Nelson Johnson - Boardwalk Empire - The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City

Portock, Warlich, and Gribbin knew the card games, horse rooms, and numbers syndicate were able to exist because the police officer on the beat looked the other way. The rackets were something individual patrol officers had nothing to do with. If there were problems with an operator who didn’t have the okay from Stumpy Orman, or if someone failed to pay protection money, then either Lou Arnheim or Arch Witham of the vice squad would be sent out by Orman to apply pressure by either collecting the money or shutting them down.

Several weeks after defeat of the referendum, Portock and company tried to subdue the organization by attacking it head-on. As Tommy Taggart had done 10 years earlier, they began making arrests for violation of the state gambling laws. Atlantic City’s racketeers were stupefied. No one could believe what was happening. Farley responded cautiously. Each of the patrol officers were summoned first to their ward leaders and then to Orman and Jimmy Boyd. According to a ward leader at the time, Portock and the others were told they were “creating a lot of bad publicity for Atlantic City” and were ordered to stop the raids. “What are you doing this for? It won’t do you any good, and you know you can’t fight the organization. Keep it up and you’ll be out of a job.”

In winter 1951 one of Farley’s lieutenants, Richard Jackson, assistant to the commissioner of public safety, arranged a meeting between Farley and the rebel police officers in an attempt to make peace. At the last moment, Jimmy Boyd killed the meeting. Boyd viewed the police officers’ willingness to meet as a sign of weakness and advised Farley he could wipe them out. Nevertheless, the arrests continued and Portock and his cohorts became celebrities, of sorts. Between November 1950 and May 1951 Portock and company wreaked havoc on the rackets. Their raids spared no one and enraged Orman, Boyd, and Farley. They were dubbed by the national media as the “Four Horsemen,” portrayed as heroes crusading against crime and political corruption. (There never really was a fourth “horseman” per se; William Shepperson and others occasionally accompanied Portock, Warlich, and Gribbin.) When Farley refused to compromise on the wage increase they found they had backed themselves into a corner. The Four Horsemen had no choice but to continue the raids. The best they could hope for was to embarrass Farley.

But the organization had the last say. The Four Horsemen were given remote duty assignments, at odd hours, patrolling on foot areas of the city where police officers didn’t usually patrol. They were assigned deserted potions of the Boardwalk during the winter months and to guard the public water mains coming from the mainland reservoir on the outskirts of town. A special traffic squad was created and Portock and friends were ordered to remain in the middle of the street prohibited from moving farther than 20 feet from their post. The traffic squad’s hours were from 10:30 A.M. to 6:30 P.M., the hours during which numbers runners and bookies collected and paid off. The rebels persisted by making raids on their own time and found themselves suspended without pay for five days at a time, the maximum then permitted under Civil Service without a hearing. Eventually each of the Four Horsemen was brought up on charges for misconduct and fired from their positions.

Before they were crushed, the Four Horsemen had their day in the sun as witnesses before the Kefauver Committee. Portock and his supporters appeared before the committee and named the key politicians and racketeers who profited from gambling. They produced a card index file listing more than 300 racketeers. They told how the numbers barons parlayed the nickels and dimes of local residents and tourists into yearly incomes of $150,000. Their testimony detailed the corrupt workings of the police department. Chief of Police Harry Saunders was at best a figurehead and the city commissioner in charge of the public safety department, William Cuthbert, was exposed as a senile old man. Testimony revealed that Cuthbert was routinely driven around town in his city car by a fireman, delivering eggs from a farm he owned on the mainland. The police department was really run by Stumpy Orman and Jimmy Boyd. Orman, the city’s leading racketeer, made sure everybody paid up. Boyd was the political enforcer who kept everyone in line. Kefauver’s Committee report concluded that it was “inescapable that Stumpy Orman has controlled the Atlantic City Police Department in the interest of the underworld gambling fraternity.”

Orman was subpoenaed to the hearings, but the committee learned nothing from him. He alternated between refusing to answer the questions put to him, and taking refuge in what he called “my very bad memory.” Farley had given him such free rein of the rackets that Stumpy Orman wasn’t used to answering to anyone.

Supporters of the Four Horsemen, such as former Judge Paul Warke and Jack Wolfe, appeared before the committee and told of the punishment meted out to anyone who bucked the system. As a county judge, Warke had given stiff sentences to several gambling operators arrested by state investigators. When he came up for reappointment he found himself out of a job. Farley denied Warke’s sentencing practices were the reason he wasn’t reappointed, but the denials were hollow. Jack Wolfe, who was not a Lafferty Democrat, had run for state assembly on the Democratic slate and was fiercely critical of the organization. He received increased assessments on the taxes and municipal utilities at his place of business.

The committee’s hearings stripped Farley’s organization bare. The testimony elicited by Kefauver’s Committee produced the following revelations: The traditional alliance between the racketeers and politicians was alive and well with the local Republican Party financed through protection money; Stumpy Orman periodically issued a list of approved gambling operations and had the vice squad close down anyone who didn’t have his blessing; Lester Burdick, a Farley lieutenant who served as Executive Clerk of the New Jersey Senate, was also the bagman for racing results payments from horse-room operators; Vincent Lane, an Atlantic County Probation Officer, moonlighted during his off hours as a gambling room operator; those racketeers arrested by the Four Horsemen were routinely charged with a disorderly persons offense, and, if convicted, sentenced to the county jail from which they were promptly released. In one such instance Austin Johnson, a convicted bookmaker, was driven home on weekends during his sentence by Sheriff Gerald Gormley’s chauffeur. In response to all the negative publicity Farley made changes in city government, mostly shuffling the players. In time a grand jury was convened but no one of any consequence, other than the Four Horsemen themselves, was prosecuted.

The impact of the Kefauver hearings was felt on two fronts. The first was in the rackets. Post-Kefauver, Atlantic City’s gambling operations could no longer be run wide open. Farley and Orman agreed things had to be done at a lower profile and gambling became a minor industry in the resort’s economy. There was also political fallout from the Kefauver investigation. Farley’s enemies were emboldened by the negative publicity and decided to make a contest of the city commission election held in the May following the hearings.

The 1952 commission election featured Farley’s handpicked slate of incumbents headed by Mayor Joe Altman, minus Public Safety Director William Cuthbert, who was forced to step down. An opposition slate headed by former Atlantic County Sheriff James Carmack ran as the “Fusion-for-Freedom Ticket.” Jimmy Carmack had fallen out with the organization shortly after becoming sheriff in 1941. As sheriff, Carmack had failed to clear his patronage appointments through Jimmy Boyd. For refusing to be a team player, he was dropped from the organization. Carmack was joined by Marvin Perskie, a pugnacious former Marine officer and brilliant young attorney who had represented the Four Horsemen in their problems with the organization.