But the booze trade had brought the crooks out of the woodwork en masse. Our problem wasn’t booze, except indirectly. Our problem was the by-products of the trade. The constantly increasing economic and political power that the criminal mobs developed. We weren’t concerned, really, about so-called white slavery or gambling or the other victimless crimes. What alarmed the honest folks was the specter of a takeover of our society by the criminal element. They were buying politicians. They were extorting fortunes from the business community through their bald-faced protection rackets. You don’t need a long litany of their crimes — the point is, we were concerned, we didn’t want to see things get out of hand. Bootlegging was one thing. Giving the mobsters enough power to elect a governor was another thing entirely. These people had — have — no respect for rudimentary human rights, let alone laws. We had to fight them. We know it now; we knew it equally well then, as anyone who’s ever seen The Untouchables on television knows.
Down in Tucson our local crime czar was a fellow who went by the name of Irwin Sterrick. It wasn’t the name he’d been born with but never mind.
Sterrick ostensibly was a restaurateur. He owned three establishments — steak houses, you know the kind of place. Gin and bourbon in coffee cups, slot machines in the rest rooms. A cut up from speakeasies. He didn’t actually own any of the wholesale operations and he didn’t actually run the extortion rackets, but he was the key man in the setup. Within the criminal organization he’d worked his way up from bookkeeper to chief accountant to high factotum. It was a loose confederation — the “organized” in organized crime is a misnomer — but to the extent that there’s a single boss in any company, Sterrick fulfilled that function here. If an underling wanted to start a new operation he had to get clearance from Sterrick; usually he got his financing from Sterrick as well. Sterrick controlled the coffers. Major transactions went through his hands. It wasn’t his money, most of it, but nearly all of it passed through his office in one way or another. He kept the books.
We knew if we could nail Sterrick and get our hands on his books we could cripple the mob for quite a while. Sterrick was getting altogether too powerful and we had to stop him.
Naturally the federal officers were eager to nail him as well. They wanted to put him away on income-tax violations. But none of us had any success in our initial efforts. We knew he kept detailed books — even criminals have to have records so tthey can check up on one another and make sure nobody’s cheating — but when we subpoenaed them the books would mysteriously disappear ahead of the officers with their search warrants. It appeared there was no lawful way we could solve the problem.
Things were heating up to a boil because there was a gubernatorial primary coming up. Sterrick’s handpicked candidate had a pretty good chance of sewing up the nomination. If we allowed them to railroad their man into the governor’s mansion in Phoenix, we knew we’d face a terrible situation. The state would have been thrown wide open to a massive criminal invasion.
The only way to stop it was to get Sterrick out of the way. Then the local political bosses who’d been in his pocket would be free to move in other directions.
We had a meeting in the courthouse. Carefully selected people — the deputy police commissioner, the district attorney, two assistants. I was one of them. And the mayor. None of us was under the thumb of Sterrick’s machine. But we couldn’t be sure of many other officials. We had a council of war. I won’t bore you with the details but the upshot was that I was appointed a select committee-of-one to concentrate on the Sterrick issue. I was pretty much given carte blanche and I insisted that I be allowed to keep my operation secret until it produced results — I didn’t want to have to turn in regular progress reports because a secret is only a secret as long as only one person knows it. I had a few ideas but I didn’t want any risk of their getting back to Sterrick through his city hall contacts.
The practice of criminal law in the halls of justice is pretty much a give-and-take affair, as you know. If you want to get a conviction against one felon sometimes you have to grant immunity to another. It’s not a system I’ve ever enjoyed working in but it’s better than most of the alternatives. Plea bargaining was just as commonplace in those days as it is today. In return for a lighter sentence a criminal might agree to turn state’s evidence. It really amounted to our only major source of information. The town’s population was only about twenty thousand. The mobsters knew every cop on the force by sight. We could hardly infiltrate them with an undercover spy — they’d know him instantly. So we had to rely on criminal informants.
At that time I had three cases awaiting trial. I mean I had a dozen or so but there were three that had some importance to this matter. One was a man named Mendes who’d had the bad fortune to be arrested with a pocketful of numbers-racket slips. He was a runner for Sterrick’s mob. The other two were independent small-time crooks who’d been arrested on felony charges — one was a forger who’d been passing checks around town, the other was a minor-league safecracker who’d done a pretty good job of getting into one of our bank vaults but got tripped up by a silent alarm system — he was caught red-handed coming out of the bank with the loot.
Because of the threat we faced, and the autonomy I’d been given, I made a deliberate decision to bend the law. That’s really the point of this little morality tale.
I took Mendes into an interrogation room and sweated him down. I made it clear, without putting it in so many words, that we might see our way clear to dropping the charges against him if he’d provide us with certain bits and pieces of information. I didn’t tell him what information we wanted. I asked him all sorts of random questions about Sterrick and various mob operations. Most of them he refused to answer. He pointed out that if he unloaded he’d be killed as soon as the mob found out. I just kept asking questions. He’d answer a few of the seemingly harmless ones. By that process I managed to get the information I wanted — without letting him know that it was what I’d been after.
What I found out from him was the location of Sterrick’s books. The organization’s books.
They were kept, as I’d suspected, in a safe. The safe, Mendes informed me, was in a real-estate office on North Stone Avenue. It was one of those outfits that handled insurance and realty. A legitimate front for the illegitimate operations. The outfit was in the name of one of Sterrick’s cousins. I suppose they actually did some insurance and realty work. But it was also where Sterrick did his bookkeeping. In the back room. They had two or three accountants who worked in that room full-time. At night they had a private watchman there. Mendes had seen the safe several times. It was a big sturdy Kessler box, far too heavy to be stolen. There was an electric alarm system and of course the safe was never left untended — when the accountants weren’t there, the watchman was.
We put Mendes on ice. I didn’t want him leaking anything back to Sterrick. Later on, when the matter was concluded, we turned him loose as we’d agreed. He was picked up again a few months later and spent most of his life in prison on one charge or another.
The state primary was coming up in June. This was April — we had about seven weeks. I had the accused forger brought up to the interrogation room. We had him cold on passing some very heavy paper — forged checks for thousands of dollars. It could have cost him several years if we’d prosecuted fully. He knew that — he was a practical fellow. He and I reached a mutually agreeable arrangement. In return for certain services he was to perform, he’d be turned loose in another state and no fugitive warrant would be issued. This of course wasn’t illegal; it was a decision on my part, morally and ethically questionable to be sure, but legal in the sense that a prosecutor has the right to decide whether or not to prosecute any given case. I didn’t acquit the forger of the charges against him; I simply decided not to prosecute them. If he ever returned to Tucson after we exiled him, he could be picked up and tried on the original charges.