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Show I WHO'S NEWS I THIS WEEK... By Lemuel F. Parion TTTTTTTTTYYTTTTTTTTTTf?? Mr. Dewey's Rat Trap. NEW YORK. Our Mr. Dewey seems to have made a better rat trap than his neighbor and the world beats a path to his door, with other cities wanting to- know how he does it. The young rackets prosecutor, ringing up seven more convictions, for a perfect score, has turned up extortion totalling about $100,000,-j $100,000,-j 000. He gets $16,695 a year. He seems to be a good investment With possible maximum sentences of 2,100 years against the seven restaurant res-taurant racketeers, he's already drawing a bead on allied industrial rackets. Governor Leliman took Thomas E. Dewey, now thirty-four years old, from a $50,000 law practice for the biggest municipal dry-cleaning job of modern history. First, he put the panderers away, Charles (Lucky) Luciano and eight others; then twenty-eight loan sharks, with their $10,000,000 blood money racket; rack-et; then, with a bit of legal legerdemain, leger-demain, he turned policy kings into rats and put them away, too. He moved on through the trucking, truck-ing, used brick, poultry, bakery, electrical contracting, tenants' and chauffeurs' rackets, and each case brought a shout of "front" to the Sing-Sing bell-boys. He comes from Owosso, in the deep woods of Michigan. There, as in Windy Gap, the sheriff is supposed sup-posed to drive out or lock up the crooks. Thomas E. Dewey seems to have brought this quaint small town idea to Manhattan. He rides 'em down. His father ran a country newspaper news-paper and he was the printshop devil, dev-il, working on nearby farms when he was big enough. He expected to be a choir singer and it was his baritone voice which won him a scholarship at Columbia. He was a paid soloist at St. Matthew's and St. Timothy's church in West Eighty-fourth street. Finishing in law at Columbia, he engaged in private practice and later joined the staff of George Me-dalie, Me-dalie, U. S. district attorney. It was 1933 when he roped Waxy Gordon, Gor-don, one of the biggest and sleekest of the rodent rodeo. He is married to an Oklahoma girl. They have one boy four years old and another eighteen months. When the Shooting Starts. A FTER writing 140 books, E. Phillips Oppenheim, the British Brit-ish novelist, complains that diplomatic diplo-matic intrigue his favorite fictional fiction-al theme isn't what it used to be. He knew the old patterns sufficiently sufficient-ly to foresee events. His novels, "The Mischief Maker," Mak-er," "Our Great Secret," and "The Makers of History" predicted the World war with almost perfect accuracy ac-curacy in time and the alignment of powers. Given a certain number num-ber of diplomats, of standard specifications, spec-ifications, engaged in routine phe-nagling phe-nagling over old, established punctilio, punc-tilio, and he could figure out when the shooting would start. But that's all over, says Mr. Oppenheim, Op-penheim, visiting this country for the first time in ten years. Diplomats Diplo-mats call names and tell all they know, and more, on the radio, and the laggard novelist shouts "Wait for baby!" as they touch off more deviltries than he can invent. At the age of seventy-one, the genial, sturdy Mr. Oppenheim is one of the few writers who can man two dictaphones at once, keeping a novel racing through each of them without stopping for water or feed. Caesar could work three stenographers stenog-raphers at once, if this reporter remembers re-members his high school Latin correctly, cor-rectly, but it was a lost art until Mr. Oppenheim and the late Edgar Wallace came along. There was talk of staging a dictating race between them when they both lived at Nice. Mr. Oppenheim has been writing fifty-one years, although his first novel, "Expiation," did not appear until 1887. Previously he had published pub-lished short stories. Of his 140 books, 100 have been novels and the others volumes of short stories, three omnibus works and a travel book. He likes to have a good time during dur-ing the day, swimming, golfing or flirting with Lady Luck when he's on the Riviera, and usually works from four o'clock in the afternoon until seven, during which hours he keeps the dictaphone smoking. He never blocks out his yarns. He just starts talking, and lets the story J unravel as it may. In 1925, they rudely taxed him out of England. He took refuge on the Riviera, but now lives on Guernsey island in the British channel. j When he was eighteen, he was i flunked in mathematics and quit school to work in his father's leather leath-er business. When he visited Paris, a French cafe owner told him some tales of underworld intrigue, with international complications. That started his long writing marathon. C ConsolifH N"fw-s Features. WNU Service. |