Some would call it poetic justice, but the boys around the district attorney’s office aren’t calling it anything—they’re too busy laughing.
The assistant D. A.’s have voluntarily imposed upon themselves a resolution to laugh only on the most auspicious occasions. Most of them lean to robustness, and their guffaws have frequently rocked their shaky building at 137 Centre street.
This shows how deserving of hearty laughter was the following case.
The D. A.’s have for years been combatting charity rackets, hampered by an outdated ordinance which practically legalizes flagrant swindles. They have been obliged to seize upon other laws to break up these rackets.
Since a telephone charity racket usually involves telephone solicitation with the unauthorized use of prominent persons’ names, the district attorneys have prosecuted under the civil rights act, which makes it illegal to represent oneself as another person.
An arrest is made, and it is usually difficult to establish a prima facie case in the hearing before a magistrate. When the D. A. convinces a magistrate to hold a man for Special Sessions he regards himself as fortunate.
Well, it seems that a magistrate in one of these cases considered the evidence and ordered the man held for Special Sessions. As luck would have it, Judge Cauldwell of Queens was the presiding justice.
The assistant district attorney tried his darndest to show how the accused had misrepresented himself over the telephone. Judge Cauldwell mocked the attempts of the assistant D. A.—the assistant tells this story—to establish the identity of the voice over the phone.
Judge Cauldwell succeeded in convincing one other justice and the case was thrown out of court. The assistant D. A. returned to his office much chagrined, for this was the fourth case his office had lost in a group of sixty-eight.
Sometime later a Rabbi Caldwell in New Jersey who had once been a justice of the peace opened operations in New York City, phoning suckers for contributions to his “charity.”
“This is Judge Caldwell,” he would say, “and I’ll fix up cases for you if you contribute. You know, I never forget a friend or a favor.”
It was not long before traffic violators were calling the real justice and asking to have tickets quashed. Justice Cauldwell was very much annoyed.
“Say,” Judge Cauldwell is reported to have asked an assistant D. A.—the same one who had lost the case in his court—, “what are you going to do about this guy giving the impression he is I and getting me mixed up in this charity racket?”
That’s why the assistant D. A.’s are laughing today and that’s why some would call it poetic justice.
—D. L. S.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
