Week

Last week Amos Walter Wright Woodcock, far-traveling Director of Prohibition, returned to New York from a four-day inspection trip to Porto Rico. Before he went to a reserve officers' camp for a fortnight's training, Col. Woodcock declared: "Porto Rico is pretty wet; our effort there has been rather weak. But the natives are a temperate lot. Porto Rico is so situated that bootleggers from Santo Domingo and Martinique have little difficulty in smuggling in their wares. In addition there are many small stills in operation. We have only three Federal agents on the island."

Meanwhile throughout the U. S. the following Prohibition news was made last week:

P: A prowling Federal searchlight stopped to glare at 16 corporations, 36 individuals. The most glaring searchlight of its kind ever to be directed against big U. S. businesses, it challenged them for conspiring to divert industrial alcohol into bootleg alcohol.

Enforcement officials had spent $500,000, waited two years to make their new accusations. They discovered that many a manufacturer of paints, varnishes, lacquers and disinfectants sells his products to customers who have nothing to paint or varnish, nothing to disinfect. By a process of distillation these bootlegging consumers remove the denaturant elements from the goods they purchase, extract drinkable ethanol (grain alcohol). Included in the charges were manufacturers of industrial alcohol as well as those manufacturers who use the alcohol as a solvent. U. S. Industrial Alcohol Co., biggest producer in the U. S.,and Glidden Co., Cleveland's prolific paint and varnish makers, were among those indicted at Baltimore. Most conspicuous individual mentioned was one Al H. Jaffe, Cleveland gangster who was killed a short time ago.

P: In Manhattan Administrator Andrew McCampbell led 25 of his agents in a raid upon a $1,000,000 brewery where 30,000 gallons of beer were seized, four workmen arrested, a major source of supply for speakeasies cut off. Mr. McCampbell charged that the city police interfered with his agents' preliminary efforts to get evidence in the slummy neighborhood. Unsuccessful were the Government's first attempts to link the brewery's ownership to William ("Big Bill") Dwyer and Owen ("Owney") Madden. (To smoke out the owners of a $1,000,000 brewery in the fashionable Sutton Place neighborhood, which Dry agents raided in May, the U. S. last fortnight started proceedings to confiscate the real estate.)

P: In Washington the State Department filed a complaint with the Canadian Government against rum-runners from Nova Scotia who had disabled a pursuing Coast Guard crew off Nantucket last month by putting chemicals into their motors, spraying a noxious smoke screen from the exhaust. Rum chasers hereafter will carry gas masks.

P: In Fort Wayne, Ind. two Federal agents were shot and killed by a fleeing 'legger.

P: In Halifax, N. S. the rum-running Josephine K., whose captain was killed by U. S. gunfire last winter off New York, arrived with her bow and stern staved in and a yarn of deliberately ramming a U. S. Coast Guard vessel in revenge.

P: In Detroit a passenger on a moonlight excursion boat on the river was wounded when a customs patrol opened fire on a rumrunner.

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