“I was just trying to collect what Bessinger owed me,” declared Arthur Raymond, who planned the robbery. “I worked in the Bessinger restaurant at Halsted and Hamilton streets and got paid next to nothing for it. You can’t work for such small wages and have any money.
“I decided I would get enough out of Bessinger to pay me handsomely for the time I worked there. I knew he carried money in the satchel and planned the holdup.”
“Let the others talk themselves into the penitentiary if they want to,” said George Wilson, the fourth prisoner. “I have nothing to say about it. We tried and fell down. That’s all.”
The four men were arrested after they had run their automobile into a fence while trying to escape with the satchel. They had knocked down Bessinger, who is a collector for the Bessinger Restaurant Company, and the automobile ran over his leg, causing the machine to swerve. The money satchel was recovered.
It will be Christmas without the “merry” for Jules Alexander, Brussels, Belgium, who will spend it in Milwaukee penniless, because of either an evil twist of fate or the daring of a hotel thief.
Monsieur Alexander, a young Belgian, is an American representative of a large machinery plant in Brussels. He has been in Milwaukee about two weeks and is staying at the Hotel Pfister.
Thursday afternoon M. Alexander decided that his suit needed pressing. Hurriedly--it must have been hurriedly--he made a change of wardrobe, rang for a bellboy and had the suit taken down to the hotel tailor.
Little did M. Alexander know that a $130 roll of crinkly American bills, practically his assets in toto, reposed in the left hand hip pocket of the tailor-bound trousers. In the newly donned suit there was not a franc, not a sou, not even a centime.
Later in the afternoon, having left the hotel, M. Alexander had use for some change. He felt in his hip pocket and found nothing. He found the same thing in all his other pockets. All at once it dawned on him that he had left the precious roll of bills in the other suit.
M. Alexander went back to the hotel on the run. He told the clerk of his loss. Quickly but quietly a search for the lost or stolen money was made through the hotel, but without avail. Evidently both tailor and bellboy declared that they knew nothing of the money.