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Show Smugglers In Big Gold Rush 'Prospectors' Profit By Gold Price Changes PARIS, FRANCE There's still a gold rush in Europe of almost Klondike Klon-dike proportions, but the prospectors prospec-tors are men with limousines instead in-stead of burros. Their tools are the financial pages of the newspapers instead of shovels. The arrest of a smuggling gang with $100,000 in American currency curren-cy hidden in the fenders of a big American car led police on an international in-ternational hunt for a revival of postwar black marketeering. They discovered that the gang had been buying gold in Italy and Switzerland and selling it in Paris for an 8 percent to 12 percent profit, for dollars. The gold price in Paris was higher. Thus, on a single trip, they could net up to $12,000 for their $100,000 investment, a neat profit in any country for a three or four day job. The outbreak of the Korean war, with resultant large fluctuations iri gold prices. Is believed to have set off the revival of the smuggling rackets. They had flourished previously pre-viously just after the war, when all Europe demanded gold. A black market artist, for example, ex-ample, can buy a Swiss gold franc for between $8.40 and $9 in Zurich and sell it in Paris for just under $10 at the black market rate for the dollar. He can peddle the same Swiss franc in Brussels for $9.60. In Brussels, police said there was "'considerable smuggling" of gold into the country from areas where it could be bought more cheaply. Swiss authorities claimed there had been a slight decrease In recent re-cent weeks, but other sources attributed at-tributed It to the fact that gold canbe bought mora cheaply in Italy. |