The San Francisco call., 1898-11-28

. Tn its expose of the secret history of the Pacific Bank and the Peoples Home Savings Bank The Call has ex- pioited many outra geOuS robbertes and < Shameless conspiracies- This morning pThe Call will show how one of the great corspirators deliberately robbed the Pacific Bank of $50 000 This robbery was committed in the latter part of 1892 and 1t still has the Endorsement of technical legality. The people of San Francisco are now familiar with the fact that late in 1892 and early in 1893 . the bank wreckers~ were assembled in New York. City. Affairs had reached . such crisis that it was absolutely ne-
 cessary for: the McDonalds to obtain money. Dick Mcdonald. as The Call . has already described. was left in this 1 city to fight: the battle alone. His father. his brother and his confederates in crime were in New York. They |: pleaded and threatened the banker In this city with the single purpose of pre- venting him: from taking the desperate measures that his desperate condition demanded
 The letters of these men show that they understood thoroughly the fact that the. banks. must go down. They had already received individually and collectively hundreds of thousands of dollars from the bank, but they were not satisfied, and realizing that the final collapse was inevitable they deter
 mined to secure more money. They pre- tended. as The Gall has shown conclu- sively. to have hopes of relief which 4 they never expected to realize. Under N the mask of assumed. assistance they planned to secure more funds Like vultures they realized the approaching dissolution of the bank and they sought s to secure their final feast on the body of the institution. The leader and the . craftiest of these schemers was Moses H. Sherman. His tremendous schemes in reference. to Phoenix properties had become by this time little more than bagatelle. Over two hundred thousand dollars had been sunk by the Pacific Bank and the Peoples Home Savings Bank in these dishonest ventures, but this enormous sum of money was very lttle.compared to the amount that had been sunk in the Los Angeles electric railroad deal. The McDonalds had staked their bank on the success of this deal and sherman knew that his dupes at that stage of the game could not re- tire. He planned, therefore, to get more money from them under the guise of assisting the. railroad in which they were most intimately concerned. He wrote false promises and dishonest as surances He declared with every pos
 sible insincerity that the bonds of the electric railroad were to be floated here and there and that the McDOnalds would get the money they had so fool ishly squandered.
 ~ Sherman understood perfectly the ef- feet of his own imposition. He gave his lying promies that he might secure A more money for himself. Time after 7 time he wrote his alluring letters and traveled from city to city to deceive his dupes with the idea that he was honestly working in their service. He /; prefessed the greatest possible concern over the affairs of the Pacific Bank and asked his victims to believe that he was as deeply interested as they. He was simply scheming to secure more money # and literally to loot the Pacific Bank = in its declining days.
 :. As already. described in The Call . majority of the conspirators were in New York They were spending hun dreds>of dollars every month simply to create false impression of energy in behalf of Mcdonald. sherman de- scribed his visit to this and that city, and in. his. own hysterical. eccentric fashion exalted Dick Mcdonald to an opinion that. everything would come out: we'll in the ~end:: Sherman had no thought that this would be the case, and. gave his. lying promises simply to filoh. more money from the banks. In December of 1892 he went to Frank Nc sDonafd and: told hin that the Los An ~ geles. Electric Railroad Company was in absolute financial distress. More money, he said. was needed. and if 1t % were not supplied the road must fail. Sherman: 1nisrepresented the condition of the road and declared that it was : daily losing great deal of money
 He assured Fran McDonal1 that i'm Auediate assistance must be given or the ~road would go under and in its collapse the Pacific Bank would lose the enormous sum of money that it : had already advanced. Sherman had [ then begun his final .manipulations that were to end only in the destruction of i U Mcdonald banks. He had already won an enormous fortune. but with the greed that marked his efforts he vented more He knew that the Mo