A GIGANTIC SWINDLE PREVENTED.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2045, 13 September 1880, Page 3

A GIGANTIC SWINDLE PREVENTED.

A few weeks ago Mr Thomas Hollister, an extelegraph clerk, was arrested at San Francisco by a Chicago detective, upon the charge of having conspired with certain speculators in the Ear West to create a panic in Pacific Mail and Mining Companies’ stock. The method by which this project was to be executed appears to have been the offspring of Mr Hollister’s fertile brain, and he had been fully empowered by his associates to put it in practice, when the whole enterprise was suddenly frustrated by his seizure. He had conveyed a galvanic battery and an isolated wire to a desolate spot in the Sierra, not far from Battle Mountain, where he proposed to cut the service wires connecting California with the Eastern States, and, by means of his own apparatus, to telegraph the following dispatch to the agents of the Press Association at Chicago : —"This morning, about ten o’clock, a huge tidal wave swept over Ssn Francisco, destroying the entire city, and surging up further inland until Sacramento and Stockton were flooded ten feet deep. Simultaneously a fearful earthquake convulsed the whole State, the heaviest shock being sustained by Virginia City and its neighborhood. Comstock Mine completely choked up. Further details of catastrophe as yet wanting.” Mr Hollister’s enterprise would have been carried out some days before his arrest but for an unexpected fall in Comstock shares, which induced his associates to postpone their coup until this particular stock should have somewhat recovered itself. Meanwhile the Chicago police got wind of the scheme, and ran the chief “ speculator ” to earth just in time to avert one of the “biggest things ” in swindles ever yet devised by Transatlantic astuteness.