Rat Trapped

Soon after dark one night last week a jury filed into a court room at Troy, N. Y., and announced that it found John Thomas ("Legs") Diamond not guilty on a kidnapping charge. Nobody was surprised. Arrested 27 times on charges ranging from homicide to "suspicious character," the shifty-eyed, pasty-faced, bony racketeer had been convicted only thrice in his 36 years. Again free, "Legs" kissed his wife, drove across the Hudson to Albany to get drunk.

At 1 a. m. Mrs. Diamond and a few hangers-on lolled over a speakeasy table. "Legs" got up, lurched toward the door. "Gotta go see some of my newspaper pals," he said. "Stick around." Outside he told his taxi man: "Gotta see Marion. Gotta tell her how I got acquitted again." The taxi man drove him to a rooming house where lived his ex-chorus girl mistress Marion Roberts (Strasmick). At 4:30 a. m. the taxi man drove Diamond on to his own cheap lodging house, the best New York's most publicized gangster could then afford. His landlady heard him climb the stairs, slam the door of his room. His wife still waited in the speakeasy.

About dawn the landlady jumped up in bed as a volley of shots rattled the window panes. Feet thudded down the stairway. A voice cried: "Hell, that's enough --come on." The front door slammed. From a window the landlady saw two men disappear inside a maroon sedan, watched ihe car slip away in the half-light. Then she called the speakeasy. When police arrived an hour later, they found a group of gaping lodgers standing around the room in their nightclothes. Diamond's doctor shifted from foot to foot. A redhaired, wild-eyed woman was mopping blood from around three slug holes in the head of the corpse that had been her husband.

Newspapers, whose publicity had made a "big shot" out of a sly little hoodlum, could find little that was kind or colorful to write into Diamond's obituary and had to content themselves with smart references to him as the underworld's "clay pigeon." and "ammunition dump." Six months ago the New Yorker counted up his eleven wounds, christened him "Big Shot-at," predicted his early demise.

Son of an obscure politician in Philadelphia, Jack Diamond ran off to Brooklyn, became a package thief, earned the name "Legs" by the fleetness of his escapes. Once caught, he was sent to a reformatory. The Draft got him during the War. but he deserted the Army. He was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary for a three-year term. First official act of clemency by President Harding got him out.

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