When the records of these men are considered, it is believed that the boldness of their operations, the ease with which they have obtained the endorsement of representative business men in Chicago and elsewhere for their various schemes, and the way in which, unchecked, they have personally profited from their operations in the name of legitimate business, are absolutely without a parallel in the history of this city.
Any number of stockholders in the different companies stand ready to testify to the correctness of the foregoing. Every company started and operated by these men appears to have been exploited for the sole benefit of themselves. The stockholders have, with a few insignificant exceptions, lost every dollar invested.
This was the opening gun in the Rhodus campaign. When Detective Wooldridge began boring in he found that in addition to the Central Life Securities Company (whatever that might mean), the Rhodus brothers were promoting the moss-grown mining proposition, and that the Mina Grande Mining Company, with certain holes in the ground located in the State of Sonora, Mexico, was also a Rhodus Company.
The Mercantile Finance Company, which was capitalized at the sum of $1,000 in the State of Maine, Maine being almost as easy as New Jersey as a corporation state, was the basis for the manipulation of all the other companies. Even Maine would not stand for a big capitalization of penniless adventurers, so to make the capitalization bug the services of the Mina Grande and the State of Sonora, where things are still easier than in Maine, were called in and the capitalization of the Mina Grande was rated at $2,000,000.
This did not look nice to the detective. There was too much hunting of easy ground. He bored in further. Then he discovered the true inwardness of the situation. Around Joplin, Webb City, Carterville and other cities in Southwest Missouri, are certain very fine lead and zinc mines. Joplin is the first zinc producing city in the world. It has been known as such for a number of years. The lead from this district is second only in output to that of Leadville, Colo. Here was another easy chance.
Of course any one who knew anything at all about the lay of the land in Jasper County, Mo., knew that all the possible lead and zinc lands had been snapped up years ago; that "Pat" Sullivan of Joplin had been a political boss on the strength of his turning monopolist of the very districts which produced the lead and zinc. But the public did not know it. At least not the great, gullible public. They only knew that Jasper County was full of lead and zinc and they in some way formed the conclusion that the whole county was underlaid with the precious metals.
Therefore it was easy for the Rhodus "companies" to start the "Independent Zinc Securities Company," bore a few holes in the ground which would produce fish-worms and black ants and nothing else, and "transfer the stock of the 'Mina Grande' to the 'Independent Zinc'." This only was used as a safeguard where a stockholder of Mina Grande began to get peevish because the holes in the hillsides of Sonora produced nothing.
But the Rhodus game was not yet complete. The Mercantile Finance Company, with its thousand-dollar capitalization in the State of Maine, might get into difficulties transferring stock to the "Independent Zinc," because somebody might know enough about Jasper County to realize that there was not enough lead in that county outside the control of the lead trust to make a small-sized pea.
Therefore it needed another company to "transfer" the peevish stockholder to. So the Mexican Development Company was formed by the Mercantile, the capital of the new company being $1,000,000, and its assets 90,000 shares of the "Mina Grande" stock, the par value of which would not buy a cigarette paper.
The literature of the new company also carried the literature of the "Mina Grande," with a glowing account of how the new company was going to turn Mexico upside down and enrich the whole world from the scorpion holes in the Sonora hillsides.