Struggle in Istanbul

One day last week an impatient, high-nosed lady with flashing dark eyes paced the deck of the steamer Rumania in Istanbul harbor. She was Mme Zahra Lilie Couyoumdjoglou, wife of a Bagdad date merchant, whose great adventure had become a sad denouement. For months in Athens she had befriended Fugitive Samuel Insull. She had successfully smuggled him off on the steamer Maiotis. She had befuddled the Athens police so badly that she faced a charge of perjury. She had rushed off to Rumania to implore Magda Lupescu, King Carol's mistress, to provide asylum for the fugitive. But Insull had not reached that asylum, and Mme Couyoumdjoglou had sailed back to Istanbul only to find that her hero, Insull, was inside a Turkish jail waiting deportation to the U. S.

At the news, tears filled her expressive eyes. Waving her Greek passport at the Turkish immigration officers she demanded to go ashore to Insull's aid. Her passport did not have a Turkish visa and they refused. Desperate, she tried to push past them at the ship's rail. One of them seized her shoulder. She wrenched to get away, toppled backwards, slid over the rail into the harbor. She came up blowing the foul water from her mouth. A sailor with a boat hook fished her out. They carried her prostrate and drenched back to her cabin and the Rumania steamed off carrying her back to Athens.

Meanwhile in Istanbul's House of Detention Samuel Insull staged his last fight against deportation. He employed an English barrister, Alexander Mango, to appeal his case to the Court of Cassation (Turkish Supreme Court). When the Turkish attorney general visited him he got more comforts: an armchair, a stove instead of a brazier to warm his cell. Often he was depressed but seldom wept.

For five days he enjoyed some hope. Then word came that before going fishing fortnight ago President Roosevelt signed a warrant for Insull's arrest ordering the U. S. Vice Consul in Istanbul, to bring the body of Samuel Insull back to Chicago for trial for using the mails to defraud, violation of the Bankruptcy Act, larceny and embezzlement in connection with the $2,000,000,000 crash of the Insull utilities pyramid in 1932.

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