New York Times, January 12, 1911, page 6.
WIRELESS PROMOTER HELD.
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Cameron L. Spear Accused of Defrauding Investors in Continental Stock.
Cameron L. Spear, alleged to be the chief promoter of the Continental Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company, the offices of which, at 56 Pine Street, were raided on Nov. 21 by direction of Postmaster General Hitchcock, appeared before Judge Hand in the Criminal Branch of the United States Circuit Court yesterday and pleaded not guilty to an indictment charging him with having been engaged in a scheme to defraud investors in the company's stock through the mails. Bail was fixed at which was furnished by Almina L. Spear of Avon-by-the-Sea, N. J.
At the time of the raid Charles L. Vaughn, Treasurer of the Continental Company and also of the Columbia Finance Corporation, the fiscal agent of the wireless concern, was arrested on the same charge and put under bail for trial. Eight Post Office Inspectors were for months engaged in investigating the affairs of the Continental Company, and when the offices were raided forty mail sacks full of letters, books, and other documents were seized as evidence.
The indictment charges that Vaughn and Spear with others on June 4, 1910, "devised a scheme of artifice to defraud Walter N. Altman of Topeka. Kan., and others by falsely representing that the Continental Company was organized to operate, develop, and control various wireless concerns, and making statements concerning the earning capacity of these concerns which were false."
Spear, according to the postal authorities, is the genius who first originated the "suckers' list" which netted millions of dollars to the promoters of fake mining and other fraudulent stock enterprises. He is also said to be a close friend of Christopher Columbus Wilson, president of the United Wireless Telegraph Company, at present out on bail on a Federal indictment charging him with using the mails to defraud investors in the stock of that corporation.