A BABY RANSOM

Hokitika Guardian, 21 June 1932, Page 3

A BABY RANSOM

NOTORIOUS EX-CONVICT,

GASTON MEANS SENTENCED

NEW YORK, June 16

Particulars of the crime for which Gaston B. Means was convicted and sentenced to 15 years’ penal servitude, show that Mrs Edward M’Lean, wife of the publisher of the “Washington Pc„„,'' procured the arrest a month ago of- Gaston B. Means, a secret service man, notorious during the Harding administration, who is charged with having secured £20,000 from her upon representations, that lie would recover the Lindbergh baby. The evidence .. showed .that Mrs Al’Lean, planned a great national coup, but Means was ungble to fulfil his promise and*;ailed to return money. “I know the very man who did it. When 1 was in Atlanta Penitentiary another prisoner suggested that lie and 1 should kidnap the ‘Lindy’ baby.” With this story All’s M’Lean, who has a fortune of 30.000,000 dollars (at par, £6,000,000) in her own right, says Gaston Means proposed that they should ransom the baby. She paid £20,000 to an intermediary of the kidnappers, and gave another £IO,OOO to Means for his clever work. But just at the last moment, when tffie baby was being handed over, a new gang of kidnappers snatched the child from the first abductors.

At any rate, that is the story Means told her when he insisted on keeping the £IO,OOO as well earned. Means served three years in an Atlanta penitentiary for conspiracy to defeat the Prohibition laws. It was while there that lie made certain statements to a woman author . upon which she wrote a book making . startling accusations the Hardings. Some years ago there was published in London a book, “The Strange Death of President Harding, from the Diaries of Gaston B. Means, as Told by May Dixon Tlmeker.” Airs Thacker prefaced it with a statement that she first met Means in Atlanta Penitentiary, when she was making a study of prison conditions in the south. She heard portions of his story and then for the purposes of publication he told her the whole of it, which she wrote in tie first person, as coming from Means himself. He related how Airs Harding, wi e of the President—both, are now dead—en. gaged him to do special detective work, and mentioned that the first approach to him in the matter was made through the private secretary; of a prominent man in Washington, Mr Edward B. M’Lean, whose wife was a very special friend of Mrs Harding. The revelations mainly concern President Harding’s alleged relations with Nan Britton a girl from his home town ci Marion, Ohio, who charged him with the paternity of her daughter, and his alleged association with grafters.