Acra Acts

The nearest New York counterpart to what the Chicago newspapers have made of ("Scarface") Al Capone, is the New York newspapers' slim, pasty-faced Jack ("Legs") Diamond, gangster, gunman and bootlegger. For years immune from the New York City police (arrested 22 times, convicted twice), Diamond found the city too warm for him only after some acquaintances shot five holes in him at his hotel last autumn (TIME, Oct. 20). When he emerged from a city hospital, the city police escorted him and a case of whiskey out of town. Just as Capone has a suburban stronghold at Cicero, Ill., Diamond had made for himself a secluded, floodlighted country home at Acra, N. Y. There he settled down to make a living from running Greene County's beer and applejack industries.

But Cicero and Acra are different. Cicero has always been a tawdry, hard-boiled village of Sicilians and "blind pigs." Acra is a clean little Catskill settlement. Cider and applejack are home industries in that countryside. Last week Acra set about to rid itself of the slick, racketeering little rat that had run to it from the big city.

Grover Parks, a Cairo, N. Y. truckman, told the District Attorney that Gangster Diamond and his bodyguard, Jack Dalton, had stopped him as he was driving a truckload of hard cider along a deserted road fortnight ago. Because he would not tell where the cider (from which apple-jack is made) was going, Truckman Parks said the city hoodlums beat him, tied him to a tree, burned the soles of his feet with matches.

Awakened in the night, Gangster Diamond was arrested on a charge of assault, taken to jail at Catskill. With feelings akin to those of Badman James Nannery (see p. 16) and of far-famed Killer Fred Burke* who was captured by country detectives after eluding the police of many a big city (TIME, April 6), Gangster Diamond protested, "They're crazy. These guys are crazy."

It took three days for his confederates to raise the unusually high bail of $25,000. Greene County seemed determined to jail him or run him out of the neighborhood, where his activities menace the summer tourist trade (mostly peace-loving New York Jews).

Three days later, while dining with a companion at the Aratoga Inn near Cairo, Gangster Diamond was shot in the back. Seriously wounded, he was rushed to an Albany hospital, 50 mi. away.

*Last week Killer Burke at St. Joseph, Mich, was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering a policeman in December 1929.

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