"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.