SUMMER HOLIDAYS

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 November 1931, Page 2

SUMMER HOLIDAYS

U.S.A. PRISON SCANDAL. A widespread American FederaJ prison scandal, pivoting on the ability of wealthy New York convicts—chiefly stock racketeers and bootleggers—to purchase summer vacations from hot prison cells for the more pleasant confinement in army detention camps, has been under investigation by the Department of Justice for several weeks (says the ‘San Francisco Chronicle’). Federal agents working in New York under J. Edgar Hoover, chief of th# Investigation Bureau of the Department of Justice already have traced 70,000 dollars in bribes pail by convicts or their friends to officials in the prison administration. The cost of the bribe-induced “transfeis” has varied from 500 dollars to 1000 dollars.

Three Manhattan jewel smugglers already have confessed that they paid 2200 dollars to graft-taking Government officials for their removal from Atlanta to Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island.

They were discovered enjoying the summer breezes of New York harbour by United States Attorney George Z. Mcdaile at a time when the Federal Prosecutor in New York believed they were safe in Atlanta—to which he had heard them sentenced only a few weeks earlier.

A check-up revealed that other important prisoners, mostly those who had battled prosecution with huge financial reserves fleeced from stock market suckers, also had been transferred from the Federal Penitentiary in Georgia. John T. Locke, playboy broker of Broadway; was discovered at Fort Wadsworth discussing financial questions with his fellow-prisoner, George Graham Rice, notorious operator in blue-sky stock. The two recently had been transferred from Atlanta without benefit of publicity. Before they left the prison a third member of the stockracketeering gentry, Harry Goldhurst, whose bucket shop was patronised by Bishop James Clannon, jun., was removed from Atlanta to the far more pleasant environment of Camp Meade, in Maryland. Transfer of bribery funds was made in several cases by postal money orders. Several of these have been seized and traced to deputy wardens, in one case to a prison chaplain.