DETECTIVES WHO DETECT
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 good character, 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 a high-class man 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 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 a 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 knows, the
Italians are so secretive that it is next to impossible to secure any
information—even from the relatives of a 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
heterogeneous 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 consists of eleven thousand members.
“Pinkerton’s Bank and Bankers’ Protection” 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 keep mum about 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 head-quarters,
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 following a forger to Australasia or Polynesia than you are a
sleuth from 300 Mulberry Street, New York.
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 and
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 his 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 more 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 manœuvring 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;
spies kept up their work in large business establishments and began to
haunt the cafés 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 and (much less) do not adorn 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
lawyer; 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 learned 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 of his faith 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 a
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
for 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.
The telephone is the modern detective’s chief ally, and he relies upon
rapidity more than upon deduction. Under present conditions it is
easier to overtake a crook than to reason out what he will probably
do. In fact, the old-fashioned “deductive detective” is largely a man
of the past. The most useless operator in the world is the one who is
“wedded to his own theory” of the case—the man who asks no questions
and relies only on himself. Interject a new element into a case and
such a man is all at sea. In the meantime the criminal has made his
“get away.”
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. His gray matter dwarfs
almost to insignificance that of Daniel Webster or the Hon. Benjamin
F. Butler. 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 (if there is any except on Saturday nights) or the
girl that slings the pie at the station. These folk have something to
_go_ on. They may not be highly intelligent, but they know the country,
and, what is more important, they know 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 of a feller, 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 ain’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 cross-roads he stopped and borrowed a match. The smith,
glad of an excuse to leave the heat of the forge, came out and got the
loan of a chew from the boss.
“Anybody have any good hosses in this town?” asked the detective.
“Betcher life!” answered the smith. “Mr. —— up on the bill 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
head-quarters. _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 fiancée 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
and (although Fisher had been in confinement for six years on the other
side) spotted it for 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 via 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. There is no man
in the world who “gets away” with so many “tricks” on his “chest” as
the sleuth. As they say, “_It’s the way we do it._” 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 instructed the detective (who had no warrant) to go to
purgatory. 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.
THE CAMORRA