Pomona con man didn’t count on some long-distance 1901 news coverage
Arthur Pechner was a barber by trade and a con man by nature, regularly clipping almost everyone he met.
He skipped out of Pomona one day in May
1901, leaving in his wake a stack of IOUS and other unpaid debts, not to mention a bunch of upset people.
Members of Company D, Pomona’s National Guard unit, wasted no time in expressing their opinion of Pechner, who just weeks before had joined their unit.
On the night of May 3, several guardsmen assembled an effigy of Pechner in uniform, hanging it from a gibbet in front of the armory. To punctuate their displeasure, they used a bayonet to impale a sign “Pechner” to it.
Pechner had only lived in Pomona for a few months so it obviously took some real ambition to inflame such widespread feelings throughout the town.
He arrived there at a time when most people actually felt confident that a man’s word was his bond — and besides, who doesn’t trust a barber? Pechner, who had a long record of unpaid debts and thefts in cities throughout California, took every advantage of this.
He had collected a dollar from each Company D guardsman for the purpose of buying swords for their officers. He left town with those contributions, plus dollars he had bummed off his fellow soldiers.
When he had arrived in Pomona several months earlier, he purchased a local barber shop with money borrowed from a Los Angeles loan broker. He advertised his Pacific Shaving and Hair Cutting Parlors — “Artistic hair cutting a specialty,” he claimed in a Jan. 2 ad in the Daily Progress.
Later he secured another loan from an acquaintance also using the shop as collateral. He got yet another loan putting up his hair-cutting equipment as collateral. Of course, he took those tools with him when he disappeared.
While in town, Pechner did deposit some of the ill-gotten money into the bank, then wrote post-dated checks to various people all around Pomona after showing them his bank statement. He withdrew his money and skipped town before they could be cashed.
In his escape, Pechner and his wife first went by train to Los Angeles and then Sacramento. There, he apparently abandoned her, hopping on an eastbound train and disappearing into the Midwest.
But justice did prevail, thanks to a tenacious police officer, and a sharpeyed newspaper reader.
Most bad guys around Pomona learned not to mess with the city’s first police officer, Constable Frank O. Slanker. He was a tough lawman who served Pomona from 1887 to 1932 and almost always got his man, even if he had to crack a few heads in the process.
Slanker sent out inquiries throughout the West seeking the fugitive barber, but his search took an amazing turn when he was handed a copy of a Midwest newspaper.
Former Kansan G. W. Raines, who subscribed to his hometown paper, the Perry Mirror, showed Slanker a short article from May 9. It reported an Arthur Pechner had been hired at a barber shop in nearby Oskaloosa, Kansas. Thinking he was beyond detection, Pechner didn’t bother changing his name.
Slanker wired the Jefferson County sheriff in Oskaloosa who jailed the fugitive haircutter. After getting extradition papers from the district attorney in Los Angeles, Slanker boarded a train to retrieve Pechner. A rather surly crowd greeted their train on their return to Pomona on May 31.
Pechner admitted his transgressions, telling the Progress that day he deserved to “be sent over the road,” meaning put behind bars. The next day, the Progress said gambling drove him to defraud so many, and as a result he still had little of his ill-gotten gains.
Justice was a bit quicker in those days. On June
4, he was arraigned and pleaded guilty before Superior Court Judge B. N. Smith. He was sentenced to serve two years at Folsom Penitentiary.
But it didn’t end Pechner’s impact in Pomona.
S. P. Creasinger, the man who first loaned him money to buy the barber shop, arrived in town on July 1 to take possession. He quickly butted heads with B.R. Durrell who showed him his own bill of sale for the shop from Pechner.
It wasn’t until mid-july that a court settlement finally gave Durrell the shop in exchange for paying $65 to Creasinger. “Presumably this is the end of the Pechner affair,” suggested the Progress on July 18.