A Bookie in Command

NEW YORK A Bookie in Command In a crowded Brooklyn courtroom one day last week, all the principals seemed to be playing the wrong roles. The judge was ranting, the hard-boiled D.A. was sobbing and a bookie was looking down his nose at both of them. This miscast scene was the unexpected end of New York's biggest police-graft trial since 1915.*

The sneering bookie was a little man named Harry Gross. The trail that led him to this courtroom fiasco went back ten years to a spot on Brooklyn's Church Avenue. Gross, then a rookie bookie, was furtively taking a bet off a customer when a plainclothes policeman came up. "You're a sucker for cheating this way," said the cop. Cheating, Gross found, meant breaking the law without paying off the cops. He stopped cheating, and by 1950 was the "Mr. G." of Brooklyn gambling, operating 35 places with 400 employees, handling $20 million a year, handing out $1 million a year to police for protection.

Gross was arrested a year ago. After four stubborn months in jail, Gross pleaded guilty to bookmaking and talked freely to the grand jury about his police connections. The jury thereupon indicted 21 policemen (some of whom had hastily retired from the force) for taking Gross bribes, and denounced 56 others as "co-conspirators." Gross got out of jail in $25,000 bail, was placed under constant guard as a "material witness."

Last week the 35-year-old bookie, perfumed and wearing an expensive suit, was led into the courtroom as the star witness against the police he had bribed. When the time came to really tie the defendants to graft, the flabby dandy shook his pomaded head and said: "I won't answer any more questions."

"Let's Go to Lunch." Judge Samuel Leibowitz at first tried persuasion. But when Gross bolted off the witness stand, the judge growled: "Bring that man back."

Gross: "I refuse to take the stand."

Leibowitz: "Bring him back and have the gentleman sit down on the stand, by order of the court. I will chain you to the stand with handcuffs. You cannot thwart the dignity of the court in that fashion . . . Your silence will be deemed a refusal to answer and the court finds you guilty of contempt."

Gross: "Why don't you give me the chair and let us get it over with, huh?"

Leibowitz: "Face around, Mr. Gross. Sit around straight. You are not at a race track now .. ."

Gross: "I wish I was."

Leibowitz: "Now, do you want to name the people that threatened you [Gross had said his life was in danger] ? .. . You can say yes or no. If you say no ... we will go on to something else."

Gross: "Let's go to lunch."

Leibowitz: "I warn you, Mr. Gross, all of this sarcasm and smart-aleck retort is going to cost you dearly."

Gross: "How much more trouble can I have than I got?"

Leibowitz: "I will give you a thousand years if necessary. I will bury you in jail."

A Weeping Prosecutor. After Gross had refused 60 times to answer questions, District Attorney Miles McDonald rose with tears streaming down his face and sobbed: "It is utterly futile to proceed. Without Gross, our other evidence . . . means nothing. I now move to dismiss the indictment against these defendants." Then the D.A. stumbled toward a chair and slumped down. After his tears had dried, he said he had heard that Gross was paid $75,000 to keep quiet, to protect all those tied to the scandal. The deal, he said, was probably closed a week earlier, when Gross eluded his guards for 23 hours, and was found at the Atlantic City race track. Others thought that Gross really was afraid that he would be murdered, like Herman Rosenthal.

Snarling that Gross was a "miserable wretch," Judge Leibowitz sentenced him to 1,800 days in jail and fined him $15,000 for contempt.

This week, Brooklyn's special grand jury, on duty since 1949, shook off the effects of the blow, and kept on fighting. It planned to reindict some of the accused policemen, without Gross's testimony.

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On Staten Island, another D.A. was having a different kind of trouble. A 36-year-old housewife, Anna Wentworth, told the State Crime Commission she had seen District Attorney Herman Methfessel in a roulette room operated by the Dalessio brothers, the island's gambling kings. Methfessel promptly had her arrested, without a warrant, then accused her of perjury. Governor Tom Dewey, an old D.A. himself, stepped in, barred Methfessel from handling any of the Crime Commission's cases. Two days later the commission learned that Michael Dalessio, a truck driver twelve years ago, had filed income-tax returns between 1942 and 1949 listing his gross income at about $85 a week. In a sworn statement to a bank made last year, he said that his net worth was $471,400.

*When Police Lieut. Charles Becker was executed for arranging the murder of Gambler Herman Rosenthal, who had started to tell how cops protect gambling.

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