ALIENS: Robert Jackson's Busy Week

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It was the lunch hour in Manhattan and all over the city waiters with flawless manners were getting orders wrong and with many an expert nourish placing the scrambled eggs before the man who ordered stuffed veal. Suddenly 40 immigration officials, 40 Canadian border patrolmen and 100 city detectives sprang from nowhere, seized 70 Italian waiters, and spread consternation through the $2-luncheon belt.

At the Ritz-Carlton five waiters took to their heels and got away. Only one, serving a group in the Oak Room, was caught—another waiter took over his customers and his tip. At the Ambassador, at the Caviar, at Joe's Restaurant, other rendezvous from Park Avenue to Sixth Avenue, the Government men struck so swiftly and quietly that customers just thought service was a little slower than usual. At the Pierre, necks were craned when a waiter, led off by two officers, let out a squawk: "They're taking us to jail!"

These waiters and eleven more gathered up by week's end had been brought over to work in the Italian Pavilion at New York's World's Fair. Having long overstayed the 30 days allotted them after the pavilion closed, they were legally deportable.

Like nearly 200 German seamen, seized in a dozen cities, including Miami, Kansas City, San Francisco, Chicago and Manhattan, two nights earlier, the Italian waiters were seized at Attorney General Jackson's orders. Most of those seized were not in hiding but it appeared that the Government meant to round up in advance transients from the Axis countries who might be potential enemy agents.

In speeches, conversation with individuals and in his first press conference in eight months, Attorney General Jackson undertook last week to tell about other of his department's activities against undercover foreign activities in the U.S.:

>The Government attached funds of the giant I. G. Farbenindustrie, German dye trust. Indicted last winter with several U.S. companies for violating the antitrust laws in the magnesium industry, officials refused to appear, contending they were not doing business as a U.S. corporation. The Attorney General claimed that the seizure (timed with expected receipt of $250,000 due I. G. Farbenindustrie that same day for license fees from U.S. firms) would compel the dye trust to appear before a U.S. court if it wanted to protest, w<ould thus automatically bring it under the jurisdiction of the courts.

>Of Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe-Waldenbourg-Schillingfurst, confidante of Captain Fritz Wiedemann, Nazi consul general in San Francisco, who was ordered deported last March for overstaying her visitor's leave, Attorney General Jackson said, "We feel better-natured about her." Reason: she had given the Government "some very interesting information."

>In Wilson, N.C., ten Italian officers and seamen were found guilty of sabotage of the seized Italian freighter Villarperosa, received sentences up to three years. First of 397 Italians, ten Germans up for trial, they got off easier than Robert Jackson wanted—he asked uniform sentences of five years for seamen, seven for officers.