Wallerin' Bee

Tammany's cigar-mouthing regulars had been confident that they could capture New York's City Hall just by looking pious and letting nature take its course. Their blueprint for victory was simplicity itself. A disciplined Tammany hand named Vincent Impellitteri, who became temporary mayor after Bill O'Dwyer's hurried resignation, was to smile frequently, keep his mouth shut, fight down ambition, and step back into obscurity when Tammany put its big man up for the job.

With this assured, Tammany would have had only to aim its squat, greying Candidate Ferdinand Pecora in the right direction, let go of his ankles and watch him go bobbing off to glory. The Republican challenger, Edward Corsi, had a good Italian name too, and had gotten headlines for his welfare and labor work. But 68-year-old Justice Pecora was remembered as the fearless Government counsel of the senatorial investigation of Wall Street in 1933, which not only led to the Securities & Exchange Commission but produced a deathless picture of J.P. Morgan cuddling a midget on his lap. And anyhow, New York is a Democratic town.

The Quick Whitewash. Only one thing went wrong: Impellitteri filed for mayor. Followed by a handful of Tammany district leaders who hoped to run the Tiger as they pleased if he won, Impy wrote out his own bill of divorcement from the Democratic machine, gave himself a quick whitewash and bounded onstage gleaming like the driven snow and shouting that he was an Independent. To Tammany's horror, the acting mayor began getting applause, particularly after he took advantage of the Brooklyn gambling scandal (TIME, Oct. 9) to appoint big, reassuring Tom Murphy, the Alger Hiss prosecutor, as police commissioner.

Last week, as a result of Impy's unsporting conduct, the mayoralty campaign had become the noisiest, eye-gougingest free-for-all the city had witnessed for decades. (Said Columnist Walter Winchell: "The only dirty show in New York today is the election campaign.") Impy and Pecora stood toe to toe exchanging invective while Corsi--at whom each took occasional condescending swipes--belabored them both wildly from the rear.

During a fortnight of mudslinging, Pecora did his best to turn Democrats against Impy as 1) a turncoat who was simply in the race to split the vote for the G.O.P., and 2) a "cowardly" pretender with no talent for administration. When Impy said that he had spurned Tammany's offer of a $28,000 judgeship to stay out of the race, Pecora's backers lamely cried that just the opposite was true: that Impy had demanded four judgeships, one for himself and three for his friends.

The Gloves Off. With the mayor's power in his hands, Impy managed to keep clanking effectively in his homemade shining armor. Last week he had the wit to jail hundreds of astoundingly puny hoodlums on the ground that they imperiled the sanctity of the polls. He announced that he had been forced to "take off the gloves." Tammany, he cried, was controlled, lock, stock & barrel, by Big Gambler Frank Costello, and Pecora was nothing but Costello's mouthpiece.

At this point the voice of Costello himself--who had gone to Hot Springs, Ark. to avoid the dead cats which are thrown at him at every election--was briefly heard. "Who, me?" he peeped, in a New York Post interview. But he was immediately drowned out by the candidates.

Republican Corsi, who had labeled his opponents the Tammany Twins, was delighted by Impy's charge. He had just finished crying that Impy was letting Gambler Frank Erickson drink oolong tea, lounge in luxury and run his illegal bookie empire by remote control from a jail on Rikers Island. Now he charged that there had been a falling out in the underworld: Pecora was the candidate of Costello; Impy, the candidate of a character known as "Three Fingers" Brown.

The Democrats were plainly worried: a good many New Yorkers seemed to be taking Impy's independence seriously; he was leading his nearest rival two to one, according to a poll conducted by the tabloid New York Daily News. As the uproar continued, a voter named Leonard Lewis, interviewed by a newspaper, said what was on a lot of New Yorkers' minds: "I'm sick ... of the pot calling the kettle black," he said. "I'm tempted to write my own name on the ballot."

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