Suspended Sentences

Things were heating up to a boil because there was a gubernatorial primary coming up. Sterrick’s handpicked candidate had a pretty good chance of sewing up the nomination. If we allowed them to railroad their man into the governor’s mansion in Phoenix, we knew we’d face a terrible situation. The state would have been thrown wide open to a massive criminal invasion.

The only way to stop it was to get Sterrick out of the way. Then the local political bosses who’d been in his pocket would be free to move in other directions.

We had a meeting in the courthouse. Carefully selected people — the deputy police commissioner, the district attorney, two assistants. I was one of them. And the mayor. None of us was under the thumb of Sterrick’s machine. But we couldn’t be sure of many other officials. We had a council of war. I won’t bore you with the details but the upshot was that I was appointed a select committee-of-one to concentrate on the Sterrick issue. I was pretty much given carte blanche and I insisted that I be allowed to keep my operation secret until it produced results — I didn’t want to have to turn in regular progress reports because a secret is only a secret as long as only one person knows it. I had a few ideas but I didn’t want any risk of their getting back to Sterrick through his city hall contacts.

The practice of criminal law in the halls of justice is pretty much a give-and-take affair, as you know. If you want to get a conviction against one felon sometimes you have to grant immunity to another. It’s not a system I’ve ever enjoyed working in but it’s better than most of the alternatives. Plea bargaining was just as commonplace in those days as it is today. In return for a lighter sentence a criminal might agree to turn state’s evidence. It really amounted to our only major source of information. The town’s population was only about twenty thousand. The mobsters knew every cop on the force by sight. We could hardly infiltrate them with an undercover spy — they’d know him instantly. So we had to rely on criminal informants.

At that time I had three cases awaiting trial. I mean I had a dozen or so but there were three that had some importance to this matter. One was a man named Mendes who’d had the bad fortune to be arrested with a pocketful of numbers-racket slips. He was a ru

Because of the threat we faced, and the autonomy I’d been given, I made a deliberate decision to bend the law. That’s really the point of this little morality tale.

I took Mendes into an interrogation room and sweated him down. I made it clear, without putting it in so many words, that we might see our way clear to dropping the charges against him if he’d provide us with certain bits and pieces of information. I didn’t tell him what information we wanted. I asked him all sorts of random questions about Sterrick and various mob operations. Most of them he refused to answer. He pointed out that if he unloaded he’d be killed as soon as the mob found out. I just kept asking questions. He’d answer a few of the seemingly harmless ones. By that process I managed to get the information I wanted — without letting him know that it was what I’d been after.

What I found out from him was the location of Sterrick’s books. The organization’s books.

They were kept, as I’d suspected, in a safe. The safe, Mendes informed me, was in a real-estate office on North Stone Avenue. It was one of those outfits that handled insurance and realty. A legitimate front for the illegitimate operations. The outfit was in the name of one of Sterrick’s cousins. I suppose they actually did some insurance and realty work. But it was also where Sterrick did his bookkeeping. In the back room. They had two or three accountants who worked in that room full-time. At night they had a private watchman there. Mendes had seen the safe several times. It was a big sturdy Kessler box, far too heavy to be stolen. There was an electric alarm system and of course the safe was never left untended — when the accountants weren’t there, the watchman was.

We put Mendes on ice. I didn’t want him leaking anything back to Sterrick. Later on, when the matter was concluded, we turned him loose as we’d agreed. He was picked up again a few months later and spent most of his life in prison on one charge or another.

The state primary was coming up in June. This was April — we had about seven weeks. I had the accused forger brought up to the interrogation room. We had him cold on passing some very heavy paper — forged checks for thousands of dollars. It could have cost him several years if we’d prosecuted fully. He knew that — he was a practical fellow. He and I reached a mutually agreeable arrangement. In return for certain services he was to perform, he’d be turned loose in another state and no fugitive warrant would be issued. This of course wasn’t illegal; it was a decision on my part, morally and ethically questionable to be sure, but legal in the sense that a prosecutor has the right to decide whether or not to prosecute any given case. I didn’t acquit the forger of the charges against him; I simply decided not to prosecute them. If he ever returned to Tucson after we exiled him, he could be picked up and tried on the original charges.

I then interviewed the accused safecracker, separately, and reached a similar agreement with him.

I hadn’t broken the law. So far.

The next step required co

The watchman at the realty office worked a twelve-hour shift. We didn’t have minimum wage laws or security-guards’ unions in those days — it was the Depression, of course, and the man was lucky to have a job at all. He would arrive at the office at seven-thirty in the evening. The accountants and sometimes Sterrick himself would still be there at that hour; they left the accounting room normally about seven forty-five or eight o’clock, turning the place over to the watchman. He went home about seven-thirty or eight the following morning, as soon as the first shift of bookkeepers arrived for work to tote up the previous night’s receipts. The bookkeeping work wasn’t round-the-clock but it was a seven-days-a-week operation. Sterrick’s people didn’t take business holidays; they staggered their work days instead. Obviously that was necessary because so much criminal activity takes place at night and on weekends.

The safe usually was locked and unattended, except for the watchman, through the night. The watchman — a trusted young cousin of Sterrick’s, not brilliant but very loyal and as tough as they make them — undoubtedly had instructions to destroy the contents of the safe if anyone arrived with a subpoena or warrant. Mendes had boasted to me about the security arrangements. In addition to the electrical alarm system there was a device, triggered by a switch on one of the desks, that was designed to release phosphor pellets inside the safe and ignite it. That would destroy the safe’s contents instantly, of course. But clearly the watchman must have had instructions not to destroy the papers unless there was a clear danger of their being removed from the safe. It might not cripple Sterrick’s business to have those facts and figures lost but certainly it would cause a colossal headache. That button wasn’t to be pushed on any mere whim.

We were counting on that.

The watchman had a trivial criminal record. It was of no account but it made our next move more plausible.