Guilt by Congregation

Twenty-two men are currently on trial in New York for "conspiring to obstruct justice" by concealing the purpose of their 1957 "underworld convention" at Apalachin. By the normal standards of American morality, the majority of them are undesirable creatures, suspected, and possibly guilty, of assorted crimes from murder on down the scale of turpitude to petty larceny.

Whatever the twenty-two defendants' legal sins may be, it is extremely doubtful that their silence about the meeting two years ago is among them. The indictment stems not from any sound legal basis, but from a good and wholesome desire to get some disreputable characters out of circulation. There is little or no case against the "convention" delegates, especially when government officials confess that it still has no conception at all of what was discussed at Apalachin.

Yet everyone feels somewhere in his heart that these nasty people ought to be in jail, and very likely that is where they will be within a year or so, unless some judge has courage enough, despite inevitable suspicions of bribery, to dismiss the indictment or to reverse the conviction that a jury trial will probably produce. Just as with Al Capone in the Thirties, the Federal law enforcement authorities have not been able to prove a case against the defendants for major crimes and have had to resort to irrelevant charges like doubtful income tax evasion or "conspiracy to obstruct justice."

Organized crime, regrettably, is often efficient enough to avoid prosecution when it does something significantly heinous. It would be nice if big-time criminals could be locked up just because everyone knew they were big-time criminals. The Anglo-American legal system, however, doesn't work that way. But, if the "conspiracy to obstruct justice" charge sticks, maybe it does.