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Payroll snatching is one of the easiest and safest crimes to commit, and it is grow ng in criminal popularity every payday Last week, seventy-five miles southwest of Bandon, two young men help up Thomas W Phillips, manager of the Manitoba and Sassatchewan coal mines near Bienfait, Se k. One bandit was armed with a shot gun, and the other had a revolver. The manager told police that he was driving out to the mines with the payroll, when he was “opped and robbed of between $13,900 and $14, 900 It was a surprise hold-up (as they usu al are) and the two men made their geta sey on a car which was later found aban doneds not too far away from the scene of the robbery. Thus far the police have not locused the bandits or the cash. Discussing the ease with which payroll snatching is accomplished, Murray Teigh Bloom in a current issue of Reader's Digest, has the simplest kind of formula to halt it. This type of larceny could be made as ob solete as horse theft if employers would pay their workers by cheque instead of in cash. The writer points out that every Fri day, unarmed bookkeepers walk the streets of industrial cities with canvas bags ob viously full of cash. They are natural tar gets for a hit-and-grab attack. Large cities have many such robberies a year and some of them are fatal And since cash is so easy to dispose of and hard to identify, little of the money is ever recovered Although employers are gradually switching to cheque payment, more than 25 million workers in Canada and the United States still receive cash totalling more than a billion dollars a week, says the article. In some areas, the law requires cash, mainly as a result of old-time abuses when em ployers would pay in scrip redeemable only at a company store. Many union contracts also call for cash, for one reason, because some workers don't want their wives to know how much they earn. However, some workers are beginning to charge their minds now, because some of them have had guns stuck in their ribs while they were carrying the cash home on pay day. Boston began a pay-by-cheque cam paign after robbers got $110,000 in one pay roll hold-up in 1948, and then set an all time record with the $1,219,000 Brink's Armored car haul in 1950. First the city started paying its own 26,000 employees by cheque, and then Police Captain Michael Clougherty personally asked employers in Boston to switch over to cheque payment. As a result, writer Bloom says, Boston had exactly 10 payrol holdups in 1956 and in 1957, two
Newspaper Details
Brandon Daily Sun
Brandon, Manitoba, CA
Wed, Mar 19, 1958
Page 25
Full Page
Clipped by
Jess H.
USA 13 Jul 2026
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