Here are two passages about insurance and crime from St. Clair McKelway, a New Yorker who, like his contemporaries A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell specialized in writing about low-lifes, McKelway being more focused in crime while Liebling and Michell liked con-men, boxers, gypsies, and the like.
When the first news stories appeared in the New York papers about Ralph Marshall Wilby’s embezzlement of $386,921.29 from Knott company, he was described as a “trusted employee” over and over again. All these stories made a point of rubbing that in. In Wilby’s case, as in the cases of most embezzlers in these times, the cliché was inaccurate and its use indicates an old-fashioned and romantic idea of the relationship between bookkeepers and the people who employ them. The ugly truth is that the higher a bookkeeper climbs in the accounting department of a firm, the lower the estimate of his trustworthiness becomes in the minds and hearts of his employers… One of Wilby’s best friends at the Knott corporation, and seemingly one of his greatest admirers, was the company’s treasurer, Mr. Casey. It was Casey who had encouraged and aided Wilby’s progress from the position of traveling auditor to that of chief accountant and assistant treasurer. Yet this same Mr. Casey, acting for the corporation in what a romanticist would have to consider an abominably gelid manner, had bet the Traveler’s Insurance Company (which insurers all kinds of people besides travelers) that Wilby would someday steal of the corporation’s funds. The Travelers Insurance Company had bet that Wilby wouldn’t. This wager was represented by a bond of three hundred thousand dollars, the terms of which were that the Knott corporation would pay the Travelers Insurance Company an annual premium of a good many thousands of dollars as long as its chief accountant and treasurer didn’t steal any money from the corporation.
That’s from “The Wily Wilby.”
It is undoubtedly true that the question of just how far to go with fire prevention is one the insurance companies have to consider with care. Life-insurance men do not have to fear that institutional advertising of the sort that urges the public to be careful crossing streets and to button up its overcoat will eliminate the hazard of death, but too much fire prevention might, in time, very nearly eliminate the hazard of fire. If professional arson were eliminated, for instance, the fire hazard would be materially cut down and the demand for fire insurance would not be so great as it is now. …The manager of the Scottish Union and National Fire Insurance Company once made an illuminating speech on the general subject of fire prevention in which he said, “I say we cannot make profits for our shareholders without fires; within certain well-defined limits, we welcome fires.”
That’s from “Firebug Catcher.” Here’s a bonus…
The idea of money is older than the idea of counterfeit money, but older, perhaps, by no more than a few minutes. There is evidence of the use of both the genuine article and the counterfeit article in the earliest recorded civilizations, and it has been established that primitive tribes had both good money and bad money before there were any civilizations to record. It seems that immediately after certain people realized that they could easily make tokens to represent cumbersome property, such as collections of animal skins and stores of foodstuffs, certain other people awoke to the fact that they could just as easily make tokens that reprsented the cumbersome property. The two ideas are so closely related that they are practically twins, and, like the products of the ideas, they are hard to tell apart. If it were not for counterfiet money, the story of money might be simply beautiful. As it is, the pattern formed by the fateful entwinment of money and counterfeit money is intricately grotesque.
That’s from “Mr. 880.” All of these essays are collected in a new set of McKelway’s writing, Reporting at Wit’s End: Tales from the New Yorker, which I read about in a Roger Angell essay about McKelway in the Feb. 15th (anniversary issue) New Yorker. The book also contains the piece Liebling began and McKelway finished about Father Divine, which makes it essential reading for Liebling fans.
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