There was another trick that Captain John Young was capable of playing, and against which we must play winning cards. Prisoners had been known to be shanghaied out of the state,--practically kidnapped from the protection of the law,--by him. The formalities of requisition proceedings had been disregarded as so much useless red tape made to adorn law books. Young wasn’t the offender in the instance I will cite. It was Captain John Jourdan.
Eddie McGuire, _alias_ Fairy, Rory Simms, and Dave Bartlett “turned off” the Bowdoinham Bank, of Maine, in June, 1866, and got something like eighty thousand dollars in cash and United States five-twenty bonds. Bartlett hired the team used in the “get-away.” They buried the loot in a wood, and in the wagon drove forty miles to Portland, where, scattering, the looters went by rail to New York.
Prior to this the gang had robbed Cooper’s silverware manufacturing establishment in Waverly Place in New York City, and sold the silver to a “fence” kept by one Morrison. For some reason, the latter tipped off Captain Jourdan, who arrested McGuire and the others at the corner of Hudson and King streets. Fairy pleaded poverty to the captain, and having turned over to him what silver they had taken, all hands were released. But there was a string on them. Jourdan forced a promise that there would be a division made the very first “trick” the gang “turned off.” Later they did the Maine “trick.” Having given the job a chance to cool down, Fairy McGuire went to Maine and dug up the treasure, and he and Bartlett asked me to sell the bonds. I bought them outright, and, as was my custom, paid the police the usual percentage, which amounted to forty-two hundred dollars. At the same time I told them that there was more “rake-off” due them, declining, however, to mention any names.
“When they get ready, no doubt you’ll hear from them,” I said reassuringly. Perhaps a week or more had gone by, during which time I presumed the lads had paid the police the remainder of the “rake-off,” but it turned out not to be so. Detective Radford came to me with a tip.
“Fairy McGuire and his pals will be pinched to-morrow by Captain Jourdan,” said he, “and you’d better tell them so. The old man was promised a ‘rake-off’ on the next job after the silver racket, and nothing has been doing. You see he knows who did the Bowdoinham ‘trick,’ for a sheriff was down here with the description of the man that hired the team for the ‘get-away,’ and it fits Dave Bartlett. Jourdan wouldn’t have known it, only in riding in a Fifth Avenue stage the other day he saw McGuire, Simms, and Bartlett in the same stage. They were loaded down with diamonds and heavy gold watch-chains. Worse than all, they never looked at the old man. He got thinking of what had been done in the crooked line to buy all this stuff, and the Bowdoinham job flashes across him. Then came the description of Bartlett from the Maine sheriff. That settled it. So the gang will be pinched to-morrow evening.”