Courts and Criminals

Regarding the work of the detective as a spy (which probably constitutes seventy-five per cent of his employment to-day), few persons realize how widely such services are being utilized. The insignificant old Irishwoman who stumbles against you in the department store is possibly watching with her cloudy but eagle eye for shoplifters. The tired-looking man on the street-car may, in fact, be a professional "spotter." The stout youth with the pince nez who is examining the wedding presents is perhaps a central-office man. All this you know or may suspect. But you are not so likely to be aware that the floor-walker himself is the agent of a rival concern placed in the department store to keep track, not only of prices but of whether or not the wholesalers are living up to their agreements in regard to the furnishing of particular kinds of goods only to one house; or that the conductor on the car is a paid detective of the company, whose principal duty is not to collect fares, but to report the doings of the unions; or that the gentleman who is accidentally introduced to you at the wedding breakfast is employed by a board of directors to get a line on your host's business associates and social companions.

In the great struggle between capital and labor, each side has expended large sums of money in employing confederates to secure secret information as to the plans and doings of the enemy. Almost every labor union has its Judas, and less often a secretary to a capitalist is in the secret employment of a labor union. The railroads must be kept informed of what is going on, and, if necessary, they import a man from another part of the country to join the local organization. Often such men, on account of their force and intelligence, are elected to high office in the brotherhoods whose secrets they are hired to betray. Practically every big manufacturing plant in the United States has on its payrolls men acting as engineers, foremen, or laborers who are drawing from $80 to $100 per month as detectives either (1) to keep their employers informed as to the workings of the labor unions, (2) to report to the directors the actual conduct of the business by its salaried officers, superintendents, and overseers, or (3) to ascertain and report to outside competing concerns the methods and processes made use of, the materials utilized, and the exact cost of production.

There are detectives among the chambermaids and bellboys in the hotels, and also among the guests; there are detectives on the passenger lists and in the cardrooms of the Atlantic liners; the colored porter on the private car, the butler at your friend's house, the chorus girl on Broadway, the clerk in the law office, the employee in the commercial agency, may all be drawing pay in the interest of some one else, who may be either a transportation company, a stock-broker, a rival financier, a yellow newspaper, an injured or even an erring wife, a grievance committee, or a competing concern; and the duties of these persons may and will range from the theft of mailing lists, books, papers, and private letters, up to genuine detective work requiring some real ability.

Detective work of the sort which involves the betrayal of confidences and friendships naturally excites our aversion—yet in many cases the end undoubtedly justifies the means employed, and often there is no other way to avert disaster and prevent fiendish crimes. Sometimes, on the other hand, the information sought is purely for mercenary or even less worthy reasons, and those engaged in these undertakings range from rascals of the lowest type to men who are ready to risk death for the cause which they represent and who are really heroes of a high order. One of the latter with whom I happened to be thrown professionally was a young fellow of about twenty named Guthrie.

It was during a great strike, and outrages were being committed all over the city of New York by dynamiters supposed to be in the employ of the unions. Young Guthrie, who was a reckless daredevil, offered his services to the employers, and agreed to join one of the local unions and try to find out who were the men blowing up office buildings in process of construction and otherwise terrorizing the inhabitants of the city. Accordingly he applied for membership in the organization, and by giving evidence of his courage and fiber managed to secure a place as a volunteer in the dynamiting squad. So cleverly did he pass himself off as a bitter enemy of capital that he was entrusted with secrets of the utmost value and took part in making the plans and procuring the dynamite to execute them. The quality of his nerve (as well as his foolhardiness) is shown by the fact that he once carried a dress-suit case full of the explosive around the city, jumping on and off street cars, and dodging vehicles. When the proper moment came and the dynamite had been placed in an uncompleted building on Twenty-second Street, Guthrie gave the signal and the police arrested the dynamiters—all of them, including Guthrie, who was placed with the rest in a cell in the Tombs and continued to report to the district attorney all the information which he thus secured from his unsuspecting associates. Indeed, it was hard to convince the authorities that Guthrie was a spy and not a mere accomplice who had turned State's evidence, a distinction of far-reaching legal significance so far as his evidence was concerned.

The final episode in the drama was the unearthing by the police of Hoboken of the secret cache of the dynamiters, containing a large quantity of the explosive. Guthrie's instructions as to how they should find it read like a page from Poe's "Gold Bug." You had to go at night to a place where a lonely road crossed the Erie Railroad tracks in the Hackensack meadows, and mark the spot where the shadow of a telegraph pole (cast by an arc light) fell on a stone wall. This you must climb and walk so many paces north, turn and go so many feet west, and then north again. You then came to a white stone, from which you laid your course through more latitude and longitude until you were right over the spot. The police of Hoboken did as directed, and after tacking round and round the field, found the dynamite. Of course, the union said the whole thing was a plant, and that Guthrie had put the dynamite in the field himself at the instigation of his employers, but before the case came to trial both dynamiters pleaded guilty and went to Sing Sing. One of them turned out to be an ex-convict, a burglar. I often wonder where Guthrie is now. He certainly cared little for his life. Perhaps he is down in Venezuela or Mexico. He could never be aught than a soldier of fortune. But for a long time the employers thought that Guthrie was a detective sent by the unions to compromise THEM in the very dynamiting they were trying to stop!

I once had a particularly dangerous and unfortunate case where a private client was being blackmailed by a half-crazy ruffian who had never seen him, but had selected him arbitrarily as a person likely to give up money. The blackmailer was a German Socialist, who was out of employment—a man of desperate character. He had made up his mind that the world owed him a living, and he had decided that the easiest way to get it was to make some more prosperous person give him a thousand dollars under threat of being exposed as an enemy of society.

The charge was so absurd as to be almost ludicrous, but had my client caused the blackmailer's arrest the matter would have been the subject of endless newspaper notoriety and comment. It was therefore thought wise to make use of other means, and I procured the assistance of a young German-American of my acquaintance, who, in the guise of a vaudeville artist seeking a job, went to the blackmailer's boarding-house and pretended to be looking for an actor friend with a name not unlike that of the criminal.

After two or three visits he managed to scrape an acquaintance with the blackmailer and thereafter spent much time with him. Both were out of work, both were German, and both liked beer. My friend had just enough money to satisfy this latter craving. In a month or so they were intimate friends and used to go fishing together down the bay. At last, after many months, the criminal disclosed to the detective his plan of blackmailing my client, and suggested that as two heads were better than one they had better make it a joint venture. The detective pretended to balk at the idea at first, but was finally persuaded, and at the other's request undertook the delivery of the blackmailing letters to my client! Inside of three weeks he had in his possession enough evidence in the criminal's own handwriting to send him to a prison for the rest of his life. When at last the detective disclosed his identity the blackmailer at first refused to believe him, and then literally rolled on the floor in his agony and fear at discovering how he had been hoodwinked. The next day he disappeared and has not been heard of since, but his letters are in my vault, ready to be used if he again puts in an appearance.

The records of the police and of the private agencies contain many instances where murderers have confessed their guilt long after the crime to supposed friends, who were in reality decoys placed there for that very purpose. It is a peculiarity of criminals that they cannot keep their secrets locked in their own breasts. The impulse to confession is universal, particularly in women. Egotism has some part in this, but the chief element is the desire for companionship. Criminals have a horror of dying under an alias. The dignity of identity appeals even to the tramp. This impulse leads oftentimes to the most unnecessary and suicidal disclosures. The murderer who has planned and executed a diabolical homicide and who has retired to obscurity and safety will very likely in course of time make a clean breast of it to some one whom he believes to be his friend. He wants to "get it off his chest," to talk it over, to discuss its fine points, to boast of how clever he was, to ask for unnecessary advice about his conduct in the future, to have at least one other person in the world who has seen his soul's nakedness.

The interesting feature of such confessions from a legal point of view is that, no matter how circumstantial they may be, they are not usually of themselves sufficient under our law to warrant a conviction. The admission or confession of a defendant needs legal corroboration. This corroboration is often very difficult to find, and frequently cannot be secured at all. This provision of the statutes is doubtless a wise one to prevent hysterical, suicidal, egotistical, and semi-insane persons from meeting death in the electric chair or on the gallows, but it often results in the guilty going unpunished. Personally, I have never known a criminal to confess a crime of which he was innocent. The nearest thing to it in my experience is when one criminal, jointly guilty with another and sure of conviction, has drawn lots with his pal, lost, confessed, and in the confession exculpated his companion.

In the police organization of almost every large city there are a few men who are genuinely gifted for the work of detection. Such an one was Guiseppe Petrosino, a great detective, and an honest, unselfish, and heroic man, who united indefatigable patience and industry with reasoning powers of a high order. The most thrilling evening of my life was when I listened before a crackling fire in my library to Joe's story of the Van Cortlandt Park murder, the night before I was going to prosecute the case. Sitting stiffly in an arm-chair, his ugly moon-face expressionless save for an occasional flash from his black eyes, Petrosino recounted slowly and accurately how, by means of a single slip of paper bearing the penciled name "Sabbatto Gizzi, P.O. Box 239, Lambertville, N.J.," he had run down the unknown murderer of an unknown Italian stabbed to death in the park's shrubbery.

Petrosino's physical characteristics were so pronounced that he was probably as widely, if not more widely, known than any other Italian in New York. He was short and heavy, with enormous shoulders and a bull neck, on which was placed a great round head like a summer squash. His face was pock-marked, and he talked with a deliberation that was due to his desire for accuracy, but which at times might have been suspected to arise from some other cause. He rarely smiled and went methodically about his business, which was to drive the Italian criminals out of the city and country. Of course, being a marked man in more senses than one, it was practically impossible to disguise himself, and, accordingly, he had to rely upon his own investigations and detective powers, supplemented by the efforts of the trained men in the Italian branch, many of whom are detectives of a high order of ability. If the life of Petrosino were to be written, it would be a book unique in the history of criminology and crime, for this man was probably the only great detective of the world to find his career in a foreign country amid criminals of his own race.

I have instanced Petrosino as an example of a police detective of a very unusual type, but I have known several other men on the New York Police Force of real genius in their own particular lines of work. One of these is an Irishman who makes a specialty of get-rich-quick men, oil and mining stock operators, wire-tappers and their kin, and who knows the antecedents and history of most of them better than any other man in the country. He is ready to take the part of either a "sucker" or a fellow crook, as the exigencies of the case may demand.

There are detectives—real ones—on the police force of all the great cities of the world to-day, most of them specialists, a few of them geniuses capable of undertaking the ferreting out of any sort of mystery, but the last are rare. The police detective usually lacks the training, education, and social experience to make him effective in dealing with the class of elite criminals who make high society their field. Yet, of course, it is this class of crooks who most excite our interest and who fill the pages of popular detective fiction.

The headquarters man has no time nor inclination to follow the sporting duchess and the fictitious earl who accompanies her in their picturesque wanderings around the world. He is busy inside the confines of his own country. Parents or children may disappear, but the mere seeking of oblivion on their part is no crime and does not concern him except by special dispensation on the part of his superiors. Divorced couples may steal their own children back and forth, royalties may inadvertently involve themselves with undesirables, governmental information exude from State portals in a peculiar manner, business secrets pass into the hands of rivals, racehorses develop strange and untimely diseases, husbands take long and mysterious trips from home—a thousand exciting and worrying things may happen to the astonishment, distress, or intense interest of nations, governments, political parties, or private individuals, which from their very nature are outside the purview of the regular police. Here, then, is the field of the secret agent or private detective, and here, forsooth, is where the detective of genuine deductive powers and the polished address of the so-called "man of the world" is required.

There are two classes of cases where a private detective must needs be used, if indeed any professional assistance is to be called in: first, where the person whose identity is sought to be discovered or whose activities are sought to be terminated is not a criminal or has committed no crime, and second, where, though a crime has been committed, the injured parties cannot afford to undertake a public prosecution.

For example, if you are receiving anonymous letters, the writer of which accuses you of all sorts of unpleasant things, you would, of course, much prefer to find out who it is and stop him quietly than to turn over the correspondence to the police and let the writer's attorneys publicly cross-examine you at his trial as to your past career. Even if a diamond necklace is stolen from a family living on Fifth Avenue, there is more than an even chance that the owner will prefer to conceal her loss rather than to have her picture in the morning paper. Yet she will wish to find the necklace if she can.

When the matter has no criminal side at all, the police cannot be availed of, although we sometimes read that the officers of the local precinct have spent many hours in trying to locate Mrs. So-and-So's lost Pomeranian, or in performing other functions of an essentially private nature—most generously. But if, for example, your daughter is made the recipient, almost daily, of anonymous gifts of jewelry which arrive by mail, express, or messenger, and you are anxious to discover the identity of her admirer and return them, you will probably wish to engage outside assistance.

Where will you seek it? You can do one of two things: go to a big agency and secure the services of the right man, or engage such a man outside who may or may not be a professional detective. I have frequently utilized with success in peculiar and difficult cases the services of men whom I knew to be common-sense persons, with a natural taste for ferreting out mysteries, but who were not detectives at all. Your head bookkeeper may have real talents in this direction—if he is not above using them. Naturally, the first essential is brains—and if you can give the time to the matter, your own head will probably be the best one for your purposes. If, then, you are willing to undertake the job yourself, all you need is some person or persons to carry out your instructions, and such are by no means difficult to find. I have had many a case run down by my own office force—clerks, lawyers, and stenographers, all taking a turn at it. Why not? Is the professional sleuth working on a fixed salary for a regular agency and doing a dozen different jobs each month as likely to bring to bear upon your own private problem as much intelligence as you yourself?

There is no mystery about such work, except what the detective himself sees fit to enshroud it with. Most of us do detective work all the time without being conscious of it. Simply because the matter concerns the theft of a pearl, or the betraying of a business or professional secret, or the disappearance of a friend, the opinion of a stranger becomes no more valuable. And the chances are equal that the stranger will make a bungle of it.

Many of the best available detectives are men who work by themselves without any permanent staff, and who have their own regular clients, generally law firms and corporations. Almost any attorney knows several such, and the chief advantage of employing one of them lies in the fact that you can learn just what their abilities are by personal experience. They usually command a high rate of remuneration, but deductive ability and resourcefulness are so rare that they are at a premium and can only be secured by paying it. These men are able, if necessary, to assume the character of a doctor, traveller, man-about-town, or business agent without wearing in their lapels a sign that they are detectives, and they will reason ahead of the other fellow and can sometimes calculate pretty closely what he will do. Twenty-five dollars a day will generally hire the best of them, and they are well worth it.

The detective business swarms with men of doubtful honesty and morals, who are under a constant temptation to charge for services not rendered and expenses not incurred, who are accustomed to exaggeration if not to perjury, and who have neither the inclination nor the ability to do competent work.

Once they get their clutches on a wealthy client, they resemble the shyster lawyer in their efforts to bleed him by stimulating his fears of publicity and by holding out false hopes of success, and thus prolonging their period of service. An unscrupulous detective will, almost as a matter of course, work on two jobs at once and charge all his time to each client. He will constantly report progress when nothing has been accomplished, and his expenses will fill pages of his notebook. Meantime his daily reports will fall like a shower of autumn leaves. In no profession is it more essential to know the man who is working for you. If you need a detective, get the best you can find, put a limit on the expense, and give him your absolute confidence.

CHAPTER VI. 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 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 of good character 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 the 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 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 known, the Italians are so secretive that it is next to impossible to secure any information—even from the relatives of the 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.