MIDNIGHT COURT

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 120, 17 November 1936, Page 20

MIDNIGHT COURT

AUCKLAND CLUB RAID

SCENE AT POLICE STATION

The police raid on the National Sporting Club in Swanson Street, Auckland, on Friday night, when sixtyseven men were apprehended, had many interesting sidelights, especially at the police station (states the "New Zealand Herald'1). The preliminaries, such as taking the names of the defendants, were not without their human side, and the first Court pro- j ceedings, commenced in the main cor- j rider of the police station at midnight and, continuing into the early hours of Saturday morning, were perhaps the strangest Auckland has known for a great many years. There were so many defendants that some difficulty was experienced in determining the location of the Court. To have chosen one of the offices would have meant charging each defendant separately, which would have taken probably two hours longer than the method decided upon. The sixty-four men charged with being found in a common gaming-house were ranged along the corridor and a charge embracing them all was read and the conditions of their bail read out to them. Each man then came to the table at which sat Mr. L. S. Rickerby, J.P., and identified' his signature to his bail bond, paid his £3 bail, recovered his property, and was allowed to go home. PUBLIC CURIOSITY. The curiosity of man was well exemplified throughout the proceedings, from the time when the raiding detectives entered the club at 9.10 on Friday night until the last defendant left the police station at 4 o'clock on Saturday morning. The crowd of onlookers outside the club until the police van left on its final journey to the police station transferred its interest to the station for a while. As ;ixy gradually dispersed they were replaced with relatives and friends of the arrested men, and it was not until 2.30 on ' Saturday morning that the group of about thirty men and several cars showed signs of dwindling away, j

Recent articles showing the long hours worked by Auckland detectives were confirmed. Practically • every man engaged in the raid and its aftermath had started the day at 9 o'clock on Friday morning and did not leave the station until 2 o'clock the following morning.

Two stayed until the last defendant left for home. Most of those twelve officers were due to start again at 9 o'clock on Saturday morning. The circumstance that only three men in the club made their escape, and then only by taking a desperate risk in dropping from a window on to an iron roof eighteen feet below, was a tribute to the efficiency with which the raid was conducted.

The old superstition that Friday the thirteenth bodes ill in certain circumstances found its expression in the heartfelt exclamation of one defendant just as the Court was declared open. When the date1 of the offence was being read he said audibly: "What an unlucky day!"