Grapefruit in the Garden State

The "Garden State" of New Jersey (pronounced Goddan State of New J-eh-sey) boasts some of the most remarkably unsylvan areas east of the city dump at Gary, Ind. Its smoke-hung Hudson shore is littered, mile on dreary mile, with dingy factories, junkyards, piers, abattoirs, disconsolate old houses and drafty barrooms. When the wind is right, the indescribable perfume of some of the world's most thoroughly fermented tidal flats profanes the air. Jersey politics--a hatchery for grasping bosses--rests in this setting as comfortably as a bloated grapefruit floating in a sump pit.

Most of Jersey's larger cities are traditionally Democratic, and the state has been Republican for ten years, but politicos of both parties have been remarkably astigmatic toward venality great & small. When New York's Mayor Fiorello La Guardia threw "punks and gamblers" out of town, they migrated, almost as one. to Bergen County, N.J., and for almost ten years no politico seemed to know that they were there.

Disturbed Currents. Horse rooms and sawdust-joint crap games grew almost as common as gas stations. The pleasant back country blossomed with ornate gambling hells, which boasted thick rugs, fine food and limousine service to Manhattan. Hundreds of Bergen County citizens rented their phones to bookies at $50 a week, opened their houses to furtive characters known as "sitters," who crouched near the receiver eight hours a day taking bets from the Big City across the Hudson. But after the Kefauver committee blabbed the tale to the world on television, New Jersey's Republican Attorney General Theodore Parsons went into prolonged spasms of surprise, horror and chagrin.

Incautiously, perhaps, he did more--sent a fire-breathing young special prosecutor named Nelson F. Stamler into Bergen County with orders to wipe it clean as a peeper's telescope on a summer evening. Last week--31 months later--this abnormal development was still having an intensely disturbing effect on the turgid currents of Jersey politics.

Spectacular Complaint. Stamler carried out his orders with tactless vigor. He slammed 100 gamblers, including Big Shots Frank Erickson and Joe Adonis, into jail, and got indictments against a score of others, including three highly placed cops and a former Bergen County prosecutor. Amidst this furor, Bergen Gangster Willie Moretti was mysteriously killed (at the orders, according to Stamler's hints, of politicians who were afraid he would talk). But Willie, according to testimony, did not die before making one spectacular complaint: he had given $286,000 to a smalltime statehouse aide named Harold John Adonis (no kin to Joe), and he had understood that $190,000 of it was going to the governor--but had got no protection from the state.

Harold Adonis skipped the country, but Stamler indicted him anyhow. Shortly thereafter, Special Prosecutor Stamler was fired by Attorney General Parsons for "insubordination." This caused even more uproar than Stamler's cleanup. The legislature launched an investigation into the affair, after Stamler shouted from the rooftops that he had really been axed for breathing too hotly on G.O.P. Governor Alfred E. Driscoll's administration. Last week, while questioning New Jersey's (just retired) Republican state chairman, a prosperous, churchgoing real-estate executive named John J. Dickerson, the legislators cut into a thick, salty vein of untapped political history.

Chairman Dickerson's most spectacular testimony: that a considerable part of Governor Driscoll's political success stemmed from a Republican tie-up with Democratic machines in both Jersey City and Hoboken. In 1949, Dickerson testified, he had done his best to help Democrat John V. Kenny beat the corrupt Hague machine in Jersey City. His best was good enough; Kenny displaced Hague's nephew as mayor of Jersey City and Hague as boss of Hudson County. In return, said Dickerson, Kenny's Democratic machine slammed on the brakes during the autumn gubernatorial campaign; Jersey City and surrounding Hudson County, which normally returns a Democratic majority of from 75,000 to 100,000, produced an edge of only 3,400 votes for Driscoll's Democratic opponent. Had city and county voted as usual, Driscoll would have been defeated.

Dickerson also admitted that the Republican state committee had accepted a $25,000 "loan" from one Joseph Bozzo, a friend of Gambler Longie Zwillman, and had kept no records of the cash repayment. What about Willie Moretti's complaint about his $286,000 bribe? Dickerson knew all about it--for Willie had called at Dickerson's home (in company with Joe Adonis and brother Salvatore Moretti) and had cried, "Tell the governor and the attorney general that I don't intend to take this laying down." The governor, Dickerson went on, had been "shocked" to hear of the bribe and had given Willie no comfort. But for all of this, Dickerson was clearly no friend of Investigator Stamler. Stamler, said Dickerson, had taken credit for work done by the state police and had threatened "to get the governor."

Burning Issue. None of this intra-Republican squabbling was as gamy as some of the testimony against Jersey Democrats turned up during recent investigations into waterfront crime. But its effect was damaging. Republican Organization Candidate Paul L. Troast--chairman of the commission which built the famed Jersey Turnpike--got the G.O.P. nomination by only a comparatively small majority in last fortnight's gubernatorial primary. Troast was opposed by a large, impressive protest vote which may swing over to his Democratic rival in the autumn. But was corruption the burning issue in corruption-scarred New Jersey during the primary campaign? Indeed not. The burning issue was bingo--which was banned because of a supreme court decision, and despite vast public outrage, two months ago. To stand the ghost of a chance in the fall, both candidates had to rise up and speak out not only against corruption, but for bingo, and its cousin skilo, too. for that matter.

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