AMERICAN “CROOKS.”

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 28 August 1926, Page 11

AMERICAN “CROOKS.”

nPHEKE are 5000 American crooks in Paris, and they are teaching young Frenchmen of the better class, not the apaches, how to hold up jewellery stores and banks in the American manner, declares M. Rene Cassellari, former police commissioner of Paris and later head of the secret service of France. M. Cassellari, in explaining the new crime situation for Continental cities, said that American crooks follow capital in its flight to the various pleasure resorts of Europe, but they always come back to Paris to spend their ill-gotten gains. “It is hard to locate them,” he said, “because they do not frequent the gay and open places, but rather they stop at the smartest hotels, dress in the most proper manner, and are very difficult to tell from the average well-to-do American living, abroad. “We have become appalled in Paris,” he said, “at this daring form of robbery, and so many have occurred on the Rux de la Paix, one resulting in the murder of a jeweller in the Place Vendomc recently, that something must be done; and I am about to study the American methods of signals and other means for checking this form of crime wave.

“Jewellery store robberies have been so very numerous in Paris in the last six months,” explained the former police head, “that there is a constant alarm in gem and gold-selling circles. The odd part of it is that once we looked to the. apaches for most of our crimes, but now there is a new school of adepts in criminology, and they are recruited from the better-educated and the better-dressed element, and they aTe most difficult to apprehend.”