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Service for Ice. The bulk of the "ice payments" were made according to a scale which he said was "standard in the trade." He paid $3 a week to the cop on the 8-to-4 beat, $2 to the cop on the 4-to-12 beat, $40 a month to the sector radio-car crew. For every "joint" he operated, he paid $15 a month to sergeants, $50 to lieutenants, $100 to captains and $200 to "the division." He said that he gave the chief inspector's office $6,500 a month. All bribes were doubled at Christmastime as a mark of good will, and if one of his horse rooms did better than average business, he paid "double ice."
On top of all this, he was eternally making gifts and doing favors. He was a great hand at slipping police officials a few hundred dollars for small good turns. He gave away television sets and watches, kept accounts at two Manhattan clothiers, to whom he sent favored cops for free suits. He once sent half a dozen deserving blue-coats to Chicago, all expenses paid, to see the Rocky Graziano-Tony Zale fight. When Commissioner O'Brien's sidekick, Acting Lieut. George W. McGirr, wanted $135,000 in big bills changed into smaller denominations, Gross was delighted to take care of it for him.
But he got service. Few of his 400 employees were ever so much as accosted by a cop. If one of his runners had to "take a pinch" a few times, Gross got his fingerprints removed from the police files so he could begin again as a first offender—at a much smaller fine. If one of his joints had to be raided, the cops always warned him ahead of time, thus allowing him to move to a "switch spot" across the street.
Grinning, Gross recalled sitting in a police wiretap room, watching gambling calls in Brooklyn being checked against a list of bookies who were paying "ice." "If a name wasn't on the list," he said, "they went out and made a pinch."
But Only $2,000 for Taxes. Gross did not make all these revelations without causing new repercussions. The Brooklyn district attorney roared with indignation at the bookie's veiled suggestion that he had protected O'Brien, Flath, Whalen and Bals, replied that Gross simply hadn't given enough information to the grand jury to enable him to act against them. O'Brien roared that Gross was a liar—and resigned his job with the Copperweld Steel Co.
Gross's sharply dressed, 24-year-old brother Jackie was slugged by two men on a dark Manhattan street, and told, "It'll be a hell of a lot worse next time if Harry doesn't shut up." Assistant Corporation Counsel Victor J. Herwitz, who is prosecuting the five cops in the departmental trial, was threatened over the telephone. In Washington, meanwhile, Delaware's
Republican Senator John J. Williams discovered that while paying a million a year in ice, Gross had paid less than $2,000 a year in income tax in 1946, '47 and '48.
Gross, who hoped to have his sentence reduced as a reward for talking, seemed unperturbed. At week's end the big city's grapevine quivered to a tale that he had more—a lot more—to spill, and that reputations would be crisped like moths in an incinerator if he felt called upon to do so.