HUMOUR AND VILLAINY

Evening Star, Issue 22452, 24 September 1936, Page 16

HUMOUR AND VILLAINY

WHEN CRIMINALS CRASH There is an amusing side even to the gentle art of forging cheques and robbing banks. Mr H. Thurston Hopkins, himself a bank official in London for nearly 40 years, did not lose sight of it when writing his dramatic and interesting book, ‘ Famous Bank Forgeries, Bobberies, and Swindles.’ When Solomon Barmash, arch-forger and head of a notorious gang, was awaiting trial—and als years’ sentence —a young and enthusiastic Scotland Yard officer insisted on talking “ shop ” with him. He boasted so loudly of his success in detecting forged notes that at last old Barmash said: “ Look here, Mr , I will ask my daughter to bring one of my sham notes to-morrow, and 1 will ask you to bring a genuine fiver. 1 will take the two of them, crumple them up in my hand, smooth them out again, and place them face downward on a table, and if you can pick out the ‘ dud ’ I will make you a present of it; but if you make any mistake, then the real fiver is mine.” “ It’s a bet,” said the officer. Next day, Mr Hopkins says, the test was made. “ Ha ha!” exclaimed the Yard man, picking up a real fiver. “ I should have known this one as a bad ’un a mile away No . . . Well, well, I’ll be hanged! It's the real one.” Old Barmash smiled as he handed the notes to his daughter. The Yard man had been looking at two real notes all the time! Barmash kept all his forging apparatus in the drawing room of his Tottenham house—including a large printing press in a corner which was “ no blooming ornament.” But he would never allow any forging to be done on Sundays! The room was cleared for respectable Sunday evening social gatherings, and “ no doubt the old man would take up his station on the hearthrug, coat-tails uplifted to the fire, and beam fondly on his daughter Jane', ‘ doing her piece ’ at the piano, or his daughter Maud, singing his favourite Moody and Sankey hymn.” Mr Hopkins tells a story of a famous American safe-cracker and his gang who entered a West End bank some years ago and cftrried off the safe in a railway van which they, had “ borrowed ” for the purpose. It was taken to a Soho cafe they used as headquarters, dumped in the cellar, and attacked with picks, jemmies, and crowbars. But it resisted hours of battering. Each time they turned it over they hoard a merry jingling, which suggested that a quantity of sovereigns were stored inside. In the end the cracksman decided to “ blow ” the safe with “ grease ” ( nitro-glycerine). But he overloaded the lock with the stuff, and the door was blown through the trap of the cellar into the street above. Incidentally, the concussion sent him to sleep for some hours. The first thing he asked when he recovered consciousness was: “ What did you find in the safe?” “ Some bundles of rusty keys and a box of cigars,” answered a crony sombrely. “’What? No gold? No banknotes?” “ No boodle of any kind.” “ Can you beat that!” said the safecracker, rubbing his eyes. , “ Blown sky-high for a box of cigars!” “ Well, they were cigars once,” observed the crony, rather mournfully, “ but your nitro-glycerine blasted them into snuff!” When Mr Kenneth Grahame, the well-known author, was an official at the Bank of England, he had to deal with a madman who drew a revolver in the sacred precincts and potted at everyone within range. Eventually he was overcome with the aid of a fireman’s hose. Grahame liked to tell the tale of the old waiter in the bank restaurant, who said to him after the affair: “ What a rotten shot that fellow was to miss you at that short range, sir. He never ought to be allowed out with a gun again!”