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“Clint” MacCabe, called on Harry Schanberger, who is engaged in an official position at police headquarters (this incident was told me personally by Harry Schanberger and in the presence ofwitnesses). MacCabe, after a chat with Harry Schahnberger, borrowed the set of keys from Schanberger, telling him that he wanted to give them to Brindemour, so that he could give a press performance and make the people believe that Brindemour had escaped “on the square.”
    Schanberger loaned MacCabe the two keys, and naturally Brindemour escaped from the police headquarters’ cells, using the genuine keys that belong to the Police Department.
    AND HE DARES TO CALL HIMSELF THE POLICE MYSTIFIER!
    In mind I can almost hear the spirit of poor Chas Bertram say, “Isn’t that wonderful?” The strange thing about this affair is that in Baltimore, another alleged jail breaker met his quietus for the time being.
    He is Cunning, who also labors under the delusion that he is the original world’s greatest. I quote from the
Baltimore News
, Thursday February 8, 1906:
    CUNNING’S GAME EXPOSED
    Cunning, the hitherto mysterious opener of handcuffs and shackles, who is exhibiting at the Monumental Theatre this week, was found out today by Acting Turnkey John Lanahan at the Central Station and had to abandon the feat that he had promised to do of escaping from a locked cell.
    Before being locked in the cell, Cunning went into the latter, pretending to examine it, andsecretly placed a key upon a ledge, but Lanahan disovered the key just as Cunning was about to be locked in, and when told of the discovery, the wizard said, “You’ve got me,” admitted that he could not open the cell without a key, and abandoned the exhibition.
    The real truth of this jail break is that Mr. Joe Kernan went to the police captain and borrowed the keys and handed them to Cunning. The turnkey, Lanahan, not being in the “know,” discovered the palpable “planting” of the keys and ran with them to the captain. In this way the “stunt” was unexpectedly exposed.
    Personally, I think it ought to be a prison offense for any official to loan his keys to these would-be and so-called mystifiers, and if managers wish to lend themselves willfully to deceive their audience, the quicker they find out that they are treading the wrong path, the better for them, too. You can take any stagehand, and in five minutes make just as good a jail breaker as the many that are now trading on my name.
    Another “gross” misrepresenter is a youth named Grosse. This man, or rather youth, claims that he can open time-lock safes and all the complicated locks of the world, stating that handcuffs are mere play to him. Why, he can’t even pick his teeth, and if he were put to a test with a lock picker, I doubt that he could even throw back a one tumbler lock. Yes, he would have trouble to pull back a common latch.
    No doubt some of the police that are entangled with some of these jail breakers will grow hot under the collar at me for showing this thing up, but as long as thesefellows are pretending to do my work, and as long as they stoop to do it in this manner, just so long will I publish the real facts as soon as I find them out.
    In conclusion, I wish to state that I defy any manager or police official to come forward and prove that I, by any underhanded means or conniving methods, have stooped or lowered my manhood to ask them willfully to deceive the public by such base misrepresentations.

THE COLOGNE LIBEL SUIT
    Houdini reports on a trial in Cologne in 1902, in which he battled claims that he had attempted to bribe policeman Werner Graff into helping him to escape from the city’s jail
.
    THE POLICE OF GERMANY ARE VERY STRICT IN matters of false billing or misrepresenting exhibitions to the public, and so when the Cologne police claimed that I was travelling about misrepresenting, and that my performance was