REAL DETECTIVE STORY

Taranaki Daily News, 12 January 1932, Page 8

REAL DETECTIVE STORY

SERIO-COMEDY IN NEW YORK. GUARDING SIGNOR GRANDI. (.Auckland Star Correspondent.) San Francisco, December 9. Dino Grand!, smiling happily behind his square-cut Assyrian beard, boarded the s.s. Augustus in New York, and galled away, unconscious of the fact that behind him a horde of 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, antiFascista, 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 Americas 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 antiFascists 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 equad. They spread themselves on roofs and in niches behind construction equipment and temporary ladders. SECRET ALARM SOUNDED. Women operatives were at work, with pistols neatly cached in handbags. A "window cleaner” at work high above the crowd at the Customs 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 albout town,” strangely armed for clubmen, followed him. At the same signal all traffic was diverted away from his route. Occasionally, by a 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 th© sailing, which was scheduled for 3 p.m., and took place half an hour late, detectives searched the ship for stowaways. Relatives and friends desirous of seeing voyagers off on the Augustus were denied the mixed pleasures and tears of a last farewell. No passes were issued for the docks. WHAT WAS BEHIND IT? •After the whistles blew, and the tugs puffed, and the gangplank was hauled in and the Augustos 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 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.