STRANGE FATES OF SPIES AND TRAITORS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LI, Issue 281, 21 November 1908, Page 4

STRANGE FATES OF SPIES AND TRAITORS.

" I am here to kill you for denouncing Colney!" The speaker was a man named Koenit, and the scene a small, lifth rate cafe in a mean street in Paris.

Koenit was a member of a gang of Apaches, tile murderous Parisian hooligans. Another member of the gang, Colney, had been denounced to the police by a woman named Sarah Baronlnaer. A court of Colney's associates had tried the woman in her absence, condemned her, and by lot had chosen Caniillc Koenit to carry out their sentence.

"Make up your mind you have to die," continued the man callously. " 1 give you a quarter of an hour to settle your affairs." With those words lie left the cafe.

, Some twenty minutes later the wretched woman summoned up courage to leave the place. She was hardly in the street before Koenit sprang upon her with an open knife and struck her to the heart.

Koenit was arrested, but, owing to the foolish leniency of French criminal law escaped with penal servitude for life.

This story reads like cheap fiction. It is, however, an absolute fact, and anyone acquainted with criminal life in Paris and other great cities knows well that organised clime never fails to t;tK<; terrible vengeance on those who betray their fellow-criminals.

Three years ago last August BLli a boy came running into the police-station of a small town in Hungary. In a voice shaking with fear, he begged protection. Gipsies, he said, had sentenced him to death because he had betrayed them to the police. The boy was given shelter in an empty room of the Court House. . Next morning he was gone. His body was found in a field near by. It had been hacked in two, and a half was hanging to each of two aeaeia trees. No body of criminals is more swift or terrible in its vengeance than the Italian Mafia. At Staten Island, Xew York, a number of Italians and a few Poles were employed in a plaster mill. Getzner, one of the Poles, was suspected by the Italians of being a "nark," or police spy. One morning, at three o'clock, the night gang caught the man and tied him to a shaft making 100 revolutions a minute. The unfortunate Pole was whirled to death, only parts of his body being discovered, together with fragments of the rope with which he was tied.

An equally revolting crime was perpetrated near Pittsburg, in Pennsylvania, (luring the great coal strike of five years ago. Here, again, the victim was a Lithuanian Pole, who was suspected of being a traitor to the nnion of which he was a member. i

The man disappeared, and on search being made was found nearly dead in an empty shed with both feet nailed to the floor!

What is said to lie the most extraordinary feat ol criminal vengeance on record happened at Algiers in 18' JO. A man named Foglio was arrested by the French police at the instance of the Italian Government. He was suspected of complicity in a Sicilian murder crime, and it was known that he was a member of the Mafia.

In gaol lie weakened and promised to tell the whole story, on condition that his life was spared.

Two mornings later his gaoler, visiting the cell, found Foglio on the floor, stabbed to the heart. The dagger was still in the wound, and on the body lay a scrap of paper with the words, "So perish traitors," in Italian. To this day the mystery of that death wound has never been solved.

The Russian Revolutionaries have absolutely no mercy on those who betray them. It is well known that in the year 1003 a traitor caught in Odessa was bricked up alive in a cellar. Regnier, a French spy in the pay of the Russian police for a long time, eluded the vengeance of the Revolutionaries.

, But they caught him at last, and that just at the moment when he fancied himself safe. His body was found in his cabin on a ship which reached Antwerp. He had been suffocated by fumes of sulphuretted hydrogen. How this was done was never discovered. No more than a month ago a Russian police spy, caught by members of the Society of the Red Hand, was bound under a steam hammer and crushed to unrecognisable fragments. Another recent crime of a similar nature was the lynching of Fehim Pacha, in Turkey. Fehim deserved his fate, if ever a spy did. The meanest, most cruel of mankind, be had made a huge fortune by blackmailing his fellows, and no one can wonder that, when the Young Turks at last got the upper hand Fehim was the first to pay the penaly of his cruelty.