The person I named as the leader didn’t have too enviable a record and it was my job to get the goods on him. So I went out gunning. I had learned that a few of the merchants who already had paid into the fund had received a card to prevent them from being molested. If I could obtain such a card, that evidence would be all I needed, and that’s what I went after. I had been told of a hoodlum who had done the collecting, and who, upon reading the story, had left the city for a safer place. He’d selected Kingston, New York, as his hideaway. I went after him, and with the aid of a bribe, I got my evidence. With that card in my possession, I returned to New York and handed the ticket over to Mr. Hennessey. Now well fortified, he called in our legal department, and within a few days, the suit was dropped, and my job was saved. The ticket bore the signature of the person who had filed the libel suit. Thus I exposed a link between crime and boxing. One of the clubs, used as headquarters for the collection of the fund, went out of business a few weeks after my story broke, and the high-powered legal talent that the gangsters had hoped to hire with the extortion fund, had to be dismissed. But there was enough money collected to enable the mob to hire Judge Otto Wahle to act as chief counsel for the quartet. Yet even with this excellent jurist in their corner, the murderers of Rosenthal were convicted and executed in Sing Sing. The case was by far the most prominent of that era in which gamblers and thugs were so deeply involved in New York’s boxing affairs; but in perspective, it was just another story in the long history of crime, politics, and the fight game. BOOK TWO [Illustration] [Illustration: 8] AN AMAZING AMATEUR When United States Senator W. Warren Barbour of New Jersey died at his Washington home a few years ago at the age of fifty-five, an outstanding figure in the Senate and the political life of his State passed away. He was a unique personality among Congressmen because here was a man who, had he belonged in a humble social station, might possibly have fought for, and won, the blue ribbon of the professional prize ring—the heavyweight crown. The Horatio Alger fiction tradition always had its hero starting from the ranks of the Submerged Tenth, overcoming all obstacles, winning golden spurs in commerce by dint of courage, pious living, and determination. Never, of course, by the boxing route.