CRIME: Yale Avenged

Another of Chicago’s gang shootings took place one pleasant afternoon last week. It was held at a spot where it was most convenient for Chicago citizens to see everything but most inconvenient for Chicago police to do anything, at the crowd-jammed corner of Madison and Dearborn streets,* two blocks from the City Hall.

The targets were Tony Lombardo, president of the Italian-American Club, good friend of Alphonse’ (“Scarface Al”) Capone; and one of Mr. Lombardo’s bodyguards, Joseph Ferrara. Mr. Lombardo lay down on the sidewalk and writhed until he died. Mr. Ferrara, wounded in the back, writhed until the ambulance came. He died in a hospital without telling who the murderers might be.

When the shooting began, pedestrians screamed and scurried. Two men had walked up behind Gangster Lombardo and stood there emptying automatic revolvers at close range. When the shooting stopped, the crowds closed in again to stare at the victims and gabble at the police. The police caught one man, rushing along the street with a revolver in his hand. But he was Mr. Lombardo’s other bodyguard, one Joseph Lolordo. The assassins had put their guns in their pockets, mingled with the mob, vanished.

It was taken for granted that the Lombardo killing was retaliation for the death, two months ago of Frankie Uale (Yale), Brooklyn gangster (TIME, July 9). But, as in some 215 other Chicago murders during the past two years, no conviction was probable. Chicago police philosophy is to let the thugs shoot each other up and devil take the hindmost innocent bystander.

-* Off Euclid and East Ninth (Cleveland), Market and Sixth (Philadelphia), Broadway and West Forty Fifth (New York), Washington and Summer (Boston).