Mobster left scant paper trail
“Legs” Diamond’s court records end before his two trials in Troy
Gangster and bootlegger John T. “Legs” Diamond has been dead nearly 89 years but his story has kept a hold on the nation’s imagination through novels, movies, a musical and biographies that built a legend around the man who grabbed the country’s attention through the Roaring ’20s.
From 1914 until he was gunned down in a Dove Street boarding house Dec. 18, 1931, after celebrating his acquittal in Troy on kidnapping charges, Diamond has never really disappeared.
But Diamond’s paper trail through the local courts and police records is harder to trace. It’s almost in keeping with his “Legs” nickname, believed to be given for either his dancing or his ability to outrun trouble.
The Rensselaer County Clerk’s Office has a bundle of 29 documents that have sat forgotten in storage for most of the last nine
decades since the headline-grabbing trial in the county’s grand Ceremonial Courtroom, which was once a church. Those few surviving documents provide insight into Diamond’s medical condition, whispered conversations with his lawyer to avoid being overheard by State Police, presidential commutation of his military sentence of five years of hard labor and his criminal history.
“Considering the celebrity status of the case, that’s a little surprising,” said Brian Keough, head of the Ualbany’s M.E. Grenander Special Collections and Archives at the University Libraries, who also launched Ualbany’s National Death Penalty Archive.
“It’s hard to document history of the pre-20th century and even into the early 20th century,” Keough observed.
What does survive can be hard to find. County Clerk Frank Merola said, “They didn’t start indexing the files until 1900. The more people dig, the more people find what’s there.”
As one opens Diamond’s files, Merola said, history percolates: “It’s got everything in it. It was an exciting case even for Troy.”
Unfolding the trifold court documents is to plunge back to April 1931 when Diamond was living in Acra in Greene County where he was establishing his bootlegging business among the Catskills resorts.
Diamond’s move to Greene County caused problems for residents and businesses. Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped in, appointing state Attorney General John. J. Bennett Jr. to smash Diamond’s gang. Arriving with 20 state troopers and assistant prosecutors, Bennett took a public role in moving ahead with the five counts of assault, coercion and kidnapping against Diamond.
The surviving court papers show how Daniel H. Prior, Diamond’s attorney from Albany, made Bennett the focal point for getting the trial moved from Greene County. That’s what brought Diamond to Troy for trial.
Bennett “has made the direct charge by affidavit that gangsters have been terrorizing the residents of the County of Greene and it is well-known that his reference to gangs and gangsters and to the leadership of such gangs causing terrorism refers to this defendant,” Prior argued in his motions for a new court venue.
The Attorney General’s Office was fierce in fighting Diamond. When it came time for bail, the state argued, “This defendant has a criminal record. He was convicted of burglary in 1914. Furthermore, he has a record of convictions and prison terms as a result of offenses committed while in the service of the United States Army, resulting in his discharge and commitment to five years in a federal penitentiary.”
This is where the court papers offer details of Diamond’s past. His criminal history detailing arrests starting with the burglary count in 1914 to his charges filed in Catskill and his court martial record are filed with the prosecution’s various legal arguments.
Diamond enlisted in the New York National Guard before the start of World War I. He was assigned to a trench mortar company as part of the coastal artillery. A private, he deserted Jan. 31, 1918, from his training camp in New Jersey and was arrested April 16, 1918, in New York City for stealing trousers, two overcoats, a waistcoat and a razor. He was carrying a pistol. Sentenced to five years of Fort Leavenworth, he was released in a general commutation of sentences by President Warren G. Harding.
Diamond was soon back in New York City and deep into the city’s underworld.
By 1931, Diamond was known across the country for his bootlegging, showgirl mistress and multiple failed attempts to kill him. It was while facing the Greene County charges that Diamond was slammed with a couple of blasts from a shotgun at the Aratoga Inn, the third unsuccessful attempt to kill him.
It’s narrow escapes like this that capture the public’s imagination. So when Diamond died in Albany after being shot in the head, newspapers ran photos of him showing each of the 15 wounds from previous attempts to kill him.
Diamond was the protagonist of a true crime story who delivered tale after tale of his doings through newspaper accounts.
“It’s just a fascination with how it is people can do terrible things. And a lot of these people are very colorful and lead these interesting lives,” said Richard W. Lachmann, a sociology professor at University at Albany who studies pop culture and the impact of war and terrorism.
Another element, Lachmann said, is that people like to puzzle out the crimes themselves to see if they could solve it. Details get eaten up by the public. Lachmann said crime always has fascinated Americans. Novels like William Kennedy’s “Legs” or movies based on the Mafia have audiences.
“There’s an interest in investigation. How do you figure this out? Have you solved this mystery? That’s the appeal of Sherlock Holmes,” Lachmann said.
Details can make the story. For Diamond, recovering from his wounds from the Aratoga
Inn hit was part of the story in heading to trial. It played a part in the legal arguments when he was moved from Albany General Hospital to the Greene County Jail.
Two troopers guarding Diamond at the hospital provided affidavits about his condition and meetings with Prior. Troopers John J. Stewart and George J. Van Antwerp worked 12-hour shifts.
Stewart said Prior visited Diamond 14 times between April 28 and May 29, 1931, at the hospital with each meeting lasting about three hours.
During the visits, Diamond and Prior “would converse together and at length, talking in whispers and with their heads close together, at frequent intervals,” Stewart said.
The state was able to get Diamond transferred from the hospital to the Greene County Jail. The attorney general’s office provided statements saying the jail wasn’t a bad place to be for Diamond.
“Diamond is confined within a large room approximately 12 by 24 feet, well lighted by three large windows and equipped with sanitary conveniences. The afternoon sun streams through the southern window, and the remaining two windows face approximately east. The room is clean and well kept. The outer walls are of concrete, while the inner walls are of steel.
The room contains two cots, equipped with bedding, but Diamond is the only occupant, “Dr. Stanley E. Alderson wrote in June 1931.
“His food is supplied to him from an outside restaurant,” said Alderson, who found Diamond could stand the strain of a trial.
The surviving Rensselaer County court records end before Diamond’s two trials in Troy. He was acquitted at both trials, although he was convicted in a federal bootlegging case held between the two state proceedings.
The Albany County Hall of Records can only document Diamond’s homicide through the newspaper clippings the Albany Police Department compiled from 1888 through 1954, said Craig Carlson, the deputy county clerk who oversees the archives.
Clippings of Diamond’s killing at 67 Dove St. the night he beat the charges in his Troy trial dominate the scrapbook pages for the end of 1931. Serving the public’s lust for details, the clips contain maps of the second floor room in which he was killed, interviews, speculation and that photo with a key depicting every spot where Diamond suffered bullet wounds including the fatal head shots.
“The popularity of the crime investigation you can see in the scrapbook but there’s nothing else in the Hall of Records,” Carlson said.
Veteran Albany Police Detective Lt. Howard Schecter is the person with knowledge of the department’s Diamond records, Carlson said. Schecter is interested in history and saddened by what became of the Diamond records.
“Forty years ago I saw some of them. I know they existed,” Schecter said. A 42-year veteran of the department, Schecter saw them at the start of his career.
Now, the department has nothing. Schecter tells you what he thinks happens to the records that would be of high interest.
“Everything was stolen. I have been spending the past years trying to find them,” the detective lieutenant said.
Those volumes of Albany police scrapbooks are the most common way of crime stories, not matter how high profile there were surviving. In collecting details of the 15,000 capital cases in the Ualbany archives, Keough said that before 1950 the official court record is a rare find and that nearly the only accounts available are newspaper clippings.
“It’s just a fascination with how it is people can do terrible things. And a lot of these people are very colorful and lead these interesting lives.” —Richard W. Lachmann, a sociology professor at University at Albany