Word: derck
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Otto Van Derck was getting $15.50 per week as a clerk in Chicago's Amalgamated Trust & Savings Bank. A dark-haired, personable youth of 23 whose duties included handling the check entries in the A, B and C ledgers, he planned to marry on Thanksgiving Day. But last week Otto Van Derck spent what was to have been his wedding day in jail. He had confessed to aiding and abetting two of his B customers in a $54,000 swindle. His confession cracked in time's nick a dazzling plot to gut a life insurance company with...
...Otto Van Derck was taken in by two notable persons. Dave Barry was the notorious long-count referee of the second Dempsey-Tunney fight in 1927. Lately he has been running a saloon on Chicago's West Madison Street three blocks from Clerk Van Derck's bank. At Amalgamated Dave Barry kept a joint account with Joseph Baiata, a onetime barber who is supposed to have taught Charles Ponzi all that swindler knew. Joe Baiata served five years in jail for helping himself to $200,000 in a Massachusetts bank, and be fore that he helped wreck a big Buffalo...
Messrs. Barry & Baiata often overdrew their joint account at Van Derck's bank but always they made good ? until last April. Then one day Baiata invited Van Derck to drop by the Barry saloon for a friendly beer. Barry & Baiata explained that the saloon had just been redecorated and $172 was due the contractor. Would Van Derck honor a check for that amount until the brewery, as was customary, reimbursed them for the redecorating? Van Derck, to oblige, doctored Ledger...
Instead of covering the shortage, Barry & Baiata soon approached Van Derck with a proposition for "financing" in the same manner a "Barry Special" train to the Carnera-Baer fight in Manhattan. That, they said, would net sufficient profits to pay off the $172 shortage, leave something extra for all. The "Barry Special" was a flop, and Clerk Van Derck, now into the bank for $1,100, was asked to finance two concessions at the Chicago Fair ? a Chinese Show in The Bowery and the Hall of Champions where a stable of broken-down fisticuffers pummeled each other nightly. Both...