"Smart Young Men"

Two big sedans roared through the night in Chicago's southwest side, last week. The second car drew up alongside the first, poured into it a stream of machine-gun, shotgun and revolver fire. Brakes shrieked; the first sedan careened toward the curb. Like rats leaving a doomed ship, two men jumped out. One sprinted 100 yards, fell on his face on the pavement--dead, full of little holes. The other floundered across a vacant lot, died with seven bullets in his flesh. . . . They, Frank Koncil and Charles Hrubek, were members of "Polack Joe" Saltis' bootlegging gang. Rival thugs had killed them. This was only another episode in Chicago's intramural liquor war, which has killed more than 100 gangsters,* an assistant district attorney, a lawyer and a few police-men in the last two years. It ends the treaty of peace, signed last October by greasy chieftains in a Loop hotel, while a captain of the police held their guns. More killings may soon be expected. The Saltis gang is eager for revenge; its rivals are eager to get Gangster Saltis.

One would think that Chicago with its $100,000,000 annual liquor business, with its $30,000,000 paid for protection, would have enough profits for all the hoodlums. But each gang has its eye on a monopoly. They encroach upon one another's territory, raid one another's warehouses, capture one another's beer trucks, slaughter one another's men. There are four major gangs: one on the North Side (with a onetime assistant state's attorney as its adviser) ; two on the south side (one of which is led by "Polack Joe" Saltis) ; one on the far west side with headquarters in Cicero where famed "Scarface Al" Caponi is king (TIME, Oct. 11). Their wars are flamboyant spectacles--a multi-punctured body on the steps of the Holy Name Cathedral in broad daylight, two more corpses across the street at the door of a florist's shop . . . the funeral of Dion O'Banion, with $30,000 worth of flowers, with thugs and city officials tramping solemnly side by side . . . "Scarface Al" Caponi sitting quietly in the restaurant of his Cicero hotel with machine gun bullets whistling all around him. . . . As King Caponi once said: "It [the Prohibition law] looked like a good opening for a lot of smart young men."

* Two affiliated gangsters were also murdered last week. Alfonso Fiori, 36, the father of nine children, was found lying in a gutter with his head torn from its moorings by a charge of shotgun slugs. Benjamin J. Schneider, realtor and bootlegger, was shot to death in front of his home.