INSANE FINANCE.

Taranaki Daily News, 23 August 1920, Page 5

INSANE FINANCE.

FORTUNE MADE IN AN ASYLUM. New York, May 26. "Insane" wa3 the verdict pronounced yesterday by the Sheriff's Court in the case of Mr. John W. O'Baiinon, an im-macula'tely-dressed man with broad shoulders, stern blue eyes, and a square jaw, who during the last six weeks, while confined in a lunatic asylum, has added, by clever financial manipulations, £500,000 to his self-made fortune, conservatively estimated at £3,000,000. The millionaire gave tho Court a dramatic account of his career, starting at 14, when he ran away from home. "I saved £60,000," he proudly declared, "frofn salaries and commissions. I invented a substitute for leather and organised the o'Bannon Corporation, whose assets at present are worth more than £1,000,000. My next enterprise was the International Rubber Company, of which 1 am president and general manager, and after that I organised the Maxim Munitions Company and sold £12,000,fk)0 of gun-cotton to the Czarist Government.

"I have not had a holiday for live years. I have been too busy, and here I am detained like a horse thief." Physicians said that Mr. O'Bannon possessed an extraordinary memory and undoubted business genius, but none the less he was insane.