Listen to the Mocking Bird

When he was arrested in September 1950, Brooklyn's swart, smart Big Bookie Harry Gross lost a gambling empire but gained a fearsome and ironic political power. He used it for all it was worth. By talking his head off before a grand jury about cop-bribing during Mayor Bill O'Dwyer's regime, he exploded the biggest New York corruption scandal since the days of Jimmie Walker. Then, after a total of 77 blue-coats had been named as defendants or coconspirators, Gross managed, with consummate gall, to spring them all.

His method was simple. Despite the tears of Brooklyn District Attorney Miles F. McDonald and shrieks of rage from Brooklyn Judge Samuel S. Leibowitz-- who threatened to send Gross to jail "for a thousand years"--he just clammed up on the witness stand. Having brought the cops to trial en masse, the prosecution was barred by laws against double jeopardy from trying to bring them to book again. Gross went off, bloody but unbowed, to serve out twelve years in City Prison.

Uninhibited Encore. Last week, called as a witness at a departmental trial of five of the policemen (held only to determine whether they are to be discharged from the force and stripped of pension rights), Gross began to sing again. In doing so, he not only cast new embarrassment upon O'Dwyer, but managed to question the political purity of his archfoe, the crusading Brooklyn D.A.

He did so by naming four of O'Dwyer's high police officials (all now retired) who had never been publicly accused in connection with the gambling scandal. Witness Gross testified that he had not only bribed Chief Inspector August W. Flath, Seventh Deputy Police Commissioner Frank C. Bals, onetime head of a special "mayor's squad," and Chief of Detectives William T. Whalen, but also former Police Commissioner William P. O'Brien, a man of whom O'Dwyer said in 1950: "I believe Bill O'Brien is as honest a man as I have ever known."

When Gross was asked why these big shots had not been named in the indictment last year, he answered: "To quote Judge Leibowitz, maybe some money changed hands." He swore he had testified about all of them before the grand jury, and had later asked an assistant D.A. if the high police officials were being left alone out of favoritism. He had been told: "Don't be a lawyer."

Before he had done for the week, Gross mentioned nearly 200 different policemen, and painted a shocking and fascinating picture of the methods by which he virtually controlled whole police divisions in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens at the peak of his career. During 1947, '48 and '49, he poured out $1,000,000 annually in graft and gifts.

Service for Ice. The bulk of the "ice payments" were made according to a scale which he said was "standard in the trade." He paid $3 a week to the cop on the 8-to-4 beat, $2 to the cop on the 4-to-12 beat, $40 a month to the sector radio-car crew. For every "joint" he operated, he paid $15 a month to sergeants, $50 to lieutenants, $100 to captains and $200 to "the division." He said that he gave the chief inspector's office $6,500 a month. All bribes were doubled at Christmastime as a mark of good will, and if one of his horse rooms did better than average business, he paid "double ice."

On top of all this, he was eternally making gifts and doing favors. He was a great hand at slipping police officials a few hundred dollars for small good turns. He gave away television sets and watches, kept accounts at two Manhattan clothiers, to whom he sent favored cops for free suits. He once sent half a dozen deserving blue-coats to Chicago, all expenses paid, to see the Rocky Graziano-Tony Zale fight. When Commissioner O'Brien's sidekick, Acting Lieut. George W. McGirr, wanted $135,000 in big bills changed into smaller denominations, Gross was delighted to take care of it for him.

But he got service. Few of his 400 employees were ever so much as accosted by a cop. If one of his runners had to "take a pinch" a few times, Gross got his fingerprints removed from the police files so he could begin again as a first offender--at a much smaller fine. If one of his joints had to be raided, the cops always warned him ahead of time, thus allowing him to move to a "switch spot" across the street.

Grinning, Gross recalled sitting in a police wiretap room, watching gambling calls in Brooklyn being checked against a list of bookies who were paying "ice." "If a name wasn't on the list," he said, "they went out and made a pinch."

But Only $2,000 for Taxes. Gross did not make all these revelations without causing new repercussions. The Brooklyn district attorney roared with indignation at the bookie's veiled suggestion that he had protected O'Brien, Flath, Whalen and Bals, replied that Gross simply hadn't given enough information to the grand jury to enable him to act against them. O'Brien roared that Gross was a liar--and resigned his job with the Copperweld Steel Co.

Gross's sharply dressed, 24-year-old brother Jackie was slugged by two men on a dark Manhattan street, and told, "It'll be a hell of a lot worse next time if Harry doesn't shut up." Assistant Corporation Counsel Victor J. Herwitz, who is prosecuting the five cops in the departmental trial, was threatened over the telephone. In Washington, meanwhile, Delaware's

Republican Senator John J. Williams discovered that while paying a million a year in ice, Gross had paid less than $2,000 a year in income tax in 1946, '47 and '48.

Gross, who hoped to have his sentence reduced as a reward for talking, seemed unperturbed. At week's end the big city's grapevine quivered to a tale that he had more--a lot more--to spill, and that reputations would be crisped like moths in an incinerator if he felt called upon to do so.

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