CHARITY FRAUDS IN U.S.A.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 201, 15 July 1936, Page 8

CHARITY FRAUDS IN U.S.A.

Tiie depression in the United States, while tragic for millions of people, appears to have been tlie means oi adding millions of dollars to the criminal .element of the country. The depression loosened people’s purse-strings, and donations to charities were the vogue. AVhen the word “charity” became an open sesame to almost everybody’s purse, racketeerdom was quick to learn the magic of the word. Eraudulent “welfare groups” sprang up by the dozen, as sharpers made a determined and successful effort to share in the golden harvest. Thousands of kind-hearted people who thought they were giving to charity, simply helped to toss millions into the coffers of sham benevolent societies, spurious missions, bogus religious societies, counterfeit ministers, and trump-ed-up institutions, to tlie detriment of really deserving charities. When a crook assumes the legal status of a “church,” “tabernacle,” or “synagogue,” lie can literally loot some towns for contributions, and still remain within the law, because in most of the States of the American Federation the law permits religious organisations to solicit funds without an official permit. A New York jurist recently estimated the combined “take” of ten such organisations, all known to be spurious, to be more than 1,009,0UU dollars (£200,000) a year‘in that city alone. A charity’s name is no index of its worth. Such titles as the “Gates of Mercy . Centre,” the “Haven ot Relief,” the “Federation of Churches,” the “United Veterans’ Relief Association, Inc.”, and “The Lighthouse, Inc.”, are among the long list of questionable organisations. “Committees” of prominent persons, printed on letter heads, or impersonated on the telephone, are untrustworthy. A spurious charity is quite likely to be “sponsored” by an imposing list of judges, business men, mayors, aldermen and senators, none of whom have ever heard of it. Some of the frauds have been so barefaced that one wonders how the operators negotiated them. “Rabbi” Jacob Dienenfeld was the “founder” of the “Downtown Centre” and the “Downtown Synagogue.” The “synagogue” occupied the second floor of an address in New York. It was fully equipped with signs Enouncing- in English and Yiddish that services were held there. The only services reported by the district attorney, who visited the place, were nine men and two 1 women in a “boiler room,” the latter in sharper’s language being a room equipped with a battery of telephones, and the solo “ritual ’ was a continuous telephone caiupaign to collect funds from tlie dupes on the New York telephone directory. A great deal of ingenuity is displayed in working these frauds and in not a few cases there is a strong suspicion that a measure of protection is afforded these undesirables from unsuspected quarters.