TRICKED POLICE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 5190, 12 October 1927, Page 2

TRICKED POLICE.

NOTORIOUS BEGGAR’S RUSE. In his latest exquisite achievement a notorious beggar, Patrick Terrence O’Malley, aged 52, hoodwinked both magistrate and police. O’Malley wandered into the Brighton Police Station and said that he had beeai a first-class petty officer on board H.M.s. Queen Mary in the battle of Jutland, says the Observer. His family had been notified that he was killed in action, but two days after the battle;, so his story ran, lashed to a mess table, he was picked up, raving mad, by Germans, and confined for ten years in an asylum at Wilhelmshaven.

On hearing his amazing story, the magistrate; dismissed the charge of drunkenness for which iQ’Malley was appearing before the Court, and paid •his fare to London. A constable escorted the “war hero” to the station, and on his arrival at London, railway men tenderly placed him in a chair and whe.eled him through the barrier. Once among the crowd, however, O’Malley vanished, and could not be traced. The Portsmouth police reveal that he had previously been convicted for begging and drunkenness, and had on other occasions related false stories of amazing exploits in the army.