CRIME: Smooth Diamond

Into a drawing room on an outbound train at Manhattan's 125th Street station was carried a case of Golden Wedding rye whiskey, one day last week." But it was not a Senator or a Governor or even a Mayor who was leaving town for a pleas ure jaunt. It was New York's nervous, hollow-eyed, pasty-faced little racketeer, Jack ("Legs") Diamond. He was going home to the Catskill Mountains. Dressed in a flashy coat, grey spats and a checked cap, carrying two novels (Jury of Death, Super-City), he had just been released from a city hospital on Welfare Island.

His paralyzed left arm still carried two re volver bullets, deposited there by unknown enemies who attacked him three months ago in a hotel bedroom (TIME, Oct. 20).

Five city detectives escorted Racketeer Diamond from hospital to station, lest some one start shooting at him again.

They rode as far as Harmon where rail road police took up the vigil. At Hudson, N. Y., Diamond and the Golden Wedding rye were carefully transferred to a Cadillac limousine, ferried across the river, driven to Acra, N. Y.

Said Racketeer Diamond to a large, attentive flock of newsgatherers from the Manhattan dailies: "Newspapers create a character for you and if you don't live up to it the public thinks you're no good."

¶ Jack Guzik, Capone gang treasurer, was sentenced to five years imprisonment, a $17,500 fine, for federal income tax evasion in Chicago last week.

¶ Flaying racketeering, Assistant Secretary of Commerce Klein declared: "A monstrous growth, a vile, malignant para site rising from the slime of criminal greed ! . . . This evil must be rooted out if American business is to progress vigorously again."