Foul Wind from Chicago

The hearing room in Washington reeked with the ugly smell of shakedown, of labor hoodlums sweating behind the Fifth Amendment, of sordid fear, as testimony on the Chicago restaurant protection racket went into its second week. To the members of the Senate's labor-management investigating committee, it was quite clear that they had caught the scent of one of the dirtier trails in labor history.

From the refusal of a dozen-odd union officials, i.e., hoodlums, to testify, from bits and pieces of testimony from frightened victims, from facts pieced together by committee investigators, a solid picture emerged: racketeers have cut a slice of Chicago's restaurant unions and intend, unless balked, to expand into a boundless labor empire. Their plan is brutally simple: sell the cafe proprietor "protection" from legitimate unionization and collect monthly "dues" from him for a fragment of his staff--a fragment that rarely knows it has been organized. The weapons are terror, extortion and violence, wielded in many cases by rod-packing remnants of the late Al Capone's mob. Items offered in evidence at last week's hearings:

P: In the last 17 months, 40 Chicago restaurants have been burned under mysterious and unexplained circumstances, doubtless because the restaurateurs resisted, for a while, the mob-run labor shakedown.

P: One Chicago innkeeper, by forming a "sweetheart" alliance with the racketeers, saved $20,000 a year in under-scale wages.

P: On at least two occasions union enforcers tried terror to silence committee witnesses: Mrs. Beverly Sturdevant, a cafe manager, was warned: "Get sick before you go to Washington, or you'll be sicker when you get back." Mae Christensen, a hostess employed in the cafe, was similarly threatened. Anthony De Santis, a victimized restaurant owner, testified quaveringly: "I haven't slept for months due to some of the things that have happened in our area."

P: The Chicago Restaurant Association, a federation purportedly formed in the interest of restaurateurs, had direct ties with hoodlum unions.

By week's end four of the committee's tongue-tied witnesses had resigned their posts in locals of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union, and more were expected to follow. This modestly encouraging result by no means satisfied Arkansas' John McClellan, committee chairman. "The testimony," he said, "clearly established that a number of local unions in the Chicago area were controlled by gangsters." The situation, he added, "cries out for remedial action, which is beyond the power of this committee. The committee trusts that responsible governmental agencies, on both the federal and state level, will follow up." That is, if they were sniffing the foul wind from Chicago.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.