Yours truly,
James McCabe, No. 32.—
Soon after receiving this letter and before his release, I had an interview with the writer. I found him a very frank and engaging person, a crook by profession, with most excellent ideas on the subject of Prison Reform—which was the main topic of our conversation.
On the day of his release Jim visited me at my office; my first thought was that he had come to strike me for money, but I did him injustice. He came simply to ask my interest and help for a young man who locked in on his gallery and in whom he had become interested.
“Can’t you do something for him, Tom,” he urged. “That kid’s no crook. If you can only keep him out of the city he’ll go straight. He sure will. You see him and have a talk with him, and see if you don’t think so.”
That was all Jim wanted of me, and at first he refused to take the small loan I pressed upon him, although the money he received from the state would not go very far in New York City. “I don’t want to take it, Tom,” he objected, “and I’ll tell you why. You’d be giving me that money thinking I was going straight. Now I’m going to try to go straight; but you’ve no idea of the difficulties. How am I going to get an honest job? The cops all know me well, they’ll follow me wherever I go. I can’t enter a theater, I can’t get on to a street car. If anything happens I’ll be one of the first men the coppers’ll be after. How much of a chance have I to get an honest job? Now, if I take your money and then didn’t go straight I should feel like the devil.”
“Jim,” said I, “you’ll take that money because you are going straight. I’ll bank on you.”
My confidence was not misplaced. Jim went to New York and, having the luck to have a home with a good mother and a brother who is straight, Jim had time to hunt his job until he found it. About two weeks after his release Jim lunched with me in New York, and in the course of conversation remarked, “Say, Tom, don’t you think there’s such a thing as an honest crook?”
“Sure, Jim,” I answered, “you’re one.”
A little taken aback by this direct application, Jim said, “Well, you know what I mean. I’ll tell you a case. There was three of us pulled off a little piece of business once, and afterward one of those fellows wanted me to join with him and freeze out the other fellow. Now, that’s what I don’t call honest, do you?”
“I certainly do not,” I said. “And now I’ll tell you what was in my mind. I call you an honest crook, Jim, because while you’ve been a crook you have been square with your pals. Because the operations of your mind are honest, you haven’t tried to fool yourself. There is nothing the matter with your mental operations. You have been simply traveling in the wrong direction. Make up your mind to shift your course, and you’ll have no trouble going straight, because you are naturally an honest man.”