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When the Civil war ended, cannon factories began making fancy grillwork and iron dogs. When railroads made Western stage coach lines obsolescent, Wells Fargo got into the railway express business. With the passing of the horse, Studebaker Carriage works survived by manufacturing automobiles. The return of beer has similarly forced the nation's underworld into evolution. As was amply evidenced last week, the defunct beer racket is swiftly being superseded as a source of criminal revenue by the uglier, more desperate crime of kidnapping. Unlike a legitimate industry, a gang which has been running beer need not modify its plant or personnel to go in for snatching. A number of people are required as abductors, guards, intermediaries. These must be tough, resourceful, utterly unscrupulous if a professional job is to be done. Automobiles are needed, as well as a thorough knowledge of police operations and an acquaintance with back roads. Old storage plants make excellent hideaways, of which several are often necessary if the chase becomes hot. Such an organization can be formidable. The U. S. President himself set two Secret Service agents on guard over his grand-children—"Sistie" & "Buzzie" Dall and Sara Roosevelt—at Little Boars Head and Rye Beach, N. H. when an unparalleled "wave" of abductions, three major kidnappings and half a dozen attempted ones, burst violently into the news last week. Swindler. Three weeks ago at "The Dells," a suburban roadhouse northwest of Chicago celebrated for good orchestras and bad customers, John ("Jake the Barber") Factor, his shapely second wife and Son Jerome, 19, were entertaining a party of friends. "The Dells" is about three miles from the Evanston line on a wide and main-traveled concrete road. Not far down it, on the way home, Jake the Barber's car was stopped by thugs with machine guns. As his frightened wife looked on from a car behind, Factor & friend were spirited away in the gangsters' automobile. The friend was dumped out not long after. Until in the Lindbergh case they historically overstepped the mark, the nation's kidnappers had for the most part confined themselves to snatching each other. Ransom was paid, the victim released and nobody, including the police, was much the wiser. Jake the Barber was one of the few underworldlings left with appreciable means. He has peddled spurious stocks on two continents—in dry oil wells, flooded Florida land, non-existent glass casket companies—since he professionally laid down his razor in Chicago twelve years ago. At one time he bought an exhausted African platinum mine, dressed Negroes up in muddy work clothes, took photographs of them, prepared literature for a grand swindle in London. He had just bought postage to distribute the literature when a newspaper exposed his knavery. Incorrigible Jake the Barber sued the British Government for the postage, lost the suit. He returned in 1929 and before he fled England for the last time had amassed $7,000,000 from a fraudulent stock selling campaign. Last April his son Jerome, a student at Northwestern, was kidnapped, returned for $50,000. It was Jerome who last week set up the machinery to buy back his father. From Oklahoma, Virginia, Florida came reports that Factor was known to be held in the vicinity. At Washington the British Embassy made formal