Jink 1. 1915.] 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



503 



interests in England. Before the voyage which terminated so 

 tragically, he had four times \ i-ited the company's London office, 

 and he was widely known in the rubher trade on both sides of 

 rh( water. 



WILLIAM H. BROWN. 



Mr. Brown was engaged in the rubber and mill supply busi- 

 ness in Buffalo, New York, and lived .ii 689 West Delaware 

 avenue in that city. He was on his way to England on a trip 

 undertaken partly for business and partly for pleasure. 



David C. Lockwood, superintendent of the Rubber & Celluloid 

 Harness Trimming Co., of Newark, New Jersey, died at his home 

 in that city on April 22. He was 74 years of age and had been 

 in the employ of the Rubber & Celluloid company for more than 

 30 years. He was prominent in local political circles and a 

 member of various organizations. Five daughters and a son 

 survive him. 



FIVE MEN INDICTED FOR FRAUDULENT RUBBER 

 SHIPMENTS. 



IN the March number of this publication mention was made 

 of the discovery of an attempt on February IS to ship 

 rubber to the other side concealed in bales of cotton wa t> 

 Tin- name of the shipper as it appeared on the manifest was 

 A. B. Newman, of New York. 



\- may be imagined, no one was more interested in a 

 tuiniiig all the tacts in the case than the members of the Rubber 

 Club, and particularly the members of the Control Committee, 

 which had undertaken to see that the guarantee given the British 

 Government in consideration of the lifting of the embargo was 

 scrupulously lived up to. The committee began immediate in- 

 vestigations and soon discovered that the cotton bales containing 

 the hidden rubber had come from 470 Pulaski street. Brooklyn, 

 where a building had been recently rented by a man who rep- 

 resented himself as a rubber manufacturer from the West, and 

 had assumed the name of an officer in a well-known concern in 

 Indiana. He bought small lots of rubber in different quarters 

 under the same disguise. These facts and many others gleaned 

 by the committee's investigators were promptly laid before the 

 Federal authorities. 



The government has been working on this matter quietly 

 ever since, with the result that on May 27 the Federal Grand 

 Jury presented to Judge Pollock in the Federal Court in New 

 Y'ork an indictment against five men for conspiracy to de- 

 fraud the government through false manifests. 



The defendants were Harry R. Salomon and Albert Salo- 

 mon, of the firm of Salomon Brothers & Co., importers and 

 exporters, of 299 Broadway; Albert B. Newman, importer 

 and commission merchant of 99 Nassau street; Franz Rosen- 

 berg, of the Oestreicher-Amerikano Rubber Co., and Sig- 

 mund Karman. a rubber expert of the Excelsior Works at 

 Budapest. 



According to the assistant district attorney having the mat- 

 ter in charge, the method pursued was as follows: Harry 

 Salomon, a member of the firm of Salomon Bros. & Co., who 

 have been in business in this country for a number of years, 

 was not an American citizen. Being in Germany at the time 

 the war broke out. he was called to the colors as a reservist, 

 with the rank of lieutenant. \s there was a scarcity of cot- 

 ton, he suggested to his superior officers the idea of coming 

 to the United States to devise a method of getting cotton 

 to Germany. While at work on this project he met. in 

 Hanover, Rosenberg and Karman. who had been commis- 

 sioned to sail for America to arrange, it' possible, for ship- 

 ment of rubber to Austria by way of Italy. Karman being a 

 rubber expert. Rosenberg, who was equipped with a letter 

 of credit for $100,000 from a Vienna bank, together with Kar- 



man, arrived in New ^ ork in December, Harrj Salomon having 

 little earlier Hen they were joined in the enterprise 

 1>< n S Salo other member of Salomon Bros. 



A. B. Newman was working in a tailoring establishment on 

 small wages, but being a nephew of Karman he was added 

 to ihe group and set up as an export and commission mer- 

 chant, with offices at 99 Nassau str< 



The in \; as to rent a place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. 



I ' > | then bought a quantity of rubber and barrels of resin. 

 They put the rubber in the barrel- and completely surrounded it, 

 und, by a thick layer of resin, melted 

 and poured in. They made up 276 barrels in this way. with 

 i total weight of 142.870 pounds. These were shipped to 

 their agent in Gi the Cunard liner "Carpathia." which 



sailed from New York on January 5, Newman rilling out the 

 manifest and swearing that the shipment contained nothing 

 but resin. But before this resin-coated rubber reached its 

 destination tin United States government bad got knowledge 

 of the matter and bad the shipment held in Naples, and in 

 the meantime resin had been put on the list of contraband, 

 which compelled the operators to find some other means of 

 concealing their rubber. Their next at rub- 



ber was in the middle of bales of cotton waste as described 

 in the March number of this publication. Before doing this 

 they had experiments made by an X-ray specialist, until they 

 believed their cotton bales were X-ray proof. 



But the government had also discovered that this plan was 

 on foot, and consequently when 178 bales of apparent cotton 

 waste were delivered at the White Star dock for shipment by 

 the "Cretic" for Genoa they were immediately subjected to 

 X-ray investigation. Several bales were passed, when the 

 operator detected a certain cloudy effect. The bale was 

 opened and the rubber discovered, and then the whole con- 

 signment was investigated. 



It is believed that the rubber concealed in the barrels of 

 n -in and the bales of cotton amounted all told to about 50 

 tons, valued at about $80,000. 



The attorneys for the defendants, immediately after the 

 indictment, gave out the following statement: 



"Franz Rosenberg, ,i merchant of Hanover, Germany, came 

 to this country for the purpose of purchasing rubber for cer- 

 tain rubber concerns in Austria. Sigmund Karman, of the 

 rubber concerns, accompanied him for the purpose of passing 

 on the quality of the rubber Newman was employed by 

 lb- m to do odds and ends. 



"In shipping the rubber in the manner they did they did 

 or the purpose of circumventing the enemy and had not 

 in view a violation of any statute. They did not know that 

 there was a statute on the books which compelled them to 

 give a proper description in the manifest of the shipment. 

 Ii they failed to comply with the law in giving- an improper 

 description in the manifest, they were entirely ignorant 

 such violation." 



The following statement was made in behalf of the Salomon 



brothers, Albert and Harry: 



"We have learned with great surprise and sorrow of the 

 action of the Grand Jury. We are informed that we have- 

 been indicted for violating a highly technical statute, which. 

 however, in\olvcs no imputation whatever of any moral 

 gdoing, but merely a technical charge growing out of 

 the present complicated international conditions. We feel 

 ourselves entirely blameless in the matter and are not con- 

 scious of Inning committed any wrong whatever." 



SHIPMENT OF RUBBER TO RUSSIA STOPPED. 

 An attempt to ship rubber by the steamship "Atantic" to 

 Archangel. Russia, in violation of the aj made with the 



British Government, was frustrated ten days ago by the ac- 

 tivities of the Rubber Control Committee. Upon investigation 

 it was found that the consignment consisted of 423 cases and 

 100 bags of rubber. The entire cargo was later unloaded at 

 Bush Terminal docks and the steamship "Atlantic" did not sail 

 Vrchangel as scheduled. 



