BURGLARY A LA MODE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3443, 15 March 1932, Page 6

BURGLARY A LA MODE

THE NERVE THAT FAILED. A man named Johnny Sjogren has just been sentenced to 37 months' imprisonment with hard labour and a fine for an audacious theft that has made Stockholm laugh, writes the Stockholm correspondent of the London Times. By an ingenious plan in the best tradition of the "shocker" novel he stole from a safe in a branch office of the Tax Commissioners last month a sum of about 500,000 kronor (£28,000). Sjogren spent over a year in perfecting his plans, and he carried them out alone. He found out the name of the cashier at the Income Tax Branch office by the simple expedient of telephoning to the manager and asking what the name was. Once he had got the name, he looked up the cashier's address in a telephone directory, and by a ruse was able to obtain a wax impression of the key to his flat.

Armed with a duplicate key, Sjogren returned the same night and, letting himself into the flat, began his search for the necessary office keys, so that he might make duplicates. These keys he found in the pocket of the cashier's trousers in the very bedroom where the whole family were asleep. Sjogren easily copied the office keys and he got into the building without difficulty, but his copy of the safe key would not fit, so he had to steal • into the cashier's flat again, borrow the original key, and make another duplicate. But this key also failed to open the safe and he had to make another raid on the flat. A fresh duplicate was also useless. Sjogren declares that he paid at least 10 nocturnal visits to the cashier's home over a period of some months.

At last, after innumerable failures, the night carne when one more key he had made opened the safe in the office. But the safe was practically empty, and it was necessary for Sjogren to come back night after night, like a poacher inspecting his lines, before he found an accumulation of tax payments sufficiently large to be worth taking. Then he helped himself to bundles of notes to the amount of 500,000 kronor, and walked home, throwing his keys down the nearest street drain.

With the aid of a false passport Sjogren then went to Denmark, but the strain of his enterprise had begun to tell upon him. He began to act in a manner that aroused the suspicions of an hotel chambermaid, and oh information which she and the hall porter supplied, he was arrested at Malmo. The two hotel employees are hoping to divide the reward of 10,000 kronor offered by the Stockholm Insurance Company.