The Press: The Battle of Peoria

As a crack crime reporter, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s husky Theodore C. Link, 43, knew plenty of crooks—and how to use them. For 22 years, off & on, he had tapped many of them for crime tips, notably the Midwest’s ill-famed Shelton brothers. On their part, brothers Carl, Bernie and Earl Shelton, who had terrorized southern Illinois before “retiring” as gentlemen farmers on bootleg and slot-machine fortunes, had a soft spot for the Post-Dispatch. It had once found out about a frame-up plot against them in 1926, and they never forgot it. That was fine with the Post-Dispatch. It suspected a tie-up between gambling interests and Illinois Governor Dwight Green’s G.O.P. machine just across the Mississippi, and hoped the Sheltons would help prove it.

Ted Link thought he had a good start. He had been given a set of transcriptions by Bernie Shelton before Shelton was murdered last July (TIME, Aug. 9). They purportedly recorded a long chat between Bernie and a man who had asked him for a $25,000 bribe for an Illinois state’s attorney to quash an assault indictment against Shelton.

Come Up & See Me. Four nights after the killing, Reporter Link interviewed Peter Petrakos, an intimate of Bernie Shelton, in a Peoria hotel room. Also present were “Big Earl” Shelton and two of his henchmen. Earl was anxious to know who had killed Bernie and Carl (who had been murdered a year ago), and whether his number was up too. Link and the Post-Dispatch had a bigger interest in the case: they wanted to find out if Illinois gamblers had killed Bernie and if they had connections with Governor Green’s machine.

Peter Petrakos had little to say. But eight days later, Ted Link’s story on the recordings broke with a bang in the Post-Dispatch. On its heels came other stories about payoffs by the Sheltons and other gamblers to state officials. A hastily summoned grand jury heard the recordings, indicted State’s Attorney Roy Hull and two other county officials for malfeasance, and charged Hull with soliciting a bribe from Bernie Shelton.

A Call for Help. With the elections in the offing—and Democrats making hay with the case—Hull denounced the recordings as a fake, and demanded another grand jury. Governor Green’s attorney general sent a special prosecutor to Peoria to handle it. Last week the second grand jury brought in its report. It indicted Reporter Link, Big Earl Shelton and the other two witnesses to the Petrakos interview on charges of kidnaping, conspiracy and intimidation. They had seized Petrakos, the jury charged, “for the purpose of getting a confession.” The grand jury also accused the Post-Dispatch of bad faith.

Burly Ben Reese, managing editor of the Post-Dispatch, promptly roared that the paper would put up Link’s $11,000 bond “and will defend him to the last ditch.” The Post-Dispatch rushed into print with a Sunday editorial (titled “The Green Machine Fights Back”) that snarled: “Cowardly men in Illinois are watching the clock as the hour hand moves toward Election Day . . . They think they can muzzle the Post-Dispatch. They are wrong. The Post-Dispatch will not be intimidated. It will not be gagged.” Staffers figured that the charge against Link would be quietly dropped after election. But the Post-Dispatch had no intention of dropping its own fight against the Illinois politicos.