As a rule our modern “Fagans” are very foxy. The boys and girls sent uptown to the Fifth Avenue stores and thoroughfares are well dressed while those down town are dressed like school children and frequently carry a bunch of books in their arms. The New York police will have to change their tactics entirely else they will never “run down” these criminals. In a great city like New York we must expect such criminal combinations to defeat the ends of justice by teaching children to steal and then receive the plunder, but when such persons are caught they should get the extreme limit of the law and be shown little or no mercy. They are the worst kind of degenerates. Recently four Central Office detectives found a “Fagan” headquarters on East Third Street in this city, run by a notorious “fence” named “Gaunt” whom they arrested with four others. The revelations came through a Tombs prisoner named Herman Doritz who made a sworn statement to the Court that he, with many others, was taught the art of thieving in Teddy Gaunt’s School of Crime. There were forty pupils in the school and after their graduation these lads were scattered over the city in large stores, where they stole thousands of dollars worth of goods besides pocket books and jewelry. As soon as the “fence” received the stolen property he took pains at once to destroy its identity. Then he sent men out to sell it at half its real value. In this way the boys said he made big money at the business. Now, whenever the police arrest a juvenile criminal they put him through the “third degree” to see whether or not he was taught in a School of Crime. This is proper. But the cause of much of this must be laid to our high living, fevered home life, grasping after the dollar and the lack of moral training in our homes and schools. I have no hesitation in saying that the Boys’ Prison of the Tombs is a prolific School of Crime! What would I do about these things? Well, when love had failed I would treat the teachers and scholars of our Schools of Crime to a dose of corporal punishment. But some one says this is degrading. So it is. But what is more degrading, blighting and damning than crime! Give them their choice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIV YOUTHFUL DELINQUENTS AND THE CHILDREN’S COURT The dense population of the lower parts of the city, the narrow streets, the ubiquitous gin mill and the dirty tenements all combine to make New York the centre of the most accessible temptations—temptations that swiftly carry ruin and demoralization to hundreds of boys and girls every year. Perhaps it is not generally known that some of the toughest and most daring of our present-day criminals began their downward career at a tender age. There is something blushingly heroic in crime—made so by the dime novel, which the boy of the tenement reads and then emulates by personal example.