The Apalachin Conspiracy

On a rainy November day in 1957, droves of sleek cars with out-of-state license plates swept through the tiny (pop. 280) upstate New York town of Apalachin (pronounced apple-achin') and converged on the secluded hilltop estate of Joseph Barbara, a beer distributor known to be high up in the underworld. His curiosity pricked by the procession of strange Cadillacs and Imperials, an alert state cop called agents of the Treasury Department's Alcohol Tax Unit in Albany. Surrounding the 53-acre estate, policemen halted 63 carefully tailored men--some at a roadblock, others fleeing through dense woods--and asked them who they were, where they came from and why they had come to Apalachin. After questioning, all were released.

Last week, in Manhattan's U.S. District Court, a jury found 20 of Barbara's racketeer-guests guilty of conspiring to obstruct justice by lying to grand juries about their reasons for coming to Apalachin.* Facing them in mid-January: maximum sentences of five years and/or $10,000 fines. In what U.S. Attorney General William P. Rogers hailed as a "landmark" verdict, the Government in an ingeniously based prosecution won its biggest courtroom victory against organized crime since the conviction of Al Capone. For without proving that the defendants had assembled for a "crime convention," youthful (36) Special U.S. Prosecutor Milton Wessel convinced the jury of the hoods' "togetherness in crime, partnership in lying."

Public Rights. Key to the Government's successful long-shot prosecution was Federal Judge Irving R. Kaufman's ruling that the police, in halting and questioning the defendants, had not encroached upon the constitutional guarantee against illegal search and seizure. Judge Kaufman, whose scrupulous conduct of the death-sentence Rosenberg spy trial (TIME, April 16, 1951) withstood all appeals, held that the police had "reasonable grounds" for believing that "a crime might have been committed"; that "the circumstances were such that an immediate stoppage and investigation was rendered absolutely necessary." Those questioned, said the court, were merely getting an opportunity to convince police that no crime had been committed. They did so and were released.

Prosecutor Wessel's strategy was to prove that the hoods had not told the truth, that their statements to police did not jibe with demonstrable facts and sworn testimony, and that in their similarity they clearly proved a conspiracy to thwart the law in a reasonable inquiry. In the early afternoon of Nov. 14, 1957, he contended, the racketeers spotted police around Barbara's place and promptly put together their common alibi; each just happened to be driving through Apalachin (from as far away as Los Angeles or Dallas or Cleveland) and just happened to drop in on ailing Pal Joe Barbara.

Conflicting Detail. Actually, Wessel told the jury in summation, arrangements for the gathering had been made days ahead (Barbara had 200 lbs. of steak in his freezer for the "unexpected" guests); the meeting on the hilltop had begun the day before the "callers" said they arrived, and some who said they were not there were seen by police. Damned out of their own mouths by repetition of notably similar detail, the mobsters used the buttoned lip too late in the courtroom. They sat stony-faced for eight weeks as Wessel pulled apart their words.

The Government's cracking of this iron-clad conspiracy--by challenging the conspiracy itself rather than the illegal acts it covered--offered a new approach to the old problem of catching up with big-time hoods. But prosecutors would have to weave their legal nets with patient care.

* In all, 27 men were indicted; one was acquitted, two were granted separate trials because of illness, and four are fugitives. Thirty-six others, listed as "coconspirators" by a U.S. grand jury last spring, may be subject to future prosecution.

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