On a couple of instances, his business activities came to the attention of the law. In 1845, a Miss Nelson obtained some furniture to the value of $400 or $500 on a loan-purchase plan from another furniture dealer, Abraham Theall. Soon afterwards, she sells the furniture to Terence2. Theall sues Terence for the value. In his defence, Terence2 said that he purchased the articles from Miss Nelson on the understanding that they belonged to her, as no evidence to the contrary had been given to him.

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And again, in 1849, 21-year-old James Casey sold to Terence some household furniture – bedsteads, mattresses, bureaus, carpet, table and looking glass –for $60, about a third of its estimated value. But it was not Casey’s to sell – he had just hired it from another furniture dealer. Casey got two years hard labour in Sing-Sing State Prison, and again there was no imputation that Terence had done anything wrong, but perhaps he should have been more curious about the goods he had been offered. For Casey, there were more serious consequences.

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Some years later in the 1850s, James Casey re-surfaces in San Francisco. Somehow, he has managed to become a member of the Board of Supervisors (a notoriously corrupt local authority) and editor of the Sunday Times.  Another journalist, the self-styled ‘James King of William’ used his paper, the Daily Evening Bulletin, to crusade against immorality and corruption in the city authorities, launching blistering and frequently scurrilous editorials condemning unscrupulous characters such as Casey.

 

Casey and King carried on a feud in their newspapers, resulting in "much personal enmity". When King revealed that Casey had done time in jail for grand larceny in New York, and was demanding the death penalty for Charles Cora, a friend of Casey’s, Casey had had enough. He accosted King on the street on May 14, 1865, challenged him to a duel (even though King wasn’t armed) and shot him dead. Casey soon joined Cora on the gallows in a judicial lynching by the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance[1].

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vigilance