WENT ASTRAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 78, 2 April 1932, Page 3 (Supplement)

WENT ASTRAY.

RABBI'S SON. GAOL FOR RECEIVING. MOST APPALLING CASE. Arthur Jack Klein, the 31-year-old financier, was sentenced at the Old Bailey to 21 months' imprisonment in the second division. He had been charged with receiving nearly £320,000 from H. Wise, otherwise Jacob Factor, and the Broad Street Press, Ltd., knowing it to have been stolen, and was found guilty of receiving over £250,000. On other counts he was found not guilty. After being out three hours the jury returned and said they had not agreed on their verdict. Mr. Justice Finlay told them it was of vital importance that tbey should agree. A juryman asked if he might be addressed on the question of direct and indirect evidence, and after Mr. Justice Finlay had given direction on the point, the jury consulted again and then announced that they had arrived at a verdict.

Fruits of Conspiracy. The judge, passing sentence, said that Klein had been found guilty of a series of counts relating to the receiving of moneys knowing they were the fruits of a fraudulent conspiracy. "I am entitled," continued his lordship, "to take into account your previous character. I think there is force in what Mr. Birkett urged upon me that you came under the influence of a stronger, and it may well be, a wickeder man, although I desire to express no views that can possibly be avoided about a person who is not here.

"The case was from every point of view —from the cruelty and the magnitude of the fraud —one of the most appalling gravity. With great hesitation, and after most anxious consideration, and only as the result of a decision I arrived at at the last moment, I have felt justified in not sending you to penal servitude, but you must know that an offence of this disastrous gravity must be visited by a severe sentence." The judge said that he would recommend the jury for exemption from further service for ten years. Klein received his sentence without emotion. Mr. Norman Birkett, K.C., for the defence, in mitigation, pointed out that Klein was the son of a Jewish rabbi held in the highest esteem in London and in England. In his summing up the judge said that they had heard of dummy directors, and secretaries who had done no secretarial work. They knew nothing about the companies with which they were connected, and they had signed anything they were told to sign. "That," added his lordship, "is a highly undesirable system, and those persons who are willing to accept offices on such terms as those may well be lending themselves to very gross frauds."