The Great Telephone Wars of Tacoma
A rival phone company manager staged a bizarre arrest of his competitor to derail a franchise bid—only for the plot to unravel at the police station.
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.
A clever scheme, engineered by Manager A. C. Sands of the Sunset Telephone company, to throw consternation into the camp of the Independent company, has enlivened the city. Manager Sands' plan was to have Frank Mortimer, the local representative of the Independent company, in jail at the time of the meeting of the franchise committee, and not until he had carried the plot through to the bitter end did he admit it had miscarried. The scheme culminated when Mr. Sands telephoned the police from the Jones building and had Mortimer and his solicitor arrested on a charge of grand larceny. Sands then induced Chief Malony to demand $1,000 cash bail from Mortimer. When Mortimer's friends arrived to pay the bail, Sands returned and suddenly announced the whole affair was 'off.' Mortimer, left confused by the entrapment, learned that a solicitor named Kendall had been used as a tool by the Sunset company to frame him. Mr. Sands later told The Times he decided not to prosecute at present, knowing he could 'get out a warrant at any time in the future.'
“Am I going to be turned loose? Can Mr. Sands have men arrested and held in $1,000 bail or turned free, just as he chooses?”
Corporate warfare in early 20th-century Tacoma was often conducted through public theater and political maneuvering, reflecting the era's volatile competition for infrastructure control. Today, utility monopolies operate in the shadows of administrative regulatory capture, but the public distrust of corporate 'franchise' power remains as potent as it was in 1904.
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