The Year Saratoga
Had to Explain Itself
In the summer of 1926, a state-led investigation exposed Saratoga as a city where gambling, politics, and law enforcement moved in quiet alignment.
What began as one citizen’s challenge to the system became a high-stakes public reckoning that revealed a carefully maintained system built on looking the other way.
For years, Saratoga Springs had operated under the Saratoga Way, an unspoken arrangement in which gambling flourished openly while law enforcement looked the other way. But in the late spring of 1926, this generally accepted part of the seasonal economy was publicly challenged by a bold reformer named Peter Finley, President of the Saratoga Springs Taxpayers Association.
By mid-summer, Governor Al Smith was feeling the pressure. Recognizing both the risks and necessity of intervention, he invoked the Moreland Act, which grants the Governor the authority to examine the affairs of any department, board, bureau or commission in the state. What had long been tolerated as custom was now being recast in Albany as a test of whether the rule of law still held in Saratoga Springs.
New York Governor Al Smith
Smith named Supreme Court Justice Christopher Heffernan to lead the investigation. He exposed a network of illegality—payoffs and protection that allowed vice to thrive under a veneer of order. He laid bare the rot not only in the city’s police department, but throughout the upper echelons of city government.
As Heffernan shouted at one uncooperative witness, Mellefont’s Cafe operated by day just 100 yards from the courthouse at 449 Broadway (the address where Soave Faire now operates today), but became at night a “Red Front” gambling house. The brazenness of it—vice transforming in plain sight within earshot of the courthouse—captured the very essence of the Saratoga Way.
“I am fully satisfied that during the time set forth in the petition gambling, consisting of pool selling, book-making, faro, cards, roulette and other games of chance, was conducted openly and notoriously in the City of Saratoga Springs,” Heffernan concluded in his report to the Governor.
Justice Christopher Heffernan
Smith promptly removed for dereliction of duty District Attorney Charles Andrus and Sheriff Arthur G. Wilmont. Public Safety Commissioner Arthur “Doc” Leonard resigned before Smith could fire him.
Prosecutors tried to indict these public officials for their misdeeds, but the grand juries they convened declined to cooperate. Mobsters, politicians, and police continued to collude in the dark corners of a city that, for one brief moment during the summer of 1926, had been forced to explain itself.
In 1931, Leonard would run again for Public Safety Commissioner — and win.
Introducing James Leary
Saratoga’s Mob Kingpin
A protégé of Senator Edgar T. Brackett, who had served as Minority Leader of the New York State Senate, James Leary was the chief architect and enforcer of the Saratoga Way. Before the hearings, during the testimony, and long after the headlines faded, he remained untouched.
Leary pulled the strings behind the scenes for more than 30 years, showing that that the true strength of the Saratoga Way lay not in those exposed, but in those who were never called at all.
Join us in Zoom to hear Greg Veitch tell it.
Monday, March 23, 7 p.m.
A fifth-generation Saratogian who retired as Chief of Police after a 25-year career in law enforcement, Greg Veitch has written two histories of crime, gambling and corruption in Saratoga Springs. His most recent is A Gangster’s Paradise: Saratoga Springs from Prohibition to Kefauver.
Greg Veitch