The City Treasurer’s Chaotic Flight
Seattle’s city treasurer, Adolph Krug, is arrested in St. Paul, Minnesota, following his alleged embezzlement of funds, sparking a bizarre legal struggle and an urgent scramble by Seattle officials to ensure he doesn't walk free.
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Although great efforts are being made to secure the liberation of Adolph Krug in St. Paul before the requisition for his return to Seattle can be received, authorities there are doing all in their power to hold him. He enjoyed a moment's liberty yesterday, for his arrest by Frank Crawford was declared illegal by Judge John J. Egan of the Minnesota District Court, who denounced the act as being 'more in accord with a tyranny like that of Russia than a free country like the United States.' However, Krug was immediately rearrested on a new warrant charging him with being a fugitive from justice. Sheriff Woolery is en route to St. Paul to return him to Seattle to face charges regarding his use of city funds to provide loans to friends and business associates.
“The court inveighed in the severest terms against the outrage of his arrest... such proceedings were more in accord with a tyranny like that of Russia than a free country like the United States.”
This 1893 scandal highlights the historical fragility of municipal oversight in a rapidly growing Seattle. Today, the city’s complex audit processes exist largely as a response to such early eras of loose, personal accounting by public officials.
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