The Enterprise (Seattle), 4 October 1928, page 1: Casper Holstein's photograph and the police doubts

The Enterprise, a Seattle weekly, printed a framed photograph captioned “Casper Holstein” near the top right of its front page on Thursday, 4 October 1928, under the heading “Held for $50,000 Ransom, Report.” It is the only image of Holstein in the records filed here. The paper does not credit the photograph.

The caption story calls him “New York colored millionaire, and reputed ace of Harlem gamblers, who reported to police that he was kidnapped a fortnight ago, by four men of long prison records.” It says that “Police, however, doubted the credibility of Holstein’s story,” because, as the paper tells it, the captors were content to take the $70 he had and overlooked a $2,000 diamond ring. It ends: “He recently instituted libel suit against a New York colored paper for $100,000, which is reported to have alleged he maintained a policy gambling house.”

Everything here is the Seattle paper’s report. “Reputed ace of Harlem gamblers” is its label. The libel suit is reported second-hand (“is reported to have alleged”); no record of the suit, or of what the New York paper printed, has been opened, and this archive does not adopt the claim. The sentence about his bank deposits is the paper’s and is not repeated. Several dollar figures on the page are garbled in the OCR; only clean ones are used.