HOLE IN POST GOVERNMENT WEIGHER COMPANY CHECKER The Case of the Seventeen Holes T By Harold J. Howland HE greatest sugar refinery in the world lies stretched out along the river front in Brooklyn. Five or six hulking, four-square structures, grimed with the breath of the city's chimneys and their own, fill the width of as many blocks. Dark galleries connect building with building high over the street, and huge pipes lead the liquid sugar from melting-pot to evaporating-pan. No casual visitor, they will tell you, has ever penetrated those forbidding walls. Secret processes, not even patented, are there hidden, so runs the gossip, from competitors' eyes. Along the riverside lie the docks where ships from Cuba and the other West Indian islands, Brazil, Peru, the Guianas, Egypt, and distant Java discharge their cargoes of raw sugar. This is the Havemeyer & Elder refinery of the American Sugar Refining Company of New York, a constituent company of the powerful Sugar Trust. Every bag of sugar that lands at those docks must pay a toll to the Governmenta customs duty of a little more than a cent and a half on the pound. But in six years the Sugar Refining Company landed at those docks seventy-five million pounds of sugar on which, by an ingenious fraud, not a cent of duty was paid. In those years there was stolen from the Government by that Company, the most important member of the Sugar Trust, nearly a million and a quarter dollars in short duties. Stolen is a harsh word, but let us quote the words of the attorney for the defense in the trial which ended in March : "The charge is that over a series of years the American Sugar Refining Company of New York has been systematically, in season and out of season, from 1901 down On the scales of which this is one, the sugar is weighed for the computation of the duty. The until the close of 1907, engaged in steal you are. Those stolen duties have just been repaid under the usual formal protest. And the cause of the restitution is to be found in the Case of the Seventeen Holes. As the sugar comes over the side of the ship it is weighed by the customs officers, and to that end there are seventeen big Fairbanks scales placed at intervals along the docks. Each scale has a platform eight or ten feet square, its surface flush with the surface of the dock, like the scales that you have seen so often outside a coal dealer's or a feed-store. The brass bar of the scale, where the weight is read, is within a little house fronted with glass, so that the weigher can see the platform and what is on it as he adjusts the poise. These scales, it should be remembered, belong to the Company, and its representatives keep the keys of the scale-houses, and are supposed to lock them every night. A few weeks ago I stood upon the platform of one of these scales, looking through the glass side of the scale-house. Behind the registering bar, facing me, two men sat, each with a small blank-book on the ledge before him. The man on my left pushed the poise along the beam till it balanced, and read off my weight, "One hundred and seventy pounds." Both men recorded the figures in their books. Then the other man leaned over to the left and dropped his hand into the dark corner under the ledge. Once more the weigher adjusted the poise-but now the beam balanced at one hundred and sixtytwo pounds. In two minutes I had, without knowing how, been robbed of eight pounds of weight. It was a little masquerade that we enacted. I represented a truck bearing four The man in the foreground is the Government weigher who was in the scale-house when bags of raw sugar. The man on my left Stepping from the scale platform, I went around into the scale-house. Taking the seat in the corner, I ran my hand down where my companion's had been a moment before. As I sat where a Company checker had sat every day for years, just by my left knee was a thick post supporting one end of the shelf beneath the scale bar. Under the shelf was a system of levers and joints which formed the connection between the registering beam and the rod leading to the platform outside. Between the post and the end wall of the scale-house was a space perhaps a foot wide, as dark as a pocket. Running my hand down the post, I touched a thin strip of iron protruding from the post, its outer end bent into a ring. The strip worked loosely in a hole in the post, and as I pushed it through, its inner end ran over a joint of the scale mechanism. It was easy to see how the spring of the steel would exert force upon the levers and make the registering beam drop. "We've found," said my companion, "that a pressure of one ounce just at that point is good for a loss of forty-eight ounces on the platform outside. You see now where those eight pounds went to that you lost so miraculously." Lighting a match, we drew out the strip and inspected the hole in which it had been. It was perhaps a quarter of an inch in diameter, and its edges were worn and rounded. Just above it was a cleat ; and beneath the cleat horizontal scratches converged into a veritable groove as they approached the This shows the mechanism under the shelf in the scale-house just in front of the Company checker's chair. Ordinarily this space was boarded over, but the covering has been removed for the hole itself. It required little imagination to picture the bit of steel spring, held in some hand (whose in the world but the man's who sat in that chair day after day?) in the gloom.of that narrow corner scratching across the post, guided by the edge of the cleat, in search of the hole into which it fitted. On the inner side of the post the hole was worn much larger. Regularly spaced along the dock stand the seventeen scale-houses; and in the obscurity of each one's farther corner a sturdy post is pierced by a hole like this. Some were worn more, some less; for not all the scales are used at once. As each ship unloads, her cargo is weighed at the scalehouses nearest her berth, and in the natural course of events some berths are more continuously occupied than others. It was proved at the trial that nine-tenths of the sugar received at this refinery was weighed on five of the scales, and it is worthy of note that the holes in the posts in those scale-houses were very much more worn than those in the other houses. In several of them the hole had been worn so large that the spring evidently did not work satisfactorily, and the enlarged hole had been filled in, in one case with putty, in another with tacks driven in at its upper edge, in a third with a sliver of wood glued in to make the hole smaller. In the most striking of the cases the hole had become enlarged; it had been reduced by driving in two wooden pegs; these in their turn had become worn; and then the wood round the hole had been cut out and a fresh piece with a new and smaller hole had been countersunk into the post. This countersunk piece had evidently been painted over at the same time with the post itself; and the dried and worn condition of the paint showed that the repair must have been made a long time ago, On one of the scales a groove had been filed at the point on the iron lever where the end of the spring rested, presumably to give an accurate resting-place for the spring, and in other cases this point had been worn smooth by the friction of the spring. Seventeen scale-houses there are, and by the same token seventeen holes. Hence the Federal Attorney's designation of the case: The Case of the Seventeen Holes against the American Sugar Refining Company of New York. In the summer of 1907 a man named Richard Whalley appeared at the Treasury Department in Washington and related that during the ten years from 1892 to 1902 he had been employed on the Sugar Company's docks as a Company checker, and that from 1897, when the Dingley tariff went into effect, he had been in the habit of using methods for lessening the apparent weight of drafts of sugar. These methods he had employed with the knowledge, and indeed by the direction, of the Company's dock superintendent. Whalley was a pretty poor specimen of a man, and he was doubtless actuated in offering this information by the desire of obtaining a reward. Nevertheless, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury had Whalley put on the Department's pay-roll as a special employee, and told him to go back to Brooklyn and see what he could find out about the continued existence of such practices. At the same time a special agent of the customs service, Richard Parr, who had been for some time quietly investigating the possibility of such frauds on his own account, was detailed to work upon the case, assisted by another agent, James O. Brzezinski. Whalley obtained employment as a tallyman for the owner of a ship which was discharging a cargo, his duty being to stand in front of the scale-house and make a record of the number of bags of sugar landed from the vessel. On November 19 he reported to Parr that while he had been unable to discover any definite evidence of fraud, he noticed that whenever a draft of sugar was put upon the scales, the Company checker in the scale-house dropped his left hand at his side in a peculiar way. It was arranged that the next morning Parr and Brzezinski should come to the dock, and if Whalley noticed the same action on the part of the Company's checker he should raise his hat. About ten o'clock on November 20 Parr and Brzezinski appeared upon the dock, and when Whalley saw them he gave the signal agreed upon. Parr, had quietly instructed another Government employee who was on the dock, when he saw Parr approach a scale-house, |