CRIME: Rat Eat Rat

In the Sunday morning quiet of Manhattan’s upper west side, two men entered the Hotel Monticello, went directly to room 831. There they found a youngish man in red silk pajamas sitting on the bed drinking orange juice. He had sat up late the night before, reading the New York Times. A chorus girl was tubbing in the bathroom, the three men went into room 829. A volley of shots shattered out. Then the two callers left as quietly as they had come. The chorus girl disappeared.

Some time later the manager of the hotel found the pajama-clad, tuberculosis-ravaged, bullet-torn figure of Jack (“Legs”) Diamond collapsed near the elevator, where he had dragged himself with the aid of a “coupla shots o’ whiskey.” Diamond was about the best Manhattan could boast in the way of a big-time gangster. They rushed him in a dying state to the Polyclinic Hospital in a private ambulance under the care of his private physician. When the police learned of the affair, half the detectives in the city jumped into the case.

The Diamond shooting closely paralleled the still unsolved murder two years ago of Arnold Rothstein, famed gambler-racketeer whose henchman and would-be successor Diamond was. Both were assailed in a hotel bedroom. Both staggered out, were carried by the same doctor to the same hospital, to the same room. Both were married, both refused to tell the police who shot them, both believing (with the police) in the underworld code of rat eat rat.

Good citizens were startled by Diamond’s criminal record. In 16 years he had been arrested 22 times. His career began at the age of 17 in Brooklyn when he was sent to the reformatory for burglary. Five times he was hailed into court on charges of homicide only to be freed . by Tammany magistrates. Eight times, too, he beat the law on robbery charges. After the war the U. S. kept him in Leavenworth penitentiary for a year for deserting the army and stealing while in it. Last summer he fled to Europe after a beer murder, was barred out of England, France and Germany as an undesirable alien (TIME, Sept. 8). He was returned to Philadelphia, his birthplace 33 years ago, on a freighter carrying 4,500 canaries, arrested for vagrancy, hustled out of town.