Balfour Fraud

The Balfour Group of companies began to unravel after the financial press blew the scandal wide open and the authorities moved in. At which point Jabez did a runner to Argentina where he lived in some style in the town of Salta. (And where he gulled the townsfolk into believing he could do for them what he did for Croydon.)

Jabez’s exile came to an end when Detective Chief Inspector Frank Froest of Scotland Yard was given the job of hauling the rogue financier back to London.

The Yard thought it might take Froest five years to do the job. He did it in months, mainly by defying Argentine law, bundling Jabez on to a non-stop train (which killed a member of the pursuing posse) and shipping him out of Buenos Aires and back to England.

After a lengthy trial Jabez and three of his cronies were jailed. The others were treated leniently (a few months behind bars) but Jabez, the ringleader, was handed a whopping 14 years.

He didn’t do it all, of course. Jabez emerged in 1906, having served 11 years of his sentence. He then kept body and soul together by writing up his experiences for Lord Northcliffe’s Weekly Dispatch which he then published as a book entitled My Prison Years.

But it’s always hard to keep a conman down. Jabez then set himself up as a mining consultant and ventured out to tin mine in Burma at the age of 72.

Jabez returned to Britain and was on his way to take a job in Wales in February 1916 when he died of a heart attack on the London to Fishguard express. He’s buried in an unmarked grave in Paddington Old Cemetery.