National Affairs: Fugitive Blackmer

Harry M. Blackmer, the fugitive from Denver and from U. S. justice for whom President Coolidge last month signed a special warrant that he might be seized in France and brought home to account for concealing from the Government his profits in Oilman Harry Ford Sinclair’s Continental Trading Co. five years ago (TIME, June 4), was still in France last week. He was moving in Paris “disguised”‘ in slouch hat and horn spectacles. He was, said newsgatherers, dodging newsgatherers, not Government officials. He did not fear extradition, they said, because he could not be extradited unless a French court said so, and a French court was not likely to say so because falsifying an income tax blank is not considered perjury in France. To perjure one must swear falsely before a judge, says French law.

Exile Blackmer’s distaste for publicity was sharpened by an embarrassingly melodramatic account of his case which was published by La Presse (Paris mob journal). The details given by La Presse were such that they seemed to have come from Exile Blackmer himself. La Presse said that when Blackmer’s passport was taken from him last year on a train between Nice and Marseilles, the U.S. consular agent who obtained the passport did so by the trick of impersonating a French police official. La Presse said that the agent slipped the passport out the train window to a colleague on the platform. La Presse said that the colleague on the platform was the U. S. Consul at Nice. Also, La Presse related an episode where Blackmer was supposed to have been invited (“lured”) to a yacht for tea, where he would have been seized by his “enemies” (the U. S. Government) but for the alertness of his personal sleuth.