WILLIAM E BROCKWAY

Alias:

Specialties: BOND FORGER, COUNTERFEITER

No: 32 Last Displayed: 9/20/2023

Description:

Sixty-four years old in 1886. Born in Connecticut. Engraver by trade, Married. Tall, thin man. Height, 6 feet 1 1/2 inches. Weight, 162 pounds. Gray hair, blue eyes, light complexion. Long, thin neck. A remarkable looking man on account of his height and thinness. He has been a counterfeiter and forger since 1850. An account of all his transactions would fill this book. He is well known in all the principal cities in the United States, especially by the United States authorities. Wears a gray beard and mustache. He studied chemistry at Yale College, and later on became a printer and electrotyper.

Record:

BROCKWAY and Charles Smythe were arrested in Brooklyn, N. Y., by the United States authorities on October 22, 1880, charged (in connection with one James B. Doyle, who was arrested in Chicago, Ill., and sentenced to ten years on June 24, 1881) with forging and uttering $204,000 of United States government 6 per cent. coupon bonds of the denomination of $1,000, and a number of forged United States Treasury notes. The bonds and notes were found in Doyle's possession when arrested in Chicago, Ill. Brockway was convicted by the evidence of Smythe, and sentenced to thirty years' imprisonment by the United States Court in New York City. Sentence was suspended in this case by the Judge, on Brockway undertaking to surrender all the plates for forging bonds and notes which he had in his possession or the whereabouts of which he knew, also to give up other counterfeit apparatus and give the authorities information about other schemes then on foot to defraud the government, all of which he did, and he was discharged from custody on November 27, 1880, by Judge Benedict, of the United States Court, with the understanding that if he ever was arrested again for forging or counterfeiting anything the property of the United States government, his suspended sentence would go into effect. Brockway was arrested again in New York City on November 10, 1883, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to five years in State prison on March 5, 1884, by Recorder Smyth, for forging a number of Morris & Essex Railroad bonds. Nathan B. Foster and Louis R. Martin (31) were also arrested with Brockway in this transaction. Brockway's sentence will expire, allowing him full good time, on August 4, 1887. His picture is an excellent one, taken in 1884.