GANG POLITICS

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 83, 9 April 1928, Page 9

GANG POLITICS

CHICAGO'S PRIMARIES ARMIES OF HIRELINGS BLOODSHED PROBABLE United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright. Australian Press Association. I. . NEW YOEK, 7th April. The "New York Herald and Tribune" prints the following remarkable dispatch, contributed by a staff correspondent, sent from Chicago. The correspondent states that machine-guns and "pineapples," as the natives playfully call bombs, may decide at Tues- ; day's primary election at Chicago which particular gang is going to harvest the hundred million dollars this year derived from the graft estimated to flow from booze and gambling. Two armies of jobholders, hoodlums, gunmen, bootleggers, gamblers, and just plain bums, will do battle in the fifty wards which make up this city, and in some of the outlying towns.. One will bo lighting under the banner of Bill Thompson and Governor Small, who is buttling for his political life, and the Kt^# Attorney Crowe, whose record in '"diuiiiping out crimo" in America's see--ond'eity has. aroused no envy in other communities. The other army will fight under,the banner of Senator Denene and Louis Emmerson, candidate for the Republican nomination for Governor, against Governor Small. WHOLESALE MURDER. Wholesale murder is confidently predicted on both sides. No one is quite sure "of the outcome, though opinion generally seems in favour of the betterorganised Thompson side. One Judge has been given authority by the Supreme Court to imprison anyone, without the possibility o£ release under bail, Whom he believes guilty of vote manipulation, and the latter has sworn in three thousand deputies, who have power to arrest anyone on suspicion. This may reduce the stolen votes from seventy-five thousand to twenty-rive thousand. Eival beer gangs, gambling mobs, and alcohol smugglers have developed such armies of gunmen, machine-gun operators, and bomb-throwers that the rate of charge for murder haa considerably dropped. Murder can be arranged for any ordinary person at fifty dollars, with considerable competition as to who will get the contract. However, this situation, which apparently only affects the Bepublican Party, is complicated. Thore are wheels within wheels, and sometimes it is a knotty problem for an honest gunman to know just whom to shoot for the benefit of his employer.'