Arizona republican., 1908-06-01

tions" to write on the blackboard, the
 betting must cease.
 | The bucketshop buys or sells in differently, always at the price ap- .pearing for the time being on the tblackboard. For example if GUS [tomer buys 1000 bushels of May wheat. he puts up a margin based lon the last quotation. If this was Lone dollar per bushel, he would put tup ten dollars. or one cent per bush | el, in order to make the deal He lhas bought no real wheat or stock he has made a bet. The shop has no interest in this. except to check
 the ten dollars up to their profit when the sucker gets skinned. If
 wheat goes down" three quarters of a cent, the margin is wiped out. for
 the bucketshop charges one fourth of Ia cent commission" On the other hand. if wheat should advance one lcent per bushel, the customer would
 make only three-fourths of a cent
 sham broker" Wheat has to ad-
 vance cent and a quarter before
 the customer can make a cent prof
 it; while, on the other hand, if it drops only three-quarters of a, cent
 lth uOlldIS are lOSl. IL IS one of the sure thing games The bucketshoppers act as principal and agent. and charge commission" and .'interest" on investments that are never made More often than not the concerns coolly pocket all the money without ever making a trade. - The public's losses are the buck etshops profits, and an idea of the tremendous amount of money cleaned up by the bucketshops is gained by this story: When William J. Odell died-he who was the promoter of the Odell Commission company of -Cincinnati-he left a will turning over to three trusted employees the business he had built up, with the stipulation that when they had made S500,O00 each they should turn the business over to the three employees next in line. Eight months later the three retired in favor of the other employees, and it is claimed that dur ing those eight months they made over a million dollars apiece out of the concern. Odell himself, when he died. was worth more than $5,000.000.
 The United States postal authorities have waged relentless warfare against the bucketshops since 1896, when
 fraud orders were issued by the gov
 ernment against some fifty firms. The
 government fight against fake finan-
 ciers has been kept up, and at the present time. when they are making
 it their business to crush the Ed ward-Wood Company. The govern ment authorities have always been
 badly handicapped by the lack of a law under which they can properly punish the offenders. The most they can do is to haul them up for using the mails to defraud. and under this law, the punishment by no means fits the crime.
 The fight of the Chicago board of trade against counterfeiters has been a spectacular one; 1t has taken years of effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the counterfeit was confused with genuine business. Us ually the victim of the bucketshops set up howl of protest against the board of trades because that saved him from ridicule as a fool. The banker who goes wrong and embezzles funds that have been intrusted to him planes a
 DOdIh Ol lIdue. A case or lnlS QcS- -cription was traced and it was dis covered that the S9O.000 the banker had stolen had been lost in a bucket shop, in Hammond, Indiana, which had been driven out of Chicago by the board of trade. Yet he declared he had lost the money "on the board of trade"
 1, InjunctiOns have been secured. cases have been followed right up to the United States Supreme Court; that court held that the board of trade was not, as bucketshops alleged. d gamb- ling institution and that it has a property right to quotations. The ex- change gathers it's crop news at great cost from all over the globe and dis seminates it free in the press and the public. The bucketshor at no parallel cost. endeavers to secure for itself the returns for a labor performed by oth- CTS. But the bucketshop days are nearing their end, from Maine to Cal ifornia.