Banks & Robbers

At No. 30 Broad Street. Manhattan, 100 yards from the New York Stock Exchange and the little grey banking house of J. P. Morgan & Co., is Continental Bank & Trust Co. of New York. One busy day last week a bold thief strolled into Continental Bank and purloined $500,000 in Government bonds from behind a teller's window. Police and bank officials advanced the startling theory that the thief had fished the bonds out through the grating while the teller was not looking, using a stick with chewing gum on the end.

Most bank robberies are not executed so slickly as that. For the twelve months ending last August the American Bankers Association reported that three bank employes, two customers, nine peace officers and 38 gunmen had been killed in bank stickups, 124 persons wounded in the gunplay. In the same period bank robberies throughout the land totaled 631--a record. Gross loss was $3,384,117. All but 77 of the robberies were committed in broad daylight.

Because the business of bank robbing is sure to reach a new high for this year, the National Bureau of Casualty & Surety Underwriters, embracing most of the companies writing holdup insurance, last week upped its rates, abolished premium discounts on the first $10,000 of coverage for protective installations such as tear gas equipment and redrew the map of U. S. stickup risks. The country is divided into four districts, ranked according to the past record of bank holdups. Banks in small towns & cities will pay a higher rate than those in big cities except in District No. 1, the Eastern States. There all banks pay the same (and the lowest) rates--$2 per thousand up to $10,000, above that $1 per thousand. Worst district is No. 4, comprising Colorado, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and the Missouri Valley States. For holdup insurance in this district a small-town banker will pay ten times as much as he would in the safe & sane East--$20 per thousand up to $10,000, $10 per thousand beyond that.

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