Western Dewey

A young Harvard-educated prosecutor who likes to think of himself as the Wild West's Tom Dewey last week could carve four more notches in his briefcase. His victims: Cheyenne, Wyo.'s mayor, chief of police and two cops.

Cheyenne's dilapidated, frame-built West End district* was a wide-open haven for girls, gambling and guzzling until last summer, when Army authorities from nearby Fort Francis E. Warren cracked down. Sin spots went under cover, which meant they had to begin buying protection. Soldiers (mostly Negroes) from Fort Warren still had a million-a-month payroll to blow. In sleazy backroom dives, blackjack stakes ran as high as $200 a game. Nightspots bootlegged whiskey because they could not get liquor franchises, limited in Cheyenne to 20 a year and unofficially valued at $50,000 each. Negro service wives were forced to prostitute themselves or be thrown out of their rooms in the congested Negro district.

All this became known to blue-eyed, baby-faced Byron Hirst, 31, the new county attorney. He also heard that the mayor was in on the take, and warned him: "I'm not interested in being a conquering hero around here, but everybody is beginning to think you're a crook." Finally Hirst set a trap. He got the buxom Negro madam of the "Black and Tan Club" to insist on paying off to the mayor and police chief in person. Hirst's men watched through a peephole, recorded the transaction on a dictograph. Last week Attorney Hirst got his convictions.

*Long known, in revenge, as "Little Chicago," because Chicago in the 1880s named its red-light district "Little Cheyenne."

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