available that was one reason for institution of cocaine. A man would
stupefy himself with narcotics and with cocaine he would get an extra
thrill and get out of it and brighten up and keep from going to sleep.
The addict may spend $5 or $10 a day in addition to other expenses, and
not being able, or disposed to work, usually becomes a thief. He can
be a prowler or he might be a pickpocket. Some addicts are very good
burglars. He might be a stick-up-man, not often.
A woman will be a prostitute or shoplifter. A man might be a panderer.
Many addicts buy in decks, 8 ounces or 2 or 3 ounces. The preaddict
would use a few grains. It differs in different localities.
MR. DAVIS. Does the price differ?
MR. HARNEY. Expressed in terms of actual narcotic content for the
preaddict it may be $2 or $3 a grain.
MR. FISCHBACH. Mr. Harney, is it your point that an individual
otherwise law abiding necessarily turns to petty crime in order to
support the addiction?
MR. HARNEY. I would not say necessarily, but it is often apparent.
I want to emphasize that addiction, particularly in the past, has
been much among the criminal element. A man was down in a dangerous
environment before he became addicted; he had to get in that sort of
association in contrast to the casual person who might become an addict
from medical reasons, but the ordinary addict becomes so by association.
MR. FISCHBACH. Then your point is there is an epidemic effect to it?
MR. HARNEY. We have a rather unusual and alarming situation which
developed since the war. It does not quite follow the pattern I set
out. My theory used to be that most addicts were old enough to be
associated with criminals and get into the underworld with addicts
before they themselves became addicts. Today, in certain localities,
we have young people, some minors, and the pattern seems to be
experimentation in marijuana first. That loses its thrill and those
persons become addicts to heroin. Sometimes cocaine comes into the
picture.
MR. DAVIS. Is marijuana used as a starter and later other narcotics are
used?
MR. HARNEY. I would not say always, but frequently. Young people get
into the marijuana atmosphere and you have a field for the cocaine and
heroin addicts.
MR. DAVIS. Are they induced to begin with marijuana by purveyors of
heroin, cocaine, morphine, and other drugs, to lead them into addiction?
MR. HARNEY. That pattern follows. Later dealers sell all three
commodities. Youngsters come into the marijuana smoking atmosphere and
soon there is no kick in it, and someone will tell them, “Try this.”
MR. FISCHBACH. Now who is that person?
MR. HARNEY. The peddler, or a cocaine addict, or a heroin addict.
MR. FISCHBACH. I would like to direct the attention of the committee to
the case of Charles M. Roberts, alias Jim Yellow, and ask if that case
presents some problems which your Bureau experienced in the District
with regard to the enforcement of the narcotics law. Present the facts
in the case of Jim Roberts, what kind of a person he was, how he lived,
what quantity of drugs he had when taken into custody.
MR. HARNEY. Jim Roberts had two convictions for violation of the
Federal narcotics laws. He had convictions for other crimes, including
charges of assault. We used an agent in an undercover capacity. Roberts
lived in a luxuriously furnished apartment. Some of these figures I
cite are on his own statement and probably you will allow for bragging,
but he had a beautifully carved television set which he claimed cost
him a couple thousand dollars, and he drove a new Cadillac. While
the officers were in his presence money was handed to him in a paper
grocery bag. Roberts referred to a hatchet and said he was waiting to
christen it in blood. When the car was seized the hatchet was under the
seat of the car. Roberts’ style of living represents big-shot narcotic
dealers. It makes a tremendous impression on others who might think of
entering the racket.
* * *
In addition to users of standard narcotics, many in Washington go in
for esoteric kicks. A growing fad in the Negro district is to inhale
incense with marijuana added.
Barbiturates are sold without prescription, because the D.C. law has
no teeth in it. Some become habituated to these drugs and, instead of
being put to sleep by them, get all the wallop out of them that others
get from opium. Many drug stores sell nembutals over the counter for
25 cents each. Nembutals are the prostitutes’ favorite. Among initiates
they are known as goof balls, or nemies. They grew popular during World
War II, when there was a scarcity of narcotics. Most who prefer goof
balls to marijuana usually end up on morphine, heroin or cocaine.
Evelyn Walsh McLean’s daughter, who was married to Senator Reynolds,
died from an overdose of goof balls.
As elsewhere, reefers are the real menace. This product of the hemp
plant is easily available, can be grown anywhere, is cheap, and in some
circles is in good repute. There is no such thing as an innocent reefer
smoker. Sooner or later, anyone on “muggles” must become a law-breaker
to some degree. Peddlers put their heads together, know how badly any
customer is hooked. Then they jack up prices to beyond what most people
can pay honestly.
All weed-heads are cop-haters. Even in reasonably normal condition they
carry a fierce resentment against conventional forces of society.
Reefer smoking is not habitual in the sense that the addict suffers
“withdrawal” symptoms, as when he is taken off other stuff. But neither
is cocaine habit-forming in that sense. Both work on the emotions.
Their use causes a physiological change in the brain. The reefer smoker
who gives the stuff up does not turn violently ill. But he doesn’t give
it up. He likes its effect and needs its lift to give him courage.
Sooner or later, all reefer smokers go on to cocaine, because the
effect is the same as from reefers, a hundredfold. When the bang of the
hemp wears off, cocaine is the only thing that can take its place. And
because cocaine is so expensive, one must become a criminal to afford
its use. And the cocaine gives one the courage to be a criminal.
The subject of tea-hounds brings us quite naturally to our next
chapter, juvenile delinquency, in which stimulants are a large factor.
18. THE YOUNG IN HEART
Juvenile delinquency as a topic has become a bromide. You’d think
there was little left to add. But here we found not only more of it,
but conditions behind it were frequently the exact opposite of those
obtaining in other populous cities.
It is generally accepted as beyond dispute that youngsters go wrong
because of poverty, congestion, lack of play-space, exposure to
the tenement atmosphere, the saloon and miserable home life. But
Washington, with its top average of prosperity, nothing that could
rightfully be called slums, no tenements and no out-and-out saloons,
has a more alarming per capita of teen-age law-breakers than New York,
Chicago, Detroit or Kansas City.
Remarkable, moreover, is the discovery that white youth is more
delinquent proportionately to the total of all criminals of their race
than Negro youth. Over all, however, more colored children break laws
than whites. A study of records, talks with social workers and personal
prying into many cases make it evident that more young people go wrong
because of overprivilege than underprivilege.
Most kids who get into trouble are well fed, over the height and weight
scientifically charted for their age, are well dressed, and have
superior intelligence quotients. We checked on one, 15 years old, five
feet nine inches tall, weighing 140 pounds, the son of a government
official who earns $12,000 a year. He confessed to more than 100
larcenies, burglaries and purse-snatches, and he had escaped from two
postal inspectors who arrested him for looting mail-boxes, searching
for government checks on which he intended to forge endorsements. He
and a 12-year-old accomplice had broken into 37 houses in the NW area
in 20 months and had robbed scores of cars. He said:
“Everybody here is on the make. We want money, too.”
Of 2,412 arrests of white males for Part 1 offenses, serious crimes
including homicide, rape, robbery, burglary, larceny, auto-theft and
aggravated assault, 564, almost 25 per cent, were committed by boys 15
and under; 1,897 of the 2,412, or 75 per cent, were committed by boys
20 or under.
The figures for Negroes are the reverse. There adults are in the
preponderant majority. During the time when white males of all ages
committed the 2,412 specific offenses for which they were arrested,
7,729 Negroes were apprehended. Of this large number, only 1,702 of the
crimes were committed by Negro boys 15 and under; of these the number
charged to males 20 years and under was 3,477, considerably less than
half, whereas white juveniles rolled up 75 per cent of the total for
their race.
Also a departure from the usual big-town findings is the sex
proportion. Juvenile delinquency is almost a complete male monopoly,
about the only one in the female-heavy District. Harlem and
Bronzeville, Hell’s Kitchen and the dregs of Brooklyn have their
“debs,” the feminine auxiliaries of the boys’ gangs of muggers,
street-fighters and thieves. The girls constitute a good one-third
of the problem children, engaged in picking pockets, shoplifting and
prostitution. But in Washington, in the period when the 2,412 serious
crimes were charged to white males, only 309 were committed by females,
and of these only 19 were under the age of 15; 96 were 20 and under.
Negro females of all ages were arrested for 1,091 Part 1 crimes, of
which only 38 were girls up to 15 and only 161 were 20 and under.
One reason for the huge incidence of juvenile delinquency, but by no
means the decisive one, was an idiosyncrasy of the population trend
here, topsy-turvy to every other in the country during the last 10
years. While the mean age of Americans was growing to such an extent
that it appeared we were becoming a nation of old people, Washington’s
population increased 26 per cent--but its child population, as of birth
records, increased more than 60 per cent. Nobody seems to know why.
If this has anything to do with the high influx of Negroes, the figures
above quoted challenge it as a delinquency cause. Our observations
led us to the conclusion that the principal influence is a system and
habit of coddling found nowhere else. By Act of Congress, none but
the Juvenile Court can take jurisdiction over offenders before they
are 15; defendants under 18 must be transferred to it on the court’s
demand. This branch is dominated by fat matrons and skinny old maids
who make a profession or a vocation of “child welfare.” To them that
means no punishment; everybody is innocent. In time the judges, New
Deal appointees all, many from crackpot groups with socialistic and
other distorted tendencies, have been conditioned to contempt of the
law and slant toward paternalistic lectures and acquittals. The result
is an enormous rate of recidivists, and the figures represent multiple
arrests of such repeaters rather than of so many individuals.
In the rare instances when the punks are sentenced to confinement, they
go to federal reformatories, where they get short terms and de luxe
treatment.
Statistics are cold; many people skip them or disbelieve them. But cops
are practical. And so appalling has moppet misbehavior become that an
extra detail of 30 officers has been assigned on duty around the clock
to watch and buzz the teensters, in an unprecedented campaign to ease
Washington’s biggest growing pain.
The vacuum in which federally appointed judges and officials
responsible only to Congress can place a community is well illustrated
by the juvenile delinquency procedure.
Judge Edith H. Cockrill, of the Juvenile Court, adjudicated in a star
chamber, concealed from the public. Nothing came out of her court but
rumors. One lawyer said her court is “a social worker’s dream and a
lawyer’s nightmare.” He said children and their parents are treated as
“patients,” none as offenders. The result is that about three-fourths
of the kids processed through Washington Juvenile Court grow up to be
adult criminals. Public pressure forced her to issue her first report
last month, after more than two years on the bench.
Judge Cockrill is a typical Fair Deal beneficiary. She graduated from
the University of Tennessee in 1939, then got her legal experience with
the OPA. Figure out how that qualifies her to sit as a juvenile judge.
Before her appointment, a couple of years ago, by President Truman, she
had never tried a case in juvenile court. Her present calendar calls
for about 60 cases a day, including bastardy, nonsupport and parental
responsibility.
The previous incumbent on the bench was Faye L. Bentley, who
voluntarily committed herself to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital--for Mental
Disorders--for treatment in 1948. This is a course we recommend to some
other judges.
Convicted juvenile delinquents are sent to the National Training School
for Boys, the National Training School for Girls, and the Industrial
Home School.
The Department of Justice estimates three of every four graduates
of these reformatories become adult criminals. And this though the
Training School for Boys, known as “The Hill,” goes in for all modern
techniques and dodads, such as plastic surgery, psychotherapy and
psychology. There are church facilities, athletics, television, radio
and musical instruments. The boys are taught shoemaking, cooking,
farming and other trades. The school specializes in group therapy,
which has its advantages and its absurdities. Sometimes an entire group
can be spoiled by one or two tough young kids who become ringleaders.
Except in the Negro sections, Washington has been spared the scourge
of kid gangs. There are no major foreign-born settlements in town.
Therefore the white kids seldom organize into mobs. Juvenile
delinquency in other cities is often blamed on Italian, Irish, Jewish,
Mexican and Puerto Rican under-age gangs.
But organization seems to be coming into fashion. While these lines
were being typed, three local men were attacked and brutally beaten by
a gang of 12 teensters in the 700 block, 6th Street, NW, apparently
for the fun of it. The victims said the boys shouted insults at them
from the sidewalk as they drove past. The three stopped and got out
of the car. The gang then swarmed on them, beat them with bottles,
belt-buckles, brass knuckles and improvised blackjacks.
Wherever young white criminals work together they are more often
prone to choose school or college mates, or members of the same
boys’ clubs as buddies. For instance, police broke up the exclusive
“Weekend Burglars” gang, whose activities had stirred up residents
of an exclusive NW residential section when they discovered that the
criminals were home on leave on weekend passes from a military academy
in Maryland. The three boys, the oldest 17, all came from wealthy
families. Their method of “cracking” a home was this:
They would ring a doorbell; if no one answered, they cut through the
screen and smashed the glass in the door. Inside the house, they
ransacked it for three articles, taking nothing else. Playfully they
would toss furniture helter-skelter and break china. The money they
spent. The whiskey they drank. The stolen guns they showed off with.
Kids of all ages and both sexes and races are smoking reefers in
prodigious quantities. These are easily obtainable from peddlers who
work outside the schools, and inside some schools, from students,
themselves. The current price for the weeds to school-children is 50
cents each, sometimes three for a dollar.
The young dope-fiends are not confined to any neighborhood of the
city or to any economic class. One high school in the area, attended
by children whose parents are in the upper brackets, is reported to
have 95 per cent addiction. A major kid crime element is marijuana.
Youngsters go on from it to more potent narcotics, then commit petty
crimes to obtain the funds to buy the drugs. Reefers and other dope
sharply bring out latent lawlessness.
High school athletic events have become a scandal. Bootleggers purvey
liquor openly in the stands. Hundreds of stinking-drunk youngsters are
swept out of the stadiums after every game.
Professional gamblers attend these games and make book without any
pretense, taking bets from the kids of from 25 cents up and giving
tickets in return.
Neighborhood stores adjacent to schools also purvey bootleg liquor and
take bets from the juveniles, not only for their own school games, but
on the horses and numbers.
Juvenile delinquency is almost as bad in the suburbs. There kids have
cars, and “hot rod” races are common.
Youngsters ape their elders when they see the callousness of parents
to the processes of law. Laxity, favoritism, New Deal “liberalism,” a
general spirit of contempt for law enforcement are reflected in the
growing generation. The solid virtues are “old hat.” Youth is on a
rampage.
Washington has no monopoly on young criminals, but it has more of them
per capita than any other city in the nation.
Lame-brains like to point out that only colored people are confined to
“slums” in Washington; that no whites live in ghettos in the capital.
If so, how come that juvenile delinquency among the whites is as
startling as among the blacks, more so, in fact? As reported elsewhere
in this book, Washington’s crime rate leads the nation. It is all the
more startling to discover how many of these crimes are committed by
children.
19. BOOZE AND BOTTLES
Washingtonians imbibe three times as much as you do, friend voter.
Except for a few silly restrictions, no place in the country offers
as many inducements to the potential alcoholic. The answer is, 14,151
drunks last year created a jail “housing crisis.” The number more than
doubled in the last five years. Liquor consumption of the District
is three times the U. S. average. Every resident, including new-born
infants, soaked up almost four gallons of hooch last year.
Even allowing for thirsty tourists, conventioners, and Virginia and
Maryland commuters, Washington drinks more than any other U. S. city,
including dissolute New York and debauched Chicago.
This is the place where price control was invented, yet the District
has no peacetime minimum price law on bottled goods. You can buy
standard brands for a dollar less than anywhere else. Many unnamed
whiskeys and gins are cheap; it doesn’t pay to cook your own. Whiskey
costs less than $2.50 a fifth, and gin can be bought for $1.75. Yet the
bootleg business is a major industry. Millions of gallons sold in the
District, on which no tax was paid, swell the known figures.
The liquor control situation is an anomaly. Like the District of
Columbia, itself, the liquor laws were born of compromise, this between
Congressmen from the wet and bone-dry states.
You can drink hard liquor in restaurants and cocktail lounges, but only
when sitting at a table. Beer and wines may be dispensed over the bar,
but not to standees. You’ve got to find a stool. Some genius figured
you can’t get plastered sitting down, forgetting that many who drink
and sit can’t stand up again.
Hard liquor may not be sold on Sundays, though beer and wine can be.
Bars can remain open until 2 A.M. every night except Saturday and
Sunday, when they must shutter promptly at 12. You can’t line drinks
on your table; anything in your possession at the closing hour will
be swept out of your hand. Most places issue the last call 15 minutes
before the limit and in that final quarter-hour there are wild
drinking scenes as customers try to get drunk all at once.
Liquor for off-premise consumption is sold in bottle stores, of which
there are about 350. They close at nine on weekdays and at midnight
on Saturdays and all day Sundays. A package store license costs $815
a year, but it will cost you $50,000 to buy one, as the ABC Board has
frozen the rolls.
Those who can’t get a bun on by closing time have no trouble locating
an oasis after the curfew. At this writing there are 613 so-called
bottle-clubs running in the District, in addition to hundreds of gin
flats in Black Town, where almost any cab driver will steer you.
Bootleggers work certain street corners, where you can buy bottle goods
after hours.
The legal age minimum is 18 for beer and 21 for hard stuff, but this
law, like almost all other rules and regulations, is breached more
often than honored.
Citizens and Congressmen seek sporadically to rationalize local liquor
laws, in hope of cutting down violations. But the dry bloc buries the
bills in committees. Everyone was surprised when the House District
Affairs Committee managed to bring up a bill permitting sale until two
on Saturday nights. This turned out to be a piece of parliamentary
jockeying in the fight against the President’s FEPC Bill, of all
things. That law, obnoxious to Southerners, would have come up for a
vote unless one with legislative priority could be sent in ahead. And
that bill, according to the calendar, was a proposed law to liberalize
drinking habits in the District. So the Southerners brought it up,
side-tracked the FEPC, and, a couple of weeks later, when it came time
to vote on the booze act, roundly routed it.
The thirsty visitor finds it easy to find a bottle-club and become a
full-fledged drinking member on the spot. The names, locations and
owners of these after-hour spots vary from day to day. Occasionally,
after clean-ups, all or most close for a couple of weeks or a couple of
months. As these words were written the District was recovering from
its most painful drought, brought on by revelations before the District
Crime Investigating Committee, headed by Attorney Fischbach.
The front-page stories forced the cops and U. S. Attorney Fay to close
some joints. Others lay low awhile. A murder in the Hideaway Club
didn’t help, either.
We made an intensive study of bottle-clubs. Of the score or more
we visited, we found only one apparently operating legitimately and
according to law. That was the Lyre’s Club, about which more later. Of
the 600-plus such clubs in Washington, it is possible that a few adhere
to the book, but we didn’t hear of them.
On paper, bottle-clubs are supposed to be membership organizations,
incorporated for social and benevolent purposes. Members bring their
own liquor, which is held for them, their names on the labels. The
clubs sell setups and food.
Charlie Ford, a Washington attorney to whom we will have occasion to
tip our hats in much more detail later, is the lawyer for a number of
clubs. He officiated at their births.
Here’s how most of them really work. Regular patrons, i.e., “members,”
are supposed to pay annual dues of about $10, depending on the club,
but most regulars pay nothing. Transients, i.e., guests, are charged a
door-fee of one or two dollars, depending on the club.
Setups are sold, to those who bring their own liquor, at a nominal
price of 35 cents and up. If you haven’t your stuff parked or with you,
most clubs will sell it to you under the counter or advise you it can
be had from a guy seated in front of the entrance in a car.
These clubs are incorporated as non-profit private enterprises, not
required to pay Federal amusement taxes even when they provide floor
shows and dancing. Nor need they have ABC liquor licenses, because they
are supposed not to be selling.
Many of them operate as follows: The prospective owner or owners and
a couple of their friends or employes incorporate as a social or
benevolent organization. The real owner then rents and furnishes the
premises, which he in turn sublets to the so-called social club at a
rent which will approximate all the “take” from membership and door
charges. The “club” thereupon turns over the kitchen, the sale of
setups and the hat-checking and cigaret stand to the real proprietor,
as a concession, in return for a token payment, which in turn goes back
to the proprietor with the rent.
In clubs that sell liquor illegally or provide gambling, records of
such activities are not kept. The proceeds go directly into the owner’s
pocket. If raided or threatened by cleanup drives, the clubs disband.
The owner organizes a new club under the same terms and repeats the
process.