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189 1940–1949 Roth Breaks Parole, Uncovers a Nazi Plot, Gives“Dame Post Office”Fits, and Tells His Own Story in Mail-Order Advertising Copy “Get your Wit and Wisdom of the Week here,” shouted the dozen girls in red aprons and white caps. Pauline had hired them, and they were led by Chig, reluctantly. Mother and daughter would have guessed that Sam’s release from federal prison would not end the requests he made of them. Upon his release from Lewisburg, Roth had Pauline design, and Adelaide and a dozen other young women wear, a costume (red apron, white cap) to hawk a twenty-fivecent newsletter in Foley Square. It detailed the charges against federal judge Martin Manton.1 In 1939, Manton, the tenth-longest-serving federal judge in the country, was convicted of “selling” his federal judgeship by accepting bribes, and remanded to prison.2 This was the man who had refused Roth’s petition for bail prior to transportation to Lewisburg. By Roth’s account, he had been placed in a holding cell with mobsters Gurrah Shapiro and Lepke Buchalter, convicted in November 1936 for labor racketeering in the fur trade (not murder, as Roth reported, although Lepke was a member of Murder, Inc.). Judge Manton granted bail for the two organized crime men, although they faced sentences of four years and $20,000 each. He did not allow Roth to be so released. Roth says Gurrah and Lepke bribed Manton (“CMAM,” 376). It is possible, although newspaper accounts of Manton’s bribery and solicitation of “loans” refer to dealings with powerful corporations, not organized-crime hard men. If Roth was in the same facility as Gurrah and Lepke, it would have to have been in late December. Roth was sentenced on December 16 and arc h a P t e r 7 190 Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist rived at Lewisburg on January 8, 1937.3 He probably would not have been in the same holding cell, as they were very small. Having lost his assets in the Crash, Manton had taken bribes to make favorable rulings in certain patent cases. He was eventually convicted and sent to Sam’s alma mater, Lewisburg. Roth’s Wit and Wisdom of the Week stunt, for which he could not immediately pay the printer, was particularly foolish for a man on parole. But it was vintage Roth—a display of vindication but at the same time a threat not only to his own freedom but that of his wife, whom Judge Moscowitz had warned not to become involved in his publishing activities . With his parole officer fully aware of this Wit and Wisdom stunt, the immediate future, as Adelaide knew, seemed to indicate a return to prison, just in time, it must be noted, to confront a chastened Manton.4 It definitely would have meant Lewisburg, if not Atlanta or a worse hole, if the parole authorities had known of his role in the distribution of the underground “Medvsa” edition of Tropic of Cancer. It is possible that he was contacted by the book’s publisher, Jack Brussel, when Brussel needed money to finish the printing. Brussel’s plan was to send five hundred copies to Ben Abramson in Chicago and an equal number to the Gotham Book Mart. Miller ’s bibliographers state that Roth agreed to advance the money, in return for Brussel printing an overrun that Roth distributed to customers, “over the years,” on Roth’s special mailing list of interested parties for banned erotica.5 One of their sources for this story is Gershon Legman. Additional evidence for it is that Richard Roth told his sister that his father had made this deal.6 According to Legman, at the time Roth had quite a few writers in his “stable ” of underground porno hacks, who would provide the customers on his special list with what they wanted. The program was similar to that by which the agent for the Oklahoma collector Roy M. Johnson received erotic stories from his New York agent. Legman writes that one of these employees was a writer and reviewer of sex pulps, Robert Maxwell Joffee. Another was Jack Hanley, known as the writer of Let’s Make Mary, a lighthearted instruction manual for Broadway-type make-out men (in their dreams). A third was Legman himself. “We all wrote smut for Roth,” Hanley said. “He’s the only book publisher really in the center of the sex business.”7 He meant before the...

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