BIG YACHT MANNED BY SMUGGLER GANG.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18012, 24 November 1926, Page 8

BIG YACHT MANNED BY SMUGGLER GANG.

VESSEL THAT FLEW IMPERIAL CLUB FLAG. (Special to the “Star.”) BERLIN, October 1. A gigantic smuggling conspiracy, which, it is believed, has been in operation for several months, involving millions of marks in loss of deities to the State, has llaen discovered by the police and Customs authorities. Ten persons, including a Berlin banker, are under arrest, and detectives arc hunting for several missing suspects. The chief of the gang is the owner Of a large and handsomely appointed motor-yacht flying the flag of “The Imperial Yacht Club“—a club which still exists under that title though its one-time patron and commodore, the ex-Kaiser, is no longer an emperor. Pleasure or Profit? This yacht, the Nixie, was a familiar craft on the waterways leading from Berlin to the Baltic, and it has only just been discovered that its ostensibly pleasure cruises were really smuggling expeditions. Tanks capable of holding 660 gallons of spirits were so cunningly built into the structure of the yacht that there was no visible evidence of their presence. Working in co-operation with this yacht and constituting a sort of “rum row” -On its own was an auxiliaryengined Schooner called the Pelican, which was kept as a floating base for. spirits in the Baltic beyond territorial limits. Banker's Part. The now-arrested Berlin banker financed this part of the organisation. Foreign distilled spirits, whose source is still a mystery, were loaded into the Pelican and later transferred to the tanks in the motor-yacht Nixie working from the shore. Then the spirits were landed on dark nights at various remote villages on the waterways running through the countryside beyond Berlin: Here they were pumped from tanks into casks, which were afterwards collected and distributed by other members* of the smuggling gang to Berlin agents. A raid by the police on a suspected garage where a large quantity of spirits was found led to the unravelling of the conspiracy.