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Show I THE HUMBERT HOAX I RECALLED BY MRS. CHAD WICK'S CASE millionaires. Bankers came forward and pressed loans upon them oh the strength of the securities supposed to be locked in the huge, sealed safe in the Humbert vaults. s a Eventually the bankers woke up and determined it was time to have a peep at the securities In the safe. They obtained ob-tained the necessary order from the Seine civle tribunal May 2, 1903, and coincident with that the Humberts disappeared. dis-appeared. When locksmiths forced open the safe the officials found a ped leather leath-er Jewel case containing a paste diamond dia-mond brooch, several worthless g-old mine shares, some antique newspapers describing the alleged $20,000,000 dowry, but no dowry. A splendid chateau near Melun was next visited by the alarmed bankers and somewhat anxious Government officials., of-ficials., This chateau, the country horae of the Humberts, was found to contain nothing giving a clue jto the supposed fortune. The Humberts' fine yacht, found moored at a private dock, was seized by creditors. A more minute examination ex-amination of the Humbert residences disclosed that valuable Corots, Weis-.sonlers Weis-.sonlers and other works of art had been replaced with copies, the originals having hav-ing been sold several months previously. previous-ly. Warrants' for the arrest of all the Humbert family at once were issued and the world was searched to find them. Lawyers and others charged with complicity In the swindle were arrested ar-rested all over France. A former Minister Min-ister of Justice, an ex-Deputy and ex-magistrates ex-magistrates In Nantes, Rouen, Havre and Paris were accused. e e Throughout her two decades of swindling swind-ling Mme. Humbert maintained high social prestige. Her pictures and Jewels Jew-els were of inrmiBe value, and her reception re-ception list Included the best known persons In France, Including the late M. Fauvre and all the notables of the Nationalist Na-tionalist party. Politics played a large part in the gigantic hoax. Lver since the first disclosures In tha Chadwick case, the Cleveland woman who -negotiated vast loans from bankers bank-ers and others, has been referred to as the American Mme. Humbert. If the mysterious .millions of Mrs. Cassle L. Chadwick be a myth, there is a striking strik-ing analogy between the two cases. The notorious Humbert family duped the sage bankers of Franae to he tune of 112,000,000' to J13,000,000, but their operations opera-tions extended over a period of twenty years before the fraud-tknown as the "great safe fraud" was detected. Wal-deck-Rosseau, Premier of France, described de-scribed it as "the swindle of the century." cen-tury." Just' before the expose the Humberts, consisting of M. and Mme. Humbert, their daughter and two brothers and a sister of Mme. Humbert, disappeared, and were not apprehended for several months, when they were arrested In Madrid in December, 1903. A sensational sensa-tional trial followed, Mma. Humbert being sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment, im-prisonment, and one of the brothers, Emlle Daurlgnac, to four years. see In the Humbert case a mythical inheritance in-heritance of J20.000.00O, acquired through the fictitious will of an imaginary American millionaire, "Robert Henry Crawford," was manipulated with such consummate skill that trie swindlers, by "cleverly-conceived legal litigation, induced loans from bankers aggregating aggregat-ing JI2.000.000, even the historical Bank of France being among the victims. The operations ruined several bankers; two of the victims committed suicide; a Lille banker named Schotsinans, who had loaned Mme. Humbert J1.230.POO, and was on his way to Paris to lodge complaint, was mysteriously murdered on a train, and tragedy upon tragedy followed in their wake. According to the French law, a fortune for-tune that, is being contested may be locked in a safe pending legal settle-I ment. ' This Is what happened to Mma. Humbert's alleged dowry, for, ' opportunely oppor-tunely enough, two Americans of the name of Crawford were declared to claim a part of the estate. These claimants claim-ants were myths, but eminent lawyers were retained to represent them, and during seventeen years of litigation the Humberts lived in the style of multi-j |
