This Is Your FBI: Misery Chiseling

This is your FBI. This is your FBI, an official broadcast from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, presented as a public service by the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States. To your FBI, you look for national security, and to the Equitable Society for financial security.

These two great institutions are dedicated to the protection of you, your home, and your country. Tonight, the story of a crime against the people. Misery chiseling. Crawling on one of the lower rungs of the criminal scale is the breed known as the Misery Chiseling.

To find him dignified terms, he is one who prays on the misfortunes of another for profit. In language more becoming him, he is a parasite who exists on human sorrow, heartache, and misery. The war with its backwash of heartaches here at home has given the misery chisler a rich field in which to work.

Through the cooperation of the victims, however, the FBI has already bagged scores of these despicable criminals and is continuously warring against them. The misery chisler is not too easily caught, because he has robbed his victim and disappeared before the victim realizes or even suspects that he or she has been robbed.

The story of tonight's case begins in San Francisco, and the modest little home of Mrs. Henry Miller, a widow. And son was reported missing in action some time ago. But just now, from a man introducing himself as Colonel Addison Bramley of British Army Intelligence, Mrs. Miller has heard good news.

You don't know how I've prayed Colonel Bramley, that this might be true. I understand. That my son was alive, even though a prisoner of the Japanese. Yes, it is much better to know that than nothing at all.