In Tammany Town

Developments in New York City's judiciary scandals were warm and multi-colored last week:

48 Girls. The Chief Magistrate of New York City, bald, big-hearted Joseph Eugene Corrigan, felt like the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. Upon one of his judicial doorsteps--the Women's Court-- stood 48 bedraggled young girls, eleven of them carrying their babies (illegitimate) wrapped in blankets. They had all come down from Bedford Reformatory, where indigent New York girls who begin their sexual lives too soon are sent as wayward minors. To Chief Magistrate Corrigan's intense embarrassment, the 48 girls and eleven babes had all been released and returned to the Women's Court on the ground, developed during investigation of the police vice squad, that they had all been improperly committed (TIME, Dec. 29).

Judge Corrigan had just visited Bedford Reformatory, questioned its inmates and returned to the city satisfied that all the girls deserved to be where they were. But John J. Bennett Jr., the State's young new Attorney General, released the 48 (and three more who could not travel) lest the State be guilty of sequestering young innocents.

With so many charges he scarcely knew what to do, Judge Corrigan lodged them in a jail, a Catholic home, a welfare institution. Then he conferred anxiously with Attorney General Bennett and Lawyer Samuel Seabury, the referee in charge of the State's investigation of the city courts. Upshot: back went all but one of the girls to Bedford. The 48th, one Anna Peltz, whom the New York World described as "a buxom girl of 19 with a wiggling walk," was left in town to be retried as a test case.

Suave Judge Corrigan does not often find himself in embarrassing situations. He has been a magistrate for 23 years, Chief City Magistrate for the last six months. A socialite, he lives on East 86th Street. His wife was once married to Artist Ben Ali Haggin.

Steuer v. Kresel. While Judge Corrigan was still smarting at being made the squire of 48 wayward dames, Tammany got in its first successful dig at the Seabury investigation. The digger was astute Lawyer Max D. Steuer, good Tammany man, father of a municipal judge. As a special investigator of the notorious Bank of United States failure, Mr. Steuer saw to it that the name of small, smart Isidor Jacob Kresel -- Seabury counsel, onetime director of, lawyer for and borrower from the defunct bank -- was frequently brought into the damning Bank of U. S. testimony. Forthwith, Counsel Kresel demanded that he be subpoenaed to defend himself against "baseless statements designed to reflect upon me." The bank's officers went to court to get Lawyer Steuer disqualified as their inquisitor.

Again, Ewald. A jury last week dead locked and was dismissed after hearing evidence that George F. Ewald, with the aid of his pretty wife, had bought a magis tracy for $10,000 from Tammany underlings. Twice before had other juries dead locked on this case. Hiram C.Todd, special State prosecutor, agreed to the dismissal of the Ewalds' indictments, on the ground that the juries' failure to agree "fairly represents the present state of the collective conscience of the community in cases of this character." Revived was the old political axiom of New York: A Tammany man cannot be convicted in Tammany Town.

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