National Affairs: Wealth on Trial(Time Magazine: Monday, June 12, 1933)
(snip)
The real showman of the Morgan investigation, however, was not a circus pressagent. nor a Senator but the kinky-haired, olive-skinned, jut-jawed lawyer from Manhattan named Ferdinand ("Pick") Pecora. Because Senator Fletcher, who at 74 looks like a wealthy Yankee visitor to his own Florida, is not another "Tom"' Walsh with the mental capacity to prosecute his own investigations, Lawyer Pecora was hired last January as the committee's counsel at $255 per month. He had spent weeks ransacking the records of the House of Morgan for material for this trial of a lifetime. In his first fortnight's performance he proved himself a worthy match for white-haired John William Davis, patrician counsel for Banker Morgan.
Ferdinand Pecora was born in Nicosia, Sicily 51 years ago. His grandfather trooped with Garibaldi. His father, a cobbler, took him to the U. S. when he was 5. He attended public school, started to study for the Episcopal ministry, turned aside to the law. In 1912 he campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt. In 1916 he voted for Wilson. Two years later Tammany gave him a job as deputy assistant district attorney. Until 1930 when he retired, his brains really ran that office where he was the principal courtroom prosecutor. He put more than a hundred "bucket shops" out of business and thereby learned the shady side of the brokerage business. He sent State Superintendent of Banks Frank Warder to Sing Sing for taking bribes in the City Trust Co. scandal. He convicted Anti-Saloon Leaguer William H. Anderson of forgery. He prosecuted bail bond racketeers, crooked milk inspectors, big-time thugs—with 80% convictions. He was in charge of the District Attorney's office in 1923 when Anna Marie ("Dot King") Keenan, Broadway "sweetie," was murdered. For days he withheld from the Press the name of John Kearsley Mitchell, "Dot King's" benefactor, son-in-law of Morgan Partner Edward Townsend Stotes-bury, to save Mitchells family from "needless humiliation and suffering.'"