work that Elias formed what later became the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, and began to write music for movies. It was also at this time that he embezzled the entire payroll of the orchestra, and left for Mexico City, on the run, because Mexico did not yet have an extradition treaty with the US. The musicians of the orchestra, knowing that Elias had ripped them off, still prepared a scroll for him, testifying to his musicianship, and for giving them a step forward in their careers. Elias kept that scroll on the wall for many years. In Mexico In the 1940s he moved to Mexico and became an exclusive artist of the XEB Radio station in Mexico City, the oldest in the country composed scores for the Cinema of Mexico including the Cantinflas film Neither blood nor sand. He had a daughter there who became a famous entertainer and violinist herself, Olga Breeskin. In 1941, Anna, Gene, and John Breeskin joined Elias in Mexico City, where he had become musical director for XEW, the most important radio station in the country. John Breeskin describes one Christmas sitting in box seat in the principal orchestra hall in Mexico City near the President of Mexico, and watching his father Elias take the stage, lift his baton, and give the downbeat for Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. John Breeskin also describes living in a mansion with several servants, including a chauffeur, a gardener, a bodyguard, a cook and two young maids. Elias would come home from work, take off his suit jacket, and reveal a tiny Capuchin monkey tucked into his armpit. He would come home from the mercado with a parrot with violently colored feathers perched on his shoulder; this was typical. In prison In May 1945, Elias was arrested and taken to jail as a political prisoner due to his gambling debts and for being on the wrong side of the political process; he was sent to "las Islas Marías" (the equivalent of Devil’s Island), where his cellmate was Ramón Mercader, Leon Trotsky’s assassin. He was held there for almost a year. During this time his marriage ended. After Elias got out of jail, he married his third wife Lena Torres, with whom he had a daughter Olga and son Elias Junior, also an accomplished violinist. While in prison, before he was pardoned by the president of Mexico, Manuel Ávila Camacho (1 December