When Racketbuster Tom Dewey last week wound up his biggest case, the most interesting item for New Yorkers was not the four-to-eight-year sentence imposed on Tammany Boss Jimmy Hines for selling protection at $30,000 a year to the city's "numbers" racket.† More significant was a probation report published the same day. In detailing the life & works of Convict Jimmy Hines, 62, with data gathered from Hines's family, friends, neighbors, District Attorney's office and Hines himself, the report gave ordinary citizens who often damn but seldom understand political bosses, a first-rate picture of how such bosses grow, what makes them tick, how they can go wrong. Hines highlights and shadows:
Jimmy Hines's father was a master horseshoer in Manhattan. To profit by shoeing police and fire horses, he had to be close to the Tammany machine. His shop was a hangout for neighborhood politicians and young Jimmy, who at 14 quit eighth grade to start working in the shop, soon learned about precinct politics.
When Jimmy was 17, Hines Sr. sickened never to recover. Jimmy ran the smithy, by 21 was acting for his father as election district captain. Twice he was arrested for street fighting, once for assaulting a girl whom he took to a hotel and afterwards refused to marry—wild oats for a young man on the upper west side. Tammany took care of its own; he wasn't sent to jail.
Mrs. Hines, taciturn and parsimonious, mother of eleven, had small faith in her husband's and son's management of money. They gave her all proceeds from the smithy except what they needed for personal expenses. She also had small faith in banks. This, says Jimmy Hines, explains why he had no bank account after 1908, why he carried large sums of cash. After he married in 1904 his wife bore him three sons and took care of most of his finances.
Jimmy Hines always tried to take good care of his family. They were devoted to him and he to them. They lived in various upper west side apartments and finally in 1930 Mrs. Hines bought a cottage at Long Beach, L. I., financed with a mortgage taken by a friend of Hines.
Meantime he had his ups & downs. In 1902, Republican Seth Low became mayor and Jimmy Hines lost the city's horseshoeing business. For $3,500 he sold a share in the smithy to one Klenke. Hines drew $75 a week for himself and about $4,000 a year out of profits, but after 1907, when he was elected alderman, politics was his real profession. In 1912 he sold Klenke the rest of the smithy for $7,000, and with a man named Madden went into the trucking business, fattening on city contracts for snow, garbage, rubbish removal. After a strike by the city's truckers, they made $10,000 in six weeks. In 1913, Hines became chief clerk of the board of aldermen at $5,000.
In 1916, after another Republican reform regime (Mayor John Purroy Mitchel's) came in, Jimmy Hines had to live on savings. In 1918 he got into the Malto-Dextrine (glucose) business as a factory supervisor and trucker for $100 a week and a percentage of profits. He arranged the sale of a 25% interest in Malto-Dextrine to Charles F. Murphy, Tammany's big boss, for $175,000.