BOGUS PASSPORTS

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 January 1938, Page 3

BOGUS PASSPORTS

GANG BROUGHT TO BOOK. After more than a year’s investigation, an alleged bogus passport organisation covering half-a-dozen European countries, including England, is believed to have been smashed by the arrest of 31 persons, 22 of them in France. The most dramatic arrest was that of Paula Kantorowicz, aged 29, known as “La Belle Paula,” who, until recently, was a clown in a travelling circus in England••La. Belle Paula" is said by the French police to have been the leader oil an international gang, and she is described by members of the Paris underworld as “a person who seemed to exercise a kind of hypnotic power over the many international crooks she gathered round her.” The arrest of other alleged ringleaders followed, and Paris detectives, claim to have found £7OO worth of forged bonds, hundreds of official stamps—many of them stolen from embassies and consulates —printing, materials, and several hundred ready printed passports waiting for the “purchaser’s" name and photograph. Passports, sold chiefly to emigres from Poland and Germany in Paris, Alsace-Lorraine, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and other border States, fetched from £4O to £6O- The police further say that only microscopic examination enabled many of the passports to be distinguished from the originals.