This reverent regard for territorial landmarks is very touching. The New York police appear to have been as much opposed to poaching as are English gamekeepers.
DELMONICO’S.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE PANTATA OF THE POLICY SHOP AND POOL-ROOM.
Among its other achievements, the Lexow Committee enriched the vocabulary of our language by the word Pantata. It is a mysterious word of Bohemian origin. What it precisely meant none of the witnesses could explain. It had no exact equivalent in the English language, but there was no difficulty about understanding how it was applied in New York. Pantata, in its origin, the interpreters explain, meant father-in-law. The term was used in households to describe your wife’s father, but it was also held to be the equivalent of Old Man; and one witness declared that in Bohemia, the country from which the word was exported, it is frequently applied to the Emperor-King of Austria-Hungary, Francis Joseph, who is said to be Pantata to his Royal Bohemians.
Whatever may be the original significance of the term, it was applied by the Bohemian Liquor Dealers’ Association to the Police Captain of the precinct in which they did their business. He was their Pantata, and from this beginning the term came to be used as a generic title for the police official, who was on terms of family relationship with the vicious and criminal class under his jurisdiction. The New York police captain was in a special sense the father-in-law, or Father-in-the-Law, to a very numerous progeny of disreputable people. Instead of being a terror to evildoers, he became their Pantata, who looked after them with semi-paternal care, and generally acted as their Father-in-the-Law, regarding it indeed as his chief function to relax the law in their behalf in return, of course, for consideration received. So long as his dues were paid there was nothing that Pantata would not do. He could, for instance, and did, practically suspend the legislation for Sunday closing. But that is a mere trifle.
It was proved by the evidence of one witness that the Pantata police did not hesitate to issue irregular licences of their own for the keeping of unlicensed saloons, or shebeens, as we would say.