The Waterbury Democrat., 1933-07-12
Racketeers Of New
 York Collect Their
 Tithes Right Along
The Liquor and Beer Trafics Are Gone From Them, But They Hold Whip Hand on Commodities Conl- ing Into Port-However, Secret Agents Are Put- ting Them on the Run
in ,numerable technicalities.

ed in inumerable technicalities.
 The prohibition situation has
 wrought amazing changes in New York. Speakeasies are running now with wide open doors. "Pro- tection," basis of the profitable op- erations of gangs, has vanished. Liquor is too plentiful to offer the
 underworld the profits available
 before.
 This revolution came at a time when the city's gangs were al- ready disrupted by assassination
 and federal prosecution on income
 tax charges.
 ,, Vincent Coll and vannie Higgins
 are dead.
 Arthur Flegenheimer, better
 known as Dutch Schultz, is in hid- ing because of an income tax 1n- dictment.
 Owney Madden has just gotten out of Sing Sing on parole after
 serving 8 stretch as @ parole vio- lator on an old manslaughter charge, and he is behaving with
 circumspection.
 Of all the metropolitan gang
 sters, Waxey Gordon, safe Tn ms Jersey strongholds, comes closest to exercising his old time sway. Stringent state supervision appaars to have kept the gangsters out or the beer business on the New York side of the Hudson, but from the moment brew was legalfzed, Cor don had his fingers in it's manu- facture and distribution in the New Jersey section of the metropolitan area.
 By an accident he escaped assas- sination in the first days Of legal beer when the Schultz mob rom New York tried to keep him from stretching his influence across the river. Max Hassel, his Pennsyl- yania ally, was killed instead. In safe deposit boxes of HasseIs, authorities found more than $250.- 900 in cash, supposedly destined, had the guns of the underworld not interfered, to be used in buying legal breweries. Legal beer is no less a. field for racketeers than was the old illegal brew, for a strong arm mob can always force bars and stores to sell favored brands and pay high prices for them, ex- cluding other brews.
 In both New Jersey and Penn svlyania the -Hassel gangs | and their allies have succeeded 10 some extent in putting legal peer on a. racketeering basis, and there is ample evidence that the New York gangsters, enviousiy Watch- ing the Jersey side of the Hudson, are exercising all their influence III the hope of getting from beer ana later from legal hard iquor-lI tne | eighteenth amendment is repeated some part at least of the revenue they used to get from bootleg op- erations. But the New York peer commission, under the leadership of Edward P. Mulronoey, former
 New York city police commission- CT. has succeeded so far Tn keeping the racketeers out to such an ex- tent that not a single compiains : has yet been filed Of any form ol racketeering in beer manuIacture or distribution in New York.
 The result is, of course, 10 aoo substantially to the number or un- derworld members who must make their income from rackets agalnst
 other businesses, and despite tne optimism of Assistant District AL torney Kane. There are many ln- | 0lCat1OnS LudL TdChCtCCAAe .S ", inc increase as growing business
 makes more ready money avail
 able.
 The labor racket is one which
 has had tough sledding through the depresison. In the building trades, the motion picture operat- ors' organizations and many other
 unions. racketeers won such a grip in the prosperous years that 1t was almost impossible for workers in these fields to hold a job without paying tribute to some pretended Representative who claimed credit for wages increases and who was able to exact tribute because his strong arm men would use physical violence against any employer who
 engaged unapproved men. In days of unemployment and wage de-
 creases. the profits from this rack
 ct dropped tremendously. But now,
 with wages in many industries ris- ling. employment increasing, and