Speaking of Crime

Last week a sensational book called Out of the Night was sweeping the U. S. (TIME, Jan. 20). In one month it had sold 350,000 copies. It told how OGPU agents murdered on order--and saw to it that the murders looked like accidents. It told how they kidnapped their enemies--and the kidnappings looked like unsolved disappearances. The work of a German ex-Communist who wrote under the name of Jan Valtin, it painted a savage picture of the depravity of the Comintern, OGPU agents, the world's Communist parties.

Last week for many readers the book came to life--and to death. Found dead in a hotel room in Washington was Walter Krivitsky, 41, onetime chief of Soviet military intelligence in Western Europe, who broke with Stalin in 1937, fled to the U. S., wrote a series of articles exposing the OGPU in the Saturday Evening Post, testified before the Dies Committee. Krivitsky was partly dressed, had a revolver in his hand. His death was listed as a suicide.

Last week, as usual, the U. S. still had plenty of old-fashioned crime at home to think about. Examples:

> One rainy night last week in Manhattan, Emil Nizich, 26, dock worker and small-time racketeer, was on his way to a gym for a game of basketball. He was shot three times from behind, left dead in the gutter. The killer made his getaway. An hour and a half later, a few blocks away, young Joseph Moran was checking the unloading of a ten-ton truck. A stranger stepped in out of the rain. "Who's Joe Moran around here?" he asked. "That's me," said Moran cheerfully. The stranger shot three times, killed Moran.

> Coming home to his Bronx apartment, John Pappas, 54, well-to-do wholesale grocer, found the place in disorder. In the bedroom, on the bed, lay the half-naked body of Mrs. Pappas, her hands and feet bound, the towel with which she had been strangled wrapped tightly around her neck.

> At a New York summer resort Mr. Max Heitner, Bronx real-estate agent, once met an agreeable, balding fellow named Benjamin Tannenbaum, who said he was an accountant. They became friends. Police knew Ben as Benny the Boss, gangster aide of Louis Lepke and Jacob Gurrah, convicted dope and fur racketeers. One night last week, while Benny the Boss was sitting up with the Heitner baby and the parents were out, the mob found Benny, left him dead with two bullets in his chest. The baby slept through it.

Back in 1923, when the U. S. was beginning to worry about its gang wars, young Jan Valtin and 27 fellow Communists, armed with guns and hand grenades, attacked five policemen in a station in Hamburg ("From the floor a policeman was still firing. The stevedore crushed his face with a kick of his heavy boot. Another policeman had the side of his neck torn away; he was bleeding to death under a table. . . ."). While the U. S. was worrying about the depression in 1930, Conspirator Valtin was carrying money from Antwerp to Montevideo, glued into the lining of a suitcase C"Astonishing numbers of undercover agents were on their way to South American states. The Communist Parties there were known to have strong anarchist tendencies. Moscow did not trust the Latin-American leaders out of sight, and therefore had them amply covered with Comintern supervisors.") While the U. S. was shaking its head over the crimes of Dillinger, Jan Valtin's Communists were ambushing and being ambushed on the Hamburg waterfront ("Seven young Nazis were on their way to distribute propaganda to the dockers at the harbor gates. . . . [The] crew sauntered up behind them on Admiralty Street, and shot all seven in the back.").

The U. S. is accustomed to taking its crime with almost morbid seriousness. Citizens read about it, brood about it, usually come to the moody conclusion that the U. S. is a violent, lawless, desperate land, with a mighty black record compared to other nations. With this belief foreigners have been prompt to agree. But to many a reader of Valtin's real-life thriller, it came with a sudden shock of realization that other nations have their mad dogs too. Compared to them, such U. S. gangsters as Al Capone are very small change.

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