MACHINE-GUN MURDERS

Taranaki Daily News, 14 December 1926, Page 7

MACHINE-GUN MURDERS

IN CATHEDRAL’S SHADOW. GANG FIGHT IN A CHICAGO STRET. New York, Oct. 17. Chicago was yesterday the scene of yet another gang outrage, in which Mr. W. W. O’Brien, a noted criminal prosecutor, was fataly wounded, while two under-world leaders were killed and two seriously injured. The murders were committed with machine-gun and rifle lire in North State Street within the shadows of the cathedral where the recent Eucharistic Congress was inaugurated and opposite the famous florist shop where two years ago Dion O’Banlon, bootlegger, hi-jacker and reputed instigator of more than a score of murders, was assassinated by the men whose liquor he had stolen. The police seem to have no hope ot capturing yesterday’s murderers. They say merely that this fresh outrage, committed in the heart of the mid-western metropolis, apparently marks a continuation of the war of extermination between two rival gangs. Mr. O’Brien, to whose ingenuity many great criminals owe their escape from the gallows, was conducting the defence of Joe Saltis, a leader of a gang ol beer-runners, who, with Lefty Koncil, was charged with the murder of Mitters Foley, leader of another gang of beerrunners. Friends of the murdered leader, including Scarface Al Capone—suspected of complicity in the murder recently by machine-gun fire of Mr. McSwiggin, the assistant public prosecutor—are supsupposed to have sworn to foil Mr. O’Brien in his efforts to secure the acquittal of Saltis. Mr. O’Brien yesterday had just left court and was on his way to the florist’s shop where the gang interested in the defence of Saltis had their headquarters. He alighted from a tramway-car as a motor car containing Earl Weiss (popularly known as Hyrnie Weiss), Paddy Murray, and two other associates ot Saltis halted outside the cathedral opposite the shop. The next moment a machine-gun, operated from the secondstory window of a house’ across the street, opened fire.

SHOTS FROM FAST CAR. Almost simultaneously a motor car rushed past the scene. Its occupants fired rifles at the group of Saltis’s defenders and disappeared. Weiss and Murray were both kiled. Mr. O’Brien was fatally wounded with three bullets in the abdomen. When the police arrived the house from which the machine gun was fired was empty. The gun had been flung into a side street. The facade of the cathedral was badly chipped by the hail of machine-gun bullets. So far this year bootlegging feuds In Chicago have resulted in 46 murders; in the last three years they have accounted for 110 lives.