The Great Tacoma Cylinder Heist
A local businessman is drugged and swindled out of a small fortune in company stock while bar-hopping in Tacoma.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
J. K. Dana, a principal in a local elopement scandal, was jailed tonight as a suspected conspirator in a sensational case. He and others are accused of drugging Joe Grant, of the Grant Brothers collapsible cylinder ship-raising devices, and robbing him of $70,000 in company stock. Joe Grant had been drinking and was coaxed into Sullivan's Side Board saloon at the corner of Pacific Avenue and 15th Street. When Joe eventually turned up, he was incoherent and requested the reporter to put in the paper that he was drunk. The conspirators, including a gambler named George Temple and the saloonkeeper Sullivan, allegedly used the stock to force fraudulent transfers. President Grant of the company vows to contest the case and hold the conspirators accountable.
“He, however, talked quite rationally at the time, and requested the correspondent to 'put in the paper that I was drunk.'”
The intersection of Pacific Avenue and 15th Street was the beating heart of Tacoma's industrial and social life in the 1890s. The story captures the era's raw, predatory capitalism, where company founders were as vulnerable to back-alley shakedowns as they were to hostile takeovers.
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