A wide range of useful information concerning the city and its environs was given to novitiate operatives in this Central District. This information was of incalculable benefit to new members of the League when once their active investigating work began. The A. P. L. training school was a very important cog in the Chicago machine, and made it possible for the district to do more work per capita and better work than would otherwise have been possible. Indeed, the training for an operative was not bad training for a newspaper reporter. What is said regarding this work in the Chicago district might apply in very considerable part also to the work in other large communities.
Operatives were obliged to take all sorts of roles. At times they acted as waiters or clerks, and sometimes they impersonated lawbreakers themselves. One of them succeeded in impersonating an I. W. W. so well that at a meeting he was covering he was asked to contribute to the I. W. W. cause—and did so! Another ingratiated himself into the good offices of the I. W. W.'s so well that he was permitted to take notes at one of their meetings with the understanding that he was a newspaper man representing one of their own papers.
The Southwest Division in Chicago is only another corner of darkest Europe. In this section, however, were located a good many foreign-born operatives, who affiliated well in that region and did their work thoroughly until the closing days of the war. Their grist included some curious and interesting cases.
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.
