800 Criminal Gangs In United States.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 78, 1 April 1931, Page 8

800 Criminal Gangs In United States.

(Special to the “ Star ”) LONDON, February 18. “ CRIMINAL ARMY is waging a national campaign—and winning. Chicago, the world’s Fourth City, has fallen,” declares Mr E. D. Sullivan in. his startling new book, “ Chicago Surrenders.” It is the sequel to the recently published “A 1 Capone,” and to the same author’s 44 Look at Chicago,” and well deserves close study. The secret source of all this network of crime is to be found in venal justice and the vast profits of the illicit liquor trade: Last year, according to Dr James M. Doran, then Prohibition Commissioner, the. perfectly. organised and murderously vicious American bootleg liquor industry had an income of £900,000,000. This sum is divided between 800 gangs scattered up and down the United States. The results have been terrific beyond all- measure. Murder is a commonplace. In Chicago alone nearly 5000 homicides have occurred under Prohibition, a record never semi-approached in the turbulent history of that spectacular city. Crime and disregard for law is nation-wide! Organisation never before considered possible in. the underworld has been established. No one is convicted; no gangster is executed. The gangs rule, and that is the fine flower of modern democracy! Less than a year ago, one Lingle, reporter on a Chicago newspaper, was murdered by gangsters. His salary as a journalist was £650 a year. It afterwards appeared that he had been spending some £12,000 a year, and that he was the liaison officer between the gangsters and the corrupt Chicago police. Murder in a Ballroom. Lingle was A 1 Capone’s friend, however, and A 1 Capone took steps to settle with his killer, one Zuta, in the usual ghastly fashion. Zuta was dancing with a number of other couples in the pavilion of an hotel at some distance from Chicago, where he was in hiding, when—• the doorman, Joe Selby, saw about eight well-dressed men .... Five went inside, Zuta, dancing within, had just passed the door of the pavilion with his partner, when the five men, one carrying a machine gun, took him by the shoulders. He fell to the floor, not a vestige of colour in his usually florid face. They picked him up calmly. Not a word was spoken as two of the men carried him bodily to the corner in which the piano stood. He was put on a chair. A gangster stood on either side of him; the man with the machine gun stood ten feet away ready. Two others, guns drawn, herded the dancers away. Zuta, rigid and speechless, never once looked towards his casual murderer. He was just falling from the chair, when the men beside him stepped away and the “ chopper ” set the machine gun in operation. No one has } r et been punished for this cowardly deed. About the date of it one Juliano, a gangster friend of A 1 Capone with eight murders to his record, was “ taken for a ride,” presumably by rival gangsters, and when his corpse was discovered it was found that every bone in his body was broken.” What is happening in Chicago is happening in all other large American cities. 44 In ratio of murder to population, twelve of the larger American cities lead bulletriddled Chicago,” says the author. New York had its A 1 Capone in one Arnold Rothstein: True master-mind, perhaps the keenest anti-social brain in criminal history . . . known to honest policemen as a “ cop shooter”; known to big thieves as a fence. . . . Seizure of the’merest fragment of his ultra private and quickly vanishing papers unearthed £1,400,000 worth of habit-forming drugs. While others proposed in New York, he disposed. Rothstein, despite his poise (pose?) of a dinner-jacketed, smooth-spoken, and carefully jewelled figure, had about him fifty people as tough and murderous as anyone in the world, and with these he could transact any type of business . . . But with all his training and calculation he could not prevent one of his puppets from turning against him. One misjudgment, one bullet, one funeral. He had himself killed some fifteen gangsters, and after his death there was a wholesale massacre of his followers.