In Spooner's Nook

Southward out of Chicago early one morning last week slipped three automobiles. They crossed the Illinois-Indiana line and parked at Spooner's Nook in the desolate outskirts of Hammond. Something heavy was flung into the brush. One of the cars was driven into a ditch. The other two cars drove away.

Just before daylight two Hammond policemen came upon the bloody contents of Spooner's Nook. The object in the bushes, the two objects in the ditched car, were dead men's bodies, ragged with bullet-holes, sticky.

Chicago detectives readily identified the three corpses as what remained of John Scalise, Albert Anselmi and Joseph Guinta, gangsters all. Scalise and Anselmi were professional assassins, members of the modest remainder of Alphonse ("Scarface") Capone's once-invincible "mob." They had wriggled through three murder trials to freedom. For the mowing down of seven members of the George ("Bugs") Moran gang on St. Valentine's Day (TIME, Feb. 25), Scalise had been indicted, had obtained temporary freedom the fortnight prior on $50,000 bail.

Chicago's police adopted the handiest explanation: the Moran gang had avenged the St. Valentine's Day massacre. The Spooner's Nook find brought the number of Chicago underworldlings who have met violent death this year to 20, an all-time high for the first five months of any year.

It was said the Moran gang had a bold plan to "get" Capone himself when he went to Chicago last month to testify in a U. S. court. Chicago police who met Capone's train unwittingly thwarted them.