Chapter IV: Part ONE: The Places (3)

Rouse made a desperate effort to reach the key to cut off the motor but the woman fought him, kicking, scratching, and biting. The Negro driver of the stolen car shoved the gear lever in and with the accelerator down to the floor board, rocketed the car into high speed. Hamilton, his head and shoulders through the window, holding on to the wheel, attempted to steer. It was impossible for either officer to jump or let go. The stolen car finally collided with a barricade, ran over the sidewalk.

With Rouse still fighting to gain control, and Hamilton still struggling, the car, without headlights and at a terrific speed collided with a tractor trailer truck. The stolen auto was completely demolished.

Private Hamilton was killed.

Scott had a record which showed he had been committed eight times as a juvenile delinquent on charges of larceny, and in 1943 was sentenced to from two to five years for auto stealing. Thereafter he was involved in six charges of robbery.

But the U.S. Attorney’s office refused to prosecute the Negroes and the police were advised that if they insisted on going through with charges before a judge, the DA’s office would nolle prosse the case, because they did not believe “a conviction could be obtained” against colored people who had so unfortunately become involved in the killing of a policeman. But when a policeman kills a Negro in the line of duty, the politically chosen District Attorney is frequently highpressured by the N.A.A.C.P. into bringing murder charges.

We have pointed to the misguided tendency to minimize the size and extent of the Negro population. If more than half of Washington’s population is not black, the per capita crime rate is even more appalling.

Like white crime, Negro crime is organized and syndicated. This does not mean every rapist, hold-up man and car-thief takes orders from above. But it means that when he gets in trouble he does seek certain directed sources for bail-bonds, lawyers and fixers.

Policy-sellers, bookmakers’ runners, reefer peddlers and junk salesmen are employed by an organization which protects them also.

The process, as it works here, will be described in detail in the chapters devoted to crime and law enforcement, as it is part of the general picture of organized evil.

In Washington, as in other cities, Negro crime on the consumer and go-between levels is operated and controlled by Negroes. They report to, kick back to, and make their fixes at upper levels with, white criminals. The topmost control rests in the hands of the international Syndicate, the Mafia, the Unione Siciliano. The Washington Negro crime-ring has more autonomy than usual, because there are few Sicilians and even fewer interested in crude crime. The national Syndicate prefers not to show its bloody hands openly in the capital, but lurks in the background--in New York, principally.

The most powerful Washington Negro is the aforementioned Puddin’ Head Jones. Jim Yellow Roberts is the boss of dope and reefers. He makes his buys in wholesale lots in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, direct from the importers. While temporarily embarrassed by a jail sentence, Roberts continued to run the Negro dope trade.

“Whitey” Simpkins is king of the Black Belt’s numbers racket. Johnny W. Carter, who owns the Club Bali, a black-and-tan resort, is one of the gamblers’ chiefs. Their payoff is a percentage which eventually reaches the Syndicate through channels which will be set forth in detail in the chapter devoted to dope and gambling in Washington.

One of Washington’s most important Negro underworld figures is Lamarr (Polly) Brown who has been implicated in every form of illegality from operating after-hour clubs to the sale of narcotics. Odessa Madre, known as the “Queen of the Fences,” is just what her honorific implies.

Following the white pattern, the largest, gayest and most colorful Negro section is also laid out in NW. This part of town abounds with colored flats where a white man may take a white or colored woman. These holes sell gin without licenses, provide bedroom accommodations for those who want them, and girls for those who don’t have them.

Many Negro cab-drivers pimp for white girls, first getting acquainted with them when they pick them up as passengers. They set them up in apartments, most of which are in NW, and sell their services to white or colored men. These cabbies also handle reefers and after-hour liquor.

If you rode with us in Washington, through the NW colored section, these are some of the things we could have shown you:

First, we parked our car at the corner of 10th and B Sts., in front of the Lincoln Barbeque. We waited five minutes, a colored man came out of the restaurant and took our order for bootleg liquor. It happened after two, when the bars were closed. His prices were moderate, no more than 50 cents to a dollar above the established tariff. But the stuff was moonshine and cut.

Let’s go to 1919 14th Street NW. This house was formerly the Star Dust Club, an after-hour drinking and gambling place. Now it’s a shoeshine parlor. It’s owned by William J. “Foots” Edwards, a notorious Negro gambler. If you want a game, you can find stud in the basement.

The dark corner of 5th and K looks quiet and serene. The colored damsels who parade past here singly and by twos are not. Stop your car at the corner and they will come over and solicit you. Business all night. If you’re a Negro you’ll know where to take them. If you are a white man they’ll go along in your car to an alley or steer you to a buggy rooming-house. Another corner frequented by dusky hustlers in search of white trade is 9th and Rhode Island.

At about this time, we’ll run through the 7th Street district, which is the Broadway of the NW Negro section, with the chief shops, restaurants, night clubs and theatres. You can make pick-ups anywhere around 7th, Georgia and Florida Avenues, but these streets are brightly lighted, so most white men who want to change their luck play the darker streets. And there it is not unusual to see white girls brace black men.

In addition to sex on sale at the corner of 7th and Florida, you can buy reefers or policy slips.

U Street, from 7th to 15th, is another bright light belt in the colored section. The Dunbar Hotel and the Whitelaw are the swank Negro inns. The Dunbar was once the aristocratic white Courtland Hotel. In its basement is the 20-11 Club, one of the Nation’s best-known colored cabarets, which caters to the cream of the colony and is patronized also by white novelty-seekers. Rich and visiting Negro celebrities check in at the Dunbar. So do Feds and cops, who have occasionally made pinches there for narcotics and morals violations. In the 20-11 Club you can pick up girls of any race.

On the corner of 7th and T are three hot spots--the Off Beat Club, for musicians, the Club Harlem, and the Seventh and T Club. We saw them serve drinks after hours and cater to fairies of all shades, female white thrill-chasers and Negro reefer addicts.

Washington, like Chicago, is a city of alleys in every block of residential property and many business squares, bisected by the rear passages. As in Chicago, they are conducive to crime, afford dark, narrow lanes for rape, assault, robbery and the pleasanter crimes of crap shooting and soliciting.

In some Negro sections where housing is at a premium, they live in shacks in the alleys. These are some of the slums already referred to--not many, but picturesque and odoriferous. One of the best-known is an alley oddly named Temperance Court. If white people lived there it would be fashionable at premium rents; it is similar to the aristocratic Washington Mews in New York’s Greenwich Village. But it is inhabited by some of the lowest members of the Negro race in Washington--and that means low.

Temperance Court is between 12th and 13th, T and U Streets, near the 13th precinct station. More dope peddlers and ginmill operators are annually arrested in this block than on any other street of comparable size anywhere in the world. You can buy anything you want there--girls, bootleg whiskey, cocaine and marijuana, stolen property, guns and knives, articles of perversion and sadism. Anything but a virgin past the age of puberty.

A notorious dope peddler operated there until recently and may still be there when this comes out. He is John Frye. He has so many children, some sleep on the roof, four on a bed, and there is always a new baby in the carriage. Narcotics agents said he hid junk in the baby’s diaper. A competitor in the same block was Wilbur Kenny, known to the cokies merely as “Y.”

Another byway in the NW Negro section, which is unpublicized in the slick magazines, is Goat Alley, off 7th Street, near M. This is terribly tough, with reefer peddlers, two-dollar wenches, a mugging a minute and murders common. Close by the Negro sections of crime and perversion is Ledroit Park, once surrounded by the mansions of aristocracy. This is back of Griffith Stadium, which, like Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, is engulfed in a sable sea. Baseball lovers must travel through miles of dangerous streets to the stadium.

Nearby is Freedman’s Hospital, the world’s leading institution of its kind for colored people, one of the outstanding institutions in the world. Its internes are Howard University medical graduates, and among these are great doctors. They get plenty of practice. The worst Negro assault cases go to Freedman’s. On Friday and Saturday nights the floors of its emergency wards look like slaughterhouses. Knifings are frequent; shootings run second. Even on weekdays the place teems with police interviewing victims.

Garfield Hospital, also near a large Negro community, is the second in assault cases.

One of the largest Negro islands in NE has as its center Central Avenue--same name as Los Angeles’ Harlem, though purely coincidental.

Gamblers in the NE section get action above the colored poolroom at 507 8th Street and E.

SW’s colored section is one of the largest in Washington and perhaps the oldest. It begins within a thrown stone’s distance of the Capitol and runs through to the Army War College. If you’ve read about this neighborhood in some pinkish publication before seeing it for yourself you will be looking for something awful. But you will drive through miles of wide avenues with deep lawns. They’re littered with rubbish and junk, of course. This homey residential section is reminiscent of God-fearing, law-abiding middle-class sections in typical Southern towns.

But what goes on inside these cozy habitations is not sleepy. The streets, so quiet by day, take on a sinister aspect at night. This whole section is known as Bloodfield. It’s worth a white man’s or woman’s life to walk there unaccompanied. Even respectable Negroes are not safe.

Young colored hoodlums of both sexes, adept at mugging and knifing, prey on strangers. The white man who comes here for pastime will find his luck all bad. The best he can hope for is a beating and maiming. But white women who are known to be Negro lovers are given safe conduct by the men, though they are attacked often by Negro women who resent the intrusion. These streets are barely patrolled by police.

The main shopping and drinking boulevards of the SW Negro section are 4th and 7th Streets. Around here the Negroes moved into and drove out what there was of a Jewish ghetto. The street where Al Jolson lived as a child and where his father practiced as a cantor is now all Negro.

The SW dope peddlers and whores make their hangout on 6½th Street. The chief madames are “Mamma Liz” and “Big Tit” Flossie.

We have indicated that many white women--especially government workers--are receptive to sexual attentions of Negro men. But the comparative ease with which a black man can get a white girl, even a so-called respectable one, does not seem to deter colored men from committing rape on women of their own race and whites.

As these lines were being written, all Washington was shocked and alerted when a 22-year-old South American girl, visiting with a diplomatic family, was stalked, attacked and ravished in a park near Arlington Cemetery by a Negro, who, Tarzan-like, leaped from a clump of trees entirely naked.

The popular form of Negro attack is mugging, a process in which the assailant comes up behind a man or woman and throws his arm around the victim’s throat, closing it sharply with the elbow out, and jabbing a knee into the small of the back.

But in Washington colored people call it “yoking,” derivation of the word unknown. It includes all forms of street assault. One process consists of sneaking up behind a lone passer-by, usually one who apparently has been drinking, and tapping him on the shoulder. As he turns around, he is hit square on the jaw with a stiff arm, then kicked in the groin when he falls. Most victims are robbed. But many young and exuberant Negroes get up yoking parties just for the joy and excitement.

Three young colored boxers, aged 14, 16, and 17, terrorized Washington a few months ago, committing at least 19 yoke robberies, netting more than $2,000. The 17-year-old was a semifinalist in the 160-pound class in last year’s Golden Gloves tournament. The youngest boxed at a boys’ club. The 16-year-old was a quarter finalist in the 135-pound class. These activities are said to breed good citizens.

The three bet among themselves which would land the first punch on the victim and whether it would be a knockout.

Police arrest hundreds of Negro yokers every year, most of them in their teens. Thousands of yokings go unsolved. The yokers are usually highly organized into juvenile gangs which fight also with home-made pistols, sawed-off shotguns and switchblade knives.

Many of these young Negro gangs terrorize students, white and black, in public schools, offering to sell them “protection” and punishing them when they don’t pay up.

Startled public officials first heard about these gangs some months ago after incidents at Banneker High. An 18-year-old colored boy was held for the grand jury on a charge of robbing a 15-year-old Banneker schoolboy of a wrist watch on the school playground. He threatened to whip the younger boy if he talked. School officials were awakened to the fact that all the schools in the city had this problem. According to the assistant superintendent of schools G. C. Wilkenson, “the gangs are made up of boys who aren’t in school and who aren’t working--mostly from 16 to 21 years old.”

Officials try to minimize the situation, but there is a wave of terror in every public elementary and high school. Young Negro gangsters lurk about the schools, sell reefers, molest girls, and commit mayhem on children who won’t pony up. Boys and girls thus forced to pay tribute are told to steal from their parents or do a little shoplifting if they have no other means of procuring the extortion money. Youngsters are put on heroin and morphine by the youthful gangsters, and soon enter a life of serious crime.

Other yokers use a tactic borrowed from the dacoits, a murderous religious gang of India, throwing a cord over the victim’s head from behind and garroting him.

Some of these colored juvenile mobs have been in existence for 15 or 20 years. When boys and girls outgrow them and become adult criminals on their own, they are replaced by new children on the way up. Among the older and better-organized kid mobs are the Fastest Runners, the Forty Thieves, the Purple Cross Gang and the Protective Association.

The Fastest Runners is composed of younger boys who fight with switch-blade knives. When they grow up they graduate into adult gangs. All these organizations have female auxiliaries, membership in which requires the young colored girls to solicit on the streets and turn the proceeds over to the boys. Girls as young as 11 participate and at 12 are “debs,” with full standing.

Among offenses which are practically Negro monopolies in Washington are the following:

_Numbers and policy slips._ Almost all numbers sellers, even in white neighborhoods and in government office buildings, are colored men and women. In other cities Sicilians, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos and Mexicans get in on this activity, but there are no sizeable groups of such in Washington. The modus operandi of numbers selling will be described in the chapter on gambling.

_Sale of reefers._ Almost all marijuana retailers are colored, which also is unique to Washington.

_Theft and conversion of government checks at the lower level._ The men, because so many are janitors and elevator boys, have entree to apartment buildings and tenement houses and access to mail-boxes. These thieves strike at the middle or at the end of the month, when checks are sent out by the Treasury for G.I. remunerations, Social Security benefits, pensions, army subsistence and similar regular allotments. Those who do the manual stealing seldom attempt to cash the checks, which are turned over to fences, often white, including storekeepers and sometimes bankers.

Another Negro industry is _the sale of bootleg booze_. The rings operate in many fashions. On some streets you find peddlers who sidle up beside you, or come up to your car when you stop for traffic lights. Many shoeshine “parlors” are moonshine dispensaries. Groceries and poolrooms also sell, usually gin, but sometimes what is supposed to be bourbon--corn for the Southern taste. The gin is mixed with cider to dilute the taste of raw kerosene and the combination has a wallop.

That good old Negro money-raising institution, known as “the rent party” elsewhere, has a specific, generic name in Washington, where it’s called a “chitlin party.” Chitlins, hogs’ innards, are a delicacy in some blacker parts of the South and are used here as a decoy to attract guests to the homey brawls which are a regular part of Blacktown’s social life. In New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville the paying guest at a rent party gets nothing in exchange for his contribution except the right to bring his woman, drink his gin, and get into the fracas.

We met a white fellow who has run Washington’s chitlin industry up into a million-dollar-a-year class. He gets the stuff from the butchers for nothing. They’re almost willing to pay him to cart it away. Then he packages it in 10-gallon jars which he sells for $2.50, or two bits a gallon. That means the capital’s Negroes consume 4,000,000 gallons a year.

These chapters were, of course, not in print when a young man known as “The Sniper” was, for a few days, the most famous person in Washington. If he were around now, our critics might have said we incited him. The Sniper--a young white man--was a congenital Negro-hater. He boiled up into an insane rage every time he saw a sable woman or man. He hid in various sections and hit bullseyes from roofs, behind trees and through open windows.

Before he was caught there was a wave of terror. For days Negroes remained indoors. Crime sagged, because even the worst elements were afraid to leave their homes.

Police Lieutenant Barrett, now Major and Superintendent of the Metropolitan Force, got him after he had killed a half-dozen men and wounded scores.

While the Sniper was in jail on suspicion, he met a drug addict, one Richard Harlowe, and confided in him where he had hidden his gun, in Baltimore. Barrett recovered it and came back to find his bird had escaped. He was recaptured in Georgetown. Barrett’s fame helped him to become the chief. His friends say it had nothing to do with the fact that he was related to Major Edward Kelley, a previous chief.

8. CHINATOWN CHIPPIES

Sam Wong, an owner of the China Clipper, Quonsett Inn, the Dragon and other popular restaurants, was indicted on a $250,000 tax fraud. The government charged he gave most of it to two blondes--sisters--who lived with him. The case was tried in Baltimore. (_Note_: Though Washington is the nation’s capital, it is merely part of the Maryland Internal Revenue collection district.)

When the case was called, the courtroom filled with poker-faced orientals. The government called some, the defense called others, including Wong, whom it put on the stand.

But not one Chinese witness testified coherently. They gave their names, addresses, and so on, muttered and mumbled irrelevant replies. Even the defendant remained mute after being put on the stand by his own attorney.

The lawyers had read _Chicago Confidential_, in which these reporters revealed that Chinese will have no truck with American courts or American law. So they gave a copy to the court and D.A., hoping the judge and jury would realize the impossible position in which the defense legal battery was placed. It did no good. Wong got a year. The blondes weren’t Chinese--and they convicted him.

Some go to Chinatown for chop suey and chow mein. We will write about those who seek other delicacies.

Washington’s Chinatown is neither as large as Frisco’s, as colorful as New York’s, nor as odoriferous as Boston’s. You will see no ancient, pajama-clad women on its streets, and only a few young slant-eyed Sadies.

Chinatown is a mere three or four blocks on H Street, beginning in a block about 8th and extending barely to 5th. It’s almost all neon-lighted restaurants, with the shops of a few wholesale merchants and traders sandwiched in between. H is a typical wide Washington street with set-back buildings. If it weren’t for the garish Chinese characters on the illuminated signs and windows, and the pale yellow-faced men with sad old almond eyes sprawling on the stoops, you’d think you were anywhere but in a Chinatown.

As in all Chinese quarters, various locations and various businesses are divided between the tongs. Only two operate in the East, though there are scores in California.

The On Leongs are dominant here, though not in the nation, through an alliance with the Hip Sings, cemented many years ago, when they drove the competing organizations back to the West Coast. Then they turned on their ally. After a series of bloody wars, they established themselves as the top dogs, with the Hip Sings the poor cousins.

The tongs are, primarily, trade and benevolent associations. Their membership is comprised of certain families or immigrants from certain villages in Canton. When the authorities clamped down on tong wars in the 1930’s, the tongs began to enforce their decrees and decisions by peaceful means, which include trade and social boycott.

According to members of the Chinese colony in Washington, there are only 500 of them, but these figures are far out of line with our count of at least 7,500. There are hundreds of Chinese restaurants and laundries in the town. Chinese always underestimate their population, as do Negroes. But with them there are more concrete reasons. Three-fourths are entered illegally, through many subterfuges, such as forged birth and marriage certificates, as well as actual body-smuggling over the Mexican and Canadian borders and from the West Indies. The price of entering a Chinese now is $5,000, as against a modest $1,000 twenty years ago. The fee is paid the smugglers by the Chinaman’s tong or family society, for whom he then works to pay it off. Nowadays most of this illegal entry is by air.

Chinese are cagey at census time, because if the rolls show anywhere near as many in the country as there are, the difference in numbers between those here and the ones on record would be so startling, it would cause an investigation and wholesale deportation. Another reason is that they are on a gentlemen’s agreement quota basis with agents of the Federal Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. When an agent runs across a group of illegally-entered Chinese, he gets practical about the whole matter.

If he turned them all up at once, he’d get a pat on the back from his superior, then have to go on a new job next week. But if he reports only one every two weeks, he doesn’t have to do another lick of work for months. So the agent makes a deal with the head of the tong, who delivers the unfortunate Chinese at set intervals, and thus everyone is happy: the government because it gets the Chinese, the agent because he can loaf, and the wealthy Chinese laundry and restaurant owners, who are not suddenly faced with labor shortages.

Washington’s Chinatown is important beyond its numerical strength because it acts as a lobby for Chinese all over the country, regardless of tong affiliation, and for Chinese merchants and enterprises all over the world. There are not enough Chinese voters in the country to enable them to influence elections, but they make up for lack of numbers by intelligence, ingenuity, wealth and Oriental cunning developed by centuries of intrigue with no qualms of honor owed the white man.

Communists never overlook a trick. They quickly took advantage of the Chinaman’s unique possibilities. Many Chinese are vulnerable because they have relatives in the old country. Thus they are subject to pressure. Many are technical law-breakers or illegal entrants, so the Reds, with their influence in high places, can threaten effectively. Chinese societies make swell “drops” for the transmission of messages and intelligence, and are being used, an angle not yet brought out publicly.

They’ll tell you it isn’t so, but some of the recent tong fighting is a war between Nationalists and Communists.

Chinatown, only a few blocks from the White House, the Capitol and the center of the business and commercial life, is a focal point for all, whites as well as Orientals, visitors and natives. In this town, where almost everything shutters by midnight, the Chinese propensity for staying up all night and sleeping most of the day has brought about several phenomena. Unless you are welcome at a bottle club, there is no late place to go to in Washington except Chinatown. Most of the restaurants there are open all night, selling food. More than a few serve liquor after 2 A.M., if they know you, in a tea-pot.

There is hectic activity all evening. Most of the white bag-swinging street-hustlers work the neighborhood. Any cab-driver will direct you there if you ask him, “Where can I get a girl?” These self-sellers usually ask $20, but will take what they can get. They go on duty at around 8, and by 10 most have made arrangements. From 10 to about 1 or 2, the restaurants are taken over by respectable people, mostly young couples who stop in for a bite of exotic food after the movies. After 1, when the tarts have completed their rounds, they come back again for more trade. At this time the drunks who have been ejected from the cocktail lounges and night clubs are transported wholesale by cab to Chinatown. Many of the drivers have deals with certain girls and some of these girls have deals with the Chinese restaurants they habitually visit.

Many of the hookers hang out at the Mai Fong.

We could find no Chinese whores in Washington. The proportion of Chinese women to men is one to ten. Any Oriental girl, no matter how homely, can make an attractive marriage. Many Chinese men are married to white women. There are no Chinese waitresses in the Chinese restaurants, except an occasional relative of the owner; they are whites. Few are for sale, but many will help get you one who is.

When the tramps finish their second round with the guys they have picked up at 2, they come back to Chinatown at 5 or 6 in the morning, by which time the waiters, chefs and bartenders, all Chinese, are locking up for the night and ready for a bit of shacking up themselves. Many of the prostitutes live with Chinese men from the restaurants and the gambling joints. These are useful to the Chinese colony, which entertains influential white people lavishly. Many members of Congress, high government officials and influential lobbyists are feted at private parties, where they are served exotic twenty-course meals of raw octopus and lambs’ eyes, washed down by shark’s fin soup. Police Chief Barrett, always accompanied by his aide-de-camp, a lieutenant, is frequently entertained in these private rooms.

Amiable blondes are supplied by the hosts if wanted, and rooms are available down the block, at the Eastern House, a cheap Chinese and white hotel, where federal agents frequently pick up dope-peddlers.

Selling narcotics is another large Chinese industry. Unlike other cities, it is not confined to selling to Chinese. In all other Eastern cities, opium, the favorite Chinese dream-smoke, is peddled by members of the On Leong Tong, who have the cream of everything, won through violence and chicanery.

In other cities, Hip Singers must content themselves with the sale of white stuff--heroin, morphine and cocaine--which is seldom used by Chinese. In Washington, Chinese are among the main retail dope purveyors for the white trade as well as their own people. There are few Puerto Rican and Italian drug passers available. So both tongs sell everything. Junkies cruise Chinatown at all hours of the day and night in search of dope, and can make a buy without any trouble. If anyone stands on a corner and looks sad for more than five minutes, he will be approached by a peddler.

The net result is that, with narcotics as with girls, the Chinese find a potent weapon with which to further the interests of their fellow Orientals all over the country. More than one high government official is on dope, which he procures from Chinese dealers, who in turn have him at their mercy because they control the source and because they have the power of blackmail.

The Chinese import some, obtain the rest from the central Mafia sources in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, or directly from abroad, as will be described later. They frequently cooperate with the Mafia in smuggling narcotics and other contraband. It is a matter of record that many Chinese secret societies have worked with their ancient Sicilian counterpart, the Mafia, over the centuries. Both Cantonese and Sicilians are widely dispersed over the world, but each faction is bound together by a common language and secret societies. Chinese societies are remarkable transmission belts. And among Chinese are many natural-born gangsters--sly rather than bold in white men’s countries.

Dope can be hidden in rice, vegetables and even wet-wash. The Chinese societies also provide the Mafia with facilities for transporting contraband money from country to country or from town to town.

There’s hardly a location in Chinatown without some form of gambling going on, quite often open to the street. Almost every restaurant has a game in the rear. Many stores are blinds for the huge wagering that goes on behind. If you came in and asked to buy some article you saw in the window, you’d be laughed at; they are usually dummy props. Huge sums are won and lost in these games, and bankrolls of a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars on the table are not unknown. This is always syndicate money. Sometimes as many as 500 or 1,000 partners all over the country are in the play. These games go on 24 hours a day, without pause. Each syndicate’s players are chosen for their ability as gamblers. They play in teams with others who relieve them.

We saw open gambling in the Fong Wah Co., in Eng Hon, in the On Leong building, and at numbers 601, 603, 606, 607, 608 H Street, in Chinatown.

The police know all about this gambling, but take no action unless white men put in a beef. They explain you can’t make a pinch stick on Chinese: the games they play are not understandable to whites, and it is almost impossible to make an identification of an Oriental, or to get one to testify, for or against.

When the Chinese hook a fat white sucker, the game moves every hour to a different location.

Sixth Street, at H, is the dividing line between Hip Sing and On Leong territory, with the Hip Sings below 6th, the less desirable part of town. The division of businesses gives all restaurants to On Leongs and the laundries to Hip Sings, therefore all chop suey parlors in Chinatown are above 6th Street.

Kwon Seto is the local On Leong boss and one of the most powerful men in Washington. George Moy, secretary of the On Leongs, is the “mayor” of Chinatown. A man named Yee is the real boss. Moy owns the Joy Inn, where an investigator for a crime committee was steered by a District official, then “mickeyed.”

9. THE OVERFLOW

Of every 100 residents of the metropolitan district, 45 live in the suburbs--over the line in Maryland and across the Potomac in Virginia. The take from these sections, in legitimate taxes and the proceeds of vice and crime, is so attractive that the city fathers of Washington have their greedy eyes on annexing this adjoining land onto the voteless District.

Almost everywhere else, unincorporated territory across city lines is a world apart. These county sections usually look different, smell different and are different from the city. They are bad or good, where people go to get away from the law, or go to get away from the lawlessness of the big city.

The border of D.C. is arbitrary. As the population of the capital grew, it spread. For all practical purposes, nearby Maryland and Virginia are as much a part of the city as any part of the city itself. Most of the residents of the suburbs work in the capital.

The entire area is really one municipality, though those living in Virginia and Maryland can vote.

There are no caste or social lines between the District and the suburbs. Society people may live in Washington, Virginia or Maryland. Residences of high government officials are spread over the three. The big wheels of the underworld are likewise scattered. The same overlords control the rackets in the entire metropolitan district.

The state lines provide gangsters with yet another safeguard. Extradition warrants are required to move them from one area to another. For some specific crimes, the authorities are hampered by the fact that no extradition is authorized. Smart lawyers take advantage of these false barriers. For instance, each day’s collection of lottery money in the District is moved into Maryland. Conversely, much of Maryland’s bookmaking take is deposited in District banks. That is all done on legal advice.

Technically, police officers in hot pursuit may cross state lines to make arrests, even for traffic violations. But few crimes are committed in the presence of a cop, and almost never any involving the upper echelons of crime. The satellite regions are remarkably free of Negroes, who prefer the city which they have all but taken over. That’s why the suburbs grew in size to such extent that Silver Spring, Maryland, adjacent to the District, of which outsiders seldom hear or read, is now the second largest city in the state.

The suburbs run the scale from swank sections where only those of great wealth reside to dingy squatters’ rows where moonshining, murder and mayhem are daily dillies. Most of the ritzier suburbs are on the Virginia side. Chain Bridge Way, Warrenton and Middleburg are peopled by the horsey set, where there are great estates lived in by possessors of ancient, honorable family names, as well as by the newly-made aristocrats of the New Deal, union officers, left-wing lawyers, five-percenters and State Department aides. Chevy Chase, partly in the District, but mostly in Maryland, is tony, too. So is Bethesda, Maryland.

But the great mass of suburbanites in both states are middle-class government employes who commute to and from work, play bridge, go to the movies and propagate.

As will be seen here, you can find almost anything in the way of crime or vice in Washington, but what you miss can usually be met in some of the Maryland suburbs when the heat isn’t on, especially in Prince Georges County, which, for its size, probably has more slot-machines, strip-teasers, resident hoodlums and general deviltry than any other place in the world--subject to a “clean-up” in progress at this writing.

_A. Maryland_

This is the Free State, where anything goes.

Chicago has Cicero, Washington has Prince Georges County.

The same cause which gives Washington the unenviable lead as the Number 1 law-breaker among cities--public apathy--is what usually makes Prince Georges County unique among county areas of the country. Washington does not have the vote, the residents of Prince Georges do have it. And they exercise it by usually voting Democratic and corrupt. Last November they kicked over the traces for the first time since 1864. But the Republican county commission won’t get far, even if it tries.

Without a dream of winning, the GOP nominated well-meaning nonentities without a policy, organization or knowledge of the local problems. Their victory was as surprising to themselves as to these reporters.

The facts for this chapter were gathered shortly before the November election. The new county government was sworn in on December 5. We returned to Prince Georges in early February for a recheck and found little changed. The new sheriff, Carlton Beall, made ten raids since New Year’s Eve. But the strip-joints still ran, though not so blatantly. Instead of featuring the nudies in their ads, they gave them second billing and headlined the male M.C. instead. But the babes were just as bare.

The gambling was under wraps, too, but it still flourished. The big gamblers took the precaution of moving their books and their bank accounts back to the District, whence they had fled a decade ago.

The crime syndicate’s technique was to keep moving across county lines from Anne Arundel to Howard to Prince Georges in the area near Laurel, where the three join.

The militant Republicans fired the Chief of Police and appealed to Senator Kefauver for aid. At this writing, the Senate Crime Investigating Committee tossed the hot potato right back into Maryland. One of Kefauver’s four colleagues on the Committee is Senator Herbert O’Conor, Maryland Democrat, elected with the aid of the corrupt Democratic machine so soundly trounced last November.

The second act of the new Republican commission was to hire another Democrat to succeed the ousted Democratic Police Chief.

The Prince Georges border is a 15-minute drive from the heart of Washington. Depending on the road you take out of town, you soon reach Bladensburg or Colmar Manor. The latter is Rum Row, with several blocks of dirty drinking-joints where wind-broken broads solicit drinks, roll drunks and whore, often as a pastime when no dough is available.

If you go to Colmar Manor to spend money, Silver Spring in adjoining Montgomery County is the place where you can get money. This is no gag. The entire main street of Silver Spring and nearby Mount Rainier in Prince Georges is lined on both sides from the District border for more than a quarter of a mile with personal loan agencies. This is because D. C. law makes it almost impossible for small loan firms, which lend you money on your own signature or that of co-signers, to operate. It so limits the interest rate as to make the business unprofitable, fixing it at one percent a month. On the other hand, both Maryland and Virginia are much more liberal with the loan companies. The former allows three percent monthly and the latter two-and-a-half. The Washington wage-earner, working for the government or privately employed, does his borrowing across the borderline. If he should default, the loans are collectable in the District, though its courts are increasingly looking into the conditions under which the loan was originally granted and refusing to issue judgments where they believe the interest is usurious.

Most Washingtonians know Prince Georges County as a place to go to have fun. This is not because Maryland’s laws, or even their enforcement, are more liberal than the District’s. With few exceptions, they are not.

The legal liquor closing on weekdays is 2 A.M. in both. No hard liquor can be sold at all on Sundays. They cheat in Prince Georges.

Prince Georges County is lined with dumps that specialize in strip-teasers. There are also many fag-joints. Peeling isn’t against the law in Washington, either. It goes on in the 9th Street burlesque houses when they operate, and at Kavakos’, near the navy yard. But Washingtonians prefer not to patronize the nuders near home. Their feeling of delicacy is overcome when they drive five miles.

Washington’s huge homosexual colony overflows up to the Baltimore Highway and into a place called the Conga. Mike Young’s occasionally specializes in fairy shows, too.

Prince Georges is a long strip predominantly devoted to gaiety, night life, gambling and whoring. At this writing, one of its most famous places is in a barnlike structure called the Crossroads. It has strippers and corny shows. Its huge bar is loaded for a pick-up. In case you do, but are not prepared, “sanitary rubber goods” are dispensed in slot-machines in the men’s rooms. The night we were there, we saw three fancy one-armed bandits whirring and swallowing. These were manufactured by Bell, which means their take goes direct to Frank Costello, instead of reaching him indirectly through other subsidiary companies, which sell machines to local syndicates. The Crossroads is a hangout for hoodlums. We recognized some well-known police characters there.

One of its owners is local gambling overlord Snags Lewis, about whom more later. Last year there was a shooting in the room, but Prince Georges County Patrolman Burgess made no report because his father had a piece of the place. Burgess is now off the force.

The Dixie Pig is a few yards down the road from the Crossroads. This barbecue bazaar is a hangout for prostitutes and gamblers. It is owned by Earl Sheriff, who, strangely enough, was the sheriff of Prince Georges before he went to Lewisburg penitentiary on an income tax charge, after pleading nolo contendere to protect the top shots.

Sheriff, now out on parole, is still electioneering, fixing and collecting campaign funds for the local Democratic machine. He worked hard for defeated Senator Tydings.

While Sheriff was having his troubles, Ralph Brown, late chief of the Prince Georges County Police, settled with the government out of court. The Democratic leaders of Prince Georges who were unaware of the vice there, or blind, are Congressmen Lansdale G. Sasscer, T. Howard Duckett, and T. Hampton Magruder. The latter two are attorneys.

Prince Georges County has a police force of 41 men, plus its village and town cops. But the county never asks for State Troopers. That is not surprising, because while we were gathering information for this book the Prince Georges grand jury said there was no gambling in the county. We saw a lot of it with our own eyes. Maybe state cops could stumble on some of it. Maybe.

Clean-up or no, there usually are more floating crap-games, illegal bookies and after-hour spots in Prince Georges than there are in Reno, where all such things are legal. The Republicans may temporarily drive them under cover--or back to the District--but those boys never stop.

The local Democratic machine was so powerful that, in 1947, the United States Department of Justice had to intervene directly with Maryland’s then Governor Lane to close down some joints. State troopers quickly shut all gambling houses--save one run by Mike Meyers, who was too cantankerous even for them. They finally drove him out by stationing police-cars around his joint every night, and taking the names of customers. After the heat was off, however, the county reopened wide.

The Prince Georges underworld was ruled until his death last year by Jimmy La Fontaine, who is known in gangland circles to have been a 20-percent partner with Frank Costello, the Mafia boss in New York, who handled the other 80 percent of the Prince Georges take. La Fontaine was a big financial backer of the local Democratic machine, though his own plush gambling casino across the street from the District line is now closed, pending probate of his multi-million-dollar estate by Attorney Charlie Ford, who gets the cream of all gambling, whoring and other organized criminal cases in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia.

Now the underworld is run by lieutenants of those who operate as vice overlords in Washington. Among them are Monk Seal, the bookmaker, who also has a piece of the Crossroads, and the aforementioned Mike Meyers, who handles the dice end. Snags Lewis is the local representative of the nationwide horse wire service, owned by the heirs of the late Al Capone, and is Frank Costello’s direct representative.

Policy-slip collections in the District are paid off to Pete Gianaris at night at the close of business. Gianaris is an interesting character who ran a $50,000 party in the ballroom of the Statler Hotel to celebrate the christening of his young son. This was cheap, considering that he imported such expensive Broadway stars as Buddy Lester to entertain the cream of local society. He is a beloved, big-hearted citizen.

The Costello interests were operating hundreds of slot-machines in Prince Georges. Some years ago, they were legalized by local option, but they remained contrary to state law, which was not enforced. Some locals, pushed out of the picture by Costello’s strongarm boys, started a tax-payers’ suit in the state courts and the Prince Georges local option law was thrown out. But some of the officials apparently haven’t heard of the decision yet.

That is not so surprising, since the sheriff, who seldom finds time to enforce the state laws, is busy applying the lash and cat-o’-nine-tails. Archaic Maryland law provides for whipping some classes of prisoners, the sheriff acting in person.

Among other joints in the county is one called the Hilltop, in Hillside. It was formerly a barbecue pit, now is a snake pit--a noisy madhouse catering to school and college kids who want to see what the well-undressed peeler isn’t wearing. The Quonset Inn, also in Prince Georges, is run by the Chinese syndicate of the District, which has established perfect harmony with the white bosses. You can see naked women at the Senate Inn, Waldrop’s, and occasionally at La Conga.

Meanwhile, the temporary exodus of Prince Georges gamblers has stepped up wagering activities in other nearby Maryland counties. Montgomery, mainly residential, with swank Chevy Chase and hard-working middle-class Silver Spring, woke up to find its Elks’ Club the victim of a police raid.

Then Sam Morgan, also of Silver Spring, described as one of the most important gamblers in the area, was locked up by State Troopers when they swooped down on “lay-off” establishments near Laurel Park and Ellicott City. These were nerve-centers for the transmission of contraband money in and out of the District. Morgan drew a suspended sentence. No one ever goes to jail.

The Baltimore Highway houses many tourist cabins, where pleasure-bound Washingtonians can drive and hire a room without baggage for $3, if not using it all night. A big turnover is the gravy for these guesthouses. A few cabin resorts are reserved for Negroes only.

The Negro population of this part of Maryland is comparatively small, most of its members doing menial or service labor for the white folk. However, the well-heeled boys of Washington’s colored set like to drive up the road a bit with their dusky dames in their Cadillacs.

The nearest amusement park to the city of Washington is Glen Echo, about seven miles away, in Maryland. This is the typical smalltown Coney Island, with swimming-pools, crazy rides, dancehalls, hot dogs and the inevitable pick-ups. Many professionals work the park in the summer, but they are outnumbered by the forlorn femmes from Washington who come there in pairs or even larger parties, looking and hoping.

_B. Virginia_

The Virginia suburbs present a more respectable exterior, though under the surface there’s plenty going on. The policy of the Old Dominion is policy.

Virginia’s laws do not permit the sale of hard liquor for on-premises consumption. Only beer and wine may be drunk that way. Hard stuff must be bought at liquor stores and taken out. This isn’t conducive to anything like gay night life. Virginians go into the District or up to Maryland if they want hi-jinks. Otherwise, most of their fun-making takes place at house parties. There are a few dives. But the after-hour “bottle-clubs” which plague Washington are to be found in Virginia too. One of these is the Commonwealth at South Pitt and Wolfe, in Alexandria.

The average resident of Virginia’s suburbs is financially a step or two above his Maryland neighbors. There are more fine homes and estates on this side of the river. The Negro problem is not so incendiary, because this is Virginia, where Jim Crow is king by statute, and colored people live in restricted areas and behave, or else. This is one of the reasons why the Negroes floated into the District, where they changed places with the whites, who overflowed back into Virginia. Remarkable was Prince Georges 64-percent population increase in the decade; but Arlington County, Virginia, had 125 percent.

The absence of night life in the nearby Virginia suburbs has been noted. This minimizes prostitution. Gambling is an important industry, as it is all over the nation.

Virginia authorities are disturbed by an influx of bookmakers and policy-sellers, white and black, from the District. Recently a Negro woman was arrested in Arlington with $3,000 in a paper bag, which was picked up that day in pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters--for numbers bets.

Sam Lano, who used to operate the Syndicate slot-machines in Prince Georges, is president of the Arlington Music Corporation, which flooded the county with pinball machines, many being used as gambling devices by local merchants. Lano came here from New York two years ago. Over a year ago he was convicted in Marlborough Circuit Court for having threatened a Prince Georges tavern-owner with prosecution on a bad check if he didn’t keep Lano’s machines in his place. He was sentenced to a year and his conviction was upheld by the Maryland Court of Appeals. So far, however, Lano hasn’t served one day in the cooler, and no effort was made to detain him when he transferred his operations to Virginia. The police of Bangor, Me., are looking for him for the removal and concealment of mortgaged property.

Considerable moonshine liquor is available in the Virginia suburbs. It comes from stills operated in the mountains in the western part of the state, and from Georgia.

On the whole, you might compare this area to the best of Westchester, or Chicago’s North Shore outskirts, or Beverly Hills. That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of dirt. It does mean it has to be something special before it hits print.

Meanwhile, considerable friction is developing as well-heeled northerners flock in; a repetition of the carpetbag days.

10. UNCLE SAM: LANDLORD

This is Washington’s largest segment--the federal domain. More than 40 percent of the property in the District is owned by Uncle Sam. (Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands is said to be the largest private owner of real estate in the District. She owned the huge Westchester apartments, but sold the property recently to Hilton.)

Though not contiguous, it has an entity of its own. It is immune from local law. That is important, because some federal property oozes across District borders, such as the Pentagon and the National Airport, both on the Virginia side.

To complicate the confused problem of law enforcement, this federal potpourri has its own local police--not one force, but several. The Capitol Police have jurisdiction on the Capitol grounds and several blocks on either side, as far as the Washington Union station. The Terminal Police police that. The White House Police are the cops for the Executive Mansion and surrounding areas. They are under supervision of the Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury. The Capitol cops are under control of Congress itself. The terminal, owned by the railroads and the government, picks its own bulls.

The Park Police are part of the National Park Police, a division of the Department of the Interior. They are the law in the parks and squares, on the boulevards, and on the road in Virginia leading to the Pentagon and the Airport.

All other government buildings are policed by the Public Buildings Police, a Treasury unit. The National Airport, in Virginia, has exempt status. Its own cops not only patrol the grounds, but the main road. The Pentagon, Arlington Cemetery and other military establishments in the vicinity are under jurisdiction of the Armed Services Police.

Hundreds of thousands are employed in this federal domain. Many more use its facilities or live in its lee. This makes the task of policing almost too complex to be figured out by any court.

Elsewhere, when there is a conflict of authority over the situs of a crime, both jurisdictions fight for the right to arrest and try the accused. In the District it works the other way around. If it’s a borderline case, both sides duck.