Press: Gossip Bull’s-Eye

Shortly before 10:45 one night last week Patrick J. Corcoran, 45-year-old union chief of 12,000 American Federation of Labor drivers, rounded a corner near his home in the Bryn Mawr section of Minneapolis, suddenly turned to flee and slumped to the sidewalk with a bullet in his brain. At midnight neighbors discovered his snow-covered body. Mrs. Corcoran dashed from the house wailing: “It’s Pat. I knew they’d get him.”

Before 4 a. m. police roused Minneapolis Star Gossip Columnist Cedric Adams, hustled him to headquarters, demanded to know where he picked up the amazing tip he had printed ten days earlier: “I met a very close friend of mine in the Loop last night. He’s given me scores of items in the past; some of them have been little scoops, too. And he’s never been wrong. Here’s one he dropped last night—you can take it for what it’s worth. A prominent labor leader in Minneapolis will be ‘taken for a ride’ within two weeks.”

When the prophecy first appeared, Columnist Adams (an erstwhile editor of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang and later Shopping. News & Guide gossiper) was promptly questioned by Minneapolis Mayor George E. Leach. He refused to tell the source of his news although Mayor Leach threatened to jail him if his grisly prediction was fulfilled. When it came all too true, Columnist Adams again told police in his scratchy, nasal voice that a reporter cannot break a confidence. Yet this was serious business. That morning, while police unavailingly checked reports that the killing was the result of an A. F. of L.C. I. O. feud, Cedric Adams feverishly telephoned the home of his informant. When he got no answer, Prophet Adams, recalling the unsolved Minneapolis murders of weekly Editors Walter Liggett (1935) and Howard Guilford (1934), who had campaigned to expose the Minneapolis underworld, was a badly worried man.

At 12:30 Cedric Adams’ personal concern was relieved when his good friend & tipster, Dr. Russel R. Noice, walked into the Star office, made known he was ready to tell police he had overheard a murder plotted in the cheap League of Nations beer parlor, but that the intended victim was not Corcoran but another labor leader. Soon Alderman A. G. Bastis revealed that not only Patrick Corcoran but four other labor leaders had been marked for death, that Corcoran himself knew he was in danger, that Rumorist Adams had merely printed what had been widely whispered in Twin City labor circles.

After five days had passed, Corcoran’s murder was unsolved despite rewards of $10,000 offered by the Teamsters’ Council, $500 by the Star, $500 by Governor Elmer Benson.