Martin Mooney

1935-1936

In about mid-December 1935, New York newspaper reporter Martin Mooney (1896-1967) faced serving his jail sentence during the upcoming holidays. His offense? Contempt of court for refusing to reveal to the local grand jurors the sources he’d used in an exposé on illegal gambling in New York City.

“It won’t be so bad if I have to go to jail before Christmas,” Mooney said. “Just think of all the presents I won’t have to buy or all the parties I won’t have to go to then.”

Journalist Stands Firm

One of the unlawful activities the grand jury had been investigating earlier that year was operating numbers, or policy,* which violated New York state’s gambling and lottery laws.

Mooney, a reporter for the New York American,** a William Randolph Hearst-owned morning newspaper, wrote a series of articles alleging that despite the grand jury’s efforts to curb the local numbers racket, it continued to prosper in the city. In other words, the citizen group’s work was ineffective. To make the case, Mooney used confidential sources, men continuing to run these games, quoting them and describing their enterprises.  

Consequently, the grand jury began looking into the validity of the claims in Mooney’s exposé. The jurors called the reporter as a witness during a related hearing, and asked him to provide the names and addresses of the people and places he’d mentioned in his pieces. The journalist refused, noting his sources were confidential and privileged.

Ethically, that was true. Legally, though, it wasn’t. The state of New York didn’t have any law on the books that protected reporters from having to reveal their sources.

The Bad Guy

Not surprisingly, in May, Mooney was sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined $250 (about $5,000 today) for contempt of court.

“The only reason I am being thrown into jail is because I refuse to head a committee of my colleagues to supply Information to the grand jury,” the reporter told the court. “Had I accepted that offer, I know very well I would have been purged” (Syracuse Herald, May 17, 1935).

The only conviction to come out of the grand jury’s inquiry into the numbers racket was of Mooney, the messenger instead of any of the perpetrators.

“I feel it is a great injustice that an innocent newspaper man should be the great prize corralled by this great grand jury in its lone investigation,” Mooney said. “There is no court in this land which holds me in the contempt in which I hold this grand jury.”

Fighting For Change

Mooney and his attorney James D.C. Murray took the case all the way up to New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. Before each legal body along the way, Murray argued the privilege afforded physician and patient, attorney and client, should be given to reporters and their confidential sources. Every court’s ruling was the same: Mooney had to cough up his sources or carry out his punishment.

“The decision was based on the law of the state, and that law today prohibits newspapers from protecting sources of confidential information,” noted a Syracuse Herald op-ed piece (Feb. 1, 1936).

Further, the Court of Appeals noted that a decision to enact a shield law for reporters was under the purview of lawmakers not the courts. (Coincidentally, such a bill, calling for reporter immunity, had been introduced in the New York State Legislature in its previous session but had been killed in committee.)

The Epilogue

Following the New York Court of Appeals‘ ruling in January 1936, Mooney served his sentence in the Queens County Jail. (Presumably, he paid the fine as well.)

The year before, at about age 39, he abandoned journalism and pursued screenwriting, in which he would be successful, too. He would base many of his screenplays on the underworld about which he’d written as a reporter. The movies for which he’s best known, according to IMDB, are “Mr. Celebrity” (1941), “Men of San Quentin” (1942), “Silent Witness” (1943), “The Great Mike” (1944) and “Detour” (1945).

As for affording journalists the right to keep their confidential sources, well, confidential, New York wouldn’t enact a law in this regard until 1970, and when it did, the privilege only would apply to certain journalists, ones with staff positions at newspapers, magazines and TV stations.

Mooney’s story, however, spurred quicker action in other states: California (1935), Kentucky (1936), Arkansas (1936), Arizona (1937), Pennsylvania (1937), Indiana (1941), Ohio (1941) and Montana (1943).

To date, the U.S. doesn’t have a federal shield law.

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* Numbers, or policy, of the past was lottery-type games in which players bet on a number they predicted would appear in a specific source on a specific future day and time. Originally, operators generated the winning numbers through lottery drawings but that evolved into them using baseball scores, parimutuel totals, cattle receipts and other combinations of figures that routinely appeared in a local newspaper. Because players could wager nickels and dimes, even those who couldn’t afford even part of a lottery ticket could play numbers. Therefore, the game became prevalent in poor U.S. neighborhoods.

** The New York American was published between 1902 and 1937, when Hearst merged it with its afternoon newspaper, the New York Evening Journal, and the combined papers became the New York Journal-American. The Journal ceased publication in 1966.

Sources

“Pigeon Jailed for Gambling”

Two New York Police Department plainclothesmen arrested a pigeon that then was forced to spend the night in the Bronx police station. Five other such birds, on the lam, were wanted. Two men also were apprehended.

The capture went down on the roof of a tenement house. When officers approached the human suspects, they noticed one of them was holding a closed paper bag. They instructed him to open it, and when he did, two pigeons flew out. Each policeman went for a bird. One pigeon was caught, and the other got away.

All three suspects, Homo sapiens and Columba livia domestica, were believed to be policy runners. Policy, also called numbers, was an illegal type of gambling then, popular in poor and working class U.S. neighborhoods, in which bettors guessed the numbers that would be drawn randomly at a future time and wagered on their choices. Runners carried the gambling slips and money between the various betting spots and headquarters.

The human runners used the fowl to transport the tickets, secured by a band around their leg, from several outposts to a clearinghouse. The pigeons delivered them to that building’s roof, of course.

“Parking Meter Puzzle to RAF—No Jackpot”
Florida, Dec. 16, 1941

The chief of the Fort Myers Police Department spotted several cadets of the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force taking turns inserting nickels and pennies into numerous parking meters lining Broadway Street.

“You’re wasting your time, boys,” he said to them. “You only get credit for one hour at a time.” He explained how the meters worked and their purpose.

One of the British servicemen said, “We wondered why it didn’t pay off. We thought it was an American gambling device.”

“Swallows Dice, Jailed”
Washington, July 23, 1934

When police raided an illegal gambling den in Kingston, one of the players present swallowed the dice. In court after his arrest, the judge gave him 30 days to “digest” and produce the dotted cubes.

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Sources

1946

Two brothers — Edward P. and George Jones — freely controlled Chicago, Illinois’ policy* racket for 25 years, beginning in the 1920s.

As a result, the two raked in money, $10 to $30 million per year, in nickels and dimes, primarily from the Caucasians and African Americans living in slums, which turned the siblings into multimillionaires. In one year alone, income from their operation, that spanned from Ohio to Idaho, was an estimated $4.5 million ($45 million today)!

On a Monday in May 1946, Edward Jones’ chauffeur drove him and his wife and cashier, Frances Myles, to Myles’ home. When the limousine arrived there, two masked men carrying submachine guns appeared, hit and grabbed Jones and tried to capture Myles, but she broke free and ran into her house. The abductors forced Jones in their car and sped away. Jones’ chauffeur and wife followed and a few blocks away, alerted police who then pursued and fired two bullets at the criminals. The gunmen fired back, shattering the squad car’s front window, injuring an officer and, ultimately, getting away.

Days passed.

Some underworld members speculated the kidnappers would hold Jones until he relinquished control of his policy business in the Windy City, or if he refused, murder him. In agreement with that motive, police theorized former Al Capone minions had taken Jones.

Their other hypothesis was that ex-cons who’d done time in federal prison with Jones (he served a couple of years for income tax evasion) had snatched him for ransom money. (Jones had been kidnapped twice before but hadn’t reported the incidents to law enforcement officers.)

Five days later, Jones was released. He said he’d been blindfolded while held but had been treated well, hadn’t spoken to his captors and couldn’t identify them.

A rumor then spread that Jones’ mother and sister had paid $100,000 ($1.2 million today) to free him.

Case Turns Cold

Police, as part of their crime investigation, tried to round up and question the usual suspects, 100 of them including former Capone associates, but the big-time players had disappeared. They included:

• Matt Capone (Al’s brother)
• Ralph “Bottles” Capone (Al’s brother)
• Sam “Golf Bag” Hunt
• Murray “The Camel” Humphreys
• Edward “Red” Meehan
• Anthony “Tough Tony” Capezzio
• Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo

Nothing came of the detectives’ efforts.

After the kidnapping, Jones moved into a 12-room mansion in Mexico City, Mexico, from where he continued to oversee his multistate policy enterprise.

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*In policy, also called numbers, players bet on a number they predicted would appear in a specific source on a given day. Originally, operators obtained the winning numbers through lottery drawings but that evolved into using baseball scores, pari-mutuel totals, cattle receipts and other combinations of figures that routinely appeared in the newspaper. Because players could wager nickels and dimes, even those who couldn’t afford even part of a lottery ticket could participate. Therefore, the game became prevalent in poor U.S. neighborhoods.

Sources

Photo from Pond5: “”The Road From Coins” by dbrus