The alleged Grand Swindle.
We copied from the Lynchburg Virginian, on Saturday, a notice of the disappearance of Capt. Decie, an Englishman, who had gotten money to the amount of $1,200,000 on sterling bills, which have since been notified to the parties here who bought them as having been protested. Capt. Decie came to America shortly after the commencement of the war, with the yacht Monitor, which he sold to this Government. He afterwards went to Montgomery county and settled there, since which time several of his children have died and been buried there. He commenced his business operations in this city by selling a bill of £5,000 on the Bank of Australia, and referred the parties he sold it to a firm in Savannah, who, being applied to, endorsed Capt. D. as a responsible and honorable man. This bill, like others, was endorsed by the Bank of the Valley at Christiansburg, Decie having requested that endorsement, as he said, to facilitate the negotiation of the paper. The bills he has drawn and sold to parties in Richmond will amount to about one million two hundred thousand dollars. One of the firms to whom he sold these bills, Messrs. R. T. Foster & Co., have received a protest of the one which they bought. They promptly attached his property, near the Montgomery White Sulphur Springs, and thus secured themselves from loss. Other parties in the city have received notices of protest of the bills they bought, though not the protests themselves. Mr. Samuel J. Harrison requests us to state that he is not the Samuel Harrison noticed by the Virginian as having been swindled by Decie. Mr. Wadsworth, of the firm of Wadsworth, Palmer & Co., also asks us to correct the report that he was a loser by or had any transactions with the alleged swindler.It is proper and just to state that several business men in the city, who have had transactions with Decie, still have the most entire confidence in him, and think that the protests resulted from the fact that the parties he drew on, in consequence of the difficulties of communication, had not been advised of his draft. He did not leave the country under suspicious circumstances, but his intended departure was known in Richmond long before it took place, and he made no secret of it. He went to carry his wife to England, on account of her very delicate health, and they believe that he will return, and that all his liabilities will be honorably settled.
