"Humiliation"

"Tonight I am going to talk about . . . a political ally of thieves, pickpockets, thugs, dope peddlers and big-shot racketeers. Albert Marinelli, county clerk . . . powerful leader of half the Second Assembly District, dominates the whole. Tonight we turn on the spotlight."

Thus on the night of October 24 to thousands of radio listeners came the dramatic voice of New York's youthful District Attorney-Nominee Thomas Edmund Dewey. In the subsequent account of the underworld connections of Tammany's Marinelli, Mr. Dewey charged him not only with hobnobbing with jailbirds with such names as "Socks" Lanza and "Scutch"' Indelicate, but with harboring, as his chauffeur, a notorious fugitive from justice named Charles Falci. It was as detailed and exciting a story as any other installment in the gangbusting radio series that had made Lawyer Dewey the saltiest campaigner in recent New York history. But hard-shelled Boss Marinelli, whose term as county clerk was due to expire January 1 anyway, neither resigned nor answered the Dewey charges.

If Mr. Dewey's Tammany targets expected that his campaign speeches would be forgotten after his resounding victory at the polls last month, they were soon disillusioned. Day after election, an organization christened as the "Joint Committee on the County Clerk" wrote Democratic Governor Herbert H. Lehman suggesting that if Mr. Marinelli was all that Mr. Dewey explicitly said he was, he was not fit to hold office even until January i. Democrat Lehman, often accused of an opportunistic friendliness for Tammany, asked Mr. Marinelli to answer the charges within a week. Shunning reporters both at his slum offices and his Long Island home, Boss Marinelli produced within the required time a fulsome protest, nub of which was that if his associates were gangsters he did not know it and was not responsible. Concealing any dismay he may have felt at this reply, Democrat Lehman asked Republican Dewey to submit his charges officially.

Businesslike Mr. Dewey not only did so, but, as the special prosecutor whom Mr. Lehman had appointed to head the Legislature's New York racket inquiry, last fortnight he suddenly subpoenaed some 400 scared Marinelli heelers to appear before the grand jury. At this point a public hearing like that which trapped hapless Mayor Jimmy Walker began to seem to Tammany chieftains a worse prospect than giving Mr. Dewey a second scalp from their wigwam. Last week Boss Marinelli wrote Governor Lehman two letters. In one he resigned the office he would have held for only 28 days more. In the other he explained why. Most compelling of Mr. Marinelli's reasons was that he wanted to spare "suffering and humiliation'' that a public hearing might bring to his more infamous lieutenants' widows, wives and children.

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