CRIME: 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.