Sing for Freedom

At one disconcerting period in his career, Hollywood Big Shot Nicholas M. Schenck took a $50,000 bundle of bills to Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, dropped it on the bed and looked out the window. Other Hollywood tycoons got into the same strange habit. Somehow or other, Willie Bioff, a pimp turned labor racketeer, was always there to scoop up the bundles, split them with a fellow scofflaw, George Browne, president of the A.F. of L. Stage and Movie Operators Union. Willie and George acted for a gang of Chicago mobsters. The motion-picture industry thus parted with a million dollars.

Confronted with this shakedown of big shots by big shots, the Government improved upon an old police practice--wheedling small-fry criminals into testifying against bigger ones. Now big shots squealed on big shots. Nicholas Schenck's brother Joe, imprisoned for income-tax evasion, informed on Browne and Bioff--and was soon paroled. A year ago, bored with the stuffy interior of the Federal Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Browne and Bioff squealed, too. Their words convicted the Chicago mob. Afterward, they were moved to the security of the "squealer's prison," a U.S. institution at Sandstone, Minn. Last week, three years after their conviction for eight and ten years respectively, a grateful Government put them on probation, gave them their freedom.

Lawyers in U.S. Judge John C. Knox's court had sung the praises of Willie and George well. It had taken considerable temerity, they pointed out, to testify against such Chicago mobsters as Louis ("The Man to See") Campagna, Frank ("The Immune") Maritote and Charles ("Cherry-Nose Joy") Gioe. This was convincing to Judge Knox, who freed Willie three years and George two years before they would normally be released for good behavior. Their prison behavior, incidentally, had been magnificent. Said Willie's lawyer: "He has the garbage cans at Sandstone shining as they never shined before."

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