Dewey was instrumental in putting Gordon behind bars for ten years, on charges of income tax evasion. The case put Dewey on the map as a rising star in the Southern District.
The prosecutor’s office suited Dewey. By the time he was thirty-five, he was running for attorney general of the state of New York, and he was already getting national publicity. Prohibition-era New York was the perfect petri dish for a prosecutor to grow into a national figure, if he had legal brilliance and fearless drive. This was the New York of Lucky Luciano, of Meyer Lansky, of Murder Inc. Even when Prohibition came to an end in 1933, there were plenty of criminal gangs to go after.
In 1935, during the depths of the Depression, anyone lacking a moral compass would do anything for a buck. “The mobs had a tremendous hold on the legitimate business life of the community,” Dewey later recalled. “As a matter of fact you could feel it. It was almost as if you could touch it.” Dewey opened a special-prosecutor’s office on the fourteenth floor of the Woolworth Building on lower Broadway, a block from City Hall. He recruited seventy-five police officers to go undercover in New York’s underbelly. “They did not look like cops,” Dewey recorded. “They had small feet, alert minds, and tough, wiry frames . . . They were of many national extractions and spoke the languages of the countries of their fathers. This, then, was to be known as the grand jury squad.”
Dewey installed an untappable phone in his office, and put twenty stenographers to work in one large room under constant supervision. Witnesses and turncoats were made to give testimony in rooms with blinds drawn. All scrap paper was burned in the building furnace. With a staff of twenty deputy assistant attorneys, ten investigators, ten accountants, two grand jury reporters, and four messengers under him, the special prosecutor began cracking some of the most shocking criminal cases the city of New York had ever seen. Dewey’s men once raided two hundred brothels in a single day. But it was the case of Lucky Luciano—Manhattan’s top mob boss—that made Dewey a national hero. Dewey’s office indicted Luciano on April 3, 1936, and the ensuing case produced the most lurid newspaper headlines of the era.
“Gangsters Split Girls’ Tongues.”
“Girl Says Squealer’s Feet Were Burned with Cigars.”
“Torture Is Laid to Vice Bosses.”
Using the testimony of call girls and their madams, Dewey won Luciano a thirty-to-fifty-year prison term.
Next on Dewey’s docket: “Tootsie” Herbert, labeled “the meanest poultry racketeer of all time.” Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, “the terror of New York City’s garment industry.” Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who went to his death in the electric chair. “No man deserved it more,” Dewey concluded. The special prosecutor got credit for putting all these figures behind bars.
Dewey’s top prize was James J. Hines—the fedora-sporting, jowly-faced boss of New York’s Tammany Hall. The trial against Hines drew tremendous attention. It was not just Hines on the stand, but Tammany Hall itself, the notoriously corrupt organization that had controlled Democratic power in New York City for generations. Dewey proved in a courtroom that Hines had illegal connections with the city’s most high-profile gangsters, and Hines was convicted of thirteen counts of racketeering. It was the biggest blow to Tammany Hall since the trial of Boss Tweed in 1873. The morning after the trial ended, Dewey invited photographers into his office so they could snap pictures of him reading the morning paper, which ran a banner headline on the front page: “Hines Guilty.”
At just thirty-seven, Thomas Dewey was a household name. He had achieved seventy-two convictions out of seventy-three prosecutions. People joked that Dewey could successfully prosecute God. The attorney’s nickname, “Gangbuster,” was used for a popular radio series. Hollywood pumped out movies inspired by Dewey’s trials—Marked Woman in 1937, starring Humphrey Bogart as a Dewey-esque crime fighter, and Racket Busters in 1938, also starring Bogart.
Dewey ran for governor in New York in 1938 and lost by a slim margin to the Democrat Herbert Lehman. But the young prosecutor’s campaign drew enough attention that it launched him into the rarified group of elite national Republicans.
“You made a glorious run and you demonstrated that you possess a deep measure of popular affection and confidence,” Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan—one of the most revered Republicans in the nation—wrote Dewey on November 11, 1938. “So far as the Republican party is concerned, you have irresistibly become one of its chief figures and one of its ranking leaders . . . We need the precise influence and viewpoint which you typify. The more active and more aggressive you are in our party councils, the happier many of us will be.”
Franklin Roosevelt was ending his second term at the end of the 1930s, and the Republicans were desperate for a new man who could counter the Democrat’s success. On December 1, 1939, in the newly opened “Dewey for President” headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, crowds pushed in to catch a glimpse of the young legal mastermind.
“I have confidence in the Republican party,” Dewey said in the opening speech of his first presidential campaign. “It always has stood for good government and stable business. Today’s responsibility is to reawaken hope and courage in a nation which has been driven almost to despair by incompetent government and unstable business.”
In his delivery, Dewey lacked spark, that unnameable charisma that FDR exuded, but the youthful Republican made up for it with cold precision and endless ambition. So fresh-faced and boyish was he that FDR’s secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, quipped that Dewey had “thrown his diaper into the ring.”
“You are getting as much publicity as Hitler,” a friend wrote Dewey during the 1940 presidential campaign. Dewey failed to win the nomination; the dark horse Wendell Willkie swooped in and won over the party faithful. However, Dewey won enough respect within the Republican ranks, it was said that it was not a matter of if he would be president, but when.
In 1942 Dewey won the governorship
