Cropper

In Manhattan last week a great courtroom drama reached a sudden denouement. Prosecutor Thomas Edmund Dewey having shown to his own satisfaction that Tammany Leader Jimmy Hines was the political fixer for Harlem's numbers racket, had rested the State's case. The defense had begun to put its witnesses upon the stand. One of them, young Lawyer Lyon Boston, onetime assistant to Tammany's District Attorney William C. Dodge, testified that Tammanyite Dodge had deputed him to investigate Tammanyite Hines's long-rumored connection with the numbers racket, that he had found no evidence against Hines. Prosecutor Dewey started cross examining. Suddenly he asked:

"Don't you remember any testimony about Hines and the poultry racket?''

Up jumped ponderous Defense Attorney Lloyd Stryker, waving his arms at the witness. "Wait!" boomed he. "I ask for a mistrial."

The courtroom shivered. Witness Boston's jaw dropped. So did Prosecutor Dewey's. He and Attorney Stryker strode to the bench where sat stern-faced Justice Ferdinand Pecora. Attorney Stryker argued that the prosecutor's remark had nothing to do with the trial at hand, was deliberately prejudicial to his client. Prosecutor Dewey insisted that the question was proper and justified. Justice Pecora, with face sterner than ever, recessed court for the week-end to decide.

Thereupon the spotlight of the trial shifted from Thomas Dewey and James Hines to Ferdinand Pecora. As the reform candidate whom Tammanyite Hines helped Tammanyite Dodge beat at the polls in 1933, as a Democratic judge presiding over a case that might make Republican Dewey Governor of New York, Justice Pecora was put to hard test of judicial impartiality.

For two days Justice Pecora pondered, then convened his court, announced he would hand down his decision. With the courtroom locked, he read in a firm, dry voice a flat and lawyerlike end to one of the most sensational cases in New York jurisprudence. Because Defendant Hines was charged only with conspiracy to "contrive a lottery," said he, the question about the poultry racket was improper and prejudicial, the request for a mistrial was granted.

To a trial which had filled the press of New York City and the nation with surprises for a month, this was a fittingly strange ending. For grinning Jimmy Hines and alert Attorney Stryker, it was a masterstroke. In a new trial before another jury the hand of the prosecutor will be lying face-up and the opportunities for cross-examination by Attorney Stryker vastly enhanced. For the "Great Prosecutor" whom Republicans had already slated for the gubernatorial nomination at their State convention this month, it was the humiliation of being caught in an ABC legal error.

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