National Affairs: Leopard Hunt

Thomas Edmund Dewey, leading candidate for the G. O. Presidential nomination next year, last week canceled plans to visit his mother in their hometown of Owosso, Mich, and to attend the Shiawassee County Fair. "Certain matters" postponed this trip, which was to have begun his attempted march to the White House. As District Attorney of New York County, young Mr. Dewey was hot on the trail of quarry which, if he caught it, would plaster the newspapers once more with heroic Dewey headlines. Last week Mr. Dewey found the trail uncomfortably crowded. Trotting along at his side were all the human bloodhounds of the F. B. I., headed by John Edgar Hoover himself, and with Franklin Roosevelt's Attorney General Frank Murphy whipping them on. Overnight, national politics made a national figure out of their common quarry: a big-nosed, big-eared, Russian-Jewish underworldling named Louis ("Lepke,* the Leopard") Buchalter, 42.

Graduate of the Connecticut Reformatory (at 20) and Sing Sing (at 21), Buchalter developed from a small-time loft burglar into the wealthy boss of "protective corporations" in Manhattan's fur, garment, painting, trucking and other trades. His gorillas slugged, knifed, threw lye in the eyes of merchants who did not pay up. Murder, if necessary, did not bother Lepke, the Leopard. When he went in for financing heroin smugglers in a big way, he had already become quite used to having people rubbed out. Two years ago he dropped out of sight, jumped bail after being indicted with his partner, Jake ("Gurrah")* Shapiro, on racketeering charges. People who knew about him began disappearing, also. Two were murdered (one just up the street from Police Commissioner Valentine's home in Brooklyn). Last month a harmless Bronx inhabitant was murdered, apparently mistaken for another man whose knowledge the Leopard would not consider harmless (TIME, Aug. 7). Up started a hue & cry against Tom Dewey for not protecting his prospective witnesses.* Thereupon Tom Dewey had the city post a $25,000 cash reward for Lepke, dead or alive, in addition to $5,000 offered by the Federal Government. Pat came announcement of a nationwide crime drive, "the greatest ever" by the F. B. I., through the office of Tom Dewey's neighbor and contemporary, U. S. District Attorney John T. Cahill, friend and protege of Franklin Roosevelt's Janizary, Tommy ("Uncorkable") Corcoran.