“After a few years of sweet liberty, I was in prison again. This time, I assure you, it was by mere accident, as I had no intention of being back again in crime. While playing with a pistol, I accidentally shot a girl. I was convicted of criminal carelessness, and was sent to prison for two years—simply because I was an old offender.
“I had been a free man several years. I never expected to go to prison again. This sentence was a surprise to me and everybody else. It was unlooked for. I was mad with myself. In prison I became sullen and brooded over my trials. My wife had abandoned me. Before I left prison I wrote asking her to secure a divorce from me. I assured her I would not oppose it.
“After leaving prison, I came to New York, where I operated extensively as a scientific burglar. In my last prison experience, I met some expert crooks who willingly perfected my criminal education. I believe the curse of our prisons to-day is the lack of segregation. I am satisfied nearly all the prisons are schools of crime.
“As long as the authorities mix young beginners with men old in crime, so long will our prisons be seminaries of vice of the darkest and vilest character.
“With my new ideas I found New York a profitable field for criminal enterprise, but was not confined to this place alone. I visited a dozen cities where I worked as a criminal. In New York City alone, I managed to perform sixty-five burglaries in a brief space of six months. In some of them I netted as much as $12,000. The police could not get ‘the drop on me,’ but were pleased to call me a ‘Twentieth Century up-to-date Second Story Man.’ I eluded them for three years. All this time I took great chances. My plans were so perfect that I never believed I could be detected.
“My methods were to hire a room or two in a respectable part of the city—usually on the top floor—go up on the roof through the scuttle at night when all were in bed, and return with my plunder before morning. I never robbed the house in which I lived, nor any place near to it. I usually crossed over a dozen houses. If one house was ten or twenty feet higher than another, I overcame the difficulty by lassooing the chimney with my silk ladder. Then I let myself down into any window I wished to enter. I overcame all difficulties. I always carried a pair of pistols ready for any emergency, a bull’s-eye lantern and a set of burglar tools in a leather case in my hip pocket.
“In July I committed six burglaries on one street near Fifth Avenue, New York, and made a big haul each time. The gold and silver heirlooms I could not sell I melted and sold for their intrinsic value.
“I was so successful in all my operations as a burglar that I became careless. I had laid my plans so carefully that I did not think I could be found out. I burglarized the house of a well known millionaire. He afterwards offered a reward of a hundred dollars for my detection, for I had taken away all his valuable bric-a-brac. A month or two afterwards I again hired rooms in the same neighborhood and went over the old grounds. This was the mistake of my life, as they were on the outlook for ‘my kind.’ I wanted more money and took chances. I became reckless in my methods. The night I was caught I was coming up the fire-escape with a pillow slip of silverware on my back. A woman servant heard me, came to the window and gave the alarm. I ran to the roof with haste and threw away my booty. I was cornered before I knew it. Three cops met me with loaded guns; when I was shot I surrendered.”
Brooks was one of the most remarkable and dangerous men that ever followed the profession, so he was characterized on the day the Judge sentenced him to twenty-three years imprisonment. Before passing sentence, the Judge said, “Brooks, I doubt if there was ever a criminal in this city like you. Cold, calculating, scientific, systematic, you have pursued your criminal career like a mechanic without interruption, for years. In the course of a few months you have committed thirty-nine burglaries and stole more than $65,000 worth of property.”