Špinavec Harry
Dirty Harry

The Life of the Famous Fraudster during the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

Summary/Abstract: On 12 November 1957 in Warsaw, the trial began of the Austrian citizen H. Jelinek who had been arrested together with two Polish citizens and accused of smuggling six hundred wristwatches and a valuable 15th century Italian painting. The Czechoslovak daily Svobodné slovo mentioned this in a very short article which caught they eye of pensioner Karel Chalupa of Jaroslavice, a little village in South Bohemia near Týn nad Vltavou. The next day he wrote a letter to the State Police in Prague, pointing out that the Austrian citizen arrested in Poland could be the very same former Czechoslovak citizen Harry Jelínek, a famous interwar fraudster who was known during the occupation as a collaborator and a dangerous Gestapo informer. To prove his assumptions, Chalupa added many facts from Jelinek’s life which confirmed his potential links to Austria and Poland. It was apparent from the amount of detail that the pensioner had much more information about Jelínek than he could have got from the press or through gossip.

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