For almost three weeks the dickering continued between Winchell and his mysterious callers until Hoover finally said, “This is a lot of bunk, Walter. You are being made a fool of, and so are we. If you contact those people again, tell them the time limit is up! I will instruct my agents to shoot Lepke on sight.”
Winchell relayed this information to the intermediary. Then it was that arrangements were made for Hoover to be waiting in his automobile on 28th Street near Fifth Avenue at 10:15 on the evening of August 24.
Winchell was parked in his car at Madison Square when Lepke came out of the shadows and stepped into the car beside him. “Hello,” Lepke said. “Thanks very much.”
Quickly, the columnist drove to 28th Street, where he pulled up behind Hoover’s car. Lepke quickly moved into the automobile beside Hoover.
Winchell said, “Mr. Hoover, this is Lepke.”
“How do you do,” Lepke replied. “Let’s go.”
And so ended one of the greatest manhunts in American criminal history.
Four months later, Lepke went on trial in the Federal district court in New York City. He sat in silence, his brown eyes expressionless, as his former henchmen paraded to the stand to tell the details of their narcotics smuggling.
Among the government witnesses, many of them pale from sunless days in prison, were Jack Katzenberg, Ben Schisoff and John McAdams, the Customs employee. No longer were they afraid of the little man who sat there staring at them.
The trial dragged through fifteen days, but in the end Lepke was convicted. He was sentenced to serve fourteen years in prison and was fined $2,500 on ten narcotics charges. Two weeks later in General Sessions Court, Lepke was convicted on thirty-six counts of extortion and sentenced to an additional thirty years in prison.