Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (36 page)

That might have been the whole story, with Hines getting wealthy by facilitating underworld activities with Schultz the same way he had with Madden, Dwyer, Rothstein, and others. But with the Dutchman, for some reason, the Old Man crossed the line. He socialized with Schultz to a greater degree than he would have with his other gangster associates during the halcyon days of Prohibition. Over many months, Hines and Schultz were often seen together at the swanky Embassy Club on West Fifty-seventh Street, where they dined with their wives. The two men went to boxing matches and the racetrack together. Hines was a frequent visitor to the Dutchman’s riding stables in Connecticut, while Schultz and his associates were regulars at the Monongahela club, where cash payments were exchanged. All of this made it exceedingly easy for prosecutors to link Schultz with the district leader when the inevitable heat came down from above.

The man who came after Hines was Thomas E. Dewey. A professional mob buster who had been a U.S. attorney, special prosecutor, and district attorney, Dewey first set his sights on Hines’s benefactor, the Dutchman. Hot off his conviction of Waxey Gordon and an indictment that would soon lead to the prosecution and conviction of Lucky Luciano, Dewey saw Schultz as his ticket to a career in electoral politics (Dewey eventually became governor of New York and, in 1948, the Republican Party nominee for president). In early 1935, he indicted Schultz on charges relating to his control of the numbers racket. The Dutchman was livid, and he began complaining loudly to high-ranking members of the Syndicate that Dewey must be taken out. The Syndicate would not sanction such a hit, fearing that the murder of someone as visible as Dewey might bring down on them the wrath of the entire U.S. government.

“Fuck you,” was Schultz’s response. “Maybe I’ll remove the cocksucker my own damn self.”

The Dutchman’s temper and loud mouth got him killed; on October 23, 1935, a team of gunmen entered the Palace Steak House in Newark, New Jersey and filled him with an assortment of high-caliber bullets. Schultz lingered for two days, mumbling a series of delusional nonsequiturs (“A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kin….” “Mother is the best bet, and don’t let Satan draw you too fast….”) before dying in his hospital bed.

Unfortunately for Jimmy Hines, the gangland elimination of his business partner and friend did not lessen his own problems. In fact, Dewey, the crusading and ambitious district attorney, merely shifted his prosecutorial focus from Schultz to Hines, whom he identified as “a coconspirator and indispensable functionary of the Schultz organization.” Dewey had the goods. In the wake of the Dutchman’s murder, his sidekick, George Weinberg, turned state’s evidence. Weinberg had been the primary go-between for the Schultz organization and Hines, often meeting the district leader at his Central Park West apartment and political clubhouse.

The case against Hines was unprecedented, the first in which a prominent political leader was prosecuted for being a high-ranking member of a criminal organization. Dewey was not just saying that Jimmy Hines was a politician who had committed crimes; he was saying, clearly and unequivocally, that Jimmy Hines was every bit as much a gangster as Dutch Schultz.

After many long delays, the
People v. James J. Hines
got underway in August 1938. George Weinberg took the stand and spilled the beans on Pops, as Weinberg referred to Hines. Four days into the trial, the judge declared a mistrial on a technicality. Dewey was not deterred. He reindicted Hines on the exact same charges. In January 1939, a second trial got underway, with one major difference. On the eve of his testimony in the second trial, George Weinberg, feeling depressed and remorseful, blew his brains out with a revolver. The dramatic suicide was a potential disaster for the prosecution, but their case was saved when the judge ruled that Weinberg’s testimony from the first trial could be entered into the record.

Hines was cooked. Not only was Weinberg’s devastating testimony used, but a host of witnesses—including John Curry, the Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, police commissioner Bolan, and even Hines’s hand-picked district attorney—took the stand and gave details on how Hines had gone about establishing the most corrupt political/criminal network since the earliest days of the Tweed Ring.

Throughout the proceedings, Hines rarely spoke. Unlike Jimmy Walker, who was the public face of the Machine, Hines was the ultimate man behind the man. He rarely gave speeches or talked to the press. He did not sponsor legislation; that was not his function. He was a money man who remained behind the scenes. Therefore, he did not take the stand and testify on his own behalf. As noted by a news service reporter covering the trial: “[Hines] sits in the well of the court and listens closely. And he looks like a paternal father who is watching his kids cut up. His tiny mouth is drawn into a line, his button of a nose supports his spectacles. Sometimes he bites his lip…. When things get hot, Hines rubs his big, thick fingers across his thumb. During a lull, he looks around at gray-haired, patient, well-preserved Mrs. Hines. ‘Tired?’ he asks, and he comes over.”

When Hines was finally found guilty on all thirteen counts of the indictment, he made a rare comment to the press. Asked by a reporter how he felt, the district leader replied, “How would you feel if you were kicked in the belly?”
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The dramatic fall of the two Jimmys—Walker and Hines—seemed to suggest that the world had been turned upside down (they not only got the man, they got the man behind the man). For decades, the Tammany Tiger had been a force of nature that powered the Irish American underworld—in New York and beyond. The Tammany model had been copied and adapted to cities large and small. Now, with Franklin Roosevelt in the White House looking to institute a New Deal for America, a strong wind swept across the land, gaining in intensity as it went. Political reform was no longer a pipe dream to be derided and laughed at by powerful ward bosses. The Goo Goos were in charge now, and they would make the scoundrels pay.

Kansas City Stomp

Of all the Irish American political organizations to be dismantled during the Age of Roosevelt, none had seemed more indestructible than the Pendergast Machine of Kansas City. Located far from the urban centers of the Northeast where the Irish had first settled, the political framework that helped to transform Kansas City from a nondescript cow pasture into a bustling midwestern metropolis was remarkably similar in tone and temperament to Tammany Hall. Although it had a miniscule immigrant population (less than six percent) and an overall Irish population that never exceeded two or three percent, Kansas City was controlled by an organization that looked, sounded, and acted as if it had been hatched in South Boston or in Manhattan’s notorious Five Points. One writer analyzing Kansas City’s government noted that the names of local politicians read like the roster of a unit of the Irish Republican Army.

For many decades, the town was run in the classic Irish American style for one reason: That was how its citizens wanted it. Kansas City had sprung up relatively late, well after the Civil War. The city’s business leaders and founding fathers were anxious to establish their town as a thriving economic outpost in the Midwest. They looked to the country’s most vibrant and rapidly growing metropolitan areas—New York, Chicago, and New Orleans—and copied what they saw as a political and economic system that delivered.

Vice was always part of the equation. Flat, industrial, and somewhat drab, the town and surrounding area was not known for its physical beauty. If Kansas City was going to lure traveling salesmen and big spenders from Chicago, Denver, Galveston, and Minnesota—not to mention laborers and migrant workers from the South—it needed a draw. From at least the early 1880s, that draw consisted largely of gambling parlors, dance halls, prostitution, and other forms of vice. Much of this activity was centered in a section of the city known as West Bottom, an industrial area along the banks of the Missouri River that became Kansas City’s version of the Levee District in Chicago, the French Quarter in New Orleans, or the Bowery in New York.

By the turn of the century, West Bottom was renowned as the best vice district west of Chicago, a favored stomping ground for cowboys, travelers, transients, and townspeople alike. The area was clustered with saloons, bawdy houses, and honky tonks. Bunco and floating craps tables were everywhere, especially in the blocks around Union Station, which became the center of Kansas City’s red light tenderloin district. The American House, a multipurpose saloon that featured gambling tables and rooms upstairs for quick assignations, became the virtual City Hall for West Bottom. It was owned by Jim Pendergast, a former factory worker who became a Democratic party committeeman from the First Ward in 1887.

Big Jim dispensed favors in the classic style, extending loans to packinghouse workers and distributing welfare to the poor, primarily in the form of bags of coal and—that old Tammany standby—holiday turkeys. His machine was built along the same lines as those in New York, Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere; the block system, as Pendergast called it, was a constellation of block captains, precinct captains, ward heelers, and aldermen, all of them on friendly terms with the boss. “That’s all there is to this ‘boss’ business—friends,” said Jim. “You can’t coerce people into doing things for you. You can’t make them vote for you. I never coerced anybody in my life…. All there is to it is having friends, doing things for people, and then later on they’ll do things for you.” This statement was standard boss fare and gave little indication that the Pendergast Machine would be described in later decades as “a state within a state, a virtual invisible government.”

Jim Pendergast was from a large Irish Catholic family of nine. Both of his parents hailed from County Tipperary and had come to America as potato-famine refugees. His mother first arrived in the United States through the city of New Orleans, at a time when Irish immigrants were dying in the thousands from yellow fever and hellish labor conditions. His mother’s stories of starvation and death in the Louisiana swamps haunted Jim Pendergast and his siblings, instilling in their clan a drive and ambition that would dramatically reshape the environment in which they lived.

Although Jim Pendergast was a hugely popular district leader, the era he presided over was known for its fierce political rivalries. Kansas City was a Democratic town, but the Democrats were divided into two factions known as the Rabbits and the Goats. Rabbit Democrats were so named by their enemies for the way they flocked to the polls in close elections like scared rabbits. The Goats, led by Boss Jim, were so called because many of them lived in shanties clinging to the sides of the West Bluffs like mountain goats. Others claimed the name came from the large number of billy goats Pendergast registered as legitimate voters in the First Ward.

Two of Jim’s brothers served important roles in his Machine. Mike, boss of the Tenth Ward, was a dedicated organizer, but his stage fright undermined his role as a leader. Thomas Joseph “T. J.” Pendergast, however, was dynamic and charismatic. A stocky, former semiprofessional baseball player, he’d gotten his start as a bouncer in his brother’s saloon. Whereas Jim was soft-spoken and a master of the art of political compromise, Tom (twelve years Jim’s junior) was blustery and tough, a man’s man who would not hesitate to use his fists if circumstances called for it. He also carried a revolver.

In 1910, not long after his wife died, Jim Pendergast retired from politics, turning his council seat over to Brother Tom, who was elected the following year by an overwhelming majority. Jim’s health soon deteriorated, and in September 1911, after weeks of being bed-ridden with an unknown respiratory ailment, he woke and asked a nurse, “Where’s Tom?” Tom hurried to his bedside. Jim looked at his brother and said cheerfully, “Hello Tom.” Those were his last comprehensible words before he expired in his bed.

Tom Pendergast picked up the mantel bequeathed to him by his older brother and turned it into one of the most astounding municipal operations in twentieth-century America. The guiding principle of the Pendergast Machine was an epigram that Jim kept posted behind the bars in his saloons: “You can’t saw wood with a hammer.” Inspired by blunt practicality, Tom Pendergast improved upon his brother’s model by first appeasing and then combining the Goat and Rabbit factions under one organization. This was done in the usual manner; thuggery, voter fraud, and intimidation were all part of the Pendergast arsenal. The machine that he devised was loyal and generally responsive to the needs of the people, with a monolithic system of patronage that compelled the
Kansas City Star
, an avowed enemy of the Pendergast Machine, to refer to it as “Little Tammany.”

In his modest office at 1908 Main Street, the unassuming, brick-façade headquarters of the Jackson Democratic Club, T. J. (as Pendergast preferred to be called) received a daily stream of small business owners, senior citizens, aspiring aldermen, clergymen, lobbyists, and mafiosi. Fat and animated, with huge ears and a lively, salt-of-the-earth face, Pendergast was the opposite of New York’s Jimmy Walker. Where Beau James was witty and attractive, T. J. was blunt and earthy. Even his enemies were sometimes beguiled by his larger-than-life persona. He was a local chieftain who laughed, cried, and seemed to care genuinely about the lives of his constituents. He could be kindly and sentimental, especially when it came to his Irish heritage. He was also a tough-as-nails, gravelly-voiced brute who mangled the English language and wasn’t afraid to get rough with anyone he felt deserved it.

In a newspaper interview, Pendergast once explained how he handled two underlings who questioned an order: “One of them hesitated, said he didn’t know anything about it. Well, I slapped him with my open hand. The other tried to protest. I hit him with my fist and knocked him through the glass door.”

T. J. didn’t have to get rough very often. As his power grew, so did his reputation. Locally, City Hall became known as “the House of Pendergast.” The state capital in Jefferson City was referred to as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Harry S. Truman, who was hand-picked by Boss Tom to run for the senate and eventually became the thirty-third president of the United States, was sarcastically known as “the Senator from Pendergast.” The boss was unapologetic about his power: “I’m not bragging when I say I run the show in Kansas City. I am the boss. If I were a Republican, they would call me a leader.”