Chapter 2

Judge Watkins, sent down from Utica by his friend the governor to hold a
special criminal trial term and so relieve the congestion in the Tombs
Prison, beckoned to Mr. Dougherty, who elevated himself upon his glossy
little tiptoes and held a whispered colloquy with His Honor across the
edge of the dais. Behind the prisoner on the first row of benches a
homely girl in a gray shawl, her broad honest face covered with a screen
of freckles, leaned forward hungrily. She had waited for Mooney over a
year; she would wait ten more if need be, or until they carried her out
in a box feet first. She also had lost all faith in the supposed
equality of the law. For Paddy had been railroaded because he had
swatted Micky Morrison over in Fagan’s saloon, Micky being heir apparent
of the lower East Side, a friend of Bloodhound O’Brien, the assistant
district attorney, and honorary colonel of the Pearl Button Kids; while
Paddy Mooney was a stationary fireman in an office building, without
political affiliations, and not even a member of the union. This he now
perceived to have been a grievous lapse, due, however, only to the
reason that they had sought to bully him into it, and he wouldn’t be
bullied.

Judge Watkins saw the tense look on the girl’s face, and guessed its
significance. For an upstate judge he knew a good deal about the Big
Burg. There are some people who suppose that after Jerome cleaned up the
Red Light District and jailed a few policemen New York became whiter
than snow, and has stayed so ever since! Yet wasn’t Boss Tweed nearly
sent up after the greatest political house-cleaning ever staged by old
Father Knickerbocker? Weren’t the Tammany Tiger’s ribs clearly visible
for years? And would it not have died of starvation had it not been for
the defeat of John Purroy Mitchel as recently as 1917? Has it changed
its stripes? And after all, is a Republican cop—if there be such a
thing—any different from a Tammany cop? Is not the nature of cops
generic? Just as the nature of prosecutors is generic?

It is said somewhere by Frazer, in “The Golden Bough,” that mankind as a
whole resembles the ocean, and that civilization, like the wind of
heaven, merely ruffles the surface, leaving the depths untouched. So it
is with municipal reforms. You can have torchlight processions galore
and political-fusion love feasts and spasms of civic virtue, but cops
will remain cops, and crooks will remain crooks, and out of the enmity
between their respective seeds will spring all the evils of any sort of
warfare—brutality and malign trickery and _schrecklichkeit_. This
hateful contest between human rats and human ferrets rarely fails to
contaminate or at any rate to harden most of those who take part in it.
For the rat is fighting for life and the ferret is fighting for his
living.

The danger to the young lawyer who out of a desire for public service
seeks an appointment as an assistant district attorney, is that in the
passion of the chase the conviction and punishment of some—to
him—obviously guilty criminal may seem more important at the moment than
the strict preservation of his own integrity or the unwavering
maintenance of the principles of justice. Shall the murderer go free
simply because some foolish law prohibits hearsay evidence or the
proving of more than one offense at the same time? Should we not praise,
rather than condemn, the young enthusiast who is willing to sacrifice
his virtue, his ideals, his very soul in order that some ruffian may
hang? Should we not pay tribute to one who is willing to be damned for
the glory of God?

Judge Watkins looked searchingly around the court room until his eye
came to rest in a far corner.

“I will assign Mr. Ephraim Tutt to the case,” said he, and at the
summons the old lawyer arose from his seat and, stovepipe hat in hand,
approached the bar.

At that moment the door was pushed violently open and Billy the
Bloodhound, surrounded by his minions, entered. Ancient enemy faced
ancient enemy.

II

It must not be presumed from the foregoing philosophic disquisition that
we intend to lay any floral offering upon the bier of William Francis
O’Brien’s moral reputation. Far from it! We desire to provide for him no
apology, extenuation or excuse; and the reader may perhaps recall that
he has hitherto at sundry times been described and figured in other
pages as “the yellow dog of the district attorney’s office,” for that
was exactly what he was—a legal bulldog or human bloodhound, as you may
prefer. One who viewed it as his duty to his God, his country, and
himself to convict by any means at his command every hapless defendant
brought to the bar of justice.

Through his pertinacity, his resourcefulness, and his lack of scruple he
had achieved great notoriety as a prosecutor. Lawyers feared him,
defendants shuddered at the mere thought of facing his merciless
cross-examination; for he was without consideration to the former or
sympathy for the latter. He had no bowels or mercies. To achieve his end
he astutely made use of a veneer of apparent honesty, of naïve
enthusiasm, that often made him seem to juries merely a blunt,
well-meaning blunderer. Yet there was no guile of serpent he did not
possess, no venom not in his teeth.

Billy the Bloodhound, as he was called, was a more prominent figure in
the Criminal Courts Building than District Attorney John Henry Peckham
himself, who was content to have it so, since he shared the widespread
belief that there had to be a crook in every law office, whether public
or private. In fact, he found O’Brien more than a mere convenience,
particularly because he could always count upon him for a conviction in
any difficult case. As he used to say to his confidential friends: “If
the Bloodhound hasn’t got the necessary evidence—he goes and gets it!”