The Street Swindler's Bad Day
A carnival-style street hawker is mobbed and arrested after selling worthless watch chains to an angry Tacoma crowd.
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.
This afternoon, Sam Selka, a street fakir, was plying his trade from an open hack on Twelfth Street, near the post office. After he had swindled the crowd out of many dollars, some of them began to clamor for their money back. Selka, in order to get away from the frenzied crowd, started to drive away, pursued by the mob. Two men, Adolph Smith and Sheldon Addicks, who were victims of the fakir, jumped into the rig and attempted to take the money back from Selka. When the cab was passing the police station, Officers Budecker and Ward rushed out and captured the trio. Selka, who is an American Jew, is said to be a smooth swindler. His game is to sell articles and give his customers their money back, but after he sold several hundred watch chains at $1 each, the game came to a stop and the purchasers were out just the amount of money they had expended. While the police were investigating the case, a mob of about 50 blocked the entrance to the police station and threatened all sorts of dire calamities to the fakir if he should be released.
“Selka... is said to be a smooth swindler. His game is to sell articles and give his customers their money back, but after he sold several hundred watch chains at $1 each, the game came to a stop.”
Street-level 'hustles' were a common feature of downtown Tacoma in the early 1900s, often drawing aggressive crowds that took justice into their own hands. Today, these transient scams have largely moved to the internet, but the public's visceral reaction to being cheated remains a constant thread in civic life.
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