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Dodge. They set up a public furor, got the city's newspapers solidly behind them. In May, convinced that they were being deliberately impeded, they took the extraordinary step of barring an assistant district attorney from their proceedings. After this clean break with local officialdom, their next move was to plump their rage and scorn and indignation square on the doorstep of New York's Herbert H.
Lehman, demanding that the district attorney be superseded by a special prosecutor of rackets. Impressed, Governor Lehman named four well-known lawyers, including Charles Evans Hughes Jr., asked that one of them take the job. Unanimously they turned it down, unanimously told the Governor that the man he wanted was one the grand jury wanted, young Thomas Edmund Dewey. Governor Lehman hesitated. Lawyer Dewey had made a brilliant crime-fighting record as Chief Assistant U. S. Attorney, capped when he sent notorious Irving ("Waxey Gordon") Wexler to prison for ten years on income tax charges. But he had since retired to private practice; the Governor doubted whether his name was big enough to head the investigation. Finally, however, the Governor was convinced, and athletic, 33-year-old Lawyer Dewey, whose favorite indoor sport is squash racquets, found himself in a posi-tion to become the biggest racket-squasher in the U. S. Thomas Dewey's handsome, foxy face has grown familiar to New Yorkers, but when it appeared in the newspapers in June 1935 few would have recognized it without a caption. An Owosso, Mich, boy whose grandfather was second cousin to the Admiral, he had grown up in his father's newspaper and print shop, studied at the University of Michigan, with singing lessons on the side. When he migrated to Manhattan in 1923 he was not sure whether he wanted to be a lawyer or a singer. For two years he studied law at Columbia, sang as paid baritone soloist at St. Matthew's & St. Timothy's Church on West 84th Street. Ending up with an LL. B., he chose the Law.
Brilliant, likable, a courtroom virtuoso, he had built up a prosperous practice by the time Governor Lehman's call came, and he hated to give it up. But as Assistant U. S.
Attorney he had acquired a passionate hatred of and contempt for racketeers. The chance to fight them was too good to miss. Big-Game Hunt-Prosecutor Dewey made one thing plain at the outset. His investigation was going to be unlike any other in the city's history. He was not going to head one more futile roundup of criminal small fry—petty thugs, prostitutes, gamblers and crooked policemen. He was out, he announced, to get the bosses. For his big-game hunt, Special Prosecutor Dewey sought a staff of assistants, young, fervent, able, fearless. He found his chief assistants in four of his onetime colleagues in the U. S.