A shop manager and an accountant appeared before Messrs. Yui and Jacobs at the Mixed Court er Thursday charged with keeping opium for sale. Four assistants were charged with aiding and abetting.
Det.-Sgt. MacGregor appeared for the Police,-and Mr. W. S. Fleming represented the defendants.
Outlining the case, the detective; said that on, August 8, armed with a Mi Court warrant, he raided No. 12 Kin Wo Ka. In an upstair room a quantity of opium was found. Hanging from the back window was a basket the idea of which was that whoever wished to buy opium would put the money into the basket and later receive a quantity of the drug which would be Let down in the basket.
Cross-examined by Mr. Fleming, witness said that he sent an informer with marked notes to purchase the opium. He was unable to ud anything which actually pointed to the sale of the drug, except a pair of scales and opium wrappers. The process of sale was worked in such a way that the buyer could not see from whom he was buying the opium. It did not occur to witness that he had arrested the wrong man.
The first accused said that he was doing ginseng business and had been doing so for more than a year. He had a business which ran nto several hundreds of dollars a day. Part. of his premises in which the opium was found was let out to a man whose business he knew nothing about: the opium must have belonged to him. Witness had never sold opium.
This evidence was corroborated by the other accused The Court said that the prosecntion had not produced sufficient evidence to convict the men for selling opium, hence all would be dismissed with the exception of the first accused who would be fined $30 for letting out his premises for, the sale of opium.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.