(5 of 9)
Prostitution & Super-Boss. As his investigators inched along the trails of scores of rackets, Mr. Dewey made a surprising discovery. He had said that he was not interested in prostitutes. Now, however, he was informed that since 1933 New York City bawds and brothels had ceased being independent, had been organ-ized on a chain-store basis by a single syndicate. This revelation was confirmed by 70 prostitutes and madams who, taken into custody, were persuaded to talk when Mr. Dewey had his lawyers and policemen daze them by calling them "miss" and saying "please," soothing their jitters with liquor as required. Pursuing the heads of the syndicate, Prosecutor Dewey made an-other discovery which was to lead to the greatest triumph of his crusade to date. After Dutch Schultz was riddled with bullets in a Newark barroom (TIME, Nov. 4, 1935), his reputed successor as New York's No. i racketeer was a shadowy in- dividual named Charles ("Lucky") Luciano. The Dewey investigators wanted him, badly, as operator of a nation-wide string of handbook houses and a national narcotics ring, boss of the city's policy gambling and of at least two of its business rackets. But Boss Luciano had learned from the examples of Al Capone and Waxey Gordon. He paid up his Federal income taxes, kept his identity and activities so well hidden that the respectable Waldorf-Astoria Hotel permitted him to occupy one of its residential suites. The Dewey staff could uncover no evidence to connect him with his known rackets. Great was Prosecutor Dewey's joy, therefore, when frightened "bookers" informed him that the organizer and tycoon of Manhattan's wholesale whoredom, known to most of his hirelings only as "The Boss," was Luciano. Extraditing the grim-lipped, droop-eyed Sicilian from his refuge in Hot Springs, Ark., Mr. Dewey brought him and nine of his lieutenants to trial on 90 counts of compulsory prostitution, got them prison sentence^ ranging from seven and a half years for lesser gangsters to 30-to-50 years for "The Boss" (TIME, May 25, June 15). By this coup the young prosecutor was satisfied that he had broken New York's worst mob, put away the nearest thing to a Capone that the City had ever had. Up to last week Mr.
