Even the Unsavory

The Apalachin raid was one of the most celebrated in U.S. police history: that spectacular occasion in November 1957 when New York State cops and federal agents picked up 63 high-muck-a-mucks of U.S. crimedom, all from one barbecue pit. That day, big-time hoods from as far away as Arizona and California arrived to roast steaks and toast marshmallows at the secluded estate of a beer distributor and longtime racketeer named Joseph Barbara.

The gathering did indeed seem downright suspicious. And if only the captured guests had been willing to tell the real purpose of their conclave, the policemen's lot would have been a happy one. As it was, many said that they had merely gone to visit the ailing Barbara, who has since died of heart trouble. Two said their car had broken down near by. Another swore that he had come to sell Barbara some fish. Barbara himself said that all the guests had been more or less unexpected --and he just happened to have about 200 pounds of steak on hand.

Convinced that the boys were hiding something, the Justice Department haled the lot of them before grand juries, and at length a U.S. District Court in Manhattan found 20 of them guilty of conspiring to obstruct justice by lying to the grand juries about their reasons for coming to Apalachin.

It was certainly an understandable temptation to throw the whole Apalachin crew into jail on general principles, but to many observers the convictions seemed a dangerous precedent. What the case added up to was legal incredulity at the notion that so many bums had gotten together for any innocent purpose.

Last week a U.S. Court of Appeals kicked the Government's case clean back to the barbecue pit: the court, reversing the convictions of the 20 hoods, ordered the charges dismissed. The main point of the unanimous decision by the three judges: Since the Government had not tried to prove that the meeting, in and of itself, violated any state or federal law, how could it prove that the defendants had conspired to lie about their presence there? The Government's "bootstrap" handling of the case, wrote Chief Judge J. Edward Lumbard, was wholly unwarranted. "Bad as many of these alleged conspirators may be, their conviction for a crime which the Government could not prove . . . and on evidence which a jury could not properly assess, cannot be permitted to stand."

Judge Charles E. Clark, in a concurring opinion, had even harsher words for the prosecution. The case, he wrote, suggests that "the administration of the criminal law is in such dire straits that crash meth ods have become a necessity ...

"A prosecution framed on such a doubtful basis should never have been initiated or allowed to proceed so far. For in America we still respect the dignity of the individual, and even an unsavory character is not to be imprisoned except on definite proof of specific crime."

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