Substitute for Beer

When the Civil war ended, cannon factories began making fancy grillwork and iron dogs. When railroads made Western stage coach lines obsolescent, Wells Fargo got into the railway express business. With the passing of the horse, Studebaker Carriage works survived by manufacturing automobiles. The return of beer has similarly forced the nation's underworld into evolution. As was amply evidenced last week, the defunct beer racket is swiftly being superseded as a source of criminal revenue by the uglier, more desperate crime of kidnapping. Unlike a legitimate industry, a gang which has been running beer need not modify its plant or personnel to go in for snatching. A number of people are required as abductors, guards, intermediaries. These must be tough, resourceful, utterly unscrupulous if a professional job is to be done. Automobiles are needed, as well as a thorough knowledge of police operations and an acquaintance with back roads. Old storage plants make excellent hideaways, of which several are often necessary if the chase becomes hot. Such an organization can be formidable. The U. S. President himself set two Secret Service agents on guard over his grand-children--"Sistie" & "Buzzie" Dall and Sara Roosevelt--at Little Boars Head and Rye Beach, N. H. when an unparalleled "wave" of abductions, three major kidnappings and half a dozen attempted ones, burst violently into the news last week. Swindler. Three weeks ago at "The Dells," a suburban roadhouse northwest of Chicago celebrated for good orchestras and bad customers, John ("Jake the Barber") Factor, his shapely second wife and Son Jerome, 19, were entertaining a party of friends. "The Dells" is about three miles from the Evanston line on a wide and main-traveled concrete road. Not far down it, on the way home, Jake the Barber's car was stopped by thugs with machine guns. As his frightened wife looked on from a car behind, Factor & friend were spirited away in the gangsters' automobile. The friend was dumped out not long after. Until in the Lindbergh case they historically overstepped the mark, the nation's kidnappers had for the most part confined themselves to snatching each other. Ransom was paid, the victim released and nobody, including the police, was much the wiser. Jake the Barber was one of the few underworldlings left with appreciable means. He has peddled spurious stocks on two continents--in dry oil wells, flooded Florida land, non-existent glass casket companies--since he professionally laid down his razor in Chicago twelve years ago. At one time he bought an exhausted African platinum mine, dressed Negroes up in muddy work clothes, took photographs of them, prepared literature for a grand swindle in London. He had just bought postage to distribute the literature when a newspaper exposed his knavery. Incorrigible Jake the Barber sued the British Government for the postage, lost the suit. He returned in 1929 and before he fled England for the last time had amassed $7,000,000 from a fraudulent stock selling campaign. Last April his son Jerome, a student at Northwestern, was kidnapped, returned for $50,000. It was Jerome who last week set up the machinery to buy back his father. From Oklahoma, Virginia, Florida came reports that Factor was known to be held in the vicinity. At Washington the British Embassy made formal representations to the U. S. State Department, claiming that Factor's abduction was a ruse under which he was making an escape to Mexico in order to avoid extradition to England, where charges resulting from the $7,000,000 coup are pending. But Jake the Barber was neither in Oklahoma, Virginia, Florida or Mexico. He never left Illinois. An unnamed friend turned over $50,000 to some unnamed men in an automobile, reputedly at Hinsdale, western Chicago suburb. After twelve days in captivity. Factor was released at La Grange, 111., three blocks from the police station. His clothes were disheveled, his beard long, his eyes swollen from their tape bandages. He tottered into the station house and asked for whiskey. He said that guns had been poked in his back, shears snipped threateningly under his ears. "I was treated like a dog. The bed they gave me was infested. They called me every vile and filthy name they could think of." Kidnappee Factor however, for all his brutal treatment, was unwilling to hazard a guess for the authorities as to his captors' identity. He threw a bad scare into many a wealthy Chicago home by announcing: "The gangsters told me that they had a list of men they were going to take and that every one of them would pay." Instantly local and state police guards were thrown around the homes of 40 rich Chicagoans, among them: Arthur Cutten, John D. Hertz. President Warren Wright of Calumet Baking Powder Co., Otto W. Lehman (former owner of The Fair department store). The names of the other 36 marked men were withheld by police. Politicians. Beer drenched and politics complicated another major kidnapping of the week. For four days the relatives of John J. ("Butch") O'Connell Jr. kept secret the fact that he had been abducted as he stepped out of his car in front of his Albany, N. Y. home one midnight. Potent relatives they are. Uncles Edward & Daniel are the unchallenged bosses of Albany, control New York's most potent upstate Democratic machine. "Butch," 24, onetime school footballer and a strapping lieutenant in the National Guard, was the hope & pride of the clan O'Connell. He had been in charge of beer distribution from the Hedrick brewery, partly owned by his uncles. The brewery's legal operation since April 7 has helped put Albany beer runners out of business. Revenge on that score might have been a motive for his kidnapping. Or his abduction might have been motivated by persons who recently threatened his father. John J. ("Solly") O'Connell Sr. used to be a Republican ward boss before his family took over the town's Democracy. His chief interest now appears to be sport. He frequents race tracks, raises gamecocks on Brother Daniel's Catskill farm. Thence last week the Clan O'Connell directed negotiations for its scion's return. Obeying the kidnappers' instructions, the names of three sets of intermediaries, 31 in all, were published in code in Albany and New York newspapers. The intermediaries were cabaret operators, ex-beer truck drivers, saloon waiters, tipsters and other questionable characters--all friends of the democratic O'Connells. Neither the district attorney's office, local or state police, nor the dozen Department of Justice agents sent to Albany specially by Attorney General Cummings at the request of New York's Senator Copeland were taken into the O'Connell family's confidence. In Albany their word is law. They were going to get their boy back in their own way. Up to late last week they had not gotten him. Ransom asked: $250,000. Banker. The courtesy of a sick old gentleman, neither brewer nor swindler, resulted in his kidnapping at Alton, 111. one night last week. At 9 p. m., August Luer, 77, and his wife were preparing to retire when two men and a woman appeared at their door, said they wanted to communicate with one of the Luers' neighbors. Mr. Luer, a banker, packer and Alton's first citizen, offered to telephone the neighbor. His slippers flew off as his captors seized and dragged him to a waiting automobile. Mr. Luer's sons, fearful lest their father's serious heart ailment be fatally aggravated by the shock of his capture, broadcast that Mr. Luer should be allowed to stand up if an attack came on, should be given no coffee, only mild cigars. "We cannot accept any ring, stickpin, or fingerprints," they warned. "You can take such things from a dead man. We must have something in father's handwriting." After five days old Mr. Luer was turned loose on a road near Collinsville. He had been kept, he said, in a dank, narrow concrete crypt in the basement of a house he could not locate. Reported ransom: $10,000. Elsewhere the week's snatching wave lapped and lashed. At San Diego, Calif., onetime President Pascual Ortiz Rubio of Mexico received two telephone calls demanding $50,000 on pain of being kidnapped. A 42-year-old poultryman named Patrick Fallon was taken from a farm at Bridgewater, Mass. Frederick J. Persons, 16, son of an East Aurora, N. Y. bank president, told how he had run away from two men who tried to snatch him on a dark street. In Atlanta, President John K. Ottley of the First National Bank identified two boys who had seized, later released him fortnight ago on his way to work (TIME, July 17). Three men were arrested as they lay in wait for another banker, Cecil C. Vaughan, near Franklin, Va. John C. Lyle, mail carrier of Crawfordsville, Ga., was kidnapped by three escaping convicts, driven in his own car to Wake Forest, N. C., freed. A St. Paul physician named Walter H. Hedberg said he was shot through the ear, beaten, drugged, left in his car in the path of a train when he refused to mutilate a chiropractor at the request of thugs who seized him. What to Do. The kidnapping and killing of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. changed the law of the land. Because abduction across a state line is now a Federal offense (punishable one year to life imprisonment), the Department of Justice's Bureau of Investigation can and does now enter a kidnapping case at once. Last week's flagrant cases set Attorney General Cummings to pondering further Federal legislative weapons. Joseph B. Keenan, fat and fierce Cleveland prosecutor, was made special assistant to the Attorney General for the suppression of rackets. Publicly Assistant Keenan advised : "Upon receipt of a threatening letter or the disappearance of a relative or friend, place a long distance call immediately to Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington. Officers will be dispatched to the scene. . . . We were not notified of the O'Connell kidnapping until Monday night. The young man disappeared Friday. That meant four days of supremely valuable time lost. . . . The family and friends of the kidnapped must do their part in cooperating promptly to bring about the desired result."

No sooner had he spoken than in Brooklyn occurred a good example of how kidnappers can be caught by prompt action. Three men had tried to extort $10,000 from Dr. Jacob Wachsman. Dr. Wachsman happens to be honorary physician of the New York Detectives' Association. He telephoned his detective friends and they promptly threw a network of espionage around him. A detective was his chauffeur. Detectives with fake ailments haunted his waiting room. When the extortionists finally named the location for the payment, the place bristled with sleuths selling oranges, taking stock in grocery stores, sweeping sidewalks in janitors' clothing. As soon as the money changed hands, detectives shot the tires off the crooks' car, ran it into an iron fence, found two of the gang in it, beat them unmercifully. The third crook they caught later.

Lest the public get the notion that the Law is helpless in the face of thugdom, the Associated Press called to mind that in 18 notorious kidnapping cases in the past three years, 43 criminals have been jailed, three are dead, ten await trial. Prior to last week, the four most important kidnappees of the year were Broker Charles Boettcher II of Denver, little Peggy McMath of Cape Cod. Mary McElroy, daughter of Kansas City's city manager, and Brewer William Hamm of St. Paul. The abductors of all save Hamm are either doing time or awaiting trial. On the basis of that record the average kidnap victim not only stands a good chance of getting home alive but of living to see his captors imprisoned.

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