Lingle & Co.?

When the Chicago Tribune's crime tipster Alfred ("Jake") Lingle was murdered (TIME, June 23; July 7) the enterprising St. Louis Post-Dispatch sent its reporter John T. Rogers to the scene, dug up and printed the earliest stories that the dead man was a profiting racketeer and only incidentally a $65-a-week legman.

As if to outdo its hometown rival, the St. Louis Star ordered to Chicago its reporter Harry T. Brundige. Last week the Star burst forth with his findings: that Lingle was but one of a legion of Chicago newsmen--executives and reporters--who have been lining their pockets with the gold of politicians, lawyers, police, gamblers, gangsters, brothel keepers, et al.

Case after case--minus names--was cited by Reporter Brundige: the reporter who is the "unofficial mayor" of Chicago; the reporter who collects 5-c- for every sack of cement sold in his territory; the subeditor who boasted that "he is the guy who fixed a price schedule for divorce lawyers who want their names in the paper"; the bond-signing racket; the legal-fee racket of "tipping" ambulance-chasing lawyers on new accidents; the "lottery racket of a newspaperman who recently 'went south' with some $50,000 of 'sucker money' and who worked his racket through the circulation department of his newspaper."

Finally, Reporter Brundige offered to give a grand jury the name of a news executive who, he said, told him: Only the dumb wits in the newspaper game in Chicago are without a racket. The reporters and editors ain't to blame for what they're doing--it's the publishers. They don't pay us enough to live on and they know it. I live. I'm getting mine while we got Prohibition. I've got a pet racket that's going to put me on easy street. Only a couple of weeks ago, just before 'Jake' was bumped, a guy from Portland, Ore. tried to 'muscle in' on my game and I got his arms and legs busted for him. Come on out to the house and I'll treat you to some swell Capone whisky."

The story also quoted Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, as pledging a grand jury investigation of all alliances between newsmen and underworld, promising to oust and prosecute "any man on our payroll who has used his employment dishonestly."

The Chicago Tribune reprinted this Star story. But other Chicago dailies hotly resented this second instance of St. Louis enterprise. Said the Chicago Daily News, one of whose reporters had been named by Brundige: "Any such blackening without proof of newspapermen by removing from them as a class the protection of public confidence, well may prove helpful to gangsters who hate and fear some individuals of local newspapers, as the Daily News has good reason to know." The American echoed its neighbor, and the Post loudly demanded that Reporter Brundige be forced to make good his boast that he would name the "arm and leg buster" before the grand jury.

The police meanwhile progressed slowly in finding Lingle's killer. A grand jury indicted Frank Foster, arrested in Los Angeles as onetime owner of the "belly gun" with which Lingle was shot. The same day, detectives arrested one Jack Zuta, Moran-Aiello gangster, suspected instigator of the murder. Soon released, Zuta was being given "safe conduct" through the loop district in a detective lieutenant's car, when three men opened fire on him. A street car motorman was killed. While the detective fought it out with the assailants, Zuta fled, unhurt, to hide from police and gunmen alike.

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