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A Weeping Prosecutor. After Gross had refused 60 times to answer questions, District Attorney Miles McDonald rose with tears streaming down his face and sobbed: "It is utterly futile to proceed. Without Gross, our other evidence . . . means nothing. I now move to dismiss the indictment against these defendants." Then the D.A. stumbled toward a chair and slumped down. After his tears had dried, he said he had heard that Gross was paid $75,000 to keep quiet, to protect all those tied to the scandal. The deal, he said, was probably closed a week earlier, when Gross eluded his guards for 23 hours, and was found at the Atlantic City race track. Others thought that Gross really was afraid that he would be murdered, like Herman Rosenthal.
Snarling that Gross was a "miserable wretch," Judge Leibowitz sentenced him to 1,800 days in jail and fined him $15,000 for contempt.
This week, Brooklyn's special grand jury, on duty since 1949, shook off the effects of the blow, and kept on fighting. It planned to reindict some of the accused policemen, without Gross's testimony.
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On Staten Island, another D.A. was having a different kind of trouble. A 36-year-old housewife, Anna Wentworth, told the State Crime Commission she had seen District Attorney Herman Methfessel in a roulette room operated by the Dalessio brothers, the island's gambling kings. Methfessel promptly had her arrested, without a warrant, then accused her of perjury. Governor Tom Dewey, an old D.A. himself, stepped in, barred Methfessel from handling any of the Crime Commission's cases. Two days later the commission learned that Michael Dalessio, a truck driver twelve years ago, had filed income-tax returns between 1942 and 1949 listing his gross income at about $85 a week. In a sworn statement to a bank made last year, he said that his net worth was $471,400.
*When Police Lieut. Charles Becker was executed for arranging the murder of Gambler Herman Rosenthal, who had started to tell how cops protect gambling.