The Cheaters

"So I buy this steak, see, an' it's supposed to be proim. Well, Alfred, he bites into it an' he sez what kennel did you get this steak at, an' I sez it's proim an' he sez, yeh, it's proim hawssmeat. But whaddaya gonna do, they're all doin' it."

"Yeh, they all gotta big smile an' a pounda thumb."

Jouncing their baby buggies as they commiserated, two Brooklyn housewives last week clucked bitterly over the news of a growing scandal in which they--and uncounted thousands like them--were the victims. Implicated in the first week's disclosures by New York's Commissioner of Investigation Louis Kaplan were at least 100 butchers, a union president, the city's director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures, and a bureau inspector. The crime: extortion of hush money from butchers who cheated their customers.

Wires & Wax. The cheating was an old story. In the cheaper shops where the ignorant or the unwary traded, callous butchers were caught using a variety of methods. Some merely weighed their thumbs with the meat. Some attached a wire from the scale to a foot pedal that they controlled from below, or blocked the customer's side of the scale with canned goods, or laid meat on a long sheet of waxed paper, then pulled on the end of the paper to increase the weight reading. Others weighed one cut of meat but substituted an inferior or smaller piece before they wrapped the package.

It was during the course of questioning butchers that Investigator Kaplan's agents uncovered the extortion ring. Butcher Manny Seligman, for one, explained how it worked. He had been summonsed for short weighing by an inspector from the Bureau of Weights and Measures, and he turned up as ordered at bureau headquarters. There, suave, mouse-browed Director Frederick J. Loughran and Inspector Bert Smith told him about a "new system." Seligman was simply to pay Loughran "a couple of thousand dollars" to kill the summons. When he protested, an inspector told him: "If you don't pay up, you will have to give 16 ounces to the pound, and you know you can't exist that way."

By way of compromise, Seligman promised to pay a $60 monthly bribe, was assured that he would no longer be bothered with summonses; if by chance he was ticketed by another inspector who was not in on the take, Seligman was told that Loughran would overlook it. In this way, according to testimony, Loughran and some of his crooked aides, helped by President Emanuel Lapidus of the 600-member Salesmen and Poultry Workers Union, swung butchers into line, wrapped up what Investigator Kaplan rates as "millions of dollars" over a period of at least 18 months. The butchers in the "club," some of whom were doing a business of $10,000 to $15,000 a week, continued to rob their customers blind.

Give & Take. Union President Lapidus copped a guilty plea on charges of extortion. Boss Loughran (who ironically had won a reputation for his exposes of rackets in retail businesses) was haled before a county grand jury, fired from his $8,250-a-year job and arrested on charges of extortion. Investigator Kaplan promised that the butcher expose was only beginning. "The protection club was all over New York," said he. "There are 5,326 butchers in the city. You will have to guess at how many were involved, especially in depressed areas, where it hurts the little housewives the most."

In the midst of the curbstone babble, a Brooklyn cab driver shrugged: "It's a corrupt city. You gotta expect things like this. Everybody in this city has his hand out. Everybody's takin'. Nobody's givin'."

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