Disappearing Mayor

A century ago New Bedford, Mass, sent whaling ships around the world, and its picturesque wharves fairly groaned with the raw material of period novels. But today New Bedford (pop. 110,000) is a textile mill town. Its Yankees have long since been joined by thousands of Irish, Portuguese, Greeks and Italians. It is old, shabby, resigned, and tolerant of both vulgarity and venality in politics as long as they are kept within reasonable bounds. When a glib, promise-'em-everything, ex-cotton salesman named Edward Peirce (pronounced purse) was elected mayor 20 months ago, New Bedford was undisturbed--even though it was fairly obvious that he expected to "get his take" from the local gamblers.

Nervously Disheveled. By all the gauges of small-town U.S. politics, in fact, Peirce should have had a reasonably successful career; he was no better and no worse than his counterparts in many another small city hall. But Peirce, a paunchy, grey-haired and nervously disheveled man, just could not seem to avoid making enemies. He feuded with the city council. He feuded with the school committee. He feuded with his own cops. He feuded with reporters.

He drank too much and talked too boisterously at the ultra-respectable Wamsutta Club--to which he could never have been elected, but in which he automatically achieved membership as mayor. Worse, he fought with the district attorney, who finally embarrassed him by engineering a raid of New Bedford gambling joints by a small army of 121 state cops. Even then, Mayor Peirce might have got by if he had not turned, in rough and highhanded fashion, upon a police lieutenant named Alfred Figueira, who was the head of his vice squad and his chief partner in crime.

Gloomily Exiled. Figueira, a gambler named William Angell, and Bookmakers John and Francis Sullivan sang to a grand jury in return for a promise of leniency from the D.A. Angell told how the mayor, with Figueira's connivance, had raided his competitors, had hushed up a robbery at his dice joint. Angell told of paying off in $500 chunks. Figueira testified that Peirce had shut down bookies who did not deal with the Sullivans, while the Sullivans flourished and prospered.

The mayor was indicted, tried, and found guilty of conspiring to cause the police department's vice squad to neglect its duties. "I was framed!" he cried. When he was sentenced to serve four years at hard labor, he refused to resign as mayor and announced that he would keep right on running the city from his cell. But by this time nobody was listening. When he entered gloomy old Dedham jail last week, he was forbidden to have more than one visitor a week, denied permission to use a telephone, to see aides or sign city papers. The city council president was authorized to act as mayor in his stead. Having accomplished the all-but-impossible trick of exiling himself while in office, defiant Mayor Peirce vanished, still talking, behind the jail walls, and then was heard no more.

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