VERY OLD FRIENDS.

Auckland Star, Volume LI, Issue 194, 14 August 1920, Page 19

VERY OLD FRIENDS.

CONFIDENCE TRICKSTER'S HATTJLS. NO DEARTH OF VICTIMS. (From Our Special Correspondents LONDON, June 'JB. In these clays It is really hard to believe that the confidence trick <an be worked upon any mnn, unlesj, as the saying gws. his "hnlr Is full of hnyseed" or his heart full of vinous trust In his fellow man. There must really be something iv London s atmosphere which still makes it profitable for confidence tricksters to ply their very ancient tnldp. for these men show no sort of originality in their methods, which are. to say the best of them, crude. Yet at the operated upon by a pins working the terribly stale "heln mc to distribute a legncy" wheeze, and with (to them) gratifying success. One of their best hauls was made from an American whom they

"picked up" in St. Paul's Cathedral, lured to a city tenshop, and gave such verisimilitude to the. old, old legacy yarn that the

'cute Yankee" pnrte<l with i'.'tnn, to show that he wns worthy of assisting Ihpm in Hie good work of distributing the "lejrncy" among tbe deserving poor. Annthei- victim was not an American, hut he cnuie from a land that has no particular re.ord for exporting "grass-green innocents." and since his "Vonfldence" appears to have been promoted tiy generous libations, and he suffered tlip loss of CSO, it would be ••iil»- rblng it In" too harshly to give any better clue to identity. A "had head" purchased at a cost of £.-.O (and possibly a few odd pounds oven is sufficient punishment even for a confidence trickster's victim in the year 1020. though I doubt very much whether, if he appealed against his "sentence" to a Jury of his own townsmen, they would prnnt any material remission.

To rend in the London papers and to hoar personally tales of men "taken In and done fur" lij "C.I-V gentry is like a brepze from the ocean of lost youth. One run conjure up visions of loose years of Jubilee \S7 ami t>7, when si'.i'h "virtuosos" as Cooper, Rnwer, mid Ilnmiltnu. Thompson and McXally. Seph and "Serzt." Macdonald. Itohins.m aii.l Connor fleeced the unwary under the very noses of a keen but Impotent police, or when, a little later, those immaculate dandies I)'Arc v Mlddleton. Forrester, Lovelock, and Caasels, alias Castles, ran their rule over the intelligence of many of their fellow men, and found It lacking in breadth and depth, (ienerically the whole of this crowd was known as the "Australian (iang," but It Is an open question whether any of them really opened their eyes to mundane thlnsß beneath the Southern Cross. Still, for what they were, they did no discredit to the lands of their birth, and some of them were real "artists," Cooper being a coining example in his own particular vocation. It was a genuine pleasure to see this, the doyen of his profession at that time, at "work." As some people to-day would say, he was "it" as regards looks, dress, manner, and bearing, and he imposed on men who had cut their wisdom teeth on the bone of world travel. In a vastly different fashion •■Sergeant" Jlacdonnld was also "clever as they make 'em." But he hunted lowlier paine. and really took much bigger risks than Cooper, whose victims were always among that class of people who deemed exposure of their folly a punishment ten times worse than the mere loss of money. As a matter of fact, I do not think Cooper was ever gaoled in England. and it was only "a woman scorned" who brought McNally nurt Thompson to grief. Connor blundered into a "seven year stretch" about the time of the Boer War, and the D'Arey Middleton quartet, were in trouble about the same time, and, if memory serves faithfully, were "put away" for fairly long spells. But those who suffered all went outside the sphere of operations generally Included In the term "confidence irlek," which, played according to the rules, tseems to be about the safest form of swindling ever devised by man, because the victims In nine cases out of ten "jib" nt figuring in police have, in five cases out of six, a hopeless task to secure a conviction.

But the marvel of it all is that in these days there are men—and men who have at any rate travelled a few thousand miles — who can be "had" on any variant of suci\ an old-stager of the trickster repertoire as the "legacy for poor people" It "passeth understanding."