organizational structure: "These organizations, such as the Mafia, are conducted under their own code of ethics which is without respect for moral principles, law, and order... Secrecy as to membership and authority to membership and authority within such organizations is a cardinal principle.” It is somewhat of a contradiction to specify that the value system of an organization is void of respect for moral principles, law, and order, for an organization is, by definition, an orderly arrangement of positions. Further, as we have shown, members of criminal organizations place a great deal of stress on honor and honesty in their dealings with each other, a form of "moral principle.” The framers of the bill obviously here had in mind specific kinds of moral principles, such as those proscribing all murders, not just certain of them.

Fourth, the preamble recognizes the essential alliance between such organizations and the public officials whose duty it is to prevent and repress crime: "The existence of these organizations is made easier through the use of bribery and corruption of certain public officials." In the terminology we have been using, the organizations include Corrupter and Corruptee positions for which men are recruited or trained.

Fifth, the authors of the bill explicitly recognize that a coercive system of justice is used in an attempt to maximize conformity to organizational authority and ethics: "Discipline and authority within such organizations are maintained by means of drastic retaliation, usually murder, and . . . similar methods are employed to coerce non-members." At least one position for an Enforcer of organizational order is a part of the division of labor.

Other sections of the bill provide additional useful descriptions of various aspects of organizational structure and value systems. All five of the points listed above are elaborated in the bill's definition of the Mafia as "a secret society whose members are pledged and dedicated to commit unlawful acts against the United States or any State thereof in furtherance of their objective to dominate organized crime and whose operations are conducted under a secret code of terror and reprisal not only for members who fail to abide by the edicts, decrees, decisions, principles, and instructions of the society in implementation of this domination of organized crime, but also for those persons, not members, who represent a threat to the security of the members or the criminal operations of the society."

The words "organized crime" as used in the above statement presumably refer, as in the second point above, to crime committed as an occupant of a position in a rational division of labor making up any "organization having for one of its purposes the use of any interstate commerce facility in the commission of acts which are in violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, relating to gambling, extortion, blackmail, narcotics, prostitution or labor-racketeering."

It should not by any means be assumed that illicit organizations consist of only the three positions described as Corrupter, Corruptee and Enforcer. Dozens of other positions are integrated with these three to make up an illicit business and government. The formal structure

But

has only been sketched out; much less is known about the informal structure-even the operational processes of illicit enterprises-than is known about legitimate organizations of comparable size. A common assumption seems to be that "everybody knows" how a business is organized and therefore how it operates, whether that business is dealing in an outlawed commodity or not. "everybody" does not know about the formal and informal divisions of labor of even legitimate business enterprises, let alone illegitimate ones. In the last decade alone social scientists have made thousands of studies of legitimate organizations. Variations in the effectiveness and efficiency of different kinds of divisions of labor-and in the conditions under which these arise, persist, and change have been studied in many settings, ranging from broad administrative systems to specific factories and firms. The theory and research results stemming from these studies would be directly applicable to illicit enterprises if even the most rudimentary scientific data on them were collected and systematized.

Collection of such data cannot proceed very far without the cooperation of law-enforcement agencies, especially those operating on the Federal level. Because the operations of organized crime units are illegal, the participants are unwilling to let them be studied. Most of what is now known about organized crime is in the files of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, and various legislative investigating committees. But law-enforcement and investigating agencies necessarily must be more concerned with collecting evidence which will result in the incarceration of individuals than with evidence about the structure and operations of illicit organizations. They are interested in putting criminals in prison, whether the criminals are occupying positions. in an illicit division of labor or not. Since prosecuting attorneys do not put organizations behind bars, the evidence produced for them, and for grand juries, tends to emphasize individual conduct and tends to neglect the relationships between the conduct of one criminal and another.

Therefore, more than an opening of police files to researchers is essential, although this would be an important first step. New questions, different from those traditionally raised by police and prosecutors must be asked, and new evidence relating to the answers to those questions must be assembled. Moreover, researchers must learn more of the things police officers know but do not file in their reports, and must have access to the informants available to law-enforcement agencies. Just as information on the economic, political, and social organization of a foreign nation can be obtained by means of interviews with defectors, so information on the economic, political and social organization of the "families" operating in the United States can be obtained by conversations with informants. The American confederation of criminals will not be controlled until it is understood, and it will not be understood until its division of labor has been specified in detail so that it can be attacked as an organization.

INTRODUCTION 1

This study focuses upon the politics of vice and corruption in a town we have chosen to call Wincanton, U.S.A. Although the facts and events of this report are true, every attempt has been made to hide the identity of actual people by the use of fictitious names, descriptions and dates.

Following a brief description of the people of Wincanton and the structure of its government and law enforcement agencies, a section outlines the structure of the Wincanton gambling syndicate and the system of protection under which it operated. A second section looks at the corrupt activities of Wincanton officials apart from the protection of vice and gambling.

The latter part of this report considers gambling and corruption as social forces and as political issues. First, they are analyzed in terms of their functions in the community-satisfying social and psychological needs declared by the State to be improper; supplementing the income of

Pro

JOHN A. GARDINER, A.B., Princeton University, 1959; M.A., Yale University, 1962; LL.B., Harvard University, 1963; Ph. D., Harvard University, 1966. In 1965, while finishing his doctoral dissertation, "Traffic Law Enforcement in Massachusetts," Professor Gardiner was appointed to his current position of assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin. fessor Gardiner was a member of Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton and graduated Magna Cum Laude in public affairs. He has been an honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Falk Fellow in Political Science at Yale; V. O. Key, Jr., Fellow of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of M.I.T. and Harvard; and Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Research Fellow and Honorary Social Science Research Council Fellow at Harvard.

DAVID J. OLSON, B.A., Concordia College, 1963; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1965. David J. Olson teaches Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, where he is also a candidate for a Ph. D. degree. Under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation he did independent research at Union Theological Seminary in New York for one year. Mr. Olson is a member of the American Political Science Association. He formerly served as a community planner II and as a consultant to the Redevelopment Authority of Madison, Wis.

1 This study, part of a larger investigation of the politics of law enforcement and corruption, was financed by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation. All responsibility for the contents of this report remains with the senior author. The authors wish gratefully to acknowledge the assistance of the people and officials of Wincanton who will, at their request, remain anony mous. The authors wish particularly to acknowledge the assistance of the news. papers of Wincanton; Prof. Harry Sharp and the staff of the Wisconsin Survey Research Laboratory; Henry S. Ruth, Jr., Lloyd E. Ohlin, and Charles H. Rogovin

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the participants, including underpaid city officials and policemen, and of related legitimate businesses; providing speed and certainty in the transaction of municipal business. Second, popular attitudes toward gambling and corruption are studied, as manifested in both local elections and a survey of a cross-section of the city's population. Finally, an attempt will be made to explain why Wincanton, more than other cities, has had this marked history of lawbreaking and official malfeasance, and several suggestions will be made regarding legal changes that might make its continuation more difficult.

WINCANTON

In general, Wincanton represents a city that has toyed with the problem of corruption for many years. No mayor in the history of the city of Wincanton has ever succeeded himself in office. Some mayors have been corrupt and have allowed the city to become a wide-open center for gambling and prostitution; Wincanton voters have regularly rejected those corrupt mayors who dared to seek reelection. Some mayors have been scrupulously honest and have closed down all vice operations in the city; these men have been generally disliked for being too straitlaced. Other mayors, fearing one form of resentment or the other, have chosen quietly to retire from public life. The questions of official corruption and policy toward vice and gambling, it seems, have been paramount issues in Wincanton elections since the days of Prohibition. Any mayor who is known to be controlled by the gambling syndicates will lose office, but so will any mayor who tries completely to clean up the city. The people of Wincanton apparently want both easily accessible gambling and freedom from racket domination.

Probably more than most cities in the United States, Wincanton has known a high degree of gambling, vice (sexual immorality, including prostitution), and corruption (official malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance of duties). With the exception of two reform administrations, one in the early 1950's and the one elected in the early 1960's, Wincanton has been wide open since the 1920's. Bookies taking bets on horses took in several

of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice; and many National, State, and local law enforcement personnel. The authors shared equally in the research upon which this report is based; because of the teaching duties of Mr. Olson, Mr. Gardiner assumed the primary role in writing this report. Joel Margolis and Keith Billingsley, graduate students in the Depart ment of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, assisted in the preparation of the data used in this report.

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millions of dollars each year. With writers at most newsstands, cigar counters, and corner grocery stores, a numbers bank did an annual business in excess of $1,300,000 during some years. Over 200 pinball machines, equipped to pay off like slot machines, bore $250 Federal gambling stamps. A high stakes dice game attracted professional gamblers from more than 100 miles away; $25,000 was found on the table during one Federal raid. For a short period of time in the 1950's (until raided by U.S. Treasury Department agents), a still, capable of manufacturing $4 million in illegal alcohol each year, operated on the banks of the Wincanton River. Finally, prostitution flourished openly in the city, with at least 5 large houses (about 10 girls apiece) and countless smaller houses catering to men from a large portion of the State.

As in all cities in which gambling and vice had flourished openly, these illegal activities were protected by local officials. Mayors, police chiefs, and many lesser officials were on the payroll of the gambling syndicate, while others received periodic "gifts" or aid during political campaigns. A number of Wincanton officials added to their revenue from the syndicate by extorting kickbacks on the sale or purchase of city equipment or by selling licenses, permits, zoning variances, etc. As the city officials made possible the operations of the racketeers, so frequently the racketeers facilitated the corrupt endeavors of officials by providing liaison men to arrange the deals or "enforcers" to insure that the deals were carried out. The visitor to Wincanton is struck by the beauty of the surrounding countryside and the drabness of a tired, old central city. Looking down on the city from Mount Prospect, the city seems packed in upon itself, with long streets of red brick row houses pushing up against old railroad yards and factories; 93 percent of the housing units were built before 1940.

Wincanton had its largest population in 1930 and has been losing residents slowly ever since.2 The people who remained those who didn't move to the suburbs or to the other parts of the United States-are the lower middle class, the less well educated; they seem old and often have an Old World feeling about them. The median age in Wincanton is 37 years (compared with a national median of 29 years). While unemployment is low (2.5 percent of the labor force in April 1965), there are few professional or white collar workers; only 11 percent of the families had incomes over $10,000, and the median family income was $5,453. As is common in many cities with an older, largely working class population, the level of education is low-only 27 percent of the adults have completed high school, and the median number of school years completed is 8.9.

While most migration into Wincanton took place before 1930, the various nationality groups in Wincanton seem to have retained their separate identities. The Germans, the Poles, the Italians, and the Negroes each have their own neighborhoods, stores, restaurants, clubs and politicians. Having immigrated earlier, the Germans are more assimilated into the middle and upper middle classes; the other groups still frequently live in the neighborhoods in which they first settled; and Italian and

2 To preserve the anonymity of the city, it will only be stated that Wincanton's 1960 population was between 75,000 and 200,000.

Polish politicans openly appeal to Old World loyalties. Club life adds to the ethnic groupings by giving a definite neighborhood quality to various parts of the city and their politics; every politician is expected to visit the ethnic associations, ward clubs, and voluntary firemen's associations during campaign time-buying a round of drinks for all present and leaving money with the club stewards to hire poll watchers to advertise the candidates and guard the voting booths.

In part, the flight from Wincanton of the young and the more educated can be explained by the character of the local economy. While there have been no serious depressions in Wincanton during the last 30 years, there has been little growth either, and most of the factories in the city were built 30 to 50 years ago and rely primarily upon semiskilled workers. A few textile mills have moved out of the region, to be balanced by the construction in the last 5 years of several electronics assembly plants. No one employer dominates the economy, although seven employed more than 1,000 persons. Major industries today include steel fabrication and heavy machinery, textiles and food products.

With the exception of 2 years (one in the early 1950's; the other 12 years later) in which investigations of corruption led to the election of Republican reformers, Wincanton politics have been heavily Democratic in recent years. Registered Democrats in the city outnumber Republicans by a margin of 2 to 1; in Alsace County as a whole, including the heavily Republican middle class suburbs, the Democratic margin is reduced to 3 to 2. Despite this margin of control, or possibly because of it, Democratic politics in Wincanton have always been somewhat chaotic-candidates appeal to the ethnic groups, clubs, and neighborhoods, and no machine or organization has been able to dominate the party for very long (although a few men have been able to build a personal following lasting for 10 years or so). Incumbent mayors have been defeated in the primaries by other Democrats, and voting in city council sessions has crossed party lines more often than it has respected them.

To a great extent, party voting in Wincanton follows a business-labor cleavage. Two newspapers (both owned by a group of local businessmen) and the Chamber of Commerce support Republican candidates; the unions. usually endorse Democrats. It would be unwise, however, to overestimate either the solidarity or the interest in local politics of Wincanton business and labor groups. Frequently two or more union leaders may be opposing each other in a Democratic primary (the steelworkers frequently endorse liberal or reform candidates, while the retail clerks have been more tied to "organization" men); or ethnic allegiances and hostilities may cause union members to vote for Republicans, or simply sit on their hands. Furthermore, both business and labor leaders express greater interest in State and National issues-taxation, wage and hour laws, collective bargaining policies, etc.-than in local issues. (The attitude of both business and labor toward Wincanton gambling and corruption will be examined in detail later.)

Many people feel that, apart from the perennial issue

of corruption, there really are not any issues in Wincanton politics and that personalities are the only things that matter in city elections. Officials assume that the voters are generally opposed to a high level of public services. Houses are tidy, but the city has no public trash collection, or fire protection either, for that matter. While the city buys firetrucks and pays their drivers, firefighting is done solely by volunteers in a city with more than 75,000 residents. (Fortunately, most of the houses are built of brick or stone.) Urban renewal has been slow, master planning nonexistent, and a major railroad line still crosses the heart of the shopping district, bringing traffic to a halt as trains grind past. Some people complain, but no mayor has ever been able to do anything about it. For years, people have been talking about rebuilding City Hall (constructed as a high school 75 years ago), modernizing mass transportation, and ending pollution of the Wincanton River, but nothing much has been done about any of these issues, or even seriously considered. Some people explain this by saying that Wincantonites are interested in everything-up to and including, but not extending beyond, their front porch.

If the voters of Wincanton were to prefer an active rather than passive city government, they would find the municipal structure well equipped to frustrate their desires. Many governmental functions are handled by independent boards and commissions, each able to veto proposals of the mayor and councilmen. Until about 10 years ago, State law required all middle-sized cities to operate under a modification of the commission form of government. (In the early 1960's, Wincanton voters narrowly-by a margin of 16 votes out of 30,000-rejected a proposal to set up a council-manager plan.) The city council is composed of five men—a mayor and four councilmen. Every odd-numbered year, two councilmen are elected to 4-year terms. The mayor also has a 4-year term of office, but has a few powers not held by the councilmen; he presides at council sessions but has no veto power over council legislation. State law requires that city affairs be divided among five named departments, each to be headed by a member of the council, but the council members are free to decide among themselves what functions will be handled by which departments (with the proviso that the mayor must control the police deparment). Thus the city's work can be split equally among five men, or a three-man majority can control all important posts. In a not atypical recent occurrence, one councilman, disliked by his colleagues, found himself supervising only garbage collection and the Main Street comfort station! Each department head (mayor and councilmen) has almost complete control over his own department. Until 1960, when a $2,500 raise became effective, the mayor received an annual salary of $7,000, and each councilman received $6,000. The mayor and city councilmen have traditionally been permitted to hold other jobs while in office.

To understand law enforcement in Wincanton, it is necessary to look at the activities of local, county, State, and Federal agencies. State law requires that each mayor select his police chief and officers "from the force" and

"exercise a constant supervision and control over their conduct." Applicants for the police force are chosen on the basis of a civil service examination and have tenure "during good behavior," but promotions and demotions are entirely at the discretion of the mayor and council. Each new administration in Wincanton has made wholesale changes in police ranks-patrolmen have been named chief, and former chiefs have been reduced to walking a beat. (When one period of reform came to an end in the mid-1950's, the incoming mayor summoned the old chief into his office. "You can stay on as an officer," the mayor said, "but you'll have to go along with my policies regarding gambling." "Mr. Mayor," the chief said, “I'm going to keep on arresting gamblers no matter where you put me." The mayor assigned the former chief to the position of "Keeper of the Lockup," permanently stationed in the basement of police headquarters.) Promotions must be made from within the department. This policy has continued even though the present reform mayor created the post of police commissioner and brought in an outsider to take command. For cities of its size, Wincanton police salaries have been quite lowthe top pay for patrolmen was $4,856-in the lowest quartile of middle-sized cities in the Nation. Since 1964 the commissioner has received $10,200 and patrolmen $5,400 each year.

While the police department is the prime law enforcement agency within Wincanton, it receives help (and occasional embarrassment) from other groups. Three county detectives work under the district attorney, primarily in rural parts of Alsace County, but they are occasionally called upon to assist in city investigations. The State Police, working out of a barracks in surburban Wincanton Hills, have generally taken a "hands off" or "local option" attitude toward city crime, working only in rural areas unless invited into a city by the mayor, district attorney, or county judge. Reform mayors have welcomed the superior manpower and investigative powers of the State officers; corrupt mayors have usually been able to thumb their noses at State policemen trying to uncover Wincanton gambling. Agents of the State's Alcoholic Beverages Commission suffer from no such limitations and enter Wincanton at will in search of liquor violations. They have seldom been a serious threat to Wincanton corruption, however, since their numbers are quite limited. (and thus the agents are dependent upon the local police for information and assistance in making arrests). Their mandate extends to gambling and prostitution only when encountered in the course of a liquor investigation.

Under most circumstances, the operative level of law enforcement in Wincanton has been set by local political decisions, and the local police (acting under instructions from the mayor) have been able to determine whether or not Wincanton should have open gambling and prostitution. The State Police, with their "hands off" policy, have simply reenforced the local decision. From time to time, however, Federal agencies have become interested in conditions in Wincanton and, as will be seen throughout this study, have played as important a role as the local police in cleaning up the city. Internal Revenue Service

agents have succeeded in prosecuting Wincanton gamblers for failure to hold gambling occupation stamps, pay the special excise taxes on gambling receipts, or report income. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents have acted against violations of the Federal laws against extortion and interstate gambling. Finally, special attorneys from the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Justice Department were able to convict leading members of the syndicate controlling Wincanton gambling. While Federal prosecutions in Wincanton have often been spectacular, it should also be noted that they have been somewhat sporadic and limited in scope. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, was quite successful in seizing gaming devices and gamblers lacking the Federal gambling occupation stamps, but it was helpless after Wincantonites began to purchase the stamps, since local officials refused to prosecute them for violations of the State antigambling laws.

The court system in Wincanton, as in all cities in the State, still has many of the 18th century features which have been rejected in other States. At the lowest level, elected magistrates (without legal training) hear petty civil and criminal cases in each ward of the city. The magistrates also issue warrants and decide whether persons arrested by the police shall be held for trial. Magistrates are paid only by fees, usually at the expense of convicted defendants. All serious criminal cases, and all contested petty cases, are tried in the county court. The three judges of the Alsace County court are elected (on a partisan ballot) for 10-year terms, and receive an annual salary of $25,000.

GAMBLING AND CORRUPTION: THE INSIDERS

THE STERN EMPIRE

The history of Wincanton gambling and corruption since World War II centers around the career of Irving Stern. Stern is an immigrant who came to the United States and settled in Wincanton at the turn of the century. He started as a fruit peddler, but when Prohibition came along, Stern became a bootlegger for Heinz Glickman, then the beer baron of the State. When Glickman was murdered in the waning days of Prohibition, Stern took over Glickman's business and continued to sell untaxed liquor after repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Several times during the 1930's, Stern was convicted in Federal court on liquor charges and spent over a year in Federal prison.

Around 1940, Stern announced to the world that he had reformed and went into his family's wholesale produce business. While Stern was in fact leaving the bootlegging trade, he was also moving into the field of gambling, for even at that time Wincanton had a "wideopen" reputation, and the police were ignoring gamblers. With the technical assistance of his bootlegging friends, Stern started with a numbers bank and soon added horse betting, a dice game, and slot machines to his organization. During World War II, officers from a nearby Army training base insisted that all brothels be closed,

but this did not affect Stern. He had already concluded that public hostility and violence, caused by the houses, were, as a side effect, threatening his more profitable gambling operations. Although Irv Stern controlled the the lion's share of Wincanton gambling throughout the 1940's, he had to share the slot machine trade with Klaus Braun. Braun, unlike Stern, was a Wincanton native and a Gentile, and thus had easier access to the frequently anti-Semitic club stewards, restaurant owners, and bartenders who decided which machines would be placed in their buildings. Legislative investigations in the early 1950's estimated that Wincanton gambling was an industry with gross receipts of $5 million each year; at that time Stern was receiving $40,000 per week from bookmaking, and Braun took in $75,000 to $100,000 per year from slot machines alone.

Irv Stern's empire in Wincanton collapsed abruptly when legislative investigations brought about the election of a reform Republican administration. Mayor Hal Craig decided to seek what he termed "pearl gray purity" to tolerate isolated prostitutes, bookies, and numbers writers but to drive out all forms of organized crime, all activities lucrative enough to make it worth someone's while to try bribing Craig's police officials. Within 6 weeks after taking office, Craig and District Attorney Henry Weiss had raided enough of Stern's gambling parlors and seized enough of Braun's slot machines to convince both men that business was over-for 4 years at least. The Internal Revenue Service was able to convict Braun and Stern's nephew, Dave Feinman, on tax evasion charges; both were sent to jail. From 1952 to 1955 it was still possible to place a bet or find a girl. But you had to know someone to do it, and no one was getting very rich in the process.

By 1955 it was apparent to everyone that reform sentiment was dead and that the Democrats would soon be back in office. In the summer of that year, Stern met with representatives of the east coast syndicates and arranged for the rebuilding of his empire. He decided to change his method of operations in several ways; one way was by centralizing all Wincanton vice and gambling under his control. But he also decided to turn the actual operation of most enterprises over to others. From the mid-1950's until the next wave of reform hit Wincanton after elections in the early 1960's, Irv Stern generally succeeded in reaching these goals.

The financial keystone of Stern's gambling empire was numbers betting. Records seized by the Internal Revenue Service in the late 1950's and early 1960's indicated that gross receipts from numbers amounted to more than $100,000 each month, or $1.3 million annually. Since the numbers are a poor man's form of gambling (bets range from a penny to a dime or quarter), a large number of men and a high degree of organization are required. The organizational goals are three: have the maximum possible number of men on the streets seeking bettors, be sure that they are reporting honestly, and yet strive so to decentralize the organization that no one, if arrested, will be able to identify many of the others. During the "pearl gray purity" of Hal Craig, numbers writing was