In the preceding chapter the writer discussed at some length the real,
as distinguished from the fancied, attributes of detectives in general,
and the weaknesses as well as the virtues of the so-called detective
"agency." There are in the city of New York at the present time about
one hundred and fifty licensed detectives. Under the detective license
laws each of these has been required to file with the State comptroller
written evidences of his competency, and integrity, approved by five
reputable freeholders of his county, and to give bond in the sum of
two thousand dollars. He also has to pay a license fee of one hundred
dollars per annum, but this enables him to employ as many "operators"
as he chooses. In other words, the head of the agency may be of good
character and his agents wholly undesirable citizens. How often this is
the case is known to none better than the heads themselves. The strength
and efficiency of a detective agency does not lie in the name at the
top of its letter-paper, but in the unknown personnel of the men who are
doing or shirking the work. I believe that most of the principals of
the many agencies throughout the United States are animated by a serious
desire to give their clients a full return for their money and loyal and
honest service. But the best intentions in the world cannot make up
for the lack of untiring vigilance in supervising the men who are being
employed in the client's service.
It is the right here that the "national" has an immense advantage
over the small agency which cannot afford to keep a large staff of men
constantly on hand, but is forced to engage them temporarily as they may
be needed. The "national" agency can shift its employees from place
to place as their services are required, and the advantages of
centralization are felt as much in this sort of work as in any other
industry. The licensed detective who sends out a hurry call for
assistants is apt to be able to get only men whom he would otherwise not
employ. In this chapter, the word "national," as applied to a detective
agency, refers not to the title under which such an agency may do its
business, but to the fact that it is organized and equipped to render
services all over the country.
In this connection it is worth noticing that the best detective agencies
train their own operators, selecting them from picked material. The
candidate must as rule be between twenty and thirty-five years of age,
sound of body, and reasonably intelligent. He gets pretty good wages
from the start. From the comparatively easy work of watching or
"locating," he is advanced through the more difficult varieties of
"shadowing" and "trailing," until eventually he may develop into a
first-class man who will be set to unravel a murder mystery or to "rope"
a professional criminal. But with years of training the best material
makes few real detectives, and the real detective remains in fact the
man who sits at the mahogany desk in the central office and presses the
row of mother of pearl buttons in front of him.
If you know the heads or superintendents of the large agencies you will
find that the "star" cases, of which they like to talk, are, for the
most part, the pursuit and capture of forgers and murderers. The
former, as a rule, are "spotted" and "trailed" to their haunts, and when
sufficient evidence has been obtained the police are notified, and a
raid takes place, or the arrest is made, by the State authorities.
In the case of a murderer, in a majority of cases, his capture is the
result of skilful "roping" by an astute detective who manages to get
into his confidence. For example, a murder is committed by an
Italian miner. Let us suppose he has killed his "boss," or even the
superintendent or owner. He disappears. As the reader known, the
Italians are so secretive that it is next to impossible to secure any
information--even from the relatives of the murdered man.
The first thing is to locate the assassin. An Italian detective is sent
into the mine as a laborer. Months may elapse before he gets on familiar
or intimate terms with his fellows. All the time he is listening and
watching. Presently he hears something that indicates that the murderer
is communicating with one of his old friends either directly or through
third parties. It is then generally only a question of time before his
whereabouts are ascertained. Once he is "located" the same method is
followed in securing additional evidence or material in the nature of
a confession or admission tending to establish guilt. Having previously
"roped" the murderer's friends, the detective now proceeds to the more
difficult task of "roping" the murderer himself. Of course, the life
of a detective in a Pennsylvania coal mine would be valueless if his
identity were discovered, and yet the most daring pieces of detective
work are constantly being performed under these and similar conditions.
Where the criminal is not known, the task becomes far more difficult and
at times exceedingly dangerous.
One of my own friends, an Italian gentleman, spent several months in the
different mines of this country, where Italians are largely employed,
investigating conditions and ascertaining for the benefit of his
government the extent to which anarchy was prevalent. It was necessary
for him to secure work as a miner at the lowest wages and to disguise
himself in such a way that it would be impossible for anybody to detect
his true character. Fortunately, the great diversity of Italian dialects
facilitated his efforts and enabled him to pass himself off as
from another part of the country than his comrades. Having made his
preparations he came to New York as an immigrant and joined a party of
newly arrived Italians on their way to the coal mines of West Virginia.
Without following him further, it is enough to say that during his
service in the mines he overheard much that was calculated to interest
exceedingly the authorities at Rome. Had his disguise been penetrated
the quick thrust of a five-inch blade would have ended his career.
He would never have returned to New York. There would only have been
another dead "Dago" miner. The local coroner would have driven up in
his buggy, looked at the body, examined the clean, deep wound in the
abdomen, shrugged his shoulders, and empanelled a hetrogeneous jury who
would have returned a verdict to the effect that "deceased came to
his death through a stab wound inflicted by some person to the jury
unknown." My friend was not a professional detective, but the recital of
his experiences was enough to fill me with new respect for those engaged
in the "man hunt" business among the half civilized miners of the coal
regions.
But the work of even the "national" agencies is not of the kind which
the novel-reading public generally associates with detectives--that is
to say, it rarely deals with the unravelling of "mysteries," except the
identity of passers of fraudulent paper and occasional murderers. The
protection of the banks is naturally the most important work that such
an agency can perform.
The National Bankers' Association has eleven thousand members.
"Pinkerton's Bank and Bankers' Protection" also has a large organization
of subscribers. These devote themselves to identifying and running down
all criminals whose activities are dangerous to them. Here the agency
and the police work hand in hand, exchanging photographs of crooks and
suspects and keeping closely informed as to each other's doings. Yet
there is no official connection between any detective agency and the
police of any city. It is an almost universal rule that a private
detective shall not make an arrest. The reasons for this are manifold.
In the first place, the private detective has neither the general
authority nor the facilities for the manual detention of a criminal. A
blue coat and brass buttons, to say nothing of a night stick, are often
invaluable stage properties in the last act of the melodrama. And as the
criminal authorities are eventually to deal with the defendant anyway,
it is just as well if they come into the case as soon as may be. It goes
without saying, of course, that a detective per se has no more right to
make an arrest than any private citizen--nor has a policeman, for that
matter, save in exceptional cases. The officer is valuable for his
dignity, avoirdupois, "bracelets," and other accessories. The police
thus get the credit of many arrests in difficult cases where all the
work has been done by private detectives, and it is good business for
the latter to let them know it.
One of the chief assets of the big agency is its accumulated information
concerning all sorts of professional criminals. Its galleries are quite
as complete as those of the local police headquarters, for a constant
exchange of art objects is going on with the police throughout the
world. And as the agency is protecting banks all over the United States
it has greater interest in all bank burglars as a class than the police
of any particular city who are only concerned with the burglars who
(as one might say) burgle in their particular burg. Thus, you are more
likely to find a detective from a national agency than a sleuth from
300 Mulberry Street, New York, following a forger to Australasia or
Polynesia.
The best agencies absolutely decline to touch divorce and matrimonial
cases of any sort. It does not do a detective agency any good to have
its men constantly upon the witness stand subject to attack, with
a consequent possible reflection upon their probity of character or
truthfulness. Moreover, a good detective is too valuable a person to
be wasting his time in the court-room. In the ordinary divorce case the
detective, having procured evidence, is obliged to remain on tap and
subject to call as a witness for at least three or four months, during
which time he cannot be sent away on distant work. Neither can the
customer be charged ordinarily for waiting time, and apart from its
malodorous character the business is not desirable from a financial
point of view.
The national agencies prefer clean criminal work, murder cases,
and general investigating. They no longer undertake any policing,
strike-breaking, or guarding. The most ridiculous misinformation in
regard to their participation in this sort of work has been spread
broadcast largely by jealous enemies and by the labor unions.
By way of illustration, one Thomas Beet, describing himself as an
English detective, contributed an article to the 'New York Tribune' of
September 16, 1906, in which he said:
"In one of the greatest of our strikes, that involving the steel
industry, over two thousand armed detectives were employed supposedly to
protect property, while several hundred men were scattered in the ranks
of strikers as workmen. Many of the latter became officers in the labor
bodies, helped to make laws for the organizations, made incendiary
speeches, cast their votes for the most radical movements made by the
strikers, participated in and led bodies of the members in the acts of
lawlessness that eventually caused the sending of State troops and the
declaration of martial law. While doing this, these spies within
the ranks were making daily reports of the plans and purposes of the
strikers. To my knowledge, when lawlessness was at its height and murder
ran riot, these men wore little patches of white on the lapels of their
coats so that their fellow detectives of the two thousand would not
shoot them down by mistake."
He, of course, referred to the great strike at Homestead, Pennsylvania,
in 1892. In point of fact, there were only six private detectives
engaged on the side of the employers at that time, and these were there
to assist the local authorities in taking charge of six hundred and
fifty watchmen, and to help place the latter upon the property of the
steel company. These watchmen were under the direction of the sheriff
and sworn in as peace officers of the county. Mr. Beet seems to
have confused his history and mixed up the white handkerchief of the
Huguenots of Nantes with the strike-breakers of Pennsylvania. It is
needless to repeat (as Mr. Robert A. Pinkerton stated at the time),
that the white label story is ridiculously' untrue, and that it was the
strikers who attacked the watchmen, and not the watchmen the strikers.
One striker and one watchman were killed.
But this attack of Mr. Beet upon his own profession, under the guise
of being an English detective (it developed that he was an ex-divorce
detective from New York City), was not confined to his remarks about
inciting wanton murder. On the contrary, he alleged (as one having
authority and not merely as a scribe) that American detective agencies
were practically nothing but blackmailing concerns, which used the
information secured in a professional capacity to extort money from
their own clients.
"Think of the so-called detective," says Mr. Beet, "whose agency pays
him two dollars or two dollars and fifty cents a day, being engaged upon
confidential work and in the possession of secrets that he knows
are worth money! Is it any wonder that so many cases are sold out by
employees, even when the agencies are honest?"
We are constrained to answer that it is no more wonderful than that any
person earning the same sum should remain honest when he might so easily
turn thief. As the writer has himself pointed out in these pages, there
are hundreds of so-called detective agencies which are but traps for the
guileless citizen who calls upon them for aid. But there are many which
are as honestly conducted as any other variety of legitimate business. I
do not know Mr. Beet's personal experience, but it appears to have been
unfortunate. At any rate, his diatribe is unfounded and false, and the
worst feature of it is his assertion that detective agencies make a
business of manufacturing cases when there happen to be none on hand.
"Soon," says he, "there were not enough cases to go around, and then
with the aid of spies and informers the unscrupulous detectives began to
make cases. Agencies began to work up evidence against persons and then
resorted to blackmail, or else approached those to whom the information
might be valuable, and by careful manoeuvring had themselves retained
to unravel the case. This brought into existence hordes of professional
informers who secured the opening wedges for the fake agencies. Men and
women, many of them of some social standing, made it a practice to pry
around for secrets which might be valuable able; spies kept up their
work in large business establishments and began to haunt the cafes and
resorts of doubtful reputation, on the watch for persons of wealth
and prominence who might be foolish enough to place themselves in
compromising circumstances. Even the servants in wealthy families soon
learned that certain secrets of the master and mistress could be
turned to profitable account. We shudder when we hear of the system
of espionage maintained in Russia, while in the large American cities,
unnoticed, are organizations of spies and informers on every hand who
spend their lives digging pitfalls for the unwary who can afford to
pay."
One would think that we were living in the days of the Borgias! "Ninety
per cent," says Mr. Beet, "of private detective agencies are rotten to
the core and simply exist and thrive upon a foundation of dishonesty,
deceit, conspiracy, and treachery to the public in general and their own
patrons in particular. There are detectives at the heads of prominent
agencies in this country whose pictures adorn the Rogues' Gallery; men
who have served time in various prisons for almost every crime on the
calendar."
This harrowing picture has the modicum of truth that makes it
insidiously dangerous. But this last extravagance betrays the
denunciator. One would be interested to have this past-master of
overstatement mention the names of these distinguished crooks that head
the prominent agencies. Their exposure, if true, would not be libellous,
and it would seem that he had performed but half his duty to the public
in refraining from giving this important, if not vital, information.
I know several of these gentlemen whose pictures I feel confident do not
appear in the Rogues' Gallery, and who have not been, as yet, convicted
of crime. A client is as safe in the hands of a good detective agency as
he is in the hands of a good attorney; he should know his agency, that
is all--just as he should know his lawyer. The men at the head of the
big agencies generally take the same pride in their work as the members
of any other profession. They know that a first-class reputation for
honesty is essential to their financial success and that good will is
their stock in trade. Take this away and they would have nothing.
In 1878 the founder of one of the most famous of our national agencies
promulgated in printed form for the benefit of his employees what he
called his general principles. One of these was the following:
"This agency only offers its services at a stated per diem for each
detective employed on an operation, giving no guarantee of success,
except in the reputation for reliability and efficiency; and any person
in its service who shall, under any circumstances, permit himself or
herself to receive a gift, reward, or bribe shall be instantly dismissed
from the service."
Another:
"The profession of the detective is a high and honorable calling. Few
professions excel it. He is an officer of justice, and must himself be
pure and above reproach."
Again:
"It is an evidence of the unfitness of the detective for his profession
when he is compelled to resort to the use of intoxicating liquors; and,
indeed, the strongest kind of evidence, if he continually resorts to
this evil practice. The detective must not do anything to farther sink
the criminal in vice or debauchery, but, on the contrary, must seek to
win his confidence by endeavoring to elevate him, etc."
"Kindness and justice should go hand in hand, whenever it is possible,
in the dealings of the detective with the criminal. There is no human
being so degraded but there is some little bright spark of conscience
and of right still existing in him."
Last:
"The detective must, in every instance, report everything which is
favorable to the suspected party, as well as everything which may be
against him."
The man who penned these principles had had the safety of Abraham
Lincoln in his keeping; and these simple statements are the best
refutation of the baseless assertions above referred to.
It may be that in those days the detection of crime was a bit more
elementary than at the present time. One can hardly picture a modern
sleuth delaying long in an attempt to evangelize his quarry, but these
general principles are the right stuff and shine like good deeds in a
naughty world.
As one peruses this little pink pamphlet he is constantly struck by the
repeated references to the detective as an actor. That was undoubtedly
the ancient concept of a sleuth. "He must possess, also, the player's
faculty of assuming any character that his case may require, and of
acting it out to the life with an ease and naturalness which shall not
be questioned." This somewhat large order is, to our relief, qualified a
little later on. "It is not to be expected, however," the author admits,
"that every detective shall possess these rare qualifications, although
the more talented and versatile he is, the higher will be the sphere of
operation which he will command."
The modern detective agency is conducted on business principles and does
not look for histrionic talent or general versatility. As one of the
heads of a prominent agency said to me the other day:
"When we want a detective to take the part of a plumber we get a
plumber, and when we need one to act as a boiler-maker we go out and get
a real one--if we haven't one on our pay rolls."
"But," I replied, "when you need a man to go into a private family and
pretend to be an English clergyman, or a French viscount, or a brilliant
man of the world--who do you send?"
The "head" smiled.
"The case hasn't arisen yet," said he. "When it does I guess we'll get
the real thing."
The national detective agency, with its thousands of employees who have,
most of them, grown up and received their training in its service, is a
powerful organization, highly centralized, and having an immense sinking
fund of special knowledge and past experience. This is the product of
decades of patient labor and minute record. The agency which offers
you the services of a Sherlock Holmes is a fraud, but you can accept as
genuine a proposition to run down any man whose picture you may be able
to identify in the gallery. The day of the impersonator is over. The
detective of this generation is a hard-headed business man with a stout
pair of legs.
This accumulated fund of information is the heritage of an honest and
long established industry. It is seventy-five per cent of its capital.
It is entirely beyond the reach of the mushroom agency, which in
consequence has to accept less desirable retainers involving no such
requirements, or go to the wall. The collection of photographs is almost
priceless and the clippings, letters, and memoranda in the filing cases
only secondarily so. Very few of the "operators" pretend to anything but
common-sense, with perhaps some special knowledge of the men they
are after. They are not clairvoyants or mystery men, but they will
tirelessly follow a crook until they get him. They are the regular
troops who take their orders without question. The real "detective" is
the "boss" who directs them.
The reader can easily see that in all cases where a crime, such as
forgery, is concerned, once the identity of the criminal is ascertained,
half the work (or more than half) is done. The agencies know the face
and record of practically every man who ever flew a bit of bad paper in
the United States, in England, or on the Continent. If an old hand gets
out of prison his movements are watched until it is obvious that he does
not intend to resort to his old tricks. After the criminal is known or
"located," the "trailing" begins and his "connections" are carefully
studied. This may or may not require what might be called real detective
work; that is to say, work requiring superior power of deducing
conclusions from first-hand information, coupled with unusual skill
in acting upon them. Mere trailing is often simple, yet sometimes
very difficult. A great deal depends on the operator's own peculiar
information as to his man's habits, haunts, and associates. It is very
hard to say in most cases just where mere knowledge ends and detective
work proper begins. As for disguises, they are almost unknown, except
such as are necessary to enable an operator to join a gang where his
quarry may be working and "rope" him into a confession.
Detective agencies of the first-class are engaged principally in
clean-cut criminal work, such as guarding banks from forgers and
"yeggmen"--an original and dangerous variety of burglar peculiar to the
United States and Canada. In other words, they have large associations
of clients who need more protection than the regular police can give
them, and whose interest it is that the criminal shall not only be
driven out of town, but run down (wherever he may be), captured, and put
out of the way for as long a time as possible.
The work done for private individuals is no less important and
effective, but it is secondary to the other. The great value of the
"agency" to the victim of a theft is the speed with which it can
disseminate its information--something quite impossible so far as the
individual citizen is concerned. Let me give an illustration or two.
Between 10.30 P.M. Saturday, February 25, 1911, and 9.30 A.M. Sunday,
February 26, 1911, one hundred and thirty thousand dollars worth of
pearls belonging to Mrs. Maldwin Drummond were stolen from a stateroom
on the steamship 'Amerika' of the Hamburg-American line. The London
underwriters cabled five thousand dollars reward and retained to
investigate the case a well-known American agency, which before
the 'Amerika' had reached Plymouth on her return trip had their
notifications in the hands of all the jewelers and police officials of
Europe and the United States, and had covered every avenue of disposal
in North and South America. In addition, this agency investigated every
human being on the Amerika from first cabin to forecastle.
Within a year or so an aged stock-broker, named Bancroft, was robbed
on the street of one hundred thousand dollars in securities. Inside of
fifty-five minutes after he had reported his loss a detective agency had
notified all banks, brokers, and the police in fifty-six cities of the
United States and Canada.
In the story books your detective scans with eagle eye the surface of
the floor for microscopic evidences of crime. His mind leaps from a
cigar ash to a piece of banana peel and thence to what the family had
for dinner. His brain is working all the time. It is, of course, all
quite wonderful and most excellent reading, and the old-style sleuth
really thought he could do it! Nowadays, while the fake detective
is snooping around the back piazza with a telescope, the real one is
getting the "dope" from the village blacksmith or barber or the waitress
at the station. He may not be highly intelligent, but he knows the
country, and, what is more important, he knows the people. All the
brains in the world cannot make up for the lack of an elementary
knowledge of the place and the characters themselves. It stands to
reason that no strange detective could form as good an opinion as to
which of the members of your household would be most likely to steal a
piece of jewelry as you could yourself. Yet the old-fashioned Sherlock
knew and knows it all.
One of the best illustrations of the practical necessity of some
first-hand knowledge is that afforded by the recovery of a diamond
necklace belonging to the wife of a gentleman in a Connecticut town.
The facts that are given here are absolutely accurate. The gentleman in
question was a retired business man of some means who lived not far from
the town and who made frequent visits to New York City. He had made his
wife a present of a fifteen thousand-dollar diamond necklace, which she
kept in a box in a locked trunk in her bedroom. While she had owned
the necklace for over a year she had never worn it. One evening having
guests for dinner on the occasion of her wedding anniversary she decided
to put it on and wear it for the first time. That night she replaced it
in its box and enclosed this in another box, which she locked and placed
in her bureau drawer. This she also locked. The following night she
decided to replace the necklace in the trunk. She accordingly unlocked
the bureau drawer, and also the larger box, which apparently was in
exactly the same condition as when she had put it away. But the inner
box was empty and the necklace had absolutely disappeared. Now, no
one had seen the necklace for a year, and then only her husband, their
servants, and two or three old friends. No outsider could have known of
its existence. There was no evidence of the house or bureau having been
disturbed.
A New York detective agency was at once retained, which sent one of its
best men to the scene of the crime. He examined the servants, heard the
story, and reported that it must have been an inside job--that there was
no possibility of anything else. But there was nothing to implicate any
one of the servants, and there seemed no hope of getting the necklace
back. Two or three days later the husband turned up at the agency's
office in New York, and after beating about the bush for a while,
remarked:
"I want to tell you something. You have got this job wrong. There's one
fact your man didn't understand. The truth is that I'm a pretty easy
going sort, and every six months or so I take all the men and girls
employed around my house down to Coney Island and give 'em a rip-roaring
time. I make 'em my friends, and I dance with the girls and I jolly
up the men, and we are all good pals together. Sort of unconventional,
maybe, but it pays. I know--see?--that there isn't a single one of those
people who would do me a mean trick. Not one of 'em but would lend me
all the money he had. I don't care what your operator says, the person
who took that necklace came from outside. You take that from me. The
superintendent, who is wise in his generation, scratched his chin.
"Is that dead on the level?" he inquired.
"Gospel!" answered the other.
"I'll come up myself!" said the boss.
Next day the boss behind a broken-winded horse, in a dilapidated buggy,
drove from another town to the place where his client lived. At the
smithy on the crossroads he stopped and borrowed a match.
"Anybody have good hosses in this town?" asked the detective.
"Sure!" answered the smith. "Mr. ------ up on the hill has the best in
the county!"
"What sort of a feller is he?"
The smith chewed in silence for a moment.
"Don't know him myself, but I tell you what, his help says he's the best
employer they ever had--and they stay there forever!"
The boss drove on to the house, which he observed was situated at about
an equal distance from three different railway stations and surrounded
by a piazza with pillars. He walked around it, examining the vines until
his eye caught a torn creeper and a white scratch on the paint. It had
been an outside job after all, and two weeks had already been lost.
Deduction was responsible for a mistake which would not have occurred
had a little knowledge been acquired first. That is the lesson of this
story.
The denouement, which has no lesson at all, is interesting. The
superintendent saw no prospect of getting back the necklace, but before
so informing the client, decided to cogitate on the matter for a day or
two. During that time he met by accident a friend who made a hobby
of studying yeggmen and criminals and occasionally doing a bit of the
amateur tramp act himself.
"By the way," said the friend, "do you ever hear of any 'touches' up the
river or along the Sound?"
"Sometimes," answered the boss, pricking up his ears. "Why do you ask?"
"Why, the other night," replied the friend, "I happened to be meeting my
wife up at the Grand Central about six o'clock and I saw two yeggs that
I knew taking a train out. I thought it was sort of funny. Pittsburgh
Ike and Denver Red."
"When was it?"
"Two weeks ago," said the friend.
"Thanks," returned the boss. "You must excuse me now; I've got an
important engagement."
Three hours later Pittsburgh Ike and Denver Red were in a cell at
headquarters. At six o'clock that evening the necklace had been
returned. This was a coincidence that might not occur in a hundred
years, but had the deductive detective determined the question he would
still be pondering on the comparative probability of whether the cook,
the chore man, or the hired girl was the guilty party.
A clean bit of detection on the part of an agency, and quite in the
day's work, was the comparatively recent capture of a thief who secured
three hundred and sixty thousand dollars worth of securities from a
famous banking institution in New York City by means of a very simple
device. A firm of stock brokers had borrowed from this bank about two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a day or two and put up the
securities as collateral. In the ordinary course of business, when the
borrower has no further use for the money, he sends up a certified check
for the amount of the loan with interest, and the bank turns over the
securities to the messenger. In this particular case a messenger arrived
with a certified check, shoved it into the cage, and took away what was
pushed out to him in return--three hundred and sixty thousand dollars in
bonds. The certification turned out to be a forgery and the securities
vanished. I do not know whether the police were consulted or not.
Sometimes in such cases the banks prefer to resort to more private
methods and, perhaps, save the necessity of making a public admission of
their stupidity. When my friend, the superintendent, was called in, the
officers of the bank were making the wildest sort of guesses as to the
identity of the master mind and hand which had deceived the cashier. He
must, they felt sure, have made the forgery with a camel's hair brush of
unrivalled fineness.
"A great artist!" said the president.
"The most skilful forger in the world!" opined another.
"We must run down all the celebrated criminals!" announced a third.
"Great artist-nothing!" remarked the boss, rubbing his thumb over the
certification which blurred at the touch. "He's no painter! Why, that's
a rubber stamp!"
What a shock for those dignified gentlemen! To think that their cashier
had been deceived by a mere, plebeian, common or garden thing of rubber!
"Good-day, gents!" said the boss, putting the check in his wallet. "I've
got to get busy with the rubber stamp makers!"
He returned to his office and detailed a dozen men to work on the East
Side and a dozen on the West Side, with orders to search out every
man in New York who manufactured rubber stamps. Before the end of the
afternoon the maker was found on the Bowery, near Houston Street. This
was his story: A couple of weeks before, a young man had come in and
ordered a certification stamp, drawing at the time a rough design
of what he wanted. The stamp, when first manufactured, had not been
satisfactory to him; and on his second visit, the customer had left a
piece of a check, carefully torn out in circular form, which showed
the certification which he desired copied. This fragment the maker
had retained, as well as a slip of paper, upon which the customer had
written the address of the place to which he wished the stamp sent--The
Young Men's Christian Association! The face of the fragment showed a
part of the maker's signature. The superintendent ran his eye over
a list of brokers and picked out the name of the firm most like the
hieroglyphics on the check. Then he telephoned over and asked to be
permitted to see their pay roll. Carefully comparing the signature
appearing thereon with the Y.M.C.A. slip, he picked his man in less than
ten minutes.
The latter was carefully trailed to his home, and thence to the Young
Men's Christian Association, after which he called on his fiancee at
her father's house. He spent the night at his own boarding place. Next
morning (Sunday) he was arrested on his way to church, and all the
securities (except some that he later returned) were discovered in his
room. More quick work! The amateur's method had been very simple. He
knew that the loan had been made and the bonds sent to the bank. So he
forged a check, certified it himself, and collected the securities. Of
course, he was a bungler and took a hundred rash chances.
A good example of the value of the accumulated information--documentary,
pictorial, and otherwise--in the possession of an agency was the capture
of Charles Wells, more generally known as Charles Fisher, alias Henry
Conrad, an old-time forger, who suddenly resumed his activities after
being released from a six-year term in England. A New York City bank had
paid on a bogus two hundred and fifty dollar check and had reported its
loss to the agency in question. The superintendent examined the check
(although Fisher had been in confinement for six years on the other
side) spotted it as his work. The next step was to find the forger. Of
course, no man who does the actual "scratching" attempts to "lay down"
the paper. That task is up to the "presenter." The cashier of the
bank identified in the agency's gallery the picture of the man who had
brought in the two hundred and fifty dollar check, and he in turn proved
to be another ex-convict well known in the business, whose whereabouts
in New York were not difficult to ascertain. He was "located" and
"trailed" and all his associates noted and followed. In due course he
"connected up" (as they say) with Fisher. Now, it is one thing to follow
a man who has no idea that he is being followed and another to trail a
man who is as suspicious and elusive as a fox. A professional criminal's
daily business is to observe whether or not he is being followed, and he
rarely if ever, makes a direct move. If he wants a drink at the saloon
across the street, he will, by preference, go out the back door, walk
around the block and dodge in the side entrance under the tail of an
ice wagon. In this case the detectives followed the presenter for days
before they reached Fisher, and when they did they had still to locate
his "plant."
The arrest in this case illustrates forcibly the chief characteristic of
successful criminals--egotism. The essential quality of daring required
in their pursuits gives them an extraordinary degree of self-confidence,
boldness, and vanity. And to vanity most of them can trace their fall.
It seems incredible that Fisher should have returned to the United
States after his discharge from prison and immediately resumed his
operations without carefully concealing his impedimenta. Yet when he was
run down in a twenty-six family apartment house, the detectives found in
his valise several thousand blank and model checks, hundreds of letters
and private papers, a work on "Modern Bank Methods," and his "ticket of
leave" from England! This man was a successful forger and because he
was successful, his pride in himself was so great that he attributed his
conviction in England to accident and really felt that he was immune on
his release.
The arrest of such a man often presents great legal difficulties which
the detectives overcome by various practical methods. Of course, no
officer without a search warrant has a right to enter a house or an
apartment. A man's house is his castle. Mayor Gaynor, when a judge, in
a famous opinion (more familiarly known in the lower world even than
the Decalogue) laid down the law unequivocally and emphatically in this
regard. Thus, in the Fisher case, the defendant having been arrested on
the street, the detectives desired to search the apartment of the family
with which he lived. They did this by first inducing the tenant to open
the door and, after satisfying themselves that they were in the right
place, ordering the occupants to get in line and "march" from one room
to another while they rummaged for evidence. "Of course, we had no right
to do it, but they didn't know we hadn't!" said the boss.
But frequently the defendant knows his rights just as well as the
police. On one occasion the same detective who arrested Fisher wanted to
take another man out of an apartment where he had been run to earth. His
mother (aged eighty-two years) put the chain on the door and politely
declined to open it. All the evidence against the forger was inside the
apartment and he was actively engaged in burning it up in the kitchen
stove. In half an hour to arrest him would have been useless! The
detectives stormed and threatened, but the old crone merely grinned at
them. She hated a "bull" as much as did her son. Fearing to take the
law into their own hands, they summoned a detective sergeant from
head-quarters, but, although he sympathized with them, he had read Mayor
Gaynor's decision and declined to take any chances. They then "appealed"
to the cop on the beat, who proved more reasonable, but although he used
all his force, he was unable to break down the door which had in the
meantime been reinforced from the inside. After about an hour, the old
lady unchained the door and invited the detectives to come in. The crook
was sitting by the window smoking a cigar and reading St. Nicholas,
while all evidence of his crime had vanished in smoke.
One more anecdote, at the expense of the deductive detective. A watchman
was murdered, the safe of a brewery blown open and the contents stolen.
Local detectives worked on the case and satisfied themselves that the
night engineer at the brewery had committed the crime. He was a quiet
and, apparently, a God-fearing man, but circumstances were conclusive
against him. In fact, he had been traced within ten minutes of the
murder on the way to the scene of the homicide. But some little link was
lacking and the brewery officials called in the agency. The first thing
the superintendent did was to look over the engineer. At first sight
he recognized him as a famous crook who had served five years for a
homicidal assault! One would think that that would have settled the
matter. But it didn't! The detective said nothing to his associates or
employers, but called on the engineer that evening and had a quiet
talk with him in which he satisfied himself that the man was entirely
innocent. The man had served his time, turned over a new leaf, and was
leading an honest, decent life. Two months later the superintendent
caused the arrest of four yeggmen, all of whom were convicted and are
now serving fifteen years each for the crime.
Thus, the reader will observe that there are just a few more
real detectives still left in the business-if you can find them.
Incidentally, they, one and all, take off their hats to Scotland Yard.
They will tell you that the Englishman may be slow (fancy an American
inspector of police wearing gray suede gloves and brewing himself a dish
of tea in his office at four o'clock), but that once he goes after a
crook he is bound to get him--it is merely a question of time. I may add
that in the opinion of the heads of the big agencies the percentage of
ability in the New York Detective Bureau is high--one of them going
so far as to claim that fifty per cent of the men have real detective
ability--that is to say "brains." That is rather a higher average than
one finds among clergymen and lawyers, yet it may be so.