Auctioneer and hotel keeper are among five prisoners in night raid
Six tons of shimmering Japanese silk cloth worth $218,000, torn from its original packages and rudely wrapped in course manila paper, were found in a roadhouse garage at Maspeth last night. The silk and five prisoners, captured after a fight in which the police used revolvers, were brought to the W 30th Street police station by detectives. The police are certain they have identified the goods as the lot stolen from a freight car in the Chelsea Yards of the New York Central March 8th.
The silk, as it was piled onto the police station floor, was without identification tags or markings but the detectives who raided the roadhouse said they found in a kitchen stove burned edges of shipping tags and cloth markers which will establish the silk as the missing property. The names of the owners of the silk were refused by the police but they said the lot had been consigned to seven of the most prominent silk merchants in the city. The complainant against the five prisoners was Robert Humphries, deputy chief of the New York Central detectives.
Captain McQueeny of the Third Detective Division, who had charge of the raid, refused to say how the police picked up the trail that led to Maspeth. It is believed the information came from a buyer who had been approached with an offer of sale and who became wary of the manner in which the goods were guarded. Those arrested said they were Peter Jorgessen, 23, 268 W 34th St., Joseph Wall, 55, a porter, Maspeth, Benjamin Serlen, 29, proprietor of the Hotel Serlen, Maurice and Newtown avenues, Maspeth, Theodore Serlen, 33, his brother, an auctioneer, said to live in Brooklyn, and David Weiner, 31, of 2138 Flushing Ave. Brooklyn, an auctioneer.
On arrival at the station the men were held on a blanket charge of burglary. Later this was changed to violation of the federal Interstate Commerce Law as the silk was in transit to another state. The prisoners were taken to police headquarters where it was announced the case would be turned over to federal authorities.
The account of the raid given by the detectives represented that great precautions were being taken to steer pursuers from the Hotel Serlen, with Deputy Chief Humphries, Detectives Jenkins, Shearing and McAuliffe started early yesterday afternoon from Maspeth and after reaching the town stopped to inquire the way. The roadhouse is on the outskirts in a deserted location with Mount Zion Cemetery to the rear. The detective said a man who proved to be Jorgessen stopped them half a mile from the hotel and tried to direct them to another road. They dragged him into the car and went on.
Reaching the hotel, they went to the garage, examined the silk and arrested Wall, who was working there. Then they rushed the hotel and gained entrance to the kitchen, where a fight took place, and three shots were fired. After the shooting, the men yielded meekly, the detective said. Wall is said by the detectives to have admitted burning the tags from the silk in the kitchen stove. Benjamin Serlen, the proprietor, denied all knowledge of the silk and said he had no idea it was in his garage.
