On July 24, 1919, the president of the Italian assizes issued an order to suspend Cocchi’s trial while they explored these shocking new claims.
“It seems now opportune, or better necessary,” the judge said, “after the new crimination of the said Cocchi, and to improve the actual debate—that the acts of the American judicial authority concerning the said Magrini be examined thoroughly.” The court needed to find out if Maria Cocchi could be implicated, if the letter about white slavery was legitimate, and if there were other records in America that would be necessary to continue the trial. Cocchi was now providing Italian authorities with dozens of names of people he said should be questioned in New York. Across an ocean, Swann said that Cocchi’s requests—or tactics—were “absolutely ridiculous and preposterous.” “This is merely a belated attempt to shift the blame,” he said.
What had begun two days before as an exercise in formality had spiraled into pandemonium. In the end, Cocchi was taken back to his familiar cell, under no formal sentence and free of any fear of extradition. There was no date set for his trial to resume. With no eyewitnesses or real physical evidence tying him to the crime, Cocchi, though still behind iron bars, was feeling free.
*
In New York, Julius J. Kron was running his own private detective agency out of a twelve-story building known as the Vincent on 302 Broadway. The store had previously been a gun shop, and you could still smell the powder, especially in the spring. Kron now had his own office, his own secretary, and several detectives who worked for him, including a woman. His letterhead had his name twice, first as Julius James Kron in the top center, and then in the right header above “The Principal.” He also listed himself as “Former Special Agent, U.S. Department of Justice and as the Chief Detective of the Morality League of America.” As the Morality League, the old team of Grace and Kron still ferreted out kidnappers all throughout the city. They rescued Gladys Benson of Yonkers and Muriel Flynn of Mount Vernon at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. After the fifteen-year-old girls were taken to the Children’s Society, they told a story that led to the arrest of two men, Harry Wurzberger and Irving Breslau. Grace and Kron were finally catching not only the victims but also the perpetrators of these acts, whether they were actual kidnappers or just smooth-talking scum. They rescued Evelyn Rose, twenty, from August Wuttereich, twenty-two, an assistant engineer at an ice plant on Atlantic Avenue. The names and places of their conquests continued to appear in the papers.
Not every case was a headline. Kron did plenty of investigative work, which New York City had an abundant supply of. Some nights it was shadowing. Sometimes it was records work or tracing. Sometimes it was just messy. Ralph E. Woods was a civil engineer who came to Kron’s office with a blank stare. His wife had taken a new job and was getting home later and later at night. Kron went to work and, within a week, led a raiding party on an apartment at 38 Barrow in Greenwich Village, where Don Luis R. Alfaro, the young nephew of the Panamanian minister to the United States, resided. When they barged in the door, they found Alfaro in a white bathrobe. There was a red dress lying on a table, along with a pair of silk stockings. Ralph, the angry husband, found his wife, Mrs. Edla G. Woods, twenty-six, of Astoria, hiding in the dark closet. Ralph immediately demanded a divorce—and custody of their son, John, two. These cases repeated like days of the week.
Grace had survived the threat on her life, but after the Brandon case had finished, Grace had gone from the most celebrated woman in New York City to something of a pariah. But she was still trying to save the girls of her city. After a few failed starts, Grace opened the Manhattanville Be Kind Club in June. The purpose of the club was to be a place where women could listen to lectures, engage in sporting clubs, and be safe from the perilous streets. The club also had a “nursery home,” where mothers could leave their children when they were at work.
That summer, the club opened its doors with a lecture given by Grace. A welcome dance followed, which carried an admission charge of five cents to defray the rent and lighting costs. Grace knew that there were many dance halls in the area known as places of vice; she thought that her club would provide a place she could control and oversee. This was a new endeavor for Grace—and she was a bit over her head, as always—but she knew that here, on the ground, is where the front lines in her war really were. As the music played and the young people danced, a gruff man flanked with two policeman walked in her door.
The man, Captain Gargan, of the police department, asked for Grace and informed her that he was going to shut her dance down. He claimed that there were “vicious loafers” on the street corners around the lights of the Be Kind Club. He said that some of them were dancing with the girls, some of whom were no more than thirteen years old. Even worse, Gargan found out that Grace had no license to operate a dance hall. Grace was shocked. She had talked to the appropriate bureau at City Hall, and they told her she didn’t need one.
Gargan loudly ordered that the dancing be stopped. Girls and their partners stared at him from the floor. Gargan said that until a license could be procured, everyone had to leave. Dancegoers said that Gargan was very insulting to Mrs. Humiston and acted in a way not fitting a policeman. Grace was so upset that she tendered her resignation as sergeant of the police reserves—the last official link she had left to the police—right then and there. Captain Gargan gladly accepted it.