A big criminal trial is something like a football game, with both sides lined up, plunging at each other in a battle of wits, each momentarily taking the advantage, fighting back and forth. The prosecution takes the ball on the kickoff, and the defense takes it on cross-examination, trying to smash down the credibility and character of the accusing witnesses.
Ordinarily it is a very successful thing for a defense lawyer to prove that a state witness is a criminal or a person of disreputable character. In this case there was plenty of opportunity for that.
Out of Dewey’s sixty-eight witnesses in the trial, forty were prostitutes and madams who told frankly about their disreputable careers. A dozen more were bookers, lobbygows, and male madams.
Joe Bendix, of course, was about as complete a thief as could be found, a thoroughly low character. His career and methods were examined minutely by his cross-examiners. In addition, Bendix’s testimony received a damaging blow when it developed that he had written a letter to his wife, a night club girl, urging her to corroborate his story that she was at the Villanova Restaurant with him when he talked to Charlie Lucky. In the letter he had suggested that she tell a “clever” story at the Dewey office, because it was very important to him. Bendix had made the careless error of putting this letter to his wife into an envelope which he had addressed to an assistant district attorney, Morris H. Panger, with whom he was dickering at the time for a lighter sentence. Only after Bendix had appeared on the witness stand did the District Attorney’s office bother to send this letter to Dewey. Bendix’s testimony took a pretty thorough kicking around.
Dewey did have several witnesses of good character in addition to the bathmaid, however,—the chambermaid, some hotel managers, bellhops and waiters from the Barbizon Plaza and the Waldorf. One after another they identified various defendants as having been seen in Lucky’s hotel rooms. Some of these witnesses blew up. The manager of the Waldorf Tower said he thought he had seen Abie Wahrman in the hotel and then he picked out Lucky’s lawyer, Moe Polakoff, as the man he was identifying. The assistant manager of the Barbizon Plaza, shown a batch of about twenty pictures, picked out two or three as men he had had a drink with in Luciano’s room. But when he got to court he said he couldn’t be sure.
But a bellhop who no longer worked in the hotel, whose testimony was plainly a surprise to the defense, recognized Little Davie and Tommy Bull without hesitation.
Another bellhop said he had seen Jimmy Fredericks playing cards with Charlie Lucky and that Lucky had addressed Jimmy as “Joe.” That seemed inconclusive, but evidence developed that Fredericks had on occasion used the name Joe Marino. This bellhop, however, blew up his own testimony by passing over the swarthy black-haired Italian Fredericks and picking out in the courtroom the fat, baldish, Jewish Jack Eller, who looked nothing like Jimmy. A day before this the bellhop had picked out Fredericks without hesitation when he had taken a look at him at the courthouse. Surprised by the switch, Dewey sat down and waited for cross-examination.
At this point, as though by some uncanny mind reading, the defense asked for the statement the bellhop had made the day before, thereby dramatically revealing the switch in identification. Dewey was to make capital out of that later, pointing out that this was the only statement of the sort the defense had asked for from these hotel witnesses. He was to cite it in his summation as evidence of the fear, the terror, which had existed in the background outside the court. He was to charge that something had happened to this witness, to make him switch, and the defense knew about it.
Other witnesses stuck by their identifications and were the clinching part of the case.
The defendants made a great play by trying to trick the identification witnesses. Ralph Liguori wore horn-rimmed glasses to court. Others changed the way they parted their hair. During a recess they exchanged neckties.
The girls were in for a frightful ordeal. Nancy Presser, having told of her visits to Lucky at the Barbizon Plaza and the Waldorf, had to try to remember each tiny detail of all those occasions. Lucky’s lawyer made great fun of her story that she had been given $50 on her first visit to the Barbizon, even though she and Lucky did not transact any business. Nancy retorted that she had gone there intending to practice her trade but had refused to do it when she found there was something wrong with Lucky.
Nancy, like the others, had to go through all the details of her drug habit, how she had acquired it and how she had taken the cure.
Finally, questions came down to the matter of describing the physical appearance of Lucky’s hotel rooms. Nancy said that the apartment in the Barbizon Plaza was a parlor, bedroom, and bath. At the prosecution table this was startling. Queries were sent out to the Dewey office. Up to now it had always been assumed that Lucky just had a room at the hotel. Hotel registry sheets gave only single room numbers to the places he had occupied. The assistant manager of the hotel was asked to describe Lucky’s apartment. He said it was a parlor, bedroom, and bath. The prosecution breathed more easily.
George Morton Levy, continuing his cross-examination of Nancy, asked her to describe how she got into the Waldorf to go into Lucky’s suite in the tower.
When you enter the Waldorf from Park Avenue you go up a gradual flight of stairs between the terraces of the Sert Room and the Empire Room, then across the open space known as Peacock Alley and past a bank of elevators, before entering the central lobby of the hotel. To go to the tower elevator you turn left into Peacock Alley about fifty feet. The tower elevators are not conspicuous and are one of the most difficult things about a hotel in which it is easy to get lost.
Nancy wasn’t able to be very definite about the way she got into the tower. She said she took the elevator before she came to the lobby. She was pretty sure it was the ordinary elevator.
“I know I lost myself,” said Nancy. “I know I got lost in the hotel. I went from one elevator to another. I always did get lost in big hotels.”
Levy did not press this subject further. It was an adroit bit of examination. It gave the impression, certainly to the newspapers, that Nancy didn’t know how she got into the place.
Examination of the record, however, shows that while she was hazy, her story was not inconsistent with the facts. It appeared later that if she took the ordinary elevator she would have to change at the twenty-eighth floor to get to the tower elevator.
Levy made a great deal out of her assertion that she had gone to apartment 39-C without being announced from the lobby. But it later appeared that while there were rigid restrictions on visitors on many floors of the tower, there had been no requirement that anyone be announced in going to the thirty-ninth floor, either night or day.
Nancy was obviously weakening under the strain of her examination. All her testimony had been given in the wan, faint voice of a semi-invalid. Most of the time the stenographer had been required to read her answers in a tone that could be heard by the court.
Levy asked her to describe Lucky’s apartment. Were there twin beds or single beds? Was there a radio? A piano? Was there a pantry?
Nancy became more and more uncertain. She remembered you went in and turned to the left.
“Now you describe that bedroom as a woman would, having the feminine touch.”
Nancy looked about at the judge a bit helplessly.
“Your Honor, I would like to ask for a ten-minute recess.”
As the court and lawyers discussed the matter for a few minutes Nancy got up and beat it for the door.
“Come back here and sit down,” said the judge.
Finally Nancy got out of the room, went downstairs and vomited. She couldn’t come back to the witness stand. She reported the next day that she had vomited all evening and all night. She had become very ill as Levy questioned her about opium. She said that ever since she had taken thenarcotic cure it always made her sick to her stomach when anyone talked to her about narcotics.
Nancy was called back again the next evening, but Levy said he did not want to examine her any more. He was satisfied with her breakdown. But Dewey called her for a redirect examination. He succeeded in rehabilitating her a lot.
The cross-examination about opium had opened the door so that Dewey could bring out that her opium-smoking companions had been Waxey Gordon and his bootlegging mob. That indicated she was not merely a two-dollar girl.
As for Nancy’s inability to describe the details of Lucky’s hotel suite, Dewey asked her how many hotel rooms she had been likely to visit every week during the period when she was doing a call business.
“Sometimes twenty, twenty-five, or thirty times,” said Nancy.
“That is all,” said Dewey.
While Dewey tried to keep the testimony in the trial on an austere plane, with words and incidents that would hardly offend the most blue-nosed censor, the defense from the beginning sought to emphasize that this was all a very dirty business. While Dewey called his witnesses prostitutes, defense lawyers referred to them as whores. Mr. Levy, the chief defense counsel, elaborately washed his hands of most of the untactful utterances of his colleagues, especially those of Lorenzo C. Carlino, counsel to Nancy’s boy friend, Ralph Liguori. Mr. Carlino was frequently asking the girls about their operations and various details of physical disability.
“Did you get sick to your stomach when you were staying with all these men?” shouted Mr. Carlino at Nancy.
“No,” she said.
“Very pleasurable to you, wasn’t it?”
“No, I couldn’t say that.”
“You enjoyed it, didn’t you? You enjoyed your depravity?”
“No,” said Nancy.
“How many men have you stayed with in your lifetime?”
“I cannot answer that question. Can you answer me how many people you have seen in your lifetime?” exclaimed Nancy.
“And you worked in a $2 whorehouse, didn’t you?” roared Mr. Carlino.
“Certainly,” said Nancy, “because Ralph sent me there, that was why. It wasn’t because I wanted to.”
“You have been diseased for a number of years, haven’t you?”
“I have not.”
“Aren’t you suffering from syphilis?”
“Yes. I believe I got that from Ralph.”
Gradually, on the not over-intelligent face of the ape-like Liguori a faint light of understanding began to break. He called his lawyer over to confer with him. Shortly later Mr. Carlino, with a brave sure confidence, challenged the prosecution to have his client examined by a doctor. During a recess Liguori took the Wassermann test. Mr. Carlino did not bring the subject up again.
Mildred Harris was the last of the women to testify. She was on the stand for something like nine hours, and also was carried through a minute biography of herself as an opium smoker, morphine addict, and madam, and all through the story of her arrest and her denials and her decision to testify.
Nowhere did they shake Mildred’s testimony.
Having rung the changes on the depravity of ordinary prostitutes, the defense lawyers called upon Mildred again and again to deny that she was a lesbian. Especially they professed to find the most decadent significance in the fact that when the police raided her hotel room on February 1, they found her occupying the place with one Phil Ryan, a female impersonator who entertained in night clubs.
Mildred said that Phil was a friend of the family; that her husband Pete knew all about their friendship and that Phil had taken them both not long before that to the annual Fairies’ Ball in Harlem. They had enjoyed it very much. Mildred said Ryan didn’t live with her but he had been suffering from an attack of influenza and she had been nursing him during his convalescence.
Mr. Levy wanted to know whether Mildred had twin beds in her room and how she and Phil managed to get undressed without seeing each other.
“You had no hesitancy in undressing in front of that fairy, did you?” he demanded.
“I never undressed in front of him,” said Mildred indignantly. “There were two bathrooms in that hotel room.”
All through the trial the defense had been filled with shock and moral indignation at the thought that the girls in custody had been allowed to drink liquor. All through the trial there had been insinuations that high jinks had been going on between the girls and the Dewey men. One girl after another had been asked whether she had been taken around to night clubs.
Now they got what they had been building for. They had struck pay dirt.
“Yes,” said Mildred. She had been to Leon & Eddie’s at two o'clock one morning with a police officer and Mr. Gelb. She had one or two drinks of brandy and Gelb paid for them.
“Did you dance?”
“No,” said Mildred.
“Sure about that?”
“Positive.”
The defense lawyers’ eyebrows were lifted in high arches. They looked at the jury as if to say: Now! You see? They had loosed a scandal.
Mildred is a great, big, tall, buxom woman with henna hair. Gelb is a little fellow, hardly more than five feet four inches high. If they actually had danced together in Leon & Eddie’s it would have been a sight worth seeing.
The defense was to follow up the Leon & Eddie story later by presenting Patrolman George A. Heidt, the cop who had been to Leon & Eddie’s with Mildred and Sol Gelb, as a witness for the defense. With many protests of reluctance, the policeman related the story of the visit to Leon & Eddie’s and. described how tight Mildred was.
The spectacle of a policeman appearing thus as a defense witness for the gangsters did not escape his superiors in the police department. Some inquiry into his affairs later brought to light the fact that in the eight years from 1926 to 1988, on a patrolman’s salary, he had banked $74,500. In the one year 1982, he had banked $22,288. He lived in a penthouse at Thirtieth Street and Fifth Avenue. Heidt later was thrown off the police force when his explanations of his prosperity seemed unsatisfactory.
In December, 1937, however, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court reversed the decision whereby Heidt had been deprived of his job, which was protected by civil service. It held that no one had disproved his explanations that he had piled up his big bank totals by a series of withdrawals and deposits and by inheritance of money. Heidt went back on the police force.