Fight Against Fear (See front cover) Jack Dempsey had screwed up his courage for a fight last week. Bright & early one morning he turned up at the State Supreme Court building in downtown Manhattan, prepared to testify that once he had been afraid to fight, had paid to be let off. Old Champion Dempsey's reputation for ferocious pugnacity remained unblemished. But as proprietor of big, flashy Jack Dempsey's Restaurant, across the street from Madison Square Garden, he had, according to the courtroom story of a State prosecutor, encountered an enemy more formidable than any Firpo or Tunney. It had appeared in the persons of hard-faced men who accosted him, snarled that it would be "healthier" for his restaurant if he joined their "association." A healthy restaurant, Proprietor Dempsey knew, was one whose waiters and cooks were not called out on strike, which was not stink-bombed, did not have its windows smashed, its food doped, its patrons annoyed. Jack Dempsey could have trounced any two of his extortioners singlehanded.
But behind them was something that could not be reached with fists, something huge and vague and sinister. He dodged that fight, paid his forfeit. Jack Dempsey was ready to fight last week because a dauntless little man with a brown mustache had come forward to champion him and thousands upon thousands of reputable New York businessmen who had been similarly terrorized and mulcted. The new champion was Thomas Edmund Dewey, 34, for 18 months the head and heart of New York City's famed Dewey racket investigation. Tweed to Walker, Ever since the State Legislature in 1853 stripped police-appointing powers from the city's Common Council (called "The Forty Thieves") and set up a Board of Police Commissioners, the history of New York City has been studded with drives against crime and corruption. In 1871 it was Samuel Tilden versus Boss Tweed, in the early 1900's Rev. Charles Parkhurst versus Boss Richard Croker, in the late 90's Theodore Roosevelt versus gamblers and scofflaw saloonkeepers, in 1902-09 William Travers Jerome versus vice and gambling, in 1905 Charles Evans Hughes versus insurance companies. Charles S. Whitman's sensational exposure of official corruption in his prosecution of Police Lieutenant Charles Becker for the murder of Gambler Herman Rosenthal in 1912 put Whitman in the Governor's chair. In 1930 Judge Samuel Seabury exposed the magistrates' courts and the next year started the disclosures which ran Mayor Jimmy Walker out of town. Despite these periodic spasms of civic indignation, crime marched on, burgeoning throughout the null into a new kind of super-crime, the racket, which no state or city authority seemed able or willing to attack. "Runaway" Jury, In March 1935 a New York County (Manhattan) grand jury assembled which was to become famed in the press as the "runaway" jury. Honest citizens, its members were appalled by the tales of racketeering terror and extortion which witnesses told them, infuriated by their failure to get action from the district attorney, Tammanyman William C.