THE LAST WORD IN BURGLARS.

Hokitika Guardian, 4 January 1926, Page 1

THE LAST WORD IN BURGLARS.

OWN GAB AGE AND JEWEL SHOP. NEW YORK. December 80. The capture yesterday of Frank Tesslor, chief of the “cowboy gang,” with ten of his confederates, including one woman, is hailed by the police as an event of the highest importance in the history of New fork crime. The men are charged with SO burglaries and two murders. A bare list of their many-sided activities reads like the synopsis of a great criminal romance. They maintained in

New York a large warehouse as a clearing-house for stolen goods, two garages where skilled workmen changed number-plates and generally disguised the identity of stolen motorcars, and a jewellery shop where experts melted down jewels and reset diamonds.

The top floor of their central warehouse was 'used by tbo bandits as a shooting gallery where members of the gang daily practised at a target with noiseless pistols. THE BETRAYER. So profitable was the big burglary business thus organised and operated on tho lines of a great industrial corporation that tlie gang lias been able to establish a large sinking-fund to furnish bail and legal assistance to those who fell Into the hands of the police. Their downfall, indeed, was due to the fact that they neglected to provide £IO.OOO hail for one of their number Murray Markine, who was captured while driving a stolen motor-ear. Markine “ squealed ” to the police, giving them detailed information regarding the activities and whereabouts of the gang’s chief officers. Tcssler, the generalissimo of the bandits, is a debonair young man, who seemed to enjoy himself immensely when at the police headquarters, where more than 20 of his victims identified him. He even bowed mockingly, when one of these victims recognised him as the man who fire five bullets into the body of a merchant named Pefka, whom Tesslcr had hound and gagged because he annoyed him by groaning. Tesslcr, who was educated at Colum-' bia University, is 25 and the son of well-to-do parents. He abandoned the wholesale fur business in which bis parents established him, for a more exciting career as head of the burglars’ trust. Every night his well-disciplined gang went in 20 motor-cars to strategic points in New York for the accomplishment of their programme of robberies.