Fireside Message

Though he wore a handkerchief mask over the lower part of his face, the tall man in mirror-type sunglasses seemed to show a workmanly patience at his job. For more than an hour one dark morning last week, he painstakingly measured out puddles of gasoline in each of the five dining rooms of Allgauer's Fireside restaurant in Lincolnwood, a suburb northwest of Chicago. While a stubby accomplice leveled an automatic at seven late workers and busboys, he methodically laid fuses of gasoline-soaked toilet paper from pool to pool. When, at 3:45 a.m.. things were finally ready, the two hoods herded their captives out the back door unharmed, threw a flaming packet of matches inside, closed the door and drove off into the night while one of Cook County's biggest and best restaurants exploded into a million-dollar fire.

Business as Usual. Chicagoans read the blaze as a message written brazenly across the sky by the smooth-running, omnipresent crime syndicate. The Fireside's proprietor, Gustav Allgauer, 54, an up-from-busboy owner-boss of three big Chicago restaurants, was one of the few restaurant men in the city who had talked at length with investigators from Arkansas' John McClellan's Senate labor-management investigating committee. Subject of conversations: mob-dominated locals -called in local argot "The Miscellaneous" -of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. restaurant workers' union. Not only did Gus Allgauer have a six-year record of dealings with the Miscellaneous, but he had a bookful of canceled checks to prove it.

The Illinois state's attorney's office, the Cook County sheriff and even the Chicago police took up the search for the arsonists, but Chicago newspapers, well aware that Chicago police have yet to solve a single one of a string of restaurant bombings and burnings stretching back to 1950. were skeptical. "If investigators ... do no more than to go through the motions of making an inquiry." editorialized the Sun-Times, "other racketeers will only be emboldened to resort to similar methods in an effort to silence prospective witnesses in court cases as well as in congressional hearings." Added the Tribune: "That a labor union should ever be suspected of a plot to destroy evidence and punish and intimidate witnesses before a Senate investigating committee ought to dismay every citizen and especially every union man."

Who Is Sovereign? At first. Restaurateur Gustav Allgauer was breathing fire and brimstone and all manner of indignation, promising to "tell everything I know.'' Then, suddenly, he switched signals and wanted to know what all the fuss was about -meanwhile prudently surveying the $1.000,000 worth of damage with his insurance broker.

In Washington Senator McClellan had the last word, just as his labor-management investigating committee hoped ultimately to have the last word when hearings begin next month. And what stern John McClellan had to say added up to a different kind of blaze across the sky. Open defiance of legal federal inquiry ''really challenges the sovereignty of government.'' said he. "Though we haven't even scratched the surfaces yet, the incidents of violence and attempted intimidation underscore the need for laws to drive the crooks out of the labor movement."

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