Ladies' Game

Next to ignoring Prohibition, the most polite and popular form of U. S. lawbreaking is Beating the Customs. Prime practitioners, in the amateur field, are wealthy ladies who count it a fashionable triumph, indicative of cleverness, to succeed in smuggling personal purchases made abroad, with the sporting risk of paying a 100% fine if caught. One-quarter of fines imposed goes to informers who tip off Customs inspectors. No smart smuggler will tell her best friend, until afterwards. This, the summer season, with tourists jamming every liner, is the time when inspectors are busiest, ladies most cunning.

Last week, news of several expensive failures at the Port of New York reached the ears of lady tourists still abroad:

Last fortnight Mrs. Ector Orr Munn. daughter of the late Rodman Wanamaker, paid $10,496 for smuggling in new clothes. Mrs. Rudolph Lederer of Chicago paid $5,286 for the same reason.

When the S. S. Leviathan docked last week the inspectors, bristling with success, sprang at 32 trunks belonging to four women, Mrs. Anna Loeb (mother of Murderer Richard Loeb) and three relatives. The Loeb ladies declared only $800 worth of foreign purchases. The Inspectors found enough frocks, gowns, fur coats and jewelry to require duties and penalties of $27,036.

Upon the S. S. France appeared Mrs. Charles Gary Rumsey, widow of Sculptor Rumsey, daughter of the late great Railroader E. H. Harriman. She declared $1,500 of Paris finery. The inspectors were not satisfied, seized $100,000 worth of jewelry and eleven pieces of baggage. When the France was two days at sea, Mrs. Rumsey had given a jeweled purse to her friend and fellow passenger, Lucrezia Bori, Metropolitan Opera soprano. Miss Bori is a Spanish citizen. Her personal belongings were not dutiable. Nevertheless, the inspectors seized her new purse and obliged Mrs. Rumsey to pay duty on that, too. The Rumsey jewelry was proved to have been purchased in this country, and was returned, though Mrs. Rumsey had to pay for having had some stones reset in Paris. For the finery she paid $7,600, bringing her complete bill to $8,783. Said Mrs. Rumsey easily: "I thought I had declared all ... my maid packed ... I neglected to check up."

Scarcely had Mrs. Rumsey closed her checkbook and departed, when the S. S. Aquitania nosed up to its pier and debarked mother-in-law Mrs. L. D. Rumsey with a $200 traveling case belonging to Daughter-in-Law Rumsey, which she failed to declare. The case was seized. Back went Daughter-in-Law Rumsey to pay more penalties.

Meanwhile customs men hung on to $150,000 worth of diamonds set in platinum, taken from Mrs. Rella Factor on May 28. Once a Chicagoan, Mrs. Factor claimed, as the wife of a London stockbroker, to be a British subject.

The customs men were investigating to make sure.