[From Det. Henry Ostermann's private notebooks. Section labeled "Prohibition observations, from Jan 1920." Representative entries.]
From 17 January 1920. The new constitutional provisions are in force. The Harbor Police jurisdiction has become, overnight, one of the three most valuable offices in the municipal administration. It is not my jurisdiction. I will list here what I see but cannot act upon. I make the list because a detective who ceases to notice what he cannot act upon ceases, in time, to notice at all.
20 January 1920. First arrest of a Ward Street man carrying a case of Canadian whisky in his delivery cart on Ironside Lane at 2 a.m. The man, upon questioning, said he had been paid to carry the case from "a vessel at the slip" to an address in the Heights. He would not name which slip or which address. He was fined $25 and released. A charge of transport was not pressed. The arresting officer was from the Harbor Police, not from my division. The Harbor Police did not seek further inquiry from our division.
3 February 1920. Pattern. The vessels landing at Quay 3 in the small hours have tripled in frequency since January. The manifest office reports nothing irregular (see Mr. Gunderson's professional reticence in the harbormaster's office — Mr. Gunderson is not a man who invents, and he is not a man who investigates either; he logs what he is given). The Hume Shipping operations at Quay 3 are therefore, on the paper, unremarkable.
July 1920. I now see Chief Keane's personal motor car drawn up at Doyle's Saloon back door on an average of two evenings a week. Chief Keane does not drink in the front of the house.
9 August 1920. Rizzo present at Doyle's on three consecutive Fridays. Rizzo does not drink in the front of the house either.
14 September 1920. Cadenza lorries, "munitions-parts test vehicles," commencing their night runs. Brecht has acknowledged to me, on indirect inquiry, that the category is accounting-only. He declined to characterize the actual use of the vehicles. I did not press.
December 1920. Twelve arrests in the first year of Prohibition in the Port Hume jurisdiction, all for minor street-level possession. Not one for the import traffic. A colleague in Cleveland tells me his division has made forty-seven import-traffic arrests in the same year, with thirty-one convictions. Port Hume is a vessel passing Lake Erie over clean waters.
Louisa Frye, October 1921. L. Frye, switchboard operator at Hume Shipping, has given her notice and departed the city. I have spoken with her aunt on Elm Street who reports her to be in Buffalo with a sister. Her pension is set at twice the ordinary rate. The aunt does not know why.
November 1921. Sgt. Byrnes visits the Hume Shipping lobby the morning before Frye's resignation. The lobby man (a friendly source of mine) says the Sergeant did not enter any office. He stood in the doorway of the switchboard room. He did not speak. He watched Frye. Frye left the next morning.
I will not interview Frye. Interviewing her would put her in further jeopardy. She left for a reason and the reason is still the reason.
11 May 1922. A Cadenza lorry (plate 4-14-78, the one Rizzo's bookkeeper Attilio drives) has run off the road at the bottom of Hornbeam Hill at two in the morning. Two cases of Canadian whisky spilled on the road. Harbor Police responded. The driver departed the scene before the Harbor Police arrived, with the cargo loaded into a second lorry that had been following behind. The spill was not recorded as a Prohibition incident in the Harbor Police blotter. The spill is in our division's blotter because a constable on the Hornbeam Hill beat (Matuszak, good man) called it in before the Harbor Police re-routed the report. I have Matuszak's original entry. I have kept it.
3 October 1922. Rev. I. Fleming at Bethel A.M.E. has preached (I was told by Mrs. Flannery, who attends there) on the text of "the spoils of the unjust are spoils also of the just, when the just look away." He did not name any individual. Several people in Port Hume looked away in the following week.
February 1923. The Clarion's M.H.-T. letter of last month re night-time lorry traffic through the Heights (see pro-09). Published. Ignored publicly; noted privately.
August 1923. Vilbrand at Aldenhaven told the parish physician of Aldenhaven over a beer, last year August, that the Hume cottage had been "closed for repairs" over a four-day period in which the Hume cottage had in fact been open and in use. This was reported to me via the parish physician via our mutual acquaintance. I have not yet identified who was in residence during the "closure." The timing corresponds with Rizzo's absence from Port Hume for the same four days, per Mrs. Doyle's observation. I have drawn an arrow in this notebook from one entry to the other.
January 1924. The arrangement is, by my count, into its fifth year. The sum I can assign to Edmund's share alone, conservatively, exceeds one hundred thousand dollars. The arrangement has not been prosecuted because the persons who might prosecute it are the persons who benefit from it. This is, in a functioning municipal administration, a small miracle. It is, in the Port Hume of 1924, an ordinary arrangement.
I will close this notebook when the arrangement ends or when I retire, whichever comes first. I think I know which will come first.
[pages remaining unused.]