Hectic headlines have been announcing a politico-criminal upheaval in Philadelphia. Following is an account of actual developments up to last week:
Murders. In the early hours of a Philadelphia morning three men with shotguns murdered a hunchback, a month ago. He was weazened, four-foot Hughie McLoon, 27, saloon keeper, prizefight manager, onetime mascot of the Philadelphia Athletics. Standing beneath a street lamp, he made an easy target. The assassins whizzed away into darkness.
A week later, Daniel O'Leary, gangster, was spending a night with his mistress. Five men entered their rendezvous. They fired a salvo into the sleeping O'Leary. The woman went away with them.
Gangs. Judge Edwin 0. Lewis of Quarter Sessions Court charged the Grand Jury. With District Attorney John Monaghan, he started an investigation of the crimes.* They learned of three Philadelphia liquor gangs: 1) the pioneer, potent Duffys; 2) the antagonistic O'Leary's; 3) the American Blackies.
Hunchback McLoon was a Duffy man.
The murder of Daniel O'Leary, one of four ganging brothers, seemed to be a retaliatory measure from Duffy headquarters. But the hearing of testimony germane to the murders gave way before the information of a stream of truck drivers, brewery bosses, alcohol dealers and other nondescript employees of what began to loom with increasing clarity as a monster liquor ring in the Philadelphia underworld.
Figures. Paramount figures in the inquiry have been Max ("Boo Boo") Hoff, sports promoter and alleged bootleg tsar; Louis R. Elfman, onetime lieutenant of Hoff's who has turned State's evidence; Edward S. Goldberg, whose "Military Sales Co." sold machine guns and bulletproof vests to Hoff and others.
Evidence. District Attorney Monaghan pondered the welter of evidence. He loosed many suggestive statements to the press. Three wheelbarrow loads of bootleggers' accounts were found in Hoff's former offices, where the racketeers operated in the guise of an investment company. They showed that in five months a single distilling plant had paid $29,400 in police bribery. Monthly bribes of $800 were recorded as paid to one police official, while another received $10,000 in one month. Said Mr. Monaghan, "I know their names . . . highest police officials have been tainted." He estimated that the liquor traffickers had deposited $10,000,000 in local banks during the past year. Meagre-salaried police officers, he claimed, had prodigious bank accounts.
"Master Mind." Melodramatic, Attorney Monaghan pictured a Master Mind of the liquor ring, a Kenesaw Mountain Landis of bootlegging, a racketeering Will H. Hays. "He is like a giant spider in the middle of a great web with eyes in front and behind. A man who sees everything, knows everything and controls everything in the underworld," said Mr. Monaghan, but did not name any name. The diversion of 350,000 gallons of pure grain alcohol from Philadelphia throughout the land was described as the Master Mind's greatest recent coup. In addition to being the upkeeper of its own 13,000 saloons and speakeasies, Philadelphia appeared as a spigot from which alcohol poured out to all parts of the country with a source of supply dwarfing even Chicago's.