Rat Hunters

One bright afternoon last week, sedentary little Mayor James John ("Jimmy") Walker of New York walked almost half way up Manhattan Island (52 mi.) leading 6,000 members of his constabulary in the city's annual police parade. Bands played "Ninetynine Out of a Hundred Wanna Be Loved"; rookies strode along in light blue bathing suit tops; the May sun glinted on the flanks of horses, on fixed bayonets, trench helmets, machine guns. Watching the show, New York Citizens quite forgot the bad odor in which the paraders had been since Referee Samuel Seabury began his police and judiciary investigation last winter (TIME, Dec. 29, et seq.). But it was not only the parade which caused New Yorkers to undergo a change of heart about their police. Two days prior had taken place a front page police triumph which Police Commissioner Edward Pierce Mulrooney had called "the most sensational in my 35 years of experience."

In an upper west side flat two young criminals had been cornered with the aid of tips by one of their girl friends and a taxi driver. They were undersized Francis Crowley, 19year-old lather, and Rudolph Duringer, 220-lb. truck driver. Duringer confessed that he had killed a red-headed dance hall hostess in a moment of drunken jealousy. Crowley, wanted for auto stealing and robbery, had shot down a Long Island policeman who approached while he was parked with his girl in a dark lane.

More than 10,000 people watched 100 officers fire 700 shots at Crowley, his 16-year-old sweetheart, and Duringer in a siege which cost $2,600. Inefficient gas bombs flung by the police were flung back at them before they exploded. But after an hour, little Crowley, wounded and out of ammunition, surrendered. Fat Duringer had been hiding under the bed. Pleased that the murder of the red-headed dancer had taken the city's attention from the murder of another red-headed girl--Benita Franklin Bischoff alias Vivian Gordon, vice racketeer, whose death on the eve of giving testimony against a venal officer is yet to be solved (TIME, March 9, et seq.)--Commissioner Mulrooney sneered at Crowley: "Sure he fought when he was cornered. But so does a cornered rat. . . . He never really shot it out with anyone."

Far less spectacular, far more important than New York's rat hunt was the roundup of six criminals in an East St. Louis, Ill. flat last week. The capture, effected by State, Federal and local officers, ended an eight-month investigation by Post Office sleuths and other agencies. According to Patrick Roche, chief investigator of the Chicago States Attorney's Office, the prisoners were remnants of the now defunct Cuckoo and Shelton mobs of Southern Illinois. They were suspected of numerous bank robberies including the $200,000 Denver Mint holdup in 1922, and kidnappings, including that of Fred J. Blumer, Monroe (Wis.) near beer brewer, last month. Nine armed cars carried the prisoners to Chicago.

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