-Caveat Lector-
excerpts from:
On The Take - From Petty Crooks to Presidents
William J. Chambliss©1978
Indiana University Press
ISBN 0-253-34244-9
-----
An amazing book. Quite interesting. Documents a national system of pay-off and
corruption.
Om
K
--[1]--
ON THE TAKE
>From Petty Crooks to Presidents
By William J. Chambliss
"Money is the oil of our present-day machinery, and elected public officials
are the pistons that keep the machine operating .... Crime is an excellent
producer of capitalism's oil . . . . [It] is not a by-product of an otherwise
effectively working political economy: it is a main product of that political
economy." -from the Introduction
>From bagman to businessman, from pusher to politician, this is the story of
the billion-dollar ripoff built on gambling, drugs, usury, business fraud,
prostitution, theft, and blackmail. Chambliss begins with a detailed study of
Seattle, Washington, and shows how the local crime network has been connected
to national business and political interests and even to the White House. He
could have studied dozens of other cities and found the same corruption and
national connections-in Arizona, Maryland, Georgia.
Trained in law and sociology, Chambliss disguised himself as a truck driver
("two days' growth of beard, a pair of khaki pants, and an old shirt") and
began his years of research by talking to small-time operators on skid row:
tavern owners, cardroom and bingo parlor licensees, porn dispensers, drug
pushers, and prostitutes. Gradually he gained the confidence of the higher
echelon of the crime networkpolicemen, businessmen, journalists, and
politicians.
Chambliss's findings are at odds with the view of organized crime held by the
general public and by most academics. He found clear evidence that organized
crime really consists of a coalition of politicians, law-enforcement people,
businessmen, union leaders, andperhaps least important of all-Mafia-type
racketeers. There is no "godfather" or small controlling group of criminals
but rather an elaborate payoff system from which many benefit.
The conclusions of this study have farreaching implications for all Americans.
Chambliss believes that "it is the bureaucratic nature of law enforcement, the
search for profit and capital dictated by the economy, and the peculiar
organization of American politics which creates and sustains organized crime
throughout the United States at all levels: municipal, state, and national."
The author vividly describes his often dangerous experiences and quotes
extensively from interviews he taped. This colorful document of social science
field research is a shocking expose of crime, business, and politics in
America.
--from book jacket--
=====
CHAPTER THREE
Profits and Payoffs
BOB WILLIAMS (P)[Pseudonym] was only nineteen years old when he was arrested
'in the black neighborhood that was his turf. He was only nineteen when he was
beaten to death in a jail while in the custody of the police. Like many other
nineteen-year-old black youths, Bob Williams, judged by white middle-class
standards, was sophisticated beyond his years. He knew how to turn a honky
around, how to survive in what he called "the jungle," and how to buy cheap,
sell dear, especially when he was buying and selling dope.
"I'm an independent. Some of these guys have all kinds of strings on 'em. Not
me, man. I'm my own boss. Ain't nobody gonna pull me around by the nose."
According to a police sergeant on duty the night Bob Williams was taken in,
"We had been watching Williams for some time. We knew he was heavily
implicated in the narcotics traffic and we were just waiting for our chance.
An informant told us he would have a lot of the shit on him that Friday so we
picked him up."
Williams was arrested "on suspicion." At the time of his arrest he had over
fifteen hundred dollars worth of heroin in his possession. The heroin, like
whoever beat him to death, disappeared.
According to the policemen who arrested him, Bob called them names and tried
to jump out of the car. I do not know what happened between eight p.m. and
midnight, but shortly after midnight Bob was brought into the emergency ward
of General Hospital badly beaten and unconscious. He was released back to the
police the next day at twelve noon. The same intern who had patched him up
Friday evening was still on duty Saturday about four p.m. when Bob was
returned to the hospital again badly beaten, this time with a concussion. The
police told the intern that "inmates in the cell keep beating him up." Bob
Williams died at three a.m. Monday from a-brain hemorrhage caused by blows to
the head.
The intern told me he believed the police had beaten him to death. The coroner
listed the cause of death as "accidental." No one was ever charged with any
criminal offense in connection with Bob's death.
Friday night, while Bob was in jail, a white physician who had lived in the
city for a number of years drove through the black ghetto. His car weaved down
the street and stopped near a corner. He took a .38 caliber revolver out of
his glove compartment and began shooting into the night air. The police came,
stopped him, and took him to jail. The police called his wife and she came to
the jail. The doctor was released to his wife's custody. He had spent a total
of forty-five minutes in custody.
On Saturday night, as Bob Williams lay dying, I played poker in a high-stakes
poker game where thousands of dollars were illegally bet. A sergeant from the
vice squad of the police department participated in that poker game.
Bob Williams paid a heavy price for his involvement in the drug business.
Others who made all or part of their livelihood from the drug business were
more fortunate. The informant who told the police when to pick up Williams was
generously supplied with heroin by the police.
Behind this tragic case lies a fundamental truth about policing in America:
the small, unprotected, unconnected entrepreneur furnishes the arrests and the
"crime problem" that provide a smoke screen behind which profitable,
organized, politically connected groups commit more serious, more profitable,
and more common crimes.
Why the enforcement of the criminal law takes this shape is quite complicated
in some ways. In one sense, however, it is very simple because it all reduces
to money and profits. The money flowing through the rackets is large, and the
profits are doubtless the highest of any industry in the world.
Item: From 1956 to 1970 each of eleven bingo parlors grossed over $300,000 a
year. The owner of one bingo parlor netted $240,000 a year after all expenses,
including payoffs to police and politicians, were paid.
Item: From 1960 to 1970 there were over 3,500 pinball machines licensed in the
state. These machines grossed over 7 million dollars a year. The investment
necessary for purchasing and servicing the machines was miniscule. The taxes
were nonexistent since all returns were in cash and could be hidden. There was
one "master license" for the county. It gave one organization the right to
place pinball machines in the amusement parlors, cabarets, and restaurants.
This small group of businessmen, closely tied to political and law-enforcement
people, had a monopoly on one of the most profitable businesses in the state.
Item: In 1968 Seattle had the highest number of federal gambling stamps issued
in any state in the U.S. except Nevada.
Item: A jeweler in Seattle was a major source of short-term loans to people in
the drug business. Typically he would loan large sums of cash for a short
period of time and receive in return a very high interest on the money. One
transaction alone involved the loan of $220,000, with the understanding that
the jeweler would receive back $350,000 "within thirty days."
Item: A consortium of businessmen, bankers, politicians, and racketeers
invested in an "amusement center" which fraudulently issued stocks and netted
the six investors over $100,000 apiece in six months on a $10,000 investment.
Item: High-stakes poker games that went on each night in dozens of locations
throughout the city had stakes bet in an evening that often exceeded $100,000
Seven nights a week, 350 days a year, the people who organized and managed
these games took away 10 percent of the pot. On a bad night for the house the
management took home only $1,000 but on good nights management grossed
$10,000, which was the rule rather than the exception.
The list could be expanded.
One of the reasons we fail to understand crime is because we put crime into a
category that is separate and distinct from normal business. Much crime does
not fit into a separate category. It is primarily a business activity. The
fact that it is an illegal business activity is an historical accident beyond
the control of those who engage in the business. But the mere fact of this
historical accident does not change the basic character of the enterprise. The
place to start the analysis is with the profit structure and with the business
expenses required to keep the profits coming in.
In Seattle the rackets constituted one of the largest industries in the state.
Gross profits from gambling alone amounted to more than fifty million dollars
a year. Of course, this is only a rough estimate pieced together from
information supplied by people who ran various gambling enterprises. It is,
however, consistent with an intriguing variety of information I gathered from
diverse sources. The following fact should give more than casual confidence in
the reliability of this figure. A recent national survey shows the U.S. adult
spends an average of thirty dollars a year on gambling. Over a million people
live in Seattle, and if everyone spent the average on gambling, the total
would be close to forty million dollars a year. Seattle is a favorite
convention and tourist city and could easily run the total amount spent on
gambling up to the estimate of fifty million dollars a year.
The profits are for the most part tax free. A pinball operator told me: "At
the outside, our reported income is only one-third of what we actually take
in. There isn't a federal agent in the world who can tell how much I skim off
the top of a pinball machine once I've gotten to the counters."
"Fun nights" at the fraternal clubs, high-stakes poker games, cardrooms, etc.
contributed huge sums. Not counted were all the other illegal businesses
associated with some of the same people who ran, owned, financed, or profited
from gambling. They include drugs, prostitution, cabarets run illegally, real-
estate transactions, illegal stock and bond transactions, and stolen liquor.
The total profits of these various illegal businesses exceeded a hundred
million dollars a year in Seattle, and this placed gambling, narcotics, fraud,
usury, and organized theft among the state's two or three largest industries.
Legitimate business relies on the support of the law and the courts to ensure
predictability and adherence to contracts. Illegal business cannot openly "go
to court" if a debtor refuses to pay a gambling debt or to make good on an
agreement to purchase a large supply of narcotics. But illegal business must
be able to accomplish the same end or else the risk to the capital investment
will be too great. The simplest, most direct way to ensure that the investment
will return its potential profits is to include as partners those whose job it
is to see that the illegal acts are punished by law. That is what happened in
Seattle and what happens everywhere. Politicians, law-enforcement officials,
professionals (especially lawyers, accountants, bankers, and realtors), and
"legitimate" businessmen become partners in the illegal industry.
If I asked any of the dozens of people who practised the arts and crafts of
gambling why the police did not enforce the laws prohibiting such acts, they
gave the same answer: payoffs. Payoffs gave the police "a piece of the
action," a part of the profits. And even a part of the profits was a lot of
money.
At the operational level the cooperation of politicians and law enforcers
takes place through the payoff. A bagman collects an established payment from
every enterprise engaged in illegal business. Cardroom operators were
surprisingly consistent in their reports of how much they paid off. The large
operators paid $350 a month to the police and $300 a month to "the syndicate."
Smaller operators paid $250 a month. Bingo parlor operators, "social club"
owners, and gamblers in the Chinese, Japanese, and black ghettos paid less.
The amount depended on the size of the operation and the amount of protection
received.
Fred Lindesmith (P), a seventy-two-year-old man dying of arterial sclerosis,
was on the police force in Seattle for twenty years. He participated in the
payoff system and retired financially secure at age sixty-five. Fred had
earned enough "extra money" as a partner in illegal business to send his two
children to college with all their expenses paid. By the time he was seventy
years old, however, he had grown disillusioned with the bastardization of
police work he had helped to create. He was, he said, wanting to "set the
record straight."
Q: Can you describe the payoff system?
A: Whoever was acting as official or unofficial treasurer would have the
responsibility to see to it that the right people got their share. Skip Tower
(P) did it for a while. Then Bob Furman (P) took his turn. Everyone involved
got their share. When Ben Cichy was killed they sent someone out from downtown
to burglarize his place. Three black dudes went out and tore up the floor
looking for where he kept the monthly payoff money hidden. They left twenty
thousand dollars worth of jewelry just sitting on the table. They were
obviously not burglars, but people sent out from downtown. They terrorized
Cichy's wife to death.
Q: Who got the money?
A: Everyone. The beat cop, the vice-squad captain, the prosecutor. Everyone.
It depended on the gig. Narcotics payoffs went through the vice squad and the
patrol division. Sooner or later it all went up to the top.
Q: Anyone else?
A: Of course the city council had its people with their hands out also.
Q: But how exactly
A: Okay. It's like this. There's a bagman who collects the money from tavern
owners, the cardrooms, or the whorehouses. He brings it in. He takes a small
cut. Then the sergeant in charge of the division, say the vice squad, takes
his cut and passes it on to the police department's bagman, who takes it on
up—a piece here, a piece there. Then it goes to the assistant chief, and he
takes it on to people in the prosecutor's office and sends some over to the
city council. The patrol division had their own payoff system. The patrol
division was required to make its payoff to the mayor's office depending on
whether the particular mayor was cooperating, and they all have, except one in
recent years.... And there was a separate payoff system for burglary and
narcotics. Burglary was probably as big as gambling. And individual narcotics
ripoffs, sporadic but very lucrative payoffs in major narcotics transactions.
Thousands of dollars in a single payoff.
Q: Who to?
A: To the narcotics dicks, then to be divided right up through the chain of
command to the majors and lieutenants, and the assistant chief and the city
councilmen.
Q: All on the local level?
A: Yes and no. There was another line that went to the state, and the state
had its own gigs. Liquor licenses and payoffs for illegal booze, stolen
whiskey from the state warehouses, watered-down whiskey and all that stuff
went straight to the state. Frank Schneider (P) has for years been going
between the governor's office and local payoff systems. People in the House of
Representatives got theirs as well. In fact the guy who flies the payoff money
to San Francisco every week is in the House of Representatives.
Q: What about different counties?
A: I'm not too sure about that setup, but it figures that they cooperated with
one another-talked about how much profit there was and what each got from it.
You should talk to _____ about that.
Q: You mentioned narcotics ripoffs....
A: Yeah. Narcotics was really big. Even bigger than pinballs or cardrooms.
It's kind of long and involved. The police would use this guy _____ to set up
narcotics dealers.
Q: Like Bob Williams?
A: Yeah. Like Bob Williams. You know what happened
to him?
Q: Yeah.
A: Well, they'd set up a narc dealer and make the arrest. Then they'd
confiscate his stuff and turn it over to -1 who'd sell it, and the police
would get a big share of the profit. The police would also have a fat
narcotics arrest record, but the heroin and pills and stuff would still get to
the street. I know the names of all those guys. I'm particularly close to the
latest one who managed this operation, former lieutenant of the narcotics
squad.
Q: At the state level, who do they work out of?
A: The state patrol; State Highway Patrol.
An item in the daily paper gave an indication of what happened to some of the
profits. Lt. T. Ryther (P), who had been a police officer for thirteen years,
died suddenly of a heart attack at age forty-one. At the time of his death he
left an estate valued at $241,786. During his thirteen years as a police
officer, Ryther had lived in a large, seventy-five-thousand-dollar home, owned
two fully paid for expensive automobiles, and taken vacations in Hawaii. He
had never earned over twelve thousand a year in salary from the city. He had,
however, earned more than twice that amount in payoffs from illegal businesses
in return for the protection and cooperation he gave them.
Both the King County prosecutor and the sheriff owned expensive homes in the
city's most prestigious neighborhoods. The prosecutor also owned a fifty-foot
ocean-going yacht. The assistant chief of police lived in an expensive house
and built another for his son in an even more expensive neighborhood. The
county prosecutor also directed unknown sums of money to state and local
politicians who supported his kind of politics and his kind of criminality.
Policemen told a standard Joke in the department: "If you cleaned this city
up, we'd all have to go on welfare 'cause none of us could live on our
salary." Some of the policemen, ironically, lost a good percentage of their
illegal earnings to the gamblers who were paying them off or to other police
officers. Others spent large sums on whiskey and nights in cabarets. Still
others invested in businesses and left the force. One ambitious and clever
young officer saved enough money in three years working on the narcotics squad
to purchase a large retail store in the downtown section of the city.
In a sense the illegal businesses were paying taxes in the form of monthly and
annual payoffs to people at all levels of law enforcement and government. It
is, however, misleading to see this network of money-flow as involving only
profits and payoffs. In fact, what took place was a complicated set of illegal
and legal business relationships which were the flesh and bones of a network
of people engaged in the systematic reaping of profits, from illegal
businesses.
This cartel constituted a crime network that was a subterranean organization
which greatly affected, as surely as it undermined, the political economy of
Seattle.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Crime Network
THERE WERE over a thousand people in Seattle who profited directly from the
rackets, bootleg whiskey, organized theft and robbery, drug traffic, abortion
rings, gambling, prostitution, land transactions, arson, phony stock sales,
and usury. Everyone who successfully engages in these criminal activities must
share the profits with someone or some group of people. The more regulated the
criminal activities and the more successful the participants, the more
systematized the profit sharing. The entire system is simply a collection of
independent operators who cooperate and compete according to their ability,
their power, and their interests.
Disparate as it is, widely distributed among people in different walks of
life, and changing all the time, there is nonetheless a hierarchy. Some people
are more important than others. In times of crisis some people have the power
to make critical decisions while others do not. Not surprisingly, those who
profit the most from the rackets and who also have the power to take action
are the most likely to meet and discuss problems and prospects. In Seattle the
group of power-holders who controlled and set policy for the illegal business
enterprises varied. Over the years the more active participants included a
King County prosecutor, a Seattle city council president, an assistant chief
of police, city police captains, the King County sheriff, the King County jail
chief, undersheriffs, the president of the Amusement Association of Washington
(who had the only master's license for pinball machines in the county), a
Seattle police major, and an official of the Teamsters Union. In addition
there were persons from the business and professional community who were
members of the network and who in a quiet, less conspicious way were as
influential over illegal business activities as were the more visible
operatives listed above. They included a leading attorney who defended network
members and joined them in investments in illegal enterprises, a realtor who
arranged real-estate transactions and shared investments, an officer of one of
the state's leading banks, a board member of a finance company that loaned
money exclusively to businesses or individuals who were either members of or
under the control of the network, and various labor union officials—mostly in
the Teamsters Union, but high-level officials of other labor unions were also
involved from time to time.
One of the problems with determining the real power sources in an enterprise
as inherently secretive and variable as a crime cartel is of course the line
between active participant (or policymaker) and compliant benefactor. For
example, a prosperous retail store-owner in the city often invested in and
profited from illegal enterprises ranging from real-estate frauds to drug
traffic. He also financed and arranged for the transportation of stolen
jewelry out of the United States to Europe, where it could be recut and sold
on the European market. He never set policy, never became involved in the day-
to-day decisions, never allowed himself even to be consulted about the
handling of a particular problem within the ongoing enterprises. Yet he knew
of most of the problems and could well have been influential had he cared to
make his wishes known. He preferred to remain silent. His decision, he told
me, was based on the "good old American tradition of selfpreservation." He
felt that the less he was involved in "administration," the more likely he was
to remain unconnected publicly with the "seamy side of business." He
acknowledged, however, that when a newspaper reported the death of a member of
the network due to "accidental drowning," he knew it was no accident.
A further problem is to decide the point at which one has enough information
to feel confident that the rumors and allegations being put forward as "facts"
by informants match sufficiently with other data to be acceptable. The people
mentioned so far were all well established in the minds of all my informants
in a position to know. These people also exhibited life-styles which clearly
showed incomes in excess of anything they could have had from their legal
incomes. (The county prosecutor claimed publicly that his standard of living
exceeded that which his salary could support because of monies his wife had
inherited.)
But it was also alleged by some informants, who should have known, that the
real power in the illegal business enterprises lay with high-ranking officials
in state politics, a close associate in Seattle, and a former Seattle city
council member. I was unable to establish the validity of these claims. In the
end the consistency of informant reports convinced me that the governor was
indeed a beneficiary of heavy political campaign contributions from network
principals. He, like many others, benefited from the profits and left the
management to others.
At one time (1963-65) it was fairly easy to identify seven people who
constituted the backbone of the network. This group shifted, however, and some
of the seven became less involved while some new people emerged as principals.
Both composition and leadership are variable; success is determined by
connections and profits. When drug trading becomes more precarious, the people
involved may lose considerable influence; when cardrooms come under fire,
those people whose profits or payoffs are principally in cardrooms lose their
influence.
Whatever the composition, this coalition of shifting membership (but fairly
constant leadership) persisted and had more to say about how the rackets were
run than anyone else. It also met more or less regularly, but here too the
pattern was not akin to a monthly board of directors' meeting but was more a
series of meetings between key players from different walks of life.
Politicians who were deeply involved in the network met regularly at their
"businessmen's club" with members of the city council, the county board of
supervisors, and several key businessmen who were profiting from the rackets.
Law-enforcement officers met monthly with a pinball operator who was the head
of the Amusement Association, an association of pinball operators which was
the official lobby for the pinball machine owners. The head of the Amusement
Association in turn met with other businessmen, at least one of whom was
reputed to be the bagman for state politicians.
Some sense of the organized- disorganized nature of the rackets can be gleaned
from a series of incidents in the mid 1960s which involved an attempt by Bill
Bennett(P) to take over part of the pinball operation in the city. Bill's
brother Frank was one of the prominent racketeers in town, a man generally
believed to be involved in prostitution and the collection of payoffs for
state officials (including the governor) as well as the police. Bill decided
that he wanted a piece of the action in the pinball business. He tried at
first to demand a territory but he met with resistance. Pinballs were at the
time concentrated pretty much in the hands of several people. The only master
license in the county was held by the Amusement Association. As president, Ben
Cichy represented not only his own interests as the major pinball operator in
the state, but also the interests of other pinball operators. Ben Cichy was
well protected in his position. As president of the association that looked
out for the pinball interests, he met regularly with and allegedly paid
substantial sums of money to politicians, to Frank Bennett(P), and to members
of the police department * In addition, the Amusement Association collected
from all pinball operators a monthly fee that was used to ply state and local
politicians with liquor, parties, and women for favors, not the least of which
were large campaign contributions to politicians who worked in the interests
of pinball owners. Thus Bill Bennett was taking on some formidable opponents
when he tried to muscle into the pinball business. On the other hand, Bill and
his brother Frank were well connected in political and business circles. Among
others, Frank was closely allied with politiclans who were the political and
personal enemies of the county prosecutor and might well have been favorably
disposed toward an attempt to undermine part of his political base.
When Bill's efforts to gain part of the pinball operation were turned down by
Cichy and the other owners, he filed what is referred to as an "underworld
anti-trust suit." He and some of his men began throwing Molotov cocktails
through the windows of places containing Cichy's machines. Some restaurant
owners were roughed up. This caused some attention in the press, so people
were getting nervous. To ralm[sic] things down, the pinball operators offered
to let Bill in if he would agree to pay them twenty thousand dollars for the
loss of their territory plus a fee of two dollars a month for each machine
over and above the fifty cents per machine that went to the Amusement
Association for lobbying.
The agreement reached by the other pinball operators was, however, not
satisfactory to the chief of police, who saw Bill as a "hoodlum." This was one
of the few occasions when the chief put his foot down. An informant in the
police department said that "in all likelihood" the chief vetoed the agreement
as a result of support and instructions from the county prosecutor. Because of
the trouble Bill had caused, the chief insisted that he leave the state, which
he did.
Several features of this event are important. First, it underlines the
competition between different persons acting primarily as individuals out to
increase the size of their business and their profits. It also illustrates,
however, that when the entire enterprise is threatened, it is possible for a
coalition of the more powerful members of the rackets to force less powerful
members to acquiesce. The incident also indicates an important element in the
way any network protects itself. The two-fifty a month which Bill would have
to pay for each machine was divided between protection (two dollars a month)
and lobbying (fifty cents a month). The one activity is presumably criminal
(by statute), the other legal.
Was This Crime Network, Then, the Local Mafia?
I talked with many people about the possibility that this network was a local
branch of the Mafia. A professional thief who had also worked in the rackets
(gambling, prostitution, drugs, etc.) told me, "You can forget that Mafia
stuff. We are Hoosiers out here. There is no organized crime like they have
back east, like in Kansas City and Cleveland. We're too independent out here."
This same feeling was expressed time and again by people at all levels.
Virtually everyone in a position to know anything about the rackets in Seattle
echoed these sentiments: "Every time you check the Congressional Record and
you see the FBI diagramming the Mafia families in San Francisco, you can tell
them to shove it up their ass, because you can't diagram this. If you do
diagram it, you can't read your diagram when you're done. It's all squiggly
lines: the chain of command and who's in charge of any operation and who's
entitled to what cut of the graft, it's all very changeable."
Q: Is the police force more or less an independent thing,
not controlled?
A: No, everybody has a part of the police department's ass. Really the police
department is the biggest corporate hooker in the whole establishment. The
Teamsters Union used them; Democrats at the time; the city council uses them;
the license committee uses them; the prosecuting attorney also had an occasion
to use the vice squad to make sure he is getting an honest count, if someone
gives him trouble on pinballs. Police chief, or assistant chief, would use the
department sometimes at cross-purposes to what the mayor or the prosecutor
might like. The mayor or the prosecutor might not want trouble, let's say,
from a bar operator, like Charlie MacDaniel. They really probably hated that,
when that thing came to a head the way it did. The cops, however, went right
in and hassled Charlie, because the cops were smarter. The cops know what's
going on out in the street, and they knew better to make an example out of
Charlie, even if it gets in the newspaper, than to lose control. The
prosecutor is like any other crime boss. Something is wrong out there: he
looks at a lieutenant, and he says, "Fix it." He might also add the
admonition, "Don't be messy, fix it." And the henchman is a technician. Like
any technician, he knows that sometimes you have to get your hands dirty when
you fix the machinery. And the boss may not want any machine oil on the floor,
but he may have to get some to get the machine fixed. So, beyond a certain
point, if it gets messy, tough shit. Because the technician is responsible,
and he doesn't It want to be held responsible. And if somebody like Charlie
MacDaniel gets too far out of line, you take whatever measures are necessary
to cover your own ass. You worry about the boss later, see? Right now you're
thinking about staying out of the newspapers, staying out of prison. So, on
any given occasion, the loyalties of the policemen might be very divided; and
this political structure that is controlling the rackets is very fractured. At
times it is fractured along the straight Democratic against Republican lines.
At times it is fractured along straight county bureaucracy against city
bureaucracy. At times it was fractured along city lines, depending on who was
contending for power and money. And that's why you can't chart it. It's not
neat.
Q: And they're all dependent on each other.
A: And each one requires the silence of the other; no matter how ugly the
fighting gets, they've got to keep it under and out of sight. This is one
reason why I think there was very little killing, comparatively speaking. When
people are killed, they were people within the apparatus, little people. Or
people like Ben Cichy if he was, in fact, murdered, who admittedly are very
visible, but for some reason somebody determined at that time that it was
desperately important that he had to die.
But who exactly was it that could decide that so-and-so had to die?
I was advised by a telephone call from someone I had met in a high-stakes
poker game that I should go to Vito's(P) Cafe on the second Thursday of each
month and see who always ate lunch there at a table in an alcove.
For six months I went to the cafe as advised. It was indeed interesting to
see, week after week, gathered at one table and talking low enough not to be
heard by anyone else: the assistant chief of police, an assistant prosecuting
attorney, an undersheriff, and an attorney from a firm of lawyers that
specialized in criminal law.
These four people met regularly every other Thursday. Rarely, however, was the
luncheon limited to just the four. A local contractor, a realtor, a
businessman whose firm specialized in "investments," the head of the Far West
Novelty Company and president of the Amusement Association, a hotel owner, a
member of the city council, a member of the county board of supervisors, an
official of the local Teamsters Union, and once a newsman from one of the
city's leading newspapers.
A friend told me that one of the regulars at the Thursday luncheon would like
to talk to me. A meeting was arranged, and I met Von Bennett (P) at a bar.
While we were drinking beer, I taped our conversation:
Q: ____ said you would tell me about the Thursday lunch group.
A: That's the meeting of the local Mafia.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: They're the boys that run the rackets: drugs, gambling, girls, bootleg
whiskey, pinballs—all that stuff.
Q: Well, that doesn't make sense to me. I have heard that ____ is the major
person in the rackets-at least in some of the rackets-and he never goes there,
does he? I at least haven't seen him.
A: Yeah, you're right, but that doesn't mean these guys don't run the rackets.
It's like this: they work for guys with either political or police pull. They
control those guys either because the big guys take a cut or because they have
something on them. So this group kind of coordinates things. And they keep in
touch with people in diverse fields, from bingo to booze.
Q: But how are they a Mafia?
A: Well, not like you read about a Mafia with a tightly knit organization, but
these guys are as close as we come out here. They've got the most—a finger in
every pie-but still, as you say, there's lots of others . . . all getting rich
from the rackets....
The people who are getting wealthy from the rackets are not the cafe, tavern,
or cardroom owners. The people who are getting wealthy are the businessmen
with capital to invest in an expanding, high-profit business, politicians and
law-enforcement officers who can convert political or police power into
wealth. It is an interesting, fascinating illustration of the two-faced nature
of the adage that wealth is power. That is certainly true, but the other side
is equally true: power makes wealth as well.
The network members who met regularly were more or less elected
representatives of the business, political, and law-enforcement groups that
profited most from the rackets. For a while Charlie MacDaniel was a problem
for them when he was refusing to pay off and later when he tried (in vain) to
publicize the existence of widespread corruption in the police department. The
inner circle of the network, after consulting with their bosses and co-owners
who stayed in the shadows, tried various strategies to deal with him.
The kind of publicity created by MacDaniel was extremely bad for some of the
most important people in the network. Businessmen who thrived on the image of
Seattle as a "clean city" and a "nice place to live" knew of the underlying
life of crime, but they wanted to keep those realities from public inspection
at all cost. Politicians knew of the potential careers ruined by public
exposure of links to anything smacking of organized crime, so they wished to
keep things quiet as well. But there were cross-pressures at work that were
equally important to the smooth functioning of a crime network. A person who
refused to pay his proper share (whether through the payment to the police or
to the "syndicate") was a threat to the entire system. If Charlie MacDaniel
didn't pay, there would be a lot more tavern, cafe, cardroom, and other
business owners on the fringe of legality who would take Charlie as a model
and refuse to pay as well. Thus, if someone caused trouble for the
organization of vice in the city, a calculation had to be made as to how best
to deal with the threat. In the case of Charlie MacDaniel the calculation that
evolved out of dealing with his periodic balking at "playing the game
straight" resulted in his being run out of business, out of the city, and
eventually out of the state.
Notice, however, that the acts which constituted a "policy" with respect to a
"problem" were the result of a process, not of a decision. True, someone
decided what to do, but it was a matter of a series of individual decisions
made by people who shared the same interests and views rather than a ruling
passed down by a boss. To the extent that there was a boss, he may or may not
have agreed with what finally constituted the policy. But whether he agreed or
not, the policy resulted from the process of coping with a problematic
situation. And, of course, some of the different people and groups involved in
network activities had different interests.
One feature of criminality that is almost always overlooked is the extent to
which businessmen who operate a presumably legitimate and wholly legal
enterprise are involved either overtly or covertly in criminal activities.
More often than is ever acknowledged by law enforcers or investigators,
businessmen are the financiers behind criminal operations. In Seattle one of
the city's leading jewelers served simultaneously as a financier for large
drug transactions and as a fence for stolen jewelry. Often businessmen are co-
opted by business and friendship ties to members of the network. A vice-
president of one of the city's leading banks was a close associate of the
county prosecutor, lunched with him, contributed his personal endorsement to
the prosecutor's political campaigns, invested in things the prosecutor
recommended, supplied links to other businessmen for the prosecutor, arranged
loans, and so forth. Both the vice-president of the bank and a jeweler were
key members of the network. Their money financed criminal activities and they
reaped huge profits from them.
Newsmen on the city's leading newspapers were also implicated. In one case it
was principally through receiving gifts from various members of the network.
There were also rumors that an editor received a monthly income from the
network. This seems unlikely, for the editor was not only co-opted by
friendship and small favors, but the newspaper was opposed to exposing any
graft or corruption lest the city reassess the value of the newspaper's
property. A local politician and one-time candidate for sheriff possessed
information linking an editor of one of the newspapers with a national wire
service that reported racing results. The police were also aware of these
links. This information was never made public, perhaps because the keepers of
the news are in the end the safest possible mediums for conducting illegal
business activities.
There is clearly no "godfather" in the crime network, no single man or group
of men whose word is law and who control all the various levels and kinds of
criminal activities. There is, nonetheless, a coalition of businessmen,
politicians, law enforcers and racketeers (see diagram) who have a greater
interest in the rackets than anyone else, who stand to lose the most if the
operation is exposed, and who also have the power to do something when it is
called for. These men do not have unlimited power, to be sure, and they must
assess their power in each incident to see what is the best strategy to
follow. Thus, when someone firebombed competitors, there were some in the
network who wanted to acquiesce to his demands, some who wanted to wait and
see, and others who wanted to "kill that crazy son of a bitch." Killing him
was a very dangerous alternative since it would surely create adverse
publicity and hostility between various groups involved in the rackets.
Letting him in might have the same effect. Eventually the head of the pinball
operation agreed to let him in for a high price, with the tacit agreement of
the other pinball operators. But the chief of police resisted and was
apparently able to force Bill out of the state.
Incidentally, a leading state politician who was also involved in the rackets
arranged for Bill to obtain employment with a criminal syndicate in another
state. Bill apparently decided that discretion was the better part of valor.
Bill's brother Frank owned a string of taverns and cabarets, a few hotels, and
the major jukebox distribution company in the state; and he allegedly
controlled most of the white prostitution rings in the city. After a visit to
one of his cabarets I made this record:
Frank plays with his keys constantly as he sits on the edge of his chair in
his Starfire Room Cabaret. The naked women dancing on three stages
simultaneously and the waitresses serving watered-down liquor stop by
occasionally and ask him a question. He hands one of them the keys and gets up
from time to time to do something in the back room. One of the women
occasionally disappears upstairs with a customer. Frank looks totally bored by
the scene. The money he's making, the naked women he's employing, the
conversation about the rackets and his role in them are all old hat. What
interests him is the possibility that once again, at age fifty-three, he may
be going back to prison. This time it will be hard time. This time he does not
have the promise of something big when he gets out. This time he will lose
rather than gain.
Frank spent eighteen months in prison in 1942-43. Those months were "no
picnic," but he was sustained that time by a promise given, the promise by a
young politician that if Frank "took the fall" and served the sentence he
would be 11 amply rewarded" when he was released. It was a fair deal, fair for
the politician, fair for the others involved, and fair for Frank.
Frank was the son of a vegetable farmer in the county. His family was
comfortable but neither notorious nor wealthy. He and some of his young
friends were untouched by crime or rackets to any significant degree, but they
were touched by the sin of many American men-womanizing. One of the women that
Frank slept with regularly was only sixteen years old. She was also sleeping
with several of Frank's friends. The young woman was arrested, and she
confessed to the police that the older men had been having sex with her for
some time. The police threatened all four of them with jail sentences. The
four men denied the charge, and the police had only the uncorroborated
testimony of the girl.
A young lawyer who was active in politics managed the business affairs of
Frank's family. The four accused rapists fell to arguing among themselves as
to how to get out of the predicament. They called in the family's lawyer to
mediate. The lawyer contacted the police, who told him that someone had to
stand trial. The police agreed, however, to drop charges on all but one of the
defendants in return for a guilty plea. The lawyer took out a checklist and
added up the pros and cons of having one of the four plead guilty to the
charge. Some were married, some had businesses that would suffer; Frank was
single and could afford the stigma. He was also only twenty-three, so the
effect of having sex with a sixteen-year-old would look less awesome. The
lawyer promised there would be no jail sentence, only probation or a suspended
sentence. He also promised that when it was over the other men would put up
the money to set Frank up in business.
The lawyer's power to negotiate a deal was less than he indicated it would be.
He did get the charges dropped on everyone but Frank, but Frank had to spend
eighteen months in the state reformatory. On release, however, the lawyer kept
his promise and set Frank up with a liquor license, a tavern, and a going
business, without Frank's having to invest any money.
While Frank was building his tavern business, the young
lawyer was building a political career that led all the way to
the state legislature. Frank and the lawyer-politician re-mained close and
trusted friends. Frank, it was said be came the state politician's personal
bagman. He went to the various rackets in the city and collected a monthly
tithe. He collected, for example, a thousand dollars a month from the owners
of bingo clubs. It was a substantial amount of money, but the profits from the
bingo operation were sufficient to easily underwrite this and numerous other
profit shares the owner made.
The next thirty years were good ones for Frank. He expanded his first club
into the ownership of numerous other clubs, part ownership of the major
jukebox distributorship in the area, partial control of some of the pinball
operations, and he handled some of the organized prostitution in the city,
especially the prostitution that ran out of taverns and nightclubs.
Frank also became a force to contend with. He was one of the people in the
rackets who could stand up to county politicians and come away intact. On one
occasion a leading politician called Frank in to put him in his place.
According to someone who witnessed the encounter, when Frank entered the room,
the politician said, "I understand you are the biggest pimp in the state."
Frank replied, "Yeah, and I hear you like to play with little boys."
The politician had probably expected a humble racketeer to grovel at his feet.
But Frank's own position in the rackets and his connections with state
politicians plus some important influence in Washington, D.C., were sufficient
to make it impossible for the local politico to squash him.
This did not elevate Frank to a position of omnipotence. Both he and the
others would have eliminated their opponents in a moment if it could have been
done without jeopardizing their own operations. But they could not. So an
unappealing alliance prevailed year after year. Occasionally harsh words were
spoken; threats and attempts to oust leading political supporters of each
other's camps were made. But the detente persisted and indeed would persist
today were it not for the fact that in time another faction emerged with the
power to squash both parties to this alliance, but that gets us ahead of the
story.
Two members of Seattle's leading families were also implicated through various
business transactions with members of the network. The business transactions
invariably came recommended by a leading local politician and brought the
investors huge returns on small investments. They certainly should have
realized that the enterprises were illegal, but in any case they participated
and showed their appreciation by supporting the politician in the face of all
sorts of opposition. When, for example, their political-business ally was
threatened with exposure by a newly appointed U. S. attorney, these two
businessmen flew to Washington, D.C., where they consulted with a personal
friend who was an adviser to President Nixon. They asked him to have Nixon
stop the inquiry. For reasons that will be taken up later their request was
refused and the inquiry continued.
There were other positions (rather than individuals) that were crucial to the
network's success. Two bear particular attention: the head of licensing for
the county and the tax assessor. The people in these positions were never very
powerful. Their careers were entirely in the hands of politicians.
Nonetheless, what they did at their behest was of considerable importance to
the network's continuance.
There were "considerate" assessments made on the taxable property Of the two
leading newspapers, the fact of which could then be used to keep them from
publishing news the prosecutor did not want made public. There was also a
payoff made to some politicians, a small part of which was sent down to the
assessor through a firm in Portland, Oregon. This firm was hired by at least
two of the state's largest industrial firms to keep the tax assessments on
their corporation properties much lower than they should have been. Small
wonder that the owners of these businesses always supported the cooperative
politicians when they ran for office.
The head of the licensing division of the county also received a share of the
profits, as well as some smaller payoffs he arranged by himself. To operate a
tavern, a cabaret, a cardroom, a taxicab, or even a tow-truck company, it was
necessary to have a license issued by the city's licensing division. These
licenses were no less than a piece of very valuable property. They virtually
guaranteed substantial profit from investment. The number of such licenses was
kept to a level where anyone who had the license was certain to have his
services heavily in demand. A tow-truck license cost ten thousand dollars
"under the board." Depending on its location and potential, a tavern or a
cabaret could cost fifty thousand dollars (plus monthly payments) to license.
A cardroom might cost only one thousand dollars since there was not the
certainty of profit accumulation from the cardroom. Monthly payments, however,
would vary according to profits, as we have seen.
Liquor licenses were handled at the state level. The liquor board consisted of
three men, all appointed by the governor for staggered nine-year terms. This
board was the source of incredibly large sums for "campaign contributions" and
outright graft for state politicians, especially those in positions
influencing licensing and liquor policies.
At the root of the crime network's operation was the money that got shuffled
from the people who operated the rackets-the bookie, the numbers man, the
whorehouse operator, the drug trafficker, the cardroom manager, tavern owner,
or pinball operator-to the politicians, law enforcers, and businessmen who
protected the network and its enterprises. The amount of money shuffled, as we
have seen, was staggering.
The day-to-day decisions might have rested in the hands of seven, nine, or ten
men who consulted regularly with the other principals in the network. But for
such a widespread and profitable system to persist, a set of relations far
more extensive than this and beyond mere payoffs had to develop, especially
since the task of maintaining control over the various enterprises and the
people involved was a task of major importance to everyone. As we shall see in
the next chapter, the problem of maintaining control was much more complicated
than first met the eye.
pps.50-80
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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