The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-11-09
STEALING FROM GOVERNMENT
 HICHLy y-DEvEL LOPED PRACTICE

age was promptly discovered, and Cochran's actions caused him to be suspected Government detectives searched his house, and found much of the gold concealed in ingenious hiding places. A safe was set in a wall so .cleverly that it's disclosure was the merest accident.
 Meanwhile, when Cochran had pre- ceived that detection must inevitably | arrive, he did 8 most extraordinary thing. He made a final raid on the vault( after it was opened, but be- and took $1OO,0OO worth of ingots, throwing them one by one into the ventilator shaft, so that they fell be- floor above. His idea may have been the hiding place of this missing wealth; but, in the end, he broke down and confessed everything. He
 was sent to prison for six years and | seven months.
 1 In former days ie was the prac- tice to stack up silver bricks in the courtyard at the Philadelphia mint. They are very heavy, and it was not thought that anybody could walk off
 with one unobserved, nor, indeed, could this have been accomplished.
 But, one day, a laborer, hit upon the clever idea of tossing a brick into a
 refuse barrel that stood nearby. It
 was an easy matter to get the bar
 rel out of the building and after wards to recover from it the silver in- got.
 When this had been accomplished, however, the man found himself fig
 uratively speaking, with an elephant
 on his hands. The brick weighed 800
 ounces. How should he dispose of it ?
 A friend suggested that he sell it to a bullion dealer, and he acted upon
 the idea. But it did not occur to him l to remove the mint stamp from the
 brick, and the consequence was that
 he was arrested and sent to jail
 Perhaps the greatest advantage of paper money, for stealing purposes l Is that it is so very portable. And
 not less important, it is easy to spend
 On June 15, 1870, the wife of a we'll
 known resident of Washington l brought some friends of hers to take l a look at the inside works of the treasury. A stranger, who had been 1 lettering in the corridor, pushed into the tissue room" with the party, and
 carelessly dropped his Panama hat
 over a package of $10 notes that lay on a table. The package was the | length and breadth of a $10 note, and
 six inches thick; there was $11.0OO l Tn it.
 The money was not missing until
 evening. There was no clue. The
 numbers of the notes, however, were 1 sent out to banks all over the country with warning. Thirty days later a
 man deposited $7,900 worth of these 1 same notes in a New York bank. He
 did not wear a Panama hat on this
 occasion, but it was the same person,
 and he was arrested.
 | There was a bit of a joke about l this. MT. Spinner, then treasurer o1 l the United States, in his annual re- port for 1869, had boasted that, all l though the office had handled bill
 lions of dollars every year, not a penny of shortage had occurred dur | ing his term. But almost immediate. l ly thereupon the Panama hat rob. bery happened, and this was quickly followed by others. Two of Mr. Spin.
 ner's subordinates, both pillars of the
 Presbyterian church, by the way, got
 away with s62,00O (of which less | than $16,000 was recovered), and 2
 clerk in the redemption division ab'
 stracted $10,000 from packages o1 paper cash sent in (to be replaced with new notes) by banks. l In February, 1877, a package sup, posed to contain $12,0OO in $10t notes, was sent from the treasury te the First National bank in Chicago l nv ix,;v, fo foiy I nothing but manila paper. Secre1 ] service detectives were put on the job, and all four, men who had had
 Ito do with preparing the package were cross-questioned. One of then l had counted the contents; the second
 had approved the count; the thirt
 had tied up the parcel; the fourtf l had addressed it to the bank.
 They were catechised separately 1 One of the four, when questioned
 shook and trembled like the prover I bial aspen-leaf. He showed all thu
 generally-accepted signs of guilt though, as a matter of fact he wa. l wholly innocent. The really guilt. party, as finally proved, was the ad
 dresser. Serious suspicion first rested upon him when it was found that h'
 had spent $1.25 in one afternoon 1 after office hours, for drinks.
 l He had run into debt in Baltimore before coming to Washington. Mos | imprudently, he began paying wha he owed, and in every instance h.
 paid with $100 notes. When he say detection imminent, he tossed bun dle containing $11,0O0 of the stolel money into the vestibule of the treas urer's residence on I street. A gov l ernment sleuth saw him do it. H, was arrested, and in one of his pock cts were found trimmings of thu manila paper with which he ha. stuffed the package. Eighteel months in the penitentiary was hi portion,
 Two years earlier, clerk in thu cash room named Benjamin Hallocl stole s47,00O in treasury notes o Il $500-an attractive denomination I The notes were not new; they wer, not numbered consecutively there fore. and it was difficult to trac, them. In this theft Hallock had tw, | accomp1ices, salOonkeepef named Il Ottman and sporting characte known as "Pegleg" Brown. Ottmal confessed, turning states evidence ment of the jury. Uncle Sam neve got any of the money back.
 The most remarkable theft from the treasury, however-and the onl, one lever known to have been com mitted by a woman-was perpetrat ed by Mrs. Ernestine Becker an ex