Scandals of New York (Cont'd)

Last week's developments from the manifold investigations, pressed and pending, into New York City's police, judiciary and officialdom included the following:

P: Samuel Seabury, appointed by Governor Roosevelt to hear charges made by the City Club against District Attorney Thomas C. T. Grain, began with an inquiry into Mr. Grain's handling of an investigation of the Pathe film studio fire in which eleven people lost their lives (TIME, Dec. 23, 1929).

P: Governor Roosevelt received charges filed against Mayor James John Walker by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Rev. John Haynes Holmes of the City Affairs Committee. The Governor threatened, as chief magistrate of the state, to jail newshawks for contempt if they continued to pester him for a premature decision. With but one allusion to the playboy Mayor's "careless standards of public life," the City Affairs Committee complained that New York's chief executive had been remiss in administering the Departments of Standards & Appeals, Licenses. Health, Hospital, Budget, Docks, in all of which have been scandals or near-scandals during his regime. It was also charged that Mayor Walker had "failed to display the slightest interest in a situation which was . . . destroying the confidence of citizens in the integrity of the courts" and had shown indifference regarding "open and sordid corruption in the Police Department." The Governor sent the charges to the Mayor to answer upon his return to New York from Palm Springs. Calif.

Lounging in flowered silk pajamas 3,000 miles away on the estate of Tammany Counsel Samuel Untermyer. Mayor Walker dismissed the accusations as "old stuff." Although he failed to make further comment, his home town press played-up stories about the beneficent effect of California sunshine on his health, accompanied by photographs of him wrapped in sheets, lolling in the sun. Adjacent to one such picture the World-Telegram printed a photograph of Mrs. Walker on her vacation--in Florida.

P: Portly Magistrate Leo Healy, cleared last summer of charges of job-buying and habitual drunkenness, resigned because of "ill health."

P: Detective Andrew G. McLaughlin, against whom the mysteriously murdered Benita Franklin Bischoff alias Vivian Gordon brought frame-up charges, was dismissed from the Police force. In the vice investigation he had refused to explain how he had banked $35,800.51 during two years when his salary was $3,000.

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