Breaks for Tammany

This autumn Tammany Hall has on its hands the toughest municipal campaign in a decade to keep John Patrick O'Brien, its prognathous, bumbling Mayor, in New York City Hall. Against Tammany is arrayed an aggressive fusion ticket headed by short, swart, pugnacious Fiorello La Guardia. City finances are in such a plight that Tammany must impose additional taxes on the eve of election. Yet last week Tammany got two lucky breaks from two grand juries in Manhattan which did much to pluck up its sagging political spirits.

The Federal grand jury adjourned without indicting runaway James John ("Jimmy") Walker for income tax evasion. For three months Federal District Attorney George Zerdin Medalie, a Republican leftover, had been investigating the onetime Tammany mayor's finances. The grand jury had questioned Russell Sherwood, Walker's fiscal agent, nine dif- ferent times without eliciting sufficient evidence to charge a crime. Sherwood stood his ground on the time-honored formula that to answer questions might tend to incriminate him. Resurrection of the Walker case would have been a troublesome black eye for Tammany's campaign.

Tammany was saved from a second black eye when the New York County grand jury failed to indict anyone on Attorney Medalie's charge that he knew four Tammany district leaders allied with racketeers. On its own initiative the grand jury had elected to investigate this charge, had heard the Federal attorney name names. Last week it reported that Mr. Medalie "frankly said he had no evidence of crime against any person but did mention certain matters he thought might be further investigated." That further investigation the jury passed on to State Attorney General Bennett, good Brooklyn Democrat.

Attorney General Bennett refused to touch the racketeering investigation, completed the buck-passing cycle by sending the matter back to New York District Attorney Grain, the 73-year-old Tammany appointee who had declined to have anything to do with it in the first place.

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