SAVED BY BLUFF

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXIV, Issue 3242, 13 December 1930, Page 2

SAVED BY BLUFF

ENGLISHMAN IN CHICAGO. TAKEN FOR A RIDE BY GUNMEN. f An Englishman, Mr. George W. Fellowes, who knows more about Chicago gunmen anad racketeers than most Americans, returned to London after waging war for many years against the leaders of the underworld. “To set foot in any of the cities where I have been acting as a secret

service investigator,” he said, ‘‘would mean my death.”

“My job was to investigate fraudulent claims on behalf of a great American insurance company. I became a secret service investigator in the State of California, and my war on hi-jackers, racketeers and gangsters became so fierce that I was put on their murder list.

“I have met A 1 Capone, the Chicago leader.. I saw him in the police ‘shadow-box’ —a screened stage flooded with powerful lights. The police can observe their victim in the box, but he cannot see them. A 1 Capone was brought up for investigation, but

that was all. “I know most of the tricks of the racketeers. I knew a police official who had a private telephone in his house, and he used it for conversation with his gangster friends about graft. There is the case of a police inspector who took a £SOO bribe not to investigate a case. I met a saloon-keeper who became chief of police: and I spent a week in hospital after an interview with the police, who supposed I had some secret documents on me.

“I figured in the murder mystery of Hicks, the St. Louis lawyer. Hicks got into trouble with the gangsters. Three men set upon him in one of the

leading hotels in the city, and he was killed by a gun with a silencer. They dragged the dead man through the vestibule—the guests believing it was just a case of a drunken man being helped home by his friends and dropped him into a ditch eight miles away. They peppered the body and the ground around it with shot to create the impression that the murder had been committed.

“An ex-convict then came on the scene. He ‘split’ and said that £IOOO had passed between the gang and a police official. The ex-convict was shot dead by six policemen and my life was threatened.

“I was lured to an office by a tele-! phone message to my wife, bundled | into a car and taken for a five-hour j ride, which I was told would be my last. But I bluffed them. I told them that they were being followed by the police and after half-killing me, they threw me out on to the road. “They were after documents, but the one I have in my pocket now,” said Mr. Fellowes, producing a typed confession by one of the gang, “provides the reason for my never going back to St. Louis.”