Chapter 10

OTTO SUNDERLAND:

"I made sergeant, after some hard studying, and lost the intimate contact I had once had with the old neighborhood. The problems of the big city were increasing-they always increase, never the other way. Population accounts for a lot of it, I guess, just that alone. Over-crowding and poverty lay hell in keeping the peace.

To be specific, about the whores, well, they were on the increase too. The mob increased the number of houses. It was real big business. The more we protested, the more trouble we got from some of the big shots at city hall.

"Leave the girls alone," the word came down.

So when you leave the girls alone, you don't monkey with guys like Boodles Scalici. He was rising slowly in the ranks. We knew he was involved in obtaining girls and in keeping the houses in order, in paying condition. I tried to figure, after a couple of stake-outs, how much the houses were pulling down. It ran into millions, figured over a year. That is a hellova lot of screwing.

But it was a period of medium hard times, so cops don't risk their jobs. We got paid less than cab drivers took in anyway-and took a lot of crap along with the salary.

We got docked for sickness, and never got extra pay for overtime. We were lucky to get straight time. I never knew a cop in those days who wasn't in hock for house, furniture, car or something. We were paid peanuts and we were arresting hoods every day who peeled big numbers off rolls that were the size of cabbages. Plenty of cop's fingers got tangled in that green stuff. Lettuce-poisoning, we called it. It affected the eyesight something fierce, and the will to proceed against certain suspicious characters.

I went on, collecting information and filing it, hoping that some day it would come in useful-like on a witness stand.

We had a suspicion that old man Dunker, for instance, was selling marijuana and girls. I think I mentioned that before. So I worked on the captain for about a month, and finally got him to agree to an undercover man. I had a guy in mind.

The guy was Irish Yates. He looked Irish, but he was mostly Roumanian or something. Anyway, the name. He had been a cop for a lot of years, eleven, I think, mostly in the middlewest.

He was smart-not smart enough to quit the cops and get a decent job, but wise to the rackets. He hated mobsters; he had a private reason which I didn't ask about, but he told me much later. His old man had been gunned down by a couple of greasy little hoods one day. Innocent bystander.

Irish was slim and not particularly handsome, and not even rugged looking. He was wiry though and was a good boxer. His hobby was collecting toy soldiers. How do you figure that?

Anyway we talked about how to get hoods like Scalici in court. And make a rap stick.

"You got to have the evidence so goddam strong that the judge can't let 'im go," Irish said. "Half the judges are bought, you know that."

"Sure. But how are you going to get that kind of evidence?"

"Undercover," he said. "That's the only way."

So I nagged the captain.

Irish Yates is not available for comment. He was killed in line of duty about a year after he began his undercover operation against the mob.

With the help of Sergeant Sunderland and several others of the force, we have compiled a brief history of that investigation. Yates' buddy on that operation was Karl Newell. Newell was Yates' contact man and worked with him when-t ever possible and prudent. He knows as much of the inside as anyone, since he also knew Irish very well.

We have reconstructed as much as we could with his help, supplying conversations as Yates' reports described them.

KARL NEWELL:

"Irish was a hellova good cop. He wanted to be a cop, it wasn't just a job to him. He did things that other cops might not have done. I think that was what finally killed him. He just took too many long chances. The mob isn't that dumb. By that I mean that Irish had too much contempt for them, I think. That's my own opinion.

Irish started his investigation by taking a bus out of town, and bumming his way back in. He wanted everything to look real-even the dirt under his fingernails.

He and I had agreed on a mail drop and on signals and a simple code. I met him every week in one of three spots, picked him up and took him to an apartment where he made his reports to Otto.

"I give you one month," Otto told him. "That's all the captain will pay for. You gotta bring me stuff that I can wave under his fat nose, so's I can get another month."

Otto wanted the mob as bad as Irish did, for different reasons, I think. Otto was OK. That goddam gum chewing got on yours nerves, but he was OK.

Irish hung out in one of five or six saloons where the mob went. He got pally with bartenders, pimps, girls, and whoever would talk. He did odd jobs, you know, dirty jobs, anything to get a meal and a place to sleep.

"You wouldn't believe the screwin' goes on," he told me once. "Hell, there's eight girls at the Ninety Seven Club (supposedly a bar and grill) and they are knocking off twenty or thirty Johns a night, each. You figure how much that is in dough."

It had to be more than six grand a week. And that was just one cheap little bar. He didn't care about the girls though, what we wanted was evidence connecting guys like Scalici with the take.

That was a horse of a different color.

Scalici didn't even show at the little joints.

Irish had a lot of evidence of H and other dope. We turned it all over to the DA's office. We weren't after narcotics then even though it was tied in with the flesh peddling. There was plenty of official jealousy over jurisdiction and we didn't want to jeopardise what we were after. In those days you had to settle for crumbs; get at the mob by scratching away little by little. The big arrests came later. But the damage was being done every day.

Irish got another month, and another. We made some arrests when we thought it would hurt the mob and not hurt Irish or make them suspicious.

But for awhile we didn't get any big fish."