Portrait of a Boss

When Racketbuster Tom Dewey last week wound up his biggest case, the most interesting item for New Yorkers was not the four-to-eight-year sentence imposed on Tammany Boss Jimmy Hines for selling protection at $30,000 a year to the city's "numbers" racket./- More significant was a probation report published the same day. In detailing the life & works of Convict Jimmy Hines, 62, with data gathered from Hines's family, friends, neighbors, District Attorney's office and Hines himself, the report gave ordinary citizens who often damn but seldom understand political bosses, a first-rate picture of how such bosses grow, what makes them tick, how they can go wrong. Hines highlights and shadows:

Jimmy Hines's father was a master horseshoer in Manhattan. To profit by shoeing police and fire horses, he had to be close to the Tammany machine. His shop was a hangout for neighborhood politicians and young Jimmy, who at 14 quit eighth grade to start working in the shop, soon learned about precinct politics.

When Jimmy was 17, Hines Sr. sickened never to recover. Jimmy ran the smithy, by 21 was acting for his father as election district captain. Twice he was arrested for street fighting, once for assaulting a girl whom he took to a hotel and afterwards refused to marry--wild oats for a young man on the upper west side. Tammany took care of its own; he wasn't sent to jail.

Mrs. Hines, taciturn and parsimonious, mother of eleven, had small faith in her husband's and son's management of money. They gave her all proceeds from the smithy except what they needed for personal expenses. She also had small faith in banks. This, says Jimmy Hines, explains why he had no bank account after 1908, why he carried large sums of cash. After he married in 1904 his wife bore him three sons and took care of most of his finances.

Jimmy Hines always tried to take good care of his family. They were devoted to him and he to them. They lived in various upper west side apartments and finally in 1930 Mrs. Hines bought a cottage at Long Beach, L. I., financed with a mortgage taken by a friend of Hines.

Meantime he had his ups & downs. In 1902, Republican Seth Low became mayor and Jimmy Hines lost the city's horseshoeing business. For $3,500 he sold a share in the smithy to one Klenke. Hines drew $75 a week for himself and about $4,000 a year out of profits, but after 1907, when he was elected alderman, politics was his real profession. In 1912 he sold Klenke the rest of the smithy for $7,000, and with a man named Madden went into the trucking business, fattening on city contracts for snow, garbage, rubbish removal. After a strike by the city's truckers, they made $10,000 in six weeks. In 1913, Hines became chief clerk of the board of aldermen at $5,000.

In 1916, after another Republican reform regime (Mayor John Purroy Mitchel's) came in, Jimmy Hines had to live on savings. In 1918 he got into the Malto-Dextrine (glucose) business as a factory supervisor and trucker for $100 a week and a percentage of profits. He arranged the sale of a 25% interest in Malto-Dextrine to Charles F. Murphy, Tammany's big boss, for $175,000.

That year, aged 42, he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Army's motor transport and went abroad to serve nearly a year in France. In 1920 he returned to politics, beat out Abraham Kaplan for Tammany leadership of his district. The next year he braved Boss Murphy's wrath to run against the organization's candidate for Borough President. He lost narrowly but thereafter was a power to be reckoned with.

Soon Hines became known as a big spender, a heavy bettor at racetracks. His family lived in style. Yet his reported income was modest, its sources vague. He filed no tax returns for the period 1929-35 until the Government cracked down. Then the following items were revealed: $3,300 a year for "services" to the Sun & Surf Club at Atlantic Beach, L. I.; $2,400 to $6,550 a year for "services" to the New Hampshire Breeders (Rockingham Park racetrack company); $4,000 to $5,000 a year from Kenway Construction Co. for "services."

In 1925-29, Mrs. Jimmy Hines had a sizable brokerage account. In 1929 a bank lent her $88,487.70 to pay off the brokers, took over her securities. Between 1929 and 1937, her bankers received $62,000 from unidentified sources for Mrs. Hines. Only once did Jimmy Hines have a brokerage account in his own name. Then he gambled in $38,000 worth of Johns-Manville stock, lost $5,458 in twelve days, settled with the brokers for $4,000. He and some friends borrowed $132,559.59 from Lawyer Max Steuer to buy 850 shares of stock in the New York Giants (baseball), on a tip that it would pay $25 a share.

Steuer got back some of his money, but lent Mrs. Hines some more and is now owed $52,000.

Where did the money come from? Mrs. Hines paid Jimmy's gambling losses with her checks, but he collected and kept his winnings in cash. The Hines family formed two office equipment and furniture companies to sell goods to the city for new buildings in 1935-37. One made $69,000 for the family, the other about $42,000. The District Attorney said that in 1928 Hines got $7,500 from a man & woman sentenced to prison in a "numbers" racket case. Their sentences were reduced. He acted as intermediary with the Tenement House Commission for several Bronx property owners. They gave him $4,000.

The Commissioner of Markets said that racketeering in the poultry market was reputedly "protected" by Hines, but this could not be proved. Neither could the District Attorney prove that Hines got $500 a month for permitting professional gambling in his Monongahela Club (political headquarters) in Harlem, or that Charles ("Lucky") Luciano, head of the prostitute trust (since jailed), was more than a social acquaintance of Jimmy Hines. He did stay at the same hotel and play golf with Luciano on a junket to Hot Springs, Ark. Another Hot Springs habitue was 'Legger Owney Madden (beer).

For years Hines romped with children of his district at picnics of his Monongahela Club. He watched such local boys make good as Frank Costello, "King of the slot machines" and Harry ("Gyp the Blood") Horowitz, executed murderer. Once he went $15,000 bail for "Scratch" McCarthy, forger (now jailed). Hines explained that as an active political leader who regularly attended sporting events his friendship was sought "by persons in various walks of life"--but insisted he shared none of their illicit profits.

The District Attorney proved that the numbers racketeers did pay him $500 to $1,000 a week for protection from 1933 to 1935. The writers of the probation report paid him this tribute:

"His processes of thought are clear, direct and, within limitations, coldly logical."

Judge Charles Nott Jr., who sentenced him, simply summarized Boss Hines thus:

"Instead of using his political power and influence for the well-being of the city and for the promotion of law and order and good government, he used his position for the promotion of the interests of this crowd of criminals."

/- J. Richard ("Dixie") Davis, the racket's lawyer, and Harry Schoenhaus, the racket's treasurer, both of whom turned State's evidence, got respectively one year (of which 170 days had al ready been served), and a suspended sentence.

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