Other raids followed, the sixth taking place on August 2, 1918, at Woodside Park, an amusement place which was filled with slackers. Two hundred A. P. L. members and agents of D. J. surrounded the place and handled in all 2,000 men, out of which more than three hundred were detained.
The seventh raid was August 6, 1918—the great slacker raid on Shibe Park, at the time when there was a crowd of 8,000 men gathered to witness the Jack Thompson-Sam Langford prize fight. There were twenty agents of D. J., two hundred A. P. L. members and one hundred Philadelphia police. They examined over 2,000 men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-two, and held one hundred and forty-one as deserters or evaders.
The eighth raid, August 15, 1918, was set at Atlantic City, N. J., and is considered the daddy of them all. At that time four pleasure piers were raided, and more than 60,000 men, women and children were handled without commotion. Preparations for this raid were left to Mr. Gaskill, since he had done so well with other raids. In the call for the assembly the members did not know where they were going—they got sealed directions. At 10:00 P. M. sharp, the entrance and exit guards took up positions and refused to allow any males to leave the pier without showing classification cards, if within draft age. The other squads of from fifty to seventy-five men were instructed to proceed to the ocean end of the pier, form a solid line and sweep all men within the above mentioned ages, found without papers, to a point at the board walk end of the pier where they were detained until the work had been completed, after which they were transferred to the armory for further examination. There were about seven hundred men apprehended in that raid and sixty real slackers. It was an all-night job, the members from Philadelphia arriving home about seven o’clock as quietly as they had slipped out of town.
On November 6, 1918, the Olympia Athletic Club was raided, and out of the 8,000 men who had gathered to witnessed the Dempsey-Levinsky prize fight, more than 1,000 were detained, thirty-six of which proved real draft evaders. This bunch of fight fans was handled by one hundred and twenty-five A. P. L. members, forty police, and twelve agents of the Department of Justice.
The signing of the armistice on the eleventh of November ended the slacker raids, but having its hand well skilled by this time, the A. P. L. went on with vice raids and picked up a great many people who had not complied with the draft laws. On November 20, 1918, Chester, Pa., was again raided and an additional forty-two prisoners apprehended. The next three days were put in with Tenderloin raids for bootleggers, of whom sixty were sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment.
It is probable that the Philadelphia division has worked out the raid matter as exactly as any other division of the country. The Chief had a carefully-drawn diagram or map made, showing the system by which the men were stationed. It is a good instance of the Web of the Law. The chart shows fifteen squads of men traveling north and south, east and west, in a systematic covering of a bootleg territory 10 by 15 squares. Therefore, one squad travels north on one street and south on another street, while the squad working on opposite sides to them travels east and then west in the same manner. This makes it absolutely impossible for an offender to operate without an agent seeing him. It was often noticed that a bootlegger approaching a uniformed man would be almost instantly surrounded by one or two or even three squads who closed in to make the arrest. Philadelphia had the hunting of the bootlegger down to a fine point.
Mr. Todd Daniel, Superintendent of the Department of Justice for Philadelphia, has always been an ardent admirer of the A. P. L. In return, the League has supplied him on request with fifty to one hundred motor cars each month, and investigated as many as 1,000 cases which his staff would have been unable to handle. No wonder he admires them.
Surveillance such as this kept property damages in and around this great industrial center at a minimum. The Eddystone Munition Plant explosion occurred previous to the organization of the League. The Woodbury Bag Loading Plant, Woodbury, N. J., was so well covered that although a great many attempts to cause explosions and set fires were made with bombs and inflammable materials, they all failed of their purpose. No one can tell how much property loss was averted through the work of the Philadelphia division. It would be invidious to quote any, and hopeless to quote all, of the many letters of approval received from persons high in Government, political and commercial circles, complimenting the division upon its efficiency.
Needless to say, Philadelphia had her own share of causes celébrès. One of the most unique and interesting of these was that of the Philadelphia Tageblatt, a German daily newspaper prosecuted under the charge of seditious and disloyal utterances. In the fall of 1917, a raid was conducted by D. J. and A. P. L. upon the headquarters of this paper, at which time many files, books, papers, and so forth, were seized, with the result that warrants were issued for the editor and all his staff. When they were called for trial, members of the division were again used for the purpose of investigating the jury panel, as well as for the procurement of evidence essential to the case. In one item, this work took the form of securing through banking members, proofs of certain signatures without which the Government’s case would have been crippled.
These men were tried for treason, but were discharged for lack of evidence. They were subsequently prosecuted under a charge of conspiracy to hinder voluntary enrollment and for violation of the Espionage Act. On the latter charge, they were found guilty. Louis Werner, the editor, and his associate, Martin Darkow, got five years’ imprisonment each, Herman Lemke two years, Peter Shaefer and Paul Vogel, one year each.