Many Fortunes

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 44, 22 February 1936, Page 13

Many Fortunes

“RACKET ” OF BLACKMAIL. "Master minds’' of the fortunetelling "racket" are making fortunes by preying upon the credulity ot' women in all parts of Britain. In a police court case recently, reference was made to a woman who employed other women to "talk nonsense" to people about the future, paying live shillings in the pound commission on all the takings of their hired crystal gazers. “These ‘master-minds’—women who go in for clairvoyance and palmreading as a business, and who never themselves do any of the work, but employ small armies of often illiterate women to hoodwink the public, arc a menace to society,” Mine. Montagu Lawrence, of the Baker Street Institute of Psychology, said. "I have heard of one woman who in the course of six months made £IO,OOO profit from this nefarious business. She employs as many as 50 women in various suburbs of London, and hers.elf lives comfortably on the profits of ths palm reading business. "This woman started with only twenty pounds of capital. Wow she owns two big motor cars and has started to go in for greyhound racing on a big scale. In addition to her fortune-telling business, she acts as bookmaker in the East End. “Shady" Clairvoyance. "She is only one of many women who have made fortunes by jirctending to predict the fortunes of others. They are all part, these people, of that shady side ot' clairvoyance which the police vainly trying to stamp out. In some cases she pays the icnt of rooms in which her employees work; in others she supplies the paraphernalia—crystals cards, joss-sticks aud the rest—which the ‘fortune tellers’ use in their own homes. Out of every pound taken in these dens the ‘master mind’ rakes in fifteen shillings. "There is another and grimmer side to this ‘racket.’ In many cases the people employed to tell fortunes are instructed also to try to glean as much information about the private lives of their clients as possible. "This information they pass on to the ‘master mind,’ who frequently uses it to blackmail the unfortunate clients. I have heard terrible stories of the tragedies that have attended the activities of these unscrupulous people. I believe that in the interests of all honest practitioners of the science of psychology, these vultures should be tracked down and their dangerous trade swept away. ’ ’