The "Garden State" of New Jersey (pronounced Goddan State of New J-eh-sey) boasts some of the most remarkably unsylvan areas east of the city dump at Gary, Ind. Its smoke-hung Hudson shore is littered, mile on dreary mile, with dingy factories, junkyards, piers, abattoirs, disconsolate old houses and drafty barrooms. When the wind is right, the indescribable perfume of some of the world's most thoroughly fermented tidal flats profanes the air. Jersey politics—a hatchery for grasping bosses—rests in this setting as comfortably as a bloated grapefruit floating in a sump pit.
Most of Jersey's larger cities are traditionally Democratic, and the state has been Republican for ten years, but politicos of both parties have been remarkably astigmatic toward venality great & small. When New York's Mayor Fiorello La Guardia threw "punks and gamblers" out of town, they migrated, almost as one. to Bergen County, N.J., and for almost ten years no politico seemed to know that they were there.
Disturbed Currents. Horse rooms and sawdust-joint crap games grew almost as common as gas stations. The pleasant back country blossomed with ornate gambling hells, which boasted thick rugs, fine food and limousine service to Manhattan. Hundreds of Bergen County citizens rented their phones to bookies at $50 a week, opened their houses to furtive characters known as "sitters," who crouched near the receiver eight hours a day taking bets from the Big City across the Hudson. But after the Kefauver committee blabbed the tale to the world on television, New Jersey's Republican Attorney General Theodore Parsons went into prolonged spasms of surprise, horror and chagrin.
Incautiously, perhaps, he did more—sent a fire-breathing young special prosecutor named Nelson F. Stamler into Bergen County with orders to wipe it clean as a peeper's telescope on a summer evening. Last week—31 months later—this abnormal development was still having an intensely disturbing effect on the turgid currents of Jersey politics.
Spectacular Complaint. Stamler carried out his orders with tactless vigor. He slammed 100 gamblers, including Big Shots Frank Erickson and Joe Adonis, into jail, and got indictments against a score of others, including three highly placed cops and a former Bergen County prosecutor. Amidst this furor, Bergen Gangster Willie Moretti was mysteriously killed (at the orders, according to Stamler's hints, of politicians who were afraid he would talk). But Willie, according to testimony, did not die before making one spectacular complaint: he had given $286,000 to a smalltime statehouse aide named Harold John Adonis (no kin to Joe), and he had understood that $190,000 of it was going to the governor—but had got no protection from the state.