Swiggers

Many a fantastic tale was told of the late William J. Fallen, debonair, daring, egotistical criminal defender for many of Manhattan's biggest racketeers two decades ago. None was more fantastic than Fallon's reputed stunt of gulleting a bottle of poison, completing his argument to the jury, sauntering out of the court and then rushing frantically to a private room where waiting doctors cleaned him out with a stomach pump.

Last week the City of New York defeated a $1,000 damage suit by a similar courtroom gesture. A Mrs. Marion Owens, watching some Park Department tree sprayers, was accidentally hit in her open mouth by a squirt of insecticide. Although the Park Department claimed the spray was an oil mixture harmless to humans, Mrs. Owens alleged that it burned her throat. Last week in court, Assistant Corporation Counsel Aaron J. Arnold lifted a pint bottle of the insecticide to his lips, downed a lusty swig, won the case.

Most fantastic courtroom swigger is Coca-Cola's prize defense witness, Curator Perry Wilbur Fattig of Emory University's Museum. In a lawsuit brought by a disgruntled consumer who had found a drowned black widow spider in the bottom of his Coca-Cola bottle, Curator Fattig put a live, wriggling black widow spider into his mouth, crunched and swal- owed it, sat quietly in the courtroom the rest of the session. Since chemical action of carbonated water sterilizes insect matter, Curator Fattig thinks nothing at all of downing such sodaed morsels as grasshoppers, houseflies, small toads and frogs, wasps, stink bugs, beetles, caterpillars, earthworms, centipedes.

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