None of Charlie’s clients has ever gone to the electric chair. One was sentenced to death for murder, but saved Charlie’s record by considerately hanging himself in jail. So he is one up on Sam Leibowitz, whose lone mistake waited for the ministrations of the public executioner. But Ford is that kind of a guy. Everyone loves him. No one would embarrass him.
We have sworn testimony before us which shows the operations of Ford’s jail-thwarting apparatus. It usually works this way: The prisoner, who may be a numbers peddler, a bookmaker’s runner, or a street-walker, is booked at the police station. He or she puts in a phone call to a certain designated unofficial party. Thereupon one of a half-dozen bail-bond brokers gets a call, and within minutes a runner for the bondsman appears at the police station and puts up surety for the prisoner.
Among bailers-out utilized by the organization are James H. Conroy, Isaac P. Jones, William P. Ryan, and Leonard, Louis, Max and Meyer Weinstein.
The legal fee for a $500 bail bond in the District is $75. The foregoing bondsmen charge the combine only $37.50, half-price, for springing a protected person. The rules regarding their surety are sketchy. They may register a $25,000 piece of property, then lay a hundred or a thousand $25,000 bonds against it.
On release, the defendant may visit the law offices of Ford, on 5th Street, where he is interviewed by Ford or his associate, Clifford Allder since the resignation of James K. Hughes. But sometimes the defendant does not speak to his counsel until the case is actually called in court, when his lawyer—Ford or an associate—whom he has never seen before, stands up for him at arraignment. If the defendant has no previous convictions, Ford’s office often pleads him guilty; whereupon the judge imposes a fine of usually not more than $25. We have proof that the fines for many of these defendants are paid on the spot from the lawyer’s pocket.
The system is keenly organized. Not one in a hundred people arrested pays his own bail-bond fee or knows who contacted the bondsman or paid him. Records of the bondsmen are kept so cryptically that in the rare instances when they are queried under oath they can say all they remember is they got a call from someone who only gave his first name, to put up bail, and they have no record to show who paid them. The rules are being changed. They must obtain a full name—but not for public record. And they won’t ask for birth certificates, either.
The Ford office has been able to pass the buck between its members. They cannot remember who retained them, who paid the retainer, or who put up the money to pay the fines, if “they actually did it,” which they “doubt.”
Ford successfully defied a Congressional committee which tried to make him divulge the names of his clients, though he admitted Emmitt Warring was one. The others, he said, were known to the public only as respectable businessmen. They were “more powerful” than Warring or even the late Jimmy La Fontaine, who were only peanut-peddlers compared to them, he said.
When pressed, Ford remembered a man by the name of Bettis whom he represented; and Earl MacDonald and Attilio Acalotti. He said he thought he had represented another defendant, named “Washington—I think it was George Washington, and that’s all I can remember now.”
Ford’s business is not confined to the gambling and hustling fraternity. You see his name bob up in court on almost every kind of criminal case. One of his recent ones was the arrest of two men on charges of violating the alcohol tax laws.