National Affairs: Waukegan Brewer

Johnny Torrio, tough, buttoneyed little dean of the Prohibition criminal era, was on trial in Manhattan last week for the same offense that undid his pupil Al Capone: cheating on his income taxes. Slit-eyed, impassive sat Johnny as 34 of the Government's 75 witnesses told on him. Then one morning his high-powered lawyer, Max D. Steuer, did not appear in court. Johnny Torrio and two of his four co-defendants pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the Government of $86,000 in taxes between 1933 and 1935. The Last of the Big Shots, who once spent seven months in a Waukegan, Ill. jail for running a brewery, looked forward to a much longer sentence.