FINED £125.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18898, 13 January 1927, Page 13

FINED £125.

DEFACED STAMPS USED. STAMP DEALER'S DEVICE. [THE PKEBB Special Service.] DUNEDIN, January 12. William Lawrence Hooper, a stamp dealer, trading under the name of Wilcox, Smith and Co., was fined £SO on one charge and £25 on each of throe other charges of having fraudulently fixed upon postal packets stamps that had already been used and that had been removed from other packages. The fines amounted to £125, which is the biggest amount collected off a single individual in the City Police Court since a man was fined £4OO for bookmaking a few years ago. The charges were heard before Mr H. W. Bundle, S.M. Chief-Detective Cameron prosecuted, j and Mr B. S. Irwin appeared for the I defendant, who pleaded not guilty. i The chief-detective said that on Noi vember 16th three packets had been posted by the defendant each bearing what were contended to be used stamps. The other charges referred to packets posted on November 18th, December Ist and 3rd. Defendant admitted having stamped the packets, and accepted I liability. I The chief-detective went through the six exhibits, explaining the markings on each of the stamps. Postal clerks, the assistant supervisor, and the postmaster at the local General Post Office gave evidence of receiving the various exhibits. Stamps from Collection. Mr Irwin said he wanted to cut the I proceedings as short as possible. All the facts were admitted, and defendant took full responsibility for posting the packets. He pointed out that the stamps had all been used on parcels or registered letters, and it was necessary for the defendant to take them before a postal official. It was not likely that he would use stamps that he knew had been used before under such circumj stances, though if they had been put into a pil|ar-box it would have been difficult to discover who had posted them. The stamps had been taken from a collection. It must be proved that there had been fraudulent intention, but he held that this had not been established, ..s any innocent person might have made a mistake. The defendant said he had been a stamp dealer for many years. He frequently got unused stamps in collections, and fully 90 per cent, of his collections had unused stamps in them. He believed the stamps were unused when he affixed them to the parcels. He had been very careful about the stamps he used. He did not suggest that the stamps had been purposely marked in the General Post Office, but he would not have used them had he known they were used ones. The president and vice-president of tho Dunedin Philatelic Society and another stamp collector gave evidence to the effect that they could find little fault with the stamps in question. s Fraudulent Intention. The Magistrate said he was convinced there had been fraudulent intention. Chief-Detective Cameron said the postal authorities'in Wellington had pressed for the maximum fine. The defendant had given the Post Office a con siderable amount of trouble, as every packet he posted had to be carefully examined. It was hard to say to what extent the country had been defrauded. He said that all the charges covered a period of seventeen days. Defendant had previously figured in the Court but had apparently not learnt his lesson, fa October, 1915, he was fined for using an official stamp, and on December 11th, 1916, he was fined £SO on a similar charge to the present ones. This was the maximum fine, but defendant still pursued his system of using stamps previously cancelled. The Magistrate agreed that a maximum fine was necessary, and fined defendant £SO on the first charge and £25 each on the other three informations.