A Day at the Races

Although it is published in Garden City, Long Island, a quiet suburb 20 miles from the bustle of Manhattan, Alicia Patterson's tabloid Newsday (circ. 180,964) has never been content to lead the quiet life of a suburbanite. Almost two months ago, when Yonkers Raceway's Labor Boss Tommy Lewis was murdered by a hired gunman (TIME, Oct. 5), Newsday said pointedly: the Yonkers trotting track is "40 miles from [Long Island's] Roosevelt Raceway, but only inches separate [them] in operating procedure." Newsday knew what it was talking about. Unheeded by other papers or by state officials, Newsday had been loudly hammering away for more than three years at corruption at the Long Island track in Nassau County. Last week Newsday's three-year-long campaign finally paid off with a blaze of Page One stories in the Manhattan dailies on one of the biggest state scandals in years. As a result, ten Roosevelt track and union officials were indicted for "extortion," and Governor Thomas E. Dewey named a special state committee to investigate corruption in harness racing.

Among those indicted was Newsday's biggest target: Long Island's longtime Building Trades Boss (A.F.L.) William De Koning, "just about the richest labor leader in the world." who had got control of the raceway's three key unions (parimutuel clerks, police protection force, maintenance employees). De Koning's lawyer angrily placed the blame for his client's trouble, and gave Newsday the accolade it had waited for. Said he: "The bitter personal hatred of Union Organizer William De Koning by the managing editor of Newsday, Mr. Alan Hathway, has resulted . . . in scurrilous attacks on [my client]. New York newspapers were finally influenced in the publication of the attack by their constant repetition in Newsday."

"I Ain't Afraid of No One." Managing Editor Hathway's campaign against De Koning was hardly personal. Ever since he came to Newsday eleven years ago from the New York Daily News, Hathway has been deluged with tips and complaints about De Koning's rough, highhanded labor tactics. When De Koning ("I ain't afraid of no one") moved in to take over control of the raceway's employees, Hathway set his reporters to work. Newsday discovered that De Koning's union members, to hold their jobs at the track, were forced to kick back part of their salaries, buy tickets at exorbitant prices to dances and dinners laid on by De Koning, and buy $50-a-page ads in the union's journal, owned by De Koning. Newsday also publicized De Koning's ownership of the Labor Lyceum, a bar, restaurant and hall where labor functions were held and where the kickbacks were collected.

The story didn't stop with De Koning. Newsday told how the Roosevelt owners, led by Racketeer Lucky Luciano's onetime lawyer, George Morton Levy, got control of the Yonkers track. In a byline copyright interview with Hathway, Lawyer Levy admitted his group had lobbied a law through the New York State legislature that prevented the Yonkers track from getting a harness-racing franchise, thus forcing it to sell control at a low price (estimated at $2,000,000) to the Roosevelt group. Among the Roosevelt-Yonkers owners: Nassau County Republican Boss J. Russel Sprague (who paid only $80,000 for stock now worth $400,000), two ex-members of the district attorney's staff, and Publisher James E. Stiles, owner of the defunct Nassau Daily Review-Star, Newsday's opposition. Newsday also broke the news that Labor Boss De Koning posed as a "nephew" and visited Sing Sing prison for conferences with Joe Fay, racketeering labor boss of New York-New Jersey building trades, who is serving a term for extortion.

No Need to Fear. When the murder at the Yonkers track got other Manhattan papers interested in the harness-racing scandals, Newsday was ready. It had already turned its evidence over to the New York City Anti-Crime Committee, which handed it out to other papers to use in digging up their own stories. The New York Journal-American discovered that Acting Lieutenant Governor Arthur Wicks, along with other prominent officials, had also visited Labor Racketeer Fay in Sing Sing (TIME, Oct. 12). As a result, Dewey asked Wicks to resign. Wicks offered to "let the Senate pass upon my fitness." In its zeal, the J-A was also slightly embarrassed. Among the stockholders of the Yonkers track was the paper's own sports columnist, Lewis Burton, who doubled as the track's publicity man. Burton was promptly dropped by the JA, and Manhattan newspapermen gossiped that other sportswriters were also on track payrolls.

While every Manhattan paper raced for its own exclusive to keep ahead of official disclosures, Newsday patted itself on the back for its spadework: "Labor Czar Bill De Koning has been indicted . . . Scores of persons who have felt . . . De Koning's wrath have written this paper anonymously. They no longer need to fear."

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