Durkin v. Drama

Every week since January 1936 Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Co. has been advertising Palmolive shaving creams with a Wednesday night coast-to-coast radio melodrama called "Gang-busters." Produced by smart young Benton & Bowles advertising agency, which claims 20,000,000 listeners for the program, "Gangbusters" dramatizes actual criminal careers. The killing of Dillinger Gangster Homer Van Meter was the subject of one hair-raising episode, but "Gangbusters" has not confined itself to dead lawbreakers. The dramatization of the capture of Massachusetts' murdering Millen Brothers was broadcast prior to their electrocution and many a live but lesser robber, forger and gangster has had his story told. Until last week there had never been a squawk from the criminal.

Last week dapper little Martin J. ("'Marty") Durkin, known in his gunning heyday as "The Sheik" and now in his twelfth year of a 35-year term in Joliet (Ill.) Penitentiary for killing a Federal agent in Chicago in 1925, was announced as the principal character in the "Gangbusters" weekly dramatization. "They've got no right to use my misfortune to peddle soap," said Lawyer Irving S. Roth for Convict Durkin, eligible for parole in seven more months. Into court at Chicago marched Mr. Roth, seeking an injunction against the broadcast. Surprised, Benton & Bowles quickly dropped Durkin's tale, instead told one about a rich New Yorker named Shattuck who pursued a thieving butler across the ocean, caught him in France and had him sent to Devil's Island.

Everybody knows that no criminal has any legal protection against the publication of the facts of his conviction. Murderer Durkin's chief hope for an injunction was therefore based on an unusual Illinois statute which makes it unlawful to exhibit for pecuniary gain criminal or deformed persons. Federal Judge J. Leroy Adair pondered, decided "exhibiting" meant displaying the person as on a vaudeville stage, refused the injunction. Benton & Bowles's Manhattan publicity department shot out an exultant news release claiming "freedom of speech in commercial broadcasting was upheld for the first time in radio history." Promptly Murderer Durkin's biography was announced for the "Gangbusters" show this week.

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