New York v. Diamond

The maximum annoyance which New York City's police have caused Jack ("Legs") Diamond, whom the city's newspapers have made the local counterpart of Chicago's Capone, is one conviction out of 22 arrests. Last week, however, as he lay with a collection of his enemies' slugs in him on an Albany hospital cot, slim, pasty-faced Gangster Diamond found himself in real trouble. The State of New York was after him.

The last time he was ambushed--in a Manhattan hotel last October--Gangster Diamond recovered, left town, went to his Acra, N. Y., country place where he planned to run Greene County's big bootlegging business. This ambition led to his indictment, fortnight ago, for torturing a Greene County truck driver who would not tell Diamond and another hoodlum where he was taking a load of cider (TIME, May 4). Three days later came the second attempt on Gangster Diamond's life.

The Diamond indictment and subsequent assault released a torrent of indignation in Greene County, whose citizenry foresaw that its nest of city rats was about to ruin the summer tourist trade. Thereupon, Governor Roosevelt, preparing to sail for Paris to visit his aged mother who is ill with influenza, appointed Attorney General John James Bennett Jr. to supersede the local prosecutor, clean up the Catskill's gangster colony.

No stranger to the ways of city hoodlums, Attorney General Bennett likes to remind people that he was born in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Mild of manner, blond, well set up, he made precedent last autumn by getting himself elected to the State's chief legal post. Not only is he one of the youngest (37) to hold the office, but the first Democrat in eight years. In 1918 he emerged from the Army a pursuit pilot, although he never got to France. While working for J. P. Morgan & Co., he studied law at night school, was not admitted to the bar until four years ago. His prominence in American Legion affairs has greatly benefited him politically.

As soon as he got on the Diamond case things began humming. Two Diamond henchmen were arrested; the Acra house was raided. Attorney General Benne.lt dug up another assault charge against the racketeer, found weapons in his automobile. With these counts, a previous conviction for burglary and an old sentence for deserting the Army against Diamond, Attorney General Bennett hopes to send him to jail under the Baumes Law for life as a fourth offender.

Meantime, the Diamond gang's central liquor dump was found, $5.000 worth of beer, whiskey and wine confiscated in an outhouse behind the Aratoga Inn, near Cairo, where Diamond was host. And it began to appear that the bullet-riddled gangman, whose life was at first despaired of, would live to stand trial. Amazed at his recuperative powers, said his doctor: "He's lead proof. They can't kill him off."

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