GUNMEN RAID SHOP

Hokitika Guardian, 23 May 1932, Page 7

GUNMEN RAID SHOP

£4OOO STOLEN IN NEW YORK. .7- ; - jNBW YOBK, May 19. Two gunman, ~ working with extraordinary coolness and ' precision, enter; dd- a large Haberdashery shop in Thir-ty-sixth Street, and Broadway—one of. the most ■ crowded districts' in' midtown New York— 1 ‘held.' up”. 43. customers and employees for; a quarter .of.'an hour, ' and escaped . with : 20,000 dollars (about £4OOO at par).; • At 9 a m.'23 .customers were hurii’iedly making their.' purchases' before the shop closed when two men with drawn revolvers suddenly appeared in the aisles and" silently rounded up the. customers and 20 employees into it Corner wllefe they cduld ilbt be seen from the street! They made them a,ll file into a basement, and drove them into a little room 16ft.; by left, From the manager, whom they found behind the counter In the basement, they took notes worth 20,000 dub Tar®, representing the day’s takings it that shop ancl several branches. The robbeiw then put -the manager in the room with the others, and left, warning their prisoners not to raise ain alarm. They did not lock the door, but the prisoners were too frightened to leave the room until the general manager of the chain of which this shop was one came in, found the place unexpectedly deserted f and shouted for the manager. The alarm was then broadcast from polioe headquarters to all cruising police patrol cars. One police car, sighting, a motor-car with tlu'ee ‘‘sus-picious-looking” men in it driving down Tenth Avenue, orderd the car to halt. The car went on, hut was overtaken by the police and driven to the kerb. One of the occupants started to run. hut was shot through the thigh by a policeman. On investigation it appeared that the men were innocently driving from a party in the Bronx to another at Brooklyn.