Fraudsters and Charlatans (20 page)

Depositors who assumed that the overdraft from the Tipperary Bank was covered by Sadleir's landed property were dismayed to discover that Sadleir had lodged the property deeds with the London and County Bank, which was not about to give them up; indeed, it had already started to sell them to meet the loans it had made to Sadleir. That company survived, but its reputation suffered by association with Sadleir and there was an ‘extraordinary mania' among shareholders to sell their holdings, while the ‘evil notoriety attached to Mr Sadleir's name rendered the retirement from the board of those directors who were in any way personally connected with him imperative'.
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The Tipperary Bank laid claim to Sadleir's properties, but it was not until December 1858 that judgment was finally given in favour of the London bank.

The Tipperary Bank was eventually shown to have liabilities of £430,000, with total realisable assets of £50,000. The entire responsibility to meet the differential fell upon the shareholders, not only those who held shares at the time of the crash, but those who had held shares at any time during the three years prior to the crash. The efforts of some individuals to be removed from the list of liable shareholders resulted in legal battles that in some cases went on for years. Vincent Scully, who had been furious at the delays in selling his shares, was held liable and lost £8,000. His personal reputation remained unblemished and he was returned to Parliament in 1859, but the scandal was the end of political ambition for the Sadleirs. Frank and John, the sons of James Scully, had been left their shareholdings by their father. John, who was a farmer, was obliged to sell the lands and cattle he had inherited and lost in total £20,000. Frank fled to Paris, where the family disgrace continued to weigh heavily upon him and he was eventually placed in an asylum. Robert Keating asked to be removed from the list of those liable, saying he only held the shares in trust for Sadleir, but eventually judgment was made against him and he had to sell his family home to pay the debt. His political career was over, and the London and County Bank insisted he resign solely because he was John Sadleir's cousin. As the full details of Sadleir's depredations were made public, so rifts appeared between the Sadleirs and the Scullys that were never healed, and some branches of the families severed connections.

Wilson Kennedy's career was also shattered, and he was forced to emigrate. Farmery John Law, another innocent man tainted by his association with Sadleir, resigned his post and fled abroad. Thomas Eyre, who had loaned a total of £52,000 (over £3 million today), spent years of litigation to recover his money and was only partially successful. Smaller investors, the widows, spinsters and half-pay officers unable to meet the calls upon their property, were stripped of every farthing they owned, and many of the claims made by creditors against shareholders were never satisfied. The manager of the winding-up proceedings was eventually able to pay depositors two shillings in the pound.

Particularly aggrieved were the English shareholders who had been duped into buying at a premium. The optimists among them banded together, started a collection for a defence fund and took legal advice. The realists fled abroad. Judgment was finally delivered in May, and it was ruled that, despite Sadleir's frauds, the people he had imposed upon had become genuine shareholders in the company, entitled to share any profits of the concern, and therefore also responsible for the losses. Pursued by the lawsuits of attorneys who had bought up debts due to the company, many had to declare bankruptcy.

‘It is probable that the conduct of no private individual has been productive of a larger amount of social misery than that of the unhappy man who has now terminated a career of deliberate and deep-laid swindling by a deliberate and well-timed suicide,'
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commented the
Annual Register
. The Reverend Thomas of Melbourne cannot have been the only clergyman to preach a sermon on Sadleir as a terrible warning to young men.

The man best placed to throw light on the financial minefield that was the affairs of the Tipperary Bank was James Sadleir, who willingly submitted to questioning. As this proceeded, however, public sympathy gradually gave way to disquiet. James was clearly guilty of neglecting his duties to the bank in order to help his beleaguered brother, but had he really, as Sadleir had declared in his suicide letters, had no hand in the frauds? James, it was revealed, had deliberately concealed the agreement made on 15 March from the bank's directors, and lied to the July meeting, telling the directors that Sadleir's overdraft was £40,000 when he must have known it was nearer £200,000. The deed of 7 September had never been seen by the Tipperary Bank directors. False names for the directors had been entered on the minutes of a meeting that never took place – and those minutes had been written up by James. Letters were produced from Sadleir to his brother showing that James had full knowledge of the plan to produce false accounts, although James denied personal involvement. Most damaging, however, were documents showing that James had colluded in the fraud on the English shareholders. He had also been responsible for the preparation of false accounts in January 1856, which had been submitted to and approved by a fictitious meeting.

As concern became outright agitation for his arrest, James removed all doubt by fleeing abroad. His wife, Emma, declined to accompany him, and he settled in Zurich, where he was able to live modestly on a small annuity provided by her family. In the following year he was formally expelled from the House of Commons. He may have retained an air of prosperity: on the afternoon of 4 June 1881 he was enjoying a pleasant stroll when he was shot dead by a robber, who took his gold watch.

SIX

A Racing Certainty

O
n the evening of 30 November 1871 a warder at Newgate Gaol heard moans of pain coming from the cell of Harry Benson, who was awaiting trial on charges of fraud and forgery. The prisoner was found lying on his bed, his legs terribly burnt. In a desperate attempt at suicide, he had set fire to his straw mattress, and then lain determinedly in the flames. He survived, but was too ill to be tried until the following July, when he had to be carried into court.

Harry Benson was the 24-year-old French-born son of a respectable Jewish merchant. Educated in London and Paris, he was well dressed, spoke several languages and was an accomplished musician and composer. The previous October he had called on Sir Thomas Dakin, the Lord Mayor of London, claiming to be the Marquis de Morancy, Mayor of Châteaudun, and bearing a letter of introduction from Monsieur Léon Say, the Prefect of the Seine. The Mansion House Fund for relief of the French had been set up during the recent Franco-Prussian War, and the Mayor was happy to give the Marquis a cheque for £1,000. It wasn't until the following month that the visit was mentioned to Monsieur Say, who replied that he knew nothing of the Marquis and had not written the letter in question. The culprit was traced to his hotel and arrested. In his possession were address cards showing that he had been masquerading under several different names, and three passports. He had cashed the cheque, and all but £70 of the money was found on his person. His distraught father offered to make up the loss.

Benson was released from prison in July 1873, still unable to walk. An aunt and uncle paid for his lodgings in Helena Road, Dalston, with Henry Avis, a 62-year-old customs officer, and his wife Ann, aged 52. Assuming the name of G.H. Yonge, he told them he was recovering from a railway accident. At first he had to be carried up and down stairs, but as time passed he was able to get about on crutches and eventually to walk with the aid of two sticks. His family paid for his accommodation, but, unable to live in the style he felt he deserved, he was obliged, much against his inclination, to look for work. In February 1874 he answered a newspaper advertisement placed by a William Kurr who wished to employ a man to write articles. Kurr, born in October 1850, was the son of a master baker and lived with his family – including two brothers and two sisters – in the Caledonian Road. The boys, and especially William, ‘were known among the neighbours as shrewd, quick-witted and “able to take care of themselves”'. As children, they did not use these considerable talents for crime, but after the early death of their mother, ‘the want of a mother's training hand, a wretched home, and a money grubbing father, soon alienated the youths from the path of rectitude'.
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They were educated at Messrs Burbidge and Ridgeway's academy at Pentonville Hill, where the members of what was later to be a betting fraud gang first met. When William Kurr left school, his father sent him to work as a clerk, but the boy's experience of honest toil was a brief one, which held no appeal. From the age of 15 he preferred to live on his wits. The experience of his eldest brother, Louis, who became a heavy gambler and died aged 26 in 1873, should have warned him of the dangers of a misspent life, but he was not deterred.

Unlike the small, frail Benson, William Kurr was a large, ruddy-faced man, who might have been taken for a farmer. To begin with, Kurr viewed Benson as just another employee, whom he paid five guineas per week, but in time the two men began to know and understand each other and to recognise that they were both rogues with very special talents. If they had never met, it is probable that they would have continued their lives of relatively minor crime. As a team, however, they could achieve very much more. Kurr lacked subtlety but had energy, determination, an abundance of nerve and was adept at directing a team of loyal confederates. Benson had polish, education, an air of refinement and a flair for smooth persuasion. It was the perfect combination.

Kurr's area of expertise was the racing and betting world. The Betting House Act of 1853 had made the running and advertising of bookmakers' shops illegal, but by an oversight that was widely exploited this prohibition did not apply in Scotland, where such businesses became common. Kurr was not, however, content to make money from bookmaking in the usual way, since he could make far more by operating fraudulent schemes that offered customers a system in which purportedly they could not lose. There is never a shortage of dupes who want to believe in a sure thing, but Kurr's idea had two drawbacks: he was never able to attract those with the most money to lose, and his businesses hardly got going before angry punters became suspicious and he was obliged to shut up shop and move on to avoid arrest. This was a trouble and expense he wanted to avoid.

There was another part of Kurr's business essential to his continued success: he needed early warning of when the police had become alerted to his latest scheme so that he could be sure to depart before he was arrested. The best possible source of information was, as he soon discovered, the police themselves.

In November 1872 Kurr had been enjoying a drink at the Angel Hotel Islington with one of his associates, Edwin Murray, when a stranger joined their conversation. Kurr revealed that he was a bookmaker, and his new acquaintance introduced himself as Sergeant John Meiklejohn, of the plain clothes detective division of Scotland Yard. Meiklejohn was anxious to find opportunities of augmenting his modest police salary by whatever means were available, and it was soon apparent to the two men that they could be useful to each other.

In February 1873 Kurr started a new business in Edinburgh, Phillip Gardner and Co., but when one of his men was arrested he was obliged to return to London. There he again met Meiklejohn, who hinted that he thought Kurr might know something of the Gardner business. With things looking a little warm, Kurr decided to spend six months in America, which gave him just enough time to promote another swindle. This was unsuccessful, and on his return to London Kurr received a message from Meiklejohn suggesting that he could get Kurr off the hook on the Gardner case. The offer was accepted, the policeman received £100, a letter was sent to the Edinburgh police and Kurr found that he was no longer a suspect. Other transactions of a similar nature were to follow, but by now Kurr was dreaming of bigger things. To give his business the look of quality it required, however, he needed a man of education to write his promotional material.

Harry Benson was a vital component of Kurr's plan to move into the big time. Benson dealt with correspondence and prepared circulars, his literary abilities giving the operation a veneer of quality and respectability. New legislation in 1874 extended the provisions of the Betting House Act to Scotland, so Kurr decided to look further afield, advertising his schemes in foreign newspapers. In July 1874 the two men were operating in London under the name of Archer and Co., with the Systematic Investment Society – yet another betting swindle – concentrating on attracting business from France. Money poured in, and was collected from an accommodation address by Harry Street, one of Kurr's messengers. They made £4,000 (£240,000 at today's values) in just six days, but then the scheme suddenly collapsed when Street was arrested by Chief Detective Inspector Nathaniel Druscovich, considered one of the best men in Scotland Yard and responsible for the investigation of foreign frauds. Kurr was obliged to close down the London operation and move to Glasgow, where the business continued as the Paris Discretionary. Before long the gang had made another £8,000.

Kurr was now a well-to-do young man, partly because of a legacy from his father, who had died in 1873 unaware both of William's illegal activities and the fact that he had brought his younger brother, Frederick, into the business. Kurr soon acquired a home at Marquess Road, Canonbury, a public house – the Oxford Arms, in Islington – and two racehorses.

Benson, too, was at last able to live in the luxurious style he craved. He took Rosebank house in Shanklin, in the Isle of Wight, where he kept two carriages and employed his former landlady, the recently widowed Mrs Avis, as his housekeeper, and a French valet. He also bought and edited a local newspaper and moved in the best society. Although he still called himself Yonge, he let it be known that he was a French nobleman and an intimate friend of the Empress of Austria. Most people took him at his own report, but when a Captain Harvey decided to check his antecedents, Benson was obliged to change his story, claiming to be an agent of the French government entrusted with handling large sums of money. Mrs Avis remained discreetly silent about his impoverished past.