The Con Man and the Tacoma Jail
After swindling banks for a half-million dollars, a notorious criminal is captured in Tacoma and offers an interview from behind bars.
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.
Albert B. Bell, captured by Officers Murphy and Moran, is identified as a notorious swindler who defrauded Asbury Park, New Jersey banks of nearly $500,000. Posing as an English fruit merchant named 'F. H. Crosby,' Bell lived in high society before his criminal career led him across the country and to Europe. Bell, currently held in Tacoma, expressed relief that he would not be deprived of his daily newspapers. He candidly discussed his methods, noting that he never took money from those who couldn't afford to lose it, framing his crimes as a conflict between 'corporations' and himself. He admitted he was in Tacoma trying to reconnect with his wife, who had been caught up in the legal aftermath of his crimes. Despite his history of escapes—including walking away from a U.S. Marshal in Philadelphia—he stated he had 'thrown up the sponge' and was ready to face the consequences.
“A man may be 'wrong' and be a fairly good man for all that. I never took a dollar or a penny from a man or a woman who could not afford to lose it.”
While bank fraud still plagues the financial system, the 1904 public appetite for the 'gentleman thief'—who offers a jailhouse confession to a local paper—captures an era where criminals were treated as celebrity curiosities. The mention of Bell's capture at the embankment railing highlights a pre-regrade Tacoma where the steep, dangerous drop-offs to the waterfront were a defining, sometimes lethal, part of the city's geography.
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