GREAT BRITAIN: Gunfire in The Smoke

London’s bobbies traditionally go about their duties armed at most with truncheons. In a kind of underworld version of old-school-tie sportsmanship, the bullyboys and tearaways in “The Smoke”−as England’s capital is known to its criminals−reciprocate by settling their private differences in an equally quiet way, with razor blades half-buried in potatoes or the point of a razor-sharp shiv. Last week London’s sensational penny press was black with scare headlines suggesting that gang warfare of a cruder type had come to The Smoke. Four men had pulled up in a car before a dingy boarding house in Maida Vale, crossed the sidewalk in broad daylight, entered the house and pumped lead into a sleazy race-track gambler. “Police believe,” reported the conservative Daily Telegraph, “that the murder is gang war with the lid off . . . The razor and knuckle-duster gangs have turned to firearms.” The Daily Sketch wondered: “Should the police now be armed?” Few London crime reporters could resist comparing their city to Chicago in the ’20s.

The newspapers were whooping it up, but the fact is that Scotland Yard has for more than a year been concerned by a London gang war that centers around a shakedown racket involving race-track bookies.

Wet Sponges. Barby Sabini, a shifty Italian from the unsavory Saffron Hill district, started the racket way back in the 1920s when he and his brothers, armed with wet sponges, used to hang around the race tracks, erasing the chalked odds on the bookie’s tote boards if they failed to pay protection money. After holding onto their franchise in the face of attacks by some of the toughest tearaways in The Smoke, the Sabini gang at last gave way to the Black Brothers, who in turn were muscled out by Jack Spot. Born of Polish-Jewish parents in a Whitechapel tenement in 1912, Jack Spot (né Comer) was a shrewd operator with a taste for custom-made silk shirts, big black cigars and 40-guinea suits. It took a fat wad of track-protection money to buy these luxuries for Jack, but to help him collect it he had the assistance of an artful knife-wielder named Billy Hill.

For years Jack and Billy had a good thing going for them in a variety of rackets. At last, like many another tycoon in the full flush of success, they took to writing their memoirs. Announcing his retirement last year, Billy hired a ghostwriter and turned out a book called Boss of Britain’s Underworld. Jack produced a rival series of articles for the Sunday Chronicle, describing in glowing terms his own rise to power. The Jack Spot memoirs hit their high point with the boast that he had mustered an army of 1,000 hoods armed with Sten guns, hand grenades, British service revolvers and German Lugers, to maintain his own rule. So long as the rivalry was literary, the Yard did not seem to mind. But then Billy Hill, bored with the artistic life, began to frequent his old haunts with the possible notion of taking over the rackets from Spot. One day last August, Spot, dressed in his elegant best, and a tearaway identified as “Italian Albert” Dimes began slashing at each other with shivs amid the crowds of shoppers in Soho’s Frith Street−an event which indicated that, at the very least, things were not all quiet in the rackets. Because of the obliging perjury of a petty con man posing as an Anglican parson, both men beat the rap. But soon afterward Jack Spot was set upon once more and slashed in the face and hands; it took 60 stitches to put him together again.

Grievous Harm. Last week razors were out again at the entrance to a nightclub off Berkeley Square. This time the cutting scrape involved one Tommy Falco, known to be a close friend of Billy Hill, who was just leaving the club, and−once again−Jack Spot, who, according to Tommy, jumped out at him from a darkened doorway and worked him over. At week’s end, fingered by Falco, Jack Spot was in jail on charges of “causing grievous bodily harm,” and Scotland Yard breathed slightly easier. “If we can just get Spot sent up for a couple of years,” said one official. If there must be gang wars at all, in the British view, monopolies are ever so much better.