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Show Jewelers in Constant Warfare on the Crook Other lines of business which suffer suf-fer from holdups und sneak thievery might find it profitable to study the methods by which 4,500 jewelry concerns, con-cerns, banded together in the Jewelers' Jewel-ers' Security Alliance of the United States, are making the operations of Jewelry crooks steadily more dangerous danger-ous and le$s profitable. The crooks have many triAs. For example, there Is the fruit eater. If the jeweler does not watch him carefully, care-fully, he will press a stone or ring Into an apple core or a squeezed orange and throw the fruit into the street for his accomplice to pick up. The gum chewer substitutes a false stone for a real one and sticks, the latter, by means of gum, under the edge of the counter until he gets a chance to remove it without being discovered. The umbrella carrier drops valuable articles into the umbrella um-brella and so on. The alliance keeps its members Informed In-formed about these devices, and methods for circumventing them. As a result, the value of jewelry stolen from members during 19l!0 was kept down to about 8111,000, which is surely a remarkable showing. Just recently the jewelry crooks have turned kidnaper. They go early in the morning to the home of a jeweler, jew-eler, stick a gun in his ribs, force him to their car and take him to his store, where he is made to open the safe and give up whatever articles the robbers want, This trick is new, but the alliance has already developed devel-oped a most Ingenious way to meet it. The crooks are smart, but the alliance al-liance experts appear to be just a shade smarter. Frank A. Fall, in tb Outlook and Independent. |