Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 188, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 August 1913 — BY ORDER OF CZAR [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

BY ORDER OF CZAR

Nicholas Savin, Adventurer, Released From Riga Prison.

International Swindler, "Man of the Hour” In Russia, Now Earns est Living—Was Btreet Car Conductor in Moscow. —Nicholas Savin, the notorious Russian adventurer who calls himself Count Nicholas de ToulouseLautrec, has been released from prison in Riga by the czar’s manifesto of March 6. When the count came out of prison he had only three rubles in his pocket He has earned 6,000 ru>les so far. A Moscow newspaper is publishing his diary and a cinematograph firm has paid him $1,500 for films illustrating his life. In Russia he is the man of the hour. He is known to the police all over Europe and America as an exceedingly accomplished swindler, who speaks half a dozen languages and whose specialty is the passing off on the guileless of forged bonds and securities. He accounts for all the records of charges and convictions against him in various parts ot the globe in two Ingenious ways. Either they were crimes committed by a cousin who is remarkably like him or he says they were charges trumped up against him by the Russian secret police in order to get rid of a dangerous nihilist. According to his own story, he took part in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877

and was severely wounded at Plevna. There Is some ground for doubting this account, for he received no medal and no wound pension. All that la known is that In 1878 he gave up his commission. When Savin was on trial at Pau In 1908 for swindling ue told the Bame story of being wounded at Plevna as well as at Santiago de Cuba. The French court ordered the prison doctor to examine his "wounds.” The doctor reported that there certainly were scars visible, but they were received in battles other than those pf war. 0 After a thrilling escape from, the French gendarmerie he fled to the Balkans, where he enlivened proceedings by presenting himself as a candidate for the Bulgarian throne. His schemes. .however, were frustrated by a Moscow barber, to whom he owed money, and who, happening to be in Constantinople at the same time, gave information to the Russian embassy as to Savin’s identity. The luckless adventurer was sent to Narim. a desolate convict settlement in Siberia, but within three months he succeeded in escaping. Afterward he lived in Chicago, where be worked as a car conductor and was naturalized as an American citizen. He was married in Canada and arrested and sentenced there for dealing in forged bonds in 1900 and has since been arrested ln«New York, Us bon, Finland and Pan. He tails

wonderful stories of escapes from Siberia and is, in fact, the most brilliant artist In modern fiction.'

Czar of Russia