What Elmer Did

THE TAX DODGERS (288 pp.)--Elmer L Irey, as told to William J. Slocum--Greenberg ($3).

Tough little Willie Bioff, big-shot labor racketeer, was testifying. "We had about 20 percent of Hollywood when we got in trouble. If we hadn't got loused up we'd of had 50 percent. I had Hollywood dancin' to my tune." Willie's compelling tune was extortion; the insistent drumbeat in the background was the threat of physical violence. Studio employees and motion-picture-machine operators joined his labor union--or else. Hollywood studio czars chipped in millions to stop the music --and keep their studios running. What finally "loused up" Willie was a big, quiet civil servant named Elmer.

Until 1946 (he died of coronary thrombosis four months ago, the day the proofs of his book came from the printer), Elmer Lincoln Irey was coordinator of all Treasury law-enforcement units. He wasn't a lawyer, he wasn't a detective, and he wasn't physically tough. But he had a genius for ferreting out the sources of gangsters' income and jailing crooks for tax evasion. Elmer Irey and his T-men put the finger on such arrogant law-flout-ers as Al Capone, "Nucky" Johnson, Moe Annenberg and Tom Pendergast.

A few months before his death, Irey (who had always discouraged publicity) was persuaded by a publisher to tell his story to William J. Slocum. The Tax Dodgers points up one of the unpleasantly ironical facts of political life in the U.S.: that pimps (like Bioff), murderers, political racketeers and mobsters can work at their trades with impunity, and are seldom brought to book for their most serious crimes.

The Enforcer. The Al Capone and Waxie Gordon stories will remind readers past their 30s that Prohibition racketeers, large & small, had come to be an accepted part of most U.S. communities. To get Capone became almost an obsession with President Herbert Hoover. Said Hoover to Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon: "Remember, now; I want that man Capone in jail."

Mellon passed the order on to Irey, who planted an agent in Al's Chicago headquarters. He laboriously compiled figures on Capone's tremendous take from his liquor operations, and from shaking down brothels and gambling joints. Al wound up in Alcatraz not because he was a thief, a murderer and a booze runner, but because Irey was able to prove to a jury that he hadn't shared his swag with the U.S. Treasury. One of Al's boys gave Irey's planted agent a classic explanation of Capone's success: "Everything is businesslike. Take The Enforcer [Gunman Frank Nitti]; he keeps everybody in line for Al. Somebody gets out of line, Al tells The Enforcer, the next thing you know a couple of guys get off a train from Detroit or New York or St. Louis, and The Enforcer tells them who has to go. The guys do the job and go home. The price is $2,500 a job.

"When the guys from out of town louse up a job and only 'hurt' somebody, The Enforcer don't fool around none. He has one of his own guys get the two guys who blew the job. That's why very few fellows get hurt around here. They get kilt."

Share the Loot. It was principally Irey and his men who broke up Huey Long's gang, gave young District Attorney Tom Dewey the evidence with which to convict Beer Baron Waxie Gordon, jailed Johnny Torrio (who proposed a deal: "Leave us cut out the shooting, boys, there's enough here for everybody"), broke the Lindbergh case and busted up the Pendergast machine.

Except for the Lindbergh case, in which Irey got Hauptmann by tracing registered ransom bills, the technique was always much the same: to determine the size of the gangster's loot, then match it against his income-tax returns. By 1940, Irey had uncovered $476,573,129 in tax deficiencies (the Philadelphia Inquirer's late Publisher Moe Annenberg made the largest single contribution to the Treasury: $8,000,000). At one time nearly two-thirds of all federal prisoners were men jailed as a result of Irey's patient, adding-machine methods.

The Tax Dodgers should be required reading in civics and political science classes throughout the U.S. Few books provide such detailed proof of the breakdown of political morality in the face of bribery and corruption. Irey, who wasn't greatly surprised by the rottenness he uncovered, found "something impressive about Mr. Truman's devotion to his larcenous constituent," Missouri's Tom Pendergast. Says Irey flatly: "Mr. Truman, then Senator Truman, used every bit of pressure that his office legally permitted to keep Pendergast out of jail."

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