In all the share-pushing scandals of recent years, the name of Spiro has stood out conspicuously. Like one of Edgar Wallace's mystery criminals he stood at the back of big swindles but remained himself untrapped. Early in 1937, realizing that the game was up, he got together £10,000 in cash and slipped out of the country, He was reported here, there and everywhere but never caught. A few months ago he returned to England, worried, it is said, about the position of his 10-year old son, and was arrested. The day before yesterday at the Old Bailey he was sentenced to eight years penal servitude, when the Recorder described him as "the head of a band of men who were nothing less than commercial brigands, preying on society."
Like so many other dramatic criminals (and here one sees the Edgar Wallace touch again) Spiro, now 45 years old, has been a man of many parts. He began life as a farmer in South Africa, served in the Royal Flying Corps in the War, returned for some years to South Africa, then in 1926 was in Scotland buying up a perfectly respectable firm of outside brokers, which gave him a list of clients to address with his fraudulent schemes. These, of course, he quickly increased. There is evidence that £600,000 passed through his hands but that is believed to be only a part of his dealings He was never seen in the ostensible office of his firm, never signed his name except once in a transaction in which he took £17,000 off a victim, and that was one of several assumed names that he used.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.