Courts, Criminals and the CamorraTrain, Arthur Cheney
History
Courts, Criminals and the Camorra
Train, Arthur Cheney
Camorra; Criminals -- United States; Justice, Administration of -- United States
The arrest of such a man often presents great legal difficulties which
the detectives overcome by various practical methods. There is no man
in the world who “gets away” with so many “tricks” on his “chest” as
the sleuth. As they say, “_It’s the way we do it._” 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 instructed the detective (who had no warrant) to go to
purgatory. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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