The Web : $b The Authorized History of the American Protective LeagueHough, Emerson
History
The Web : $b The Authorized History of the American Protective League
Hough, Emerson
American Protective League; Propaganda, German; World War, 1914-1918 -- Secret service -- United States
There was, for instance, a certain person called Panco, the Fry Cook,
long wanted by the Department of Justice for anarchistic and seditious
utterances. The Department had been hunting Panco for months but could
not find him. Four Southwest A. P. L. operatives went after Panco. Two
of them became members in a waiters’ union in which Panco was known to
belong. They could not find their man, who did not seem to report often
at the headquarters of that union; so they gave out reports everywhere
that Panco was a dead beat and would not pay his union dues! This came
to Panco’s ears. He showed up at headquarters to deny this impeachment.
He got thirty years.
A Lithuanian lecturer was described as about to deliver a seditious
harangue in the village of Cicero, near Chicago. The Southwest Division
sent out several motor cars with picked men ready for trouble. They
found a hall crowded with foreigners who were listening to a much
bewhiskered man, clad in shabby tweeds, who was demonstrating at a
blackboard on a platform, and was speaking in some unknown tongue. At
last one of the operatives who had been taken along as an interpreter
began to laugh and said, “Let’s go home, fellows; we’ve got the old
bird wrong. He ain’t talking anarchy; he’s giving a lecture on sex
control!”
An unusual amount of shrewdness should be credited to some of these
operatives. It was a mere guess, for instance, on the part of such
a man that the figure “8”—the final figure on a foreign birth
certificate—had been changed to a “5”. If this were true, it meant
that the suspect would come within the draft age, although otherwise
his story was perfectly straight. Suspicion is not evidence, so the
Department of Justice was about to release this man. The latter had
remarked to someone that his father lived in Indiana. The operative
went to the phone and pretended to call up the father in this town
personally, with the intention of inducing the suspect to eavesdrop on
the phone conversation in the next room. After a while the operative
turned to the suspect, his hand over the receiver, and said: “Well,
we’ve got the information we wanted. What have you got to say?”
Completely fooled, the suspect confessed! He was inducted into the army.
A certain colored draft dodger was discovered to belong to a staff of
colored waiters in a certain hotel. The head waiter, very pompous and
very shiny, refused to allow a search. The A. P. L. declared that if
the suspect was not forthcoming he would arrest every waiter in the
place and carry them off in the wagon. This brought out the suspect.
He’s in the Army now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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