Hattiesburg daily progress. (Hattiesburg, Miss.) 18??-1909, 1903-12-03
OPIUM sMUGGLERS TRICKS.
FACTS BROUGHT OUT At A TRIAL
IN CALIFORNIA.

to Conceal His operations-opium
| Hidden In Queer Piaces-A Profit
able Transaction.
A good deal of opium is still Snug
| gled, writes the Los Angeles (Cal.)
correspondent of the New York Sun.
The smugglers are mostly Chinese
and few Americans living along the
| boundaries between British Columbia
and Washington and Idaho. and be-
| tween Mexico and Arizona and Cali
fornia Once in a while seizure Of
| $4,000 or $4,000 worth of opium Is
made. Fifteen or twenty years ago
seizures of struggled opium worth
| $4,000 and SIS 900 were made.
The recent trial OF See Lick. a
wealthy old Chinaman, who has done
business on the Pacific coast for forty
years, has brought out some interest
ing facts regarding opium smuggling.
In order to escape heavy sentence
he and two accomplices gave much
information on the subject to the GUS
toms officers.
See Lick says he never had any
trouble in getting his opium into
Mexican ports free Of duty, and that
his only difficulty has been to devise
new schemes for smuggling the stuff
| into Uncle Sans domains. To this
end, he has been at times a vegetable
gardener, a laundryman, the buying
agent for firm of Chinese merchants,
a money lender and a Christian mis-
| sionary among the Chinese in the
mining camps along the American
and Mexican boundary line.
He has struggled opium into the
country inside the cushions on the
seat of ramshackle vegetable
wagon, inside Bibles carefully hol
lowed out, inside the mattress upon
which an apparently dying Chinaman
lay grooming, and inside huge fire.
crackers. He once brought forty
pounds of opium sealed in copper
boxes into San Diego inside the car
cass of a 200-pond hammerhead shark
that, an accomplice told a custom
house inspector, was anxiously await
ed by the Chinese in San Diego as a
rare table delicacy.
Once he got a large quantity of
opium safely into California inside a
load Of baled alfalfa hay. Then he
packed the drug into the folds of
| cabbages from which the inner leaves
had been cut out. About sixty pounds
of the drug could be packed inside the
cabbages in a crate and thus go to
market, billed to some Chinese mer-
chants in California or Arizona towns
who could be relied upon.
Once Bo Sing, an ally of See Lick.
bought for mere song two rusty old
iron safes at an auction junk sale in
Los Angeles. To the bystanders, who
smiled at his buying such property,
he said he was going to fool some
other Chinaman into purchasing the
safes at a higher price.
He sent the safes down to San
Diego. See Lick offered to give sto-
rage to the safes until the buyer
could persuade some one to take the
iron safes off his hands. The safes
were hauled to an old shed near the
Chinaman's vegetable garden and for
weeks they stood there.
One day Bo Sing went joyfully to
the railroad freight office, saying that
he had got a fool Chinaman in Phoe-
nix to take one safe, and another
Chinaman in Tucson to take the
other A day later the safes, Grated
and covered with burlap, were hauled
to the freight house, and were billed
to their purchasers in Arizona.
Now it has come out that See Lick
and Bo Sing sent over eight hundred
pounds of poium, at a profit Of $1,000,
in the safes. The chunks of plaster
of paris within the walls were care
fully bored out, and boxes of opium
were packed tightly into the safe
walls. Then the iron plates were re-
placed and painted black.
John c. Cline, United States Gus
toms collector at Los Angeles, said
the other day:
The tricks that the Cinnamon play
in getting opium into the country free
of duty are the cleverest and most
adroit of all we have to deal with in
the way of smuggling. A year or two
ago the Los Angeles Chinese pre-
tended to have a special fondness for
peculiar variety of lily that is
grown by the Chinese residents of
Vancouver, British Columbia.
For several months nearly every
schooner down the coast brought lot
of big flower pots in which were grow
ing yellow Chinese lilies. The care
with which these plants were received
at last aroused suspicion and one of
the inspectors jabbed his walking
cane into the sand of a flower pot
HE struck something hard a few
inches below the surface. Working
out the earth and the bulb, he found
a dozen copper five-tael boxes OF
opium. An investigation showed that
there were over one hundred pounds
of opium in that one consignment OF
lilies and flower pots.
II have known Cinnamon to con-
ceal opium in the thick wooden soles
of their shoes, and to make hollow
the oars in a rowboat. and then pack
the hollow spaces with opium picked
up in the harbor where it had been
tossed by a confederate aboard a
steamer coming into dock. Cinnamon
used to conceal opium in their coiled