SAVED BY BLUFF.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 18762, 29 December 1930, Page 12

SAVED BY BLUFF.

ENGLISHMAN IN CHICAGO. “TAKEN FOR A RIDE” BY GUNMEN An Englishman, Mr George W. Fellowes, who knows more about Chicago gunmen and 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 w r as 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-jack-ers, 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 ‘sha-dow-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 conversations with his gangster friends about graft. There is the case of a police Inspector who took a £.5000 bribe not to investigate a case. I met a saloonkeeper who became chief of police: and I spent a week in hospital after an interview with the police, who supposed I had some secret document on me. “I figured in the murder mystery of Hicks, the St. Louis lawyer. Hicks eot into trouble with the gangsters. Three met 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 a case of a drunken man being help* ed 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 there.

“An ex-convict then came on the 6cene. He ‘split’ and said that £IOOO had passed between the gang and a oolice official. The ex-convict was shot dead by six policemen and my life was threatened.

“I was lured to my office by a telephone message to my wife, bundled -•to a car and taken for a five-hour ride, which I was told would be my last. But I bluffed. I told them that they were being followed by the nolice, 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 concession by one of the gang, “provides the reason for my never going back to St. Louis."