U.S. STAMP THIEVES.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 258, 31 October 1929, Page 15

U.S. STAMP THIEVES.

BIG LOOT AND BIG PROFIT.

NEW "RACKET" FOR GANGS.

ASSISTED BY BROKERAGE SYSTEM,

The stamp collecting craze is a arniliar enough activity of -well-to-do lderly nlen and eager little boys. But o picture "criminals engaging themselves a an avocation so, apparently innocent 3 something of a surprise. As in other elds, however, this sport, art, sciencewhatever you choose to label philately— aay be employed as just another remunrative racket. About two years ago the post office ,t Pawtucket, R. 1., was the scene of in elaborate and well planned early oorning hold-up. A gang got a\yay rith £50,000 worth of postage stamps; .bout 2,000,000 of them were of the wo cent variety. The average, unim.ginative burglar is lucky to cash in for 5 or 20 per cent of the real value of his oot. These stamp thieves probably ;ot 90 per cent of the value of their ich haul. A stamp stealing . conspiracy, which an all the way from New York and Brooklyn to Chicago, Cedar Rapids,and Charleston, was recently uncovered, with ialf a dozen arrests made and some twenty more accomplices wanted by he Federal authorities. From the point of view of the criminal ,vho directly purloins sheets of uncan:eled stamps, the beauty of the racket :onsiets in the fact that detection is ilmost impossible. United States stamps, unlike bonds or bank notes, ire unnumbered on the face, and, theretore impossible of identification. It is true that every sheet of 100 stamps is numbered in red ink on the white paper margin of the whole sheet; but since these margins are nearly, always removed before sale to the public the numbering is of practically no value. The Stamp Broker. But why is not any vendor of postage stamps immediately suspected of fraud? A two cent stamp is worth two cents, a sheet of 100 is worth two dollars. When a man comes into a shop and offers to sell such a sheet for one dollar eighty cents is he not, on the face of it, a crook? Nine times out of ten he is not a crook, but an honest broker pursuing a legitimate trade. All of the thousands of mail order houses in business throughout the United States are obliged to take payment in postage stamps for small articles of merchandise. One of these houses in New York, by no means the largest, takes in more than £1000 worth of stamps every week. The store must get rid of its stamps. Unlike the English postal system, the United States will not redeem them at their face value. Some buyer has to be found, therefore. So, throughout the United States, there are thousands of stamp brokers who make a practice of plodding the rounds of the mail order houses, buying stamps at 70 to 80 per cent of their face value, and reselling them to drugstores, stands, groceries, for v 00 per cent of their worth.» • ~•_-*.' Thieves, therefore, continue to-jemmy! post office windows and clean out the stamp drawers;;crooked mail clerks of large corporations calmly dump circular letters into the incinerator and pocket the stamps that the mail should have carried. One great telegraph corporation, for instance, spent two years and a lot of money trying to find outwhy ite branch office managers did not answer correspondence. i But the latest development is the widespread re-use of cancelled parcel post stamps. This practice may be best illustrated by the case of a drug store proprietor who was recently sentenced to thirty days in gaol. Using Old Stamps Again. This man maintained a substation in his drug store. He carefully saved the stamps on incoming parcel post packages, then, when customers wished tc send out packages he pocketed theit money, put the old stamps on the outfoing parcels and cancelled over tht ret cancellation marks. He might havt continued his profitable practice indefinitely had he not become over zealous with his, cancellations and practically obliterated the faces and values of the stamps, thereby annoying the centra' post office authorities. There has also, it seems, been a Con-siderable-amount of washing of cancelled stamps. This practice would scarcely pay with stamps of small denominations but could be made quite profitable wit} stamps of a value up to five or ten dol lars. It had been previously supposec that the black cancellations of ordin ary first-class mail did not yield readilj to washing, though it was well knowi that there was a good deal of illicii trade in revenue aiid registry stamps which-are cancelled in red. Most o: the recent arrests for stamp washing are the result of the widespread com plaint that the gum now used s on th< backs of stamps is of inferior quality which was, of course, put there by thi stamp washer.