LURE OF LOOT.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 10 December 1924, Page 4

LURE OF LOOT.

OFFICIAL TURNS BANDIT,

£600,000 TRAIN HOLD-UP

CHICAGO, November 27

William Fahy, the Chief Post Office Inspector of the Chicago district, and one of the higlies-tpaid officials in the American postal service, became so interested in running down bank and post office robbers that he decided himself to organise the biggest theft in history.

This charge was proved before a jury last night, and to-day Fahy and James Murray a ward politician, who furnished the gunmen for Fahy’s job, were each sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary.

Their gang, consisting of 12 men, stopped a train near Roundout Station taking nearly £600,000 in cash and bonds, which had been carefully placed aboard under Fahy’s supervision an hour previously. Everything went well with the robbery until one robber lost his temper with another and shot him.

This injured man was captured, and when the doctors told him he had but a day to live, he confessed everything. He then rapidly, recovered. • The 11 Other robbers were also captured and confessed. They were sentenced to short terms of imprisonment. Seventy per cent of the loot has been recovered.

Leo Koretz, who swindled various investors of £1,000,000 sterling, and then disappeared, might still be free if he had exchanged his fine .clothing for somebody,’s overalls at the first opportunity. He absconded last December with half his loot, and ten months later was pleasantly established in Halifax, living at the best clubs, and the owner of a fine estate. But he had an inquisitive tailor, who found on the label of his coat collar a name that was not Koretz’s. The tailor told his banker, who earned the £2OOO reward. Koretz will face the court in connection with a great Bayano oil swindle. In his prospectuses he described a wonderful estate in Panama. From the investment of fresh “suckers” lie paid dividends to old ones. A committee finally insisted on personally visiting his Panama plantations, and about the time they arrived, to find that they did not exist, Koretz faded from view, only to be betrayed by his coat’s tell-tale label. Leo Koretz, .head of the “Bayano Trust, of Panama,” who was accused of swindling many wealthy Chicago people, fled from Chicago to Honduras, by aeroplane last December. Before leaving, he distributed £llOO,000 among his family, who later volunteered to turn the money over to the police to assist the swindled people. Koretz operated for several years, and was believed to have swindled his victinis of £1,000,000 through investments in fake oil companies.