Word: arsons
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Nobody knows. Perhaps a drunkard threw a cigaret in a wastepaper basket. Perhaps there was a short circuit. Perhaps radicals set the blaze. Captain Warms and, by no coincidence, the whole Ward Line leans to the last theory. If arson can be proved, the line will be freed of criminal negligence liability. The owners of the Vestris were sued for $5,000,000 in personal liability claims...
Into the business of arson enter three parties: 1) the owner of a well-insured establishment. 2) the middleman, 3) the firer. An arson-bound store owner can find many a middleman who, for some $2,000, will arrange a fire. But the middle-man can find few skillful firers. Bertha Warshovsky, Chicago's most expert firer, knows most of arson's middlemen. Some ten years ago she began to make money by fabricating and selling to arsonists a gadget consisting of a short candle tightly bound with kitchen matches. Price: $5 to $10. Later when she found...
Last June Chicago police rounded up many a middleman, announced that they had smashed a "million dollar" arson ring. Three weeks ago they decided to tidy up the last stray clue by picking up fat Bertha, whose only connection with the case seemed to be that her son-in-law had been arrested. Much to their surprise, she began to talk. Last week she was still talking, spouting a voluble stream of names, addresses, dates, fees...
...pocket, splashed it over the canvas, yanked the caricature from the wall, touched a match to it. The flames flickered out quickly, but the picture was ruined. Housewives fled screaming. John Smiukse was instantly arrested. While Mr. Birch-Field and Jere Miah II conferred whether to make the charge arson or malicious mischief, reporters found John Smiukse in the Tarrytown police station...
...hero of a U. S. cinema epic. Such is not the case. Viva Villa, with adroit omissions and exaggerations, makes Mexico's most famed outlaw an estimable child of nature, noble if crude, an illiterate amalgamation of Don Quixote, Dillinger and Napoleon, wrhose more serious misdemeanors, like robbery, arson, lechery and wholesale slaughter of prisoners, are excusable on the grounds of good intentions...