Johnny Stool Pigeon

Stand where you are.

All right. Get'em up, both of you.

I'm Harrison, customs.

That's Morton, Narcotics Bureau.

He got away.

The sailor's dead.

Call the coroner's office, will you, please?

John Whalen. Age 20 years.

Only a kid.

Not a bad kid, just foolish.

Somebody in Shanghai told him a way

to make an easy buck and he believed them.

Smuggling. Nothing to it.

All you needed was a little luck.

And so one night on a Shanghai dock

they slipped something into his hand

that looked like an ordinary can of tobacco.

Only it wasn't.

And John Whalen wasn't lucky.

That was the start of tracking down

one of the biggest narcotics rings

in the history of the bureau.

But we didn't know that then.

All we knew then was that we'd had a tip

to watch the docking

of a certain vessel from the Orient

and that a kid sailor had walked off it

to his death.

The next step was to identify

the man who got away.

That wasn't too hard to do.

We had a pretty thorough filing system.

He turned out to be an old friend

listed by the Bureau as Pete Carter.

Hiya, boss.

Good morning.

Hi, Morton, Sam.

Well, what did you find?

It's Carter, all right.

Only a little older and heavier now.

Aren't we all?

Pete Carter. Alias Carl Nobel,

alias Harvey Coleman.

What's our last report on him?

Late '41, early '42.

Always a West Coast operator?

As far as we know.

I don't like it.

Steady operator. Long record.

Drops out of circulation during the war.

But, now he's back.

A guy like Carter doesn't play for peanuts.

He'll have an organization in back of him.

He'll have a new source of supply lined up.

I tell you, this guy is big time.

He's latched on to something.

Like what?

Our ports of entry are closed like ratholes.

We know there's nothing coming in

from the Far East.

You customs men have

a big territory here, fellow.

Eighteen hundred miles of coastline.

Borders north and south.

What do you think?

I don't know.

But I don't like it.

Let's put him under surveillance

and see what that gets us.

Ordinarily, yes.

This time I'd say no.

This time I'd say bring him in.

But he's the only lead we got

to the boys at the top of the mob.

If we bring him in, we tape our hand.

If we don't, it might take months,

years before we get to the top.

I want to crack this outfit now.

It's liable to take a lot longer

than that if he won't talk.

What's the ballistics report

on the kid sailor?

He's got something.

It shows your gun didn't kill him.

Or yours either.

So it must have been Carter.

Yeah.

Bring him in.

With a murder rap hanging over him

he might sing like a canary.

Okay, boss.

A successful manhunt is usually

the result of long and often dull routine.

But there is one shortcut.

A professional informer, who makes a business

of picking up a few precarious dollars

by selling scraps of information to the authorities.

Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

When it does,

it can save a lot of time.

This time it did.

Hello, Mr Morton?

Carter is at the Zelder apartments.

Corner of Grant Street.

Room 303.

Well, there goes our lead.

Yeah. Proves one thing, anyway.

Benson's hunch about the outfit

behind him.

Yeah, they play rough.

Smart, too. Way ahead of us.

They knew he'd talk when we got him

so they beat us to him.

Maybe we can nab the guy who did it.

Professional job, hired gun.

Chances are he didn't even know

who he was working for.

They'll send in another man to take up

where Carter left off

and maybe after six months

we get next to him

maybe six months later we'll find out

who his boss is

and by that time the stuff will be flooding in

all over the country.

It was a tough one to lose.

Make anything out of that?

No, a lot of mumbo jumbo.

Figures mostly.

Probably records of transactions.

This Vancouver outfit,

the Arctic World Trading Company...

That might be something new.

Worth checking

with the Canadian people, anyway.

Canadian boys have anything

on the Vancouver angle?

They know about an Arctic World

Trading Company in Vancouver all right.

A guy named William McCandles.

They've got no record on him.

Must be some connection if the outfit's listed

in Carter's little black book.

Why don't we try to move in on him?

No, no good.

You don't know what you're up against.

For an undercover job, Sam,

you gotta know who you're playing with.

What to convince them, what they'll believe.

That's the trouble with this thing.

There's nothing to go on,

nothing to get your teeth in.

But they're out there somewhere.

Just getting started.

And pretty soon we'll be seeing

some of the results.

Heaven knows they're bad enough now.

Admissions to the narcotics ward

of the City Hospital,

the County Jail Hospital, the morgue.

All in a week.

Maybe that's why a guy like me

stays on in this business.

I can't think of any other reason.

But I really hate the rats that are responsible

for that kind of thing.

I hate them with every bone in my body.

If people could only see some of the poor,

pathetic wrecks that we see every day.

Well, that's not getting us anywhere.

I think I got a notion.

Wanna let me try it?

What?

I know a guy who can get me

into that mob.

In Vancouver?

Any mob.

Who?

Johnny Evans.

Johnny Evans?

Are you crazy?

Maybe.

Maybe I was crazy.

It was a long chance to take.

I was the one who had sent Johnny Evans

up to Alcatraz.

I'd known him since we both were kids.

He'd never been a narcotics operator

but he was a gangster and a hoodlum.

And he hated every cop

that ever breathed.

And me most of all.

There was one thing, though.

One thing that I knew about Johnny

that nobody else ever did.

And that's what I was counting on.

It would be pretty rough on Johnny, but...

I thought I knew what he'd say.

Hello, Johnny.

Sit down.

Cigarette?

I wanna talk to you.

I got a job to do.

There's a big push open again.

We think it begins in Vancouver.

A guy name McCandles.

But we don't know.

We don't know where it goes from there.

We only know there's a big mob somewhere.

A big operation.

I want you to get me in.

I can't make any promises, but...

you might do yourself some good.

Is that all?

That's all.

Only you haven't given me an answer.

Cut it out.

You may be an awful tough man

with those hoodlums of yours,

but to me you're a dime a dozen.

I'll make a deal with you.

Gonna take you on the outside for 24 hours.

I'm gonna tell you some things

and show you some things.

Then, after that,

if you wanna come back here

all right.

And no restraint.

Sure.

You think you can get me on the outside

and I get a taste of it and I go crazy.

Well, let me tell you something.

I'll rot in this place forever before I'll be

a stool pigeon for a copper.

How long have you been in here?

You know how long.

Yeah. Times change a lot in three years, Johnny.

New faces, new places.

All the girls get the new look.

What have you got to lose?

Twenty four hours.

What's this?

They're gonna drive us.

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