A NEW RACKET

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 193, 30 July 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

A NEW RACKET

GANGSTERS AND GOLF THREAT TO INTERFERE WITH CHAMPIONSHIP. SHOCK TO NATIONAL CONSCIENCE. It is hinted—and with some show of confidence—that the gangsters in America have at last gone too far. They are like the man in De Quincey’s essay who owed his ultimate downfall and his lapse into major crimes like Sabbath-breaking and idling during office hours to some trivial little murder about which he thought next to 'nothing at the time.

With murder and kidnappings the gangsters have long been familiar—and so have the curiously resigned citizens on whom they prey with such impunity. But now these miscreants have done something which really does shock the national conscience—they have tried to interfere with the American Open Golf Championship.

The New York correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian” ’ says that they approached the committee in charge of that contest, and demanded the right to set up a totalisator machine and gambling booth near the clubhouse.

When this scheme was rejected they demanded a cash payment for allowing even as, in more familiar forms of the

“racket,” they extort payment from laundrymen and greengrocers on peril of death or the destruction of their business premises by bombs.

In the ease of the Fresh Meadow Golf Club the “racketeers” said they would destroy all the greens if their cash demand were not satisfied —an entirely new form of “green fee” as such charges are understood in this country.

The reply of the outraged golf com mittee was to put the whole course under police protection, for, as our New York correspondent observes severely, “Even in America such impudence as this proposal is without parallel.”

One can only hope that the protective measures will prove successful — even if they mean calling out Federal troops to watch the police, who might easily be in the pay of the gangsters and green-destroyers. For our own peace of mind and pious reputation might be imperilled by this latest development in racketeering. Why should this enterprise pause at wrecking putting greens?

If Gene Sarazen is wafted away and Walter Hagen’s usually delayed appearances are permanently postponed .by kidnappers, the rumours may be set about that our own Royal and Ancient had something to do with the removal of these rather embarrassing experts.