O’Carroll and his aides strive to make the instruction as realistic as possible by providing problems which simulate actual situations the young agents will face in their everyday work. In the 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. classes, held five days a week, the men spend about half their time working on practical law enforcement problems. The other half is spent in listening to lectures by agents, police administrators, college professors and attorneys. The lectures cover such subjects as constitutional law, civil rights and rules of criminal law procedure.
Toward the end of the course, the students are divided into squads of five men and given the problem of arresting a suspected criminal, searching his apartment for evidence, preparing the case for presentation to a grand jury, and appearing in court as witnesses.
On the fourth floor of the school building is a furnished room in which have been hidden narcotics, counterfeit money, betting slips, jewels and other incriminating evidence. The room is occupied by a veteran agent posing as “Richard Roe,” the suspected criminal.
Roe gives them a rough time. He complains of a serious heart condition and asks to be given medicine from a bottle on a table. He accuses the agents of stealing money and a diamond ring from a desk drawer. He continually demands to see his lawyer. A postman delivers a registered letter and Roe challenges the right of the agents to open the letter after he has signed for it. He tries everything short of violence to impede the search.
Sometimes the young agents refuse to give Roe his medicine. They ignore his accusations of theft. Or they accept his argument that they have no right to seize the registered letter.
If the searching party fails to find at least 80 per cent of the items concealed in the room, they do not obtain a “conviction.” Then experienced agents carefully explain where they made mistakes in the handling of the suspect.
When Roe claimed he was ill, the agents should have called his doctor to determine the truth. Upon their entering the room, Roe should have been advised to collect any valuables so that an inventory could have been made on the spot to be signed by him. When Roe signed for the registered letter, then it legally could be seized with no invasion of his privacy. Roe’s rights were not violated when his requests for an attorney were ignored during the search, prior to his arrest.
In a mock courtroom scene, an agent who formerly was a U.S. attorney acts as the defense counsel. He grills the rookies on every move made in Roe’s apartment, seeking to confuse them while driving home the point that months of careful police work may be wasted by an inept or careless presentation of facts in court.
The school has proved to be such a success that it is now supported enthusiastically by all the Treasury agencies, which prorate the cost and make their best men available as instructors. But for many years a few men struggled to keep the school going in the face of apathy and even active opposition.
The man who perhaps contributed most to keeping alive the idea of a professionally directed school for Treasury agents was Harry M. Dengler, a retired Internal Revenue agent who now lives in Washington, D. C. A short, plump man of enormous energy, Dengler joined the Internal Revenue Service in 1918 after a dozen years of teaching in high schools in southeast Virginia and Montana. He was thirty-six at the time he was assigned to the IRS’s Intelligence Division, working on internal police problems and on tax conspiracy cases.