Word: derck
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Dates: during 1934-1934
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...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...
...glance wistfully at Abraham Lincoln Life Insurance Co., which had $13,000,000 of perfectly good assets. Working control could be bought for $400,000. Gathering about him a crew of sharpers, Mr. Baiata arranged to buy the company for $25,000 down, the balance in instalments. Clerk Van Derck provided the down payment from Ledger...
...ring-around-the-rosy scheme went askew in St. Paul, where a bank refused to honor Ehlers' signature. President Lindquist scurried up to St. Paul to see his wife and children, and pick up the unhonored draft. By no means embarrassed, Baiata calmly called on Otto Van Derck for another $25,000 piece of "financing." That was too much for the young bank clerk. Prompted by his 22-year-old fiancee, he told all to the police, who dubbed him the "world's biggest sucker." All he had received from the $54,000 actually swindled...