1915-07-11-New York Times-D Leroy Dresser Once Rich Banker Commits Suicide
New York Times
11 July 1915, page 1
D. Leroy Dresser, Once Rich Banker, Commits Suicide
Brother of Mrs. G. W. Vanderbilt and Mrs. John Nicholas Brown Shoots Himself.
ALONE IN FRATERNITY HOUSE
Married Seven Months Ago, After Being Divorced, and Was in Financial Straits
ONCE DEALT IN MILLIONS
Prominent in Shipbuilding Trust, the Collapse of Which Ruined Him.
Daniel LeRoy Dresser, whose rise and fall in finance was one of the greatest sensations of the banking history of the first decade of the century, shot and killed himself late yesterday afternoon in the library of the Delta Psi fraternity rooms in St. Anthony's Hall, 434 Riverside Drive, near 116th Street. Mr. Dresser was a brother of Mrs. George W. Vanderbilt and of Mrs. John Nicholas Brown of Newport, whose son, John Nicholas Brown, 2nd, was long known as "the richest boy in the world."
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Merchant Prince With $100,000 a Year
Dresser & Co. was formed in 1897. At that time he was making $100,000 a year and was spoken of as one of the merchant princes of the city. Within a dozen yeras after leaving college he had become a financial power in New York. In 1898 he was elected President of the Merchants' Association of New York. He became interested in the American Asiatic Steamship Company, a director in the American Brass Company, the Holmes, Booth & Hayden Company, the American Tubing and Webbing Company and the Security Warehouse Company.
Some years later he organized the Trust Company of the Republic, interesting some of the most prominent figures in the New York financial world. He began to think and work in millions. The United States Shipbuilding Company was formed. Associated in its formation were such men as J. P. Morgan, Charles M. Schwab, Lewis Nixon, and Max Pam. Dresser was asked to underwrite the bonds of the Shipbuilding Trust. As President of the Trust Company of the Republic he undertook the task. If he had succeeded he would have made millions for the trust and millions for himself. It would have meant the realization of his dreams of financial empire.
He made arrangements with Wall Street houses to hold up the prices of the bonds he underwrote, agreeing to take themat the market figures in addition to the brokerage. Among those associated with Dresser in the great scheme was John W. Young, father of William Hooper Young, the slayer of Mrs. Pulitzer. Dresser made a contract with Young whereby Young was to dispose of $4,200,000 of the bonds in Paris. As a part of Young's commission he received ad interim stock receipts in the company, with the understanding he should raise money on them and live like a millionaire.
Success Within His Grasp.
At first it looked as if Dresser would succeed in the daring financial undertaking more prudent bankers had refused. Young had arranged the sale in Paris, but it was held up for the correction of a technical blunder.
Before this could be remedied Morgan and Schwab,who had bought the Bethlehem Steel Company, sold it to the Shipbuilding Trust for $35,000,000 in cash, stocks and bonds. This frightened the French bankers off. Dresser rushed to Paris. Before going he borrowed $3,500,000 on sixty-day notes to enable the Trust Company of the Republic to make good on its part of the contract. He gambled on getting the French money before the bonds fell due.
When he got to Paris he found no chance to sell the bonds. Young was in a state of collapse. When he was in Europe drafts Young had drawn on him began to reach New York. When Dresser returned to America he found obligations piling upon him thick and fast. When he set to work to stem the flood the brokers who were holding the Shipbuilding Trust bonds began to call on him.
Then Dresser realized what he was facing. Instead of keeping the bonds, he found investors were throwing them back upon the market, and he was obligated to take them. They came from brokers in stacks and he took them as they came. The Trust Company of the Republic had spent $250,000 trying to maintain the price of the bonds.
He used tens of thousands from other sources but he could not halt the avalanche. Rumors about his trust company began to circulate in the Street. The stock dropped from $350 to $50. Dresser had personal notes for $750,000 in the hands of bankers. When these became due he could not renew them and on March 7, 1903, the trust company crumbled. The firm's liabilities were put at $1,250,000 and the assets at $750,000.
Beaten to the wall in 1903, Dresser started to beat back. In 1907 he was discharged from bankruptcy on the unanimous petition of his creditors after he had paid back more than $1,0000,000 of the $1,400,000 claims against him in 1903. Then he started to get revenge on the men he thought responsible for his ruin four years before.
He brought suit against John W. Young, James H. Hyde, the Mercantile Trust Company, and others interested in the 1903 fiasco. He charged that representations made to him when he was asked to underwrite the bonds were false to the extent of $15,000,000. The maze of suits were settled in 1908 by the payment to Mr. Dresserof $200,000.
Mr. Dresser then announced that he was quits with all and that he would regain his financial position. He started out to re-establish the old commission firm of Dresser & Co.
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