A COLOSSAL SWINDLE BAULKED.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 2, Issue 574, 21 September 1880, Page 2

A COLOSSAL SWINDLE BAULKED.

A few weeks ago Mr Thomas Hollister, an ex-Telegraph clerk, was arrested at San Francisco by a Chicago detectire charge of having conspired with. certain speculators in the Far West to create a Wall Street panic in the Pacific mail and mining companies stock. The method by which this project was to be executed appears to be the offspring of Mr Holliater's fertile brain, and he had been: fully empowered by his associates to put it iu practice, when the whole enterprise was suddenly fuatrated by his seizure. • He had conveyed a galvanic battery and an isolated wire to a desolate spot in the Sierra, not.far from Battle Mountain,, where he proposed to out the service wires'-' connecting California with the Eastern States, and by means of his own apparatus to telegraph the following amazing despatch to the agents of the Press Association at Chicago :—' This morning about ten o'clock a. huge tidal wave swept over San Francisco, destroying the entire' city, and surging up farther, inland until-' Sacramento and Stockton were flooded ten feet deep.. Simultaneously a fearful : . earthquake convulsed the whole State, the heaviest shook being'sustained by - Virginia City and the neighborhood. Comstock Mines completely choked up.Further details of catastrophe' are yet ■•' wanting.' Mr Hollister's enterprise would ' have been carried out. some days before ' his arrest, but for an unexpected fall in Comstock shares, which' induced his associates to postpone their coup until . this particular stock should have some-, ' what recovered itself. Meanwhile, thiChicago police got wind of the soheme, and ran the chief ''speculator' to earth just in time to avert one of the ' biggest things' in swindles ever yet devised by Transatlantic astuteness. ■■■