Major Crushing

Thomas Edmund Dewey celebrated his 35th birthday last week, but he had to wait until next day to get the finest present of his life. It was given him by a jury which for more than nine weeks had been listening to the case he had built up, as New York City's brilliant Special Prosecutor, against seven men accused of running a Manhattan restaurant racket.

Since June 1935, Prosecutor Dewey had brought 52 loan shark and prostitution racketeers to trial, sent every one to prison. But those convictions had been incidental to his major objective. After 18 months of evidence collecting, the restaurant case marked his first courtroom move against New York's industrial rackets, which were the big game Governor Lehman appointed him to track down. On last week's jury verdict hung the probable success or failure of his whole drive to rid the nation's largest city of criminal business parasites (TIME, Feb. 1).

Against three operators of a restaurant "trade association" and four officers of waiters' and cafeteria workers' unions, Prosecutor Dewey's chunky right-hand man, William B. Herlands, argued a total of 182 charges of conspiracy, extortion and attempted extortion. By stink-bombings, strikes and threats of strikes, he asserted, they had forced the terrorized proprietors of The Hollywood, French Casino, Brass Rail, Jack Dempsey's, St. Regis, Lindy's and many a lesser restaurant and cafeteria to join their "association," pay tribute of some $2,000,000 per year. Not seriously disputing the picture drawn by Prosecutor Herlands and his witnesses, the seven defendants mostly whined that they had been the innocent or terrorized dupes of the real racketeers--the late Arthur ("Dutch Schultz") Flegenheimer & henchmen. It took the jury less than five hours last week to decide that these excuses were nonsense. It found every defendant guilty on every count, enabling Justice Philip J. McCook to sentence each one, if he so chooses next week, to 200-to-300 years in prison. As the jury foreman called out "Guilty" 182 times, ending their four-year reign of terror, two of the racketeers broke down, were led blubbering from the courtroom.

Cried exultant Thomas E. Dewey, who was primed to move next against rackets in the baking, trucking, garment, electrical contracting and used-brick industries: "The verdict establishes that RACKETEERING CAN BE CRUSHED."

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