arbitrarily on a Monday that we would have to pay the bill Wednesday, or he would decline to furnish paper for the current edition, which was then on the press.
When I saw trouble coming I got together a committee of my stockholders in New York City, and a group of about a dozen men endorsed three notes of ten thousand dollars each. The net worth of these dozen men was over two million dollars. We took the notes to one bank in New York City. The bank accepted them. We checked against them, and got money on them, and the next day were notified we would have to take the notes out of the bank.
Of course you say this is an illegal proceeding, and can't be done. I assure you it was done. We were thrown out of that bank, after the bank had accepted our paper, and after we had checked against it. The manager of the bank told me that he was powerless—that the "down-town" folks had thrown us out. Several other banks that had loaned me money for ten years told me that they could not do anything for me now—that I was in bad "down-town."
One banker who flatly said he would loan us money whether Morgan's crowd wanted him to or not, was put out of business himself within a few months. This man's name is Earle. He was then running the Nassau Bank. I do not know whether Earle would tell his story or not, but the way the Morgan crowd drove him out of the banking business was one of the coldest-blooded things I ever heard of. They punished him for trying to accept perfectly good banking-paper to help me out of my crisis.
The foregoing facts are dictated hurriedly but there are some points in them that I believe you will want. Of course you know the finish of the properties. Within ten days after the thing began to close in on me, I had to turn my affairs over to the lawyers, and then a group of people appeared who were said to be the "International Correspondence" group of Scranton, Pa. They brought in letters from bankers, etc., showing they were very reputable and high-classed, and I had the choice of going into the hands of the receiver, or letting them take the property. They paid me just money enough so I could get my stock out of hock. The rest of the money they were to pay me was evidenced by a contract. I turned the contract over to my attorneys for protection of my preferred stockholders. Within a few weeks' time we became convinced that the fellows who had taken over the property intended to loot it. The bookkeeper told me they took one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars out of the property in a few months, and took the books down to the East River and threw them off the bridge.
The result of it all was that I worked with the United States Government and had the crowd indicted. In time we brought them to trial. The trial lasted four or five weeks. We literally could not prove anything. We did prove that "Hampton's Magazine" was a valuable piece of property and that it was making money, but we could not prove that the fellows who got it were crooks. All the records were destroyed. The result was, the judge threw the case out of court, after it had been in court for four or five weeks, and we never got back any of the money. Of course, the property in the meantime had been ruined.
