GANGSTERS’ VENGEANCE

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 November 1931, Page 2

GANGSTERS’ VENGEANCE

MEN SHOT FOR DEFIANCE. NEW YORK, September 17. The American Legion has been dragged into the mystery surrounding the murder of three gangsters in a Detroit house yesterday. They had been shot in the back of the head by five men who had driven to the house in a car. To drown the noise of the shooting the horn of the car was sounded continuously. The “Detroit Mirror” declares that the men were killed because they ‘‘hijacked” (stole in transmission) liquor worth £22,000 which, was being shipped into Detroit for the American Legion Convention which takes place next week. They were shot, it adds, after they had disregarded an ultimatum to surrender the liquor.

The police state that the men were members of a Detroit River rum-run-ning gang known to the “underworld” as the “Little Jewish Navy.” The body of Meyer Shapiro, the leading figure in the illicit alcohol trade in Brooklyn, was found in the basement of a squalid lower East Side tenement this morning with a bullet wound behind one ear.

Racketeering has been a regular profession in the Shapiro family, for his brother, Irving, after amassing wealth in the slot machine gambling racket, broke into the illicit alcohol business. He made many enemies, and was murdered last July. INFORMER’S FATE. PROVIDENCE R. 1., September 17. Harry Volpe, the notorious bootlegger and informer, has been found dead in a motor-car here with a bullet in his brain. The police assume that he was “rubbed out” for “squealing” on his former associates. Volpe was well known by officials in Washington, for when the Federal Government wanted information about criminal activities in almost #ny part of the country he was one of the first to be called for. His greatest “success” was in regard to the indictment of 112 men at Cleveland in 1926—0ne of the biggest liquor cases in the country, in which the Government spent £40,000 to secure evidence convicting four millionaire bootleggers.