Car-Watchers

In New Orleans, drivers who park near the coliseum, midtown auditorium or uptown stadia are pestered by urchins or oldsters who offer to watch cars for a small tip. If it is refused, they slash tires, put gravel in the gas tank, disconnect the carburetor. In San Francisco, boys cluster around fashionable restaurants, try to watch cars or get taxis. Philadelphia had a lot of trouble with bands of 12-year-olds who worked a similar racket around Shibe Park, Temple Stadium, Franklin Field, the Convention Hall. Police finally stifled it by making arrests for "malicious mischief." Los Angeles police in the Hollywood area recently had to clean up an outbreak of car "jockeys''--youths who jumped on the running board, wiped the windshield with a dirty rag, refused to budge until tipped. Berliners are bothered by car-watching on Kurfurstendamm, Chicagoans in the Loop, Viennese on the Ringstrasse.

New York, a city of extremes, is characteristically the home of the most virulent form of this latest and most irritating petty graft, the car-watching racket.

One night last week a 55-year-old importer named Dante Gambinossi took a woman to dine at a West Side restaurant, parked his car meanwhile on 46th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues--a district so tough that it has long been known as "Hell's Kitchen." At ten o'clock, just as the pair got back into their car, a youth jumped on the right running board, asked a tip for watching the car. Importer Gambinossi gave his companion a dime to hand him. "Cheap skate!" snarled the young man. Gambinossi got out. At once four other hoodlums jumped on him. All five gave him a severe beating. When he got away, he limped to the nearest police station.

Thoroughly incensed at this climax of a long series of complaints, Police Commissioner Lewis Joseph Valentine declared war on the car-watching racket, sent 25 rookies in plain clothes into Hell's Kitchen with orders to arrest adult car-watchers, take urchins to the Juvenile Aid Bureau.

Most Manhattan car-watchers are from 8 to 20 years old. know all the tricks. To newshawks, Commissioner Valentine explained that there was no law specifically covering car-watchers. that soft-hearted judges usually let them off in court when they pleaded that they were "only trying to make an honest living." The Board of Aldermen at once took the logical step for cities blighted by the car-watching racket, by drafting amendments to the Traffic Code and City Charter forbidding it. Before they were passed, to City Magistrate Anthony F. Burke was brought 18-year-old Negro John Preston who admitted soliciting to watch cars, pleaded that no one had to accept his services. "That's a lot of horsefeathers!'' snapped the Magistrate, giving Negro Preston 15 days in jail.

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