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Show Clerk Pleads Guilty To $780,000 Theft Lived Luxuriously and Kept Two Private Yachts. NEW YORK. - William Arthur Nickel, $(14-a-week clerk who lived luxuriously and kept two yachts ' while he embezzled $780,000 from his employer, pleaded guilty as he ' went on trial with two of his three co-defendants. Nickel, who apparently will be chief state's witness in the huge Mergenthaler Linotype company swindle, entered his plea to a 202-count 202-count indictment charging grand larceny and forgery. TIip 48-year-old former Mergen- I thaler employee, whose extravagance extrava-gance failed to arouse suspicion until un-til a fellow employee discovered i fraudulent entries in his books, was ' arrested last October in a Florida I hotel. Nickel, who had fled to Detroit, j Chicago and Florida when he roc-I roc-I Ognlzed that his accounts wi re under scrutiny, talked freely after his arrest and implicated three' others in the complicated plot. Julius Lobe!, alias Jimmy Collins, a Broadway figure who has been at liberty under $85,000 bail, and Irving Irv-ing Cohen, 45, known as "Izzy the Eel," are co-defendants in the swindle swin-dle trial. A fourth co - defendant, Isidore Rappaport, 55, president of the Ultima Optical Instrument com-' pany, was granted a separate trial because he and his firm were named in only 41 out of nearly 500 counts in the indictment. Rappaport, a war sub-contractor for the linotype firm, was said by Nickel to have master-minded the plot in which fraudulent checks made out supposedly in payment of Mergenthaler bills escaped company com-pany detection. Rappaport, however, how-ever, was said to have been ousted in favor of Collins later in the plot. |