FAT MEN AND FRAUD.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17345, 27 September 1924, Page 24

FAT MEN AND FRAUD.

STRIKING INSTANCES. According to the play, Julius Caesar distrusted loan men ; he wished to have men about him that were fat—-sleek-headed men. and such as slept o’ nights. In this lie showed less than his usual knowledge of human nature, for fat men arc more to l>e tea red in many ways that the lean kind, writes a “Thin Man” in the “Daily Mail.” Fat and fraud seem to go together, as witness the curious fact that the foremost swindlers of our time have been gross, bulky men. Instance, that wily hypocrite Jabez Spencer Balfour, whose “Liberator” frauds ruined so many thousands of poor investors. The thick neck and protruding paunch of Horatio Bottomley have been made familiar by a thousand posters ami photographs. Most gigantic impostor or all was Arthur Orton, the consummate villain who claimed the Tichbornc estates, and. based his claim on the most extensive foundation of perjury ever constructed. Ho was awarded fourteen years’ penal servitude for perjury and fraud, and deserved every hour of it. This soil of a 44 apping butcher, who pretended t » ho the scion of one of the oldest families in England, was a perfect mountain of a man. weighing goodness knows how many stone. Some years ago a Parisian banker grew fat and fraudulent. When he weighed several stone more than was absolutely decent, he filled a suit case with the hank's funds and went secretly to a. provincial town. There he spent his time in a. Turkish bath, and at the end of a month or so his own creditors would not have known him. so much of his fat had been taken .off. Deeming himself unrecognisable be boldly walked tbe streets, but the shrewd police arrested him He looked so unnatural with the skin hanging and flapping about him that they thought something must be wrong. They kept him confined and fed him well, and ere long he was as fat as ever again. Thereupon they had no difficulty in recognising in him the banker “wanted” by the Paris police for fraud and embezzlement.