GENTLEMAN BANDIT.

Clutha Leader, Volume XXXIX, Issue 84, 6 June 1913, Page 7

GENTLEMAN BANDIT.

LED ASTRAY BY A WOMAN. In a remarkable confession garnished with quotations from Virgil and Cicero, a man named Joseph Taylor lias furnished the New York authorities with a detailed narrative of outrages committed by a gang of motor-car bandits organised under his leadership. The narrative solves the mystery surrounding a score of robberies executed in broad daylight by men who made use of motor-tars. It implicates 10 men, now under arrest, who acknowledged Taylor as their "captain." Taylor, wno is of good family, refused to divulge his real name. He says that lie was brought up in pious surroundings and enjoyed a university education. He traces his downfall to his recklessness in exhibiting a large oil of banknotes in a publichause at Harlem, a district of New York. After chatting on that occasion with several strangers he remembered nothing more until he awoke, sick and dazed, in a strange house. A woman, he says, nursed him through a dangerous illness and taught him to smoke opium and to use morphine. After he had spent months in idleness the woman suggested to him that he could earn money by organising a gang of motor-car bandits. He made acquaintances among chauffeurs and enlisted a company of 10, whom he supplied with revolvers, which they returned to him after' each outrage. Taylor says that the first enterprise was to steal motor-car and attack the proprietor of a publiehouse while on the way, as they supposed, to his bank._ He and his companions left their victim senseless iu the street and hurried across the River Hudson in the ferry, only to discover that a bag they had stolen from the man contained nothing but a dozen napkins, a few towels, some fish and a sandwich. Their subsequent robberies were always carefully rehearsed beforehand, so that each member of the band knew exactly what was expected of him. "I lever forgot I was a gentleman," says Taylor in describing the manner in which he maintained discipline among he robbers. He declares that the acquisition of a motor-car never caused him the slightest uneasiness, as he was always able to find a chauffeur willing o place his master's car at the disposal >f the robbers in return for a share in the loot.