(2 of 2)
This week, as Dewey's investigators got to work on the Yonkers mess, the New York World-Telegram and Sun trotted out another scandal, this one at Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island. Labor bosses, the paper said, have been milking the paychecks of track employees for $345,000 a year; every Friday night, Roosevelt employees who wanted to keep their jobs hastened to a bar in nearby Hempstead and forked out cash tribute to the racketeers.' Some of the payments went for tickets to clambakes, but the rest of the money was simply handed over with no questions and no explanations.
Owner of the bar is William De Koning, onetime A.F.L. power and close friend of George Morton Levy, head of the Roosevelt Raceway. In 1951, Levy admitted to the Kefauver committee that he paid Frank Costello $60,000 over a four-year period to keep bookmakers out of the Roosevelt track. De Koning, it developed, is a capitalist of some dimensions as well as a big union man; he owns approximately $300,000 worth of stock in the Roosevelt and Yonkers tracks, has admitted yearly incomes as high as $125,000. De Koning resigned last May as chief of Long Island's construction unions, but continued as the unofficial labor leader at Roosevelt Raceway.
Immediate reaction to the Long Island revelations was a chorus of denial from the Roosevelt management and a flurry of subpoenas from the Nassau County district attorney's office.