BOY'S 80 BURGLARIES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 17983, 7 January 1922, Page 2 (Supplement)

BOY'S 80 BURGLARIES.

EXPERT SAFE OPENER. t GIVES POLICE DEMONSTRATION. Two Newark, New York, detectives saw Leonard Hoffman, 19 years old, wandering, about recently, and he acted so suspiciously that they took him to headquarters. Then they sat down to question him, and the first question they asked him was what he did for a living. ''I'm a burglar," the boy said calmly. " Of course I live at home with my mother and father, hut I never work." "How much of a burglar are you!' 1 one of the detectives asked. "Well," the boy said proudly, "I've robbed at least eighty places since I began eight months or so ago. I'm a sharp. shooter with a revolver, too. I shot a guy about three months ago." "Whore was this?" "In Fourteenth Avenue," said young Hoffman, " I was picking the leek on a garage there and two men across the street yelled at mo. I pulled my gun and let thorn have il I aimed at one guy's stomach, but I hit him about an inch lower down, I think." Young Hoffman went into details about his brief but exciting career of crime. He gavo tho addresses of thirty storert and houses which he> said ho had robbed. Most of his burglaries were small ones, as he only took cash and clothing, but he said that in his list were included about fifteen

garages, from which ho stolo tools and aatomobiles in which ho rode for awhile and then abandoned. When the detectives asked him how ho got into the stores and garages and houses he said that he usually picked the door locks, and to prove that he could do this he picked three locks which the dcteotives handed to him. Ho said also that ho could open a small safe by manipulating the combination, and opened a. thirty inch safo in 'headquarters within a few minutes. Re told the police that ho had opened perhaps half a dozen small house safes, but he usually had bad luck, because few of them ever had any money in them. l)toU-jctb t ,3 W'!; to the boy's honso Rpd said afte T ward uat in his room they feitiud six revolvers, all of them fully loaded, and one of them a heavy calibred weapon. Young Hoffman boasted that when he went out on a "job" he always carried two *r;v,lv9rK, aim volunteered the information that he was a bad man to interfere with. " I can shoot with either hand," he i'aid. " and when I pull down on a man I can hit him wherover 1 want to." The police have verified tho boy's Btory to the extent that they have learned that robberies occurred at many places which he said he had robbed, and they have also learned that a man was shot in the abdomen on Fourteenth Avenue al'oiit three months ago. The. police report on the Taylor case said that he was shot by an unknown assailant opposite a garage.' Taylor was in tho hospital for six weeks, and was then sent home,