PROTECTED FROM PLOTTERS

Evening Star, Issue 20996, 9 January 1932, Page 10

PROTECTED FROM PLOTTERS

GUARDS BESIEGE GRAND! [From Our Correspondent.] SAN FRANCISCO, December 9. Dino Grandi, -smiling happily behind his square-cut Assyrian beard, boarded the s.s. Augustus in New York and sailed away, unconscious of the fact that behind him a horde of pseudo window washers, taxi drivers, bell boys, hotel clerks, and spaghetti merchants were stripping off their disguises and becoming plain-clothes men again. The most thrilling chapter in New York’s frantic official efforts to protect her guest from cranks, radicals, anti-Fascists, international ' plotters, and spies was written so ably that not once did the Italian Foreign Minister know that every second person he saw on his visit to the United States was a detective. Directly Grandi had left America’s shores details of the amazing detective story were revealed in New York. Detectives lurked on roofs and along sidewalks. They loitered in lobbies and loafed at theatre entrances. They sat in the orchestra at the opera, and shadowed him at private clubs. They hid behind desks and chairs and divans, behind posts and palms and potted rubber plants. They mingled with anti-Fascists, and gave ear to rumblings among Communists. In the guard that constantly surrounded Grandi in all his waking and sleeping hours there were members of the bomb squad, of the radical squad, of the international crime squad. They spread themselves on roofs and in niches behind construction equipment and temporary ladders. WOMEN SET TO WORK. Women operatives were at work, with pistols neatly cached in handbags. A “ window cleaner,” at work high above the crowd at the Custom House, carried his revolver in his pail. When Grandi stepped from his hotel to the official automobile that was always at his disposal, a secret alarm was sounded. Unknown to him, a second car, crammed with “ gentlemen about town,” strangely armed for clubmen, followed him. At the same signal all traffic was routed away from his path. Occasionally, by peculiar coincidence, an automobile would suddenly crowd a suspected car to the sidewalk, just in case—. At the pier, when he sailed, the same activity was manifest. For hours before the sailing, which was scheduled for 3 p.m., and which took place half an hour late, detectives searched the ship for stowaways. Relatives and friends desirous of seeing voyageurs off on the Augustus were denied the mixed pleasures and tears of a last farewell. No passes were issued for the docks. After the whistles blew and the tugs puffed, and the gangplank was hauled in and the Augustus swung into the stream, and the uniforms marched

away, the “loungers” and “stevedores ” and “ ship officials ” _ went home, pulled off their false whiskers, and went down to the station house to report. The Grandi guard was the most elaborate ever accorded to a New York visitor. From time to time newspapermen attempted to learn what was behind it. What threats had been received to cause the police department to take such extensive precautions? The answer was that there were no specific threats, except the usual few from cranks. Because of the economic depression and its attendant unrest, and because New York’s large Italian population embraces many anti-Fascists, the police department decided to spare no expense in protecting its visitor.