The King Meets a Christian

Louisiana's Sheriff Frank J. Clancy is every inch a king. For the past 22 years he has ruled the delta flats and neon jungles of Jefferson Parish, near New Orleans. Clancy was at his imperial best when the U.S. Senate's crime investigators swooped into Louisiana last month with embarrassing questions about gambling, whorehouses and bookie joints. He received the investigators with proper hauteur and met their questions with regal silence.

But when the Senators prepared to crown King Clancy with a contempt citation, the thought of rubbing shoulders with all those commoners in a federal prison gave the King pause. One day last week he bought train tickets for himself and his chauffeur (so he would have someone to play gin rummy with) and rushed to Washington to make amends. Seated in the hearing room of Senator Estes Kefauver's crime investigating committee, Sheriff Clancy set out to explain some of the royal problems.

Jefferson Parish. "I thought that incrimination was more local than it was involved in the federal angle of it," he said in the imperial tongue. "And ... I think that something ought to be said in all fairness to Jefferson Parish." Of course, he added hastily, "I would not want to say that Jefferson is one of the finest places in the world ... or anything like that."

What did Sheriff Clancy know about crime in Jefferson Parish? Well, he had been sheriff for only 22 years, so naturally he didn't know all about it. "Insofar as gambling is concerned," he obliged, "that has been going on there for hundreds of years. I presume that a man that would run for office down there . . . unless he was for it,he could not have been elected."

Why so? the committee asked. "So many people worked in these places, up to better than 1,000," explained the sheriff. "Of those, there were a lot of them were underprivileged and old people ..."

Brimstone. Charles Tobey, the seriously Christian Senator from New Hampshire, gazed, upon Sheriff Clancy as if he had just confessed to correspondence with the devil. "Have you upheld the law as against gambling?" the Senator boomed.

"I cannot say that I did," Clancy admitted, with an engaging smile.

"Then you have broken your oath of office," cried Tobey incredulously.

"That is right, Senator," replied Clancy pleasantly. "I broke it for the sake of those old and unfortunate men who could not get employment any other place."

Clancy's concern for the old and unfortunate went even further--to make sure they got work, one of Clancy's deputies had the job of hiring all dealers, croupiers, chartmakers and other attendants of illegal establishments. Clancy agreed to let Dandy Phil Kastel, partner of Manhattan's Frank Costello, open a gambling spot on the understanding that it would help relieve local unemployment. Unless they hired local people, said Clancy grandly, gamblers couldn't open in Jefferson.

"In other words," he was asked, "you are the high power who gives the clearances?" "Yes, sir," said Clancy proudly.

"And when Clancy lowers the boom and says to close, they close; is that not right?"

"That is right," said Clancy, "they close."

The smell of brimstone almost suffocated pious old Charles Tobey. "Why don't you resign?" he demanded. "I simply cannot sit and listen to this type of . . . political vermin who comes up before us and shoots off and defies the law; a good humor man, he laughs about it all with a smile on his face."

Salvation? Still smiling, King Clancy told about his own financial successes. In the last four years he had made $78,000 betting on the horses. The Senators wanted to know his system. "My formula is to play the last race," he explained. ". . . You cannot play every race and win . . . If you play the first races you stay there and be hooked ... If you play the last races [and] get a winner, you go home."

For 2 1/2 hours, King Clancy bared tiny, selected bits of his soul to the Senators, not really giving them much more than they already knew about crime in Louisiana, but astonishing one & all with his shameless villainy. Clancy ended his testimony with a promise: when he got back home, he was going to close up every joint in Jefferson--"give them until 6 o'clock to get closed up, otherwise go to jail." Even Senator Tobey, somewhat mollified, saw hope for King Clancy's salvation.

"Come hell or high water?" Tobey demanded.

"Definitely," said Clancy. "You have my word for that ... I want to thank Senator Tobey for his remarks because I think it will help me to make Jefferson a better place."

"Yes," concluded Tobey reflectively, "you and I are getting older. Life is a very uncertain thing when that time comes when the bell rings and we have to move on."

"That is right," Clancy agreed soberly.

The committee dropped the contempt charges and sent smiling King Clancy back to his 1,000-acre ranch, his new home, his kennel of hunting dogs, his big cattle barn, and the thousands of reverent Jefferson Parish subjects who figure the King can do no wrong that hasn't been done by many another public official in Louisiana.

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