dollar of the five per cent. subscription should be returned; next, to
so use this amount that no one to whom stock was allotted would back
out, but, on the contrary, promptly take his whole allotment and pay up
the balance. To effect this they decided to allot each subscriber just
the number of shares of Amalgamated necessary to render the amount of
money accompanying his subscription equal to about a twenty-five or
thirty per cent. payment on his whole allotment. This would constitute
such a large margin as to assure the payment of the other seventy or
seventy-five per cent. due. For instance, a man who applied for a
hundred shares accompanied his subscription with a check for $500. He
was allotted twenty shares, value $2,000, on which his $500 check
represented a payment of twenty-five per cent. If the conditions of the
National City Bank's advertisement had been complied with, he was
absolutely entitled to three shares of every five subscribed for, or
sixty in all. To bring about the proportion which Mr. Rogers wanted, a
bogus subscription of five or six times the unallotted balance was put
in by him, and this is where the fraud was committed. The National City
Bank was in duty bound to protect the public from any such bogus
subscription, and to see that fair treatment was accorded to all
subscribers. Yet, unfaithful to the trust, it permitted this bogus
subscription to be put in, many hours after the bids had been opened. It
utterly failed to comply with the conditions of its advertisement, and
was thus a direct party to the fraud perpetrated by its president and
Mr. Rogers. The exact amount of the bogus subscription could not be
decided until the exact figures of the subscriptions had been compiled,
so the figures I gave out that night were only estimates. Within the
next few days it was ascertained that the genuine subscriptions totalled
$132,067,500, upon which an allotment of one share in five, or
$26,413,500 of stock altogether, was made to the public.

In this way the conspirators secured from the public $26,413,500 of the
original cost, $39,000,000, and yet retained over $48,500,000 of the
authorized stock of $75,000,000. In other words the public paid
two-thirds of the purchase price, and the conspirators retained nearly
two-thirds of the property.

The fraud thus perpetrated amounts to this: Every subscriber legally
entitled to three shares of Amalgamated stock was deprived of two of
them by the National