Word: obstruct
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week, in Manhattan's U.S. District Court, a jury found 20 of Barbara's racketeer-guests guilty of conspiring to obstruct justice by lying to grand juries about their reasons for coming to Apalachin.* Facing them in mid-January: maximum sentences of five years and/or $10,000 fines. In what U.S. Attorney General William P. Rogers hailed as a "landmark" verdict, the Government in an ingeniously based prosecution won its biggest courtroom victory against organized crime since the conviction of Al Capone. For without proving that the defendants had assembled for a "crime convention," youthful (36) Special...
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...
...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...
...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...
Impossibly Difficult. Studying the mass of uninformative testimony, Justice and Treasury Department officials came up with the idea of hooking the most recalcitrant members on an unusual charge: conspiracy to obstruct justice (possible sentence: five years' imprisonment and/or $5,000 fine each) on the basis of their concerted refusal to talk (three of the 21 were also indicted on straight perjury charges). By that legal device, the Government hopes to put some of the top U.S. thugs out of circulation-certainly a worthy aim. Yet achieving that aim might prove impossibly difficult. Although circumstantial evidence is given substantial weight...