True Stories of Crime from the District Attorney’s Office

Former New York DA Arthur Train tells true crime stories from his time in office.

By : Arthur Cheney Train (1875 - 1945)

01 - Preface/Chapter I -- The Woman in the Case 02 - Chapter II -- Five Hundred Million Dollars 03 - Chapter III -- The Lost Stradivarius 04 - Chapter IV -- The Last of the Wire-Tappers 05 - Chapter V -- The Franklin Syndicate 06 - Chapter VI -- A Study in Finance 07 - Chapter VII -- The ''Duc de Nevers'' 08 - Chapter VIII -- A Finder of Missing Heirs 09 - Chapter IX -- A Murder Conspiracy 10 - Chapter X -- A Flight Into Texas 11 - Chapter XI -- A Case of Circumstantial Evidence

The narratives composing this book are literally true stories of crime. In a majority of the cases the author conducted the prosecutions himself, and therefore may claim to have a personal knowledge of that whereof he speaks. While no confidence has been abused, no essential facts have been omitted, distorted, or colored, and the accounts themselves, being all matters of public record, may be easily verified.

The scenes recorded here are not literature but history, and the characters who figure in them are not puppets of the imagination, but men and women who lived and schemed, laughed, sinned and suffered, and paid the price when the time came, most of them, without flinching. A few of those who read these pages may profit perhaps by their example; others may gain somewhat in their knowledge of life and human nature; but all will agree that there are books in the running brooks, even if the streams be turbid, and sermons in stones, though these be the hearts of men. If in some instances the narratives savor in treatment more of fiction than of fact, the writer must plead guilty to having fallen under the spell of the romance of his subject, and he proffers the excuse that, whereas such tales have lost nothing in accuracy, they may have gained in the truth of their final impression.