Line of Duty

The Capitol thundered last week with fresh Wet talk, with warnings of civil war, with new denunciations of U. S. Dry agents' use of firearms. What prompted the outbursts:

In Minnesota. Henry Virkula lived in Big Falls, ran a candy store. He had a wife, two children, a car. One day last fortnight he drove them all to International Falls on the Canadian border, started back for home along the public highway after dark. Mrs. Virkula was in the front seat with him, the children asleep in the back. He stopped to light a cigaret, then drove on along the lonely wooded road.

Suddenly two figures leaped up before him in the middle of the road. One held a sign: STOP! U. S. CUSTOMS OFFICERS. Virkula braked his car but had not stopped before a volley of shot tore through the rear windows. The car plunged into a ditch. Virkula was dead, a slug in his neck.

U. S. Border Patrolman Emmet J. White, 24, came up to the car. Shrieked Mrs. Virkula: "You've killed him." 'Replied White: "I'm sorry, lady, but I done my duty." No liquor was found in the car. The Virkula children woke up, began to cry.

Patrolman White had fired five rounds from a sawed-off shotgun into the Virkula car. His defense: the machine did not stop when Patrolman Emil Servine held up the stop sign. White was lodged in the International Falls jail, charged first with manslaughter, then with murder. Safe there, he made no great effort to raise his $5,000 bail. The little town's citizenry seethed with indignation against White and "the system" he represented. Banding together they wrote a public protest to President Hoover which concluded: "In our utter helplessness, terror and distraction, we are at last resorting to you. . . . For God's sake, help us!"

In Michigan. Last week the U. S. gathered in Detroit and along its rum- reeking river some 400 Dry agents. In the face of this new Prohibition drive Archibald Eugster, 21, with three companions, loaded 35 cases of Canadian liquor for which they paid $1,258, into their speed boat and started across. At the mouth of the River Rouge a Customs boat gave chase. Ten cases were jettisoned without widening the gap between the two boats. The rum-runners beached their craft, took to their heels. Customs Inspector Jonah Cox landed, stood guard over the liquor while his comrade went back to headquarters for assistance. Eugster & friends came back. A fight started. Eugster was shot by Cox, died the next clay. The U. S. quickly exonerated Cox for a killing "in line of duty."

In Washington. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Seymour Lowman, in charge of Prohibition enforcement, asserted that both killings were justified and justifiable. He stoutly promised that the U. S. would stand behind Patrolman White, would transfer his murder case from the Minnesota courts to the U. S. court. He asserted that the newspaper accounts of the Virkula killing were "highly colored, to put it mildly," a statement denounced as "absolutely false" by the Minnesota authorities at International Falls. He rejected the suggestion that the Treasury disarm its border patrolmen, "which in effect would amount to a repeal of the Tariff Law." He insisted that the patrolmen had been ordered to use their guns only for self-defense or to prevent the commission of a felony, but later announced that he would forbid the carrying of shotguns and rifles by the border patrol.

New York's Congressman La Guardia issued the civil war warning, thus: "At some place at some time the wrong person will be shot and the people of that locality will retaliate. When that happens such a spirit may sweep this country that our people will rebel against this tyranny. Prohibition is not worth plunging the country into civil war."

Contrary to precedent, the Drys in Congress sat mutely by, neither applauding the new Dry killings nor coming to their defense.

In New York. Into a Plattsburg hospital early one morning last week two U. S. customs patrolmen carried a human body, dumped it on the floor, hurried away without giving any information except that they had "found it in the road." The body had been Arthur Gordon, 22, border rumrunner. Great was the mystery as to this shooting. New York authorities started John Doe proceedings. Then from Collector of Customs John C. Tulloch at Ogdensburg came this explanation:

Border Patrolman Cheatham had been chasing Gordon through the woods, whither he had fled when U. S. agents had forced his car into a ditch on the highway. Patrolman Cheatham had "fallen flat over a rock," struck his elbow on a stone, discharged the rifle he was carrying. Getting up, going on, he had come upon Gordon, shot in the back, dying.