Gamblers and Rattrap

While New Yorkers watched their crusading District Attorney Thomas Dewey expose a gambling racket that preys on the pennies of the poor, Chicagoans were last week being treated by their State's Attorney Thomas Courtney to a more de luxe gambling crusade. Shuttling across the sprawling city, Mr. Courtney's ax squads demolished 19 handbook (horse-race betting) offices. Other gambling dens closed their doors in fear, or installed cheap furniture and carried on furtively.

A threat potentially more fearsome to gamblers, however, than State's Attorney Courtney--whose zeal, they guessed, would cool after election--was an archaic legal rattrap brought out and set last week by an irate Chicago matron in behalf of her son-in-law. Paragraph No. 330 (enacted in 1817) of Illinois' Criminal Code sets forth that: 1) any person losing $10 or more gambling in Illinois can sue the winner and recover his money; 2) if a loser does not sue within six months, "any person" can sue the winner for three times the loser's losses, the county taking one-half of the sum recovered. Last week's suit, brought by a Mrs. Libbie Maxwell against "Big Bill" Johnson & four associates, declared that her son-in-law, Herman Van Spankeren Jr., lost $15,000 of hers over a period of seven months in the D & D Club, Horseshoe Club, Harlem Stables and Devlin Club.

A similar suit last year, by a righteously indignant Miss Frances Moore against one John Thermos of Cicero, Ill. who won $50,000 on an Irish Sweepstakes ticket, was beaten by showing that this "gamble" took place outside of Illinois. Chicago lawyers last week said the odds were on Mrs. Maxwell to take Johnson for $45,000.

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