FORGER GAOLED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 167, 18 July 1938, Page 5

FORGER GAOLED.

FRANK STATEMENT.

CLEVER PHOTOGRAPHER.

ENGLISH AND BELGIAN NOTES.

(Special.—By Air Mall.)

LONDON, June 24.

Friedrich Beckert, a German photographer brought to this country from Paris by Scotland Yard officers for forging English and Belgian banknotes, was sentenced at Old Bailey to four ; years' penal servitude.

Beckert, who is 40, pleaded guilty to forging £10 and £5 Bank of England notes and Belgian 1000 and 500 franc notes, and making plates for forging them.

Mr. G. B. McClure, prosecuting, said that a number of cleverly forged £10 and £5 English banknotes reached the Bank of England. Beckert was arrested in Paris for uttering a £10 Bank of England note and 16 of these notes and 27 £5 Bank of England notes were found on him. In Financial Trouble. Detective-Inspector Hatherill went to Paris and was able to trace through a laundry mark an address in Shoot-up Hill, CricfcJewood, where Beckert had lived with his niece and had carried on business as a clever photographic artist. Under some floorboards were found broken pieces of plates used in forging notes.

Beckert made a frank statement in which he said he came to England first in 1927 and learned photography at the Polytechnic. He opened business .at Shoot-up Hill in 1932. Afterwards he got into desperate. financial strait* and experimented with forging English, Belgian and German notes.

! Mr. McClure said Beckert did not appear to have passed any notes in this country, but he had uttered them in Brussels, Antwerp, Paris, Vienna and i Lille.

Thousands of Pounds. Detective-Inspector Hatherill said that according to the German police Beckert was arrested for armed robbery in Frankfurt in 1920. He was placed in a mental institution, and later transferred to a curative institution, from which he escaped in" 1921.

Altogether Beckert had forged, according to the authorities, German notes to the face value of £2500 and Belgian notes to the face value of £2092. He had said he had forged English notes to the value of £5000, but he afterwards denied this.

He made about 300 of the 500 franc Belgian notes and 143 of the 1000 franc Belgian notes. He sold the Belgian notes to three men of Jewish appearance in a London restaurant.

In 1937, the statement went on, he decided to make English £5 and £10 notes. He left London by aeroplane for Paris and changed several notes on the day before he was arrested there.

The statement also said that he buried a tin box containing forged notes to the face value of £5000 under the floor of an old barn in this country. Mr. Donald Sumner, defending, suggested that Beckert was "not quite normal." He had been manager of a firm in London at £10 a week, but the firm "went smash," and he fell to the temptation of forging the notes. He had served nine months in France before being extradited, and the German and Belgian authorities might still want him for the eame activities.

The recorder told Beckert that so far as deportation was concerned he might have abused the hospitality of this country, but it was a matter test considered by the Home Office.