Adroit Horse Thief’s Career Ended

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30886, 20 October 1965, Page 15

Adroit Horse Thief’s Career Ended

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter) WARSAW. Many Poles are regretting the end of the career of the country’s most adroit horse thief whose exploits over 50 years read like a Wild West film story.

For over half a century Cyryl Hamak has pitted his wits against authority—no matter whether it was Tsarist, Ukrainian, Polish, Prussian or Nazi.

For most of that time he was regarded by everyone, fellow raiders and police alike, as the prince of Polish horse handlers.

In his prime he was more than a match for armies, let alone the police. No farm, no gentleman’s estate, no cavalry unit, no stable door was secure if Hamak decided he wanted a horse.

But now in socialist Poland, when the sound of a galloping horse arouses instant attention, when police patrol remote forest areas on new roads and helicopters can pick out a forest lair, there is no future for a man like Hamak.

Today, aged 67, he sits in prison awaiting trial on charges which could carry an eight-year sentence.

Sympathisers have written urging clemency for one who has roamed the forests all his life without identity card or home. There have been appeals that he should be allowed to sink into village obscurity. Hamak was thrust into his lifelong trade because of violence. His father, the overseer on an estate in eastern Poland, was axed in a quarrel with a farmhand. On that night in 1914 at the age of 16 years, Hamak crept to the stables and led off two fine horses. That was how it started. GIPSY DYES

He became expert at night raids and could tan a horse’s hide with gipsy dye so that the owner would not be able to identify it He led a band

of men who built camouflaged stables and paddocks in the dark forests where stolen horses could be rested until the hue and cry had died down.

Two world wars, the march of armies, the thud of bombing did not deter Hamak from his trade—it merely enlivened it with unusual opportunities. Towards the end of the World War I he served in the Polish cavalry and became a warrant officer, but he ended his army service suddenly, taking with him several dozen prime army mounts. Twenty years later he became a horse agent for the German Wehrmacht after the invasion of Poland. Combining profit with patriotism, he engineered the stampede of several hundred horses, causing chaos and enormous loss of supplies. Perhaps his boldest coup took place between the wars when he organised a dynamite attack on a train transporting 500 horses in central Poland. Almost in the tradition of an unlikely film story, he blew up the engine without derailing the horse waggons. Travelling hard by night, he and his men soon had the horses across the Rumanian frontier, where they were sold. Police Ambush The exploit he will probably cherish most was the time he evaded a police ambush at a country fair. Hamak heard of the ambush plan, sold off his stolen horses for others and obtained legitimate bills of sale. He convinced the police that the horses he now had were honestly acquired—which they were—and threw a lavish party to console them. Hamak was the first to

leave the party, taking 42 police horsey with him! In his 50 years’ career—until now—he has only once encountered trouble.. There was some talk in a police court about stolen horses but Hamak covered his trail so well that in the end he was only fined for trading in horses “without authorisation.” FINAL DISASTER

After World War 11, times became hard or him. The final disaster was the theft of a .pair of blood stallions from a Polish State stud farm.

To the handler a horse may be a horse, but to the Polish State the thoroughbreds represented tens of thousands of dollars in the markets of Britain, Ireland, the United States, Mexico and Latin America.

Hamak was arrested after a pursuit lasting several days and nights. As he galloped across a road he startled a car driver, who drove into the ditch, and the police were alerted.

Times may have got increasingly bad for him, but, as his sympathisers claim, “he never debased himself by engaging in any other profession.”