Brisbane's Coup

To a large room in "Section D 5" on the sixth floor of Cook County Jail on Chicago's west side went a Hearst reporter one day last week. He was older than most newshawks, grey-haired, baldish, dewlapped. Within the room he found, playing solitaire at a table, "Scarface Al" Capone. For about an hour reporter and prisoner talked together.

It was not extraordinary that Capone should have been interviewed in his cell. But next day Hearstpapers everywhere splashed the interview over four columns, in some cases under screaming eight-column banner headlines. For the interviewer was no less a journalist than Editor Arthur Brisbane.

The Brisbane interview reported "Scarface's" willingness to help hunt for the Lindbergh baby if the authorities would let him out of jail. He would, he said, let a Secret Service man accompany him day & night, "and I will send my young brother to stay here in jail until I come back. You don't suppose anybody would suggest that I would double-cross my own brother and leave him here, if I could get away?"

''What could I do if I were out?" Editor Brisbane said that Capone told him what he could do, not for publication.

Capone talked about other things besides the Lindbergh baby. He discussed the Chicago beer situation, told how he had given employment to "at least 300 men . . . in the harmless beer racket." He dwelt upon the injustice of his incarceration and Editor Brisbane printed it. For Hearstreaders who wondered about Capone's appearance, Editor Brisbane recommended a study of the equestrian statue of Colleoni* in the Chicago Art Institute on Michigan Boulevard.

Other elements of the Press, not sharing the Hearstpapers' reverence for Editor Brisbane, minimized the exploit in various ways. The Chicago Tribune Press Service gave it a loud horselaugh with a string of home-brewed dispatches purporting to come from Joliet, Santa Fe, Leavenworth and other prisons. These "dispatches" said that Loeb & Leopold, Winnie Ruth Judd, Albert Bacon Fall, Terry Druggan and other more or less celebrated convicts might help the baby-hunt if let out.

United Press hastily informed its clients that it had "approximately the same interview" with Capone several days earlier but killed it "because we feel that our service should not be used for the glorification of criminals."

In Manhattan the World-Telegram (Scripps-Howard) flayed the interview, refusing "to believe that American justice has sunk so low that it must go begging and bargaining for such help."

Bolstering the propriety of the Brisbane interview, Hearst's Universal Service reported that "the gangster's proposal . . . was discussed by President Hoover and his cabinet today" and that Capone would "be asked to inform the Government at once what plan he may have in mind." But in Washington, Attorney General Mitchell stated that his Department was "not doing anything about it." Observers agreed that the whole affair was a typical Hearstian exploit -- shrewd, bold, and precisely on the borderline of journalistic integrity.

P: In New Jersey occurred a break between Press and State police. The written questions which the army of newshawks at Hopewell had been submitting every day became more & more domineering until Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf refused to answer any more. Instead he began issuing a twice-daily routine bulletin.

P: Said President John Grier Hibben of Princeton University: "If the Lindbergh baby is not found, it will be the fault of the Press for their interference in the case."

P: Macfadden's tabloid Graphic, the Brooklyn Times, the Philadelphia Record each proposed to forego printing news of the case and withdraw their reporters for two days if all other metropolitan dailies would agree. No others agreed.

P: Most other dailies, led by watchful Editor & Publisher, tradepaper, shouted down the suggestion that "Press silence is to be added to the advantages already held by gangsters over society."

P: Just as the story threatened to bog for lack of clues a Hearst sobsister reported that she had found a baby's diaper in an abandoned shack near the Lindbergh home. Simultaneously Joan Lowell (author of white-fibbing Cradle of the Deep), currently employed by (Hearst's) Universal Service, turned up that nearly indispensable adjunct of New Jersey crime -- a "pig woman" (see p. 8).

* Bartolommeo Colleoni (1400-75), Italian soldier of fortune, who fought for & against the Venetian Republic.

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