Keowee courier. [volume] (Pickens Court House, S.C.) 1849-current, 1908-12-30

'heh III d snappy, Ill numOred sort OF
way he would toss the three monte
papers and invite them, if they were
SO smart, to pick out the right one
Willing to divert and at the seme
time th put it on the grouchy man,
they'd stand for the harpocn, and
Morton tossed it into them for yea rs
that way without ever getting rum
bic.
He took turns working different
important trains, but mostly he'd
work the Paris express from London.
Occasionally he'd keep right on and
do profitable monte business through
to Constantinople or st. Petersburg.
ut wasn't until Morton had snaked
out whole dishpan full of money,
enough to last him for life, that
Scotland Yard woke up to his lay and
invited him to take quick look at
his native land. He settled on a ranch
in Southern California and died there
in luxury, very old man.
Then there was Dinge Fraser, a
good looking duck from Mobile, who
got his nickname because he was sus-
pected Of being an octoroon. Fraser
took swell mob of American dips
over to England in 1870, and what
the Fraser outfit did to Great Britain
during that tour was too many for
anybody to recite or run over hastily.
ERASER used the makeup and
graft Of an American street medicine
fakir, with the long black Buffalo Bill
hemp, the sombrero, frock coat and
all that stuff. Rugged that way, he'd
charter an open barouche and sell
what he called American YARDS, with
gold watch and chain and a dia-
mond pin with each shilling package.
But the dope was only side issue.
THE main graft was to get the
folks together around the wagon
With the crowds asse ..lbled, Dinge's
squad Of leather workers would ge .
busy. Every one of the dips in tn.
Fraser troupe was a Glass A man at
the game, and the way they did de-
walletize England, Scotland and!
Wales was sin and a shame.
''1t took the Fraser outfit more
than two years to work Great Britain,
and during all that time the Yard
never got hep to it that Fraser's street
medicine gag was only blind for the
operations of the dips. Finally the
Yard folks hepped up to it, however
and Fraser and his bunch got the
rumble and had to beat it back to
the States. Not a man Of the gang
nad to work for three or four years
when they returned to this country
after that huge cleanup.
american crooks somehow or
another used to find it mighty easy
to put down scratchy paper in Eng
land. You remember. the big case
where the bunch trimmed the Bank of
England for millions before getting
accidentally nailed. But there were
others. r...
"There was Joe Mason, the merry
go-round man, one Of the original
mt rry-go-round men of this country,
by the way. Joe was an educated
man, and he put a series of fake
American gold mine frame-ups across
in Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester
and those towns, in 1881, that was
something scientific.
'He took the first American steam
propeller merry-go-round to England.
But the thing didn't fetch in the
coin quick enough to suit Mason, and
so he just left 1t standing in a lot
and went after the big stuff with
some nicely engraved shares in Amer
lean gold mines that weren't.
81 don't know just how much high
change he picked up at that game,
but 1t was away up in the tens of
thousands before the Yard fell to
smiling at his heels. I don't know if
he did any squaring, but it's GER
tainty that he wasn't pinched. All
that happened to him was that he got
one Of those go away from here in>
vites from Scotland Yard, and he
wasn't unwilling to skin back here
with four OF five Gladstone bags stuff
ed with kale so that their sides
bulged.
Mason, when he got back here,
went to his home town in the West
and he died there only nine or ten
years ago. His widow had a memo
rial window placed in the church
which Joseph attended after he got
coin enough to conclude that he could
afford to be religious"