CRIME: The Big Swindle

New Yorkers love a good crime story. They also dote on stories about people with big wads of money. They also like stories about what people do when they manage—as most New Yorkers never do —to break out of their humdrum, nickel-nursing lives. Last week they got all three kinds of story rolled into one.

First there was a guy in a humdrum cashier’s job who managed to steal more than $800,000 in a little more than a year. He was a bland, nice-looking fellow with a black mustache, who had worked all his adult life (22 years) in a nickels-&-dimes job with a big outfit—the Mergenthaler Linotype Co., over in Brooklyn. It was funny the way they happened to find out about the big embezzlement; a clerk got nosy about a check paid out to an unfamiliar company and first thing you know they find a lot of bogus checks. And then when they look for the trusted cashier, he’s gone. But he has a great name for a cashier and an embezzler: Nickel.

What they discover at William Arthur Nickel’s unpretentious house out in Freeport, L.I. is plenty. He has a pert dark-haired wife, who is very photogenic. She has two mink coats and a pile of jewelry —about $40,000 worth. And she also has a big, beautiful wad of money—$83,000. Well, they begin digging into Nickel’s life and he comes up as a slightly different kind of embezzler, not a racetrack, nightclubbing type. He wanted to live like a solid, rich citizen.

Shady Men. There was a big motorboat and a little motorboat, $20,000 worth of antiques for a big suburban house he’d put a down payment on, and he’d bought some lots and put up $40,000 for an apartment on Manhattan’s upper East Side. Not until the night he fled did he tell his wife where all the money came from.

Of course, they find Nickel (minus mustache) down at Miami Beach and he tells them all about how he worked it. He merely sent some fake bills to the Mergenthaler Co., drew checks to cover the amounts, cashed the checks himself.

But the dicks are wary. They figure one man can’t do all this without some help. So Nickel spills it, and out come some shady Broadway characters. One is a sharpie named Isidore Rappaport, who is supposed to have thought up the deal, and one is an ex-convict named Kupsnecker, who runs a check-cashing office.

By then it begins to look as if Nickel is maybe just a sucker—that the sharp boys maybe got the most of what he stole. Didn’t he even have a dame or get some fun out of it? The old reliable, crime-thumping Daily News had the answer for that one. The News found out that Nickel kept a Broadway hotel suite, which was stocked with nylons and Scotch, and was handy for blondes. He gave $20 tips.

So the story stood this week, with Nickel on his way back from Miami with the cops. New Yorkers could hardly wait for the next day’s editions; this one was going to be good for a long time.