BOGUS COUNT

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 461, 1 July 1937, Page 3

BOGUS COUNT

HOTELS DEFRAUDED Dangerous Criminal London, June 9. The criminal activities of a handsome young Russian who, posing as the Count of Covadonga, defrauded West End hotels and etores, were laid bare at the Old Bausy, when Michael Nesteroff, aged 25, was sentenced to 8 months’ hard labour after pleading guilty !to receiving a fur coat and a cheque book. Nesteroff landed in this country in 1935 by hiding himself in a pleasure steamer sailing from Dieppe to Newhaven. He had come from Paris, where he had just served a term of imprisonment, arid been expelled for theft in a store. He presented himself to a Russian Relief Committee, who found work for him as a decorative artist, but when he became unemployed! he again turned to crime. Father Shot in Russia. After the sentence Mr. Gaabs, of the Russian Refugee Committee, told a reporter: “I have not seen Nesteroff since he came to me wiieti ne landed in this, country. He then told me a story of his father being killed His former landlady, in a Russian and work was found for him.”

hotel with a woman, registering in club in Chiswick, said: “He is really an engineer, and his father was condemned to death and shot after one of the Russian trials.” It was stated in court that for some time he lived in a West End the name of Mr. and Mrs. Donegal!, but telling.the proprietor that he was really the of Donegal travelling incognito. When the police came to search Nesteroff’s rooms in Gloucester Terrace, Bayswater, they found he had a large wardrobe of dress and lounge suits. The mink coat, valued at £2OO, belonger to Mrs.. Ruth Balfour, an American widow’, of Chesham Place, W., and whs stolen from the Covent Garden Opera House. The recorder (Sir Holman Gregory, K.C.) told Nesteroff, “I look upon you as a dangerous criminal, who has been getting his living from time to time by committing a series of serious crimes.” 6e was recommended for deportation.