Plot

This MGM short, part of the Crime does not Pay series, focuses on industrial sabotage during wartime. After a valuable shipment of manganese is blown up at a plant, the FBI try to find out how information on the manganese shipment was found out. They get a lead on one of the plotters, Beulah Anderson, who as a waitress in a café gets to pick up all kinds of scuttlebutt from the innocent but loose talking clients. Once they figure out how she is sending the information she gathers, the FBI sets a trap. The moral of the story is: Don't Talk!—garykmcd

The MGM Crime Reporter introduces FBI Special Agent Jack Sampson, who talks about wartime industrial espionage and the damage done by foreign agents on US soil receiving information through what are innocent means of those passing the information unwittingly to them. Changing the names to protect the innocent, he talks about one case initiated by a bombing at Harmon Industries, where a shipment of materials key to the war effort were destroyed. Five loading dock workers were questioned, they who were the only ones who knew internally about the shipment, and how they may have spread information of the shipment through social chit chat. Checking places such as where the men got their hair cut or where they ate, Sampson's team found that the background of waitress Beulah Anderson at the Elite Café did not check out. They discovered that she was really a foreign spy gathering intel on key Harmon shipments through this social chatter of Harmon workers eating at the café. The FBI couldn't pick her up until they found out her local team and how she was disseminating that information to them.—Huggo

This Crime Does Not Pay series entry dramatizes the idea that during wartime, people should not discuss anything related to their work when in public. A casual remark can be overheard by an enemy agent and used to sabotage the war effort. In this short, the story involves shipments of parts to a defense plant.—David Glagovsky <dglagovsky@prodigy.net>