The Detroit Times

Is the Prosecutor Going to "Back Up and Get Planted Right?"

For the Investors With Failed Brokerage Firm Know Simply That They Are Out Their Money.

About the only fact established thus far in connection with the blow-up of the brokerage firm of Cameron Currie & Co. is that THE CUSTOMERS LOSE. They turned in their money in speculation and it is still IN, with not even a sight for them of the stock that they BOUGHT AND PAID FOR.

And it looks very much as though no one was going to suffer for the losses--yes, the robbery of these customers. The grand jury investigation which the prosecutor deemed called for result of revelations in civil action following the failure, developed farce, just as we thought it would. The indictments which placed the blame on everybody connected with the business with the exception of Cameron Currie, the scrub woman and the office boy, were all disposed of with neatness and dispatch when capable lawyers got after them in the preliminary examination of the indicted.

To represent that the clerks employed in the brokerage office were to blame for the failure and the bilking of the customers, and Cameron Currie himself was innocent was ridiculous and amounted to an insult to the public intelligence. Justice Jeffries' action in dismissing the defendants was most proper and fully warranted by the testimony of Cameron Currie on the witness stand. His advice to the prosecutor, too, to "back up and get planted right," was most apt.

Now, will the prosecutor BACK UP? Will Mr. Van Zile follow up his expressed opinion that criminal action was called for by the failure, and LAND THE GUILTY. The speculators paid their money to Cameron Currie & Co. for stocks. Many of them haven't seen the stocks they bought to this day and they haven't been paid back. They were cheated and stolen from. IS IT POSSIBLE THAT PEOPLE CAN BE DEFRAUDED IN THIS WAY AND NO ONE SUFFER?

The public, we believe, has had enough of these two-man grand juries. The history of this form of investigation is not such as to permit of much faith in landing the guilty and ALL the guilty. The investigation by a police justice and a former prosecutor of members of the board of education resulted in a whitewash of the accused and the vilifying of honest men who brought charges of corruption. The indictment by a Democratic justice of a Republican police commissioner was charged to politics. The indictment of the manager and the clerks in the office of Cameron Currie & Co. and the failure to indict Cameron Currie himself by this last grand jury has been quite generally accepted by the public as an attempt to shield a man of influential friends in the community.

Currie owned nine-tenths of the business, took down nine-tenths of the profits and CURRIE SHOULD CARRY NINE-TENTHS OF THE RESPONSIBILITY TO THOSE WHO LOST THEIR GOOD MONEY WHEN HE FAILED.

The results obtained by the grand jury in Jackson county which investigated the prison scandal prove that 25 citizens, chosen regardless of political faith and under no obligations to consider party or persons, should sit as inquisitors upon matters in which the public is seeking satisfaction and protection. It is very doubtful had a grand jury of 25 citizens heard the evidence in the Currie case if these young men would have been called upon alone to face the responsibility for a failure where they were only paid subordinates. That they were compelled to so appear before the public between the time the indictments were announced and their exoneration as conspirators was accomplished, amounted to little less than rank injustice where the public looked for justice.

If we have heard the last of the Currie case in the criminal courts we can only extend our sympathy to the investors who have nothing much show for their coin of the realm but experience. Possibly that is all they would have had, anyway, had they gone on and had the dealings of Cameron Currie & Co. been aboveboard. It is a little lesson, perhaps, from which they will profit and in the future they will look for safer places to invest their money.

Some of the clerks who have just escaped jail, it appears, have learned their lesson. We notice that three or four of them have embarked in business and gotten far, far from the ticker. They know what the game is. They know that a dollar cannot be made unless somebody else loses a dollar and they know that one cannot win all the time. They have come to realize that there is more satisfaction in a dollar for which they have produced something than in one they know somebody else has lost.

A few days ago the financial backer of another Detroit broker shot and killed himself while despondent over his losses. He had built nothing, had nothing for his years in the struggle to top when he found himself on the wrong side of the market. Many other men have ended their lives the same way, finding themselves unfitted to meet reverse over the ticker. A dollar earned by good hard work and saved is a dollar in hand and you know where it is when there comes the rainy day.