Editing Thomas E. Dewey (section)

===Federal prosecutor===
Dewey first served as a federal prosecutor, then started a lucrative [[Practice of law|private practice]] on [[Wall Street]]; however, he left his practice for an appointment as special prosecutor to look into corruption in New York City—with the official title of Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.<ref name="five families book">{{cite book |title=The Five Families |date=May 13, 2014 |publisher=MacMillan |isbn=9781429907989 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5nAt6N8iQnYC |access-date=June 22, 2008}}</ref> It was in this role that he first achieved headlines in the early 1930s, when he prosecuted [[rum-running|bootlegger]] [[Waxey Gordon]].<ref>{{Cite news|last=Rogers|first=Stuart|url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/102269764/stuart-rogers-gordon-guilty-gets-10/|title=Gordon, Guilty, Gets 10 Yrs., $80,000 Fine|date=December 2, 1933|work=New York Daily News|access-date=May 21, 2022|page=3|via=Newspapers.com}}</ref>

Dewey had used his excellent recall of details of crimes to trip up witnesses as a federal prosecutor; as a state prosecutor, he used [[Telephone tapping|telephone taps]] (which were perfectly legal at the time per ''[[Olmstead v. United States]]'', 1928) to gather evidence, with the ultimate goal of bringing down entire criminal organizations.<ref name="five families book"/> On that account, Dewey successfully lobbied for an overhaul in New York's criminal procedure law, which at that time required separate trials for each count of an indictment.<ref name="five families book"/> Dewey's thoroughness and attention to detail became legendary; for one case he and his staff sifted "through 100,000 telephone slips to convict a Prohibition-era bootlegger."<ref>(Smith, p. 21)</ref>