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For years Jack and Billy had a good thing going for them in a variety of rackets. At last, like many another tycoon in the full flush of success, they took to writing their memoirs. Announcing his retirement last year, Billy hired a ghostwriter and turned out a book called Boss of Britain's Underworld. Jack produced a rival series of articles for the Sunday Chronicle, describing in glowing terms his own rise to power. The Jack Spot memoirs hit their high point with the boast that he had mustered an army of 1,000 hoods armed with Sten guns, hand grenades, British service revolvers and German Lugers, to maintain his own rule. So long as the rivalry was literary, the Yard did not seem to mind. But then Billy Hill, bored with the artistic life, began to frequent his old haunts with the possible notion of taking over the rackets from Spot. One day last August, Spot, dressed in his elegant best, and a tearaway identified as "Italian Albert" Dimes began slashing at each other with shivs amid the crowds of shoppers in Soho's Frith Street−an event which indicated that, at the very least, things were not all quiet in the rackets. Because of the obliging perjury of a petty con man posing as an Anglican parson, both men beat the rap. But soon afterward Jack Spot was set upon once more and slashed in the face and hands; it took 60 stitches to put him together again.
Grievous Harm. Last week razors were out again at the entrance to a nightclub off Berkeley Square. This time the cutting scrape involved one Tommy Falco, known to be a close friend of Billy Hill, who was just leaving the club, and−once again−Jack Spot, who, according to Tommy, jumped out at him from a darkened doorway and worked him over. At week's end, fingered by Falco, Jack Spot was in jail on charges of "causing grievous bodily harm," and Scotland Yard breathed slightly easier. "If we can just get Spot sent up for a couple of years," said one official. If there must be gang wars at all, in the British view, monopolies are ever so much better.