. The final five years is marked by almost total cor ruption, usually brought to a head by a single outrageous incident that shocks a com unity so much that its news paper (whose reporters, by and large, have known for years that the cops are on the pad from the saloon talk re porters inevitably engage in) is ‘able, without professional investigators, to blow open the situation, get public hearings under way, and hope that a grand jury will hand down enough indictments to satisfy the public need for vengeance and or righteousness. Some times the expose will come in the form of a congressional or state probe—the McClellan and Pepper committees are good examples—or a political ly motivated investigation. John Lindsay barely got his Knapp Commission put togeth er in time to keep the hungry upstaters from having a real circus in his town. In the end, of course, it is generally found that it wasn't the police who were corrupt at all, except as a manifestation of a society growt mean,, bru tal and nasty, a sort of munic ipal Dorian Gray whose slimy, greening portrait in the attic reflects every sawbuck offered to a cop by a speeding GS13, every century note slipped un der the table to purchase an early peek at a bid specifica tion, every drink sopped up by a salesman at an after-hours joint, every marijuana ciga rette smoked on Saturday night in those marvelous sub urbs (only a few hours before it's time to go to church), every dollar spent to buy a judgeship, every bottle of booze bought in D. CG. and trunked back across the 14th Street Bridge. By this time, historically, the grand jury will get just as far as the district attorney will let it, and in most cases in the past that hasn't been very far, because it will turn out that the prosecutor and or his friends and associates ha ven’t been altogether clean during these years. And in the end, because it is a genera tional thing, a lot of cops will seek early retirement, many more will be demoted and reassigned, perhaps a new po lice chief or commissioner will be brought in from the outside (although, again his torically, it will turn out that the local second or third in command will be believed honest enough to take over and straighten things out), a few Cops will go to prison and several will go to Georgia, from where God himself couldn't extradite you without your consent, THE REFORMERS by now will have lost interest, except for a handful whose attention span is somewhat longer, and the city leaders have turned over a few rocks they would rather not have turned over, and by the time it is getting to look as if the next scandal will be a chain of brothels owned by the diocese the in vestigation is closed, the police force is reorganized and pronounced clean, the mo torists dumb enough to try to bribe a traffic cop will be hauled off to prison as an example to others, and the cycle is ready to begin again. It has happened in New York. The Knapp Commission is just finishing up its work of 1970-71, and it has been fairly well demonstrated that the “rotten apple’ theory of po lice corruption there has to be abandoned in favor of the rot ten barrel theory. A handful of cops have been indicted, and Commissioner Pat Mur phy has shifted literally hundreds of men from plain clothes to uniform, from uni form to plainclothes, from Harlem to Queens, from Brooklyn to Harlem, acting for all the world like Gil Hodges changing pitchers in the ninth inning of a tight game. Twenty years earlier it was another investigation, this time showing that a gambler named Harry Gross owned m most of the Brooklyn division lock, stock and barrel. At that time it became popular for old captains to jump out of a window at police headquar ters, and to this day it is a small joke among internal af fairs division men (the cops call them the Gestapo) to close the window while inter rogating a policeman suspect ed of having violated the rules. Twenty years before that was the Seabury Commission probe, originally set up by Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, notable mainly for uncovering a woman judge who convicted prostitutes on the uncorrobor ated testimony of vice cops and then altered the court records to back them up. Oh yes. In the middle of this one Judge Carter did his famous vanishing act. In fact, the New York City Police Department was inves tigated the year after it was founded, in 1843. Chicago is fairly quiet now, but it and Cook County— you've heard of Cicero —have had their cycles, and Chicago. Probably would have been into the expose part of the present one if it hadn’t been for the 1968 Democratic National Con vention, which prompted re organization of the force for other, more sinister, reasons. I am told, however, that the “captain's man is still mak ing his rounds of bookmakers in that city. Chicago was briefly shaken earlier in the ’60s, when a burglary ring was discovered operating out of police head quarters. That led to a new police commissioner and an other reorganization, but that case—like the cops-turned-rob bers cases in Denver and Buf falo around the same time— was a freak, even to a cop on the pad, another cop , who commits an actual crime, a repugnant crime against a person or a crime. God help us, against property, is the lowest form of humanity, a scumbag. (It used to be that cops also thought it despicable to take graft from narcotics dealers, too, but that is chang ing as more and more cops see more and more civic stal warts smoking and talking about smoking more and more pot.) POLICE CORRUPTION in the early 1950s in New Orle ans was directly responsible for the takeover of that city by organized crime, a stran glehol that exists today. A citizen's committee (later en joined from further hearings on an action brought by a notorious bagman and father of a famous trumpet player) found that in one precinct more cops were engaged in the collecting and distribution of graft—systematic, even down to little brown pay enve lopes—than were on the street enforcing the law. * Jim Garrison, the famous D.A., swept into office as a reform candidate on the coat tails of that investigation, and only a few weeks ago—a gen eration after the earlier situa tion—he was accused, togeth er with the head of the vice squad, of taking money from the gambling industry. He is under indictment. In Miami in the early hours of the 1950s, the Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for un covering corruption in the po lice department, and the lobby outside hearing rooms at the federal building during the Kefauver hearings were filled with bleary-eyed old captains, chain-smoking and sometimes making it to the toilet before vomiting. In the mid-1980s the Herald tried again, but the nest of snakes it uncovered was too intricate, and some of them had more than one head. A handful of cops again were thrown to the wolves; the bad ones went to Georgia..The worst one picked up the bill for the prostitutes furnished by the biggest pimp in Dade County for the police witness es coming from Texas and Arizona to testify in the mur der trial of Candace Messler.) All across the Mohawk Frontier in New York State cops have sold out to the devil at one time or another. In Buffalo, Rochester and Syra cuse, cops in the past have consorted with criminals to the extent that organized crime in America now consi ders those cities as home. In Utica, where the brothels once matched the splendors of the East (the east side of Manhat tan, that is), the entire vice squad went to prison in the early 1980s. Utica, incidental ly, was represented by three local citizens at the Apalachi an Crime Conference. In 1970 the deputy police chief of Seattle went to feder al prison for lying to a grand jury about his involvement with gamblers. Last year a reform district attorney got indictments against another three dozen or so cops, who are as puzzled about the thing as the vice cops were in Utica and the bagmen were in New Orleans and New York's Fin est are today as Pat Murphy scouts and polishes at the badges so tarnished that they may never come clean. And puzzled they might well be. Police in America have been asked to perform an im possible task. Gambling is il legal in 49 states, yet the gambling turnover in the na tion is in the billions of dol lars. In Harlem alone it has been estimated that from $250 million to $1.2 billion changes hands annually on numbers. ‘That figure drops to about $30 million in the Washington area. Football cards, baseball pools—the Friday night poker game at the home of the com pany vice president—are a part of the American scene. In Washington it is illegal to make a bet of any kind yet the sports pages of the news papers carry race charts from out- of-town tracks, and contin ually quote Las Vegas odds on other sporting events. In New York, betting with a bookie is legal if the bookie is Howard Samuels, head of the Off Track Betting Corp., but ille gal if the bookie is Hugh Mul ligan. PROSTITUTION is generally illegal in this country, because it has been called immoral. Yet prostitution has a better chance of being stamped out by the sexual revolution—the easy availability of free sex— than by the culprit or the precinct station. Liquor corrupts cops, be cause everybody uses it but clouds its use in a myriad of regulations and strict statuto ry controls, and then asks a dude with a high school edu cation, a badge and $10,000 a year to make sure things run smoothly. Narcotics was a dirty word during the 1950s and 1960s, but the cops weren't fooled by scare stories and horror tales of li-year-old junkies, and it took the kids and their ubiqui tous pot to show us that dope fiends are just like the rest of us, and by mid-197L we even found out that you could fight a war with your troops spaced out on smack. What you want is what you get. if a cop is supposed to ‘arrest a black junkie but not your pothead kid; if he's sup posed to bust a bookie but leave your church bingo game alone; if he's supposed to col lar a hooker on 11th Street but leave your high-priced hotel whores alone; if he’s supposed to haul in a bootlegger but ignore your club when it lets you sit and drink quietly until 3 or 4; then you're giving discretionary powers to a man who never asked for them, and doesn't know how to use them when he has them. But he can sure figure out a way to make them pay off. Nobody has the solution. New York's Pat Murphy thinks that if you order total enforcement and make the po lice commanders responsible for the actions of their men, things will straighten out. Rocky Pomerance, chief of police in Miami Beach, says: you've got to pay your men move and train them better, but Christopher Bayley, the NA, in Seattle, says you can pay them all you want and they still won't make as much, as the captains make in graft. Harold B. Foner, a flamboy ant lawyer in Brooklyn who Specializes in defending cops in departmental cases (and who packs a .38 on his hip wherever he goes) throws up his hands and says it's hope less. Aron Kohn, director of the Crime Commission of New Or leans, who has been around a. Robert H. Williams is an assistant national editor of The Washington Post. He i completing a book on police corruption, long, long time and who has seen many strange things, says simply: “We have asked policemen to take the place of the home, the family and the church, and until we change that, there will be corrupt police men. And those corrupt po licemen are, waiting for a community, and a leader, to inspire them to honesty. Perhaps he is right. In the meantime, as any street dude will tell you, if you want to play, you got to pay, loophole that can’t be gauged they are below the taxable wider by a good tax lawyer. _ level for participating. “* IN MOST CASES it would be vastly cheaper to give sim ple, direct federal grants. Take tax-exempt bonds, for example. Cities and states fi nanced themselves by selling bonds to the rich that are like church indulgences, sold in the Middle Ages, to keep a loved one out of Purgatory. Only these are tax indulg ences. The poor today can’t afford to buy themt-it takes money to escape taxes. As Surrey figures it the Treasury pays $1 in tax benefits to a top-bracket taxpayer so that he will pass along 75 cents in interest rate benefits to the state or city issuing the bond ~—4 133 per cent commission. Three thousand families in America have an annual in come of §1 million or more. The experts explained the lovely bargain-counter subsi dies, tax shelters and rebates open to the top 3,000—Ameri ca's fiscal elite. They are in fields like oil drilling, stock farming, equipment-leasing and the like. Poor people can't shop here; few of the 12 mil lion shabby families with in comes under $5,000 go into these Tiffany shops. Tax incentive rebates are only one form of subsidy but, it is amusing to consider them in this light. It turns a lot of things upside down. For ex ample, the 1971 act gives a tax credit for political gifts, a worthy objective it seems, amounting to a credit of one half of the contribution, up $25 on a joint return. Thus if a taxpayer sends $25 to a candi date, the government in effect will also send $25—the result of allowing half the amount off in taxes for a $50 contribu tion. But if poor people contribute money the government refus es to match funds. Poor peo ple don't pay income taxes; IT’S ALL VERY complicat ed, of course, and hard to follow! Phil Stern tried to put it in simple terms. Suppose, he said, you read an imagi nary AP dispatch from Wash ington saying that “Congress today completed action on a revolutionary welfare pro gaam that reverses the usual pattern and gives huge wel fare payments to the super rich but only pennies per week to the very poor.” You would rub your eyes, but that is the way, he says, the system works. Under the fictitious new program, Stern’s imaginary dispatch continues, “Welfare payments averaging some $720,000 a year will go to the nation's wealthiest families. For the poorest families under $3,000, the welfare allowance will av erage $16 a year, or roughly 30 cents a week. The program, enacted by Congress in a se ries of laws over a period of years would give America’s most affluent families added weekly tak-home pay of about $14,000. Total cost of the pro gram—the most expensive welfare program ever voted— comes to $77.4 billion a year.” Stern, of course, means that present tax subsidies and shel ters now actually amount to this huge total, many of them, of social value but in the aggregate giving a staggering benefit to the rich. The satirical dispatch con cludes with Washington re porters pressing the Senate Sponsor on whether the new law carries a ‘work require ment,” like most welfare bills: ‘The senator seems puz zled by the question, ‘The rich? Work?’ he said, ‘Why, it hadn't occurred to me.'” Incidentally, Phil Stern (45), magna cum laude Harvard, onetime aid of the great Paul Douglas, is himself a multim illionaire. Jerry ¥. Wilson Scared of Probe
Newspaper Details
Gazette Mail
Charleston, West Virginia, US
Sun, Jan 30, 1972
Page 118
Full Page
Clipped by
Larry C.
USA 29 Jun 2026
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