Victim No. 3

From a black sedan, skidding around a slushy Minneapolis corner one midnight last week, gunfire blazed. From a parked car, the gunners' target, jumped a man and woman, running for their lives. The man, obviously hurt, shouted: "Don't shoot, for God's sake, don't shoot. . . ." As if he recognized the killer, he called out a name. Then he toppled over into the snow. Next day, his companion, a prostitute, told police she couldn't make out what name her friend had cried out.

Thus last week a dog's death came to Arthur Kasherman, 43, publisher of an unsavory Minneapolis one-man tabloid, the Public Press. He died as he said he would: "Just like they got Guilford and Liggett." In 1934 gunfire from a passing automobile had brought down another Minneapolis publisher, Howard Guilford, who circulated two scandal sheets, the Saturday Press and Pink Sheet; and, a year later, Walter Liggett, publisher of the Midwest American, got his. Liggett, a former editor of Plain Talk (a magazine), and Guilford, a veteran St. Paul newspaperman, once had some legitimacy as journalists. Kasherman had none.

To his acquaintances, who had developed a studied indifference to his talk of crusades, "expo-ZAYS" and threats, the wonder was that anyone had wasted a bullet on Kasherman. He was a man of thin face and slickly pompadoured black hair, a police station hanger-on, petty racketeer and blackmailer, who once did a two-year penitentiary stretch for a $25 shakedown of a whoremistress. His Public Press was a newspaper only by the utmost professional courtesy: it came out intermittently, whenever Kasherman could find someone to smear and someone to pay him for it; it was full of black-inked diatribes against the cops, the mayor and the gangsters, and promises of a detailed "lowdown" which would come in the next issue but never did. In his cheap rooming house, police found almost an entire 10,000 edition of the Public Press, already a month old, still undistributed to the few Loop newsstands that would sell it.

Police confessed themselves as baffled by Kasherman's murder as by Guilford's and Liggett's, still officially listed as unsolved. Minneapolis' legitimate newspapers cluck-clucked properly over Kasherman's death, hoped that the latest killing would do what police and city officials had failed to do: put a stop to blackmail parading as journalism.

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