STOLEN THOUSANDS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 226, 24 September 1927, Page 23

STOLEN THOUSANDS.

TAKEN OVER FRONTIER IN TEDDY BEAR.

A teddy bear staffed with 400,000 Polish zloty, or about £10,000, was the means repeatedly employed by a trio of bank robbers to smuggle 1,300,000 stolen zloty from Poland in Germany. Wheq a man stepped up to the cashier's cage of the Disconto Bank at Frankfort-on-Main recently, with the request to change 500,000 zloty into German marks, the large amount made the cashier suspicious. The bank communicated with its Brealau branch and was told that the bank notes were 0.K., but attention was called to a bank robbery recently committed at Krolewska Huta. Investigation led to the arrest of a postal clerk, Karl Kessler, who had a key to the strong room of a bank at Krolewska Huta. He confessed to having hidden the money with a pal, Gottfried Ciesslik, who gave it to his wife for safe keeping. The same night both men skipped across the frontier. A few days later Mrs. Ciesslik stuffed as many of the stolen zloty as she could into a teddy btar which she gave her little girl to carry and so also got across the border withoti a hitch. She repeated this trick a mint be of times.