PART ONE

THE PLACES

(_Confidential!_)

1. DISTRICT OF CONFUSION

The Nation’s Capital is a bastard born of a compromise and nurtured on a lottery.

The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that government in a stinking, steaming swamp. This was a peace offering to recalcitrant Southerners, who were that way then just as they are now.

The first funds to build and improve that city were raised by selling real estate by lottery. With such ancestry, it is no wonder today that “numbers” make one of the biggest businesses in Washington. The policy racket far exceeds bookmaking, the Number 1 source of gambling revenue in all others parts of the country.

Before the plane which brings the arriving traveler to Washington lands at the National Airport, on the Virginia side, it swoops gracefully over the city in a salute. The tall, needle-like Washington Monument and the familiar dome of the Capitol arise through a sea of green, to dominate the landscape.

They and the other public structures, which alone form the skyline in a city where buildings over 110 feet high are banned by law, are the symbols of Washington. It is an old-fashioned, tree-shaded Southern town, delightful and gracious, taken over by a gigantic governmental apparatus which, though founded on Colonial Virginia’s tradition of personal freedom, has mushroomed into the world’s greatest bureaucracy, humpbacked and bow-legged under tons of laws and endless regulations.

The spacious avenues, the tree-shaded lawns, the green which one sees wherever he looks, is a symbol too--that Washington is dominated by the rural mind.

It is the only capital of any world power where there is no variety of humanity. London, Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, these are great commercial centers where national government is incidental. Washington is inhabited by residents of every state in the union and representatives of every country on the globe, yet it is as backwater and provincial as any small inland one-plant town.

This most uncosmopolitan capital is overshadowed by that giant of metropolises, New York, only minutes away by air, and by Baltimore, with its wide open and blatant vice much nearer. The foreign trade commissioners, the visiting bankers, and all the important public personages go to Manhattan, where the United Nations is cutting into Washington’s diplomatic monopoly. The lowlier links lam the 36 miles to Baltimore to cut up.

Not that Washington has no vice and venery. It has more of it than the escape havens. But, as in all ingrown towns, the “respectables” must go away from home to prance and play. It is the story of the deacon from Dubuque all over again, and what happens to him in the Big Burg. Only here the deacon is a Congressman, or--

As we unfold the rates of crime, vice, sex irregularities, graft, cheap gambling, drunkenness, rowdyism and rackets, you will get, thrown on a large screen, a peep show of this stately concentration camp of cold monuments and hot mammas where there are four women for every three men. Murkier than the “smoke-filled room” so often used as a cliché to typify a corral of politicos, it is a vast bedroom with a jumbo bottle of bourbon beside the bed.

And yet its manners and morals are those of the barnyard and the railroad-junction town rather than the romantic intrigue of the salon and the scented boudoir.

Washington has a kind of glamor all its own. It is not the kind one finds in New York, or Paris, or even Atlantic City. The Washington feeling comes from being close to great events and to the memory of great people. It is, to a certain extent, similar to the public appeal of Hollywood’s famed Forest Lawn Cemetery, the place where the movie stars are interred. Forest Lawn there is a must for tourists. There is no sacred peace about this graveyard. Trippers photograph its ornate tombs and profane its dead. The tombs were purposely designed by hams who craved publicity even in death.

Washington does remind one of a well-kept cemetery. Its gleaming public buildings of white marble are like so many mausoleums. It is the nation’s Forest Lawn, where is sunk its priceless heritage, killed by countless generations of getters and gimme-ers.

Washington is a reflection of Los Angeles--a Los Angeles without palm trees. Where it doesn’t look like a cemetery it resembles a movie set. It has a feel of unreality. This is a designed city, the only important one in America, and its streets are so straight, its architecture is so conforming, and its sidewalks are so neat and clean, it might have been set up in _papier-mâché_ only today.

And it’s a dead heat which--Washington or Los Angeles--has more yahoos from more dull places. New York gets its share, but its tourists include many from fairly alive communities; the plowboys hail from New England or other points not very far away. But the barbarians who inundate Washington and Los Angeles would be conspicuous if they visited Little Rock. Heaven knows where they come from. Their clothes, make-ups, manners and expressions are of the cow-pasture.

We were sitting in the Senators’ Reception Room in the Capitol, waiting for one solon to come off the floor. This rococo room is open to the public. While we sat there, we idly contemplated the sight-seers who gaped at the mid-Victorian gold and mosaic with which it is embellished. One coatless yokel, with two dirty-nosed youngsters in tow and a dreary wife toting a wailing babe bringing up the rear, figured we knew something because we were wearing ties and sitting down.

“What room is this?” he humbly asked.

“This is the President’s private office,” we replied. “No visitors allowed.”

You should have seen them scram!

The number of transients who enter and leave Washington annually is in excess of 45 million. Most of them are peasants who shudder when they ride in an elevator and gape at an escalator. The sessions of Congress find them in the galleries of the noisy House and the sedate Senate. The men are negligee with firemen’s suspenders, the women often suckle babes at their breasts while some Demosthenes below debates a bill vital to the world.

But the residents of the Washington area are, on the whole, remarkably well-dressed--not only the natives in Washington but the government employes drawn from every corner of the map. It is surprising how quickly they shed their corn-fed looks and begin to look like Easterners and try to act like them.

One wonders where the hoards of ill-dressed, low-mannered visitors eat and sleep.

Tourists may wander coatless through the White House and in the legislative office buildings, but all of the better restaurants and hotels require men to wear coats and ties at all times. This, of course, is universal in New York, but in Chicago, horny-handed, wilted hoi polloi are seen in lobbies of such swell hotels as the Ambassador and Drake in shirt-sleeves.

Washingtonians are completely white-collar. Its private business is merchandising. The service trades, such as feeding and sleeping visitors, form its chief non-governmental activity. Before the New Deal put a premium on alphabet soup, federal employes got miserly wages. Washington was a poor city. Now some secretaries make as much as $8,000 a year and Senators’ assistants drag down $10,000. We talked to one babe, some kind of an expert in the Treasury, who draws $15,000 a year on a fee basis. In her spare time she checks hats in a joint which sells liquor after hours.

The average family income in Washington is the highest in any big city in the land, despite its disproportionate Negro population. Colored folk work for Uncle Sam at salaries equal to whites’, in many cases get preferential treatment, and others draw liberal relief checks. Another reason for high family income is that in so many families husband and wife work for the government, and many who are grounded there also hold outside jobs, after hours. This practice is permitted in many departments. Even members of the Metropolitan Police are allowed to accept outside employment after their eight-hour day. Many drive taxies or are chauffeurs.

The per capita income in Washington is $1820, compared with the national average of $1330. Even rich New York is second to Washington with $1758.

Washingtonians file more income-tax returns per capita than do any other Americans. More than two-thirds of the homes in the District are worth more than $12,000. The city has the highest retail sales per capita on earth. Government employes are paid regularly by a boss who never goes broke--though that isn’t the fault of the politicians.

Added wealth streams constantly into the city, from the cornucopias of lobbyists with no-limit expense accounts, tourists and representatives of foreign governments who let loose a few francs, shillings or lire before tapping our tills.

Here we have a city which, if mental cripples who believe in planned economies were correct, should be a happy place, free of crime and vice. Washington is rich and almost everyone in it is insured against want for life. Yet it has that apex rate of crime. The waterfront of Marseilles, the alleys of Singapore’s Chinatown, the sailor’s deadfalls of Port Said have nothing on it. Washington makes even Chicago look good. And that’s been going on since Abigail Adams hung the family wash in the backyard of the then unfinished White House--and shuddered lest the President’s drawers be stolen.

In the early years of the Republic, grifters and grafters, highwaymen and conmen, pimps and prostitutes flocked into the city. Instead of being a community where women greatly outnumbered men, as they do today, early Washington contained almost entirely males. The first Congressmen and early office-holders were easy pickings for the fancy girls and their fancy men, who arrived a jump ahead of the lobbyists. Lonesome men whiled their time at cards and dice, and ever since then Washington has been a gamblers’ garden.

Foreigners and many American political philosophers say one great fault of our American system is our form of municipal government. They point out the astounding crime, legal laxity and municipal deviltry in this country where we elect our local governments directly and give them great power, whereas most foreign countries are ruled from above, with cities and provinces allowed minimum authority.

Well, Washington is ruled from above. It has no votes, no county chairmen, no campaign funds to be raised, no favors to be returned. It is policed by a constabulary appointed directly by the United States government and paid from the public treasury of the United States. Its judges are appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate, and all but municipal court judges serve for life. Its District Attorney is chosen by the President, as are its city commissioners, and through them all public District officials.

There is no chance for a neighborhood gang boss to establish himself through floaters and colonized flotsam. Yet there are neighborhood bosses. There is influence. Judges and police are bought. Washington has the blackest record of any city in the country on the F.B.I. ledger of reported crimes. Black is the color of its crime, too, as will be shown. The proportion of Negro crime to white is almost eight to one.

Another reason for Washington’s defiance of the law which is made in Washington is that, except for ogling tourists, everyone who comes comes to get. To get jobs, contracts, favors, pardons, commissions, and sometimes social preferment. This acquisitive horde is not interested in the city. Toward local public affairs there is lethargy of mind, spirit and body, nothing conducive to enterprise or local pride.

This potpourri of human beings on the make remained within bounds until the first World War. There was room for all. As every schoolboy knows, the original grant of land from the states of Maryland and Virginia for the national capital was a square, ten miles wide. This proved too big and the Virginia part was receded more than a hundred years ago. The remaining area, all in Maryland, was ample for the needs of the city until overnight, in 1917, it changed from a country town to a madhouse in which all the residents are inmates. There was some respite during the 1920’s, but since the coming of the New Deal, Washington burst its pants and overflowed back into Virginia and across into Maryland.

As with other large cities, the 1950 census returns found the rate of growth of Washington suburbs far outstripping the parent. At this writing there are about 800,000 people in the city limits and 750,000 in the satellite suburbs of Virginia and Maryland. The percentage of Negroes is higher than it is in Mississippi.

Seniority rules in the Congress, which permit one-party Southern Senators and Representatives to control more than their share of committees, account for continuance of its Dixie slant. So Washingtonians talk like Southerners. Even the Oregonians and down-Easters fall into the liquid drawl after a few years in the capital. With the dulcet Dixie dialect comes the Southern attitude toward the Negro. Fiery FEPCers from New York, after a couple of years’ indoctrination, wink in private over the “tolerance” they sell in public. As Negroes move in the whites flee out.

As residents of Virginia and Maryland, these automatically gain the votes they surrendered or never had. Though still employed in Washington, they lose all interest in its municipal affairs. They live, vote, pay taxes, send their children to school and join churches beyond the borders.

And, as the Negro immigrates and propagates, Washington’s chance of ever getting the vote dwindles. Even Northern congressmen, with huge Negro voting constituencies at home, won’t burn their hands with such legislation. They declare for the principles of home rule, sign petitions to withdraw bottled-up home-rule bills from committees, then secretly withdraw their names.

As these pages unfold you will get a picture of how more than 1,500,000 people live. Few would stand for some of Washington’s nauseating conditions in their own towns. Yet they take them here complacently. Congressmen, the lords of the city, shrug at what would throw them out of office if the good burghers in Beloit or Boonetown suspected--and cared.

Washington has a heritage of “everybody’s business is nobody’s business.” But the stimulation which sparks its evils is different, though the result is the same.

Of old, Congress didn’t worry about local crime because all the people could do about it was write letters to the papers. But now, since crime is nationally syndicated, some legislators actively protect Washington crime, because it means more funds back in their bailiwicks from the branches of the swelling Syndicate of silk-lined racketeers who are allied with Washington’s criminals.

So this is the nation’s capital: with its panderers and prostitutes; gamblers and gunmen; conmen and Congressmen; lawmakers and law-breakers; fairies and Fair Dealers.

It is a city of moods, even drearier when Congress is away campaigning or vacationing; yet it turns electric when something big is about to happen.

It is a city of the wistful little people with adding-machine minds.

Over all, a feeling of fear pervades it. People become conditioned to talking in whispers. Senators will walk you to the middle of the room, then mumble, even when what they have to say is inconsequential. The main indoor sport is conspiracy.

We give you Washington: not the city of statesmen, but the stateless city.

2. “GORGEOUS” GEORGETOWN

We shall begin this catalog of places with Georgetown, by far the oldest in the city.

Not all who reside in Georgetown are rich, red or queer, nor do all Washington millionaires, Commies and/or fags dwell in Georgetown.

But if you know anyone who fulfills at least two of the foregoing three qualifications don’t take odds he doesn’t prance behind Early American shutters in a reconditioned stable or slave-pen in this unique city within a city.

Georgetown was a thriving Colonial village when the rest of the District was swampland. It was included in the District of Columbia from the time of the original grant, but Georgetown remained an independent municipality until 1895.

If you like that kind of stuff, Georgetown, which lies in the extreme NW section of the city, has a charm all its own.

Some people like the smell of dead fish in Provincetown. Others like to climb up four flights of stairs to ratty garrets in Greenwich Village. Georgetown is quaint that way, too. Now all this is to be preserved for posterity forever, through an act of Congress setting up a commission to keep it looking the way it is under penalty of the law for modernizing anything in the community without the permission of some bureaucrat.

Until twenty years ago, Georgetown was just another rundown backwash in a great city. Most of its residents were Negroes. Most of its real estate wasn’t even good enough for Southern Negroes, and don’t forget that a Southern Negro is forced to live almost anywhere. New Dealers and the bright young braintrusters from Harvard reversed what seems to be a foreordained rule in every city in the country. In other words, the whites drove the Negroes out--as many as they could--and took over for themselves what was practically a blighted area.

This is how it came about: When Washington was suddenly flooded with a horde of crackpots from the campuses, Communists, ballet-dancers and economic planners, there was no place for them to live. They abhorred the modern service apartments. These people were “intellectual.” The women wore flat-heeled shoes and batik blouses, and went in for New Thought. The men, if you could call some of them that, wore their hair longer than we do, read advanced literature, and talked about the joys of collectivism, though all of them were so individual they couldn’t bear to live in skyscrapers.

Most of these people had dough. The others got good government jobs, became “contact men” or spoke at meetings and wrote for publications sponsored by rich left-wingers to provide automobiles and other luxuries for the needier pinks.

Washington had nothing like New York’s Greenwich Village, but in the early days of the New Deal Mrs. Roosevelt herself, during one of the fleeting moments she was in Washington, “discovered” Georgetown and conceived it as a genteel bohemian community where her sandal-shod friends could find congenial company. She wouldn’t allow the WPA to alter anything though sewage comes up from the river. Georgetown is overrun with rats, which frequently chew up Negro infants.

Ancient wooden houses, much the worse for the wear of centuries, which could have been bought lot-and-all for $2,500 in the ’20s, skyrocketed as it became “smart” for society to move to Georgetown. Some properties are now worth twenty times what they brought twenty years ago, though terrible odors emanate from a nearby slaughter house.

Following the discovery of Georgetown, the truly gentle Negroes who had lived there, some for a hundred years or more, were driven out. Few owned their homes. Into rickety structures which had once housed as many as ten Negro families--seventy-five people--moved one millionaire left-wing carpetbagger and his wife. With improvements, naturally. Equality is okay to talk about. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on some of these homes, modernizing, beautifying, disinfecting and furnishing them. Now they have house-and-garden tours for visiting Kiwanians.

Not all the Negroes could be ousted. Even today, Georgetown has a considerable colored population, though it is the only part of Washington where there are fewer Negroes than there were twenty years ago. Those who remain live in shanties so undesirable that no rich white fairies can be found who want to turn them into something gay. In fact, there’s a saying in Georgetown now that you’re not “smart” unless darkies live next door to you.

The sight-seeing buses point out historic Prospect House, now used by the government for visiting notables, but they don’t show you the tumble-down Negro shacks behind it.

One of Georgetown’s most distinguished residents is Dean Acheson. Emmitt Warring, king of Washington’s gamblers, about whom more will be found in succeeding chapters, is in business nearby.

Warring is the kingfish of Georgetown. He controls its local police precinct as well as its local crime. As will be shown, he has direct affiliations with the national underworld syndicate.

Eleanor Roosevelt gave Georgetown that first big impetus after her son, Jimmy, who didn’t “got it” in California, moved across the street from the old Imperial Russian Embassy, in the 3200 block of Q Street. It looked like good business to build up the area.

Soon the section filled up with all manner of strange people. Many of these were buddies of the First Lady. We have seen a letter she wrote to one Ben Grey, in which she pats such types on the head.

One of the queerest sights visible anywhere is the one from a window on the second floor of Dean Acheson’s quaint home at 2805 P Street. It faces the 28th Street side over a back yard. The Secretary’s personal lavatory faces that way. His mind apparently weighted by cosmos-shaking affairs of state, the secretary forgets to draw down the shade.

It is on the second floor, and Acheson doesn’t know he can be seen. This is to tip him off to what the whole neighborhood knows, first-hand and not confidential.

In the next block lives Justice Frankfurter. He and Acheson, fresh air fiends, walk to town every morning.

Another neighbor is Myrna Loy, out of films while on a special mission for the State Department. She is developing a “new type propaganda campaign.” Well, she played enough spy roles in the movies.

Georgetown is also the home of Georgetown University, oldest and largest Catholic school in the country. The broad acres of its beautiful campus were undoubtedly originally responsible for preserving the historic buildings of the community from the onward rush of modernity which swept over the rest of Washington.

But also in Georgetown is the Hideaway Club. It is known in local parlance as a bottle club. A bottle club is a resort which gets around the law which provides that all liquor dispensaries shall close at 2 A.M. Despite a murder at the Hideaway and a recent Congressional investigation of such enterprises and a flurry of activity by the United States Attorney, there are still at least 500 of these unlicensed places, some say more, in the District, a subject which will be covered in detail hereinafter.

The area’s favorite gathering place is Martin’s Bar on Wisconsin Avenue where New Deal and Fair Deal policy is made. It was the hangout of Tommy the Cork and Harry Hopkins, who changed the world over bottles while Georgetown students roistered around them.

Georgetown is relatively free of street-walkers who plague every other section. That is because there are no hotels and few transients. But what it lacks in ambulent magdalens is more than made up for by homosexuals of both indeterminate sexes. It seems that nonconformity in politics is often the handmaiden of the same proclivities in sex. Among the thousands known in the capital, a goodly proportion live in the storied ancient dwellings of the area. The fun that goes on in some is beyond words and was even worse when the staffs of the embassies of some of the Iron Curtain countries still found it feasible to travel about in society.

Some Washington policemen will tell you with a shrug of despair of the times the patrol wagons pulled up at particular homes as a result of complaints from neighbors, only to find the prancing participants in the unspeakable parties were Administration untouchables or diplomats sacred from interference.

Which, when you consider that Emmitt Warring also seems to be immune, makes Georgetown seem like a wonderful place to live in--nobody ever gets pinched there.

3. NW COULD MEAN NOWHERE

The first question asked by members of the new Seventh Congress, after taking the oath in the draughty and unfinished Capitol in 1801, was “where is a saloon with dames?” or the early 19th century equivalent thereof.

The chief usher escorted them to the steps on the Hill, which overlooked what there then was of the young city, a collection of boxes resembling nothing so much as a rude Oklahoma oil-boom town on a rainy day, and pointed northwest. “There,” he replied. Ever since that historic moment, anything that matters and much that doesn’t is in that part of the city known by its postal address as “NW.”

“North West” is the only section of Washington which counts. It is the capital of the capital. NW is the works.

When Major Pierre L’Enfant accepted the commission to plan the capital, he went Caesar’s Gaul one better and divided it into four parts. These he laid out like spokes around a wheel, with the hub “The Hill,” on which he built the Capitol. He named each section after compounded cardinal points of the compass, NW, SW, NE and SE. The others you can throw into the garbage-can--NW is the city.

Other municipalities have distinctive sectors. In Washington everything, the rialto, marts of commerce, homes of the wealthy, are piled into this one corner, where they rub shoulders with the lowly, the dirty and the wicked, not to overlook Washington’s No. 1 problem, the colored.

Washington’s Main Drag is F St. if you could call it such. The crossing at 14th Street is its Times Square, its State and Madison--an insult to both. Most of the 1,500,000 who live in the District and environs, plus a half-million tourists, pass it daily.

Here are the movie palaces, but its sole legit theatre is almost a mile away. Its best-known restaurants are around the corner. Any night, Saturday included, the heart of America’s heart is dark and quiet.

Washington’s Main Stem is somewhat more somnolent than those of most villages. Don’t get us wrong--things do happen after dark. But--those who do them don’t want them seen.

When one seeks the reason for the empty dreariness of Washington at night, where trees swaying in the wind often are the only living things, he is told what seems the obvious--Washington is a town of early-to-bedders who do not go in for night life. That is not true. Washington has hundreds of sneak-ins that remain open all night. Your hardy reporters almost collapsed before they could complete this assignment--to visit every place openly or surreptitiously breaking the law. Almost all are in NW, which should have made it easier.

After-dark Washington is the way it is because it has the smalltown mentality. People do their sinning in homes and hotels or in pseudo-private “clubs.”

Now let’s get on with NW.

Most Congressmen live there. That’s a break for all except cab-drivers. Hack rates are regulated by zones. Passengers pay the same fee regardless of where they ride to in a zone, with a surcharge for each extra zone the cab enters. The Congressmen, who make all the District’s laws, talked the Public Utilities Commission into gerrymandering the zone map in such a way it ended up allowing them and you and us to go almost anywhere from the Capitol into NW for a minimum fee. No one wants to go elsewhere, so it’s a fine deal for all but the cab-jockies.

All the big hotels are in NW. That includes everything from popular-priced tourist fall-ins near the station to the luxury hostelries like the Mayflower, Statler, Carlton and the residential ones in the outskirts, such as the Shoreham and Wardman Park. And the assignation hotels are downtown, smack in the middle of everything, very snug.

Perhaps the most famous hotel is the Willard, at F and 14th Streets. They call it the New Willard now, though the new section was built during Teddy Roosevelt’s first administration. For almost a century, VIP’s from all over the world stayed here. Julia Ward Howe wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in one of its rooms. Now its cocktail bar is a hangout for lonesome government girls and other fancy-free women, best time after 5 P.M.

The new and modern Ambassador Hotel is at 14th and K, one of the many holdings of Morris Cafritz, husband of Washington’s “first” hostess since the elevation to the Diplomatic Corps of Mme. Mesta. The High Hat Cocktail Lounge in the Ambassador is a gay drinking spot, much patronized by the lonesome of either sex because of its informality. When we asked a cab-driver where we could meet a “friend” he directed us to the Ambassador. We sat there five minutes, not long enough to attract a waiter’s eye. But the eyes of two blonde things, young and not bad-looking, were quicker. One asked us to buy her a drink. We did.

Before long we were old friends. They told us they’d spend the evening with us for $20 each. We said we had to catch a train. They thought we meant the price was too high and reduced it to $10--“if we had a place to take them.”

We returned to the Ambassador half a dozen times, and all except once we were approached. That time it was too late, about 1 A.M., and all the volunteers had already booked themselves. We also saw other stags talk to girls with whom they hadn’t come in, but with whom they left.

Another cash-and-carry supermarket is the gracious old Peacock Alley of the Willard Hotel, a broad indoor parade where once world statesmen sat and sized up famed society beauties.

These hotels are not unique. All of Washington’s respectable inns and cocktail bars are plagued with loose ladies; there’s nothing much can be done about it, because the muddled situation of District law and law enforcement makes it impossible for the managements to bounce that sort of undesirables--if they are so regarded. The cops would refuse to eject them for fear of suits; the hotels and saloon-keepers are subject to the same liability. We saw hookers, or busy beavers that looked remarkably like them, speak to strangers in the cocktail lounges of the Statler and Carlton, and we were approached by one in the former place.

The hotel situation is never static. Comes war or emergency and the town is always short on rooms. In times of depression or recession there are too many rooms. When your authors began their regular trips to the city in search of material for this book, Washington had not started to take on its Sino-Korean war dress. We and our money were welcomed with open arms. We spent lavishly throughout the summer at the Carlton, a haunt of New Deal and Labor aristocracy, where John L. Lewis and White House assistant David K. Niles maintain luxurious suites.

As the summer wore on, Washington filled up with hoards of businessmen, manufacturers’ agents, lawyers, fixers and other finaglers. They had unlimited expense accounts. Remembering what happened in Washington during the years of World War II, some leased permanent suites. Others slipped large and welcome tips to room clerks and executives. Then reservations at the Carlton for mere confidential reporters were bitched up. They were unceremoniously moved from room to room, given second-class accommodations, notified they must get out; so better spenders could get in--and our bills had been running to $100 a day.

The Shoreham asked permanent guests to leave. Included were many Congressmen who had been living there for years. Some had voted against rent control in the District. But now they were Displaced Persons.

It was no secret that among the permanents who were in danger of being forced to go house-hunting were several statuesque blondes whose rents were being paid by high officials, diplomats and senators. The swank Shoreham, one of the most beautiful hotels anywhere, has figured prominently in police court and divorce court news more than once.

Washingtonians smile when they wonder if the Shoreham’s managing director, Harry Bralove, asked his pretty ex-wife to find other lodgings, too. There was a lot of gossip when she and Bralove were divorced. Once, when unable to meet an overdue $900 alimony bill, he convinced the court he no longer had an interest in the hotel, merely worked for it. Meanwhile he and his former spouse renewed their sentiments, but figured they’d be happier as friends than as man and wife. So the former Mrs. Bralove moved into the Shoreham.

A very pleasant exception to the general rule about kicking the guests around is the Mayflower Hotel, after three decades, still the choice of Washington’s smart set. In the wing devoted to private apartments are housed some of the most prominent people in the nation and they haven’t been moved to enable the management to snag profiteer revenue.

What there is of show business is in NW. That is little. Yet it was not always so. In the early days Washington was a hell of a show town. There was gaiety then. Long before the streets were paved, dignitaries attended the theatres and dined sumptuously at famed eating spots.

The theatre figures prominently in Washington’s history. The martyred Lincoln was slain in Ford’s Theatre, now a museum. President Wilson was an incurable vaudeville fan with the real habit, attending the same theatre every week on the same night. He used to slip out of the White House to Keith’s, a block away, where the management held a seat in the back row, where he tried to be unobserved. Washington had top vaudeville before the demise of that medium. Today Keith’s is a grind movie house. The only thing resembling variety is at Loew’s Capitol, where four or five modest acts are sandwiched in between runs of a picture.

Washington’s sole remaining legit theatre was the National. Once Washington was a hot road show town. Many New York hits-to-be had their tryouts there. Successes played week stands after leaving Broadway. Washington had minor population but supported many houses. Its residents were avid show-goers. The National gave up the ghost and turned into a movie house because of the race problem. Few Washington theatres permit colored patronage, though Negro theatres allow whites.

The National was restricted against colored attendance in its lease. A couple of years ago, a race-conscious Actor’s Equity Association, steamed up by Eleanor Roosevelt and her “we’re-all-brothers” group resolved not to permit its members to appear in any theatre in Washington while racial discrimination was enforced. Equity did not issue the same edict against theatres in the rest of the South, all of which are so restricted. The operators of the National were bound by the terms of their lease and could not change their policy. Rather than risk a long, costly fight, they converted the house into a cinema. Meanwhile, for two years, the capital of the world’s most literate nation was barren of all living drama.

Within the last few months, the owners of the Gayety Burlesque, on 9th Street, which is Washington’s Skid Row, converted it into a legit house. The Gayety had offered pretty low entertainment, because practically anything is permitted. But trade wasn’t too good. The cagey operators, not hampered by contractual restrictions, switched. To accent the fact that they were going all out on this new line of race tolerance, they booked as their first attraction a show with a mixed cast, “The Barrier” starring Lawrence Tibbett and Muriel Rahn, who is a Negro. Its theme was miscegenation in the Deep South.

The opening in the old home of burlesque, surrounded by shooting galleries, tattoo artists and cheap sex movies for “adults only,” was attended by the top layer of Washington New Deal and left-wing weepers and critics for the Negro press and the _Daily Worker_. The show was panned by the other reviewers. It closed prematurely, after five days. Producer Michael Meyerberg said, “We shouldn’t have opened in Washington.”

After that, the theatre limped along, sometimes lighted, sometimes dark. The Negroes showed no zeal to patronize it. The whites passed it up. Now the Theatre Guild is sending shows there, subsidized by highbrow subscribers.

Many who want to see good drama go to New York. There’s usually a Broadway hit playing in Baltimore.

During the summer, attempts are made to present road shows of New York companies on The Water Barge, in the Potomac, and in some neighborhood playhouses. Regardless of the success of some individual play, Washington can be written off as a theatre town.

Despite all the hardships, there are always optimists, especially when they can get their names in the papers. One of these is Congressman Klein, of New York, a screaming New Dealer, who represents one of Gotham’s most poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Klein is trying to get the government to spend $5,000,000 for a national theatre. Naturally it is to be named the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Theatre. Some of his constituents need shoes, but F.D.R. needs another monument. His bill forbids barring any person from appearing in it or attending it because of race, creed, color, religion or national origin. It would be conducted by the Secretary of the Interior, who at this writing is that well-known showman, Oscar L. Chapman, of Denver, Colorado, who is a co-founder of the Spanish-American League to Combat Exploitation of Mexican Workers in the United States, an arty cause, no doubt.

For most of the area’s 1,500,000 permanents and 500,000 transients, movies offer the big night out. How much longer, in the face of TV competition, remains to be seen. At the present time, attendance runs 100,000 a day. Most film houses in white neighborhoods are restricted to whites. Negroes have their own. One of the most famous is the Howard, in the NW colored section, which often augments its shows with top-flight Negro stage shows. At such times the place is apt to draw more white customers than black. Washington has its hep-cats. Many of the younger social and diplomatic sets get a bang out of hot licks. These people who willingly sit next to dark folks in the Howard refuse to permit them in their own theatres or restaurants. That’s typical Washington thinking.

The high-class shopping street--the Fifth Avenue--is Connecticut Avenue, running from La Fayette Square, past the Mayflower Hotel, and out into Cleveland Parkway, past residential hotels and swank apartments.

There are plenty of first-grade shops here, with chic imports, expensive antiques and other gewgaws to lure the feminine dollar. Despite the great wealth of the District and the presence of an international set, all is not pheasant for these merchants. New York and the magnet of its style-conscious stores is too near. Even Baltimore gets some of the trade which can’t find enough smart things at home. But a curious reverse process has been taking place in recent years. Whereas many Washingtonians travel to New York to shop and to dine, a couple of Washington’s best-known institutions have been reaching out and taking over some of the same places in New York which Washingtonians travel 225 miles to patronize.

Garfinckel’s is Washington’s high-fashion department store. A couple of years ago, its proprietors bought out the ancient and aristocratic New York men’s furnishing house, Brooks Brothers. Within a few months, the Garfinckel octopus reached out and gobbled up one of New York’s oldest and best-known Fifth Avenue stores, de Pinna.

While this was going on, a couple of smart Swedes, who had made a tremendous success at Olmsted’s Restaurant, a popular eatery with fine food in the NW business section, bought New York’s oldest and most famous restaurant, Luchow’s, on 14th Street, one of the last places left in the country where dining is still a fine art.

Reference to the appendix will show many other Washington eating places, some good, some bad and not all recommended, but most of them are in NW.

One of the best-known and best is Harvey’s, on Connecticut Avenue, near the Mayflower. This is J. Edgar Hoover’s nightly eating place when he is in Washington. Like most Washington restaurants, Harvey’s has been in business long. It specializes in sea food. The room does a sell-out business and it’s almost impossible to get a table at the height of the dining hour. Service by ancient Negro waiters is slow. Best time to eat is after 9, because most Washingtonians dine early; 6 o’clock is the standard time. Many start at 5. Those are the homely habits. Some restaurants close at 8, and a few at 7.

Julius Lully, who owns Harvey’s, is the butt of J. Edgar’s robust sense of humor. Once Hoover had a batch of wanted-fugitive-identification “fliers” made up showing Lully in his World War I private’s uniform. He had them nailed up on posts for miles around Lully’s country place. When the hick sheriff locked up the restaurateur, who sputtered and gave Hoover as a reference, J. Edgar said he had never heard of him.

On another occasion Hoover sent a letter, purporting to be from Oscar of the Waldorf, threatening to sue Harvey’s for appropriating his salad dressing. Lully hired a lawyer and told him to offer the Waldorf $2,500, but J. Edgar advised him it wouldn’t be enough.

The Occidental is hoary with age and legend. Pictures of presidents, cabinet officers and generals cover the walls. This was our favorite, but the Occidental has succumbed to the new boom. An officious head waiter, with a typical Prussian attitude toward customers, lined us up like prisoners of war, then heaped contemptuous abuse when we dared question his excellency about the possible chances of being seated and served. Washingtonians take it. They are used to being kicked around. Senators or cabinet officers they may be, but at heart most are grass-rooters overawed by the big city. We didn’t take it. We walked out. We are used to consideration and hospitality, spoiled by the good manners of heartless Manhattan.

When Major L’Enfant plotted the city, he provided that the streets should run in three directions, north and south, east and west, and diagonal. Where the diagonal avenues, which are named after states, cross the rectangular streets, generally numbered or alphabetically lettered, there are wide circles or broad squares. One of those is Lafayette Park, known to all Americans because it is the square in front of the White House. Here, less than a hundred yards from the President’s front door, is one of the most sordid spots in the world. At night, under the heroic equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson and in the shadow of the foliage of overhanging trees, there is a constant and continuous soprano symphony of homosexual twittering.

The President knows about it; he reads the papers. The police superintendent knows about it. Congress, which governs the District, knows about it. Recently, the secretary of a Senator was arrested there, charged with indescribable misbehavior. He was acquitted by a jury. There are few convictions.

Lafayette Park is one of the showplaces of NW. Another is Thomas Circle. Years ago, the circle and all the streets leading into it were lined with mansions. Now you can pull up in your car in front of a newsdealer there, at any hour, day or night, and place a bet on a horse, buy a deck of junk or get a girl--$10 asking price, $5 if you put up a struggle.

Another NW cynosure was Dupont Circle. It was social. There were the homes of such as Princess Eleanor Patterson. Now they’ve been razed or cut up because of taxes, death benefits, estate distributions and the high cost of maintenance. Those that still stand have been turned into embassies, headquarters of national organizations, and rooming-houses in between. One triangular corner was torn down to make way for the Dupont Plaza, a glassy and glossy apartment hotel, swell for lobbyists, flashy girls and 5-percenters. What happened to Dupont Circle hit all the way out the length of 16th Street, which runs off from the White House, and Massachusetts Avenue. These two long, broad avenues run through all NW. They are the “Ambassadors’ Rows.”

Of the sixty embassies, legations and chancelleries, almost all are on one or the other. Both have a liberal sprinkling of organization headquarters, such as unions, trade associations and eleemosynary institutions, with the ever-present furnished-room coops and apartment hotels.

The complexion of NW is changing, growing darker. The area always had a large Negro section. There are no racial zoning laws. Restrictive covenants cannot be enforced. There are no longer any racial boundary lines and some people think that is dandy. They have been in the driver’s seat since 1933.

You will find colored people living within a half a block of an embassy or around the corner from a new luxury apartment house. There is no reason why this should not be so, but the property-owners and the white residents do not agree. As the process continues, NW grows less swank and less desirable, while many of its rich residents move into Maryland suburbs such as Chevy Chase and across the river into Virginia.

The Negroes and other specific phenomena of NW will be considered in specialized chapters.

4. NOT-SO-TENDER TENDERLOIN

The District’s “red-light” region may be the largest on earth. That is because almost all of it is such, neither restricted by law, custom nor local habit to a particular part of town. But, more than any other, NW is the Tenderloin, in some ways more blatantly open than ever was New York’s infamous Satan’s Circus or Chicago’s 22nd Street.

Of all places, you would think Washington would be the last location a practical, professional prostitute would pick to pitch her camp. With so many more women than men, so many dames lonesome and far from home, on the eager upbeat for a meal, a drink or even a kind word, you’d figure mathematically, psychologically and pathologically that this would be a ghost town for the trollops.

Part of such traffic is always supported by tourists and strays. Washington has a large and constant visitation of these, but many other places have more and have virtually expunged street-walkers and entirely eradicated the sweatshops where such operators do homework. Yet in Washington they flourish, though they are supposedly verboten, and the Weary Winnies parade the pavements. It made a couple of graying Chicago boys homesick for their childhood.

Lorelles--as the Parisians call them--are in the Washington tradition, claim the capital by long-established squatters’ rights, almost by right of discovery.

The same stagecoaches which carried the first Congressmen to Washington 150 years ago brought also the first whores. They and their descendants have been here ever since, an integral, important segment of the population.

For the first 113 years they were protected by law. Segregation in the District was expunged by act of Congress in 1913, in the first year of the presidency of the school-teacher from Princeton.

In the early days of the Republic, whoring flourished as an essential and honorable trade. Transportation facilities were so primitive, many Congressmen and officials from backwoods sections had trouble getting to Washington themselves and would have found it impossible to transport their women. Trollops became an adjunct to legislation. Without them, it is doubtful whether a quorum could have been maintained for transaction of public business, which might not have been a bad idea sometimes.

The last compound of the trade was in what is now the Federal Triangle, between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Mall, from 10th to 15th Streets. The Willard Hotel, the Treasury and the White House are nearby--which made it convenient for all concerned.

In the Civil War, General Joe Hooker’s division was encamped in Washington to protect the President. It was bivouacked in what later became the official restricted district. One story, accounting for the term “hooker,” now worldwide, ascribes its origin to the habitat of local prostitutes, who gathered near the camp to pick up soldiers and remained after the soldiers left. When local blades went out for a night of hell-raising they said, “Let’s go over to Hooker’s.”

Another version ascribes the origin of the word to the Hook, in Baltimore, the town’s sailor section, where tarts picked up sea-faring men.

In the absence of a determination by H. L. Mencken, we will remain neutral as to the competing claims of the two neighboring cities, except to say that the residents of either ought to know what they’re talking about, because there are so many hookers in both.

Leaving out all occasionals in Washington who do it for fun or because of temporary monetary embarrassment, and counting only pros--those who have no other form of livelihood, some say there are at least ten thousand floozies actively in full-time business at this moment. We were solicited by half that number.

Most of these girls work as loners on the streets or in the cocktail lounges and bring their earnings back to their pimps. Some function through call services, via a headquarters phone-number, a cocktail lounge bartender, or a switchboard operator in a cheap hotel.

Many are tough and predatory. A 20-year old youth was stabbed and slashed after he turned down a street-corner proposition at Third and E. He fled when the woman drew a knife, but two colored men caught up to him and gave him the business.

Until recently, Washington was loaded with whore-houses, was in fact the last large city where this ancient and storied institution existed.

That’s because it was necessary to take care of the transients and the male government employes and officials away from their wives. The war and the post-war housing shortage virtually put the final kibosh on such dives here as it had done a few years earlier in other towns. Property became so valuable, landlords could do better by running it legitimately.

We spoke to a police captain who told us that obstacles were no longer placed in the way of the vice squad when it came to raiding these premises; but it is impossible to keep the girls off the streets and out of the hotel lobbies and cocktail lounges where they had transferred their business addresses.

Under the law of Washington, as well as all other municipalities, vice-squad detectives are forbidden to partake personally of forbidden wares while on raids. If they do, they have no case, for a prosecution then becomes “entrapment” and they are agents provocateurs.

During a recent raid, an operational plan was drawn up in advance. One of the cops, the handsomest, made the pick-up, and his confederates were supposed to crash in five minutes after he entered the room, which would give both time to disrobe, and that is enough evidence to make a collar.

But the raiders were late. The honest, hardworking cop went through the motions of undressing. Finally he had to get in bed with the wench; 15, 20, 30 minutes passed, and still no raiding party. He couldn’t stall her off any more.

By the time the doors were busted in, the evidence was null and void.

The figures in this chapter refer solely to white tarts. The black sisters are mentioned in another one.

Health records indicate that 50 percent of Washington’s white street-walkers are infected with venereal disease. With the colored ones, it goes up to 99 percent.

Many of the white women who solicit on the streets are young; it takes some time for these girls, fresh off the farms, to get the nerve to hustle in high-class hotels. Police have arrested girls 14, 15 and 16 hawking their bodies on the public highways. Many of these children, who should be home doing their schoolwork, left the hills when they were 12, after first having been raped by a local lout, usually a relative.

This story is not apocryphal. A very young street-walker was formally charged by the arresting officer with “practicing prostitution.”

“That’s not so, your honor,” she piped up. “I don’t practice any more. I know how now.”

The going rate for whores, the pick-up kind, is $20 and down. Pretty fair ones will take $10, and many will come along for $5. These prices are low compared with the current tariffs in other large cities, the reason being the extraordinary amateur competition.

Many of the girls roll their customers, mugg them or use knockout drops and then go through their pockets. But Washington’s prostitutes are not so hard-hearted as the street sirens in New York, where it is commonplace for one to be taken to a hotel-room and wake up doped and robbed, but never loved.

Many Washington nymphs conscientiously give value received.

In other cities the cops take stern measures against the untrustworthy whores. It is considered the lowest form of larceny to take advantage of a man with his pants down. New York police recently sent a young married woman to the penitentiary for five years for just such an outrage, but in Washington the appointed judges, many unrealistic and some downright dishonest, condone and encourage such unethical practices.

David L. Miller, 43, a resident of the Soldiers’ Home, picked up Alma Lee Dugent and took her to a 16th Street, NW, room. He said the 33-year-old woman robbed him of $2 in bills and a $30 wrist watch while he lay asleep. The woman pleaded guilty of petty theft.

“This man is as guilty as the woman,” thundered the judge. He ordered Miller to pay half of Mrs. Dugent’s $25 fine.

At this writing there are few really big madames operating in Washington. One of the last big operators was Carmen Beach, deported to Spain. But Nancy Pressler, who figured prominently in the conviction of Charles “Lucky” Luciano, international Mafia overlord now in Italy, when she turned state’s evidence against him in New York, is in business in the capital.

Though many of the girls work as independent contractors, except for the inevitable pimp, they are loosely organized for emergency purposes in the event of arrest, through bail-bond brokers and lawyers who specialize in underworld cases. The law staff of Charles Ford is frequently in court defending intercepted prostitutes, who usually get off with a small fine or a warning.

Many singed doves get their weekly check-ups from a physician in the 1700 block of K Street, who charges them $5 a visit. They learn about him through their community of interests.

We have studied commercial vice in most large cities. It is as a rule confined by public tolerance to certain streets or sections. When we wrote about New York and Chicago we were able to name these thoroughfares and state exactly what kind of merchandise was for sale in each. That is not so in Washington, where the city seems to be one huge red-light range, with tramps falling over themselves trying to grab unattached men.

We made a contact on the southeast corner of 14th and New York Avenue, NW, in front of the cigar store, with a young pedestrian who told us her name was Sue. She came originally from Florida and had been hustling in Washington for four years. We asked how to get in touch with her again and she said, “Just call the Astoria Hotel and ask the operator for Sue.” When we inquired her last name she said she was the only Sue there. The Astoria is a cheap hotel on 14th Street.

About two weeks later we were walking through the plush lobby of the new Statler Hotel and saw Sue ensconced in one of the comfortable armchairs. We stopped to watch. The slender blonde leaned over to a gent in another chair and asked for a light. In a couple of minutes they struck up a deal and walked into the elevator together. When she came down half an hour later we asked her how much she got.

“Ten bucks,” she exclaimed, “and the tight-wad stiffed me out of luck money.”

When we first came to Washington to work on this book almost everyone we spoke to, except cops who knew better, said we wouldn’t find any professional whores, because why should anyone pay when so many government girls are easy?

We took some of these friends--government officials, members of Congress, newspapermen and others, on our tours. And this is what we showed them:

We were solicited by two girls at Jack’s Grill, 3rd and G Sts. Three broads came up to us at 4th and G NW and asked us if we wanted company. We also saw girls bracing strange men at the Purity Lunch and Grill, 3rd and G NW, and at Mitchell Grill on the same corner. Mitchell’s is the hangout for precinct cops who saved its license after charges.

A white prostitute tried to date us at the Mai Fong restaurant, in Chinatown, and two other girls spoke to us at the China Clipper on 14th.

We could have made pick-ups--$10 asked, $5 bid--at the corner of 14th and R. We were approached by girls at the Casablanca Tavern, 421 11th St., NW, and the Covered Wagon, 14th and Rhode Island. The manager of an all-night diner back of the Statler offered to get us a bed companion for $15 if we bought a bottle of Seagrams for $8.50--cheap when you consider it was after hours and he didn’t have a license.

Few if any restaurants and bars employ B-girls. These are women who in Chicago circulate from table to table and hustle drinks on commission. They are illegal in the District, though quite common in Maryland, near the border and in Baltimore.

The femmes fatale who frequent Washington joints usually do so in free-handed reciprocity. The management steers lonesome men to the gals who hang around regularly. They, in turn, bring their customers in for drinks or tell them that’s where they can find them. A saloon which gets a reputation as the hangout for the best-looking dames finds its gross up.

When a girl closes a pitch, she usually has a place to take the guy, if he can’t or won’t bring her to his own room. Most Washington hotels, including the largest, are very broadminded about this, and if you don’t make noise they don’t make trouble. But this situation is changing as the hotels are getting more crowded and more independent.

Few small hotels, even if so inclined, properly police their guests. Some of the girls take their clients to the New Colonial and the Fox.

A former madame named Jackie is now running a rooming-house at 703 Mt. Vernon, where some of the girls steer their customers. You can usually find seven or eight girls hanging around Ivy House Inn, on New York Avenue.

Among the most active hookers are Kay Saunders and Peggy Proctor, both 29, who were once arrested while entertaining 15 male customers. At this writing they are still in business on the second floor of a house in the 2300 block, Lincoln Road, NE.

One of Washington’s most famous characters is a toothless old hag known only as Diane. She hangs around 14th and Florida. Diane reminds old New Yorkers of the fabulous Broadway Rose, who used to panhandle in front of Lindy’s until she was carted to the bug house.

But, unlike Rose, Diane is an out-and-out hustler. Once upon a time, they say, she was a good-looker. But her main trouble seemed to be that she liked her work too much to commercialize it.

We spoke to a man in his late 30’s who remembered her when he was a school boy. He said the kids used to pick her up because she would take “small change.” Now some of her old customers, matured and prosperous men of the world, occasionally drive by her corner to stake her to a hand-out.

All she can get now are colored men, “winos” and dregs. But she refuses to retire.

We picked up a girl by the name of Doris who had just been discharged from the Federal Hospital for narcotic addicts in Lexington, Kentucky. The story she told us illustrates how girls are recruited for prostitution in the District.

Doris said she lived in a small town in West Virginia. She and a girl high-school mate occasionally did a little free-lance whoring on Saturday nights, on call of a bell-boy in the local hotel. Once he sent them to a room occupied by two men. One, whose name was Grigsby, tried to sell the girls on coming to Washington. He said he’d put them in a swell house. The teenagers were afraid of the big city. Grigsby told them the landlady of the house was in the next room and called her in. She was a motherly sort. They consented to come with her.

They found themselves in the house of a madame named Billie Cooper, on 7th St., in the 1000 block. Doris told us she was an instantaneous success in the Cooper menage. She was only 17, fresh, buxom and bucolic. Madame Cooper’s clients were charmed. After she’d been in the house a few weeks, the madame asked Doris if she’d like to get a “kick.” She produced a hypodermic needle and gave the child a shot in the arm. Doris liked the sensation, wanted more. This went on for several weeks, Doris said, and every day Billie Cooper increased the frequency of the shots.

One day Doris woke up, nauseated and ill.

Billie Cooper exclaimed, “You’re hooked!”

She informed Doris she had become a dope fiend, that henceforth Doris must pay for the shots.

The girl went into debt, though she was taking in up to $50 a day and, no matter how much she made, the dope always cost more. She knew no one else who sold it. She was truly hooked, which was Billie Cooper’s original purpose, to keep the young girl in her joint and take her money away from her.

Billie Cooper’s clientele was mostly Chinese. When U. S. narcotics agents raided her establishment at 5 A.M., gaining entrance with a ladder borrowed from a fire-house, so two T-men would get into Billie’s bedroom before she had a chance to flush the narcotics down the drain, they found several Chinese customers in the place. While the search was still on, 15 more came to the door and were admitted; of these two were officials of the Chinese embassy.

In the trial it developed that Billie Cooper, who was sentenced for violation of the narcotics laws, was charging Doris $7 a deck for heroin, which she bought at half that price from Chinese peddlers. The F.B.I. proceeded against Grigsby for white slavery violation and he, too, was convicted.

Doris swore to us that she was off the stuff now. She said she was living with a Chinaman who worked in a gambling house in Chinatown.

The glamorous brothels are no more. Not since the notorious Hopkins Institute was closed by the F.B.I. some years ago has there been anything operating on a lavish scale. Now there are some so-called masseurs who use that classification as a blind, but nothing on the grand scale.

When F.B.I. men raided the Hopkins Institute, an innocuous-looking massage parlor in the 2700 block on Connecticut Ave., they uncovered one of the most sensational call-houses ever in Washington. Not only was the clientele accommodated at the so-called Institute, but a phone call could arrange a date on short notice almost anywhere in the District. The establishment kept a detailed and up-to-date written record on each patron, fees paid, dates of service, and eccentricities. Girls there said this list contained entries that could flabbergast some very prominent persons, in and out of Washington.

The proprietor of the Hopkins Institute was one George Francis Whitehead, who lived in New York and seldom visited the place. Profits were sent to him weekly by the “resident manager,” Diane Carter, who was vice-president in charge of the operation. The Institute was established originally by someone else and was bought by Whitehead in 1941. He ran it for several months, then engaged Diane Carter to manage it at a salary out of earnings. Her principal duties entailed accepting calls, arranging to send girls to answer the calls, and to have girls available on the premises.

Whitehead left Washington in 1941, after the girls began to complain that his presence was hurting business because of his excessive drinking, untidy habits and uncouth deportment. He did not live up to the dignity and spirit of an Institute. The girls threatened to strike.

The record system was originated by the first operator and passed on to Whitehead. In addition to other entries, initials of each girl filling an assignment and the amount of the fee were noted. For the fees a code was used, to conceal the fact that some paid more than others. The word “FITZGERALD” was the key to the code. Each letter stood for a digit, i.e., F was 1, I was 2, T was 3, etc. Thus the symbol “FD” beside the name of a customer meant $10; “TD” meant $30, etc. This method was used also to bamboozle Whitehead, if he checked on his share of the proceeds.

The U.S. Commissioner issued warrants for the arrests of Whitehead, Diane Carter and 13 girls involved, on charges of violations of the White Slave Traffic Act. Whitehead was arrested in New York and extradited. Two indictments were returned against Whitehead, Diane and nine others. Whitehead pleaded guilty to both and was sentenced to one to four years on the Act and to eighteen months on conspiracy. But he was adjudged insane and committed to a mental institution.

Diane Carter pleaded guilty to both indictments and was sentenced to three to nine months on each, the sentences to run concurrently. Seven other defendants were found guilty.

The Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the convictions of the seven, held the violations were of legislation of the District of Columbia and not of the White Slave Traffic Act.

But the racket was broken. The place never reopened. The F.B.I. seized the files and never revealed a name, but hundreds of men still tremble when they remember the Hopkins Institute. Some still attempt pressure to try to get their names blacked out. They have no success with the F.B.I.

5. HOBOES WITH NO HORIZON

The pride of the bum, even when he has abandoned the virile vitality to hold out his paw as a panhandler, is a terminal twinkle of consciousness that he is only resting between Election Days, when he is a man. These derelicts have swung cities and states. But in Washington even that last link to a reason for being is lost.

No Hinky Dink, no Pendergast caters to him, gives him free beer and rot-gut or a kip in the flop on the joint. No eager dirty duke stretches forth to greet the floater and the repeater. He can do nothing for anyone.

So he is just a shade lower, lousier and grizzlier than the ones at whom you shudder as you pass them in your own town. Agglomerations of beachcombers vary little, even with differences of climate. Every city has its Skid Row. But Washington has three of them. Like everything else here, they are departmentalized. No alphabetical designations have yet been allocated to them, but don’t despair.

One is for the general riffraff; the second is for old-timers; the third is exclusively for sailors.

But first let us tell you about 9th Street--NW, natch--and specifically where it crosses Pennsylvania Ave.

Stand on one side of the avenue and you are in the shadow of the great marble structure which houses the forces of law and order. This is the Department of Justice Building, and the corner we’re standing on is the entrance to the F.B.I.

Cross Pennsylvania Avenue and walk into 9th Street, and you are an intruder in the most publicized Skid Row of the three--they call it the Bowery here, to distinguish it from the others. As such thoroughfares go, this is pretty classy-looking. It is wide. All Washington streets are kept clean, so neither rubbish nor drunks litter the pavements--anyway not by day. By nightfall, topers rendered hors de combat on smoke and cheap wine pile up in the doorways.

This part of 9th Street is packed solid with “play lands,” featuring pin-ball machines, peep show movies and souvenir stands which sell composition statuettes of the White House and Washington Monument, and embroidered pillows tastefully lettered with “Love to Mom from the Nation’s Capital.”

But this human dump lacks romance and legend. No songs are written about it. There are no grisly tall tales, such as are told about the Barbary Coast, Basin Street and Chicago, much near the Loop and most of the old Levee. This is merely a street of convenience, moved up from around the corner when Pennsylvania Avenue itself was flophouse lane and Al Jolson and Bill Robinson performed on the sidewalk for pennies.

There’s no law agin’ stripping or peeling in Washington, but it doesn’t pay off well enough to build a permanent industry around it. The old Gayety Theatre, which ran pretty high-class traveling burleycue, is now, probably only temporarily, a legit house. Meanwhile, the burlesque fans buy their titillation in the cheap movie houses adjoining the Gayety. Sometimes they amplify their celluloid bills with “living dolls,” at other times the customers have to get their kicks out of sex movies advertised “For Adults Only.” An ad before us, of the Leader Theatre, says, “Burlesque’s brightest stars on screen.” The day’s program provided snake-charming Zorita in “I Married a Savage”; body-peeling Ann Corio in “Call of the Jungle”; and Maggie Hart, the stripper, in “Lure of the Isles,” plus “two more thrills.”

In and in front of cheap saloons, cocktail lounges and lunch rooms, are tarts, reefer-peddlers and novelty salesmen whose chief stock in trade is “sanitary rubber goods.” Pistols are on sale at $20. The local law isn’t tough on gun-toters.

Though Washington’s legal liquor closing on weekdays is 2 A.M., this street, like all in the city, is deserted early. Long before midnight its habitués have already made sleeping arrangements or are snoring in the alleys, cheap overnight lodgings or hallways, paralyzed by alky or cheap domestic red wine.

Crossing 9th Street here, is D Street, known as Pawnbroker’s Row. But get this--hockshops are against the law.

When you see a shop with a sign reading “Pawnbroker’s Exchange,” don’t believe it. The window looks like any “Uncle’s” anywhere in the world, with a profusion of new and used articles ranging from mink coats to tin watches. But that’s the build-up. These exchanges are only second-hand stores which buy and sell uncalled for articles pledged in other jurisdictions, where the three balls of the De Medicis are legal.

The temporarily embarrassed visitor, in need of cash quickly, often gets rooked in one of these pseudo-hock shops. Take the case of the stranger who runs short of petty cash until he can wire home. Suppose he has a $200 watch which he wants to put up for security. Needing only perhaps $25, that’s all he asks for, figuring when he redeems it in a few days he will pay only that, plus accrued interest. Yet when he asks the pawnbroker’s exchange man for $25, he is actually selling the $200 watch for that.

Some of the more legitimate shops get around the law by guaranteeing to sell the article back to the owner at a specified rate after a specified number of days. What usually happens to the unsophisticated is that they have lost their security for a fraction of its value, because it has already been sold.

Little effort is made to police the Bowery stretches of 9th St. The armed forces maintain a few MPs, but practically anything goes, short of mayhem, and even that is not uncommon.

The tomatoes who solicit the young and lonesome men in uniform in this neighborhood are pretty low. The five bucks they ask, plus three dollars for a room in a handy flea-bag, should be reported to the Better Business Bureau, considering the quality of the merchandise and the strong possibilities of picking up souvenirs of the sort they don’t display on counters.

Interspersed between the shooting galleries, theatres and hamburger hideaways are the usual bargain men’s clothing stores, army and navy outfitters, etc. One of the clothing stores, visible from the windows of the Department of Justice, was built by money inherited from a gangster who isn’t around to enjoy it, due to a sit-down strike in an electric chair.

This street is a little too fast, flighty and noisy for the old-time bums and stiffs. It is for younger men. The perennials, who know every flop-house and smoke-joint in the country, and travel from town to town with the seasons and the harvests, prefer the Skid Row at 3rd and G Streets, NW and vicinity, around the corner from Chinatown. Come to think of it, Skid Rows all over the continent are around the corner from Chinatown.

We call this Mission Row, because it’s where the mission stiffs hang out. These are the hoboes, bums and tramps who get their morning’s coffee and their night’s sleep on the benches of a gospel shop nearby on H Street, in return for listening to a “Come to the Lord” sermon. Mission Row is the best-looking Skid Row in the country. The streets are broad, with grass and trees, and most of the set-back buildings are reconverted residences with stoops and a surviving air of charm. We have been assured it is refreshing to wake up in the gutter here with a smoke hangover.

You find no brassy newcomers in these quarters. Young tramps abhor missions. They prefer 9th Street, with its zip and excitement. The mission stiff, almost an extinct species, is on in years and no longer troubled by dames. His animal needs are taken care of by a bowl of soup and as much red-eye as he can drink. If only one of the two is available, the former can be dispensed with. Some of these mission-moochers are junkies. But dope, like everything else, is suffering from inflation, and the wherewithal is forbidding.

The Greek colony, large for the size of the town, runs into this Bowery. Many Hellenes are gamblers. Hecht’s Hotel, at 6th and G, where girls take their men, was owned by a Greek arrested last month in New York on narcotics charges. The Hellenic Social Club, next door, is a gambling house.

There’s one Skid Row no visitors and few Washingtonians ever see. That’s Sailors’ Row. Unlike the other two, which are in NW, this is in SE--8th Street, down near the Navy Yard. After Chicago we thought nothing could make us blink. But some of the dives on 8th Street made it. At the northern approach of this stretch of howling hell are a couple of Filipino joints where bus-boys, house-boys and valets pick up white whores. Eighth Street runs into Sailors’ Row proper, a line of groggeries and lunch-rooms that hit bottom.

The undermanned Washington cops can do little to keep it orderly. The Navy’s shore patrol takes over most of the policing. We saw Navy paddy-wagons in front of Guy’s, the Ship’s Cafe and the Penguin. But the SP’s seldom make a pinch unless there are fights. We visited four or five of the bars--not alone, because hereabouts, even in the shadow of the Capitol’s dome, outsiders who travel in parties of less than four are crazy.

We saw hustlers working in the Band Box, the Ship’s Cafe, Guy’s and the Penguin. These were the frowsiest broads we have ever seen, dilapidated, toothless, drunk, swinging the shabby badge of their shoddy trade, long-looped handbags.

The worst and the cheapest were in the Ship’s Cafe, where two girls--call them that in charity--offered themselves to us at $3. The going price in the other places was $5. They circulated along the bar and from booth to booth and from table to table. They do not work in these saloons as B girls or house prostitutes. They use them as points of contact with their trade, apparently with connivance of the management for the business they bring in. In these Sailors’ Row joints we saw many amateurs, typical sailor-crazy bobby-soxers, servant girls and Victory girls. These may ask for money but can be talked out of it. There are many cheap hotels and rooming-houses close by. But the dark streets or alleys are free and busy.

6. GREEN PASTURES

Agonized oratory through the decades has been banging against the walls of the Capitol, demanding that Washingtonians be given the precious privilege of the vote. It is as futile as spitting against the wind.

And we will tell you why there will be no vote--Confidential.

If Washington got home rule, its first mayor would be a gentleman affectionately known to his constituency as Puddin’ Head Jones. And Mr. Jones is a Negro.

We will tell you what no one else has dared to publish--there are more Negroes than whites in Washington. We will prove it by incontrovertible figures.

There is an amazing underground proclivity in all big cities, south, north and everywhere, to fake the facts on Negro population. For some distorted reason, both races conspire in this foolish flummery.

Census figures are off the beam. They always lag in summing up minority races. Most of the migrant census-takers assume that they should help to make the picture as light as possible. If a Negro is not unmistakably black, he is encouraged, if he does not think of it himself, to be listed as a Cuban, a Puerto Rican, a West Indian, a South American, Filipino, Indian, Mexican or even Eskimo; the blood of all these is sprinkled through many generations of admixture.

There is no way of calculating how many light-skinned citizens can and do “pass.” Some Negroes sleep in shifts in crowded premises, so that a count in the regular course would register about one-third of the true total. Many are house servants and these do not go into the tally where they are employed, nor are they home during the hours when enumerators call.

More Negroes than whites are police characters, as will be demonstrated. And as a rule members of the race are wary and suspicious of questioners from “the law.” Many census-takers deliberately duck more than superficial duties in predominantly dark districts, because they are confused and afraid after getting hostile receptions and responses.

But in Washington there is one indisputable check.

The District of Columbia has a single Jim Crow law, segregating Negroes and whites--in schools. When pupils are enrolled they must reveal their true race. There can be no tampering with these statistics.

And in the winter of 1950–51 there were registered the following in all public schools through all grades from elementary to teachers’ college:

Negroes, 47,807; whites, 46,080.

Broken down, these figures are even more definitive. There are more Negroes than is evidenced by the bare totals. Negroes, because of their economic outlook, do not keep their children in school as long as do whites. That is sharply proven by the enrollment in the senior high schools:

Negroes, 4,787; whites, 7,176.

But there are 10,146 colored children in junior high schools compared to 9,270 whites.

The attendance at parochial and private schools is minor. Washington has the largest per capita Negro Catholic population in the United States.

Even an excess of 10 per cent of whites in the grand total and allowing for unmarried government workers would still indicate a Negro majority over all, because of the earlier departure from school of Negro children, as shown above.

This reveals a startling metamorphosis in a ten-year period. In 1940 the school record showed 66,000 whites and 36,000 Negroes. Thus there has since been a decline of 20,000 white children and a rise of 12,000 Negro children. The over-all decline is due to removal of white families to suburbs.

Negroes lived in Washington before the first President chose the rolling land along the Potomac to bear his name. Slavery was legal in the capital until the emancipation. The population of Washington about doubled between 1860 and 1870. Much of this influx represented slaves who escaped from plantations and got through the Union lines during the Civil War. But the big swell came when thousands of ex-slaves, free and foot-loose for the first time in their lives, left the destroyed and deserted Dixie farms and headed for Washington, which was not only near Virginia and Maryland and the Carolinas, but which exercised a fascination for them because they felt safer near their savior and their demigod, Abraham Lincoln.

Until the middle 70’s, Washingtonians of all colors had home rule, elected their own officials under a territorial form of government similar to that now practiced in Alaska and Hawaii, where mayors, legislators, judges and other lower-level officials are elected. They sent a delegate to Congress.

Long before LaGuardia, Marcantonio, Ed Flynn and Ed Kelly found the formula of organizing Negroes into blocs which could be voted en masse to perpetuate control of left-wing and criminal political groups, that was old stuff in D.C., where it was invented by one “Boss” Shepherd in Washington, the first large city in the country where Negroes were allowed to vote, and where there were enough of them to throw any weight as citizens.

Washington had been a sewer of iniquity during the Civil War; when Shepherd took over control it turned infinitely worse. The stench asphyxiated the members of Congress, who were exposed to it so intimately, and they exercised a forgotten constitutional prerogative, “to exclusively govern the District.” The polling booths made swell bonfires.

As will be seen, however, under the unique voteless system, the Negroes now exercise far more power, and Puddin’ Head Jones is by common consent the “mayor” of Washington’s Black Belt. As we progress you will be let in on how that could come about.

Despite the high enrollment of Negro children in public schools where they enjoy facilities for education equal to white children, Negroes continue to have an illiteracy far above the full population. In 1942, illiteracy in the District was only 1 percent for all races, whereas the Negro group showed 4 percent. Weighing these figures against the proportions of population in 1942 would seem to indicate that the Negroes were about 15 times as illiterate as whites.

Much later figures are available, however. Only 4 percent of Washington’s white youths who took the Army’s mental tests in 1950 failed, but nearly 29 percent of the prospective colored recruits were turned back.

New York’s Harlem is self-contained. Though Chicago’s Bronzeville has gone over its borders and set up tributary colonies in other sections of the city, it is still the center of Negro life there and contains most of its colored population.

But Washington’s Black Belt is no belt at all. It is sprawled all over, infiltrating every mile and almost every block in sections which for 150 years were lily white.

In New York, when you refer to Harlem, everyone knows what part of town you’re talking about. Similarly, Bronzeville and Central Avenue have definite meanings in Chicago and Los Angeles. In Washington, you have no way of indicating Darktown, because the Negro section has no generic name and it isn’t a section. It is all of Washington.

What is occurring in Washington is happening on a lesser scale in large northern population centers, except probably Manhattan, where Harlem is geographically restrained by Columbia University and Central Park, though Puerto Ricans are generously overflowing its borders on both sides.

In Chicago, instead of being bound in black ghettos, Negroes have preempted many sections, including former residences of millionaires. They live along wide and vernal boulevards in once splendid apartments and luxurious private homes with greeneries, and in palaces of packers and pioneer pirates.

This process is being repeated in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit and especially Philadelphia.

The South, with its restrictive practices against Negroes and its underpayment of them, is gradually being denuded of its cheap labor, which is drawn North.

The recent census showed the population of most metropolitan cities remained stable. But their suburbs, beyond city limits, increased in many from 50 to 100 percent or more. This growth of Suburbia was made by whites who left as Negroes came. That kept city populations in status quo.

The words used to paint the picture in Chicago may be repeated in Washington, but with emphasis and re-emphasis. Here they took mile after mile of fine old dwellings on wide, tree-lined streets. And they also overran the slums. But Washington, despite the anguished yelps of the do-gooders, long was and now is practically slum-free.

Some rookery regions are on F St. and New Jersey Ave. near the Union Station and Capitol. But there are poor whites living in hovels equally depressed. On the other hand, 95 per cent of the Negroes live in lodgings as good as and better than most white residents’. Negroes have taken over most of the desirable blocks near the government offices and downtown.

We have before us an article on “The Negro in Washington,” in a recent issue of _Holiday_ magazine, a slick-paper, 50-cent pleader for leftist causes, published, curiously enough, by the staid, rich and conservative house of Curtis, owners of the _Saturday Evening Post_. This effusion is illustrated with four pages purporting to show the Negro’s treatment in Democracy’s capital, which the editors call a “democratic contradiction.” There are photographs of Negro children at play in cluttered backyards which are called typical of the city’s overcrowded Negro slums. Another picture shows a Negro woman in an alley dwelling; another is captioned, “Capitol Dome presents a contrast of obvious irony to the Negro slums which it overshadows. Overcrowding, dirt and disease are all prevalent.”

Your authors traveled up and down 1,000 miles of streets and boulevards, 404 of alleys, not once but a dozen times. They saw the slums illustrated in _Holiday_ magazine, but they saw few others, because there are few others. At the most, 20,000, of a total of 400,000 Negroes, live in these “slums,” which, even at their worst, are turreted castles compared to the degraded dwellings in which Negroes and myriad whites are forced to live in New York.

_Holiday_ did not print one picture showing the thousands of fine homes and small apartment buildings in which most of Washington’s Negroes live.

Cup your ear and we’ll let you into a little secret about these “slums.” Whether you read _Holiday_ or not, you’ve seen the pictures, because they are the ones which are always used by Reds and Pinks to point up to the world how gruesomely America treats its dark step-children. The reason you’ve seen these pictures--always with the Capitol dome in the background--is that there are no others available.

Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the chief propagandists who exploited this “blot” on Washington. This particular slum, always photographed, always on every sight-seeing itinerary, is only a couple of blocks long and is surrounded on all sides by presentable Negro homes. But this slum is permitted to remain behind the Capitol only so the lefties will have something to breast-beat over. It remained there during the Roosevelt administration, when public housing and public building projects were reshaping the face of Washington, only because an official who was in Mrs. Roosevelt’s confidence ordered it undisturbed--for propaganda purposes.

The headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is in a ramshackle old house near the New Jersey Avenue slums. These are the specious ones referred to elsewhere, which are kept untouched and maintained to impress visitors with the shocking degradation forced on Negroes in view of the Capitol dome.

The N.A.A.C.P. is rich and could locate in one of the prosperous, more imposing Negro sections. But that would wipe out the psychological advantage of bringing its visitors through the stage-managed slave-quarters area.

Under Negro occupancy, some of the best dwellings in Washington, once residences of ambassadors, cabinet officers and the hated capitalists, now look like the slums the Fair Dealers decry.

In Washington, a Southern town with a Southern mentality, Negroes are not popular, are not accepted as brothers except by a nagging and noisy minority. The Negro is not Jim Crowed in street cars. There is no law against a Negro’s attending a theatre with whites, eating in the same restaurant or sleeping in the same hotel. But the law has upheld proprietors who refuse to serve a Negro, though United States Supreme Court decisions have gone otherwise elsewhere.

Yet there is considerable intermixture between the races. It is not uncommon to see white girls with colored men, especially jazz band musicians, who seem to exert a magnetic appeal for Caucasian women all over the country. Many Negro madames and pimps employ white girls for their colored trade. In some New Deal left-wing circles it is considered chi chi to meet socially and even sexually with Negroes, though, because of accepted restrictions against Negroes in the better spots, these contacts are not evident in the better public gathering places.

White people frequent colored night spots. Most of the reputed 480 Negro after-hour bottle-clubs cater also to whites, though no white club admits Negroes except possibly a prominent entertainer or band leader.

It is not uncommon to find white women living with colored men. Practically no instance has come up in recent years of white men consorting with colored women, except temporary pick-ups or in brothels.

A raid on the Logan Hotel, at 13th Street and Rhode Island Avenue, disclosed a white girl living with a Negro. She was the daughter of a Texas physician.

Police answered a trouble call at 17th and Q Streets and found a white girl, employed by the Social Security Administration, visiting with a colored janitor. He confessed that six other white girls from the same U. S. agency visited him regularly for intercourse, one each night--and paid him for it.

Another white girl employed by the Government was arrested at her home in Alexandria, after having received marijuana from a colored musician named Brisco. Brisco, well-known in Washington, mailed the marijuana from New York. According to U.S. Narcotics Agents, two white Washington girls under 18 admitted smoking marijuana with him and said they had unnatural sex relations with him--they were afraid of pregnancy.

Due to determined efforts of local reformers, Jim Crow seems to be on the way out in Washington, as it is everywhere and should be. Until 1949, the city’s six public swimming pools were restricted, to either whites or Negroes. In 1948, the last year of such rules, the total number of swimmers was 415,000, of which only 69,000 were Negroes. Two pools were set aside for colored and four for white. In 1949, when there were no racial bars, total attendance dropped off to 332,000. One pool, Anacostia, was shut down for most of the summer after disturbances started when colored swimmers first attempted to use the pool. McKinley’s white patrons stopped using it completely.

It was hoped that whites would have learned tolerance by 1950, and toward the end of the season many of the loudest crack-pots brayed about the success of the new policy. In the fall of 1950, Eleanor Roosevelt, in her syndicated column, mumbled about how all friction was ended and the millennium had arrived. As usual she was wrong. Official figures released a few days later showed attendance had skidded another 33 percent, down to a total of 220,000, of which--and get this--only one-third were Negroes. In other words, whites had almost stopped using the pools; on the other hand, there were barely more Negro patrons than when the pools were restricted. Agitation was heard from tax-payers to shut the pools, now run at a heavy loss to the city.

Only in public schools does legal Jim Crowism hold out. Recently a performance of a tableau representing the Sesquicentennial of the founding of the city was banned from the stage of a high school auditorium because it had a mixed cast. The school board said: “Congress makes the law and we enforce it.” There is a technical question about whether a colored member of the board may visit white schools, and vice versa.

Adopting tactics employed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People elsewhere, Washington Negroes and whites who are trying to break down racial restrictions often picket restaurants and other facilities which refuse to serve Negroes, and sometimes stage sitdown strikes within them. After such an experiment in the John R. Thompson chain, the demonstrators for racial equality were arrested for disorderly conduct and sentenced by a judge who at this writing has not been overruled.

But the lot of Negroes is enviable compared to that of their brethren elsewhere. We called Chicago’s Bronzeville Black Paradise. But that was before we saw Washington’s Negro Heaven.

The life of the Washington Negro is made pleasant by the force of many circumstances. The odds are he is employed by the government, which has raised salaries. If he doesn’t work for the government, he serves government workers. He shares in the highest per capita earnings, yet the cost of living in Washington is not so high as in New York and many other large cities. All streets, in white sections or colored, are broad and tree-lined.

No Negro is ever fired from a government job if it can possibly be helped. When necessary to cut down a staff, the whites go first, reversing the process of private business.

If they can’t do their work, whites are hired to do it over for them. An instance, typical of thousands, occurred in the Bureau of the Census, where five Negro women were so inefficient that their department head requested permission to discharge them. His immediate superior almost had a stroke.

“If Eleanor hears about this,” he gasped, “there’ll be hell to pay.”

Eleanor no longer lives in the White House. But she is still a potent force in Washington, where her kitchen cabinet continues to rule the nation that President Truman thinks he rules.

The upshot of the matter was that the section head was told to keep the five colored women and to hire five white girls to do the work over for them, on the night shift.

The same sort of favoritism is shown Negro job-holders and applicants throughout the whole governmental set-up in the District. When a white man wants to become a cop he takes a stiff civil service test and is subject to a searching investigation. Most of the Negroes who have been getting on the force recently did it on political pull.

Kid-glove handling of Negroes is the rule in every phase of Washington life, in addition to favoritism in appointments to the public payroll.

Apparently no effort is made by the police and other public authorities to enforce the liquor laws in the dark sections. The local Alcoholic Beverage Control code provides that no one may be served while standing. Bar customers must be seated on stools, and even then may be served only beer and wines. Hard liquor may be consumed only at tables. This is strictly enforced in resorts catering to whites. But almost all colored saloons sell liquor openly over the bar, where drinkers stand--as long as they can stand. Few attempts are made to restrict gambling or policy-slip sales in the colored sections.

Almost 500 Negro after-hour clubs are running, most of them not even bothering to get club charters. Thousands of Negro flats are operated as blind pigs, where liquor, mostly gin, is sold openly to all comers at all hours. None has a license, naturally.

Occasionally hokum raids are made and sometimes the defendants are fined $25. Next day they are in business as usual. Honest policemen are afraid to make too many pinches in Negro neighborhoods for fear the pinkos will list them as “nigger-haters” and send their names up above--maybe even to the White House. One cop whose name we will not mention told us that one night after he pulled in a colored after-hour spot, word came directly from the White House to the 13th precinct station, in which the arrest had been made, to lay off. F.D.R. was President then.

Despite the maudlin tears of reformers about the horrible conditions existing in Washington’s “Negro Ghetto,” there are probably more new Cadillac convertibles being driven from its doors than from any others. Sleek, new, expensive convertibles of the flashier brands have become the sine qua non of Negro policy-peddlers and reefer-pushers here, as well as in all other major American cities. Respectable people are returning to the old-fashioned closed models for fear their bankers will wonder what they’ve been up to.

Yet, despite the flashy visible prosperity of Washington’s Negroes, a disproportionate number are on public relief. Many draw dole and social security checks under one name while gainfully employed at one or two jobs under other names. This racket, invented for the residents of New York’s Harlem and Little Puerto Rico, has been brought to its full flower in Washington.

The humanitarians and the New Dealers, worrying about colored votes in the northern states, help to put butterfat in the colored man’s milk in the capital. If the colored man works it right, he can get a relief check the first day he lands in Washington.

This story wasn’t published, but the federal agents who made the pinch and compiled the record had carried it on their chests so long, they ached to unburden it where it wouldn’t come back and bite them. When they broke in on a Negro whom they suspected of selling narcotics, he indignantly asserted, “You can’t arrest me. I am a friend of Mrs. Roosevelt.”

To prove it, he brought out a couple of letters from the First Lady, one of which was addressed “Dear Jim,” or “Joe,” stating she was sorry to hear that his relief check had not arrived on time, and she would see that he was not pushed around in the future--he shouldn’t worry. The boys arrested him and got a conviction.

Mrs. Roosevelt, while in the White House and out, sincerely sought to improve the position of Negroes everywhere. But sometimes her efforts went to such extremes she hurt the cause. Once she made a reservation for a small banquet party of sixty at the swank Hay-Adams House, across the street from the White House. When the managers discovered it was to be an interracial affair they cancelled it. On September 14, 1950, Mrs. Roosevelt tried to register three Negroes in her party into the Willard Hotel. She was staying elsewhere, with friends. The Willard refused.

White property-owners tremble at the financial danger that would result should Negroes crash white residential areas.

But entry is made through a tactic known as “block-busting,” developed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and utilized by it and by white real estate agents out to make a buck.

Government agents first heard about it when they arrested a Negro woman on narcotics charges and asked her for her occupation. She replied with dignity, “I’m a block-buster.” She explained to the mystified T-Men that she was employed by a real estate shark and her duties were as follows:

When her employers had scouted an all-white neighborhood they thought ripe for plucking, they would find a white property-owner who, for a bonus, was willing to sell his property to a Negro. If the place was worth $25,000 he would be bribed with as much as another $25,000 to sell out. There are few neighborhoods where not one greedy white man could be found after a searching survey by private detectives.

After the block-buster--in her own name--made the purchase, she and her large Negro family moved in. Immediately, all other property in the neighborhood sank in value and most of it was thrown on the market. The far-sighted realtors then bought it up at greatly reduced values. Then they resold it or rented it to Negroes at inflated prices, and started another Negro island in the city.

When this was accomplished, the block-buster moved on to another base and repeated the process.

You can sense a neighborhood in the process of being block-busted by “For Sale” signs on porches or lawns, oddities in this otherwise overpopulated, under-housed metropolis.

In cities where Negroes and whites live in separate and distinct sections, opportunities for racial strife and violence are rare. In Washington, where they live side by side all over, use the same street cars and buses, patronize the same stores and constantly brush shoulders on the streets, there is friction which sometimes flares high and hot. Some of their leaders advise Negroes to be assertive, aggressive, to demonstrate their equality. They pick fights and needle Caucasians, most of whom are afraid to make complaints, because when they get into court the federally appointed Yankee judge, whose robe was bestowed upon him by a “civic rights” President, in many instances finds for the Negro and castigates the white complainants, especially policemen.

Among Negroes on the national political level who most zealously fight to assert prerogatives of their race in the capital are:

Congressman William Dawson, vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, chairman of the mighty House Committee on Executive Expenditures. He represents Chicago’s vile Bronzeville and is a patronage-dispenser for the malodorous Cook County Democratic Central Committee. He is extremely friendly with big shots of the infamous Mafia, which controls all crime and corruption in the United States. Before a Congressional Committee, Dawson was charged with being the defender of the rackets. The charge was made by the late Bill Drury, former Chicago police captain, who was slain by assassins who ambushed him in an alley after Drury tried to reach the Kefauver Committee in an effort to put the full inside story of the underworld on the record.

Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Democrat from New York’s Harlem, who usually voted hand-in-glove with Marcantonio. He is supported in every election by the successors of “Dutch” Schultz, whose policy-slip and murder ring had its headquarters in what is now Powell’s district. He is married to Hazel Scott, Negro pianist, who has been frequently cited by Congressional and Legislative committees as indicating pro-Russian proclivities. She has denied it. He and his wife live in a swank Long Island home, far from his bailiwick, and ride in a chauffeur-driven $6,000 limousine.

William Hastie, former governor of the Virgin Islands, now the first Negro on the exalted bench of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals. In volume 17 of the published records of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives, Judge Hastie was cited as belonging to at least five Communist-front organizations. He was, however, subsequently appointed to the Federal bench by President Truman.

Wherever Negroes live, they have their own snobberies, castes and social strata. Rich ones and light ones are contemptuous of the poor and the black, and toward them they more often use the tabooed word “nigger” than do most whites. And they add one extra prejudice, not found among whites--resentment of the native-born Negro for the recent comer from the Southern plantations.

7. MIGHTY LIKE A ROSE

There is a daily in Washington (as there are others in principal cities) which never identifies a Negro as such unless he wins a Nobel prize or is selected the rookie of the year.

We protest. News cannot be honestly reported by arbitrarily slurring facts. Of almost all other non-whites, many are marked by recognizable names. Most Negroes have Anglo-Saxon names, many of them adopted centuries ago from their slave-owners. For instance, Thompson’s Ebenezer evolved into Ebenezer Thompson.

That same newspaper does not bar true and fair reports of misdeeds by people named O’Rourke or Ginsberg or Dinkelspiel or Stanislawsky or Protopulus or Garcia or Potapinsky or Napolitano. Concealment of the identity as Negro distorts the truth, for the natural assumption then is that the miscreants are white and we have an unjustified libel on the Caucasian population.

The most rabid Negro papers publish the crimes of their own people and then editorialize on the cruel inequalities which help to cause them. That is the proper use of freedom of the press. Arbitrary withholding of vital facts is an impertinence and a misuse of the common franchise.

Fancy if you can what this chapter could not tell were we to suppress racial references.

Of every four felonies and other breaches of the law in the grades where a defendant has the right of trial by jury more than three are committed by Negroes. That is not confidential, but official. Arrests for Part One felonies--the more serious--in 1949 were as follows:

Colored males, 7,715. Colored females, 1,085. Total colored, 8,800. White male, 2,396. White female, 309. Total white, 2,705.

Here is a breakdown on some:

Murder, colored 40; white 8. Manslaughter, colored 6; white 1. Rape, colored 140; white 23. Aggravated assault, colored 2,651; white 381. Burglary, colored 2,322; white 640.

Negrophiles and impractical activists for brotherhood of all God’s children campaign to force newspapers to omit racial identification of the lawless and hide it with white lies. That is the foggy, unrealistic policy of visionaries, sparked by the cold, hard practicality of Reds.

Arrests for Part Two felonies (less serious) and important misdemeanors showed an even higher incidence of Negro crime.

Estimating the Negro population at 50 percent, this means half the people commit 85 percent of all the crimes. As will be shown in a later chapter, a large quota of the white crimes can be charged to transients.

The data on crimes by whites are incontrovertible. Those by Negroes in Washington, as well as in all other northern cities, do not give the full picture. Most police officers prefer not to arrest blacks, especially if there is no white complainant. They have nothing to gain by such a pinch; they merely invite an uproar for “persecuting the gentle Negro.”

Many colored law breakers are never arrested; many who are are not booked, the officers often preferring to mete out summary punishment on the back stairs, which they know is a better deterrent than the inevitable discharge or suspended sentence by a timid, “seen” or left-wing judge.

If you doubt that, the following is from the record of a Congressional hearing and there are plenty of other stories like it:

Private Hamilton was assigned with Detective Sergeant Clyde Rouse for midnight cruising. They observed a stolen car parked on Q Street NW, with two occupants.

Rouse and Hamilton walked up to the car. Rouse went to the left and Hamilton to the right. Rouse recognized the driver as Charles W. Scott, colored, 24, of 476 O Street NW, wanted for questioning in connection with stolen auto hold-ups.

Rouse opened the door and tried to seize Scott, but only succeeded in shoving the gear shift lever out of gear. Rouse was on his knees on the front seat, practically on top of the other occupant of the car, a woman, who proved to be Marian Holston, 20, colored, of 16 Q Street NW, who had been picked up by Scott.

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.

For instance, if you’re pinched for anything on or along the road leading to the National Airport there is a conflict between the National Park Police, the Airport Police, the local Virginia Police, municipal and county police, and possibly, the MP’s. No one wants any part of it. So there is merry law-breaking in this federal domain.

At this writing, 27,000 people are employed in the Pentagon. It is a city within a city. Like all cities, it has its peccadillos. Many elevator operators are runners for bookies. Many colored messengers, male and female, sell policy slips. Reefers can be had. The cops--all kinds--don’t know what to do about it. The military police don’t like to arrest civilians, even those employed by the Army. The Virginia police say they have no authority because it’s federal property.

The same apathy that marks everything in Washington pervades the Pentagon and other federal buildings. A high Army officer, highly placed because his brother is close to the President, is a homosexual. He had gathered 95 other officers of similar inclinations to form what was known as the “Fairy Brigade.” Though scandalously abnormal acts have been committed within the Pentagon walls, no consequences ensued. No one knew how to go about it. Instead, the suspected fairies were transferred to distant posts--separately, of course--in the hope that when they got into trouble in their new stations their commanding officers would pick up the buck.

More recently a Signal Corps captain in the Pentagon was apprehended lurking in the stair wells, where he exposed himself to young women. The Army took the easiest way--transferred him to Fort Monmouth, where he was eventually chased out of the service.

The same situation applies in all government buildings in the District and in the suburbs. No one wants to do anything about anything. There is scarcely a government installation anywhere in Washington where you can’t place a bet or buy a numbers slip. When elevator jockeys aren’t selling them, clerks and typists, white and dark, are. Dates and assignations are made on U. S. property by government girls looking for fun or extra earnings, and by come-getters who barge in and solicit men for dates after work--even sometimes for affairs right on overstuffed leather couches which we own, you too.

Any punitive action in these cases is not by police officers. When things get out of hand, department heads fire the culprits.

While the Kefauver Committee was investigating bookmaking, two elevator operators in the Senate Office Building, in which the hearings were conducted, were taking bets on horses with full knowledge of most Senators, many of whom were placing wagers.

That guy you see at the corner of 1st and B, outside the House Office Building, talking to a cop, is a bookmaker’s runner. That’s his station. That’s where typists, messengers and other help in the House of Representatives lay it on the line.

Many have fallen into debt because of the convenience with which they can place bets all day. Hundreds are in the clutches of the loan-sharks in Maryland and the shylocks, who work their trade right in the government office buildings, exacting 100 percent interest for a one-month loan. Many are in arrears on their income taxes for this reason; those who owe more than what is withheld. This has posed a serious problem for the collecting authorities, who are balked by a quirk in the law which forbids them to garnishee tax delinquents among federal employes.

The indifference to rules that apply in private employment results in a sort of Alice in Wonderland atmosphere throughout the unwieldy federal domain.

Humorist George Dixon’s story about the two crews hard at work in the Pentagon sums it up:

One crew puts up partitions. The other crew takes them down. The paths of the two crews seldom cross, though there have been embarrassing occasions when they arrived at the same office simultaneously on conflicting missions. But that was the fault of “inefficiency” higher up, not of the putters-up and the takers-down.

Retired brass which had come roaring back to the Pentagon found itself assigned to broom-closets because many mere swivel-chair warmers had commandeered enough office space for a bowling alley.

That’s why the Pentagon has two crews, working independently, day and night. One makes offices bigger for new brass, the other makes them smaller for the old.

The confusion is proving hard on fixed Pentagon employes. They suffer severely from wet paint.