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Show rrrm mi nniii ihm iiiiiii i iiiinniii iiiiiii mill I PARALLEL II the criminal ms I I How He Planned the g I STORIES Deed and Sought to Close 1 r "E a ftr-viTTo Every Avenue of Knowl- if Jt iiMUUb edge Leading to His Guilt 3 1 Utt T C! The Detective Shows How 1 1 A 1 M L 2) Futile These Efforts Were and 1 ' How the Old Adage, Murder j By KENRY C. TERRY Will Out, "Always Holds Good." J I (fan rnmnmr- 1 "" .i,i'tj i r'ifTr a (CoDjrijht by P. L. Nelsoo Jimmy Parsons, who ran a fence in Whitechapel. Parsons had a customer waiting for the stones. He got $75,000 for them, and that shows you what a poor, run for his money a crook gets. "Tim got square with the old man in a roundabout way. Parsons had a daughter, Nellie by name, a slim, black:eyed, black-haired lass, the very look of whom would set the heart of any man to jumping unless he had ice in his veins. Tim was bowled over at first sight, and she was just as bad gone with him.- Nellie gave us a tip on an old cove who was in the jewelry repairing line. He was said to have a big lot of boodle hoarded away in a little shop where he had worked for 50 years or more. Nellie visited the old man and got into his confidence. She didn't fancy the work, hut she would do anything Tim said. The old cove talked freely with her about his hoard and complained that when he was through with it he had no chick nor child on earth to leave it to. She got an idea from him where it was kept, and when she reported to us we made up our minds that it would be rank cruelty to leave England without doing do-ing something to relieve the old man from worry. "His name was Bennett, I think, and he lived alone in a very lonely spot near the Thames on Cooper street. Tim and I called upon Bennett late in the afternoon to see about getting a watch repaired. While he was squinting squint-ing at the works with an eyeglass Tim thumped him with a bit of lead pipe. I growled at Tim for hitting him so hard. From the way he fell I thought his light was out. The old man usually us-ually went out about the time that we visited him, so Nellie told us, so we just locked the door, put out the lamp and went on a scout for the coin. "We turned everything inside out without making much headway. We got only a few dollars here and there. Then I remembered that Nellie told me that when the old man wanted to get any money he always took a small ladder and went into a little closet in the seeping room adjoining the shop. I found the ladder under- the counter, and the closet was behind the old man's bmnt. Afrr a little search I found a box and a small bundle. I ripped open the package and found that I had struck the right spot. The money was in Bank of England notes, and figured up just $26,000 in American Ameri-can coin. "I was hoping there was more, for the old man was lying very still. It's worth more than that to have a murder mur-der on your soul. Before leaving we fixed everything up in proper shape, turned up the lamp and got away without ever a soul piping us off. Old Bei.nett did not die, but the shock knocked all the sense out of him for a while. No one had tumbled to the robbery, so far as the stories in the papers went. But I was mistaken in this, as it turned out afterward. It was through a little thing we knew nothing about at the time that both of us were nailed in Philadelphia for the Simpson robbery." THE TRAIL OF THE TATTOOED HAND. rfN optimist, in . search of a clinching argument that the ' 1 world is growing better, has if but to persuade a police de-nr" de-nr" tective in any large city in- La to a comparison between CSf ) crime conditions now and those of a generation ago. i But statistics, you say, will prove that crime is on the increase, j , I question whether the number of i crimes in proportion to population has increased or whether the figures ( merely prove that more crimes are reported, and greater publicity given them by means of our perfected news gathering systems. Certainly the New York city of today shows a vast improvement im-provement in morality over the city of a generation ago. Recently two bank messengers were , robbed of $25,000 in broad day in a taxicab in downtown New York. The i thieves were soon apprehended and . the greater part of the loot recovered. The perpetrators were mere boys. It ! was the first essay in crime for sev- eral of them. Their methods, although daring, were crude. Yet the city rang with the cry of "crime wave." Compare conditions with those existing ex-isting in the days of the old Catherine j Market gang. Then bold robberies on , public thoroughfares were a daily- oc-! oc-! : currence in New York. , I Jeff O'Neill and Tim Little were ' two of the most desperate members of the gang, every member of which was a desperado. After the passing of Denny Brady, who carried to his grave four bullets and more than a hundred knife scars, mementoes of his rough-, rough-, and-tumble fights, both with other crooks and the police, O'Neill and Little became the king pins of desperate des-perate crime in New York. Their "pull" with the police seemed to be perfect, and many a time saved them from capture. But they were finally landed, as every crook is in time, and, it chanced, through the slender clue of a tattoo mark. But from this point I shall let Jeff O'Neill tell his own story as he related it to me at the end of his ten-year stretch "up the river." JEFF O'NEILL'S STORY. "I went on the road," said O'Neill, "with Tim after the whole gang nearly near-ly got settled by a skunk of a thief who gave up to the police to save himself him-self from doing a twenty stretch. But" it did not do him any good, as his body was picked up in the East river with a hole in his skull soon afterward. after-ward. Tim had been shot at Hastings, Hast-ings, up the river. Some one had blazed away with a gun out of a window win-dow while we were digging a hole through his front door. This made us both a little skittish about night work. "At this time Simpson, the old original orig-inal pawnbroker, was running a shop on Chatham street, and was doing a regular business in setting diamonds I besides. He used to put a lot of the sparklers in his window every day. As Tim and I were going by the place he said to me: 'What's the ' matter with giving the old man a call?' I was willing, but thought he meant to hit up the safe, which was noised around to hold about half a million 1 worth of the stuff the year round. But Tim was out of the safe-cracking line, ! and was looking for something genteel-like. genteel-like. "We dropped down to the old 'Curi-: 'Curi-: osity Shop,' and he got a padlock that : snapped shut- I had no idea what he me & lot of trouble several years be- fore. Then I started in to get a lit- , tie information about the Simpson I robbery. It was like pulling ' teeth. The gang would not discuss the rob- i bery at all except in a general way. for the life of me I could not get a line on any of the gang who were out of j the city. ' I "I tried to get a start on the fences where the property was disposed of usually, but I ran up against a solid wall. Every thief I met I took a look for an 'L' on his right hand, but rione I was able to find had the accusing mark. I wanted to get some information informa-tion from the outside about a crook known as Peg Reilly, so one night I quit the gang and sneaked to headquarters. head-quarters. I was followed by Red Wormser. He had been suspicious of me after the robbery on Long Island because I would not let him abuse an old woman who defended her property. "I did not know that he was looking for me or I would have been more cautious. I only learned it afterward when. I turned the gang up and landed land-ed seven of them in Sing Sing. After leaving headquarters I went to Andy Mullen's. He spoke very pleasantly to me and threw me completely off my guard. We had a few drinks and then Red went out with several of the crooks. I tried to find out if anything was up, but could not. I left Andy's to go to my room about midnight. I had only gone a short distance when I got a terrific blow from a sandbag. It was meant for the back of my neck, but the aim was bad and I caught it on the shoulder. Pour of them came at me. The darkness was in my favor, and I escaped the lunges of three knives at my heart. I got pretty well bruised and battered. Help was out of the question. At the first opportunity oppor-tunity I ran like a deer and several shots came after me. "The next day we received a report from Scotland Yard of the robbery ol a jeweler named Bennett in London, believed to have been committed by American crooks. In the description was the statement that one of the thieves had the letter 'L' on his right hand. A hoy who had been apprenticed by old Bennett saw the men enter the store and noticed that India ink mark on the hand. The boy knew that old Bennett had a lot of money in a chimney. chim-ney. This had been taken, and the old man was found unconscious. He could not tell what had happened. The police kept the facts quiet as to the evidence of assault on him, hoping that the thieves would believe th story which had been printed about his miserly habits making him ill. "I was sent to London to look the matter up. There I learned that Jimmy Jim-my Parsons had been mixed up in it, in some way, though there was no evidence evi-dence of his actual participation in the crime. Years before I had done Parsons Par-sons a favor when he got into trouble in New York. He had been arrested for forgery. I proved that he was entirely en-tirely innocent and cleared him. . I went to see him and made mysell known. At first he was very reticent I went to see him every day for a week to urge him to explain how his name had been brought into the Bennett Ben-nett robbery. When I gave him my word that I would protect him he told me all he hew. "He said the two crooks from New York had come to him with a load of diamonds, and he bought them. He did not know who had been robbed, as it was not his business to inquire. They stayed around for a week and had spoken to him about old Bennett's money. The robbery of Bennett occurred oc-curred the next day and the thieves skipped. "Parsons told me with tears rolling down his cheeks how they had induced his daughter Nellie to steal a bag oi gold that he had in the safe and go with them. He had thought at first that she had only run away for a little change, and he tried to get the police to find her. Then he got a letter from her saying that she had gone to America Amer-ica with his friends. "He denied all along that he knew who the thieves were. One day I asked him what the 'L' stood for. "He replied re-plied 'Little,' in an absent-minded way. I felt like turning a handspring for joy. He saw his mistake in a second, and then gave up all he knew. He said the crooks were Jeff O'Neill and Tim Little, and that they were in New York. "I came back on the first steamer, well satisfied with my trip and feeling feel-ing that sooner or later I would bag my game. During the time that I had lived with the thieves in the Fourth ward I had been very friendly to a simple-minded fellow whose head had been split open with an ax. I used to take him to my room to sleep. He talked so much that I did not dare ask him any questions. He was known as Slimy Baker. I fixed myself up in good shape, went down to Water street on a hunt for Slimy, and got him after two days. I asked him about a lot of the boys, and then carelessly care-lessly inquired if he knew Tim Little and Jeff O'Neill. He told me that he had seen them that very day with Little's Lit-tle's wife, an English girl. This was great news for me, and I stuck to Slimy closer than a brother. He took me down to Madison street and pointed point-ed out the house. I notified headquarters headquar-ters and several detectives joined me. "We had the thieves, but to prove it was the next thing. One of Simpson's Simp-son's clerks identified Little's hand by the 'L.' They bluffed it out and might have beaten the case if I had not sprung the Bennett robbery on them. This brought them to turn, and they agreed to plead guilty to the charge of robbery at Simpson's rather than fac the English complaint. They got ten years each. "I sent Nellie Parsons home to her father, and glad enotigrh she waa to get back, so he told m afterwards." DETECTIVE BARNETT'S STORY. "The tapping of old Simpson's place," said Detective Barnett, "was a new wrinkle for the New York police. It was so easy, the only wonder is it never had been worked before. "I was put on the case the night of the robbery, and made a careful investigation in-vestigation into all the circumstances with very little result. There was not a clerk who had got a good look at the thieves. About the only thing of .value in their description was that one of them had an india ink L on his right hand. This was very little to work on, but I started to do the best I could. I made up my mind, without any evidence to support it, that the work had been by one-of the Fourth ward crooks. That gang was about as tough a one as a fellow would care about going against. "I dropped down into the Fourth ward and took a lodging in a Water street den in the role of an ex-convict just out of jail after doing a long stretch. I kept much to myself for a while and did not try to push my way ahead. I knew enough of the gang's methods to be sure that asking questions ques-tions would make them suspicious. I went in and out the Water and Cherry street dives, met thieves of all kinds, but waited for them to make advances to me. I had the convict's shuffle to perfection, and never took a step without with-out the movement of .the lockstep. It took me more than a week to get with-ir with-ir speaking distance of several old-tiive old-tiive crooks. I was very reticent and ta'Aed in the subdued voice that thie-ves acquire in jail. I put aside a job or two that was offered to me in the crook's line, as most thieves will do after a long stretch. Still I let it be known that if anything good was going on I would not hesitate about taking a hand. "Just to keep suspicion from being aroused, I went Into a couple of jobs on Long Island. I marked the men who were in it, just for future reference. refer-ence. I showed them that I was a pretty good thief, and got the confidence confi-dence of Ted Mulry and Pete Abrams. two old-time burglars, who had given wanted with it, and he didn't tell me. We went out and we walked around till Tim found a loose cobblestone. He picked this up and put it under his coat. Then we went to Simpson's. On the outside front door was a heavy iron grating, which was shut at night to keep the mugs away from the door. It was just coming on evening, and Tim unfolded his little plan. I was to fasten the iron door with the lock while he put in the heavy window with the stone. Then we were both to grab everything in sight and sneak "I put on the lock and when I snapped it Tim let the rock go. It made a hole about big enough to put your head through. Tim grabbed with both hands, and then I took my , pick, and before those inside were aware of what had happened we were out of sight. We went in different directions di-rections and met at the old Catherine Cather-ine Market within twenty minutes. We went into Riley's and looked over the stuff. We were both pretty guod judges of the dewdrops. and the load figured up about $50,000. It was the easiest snap that erer I had in my life. I knew no one on the inside could recognize rec-ognize us, because the old caps we had on covered our eyes "The story of the robbery gave an Interview with Simpson and his clerks. They said they did not see the faces of the thieves. The police had nothing to work on, except a description of the stones. They hoped to nail us when we sported them. But we bad been in the business too long for that. When we got a good chance we dusted for London and managed to get rid of the stuff in two days for $30,000 to |