Evening star., 1940-03-10

San Francisco Post Office as a man
serving in the Army in the Philip
pines. While Hugh was on trial, q
Portsmouth, Ohio. steel worker rec
ognized pictures of Roy and Ray in
a newspaper feature article as men
he had worked with there.
The three brothers were sentenced
to life Imprisonment in 1927 upon
conviction of one murder charge. In
case they ever should be paroled
from those terms, the evidnece
stored in the historical room" here
will be brought out to attempt to
send them up again. Three murder
indictments and a mail robbery
charge still are pending against
them.
Now stationed at Boston. Inspec-
tor Jefferson has been devoting
most of his time for the last few
years to the investigation of sale
through the mails of lottery tick
cts, with the same sort of bulldog
determination that he displayed in
the De Autremont case.
He has been instrumental in send
ing scores of lottery racketeers to
prison. And-significant news for
those tempted to buy a brightly
colored ticket in some sweepstakes
he says that in the thousands Of
tickets he has confiscated he never
has seen genuine one. There are
few genuine Irish Sweepstakes
tickets sold here, of course, but ap-
parently most of them and practic-
ally all of those purporting to be
on some Canadian sweepstakes are
counterfeit.
Numerous samples of the counter
felt lottery tickets make UP part
OF the historical room" exhibit
here. They are arranged at one
end of the room given over to a dis
play OF evidence from a wide variety
OF mail frauds.
Medical Cases.
Medical frauds have provided the
biggest collection. Four inspectors
and seven clerks are giving their fun
time to investigating medical
frauds through the mails and they
are sWamped with work all the time.
One contraption on display. a
skul-cap affair made of bright
metal with electric wiring, was guar
anteed to grow hair on a bald head
lts distributor flched $4,000 from
the public before being caught
in 1887.
Beside it is what looks like an
old-fashioned horse collar, an cleo
trlc induction coil covered with
imitation leather. The patient was
instructed to put it around his
chest or shoulder and told it would
cure heart disease. Its inventor and
distributor died of heart disease
after selling sl,4OO,OO0 worth of the
horse collars"
One OF the biggest of such rackets
involved the sale of spectacles bv
mail, with the patient examining
his own eyes with the aid of sample
lenses provided him and then
writing his own prescription. The
Bureau OF Standards found the
glasses were worse than none at all.
But their sale brought $4,000 900 to
a Chicago doctor" between 1919
and 1885. He was hard to stop,
operating under 46 different COM
pany names during that period.
In one museum case are displayed
side by side sample of the
kind OF false teeth on which an
other racketeer cleaned up Sill 900
through mail sales, and a good set
prepared by the Public Health Serv-
ice. AS one inspector phrased it,
the teeth sold by mail appeared good
only Ito eat hay with"-the uppers
and lowers didn't come together
enough for good "bite."
Samples of other such swindles
include a pair of rubber tipped
hammers with which patients were
advised to hit themselves across the
eyes to restore lost vision; a box Of
fountain Of youth" tablets which
brought their seller $1,260 900 in
four years; cake of reducing SOAP
guaranteed to wash the fat away"
that sold s125,0O0 worth in a year.
and $3.50 voodoo charm on
chamois skin.
OF recent date is homemade
cigar box" bomb-one of six mailed
at Wilkes-Bare, Pa, on April 9,
1886. Its recipient opened it at the
hinged end of the cigar box SO it
did not explode. Two of the others
did explode, killing three persons
and wounding two. Methodical in
spectors traced the cigar box from
the factory to the home of Michael
(See MUSEUM, Page C-l2.)