Evening Star Newspaper, July 26, 1931, Page 63

PART . 7. - = he Sunday Stae Magaszine WASHINGTON, B, G, JULY 26, 1931 Features 20 PAGES. HIGH SOCIETY OF CROOKDOM The “Spiders,” Who Weave Webs to Entangle Unwary Members of the Smart Set, Lay Traps That Net Thousands of Dollars—But the Public Seldom ‘ Hears of Their Lucrative Coups. HEN news broke that a gentleman had been ar- rested in Philadelphia on a charge of getting some- thing more than a million dollars by unlawful means from the pockets of “a high British personage” and some others, members of the crim- inal investigation department at Scotland Yard looked up in surprise and said, “Aha!” And their colleagues of Paris and Berlin doubtless also ele- vated their sophisticated eye- brows and made exclama- tions suitable to the occa- sion. For this looked like & charge of a “spider” crime, And among the specialists who study the ways of this most delicate, fastidious, aloof and delusive of all the denizens of the international underworld, it is generally accepted that “spiders” are not found in the United States; indeed, that they desert the favorable environ- ment of the luxury play- grounds of the Old World only in order to spin a little web and pull something par- ticularly soft into it on the transatlantic ferry, heading east again by the next boat nosing out of the New York docks. Here let me say that a spider is something 1nore than a gentleman, or, it may be, a lady, who spins a little web with intent to lure therein some weal'hy per=- son and strip him of a por- tion of his bank roll. Beicre he qualifiies for the title in criminal investigation de- partment circles (where they make subtle differen- tiations unknown to the common or garden variety of cop, who would bluntly term our friend a crock and let it go at that), he must be a high fiyer and he must operate in the international sphere and in high life— the term “high life” in this case including the plutocracy along with the aristocracy and upper circle of ¢the - demi- monde. HERE are spiders and spiders. They range 4 from the 2stute brain which wove a web around the celebrated “Mr. A.” and stripped him of a million dollars to the genius who éplayed” the South American, whom we must call “Mr. X.,” for 12 months before selling him an Elizabethan country house full of spurious antiques and old masters painted the previous year in an attic factcry on the left bank of the Seine; and from the siren who began to spin in a Palm Beach hotel the web in which she eventually caught her banker from the Amer- ican Middle West in a London hotel and took $25,000 - from him without leaving any sour feelings, to the Greek gambler who patiently went on weaving a web around the wealthy English Jew art dealer for two years before he caught him in it in the state room of a transatlantic liner and, after the expert banditry, asked the victim smilingly what he was going to do about it and got the furious but inevitable answer, “Nothing!” The sophisticated will understand why the crimes of the spider (Crimes? It seems a rough, hard word) are an Old World phe- nomenon, rarely known in the United States. The federated States of North America com- prise a rich, new land which sends wealthy travelers forth for long sojourns in the capitals and beauty spots of older lands, but does not in like manner receive the wealthy pleasure seekers and holiday-makers of the Old World, except, perhaps, to some extent in Florida, whose attractions as a Winter resort the rich and highly-placed of England discovered at about the same time as Al Capone. As both a psychologist and a romanticist, the spider is aware that so long as his potential prey remains at home amid familiar surround- ings and people and scénery he may spin end- less webs, yet the fly will never come into his parlor; but once get the millionaire, the wealthy aristocrat, the banker, the merchant prince, the potentate, the rich woman with a reputation to lose—get any one of these away from family mansion, ancestral castle, Summer estate or \ She has her sidelines. She introduces men with money to men who want money. By C. Patrick Thompson. Illustrations by Joseph Simont. the office, and waft him off for a playtime season to some foreign paradise—and who knows what may happen? These are the times when the blood quickens, the eye brightens, the old sense of adventure comes alive again. The protective crust is off. Normal defenses are weakened. In short and, to borrow the inexcusably crude phrase of one spider (it destroyed his web just as it was com- pleted and all ready for the fly—serving him right), the bacon is ready to be fried. The case of “Mr. A.,” now the Maharajah of Kashmir, who was pulled into as pretty a spider’s web as has ever been woven and paid $1,000,000 to get out of it, back in 1924, is one of the classic cases. I have known crime specialists to go into ecstasies over that affair. ERE we have a young Indian prince, heir to a throne and millions, on holiday in London and Paris. At a London charity ball he meets an attractive woman; in Paris she comes to his room—and so, at the moment con- sidered correct in these comedies, does the lady's husband. A million dollars will assuage the husband's wounded feelings and save the prince from being cited as co-respondent in a divorce suit. The prince, in a panic, pays. If this gets out it may ruin him. His uncle, the maharajah, is straitlaced. He has only adopted his nephew as heir to his kingdom and fortune anyway, and there is a strong rival on the scene already. All the factors and circum- stances are perfect. It would all look like a dream, too good to be true, but for the steely fact that spiders deal in dreams and weave their webs of such fantasies. They can do nothing with the threads of the commonplace and the everyday. There was only one thing wrong with that job. Too many spiders were needed to spin the web between India, London and Paris, and some subsequently got greedy and quarreled over the division of the spoil, and so, ironically enough, the whole affair was thrown out of court on the initiative of spiders warring for their “legal rights,” and the truth came out. Spiders figure more prominently in the pri- vate files of police departments and family lawyers than in the published records of crime. Some of the neatest and most artistic jobs have never got into the newspapers or brought their " perpetrators into the dock. For example: On a dull day last April one of the most in- teresting women in Europe set sail from Liver- pool, en route for one of the smaller and more tolerant South Americaf republics. A Scotland Yard officer saw her aboard the train, and two higher officers traveled up in that train and saw her off at the gangplank. She rather ap- preciated the compliment. Under the shelter of the dark roof she looked out at the gray drift of rain and wrinkled a noticeably pro- vocative nose, and shrugged. But she extended a slim hand to each of her escorts in turn. “Charmed,” she smiled, “charmed.” Men standing near glanced over with envy and curi- osity, for this was a notably elegant and lovely woman, dressed with taste, as befitted a duchess. ‘Wonderful how people rise in the world! In 1921 this duchesse was a hostess in a Paris night club, and her name then was Jenny—well, we will forget surnames in this article. But if you went back to 1911 you would have seen her, & barefoot tot, attending her mother’s orange barrow in the streets of Marseilles while the aforesaid parent went off with her shot of brandy (which was often). Just when Lucille (her baptismal name) took her first step in “spiderism” no one knows except Lucille, but we do know just when and ances and $75,000 in Bank of England notes in a jewel case. In following years she came back twice and in cer= tain circles was known as the queen of the baccaret clubs. Persons of rank, wealth and high repute went to play at her gaming salon and none had cause for com- plaint from first to last. The duchesse is typical of the high-flyers who flit from capital to capital and from exotic playground to exotic playground, according to the season, live by their wits and cause the police endless trouble. . She has her sidelines. She introduces men with money to men who want money, She assists, at a price, the socially ambitious, also moths anxious to “see life.” She has married off fat widows of 50 to gigolos and taken a commission from both parties on the deal. Further, she does a lucrative trade in introducing rich fools, young and old, to crooks who can strip them far, far away from her and her beat. ‘The particular affair as a result of which she had been “requested“ to leave England was something about which the full truth will never be published. In the Autumn of last year a gang of international crooks arranged to buy a French ancestral chateau, with con- tents, and resell. They sold to a wealthy Argentine cattle man, who intended to spend part of every year in France with his family. He bought, on an expert’s valuation, pictures, silver and so on. The price was well over $500,000. Well, the expert was “nobbled.” He passed as genuine some spurious pictures and works of art and, in all, let his client in for twice as much as he should have paid. The sale had no sooner been completed and the money secured and sent out of the country than the gang robbed the mansion, and not only stripe ped it of the few genuine old masters, silver; everything worth carrying away, but also clear- ed off the spurious pictures and objets d'art. No evidence was left of the original fraud. The police were sent after the robbers and failed to get them. The chiefs of the detective bu- reau got on the track of the truth about the affair, but without proof or captures there was nothing they could do. Our duchesse played the chief role in that coup. She had met in Paris the impoverished French nobleman who wanted to sell and she had conceived the whole ingenious scheme. She also found the buyer, whom she had met at Biarritz that season in a social way. Her share of the spoils is said, in quarters where these things are gossiped about, to have amounted to more than $60,000. She had arranged to repeat a somewhat sim- ilar coup in England when the C. I. D.— which now work in close touch with the de- tective forces of Europe and New York police headquarters—paid her a social call and sug- gested that a sea voyage would benefit her health. As the police of Paris and of Berlin wanted her, she thought she had better rest for a while in a certain Latin American republic whose legation does not inquire too closely into the antecedents of persons requesting visas, so long as they have' money. I have no doubt that even in the capital of that sub-tropical little land she will make things, hum. WHEREVER in England or Europe cosmo= politan society, and especially rich and socially ambitious Americans, settle during & season, there you find these sirens, or their hangers-on gathering like vultures for the feast, Some are highly accomplished blackmailers;