One Man's Army

Two! Four! Six! Eight! Who do we

appreciate? Jimmy Hines! Jimmy Hines! Jimmy

Hines! Jimmy Hines!

Shrieking cheers of gratitude for their benefactor, 25,000 yelping children and their mothers clambered and danced through the meadows of Manhattan's summer-striped Central Park. It was a grand picnic--the 22nd annual June Walk of the Monongahela Club. Round-faced, genial James J. Hines eased a piggybacking child from his shoulders, doffed his straw boater, wiped the sweat from his face and said proudly: "Kids who came to the first of these things are voters now. They're not all voting my district, but they're voting somewhere."

The year was 1936, and Jimmy Hines was riding piggyback on political success. As Tammany Hall's leader of the slum-bound Eleventh Assembly District on the city's uptown west side, charged with guarding and delivering the district's Democratic vote, Hines had won the acclaim of his followers by employing a basic technique: disbursing favors. "In politics," he explained, "the thing to do is build yourself an army."

Ballots & Bail. Jimmy spent 25 years building his army among the hard-put widows and workingmen in his district. At Christmastime and Thanksgiving, he handed out turkeys to neighborhood families. He bailed out errant youngsters and toughs, whispered pleas to magistrates, found jobs for the hopeless. He swept into local political primaries with ballot stuffers and phony votes, wrecked opposition organizations, beat off a Tammany headquarters attempt to stamp him out, maintained absolute power in his district.

With the election of crooked, dapper Mayor Jimmy Walker in 1926, Jimmy Hines's big days were at hand. In his unostentatious apartment on West 111th Street, Walker Man Hines received long lines of favor seekers and job hunters. Dispensing money, making "contracts," Jimmy ran his quickly growing empire with smiling aplomb and efficient service. Smarting under Al Smith's attempt to run Tammany, Hines backed Franklin Roosevelt for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932, won a fat reward that left Tammany with tongue drooping; F.D.R. handed him the job of dispensing all federal patronage in Manhattan.

Dutch & Lucky. On the New Deal tide Jimmy rode high. His pockets crammed with money, he fronted for an army commanded by a young man named Arthur Flegenheimer, better known to his fellow racketeers and murderers as Dutch Schultz. While Schultz and his mob prospered in bootleg whisky and the numbers racket, Hines provided the necessary protection. Uncooperative policemen were shifted to faraway beats, district attorneys obligingly quashed indictments, amiable Hines magistrates freed the small fry. Into Hines's personal treasury came --in addition to the customary kickbacks from city employees and officials--vast wads of money from Schultz. How Hines profited from his warm association with other leading hoods, e.g., Lucky Luciano, young Frank Costello, Rackets Banker Arnold Rothstein, only the principals knew--and they never talked.

Easygoing Jimmy Hines never minded the charges that began to cascade upon his empire, mostly because nobody could prove them. He cautiously avoided bank accounts and investments, was always careful not to record such income as the $200,000 or so received from Schultz. Even when Dutch was bumped off in Newark by a rival mob, Jimmy's power was such that he continued to operate his special political services for Schultz's successors. Then, in 1937, a prosecutor named Thomas E. Dewey rounded up three talkative Schultz mobsters. With their testimony, Tom Dewey nailed Hines on 13 counts involving him with the numbers racketeers.

It was the end for Hines and for his era. He served three years and ten months in Sing Sing, won a parole in 1944. At 67 he settled down with his memories and his wife in a Long Island beach home. Last week, at 80, his armies and his power long gone, his name hardly known in the new army, Jimmy Hines died of the infirmities of age.

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