Show for tm pop paper TALES STALES OF government CRIME cram by bv frank Q G Oar carpenter penter 1896 HAVE M 0 R g stories today of men who are trying to break into U uncle n c I 1 e sams money box he keeps his p pile I 1 I 1 e you know in the united S states t a t es e s treasury and there artt in his bis vaults today this vast sum is under the charge of the united states treasurer a bright eyed active roan man of anity per hapa hap who stands stans not over five feet seven in his stockings and does not weigh more than one hundred bundred and fifty pounds he has not the muscles ot of a sandow and it bec he carries atries a revolver it is not to be seen seem still he is responsible for more money perhaps per naps than any other man in the world and when he took possession sams purse about two years ago be gave what is said to be the biggest receipt ever written for money actually transferred it was for the mans name is daniel N moreen and he is uncle sams chief wa watchdog ag I 1 called upon him this altern pon there was not even a mes fiener tto stop me at the door and I 1 walked right up and stood bide beside the asdik gsg desk before which he was sitting p ing away millions with a black ablack fountain fi bijj pen and he told me that with inthe iab lin last five days he had signed draftee draft te to the amount of with jt it I 1 lacked asked him some some questions as to the sm HaNie which he abe had charge of for uncle n nd ae was vim posted boated as to every cent of that stead steacy v stream of gold and silver and gen backs which flow at the tote fate of almost a million dollars a day in and out of the united states trea treasury tury said he you want to know ot of some of the ways is ia which uncle sam is robbed we well I 1 the they are tew jew the united states government govera meat loses very little money I 1 can tell you though trough there are many attempts of one kind or another to steal from it but first let me give you some idea iaea of rf the money which we have on box we have bave sven oven great vaults each ach of bi which contains millions in vaud noi thaia nothing but silver it i i in oliver p wor dollars and halves and ifie sum tow is more than poe one hundred bundled in ia vault at we have a lot of fractional adver and between two ano and three million dollars worth ot of gold coin vaults 3 and 4 are arc filled with national bank notes which come in for redemption and in vault no 6 we have a little matter of worth of mixed money for our daily use in vault no 7 there is a quarter of a billion dollars worth of bonds bonas which are held as security for the national bank circulation and in another vault we have worth of notes to replace worn and mutilated money which is unfit for circulation the total weight of the coin is tons and there are enough greenbacks green backs to carpet a farm the chief robberies attempted are in connection with the greenbacks green backs and most of these come in through the re demotion demp tion bureau I 1 will give you a messenger now who will take you to the chief of that bureau and I 1 will ask him to give you all the information you want with this treasurer morgan pressed a button an ebony messenger appeared he led me down into the appear base ae ment of the treasury building opened a door or iron grating and took me into a room where hundreds of thousands of dollars in all ail sorts of packages were alyin lying g about these pack ages were of 0 old id bills which had come in lor jor redemption some were corded up in piles others were neatly laid out upon i the he counter and others were still in the great boxlike box like carts in which they are carried from one part of the treasury to the other the packages were lying about just as they came from banks and as I 1 looked mr albert relyea the chief of the bureau picked up jup one of them and handed it to me Ih there ereis is enough in that handful to make you rich said he I 1 looked at the figures fi ures on its outside and found that I 1 had in my hand you have before you he went on as lie be i pointed hinted to about two bushels of ban bank note packages on a desk at the right we handle in this bureau just about a million dollars of notes a day uncle sam gives new money for old we pass upon the old cut it into pieces and send it to the bureau of engraving and pruning printing where it is ground up into mush it there are any pieces of a bill left and it can be shown that the man holding the pieces has legitimately lost the balance we give him new bills we have replaced burnt money and money chewed into thousands of pieces A great many of the attempted frauds upon the treasury are from people who pretend that money has been destroyed when it has not and want uncle sam to give them a new supply here hem for in instance sauce is a job that ha haa been troubling me mel lor for some time ja said d mr relyea as he to look a hat handful of manila paper slips each the tho size of a bank note from a draw at his bis right and laid them before me on the corners or at the top of each slip there was a little piece of a bank note pasted some of these were pieces of 50 notes some of 20 20 some of exo 10 some of a hundred and several of a thousand none of the pieces weri were bigger than your little finger nail and they came as it was afterward shown from a hundred different notes those bits of money said mr relyea were brought in to me one day a few week ago by a slouchy looking advent adventurer urey who came from one of the backwoods counties ol of Pennsyl pennsylvania vaDia he brou brought golf them in in a pillbox and laid them b before me and told me he wanted the united states to redeem the amount ot of money which they represented I 1 asked him how bow the money had been destroyed and he told me his bis story lie said he was a peddler and that while out in oregon about a year ago he had made a lucky real estate speculation which had netted him this money he had brought back with him to his home in the east and had taken with him to his farm in in pennsylvania he said it was in the time of the panic and he feared to trust the banks so he buried it under the floor in his spring house bouse after a few weeks he went to ook at it and he found that the rats had gotten in and eaten it up these were all the pieces that remained and he wanted to know if uncle sam would not pay him back his 5 oooo the story was vet deiy y fishy continued mr relyea 1 I questioned the man but he stuck t to 0 his tale and I 1 finally told him I 1 would put the money in the handsol hands of our experts and see what they could make of it they pasted it ou on these slips and they found that it re presented pieces of wor worth of bf notes the fraud in toe case however was evident it was a thing that there was no piece from the middle of a note and that the rats had left only those pieces of the notes which had some printing on them to show their denominations nominations rie we told the man we could not allow him the moneys money he went away very angry about two weeks later he came back bringing three big rats nests with him he laid these down on the table and said there sir are the rats themselves you will find some of the my still in them I 1 found these after I 1 went home and I 1 have brought they down just to show you that I 1 have brentell been tell ing ina the truth my money has been ealen and I 1 want it all right said 1 I we will lok at the nests ests 1 I handed toem over bour to our experts and the pieces ot of mony money vereil k picked out we found that in the bests f there were the pieces of seven bils bills one of these was a hundred dollar bill another was a ten and there were five one dollar bills we at once saw that they were not torn by the rats but that they had been pulled apart by hand A rat makes a clean cut when it eats a greenback it does not masticate the whole bill but it cuts holes in it and gnaws out a piece here and there his notes were all torn in little pieces we then turned him over to the detectives they traced him and they found that he was as he claimed a farmer peddler who had gone to oregon and made there i 1500 by jumping a mans claim he had bad brought this money back to pennsylvania and had deposited it in a bank it is my belief that he drew it out in large bills say twenties fifties and hundreds he then pinched a corner ak or a little strip off of the top of each of these bills this would not be noticed and would not hurt his passing the bill and having it changed for smaller bills the small bills he would again deposit and again draw out the money in large bills pinching off the ends so that he finally got the pieces which made the representation of he was a great rascal and I 1 wanted chief brooks ot of the secret service to see him I 1 remember he came into the department that day with a rank cigar in his mouth it was so bad that I 1 had to tell him he must not smoke while in the redemption bureau he was loud in his language and very profane and I 1 told him he must not swear before the ladies it was shortly after this that we went up to see chief brooks mr brooks is a kind of a sunday school man he likes to warn boys against entering the paths of crime and before we came to b business i he told me of a sunday school meeting which he had just attended in philadelphia and a speech which he had made to the boys he then talked at length with the swindler while I 1 sat in the background when we left however I 1 saw the swindler throw his arms around mr brooka brook neck and heard him say this brother brooks I 1 am a good man I 1 never smoke I 1 never swear I 1 am a poor humble follower of the lowly jesus and I 1 want you to help me to get back my money 11 the rascal had heard brooks remarks about the sunday school and he thought he could work upon him in this way 4 Is not money often lost through the counters mr relyea I 1 asked you have a large number of women here who handle hundreds of tiou thousands sands 0 of i dollars a day I 1 should think it would be easy to slip out a bill now and then such a thing is impossible replied the chief the money all comes to us do done ne up in in packages from the banks the amount in the package is marked and the woman who counts it is responsible for the amount she receives they come in packages of a hundred bills it the packages are not as marked the woman must report them at once to the chief and the bank stands the loss if she makes a mistake or passes a counterfeit she must make the mistake good after the money is is counted it is cut lengthwise in halves and one half goes to the Secre office and the other half to the counters of the registers office here it is recounted and there is in fact no chance for the slipping out of hills bills as you call it we had however one case of this kind and the women who did it probably stole thousands of dollars from the government this wo mans name was mrs ernestine becker she bad been in the department lor for twenty five years and she was appointed through the influence of president johnson she was considered a very good counter and up to my taking charge of the redemption bureau she was not suspected toward the last of her career however she grew reckless she spent a great deal of money she came to the department every morn morning n g in her carriage with her driver in I 1 livery ivery mr hyatt was treasurer at that time and he and I 1 usually walked down together because we were too poor to afford a carriage carnage I 1 saw this woman and it seemed strange that she should live so well on 1600 a year she had a house in the city and one in the country and she had sent her boy to europe to be educated upon inquiry it was stated that she received a fortune from the death of relatives another thing that created suspicion was the fact that it was discovered that she had one name in the department and another outside she had been married twice and on the treasury rolls her name was mrs becker while outside she was mrs smith well one evening we found an error in our accounts and this error was traced to mrs deckers beckers desk I 1 asked for her the next morn morning ing intending to give her a little scold scolding i ng lor for her carelessness she was not present she had remained away from office without leave this had happened quite frequently and I 1 gave orders for her papers to be examined and for the money she had counted to be gone over there was only the account of three days which had not yet been sent to the macerator mace in the money she had counted during those three days ays we found that she had stolen and she had probably been stealing tor for no one knows how bow long at the rate of and upward per day she accomplished her thefts in a curious way she would take ten bills and by tearing and pasting so manipulate akem them that she would make ten short bills out of nine ordinary bills this done she would put the tenth good bill in her pocket I 1 dont know whether she did her work at home or at the department I 1 have understood that the trick dates back to the days of the war there is no telling how much she stole she had a lover who I 1 think was the chief devil in the plot he was a married man and it was shown that she had loaned him lar large ge sums of money the woman died ot of cancer not long after she was discovered I 1 do not think she was ever sent to prison the most of the money which comes to the united states treasury from the banks is sent in by express it is wrapped up in in packages about the site of a square loaf of bread and the bank that sends the money puts its seal on both ends if this seal is broken the treasury Depatt department ment refuses to receive the money if it accepts it and the money is short it is a question whether it was stolen by some of the employees of the department or by one of the bank clerks A number of instances are known of such packages being opened and ot of nothing but strips of newspapers being found in the place of the notes in such cases if the express company pany cannot prove that the theft took place at the bank or at the treasury thel they pay the bill and refund the money the tie chiet chief of the redemption bureau during 0 my visit sent for a package of f worth of such money it came from a national baneat bridgeport conn he showed me how the express messengers sometimes took a hot knife and raised the seal and were thus enabled to get out the bundle of greenbacks green backs and to put in their places bundles of newspaper slips he says that this form of stealing grows less however from year to year and that the express companies now put such packages in safes which are not opened until they reach their designation not long ago a package of came looking apparently all right on being opened it was found to contain only soo the other having been stolen the express company made good the loss A noted express robbery was that of Q a clerk named winslow this occurred in 1876 winslow took a package containing in boo notes which had been put up and ordered sent to the national bank of illinois winslow knew that this package was to be sent out he prepared an envelope just like one of the regular official envelopes and had it filled with blank paper he had sealed it with the office seal and when he got his hands on the package of genuine tune notes he put it in his pocket and ana substituted his blank paper package for it the fraud was of course at once discovered and within a month the secret service bureau were on the track of the thiel thief he had grown frightened and had left a package containing at at the home ot of the chief of the secret service this was traced to him and he was arrested convicted and sent to prison A clerk named halleck hal leek created a bi big sensation about a year before this he e was acting in the c cash ash room of the treasury department and he had a confederate in in the shape of a saloonkeeper in washington named ottman he |