Crime Marches On

AMERICAN NOTES Crime Marches On Bulletins of the decade's first days support Hamlet's alarum: "Rank corruption, mining all within, infects unseen." Thirty-two West Virginians, including a former Governor and other notables, were indicted last week for assorted acts of malfeasance and peculation. In Morgantown, W. Va., a young prosecutor, Joseph Laurita, spent his first year in office crusading against organized crime. He was seriously injured when a bomb went off in his car. New Jersey was lurching through one of its periodic discoveries of mobster influence on public men and public affairs, while across the border in Pennsylvania there were no known leads to the identities of the brutal killers of Union Leader Jock Yablonski, his wife and daughter. The football industry, which usually confines mayhem to the gridiron, was shuddering on the eve of the Super Bowl through a fresh gambling-scandal scare.

In part, the headlines merely reaffirmed the humanity of the race, which in the space age remains as susceptible to greed and graft and the curse of Cain as it has been since the dawn of time. For the weak, temptation is ever at hand; for the brave, violence waits patiently in ambush. Beyond private sin, however, those who misuse public trust do a special evil. West Virginia and New Jersey seem to justify the theory of democracy that argues not that the people are virtuous enough to rule themselves, but rather that no man is ever virtuous enough to be allowed for long to rule others.

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