The Crime Syndicate

The shifty-eyed gambler who walked into Publisher Sevellon Brown's Providence papers last September had a frontpage story to spill. Pasquale Borino wanted to fill in the Journal and Evening Bulletin on a mob which he said was running the lottery, sweepstakes, race-track and baseball-pool rackets in Rhode Island. But when Bulletin City Editor Leo Son-deregger tried to track down Borino's leads, he found they cut across state lines and involved shadowy national figures.

That gave Sonderegger an idea: Why not set up a newspaper syndicate and clearing house to report crime on a national scale? In Chicago last month, at the Journal-Bulletin's invitation, staffers from the New York Herald Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Chicago Daily News, the Denver Post and other major newspapers met in secret to set up the syndicate.

After swapping information about racketeering, they split the country up into reporters' beats, and each member agreed to cover his territory on crime stories for the others. Said Sonderegger: "We hope to make the public thoroughly aware that the rackets are tied together in a national federation organized to break state laws but beyond the reach of those laws."

This week, members of the 14-paper syndicate got their first pooled story, written by Ted Link of the Post-Dispatch (TIME, Nov. 1, 1948) and reporters from the Chicago Daily News and the Miami Herald. A kind of ABC of national crime, it contained no bombshells likely to blow Frank Costello out of his Manhattan apartment. But the new syndicate's bosses were betting that cooperative reporting would make national headlines before long. One promising sign: gangdom was so worried that pool reporters had already been "approached" by the underworld.

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