Mobster Abroad

In Italy the Army suddenly had a crime wave on its hands. Soldiers on leave in Rome swapped rumors of robbery and murder. Bandits had held up the chauffeur of Polish Lieut. General Wladyslaw Anders when he was returning in the general's super-Cadillac from delivering the general to the airport. Military supplies were stolen. A cafe owner was shot to death. Nervous citizens stayed out of alleys, wondered what would happen when the weather got colder and hungry desperadoes grew more desperate.

Allied military and Italian police rounded up one gang. It included seven Foreign Legion deserters, one deserter from the U.S. Army, one Italian and five Spanish civilians. But still the brigandage went on, especially along the road from Rome to Naples.

Then one night several weeks ago a jeep crashed to a halt on a street in Rome. Police pulled a Canadian soldier out of the car. He was a deserter, armed with a pistol stolen from an American MP. Police stood guard over the jeep. When another Canadian and a U.S. sergeant showed up and tried to recover the jeep at gunpoint, the guards nabbed them. That was a break which U.S. Lieut. Colonel John R. Pollock, Allied regional director of public safety, had been hoping for.

Crime--U.S. Style. The second Canadian and his U.S. partner were also deserters and were VD cases to boot. They were marched off to a hospital. In the best Hollywood mobster style, pals tried to rescue them. Disguised as MPs, armed with submachine guns, the mob might have succeeded if real MPs had not scared them off.

They escaped, but from the three in custody, Allied authorities collected names, addresses, information. Police dropped in on a Rome cafe just as the mob was driving away with an Italian civilian who had been acting as their fence. They had marked him down as a stool pigeon and were taking him for a ride. Police captured them all.

In the mob were another Canadian, five more U.S. soldiers. Three days later, after routine detective work, a police net dragged in the mob leader: a 23-year-old U.S. soldier from the State of Pennsylvania, identified only by an alias "Robert Lane."

Allied and Italian officials breathed more freely last week. But with plenty more deserters from the Allies' polyglot armies in Italy running around loose, they were not looking forward to a peaceful winter. Goggle-eyed Romans, reading the story of the Lane gang, wondered how much their homegrown desperadoes were learning from the American visitors.

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