The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York CityMcCabe, James Dabney
History
The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York City
McCabe, James Dabney
New York (N.Y.) -- Description and travel; New York (N.Y.) -- History
The necessary expenses of the detection of crime are often
considerable. Information must be obtained, even if it has to be paid
for liberally. Officers must be in concealment for weeks, and sometimes
for months. Long journeys must not unfrequently be made; and in a
hundred ways large expenditures will be called for. We were told of a
case where a treasury note of the government was counterfeited with
consummate skill, and it became a matter of vital importance to obtain
the plate from which the counterfeit was printed. One of the most
successful detectives was employed to work up the case, who soon found
that the cost of securing it would be so great that there was little
probability that the treasurer would audit his accounts. He therefore
told the government that the cost would be so great that he declined to
undertake it; but the possession of the plate, and the information that
its capture would give, were so exceedingly important, that the
detective was authorized to go on with it. He did so; the plate was
obtained; all the information sought for was procured, and the
counterfeiters and their abettors were captured. But it cost the
government one hundred and twenty thousand dollars to accomplish this
result. There were regular vouchers for every payment, and each was
carefully scrutinized and verified. There was no doubt whatever that
all the expenditures had been made in good faith, and with the utmost
economy. Doubtless the government felt that the possession of that
plate, and the knowledge gained, were worth all they had cost.
TRACKING A MURDERER.
The following case, which occurred a few years ago, in a sister city,
will show how the detectives track and secure their game:
A terrible murder had been committed. The sods were scarcely heaped
upon the coffin of the murdered man when one of his murderers was
securely confined in the cells of the central station. The arrest was
one of unusual difficulty. When the detectives visited the scene of the
murder, the only clue to the perpetrators was a blood stained
handkerchief and the gag used in strangling their victim. With these
faint traces there was little hope of ferreting out the murderer, but
Detective Joshua Taggart assumed the task. Returning to the store, he
reconnoitered the premises with new diligence. A new trace was then
discovered. A new mortise chisel, wrapped in a piece of brown paper,
lay on a shelf in the room. The chisel was not the property of the
proprietors of the dental depot. It had plainly been brought there by
the burglars. To trace it then became the task of the detective. Upon
it depended his only hope of tracing the murder from the dead porter to
the burglars who had killed the unoffending warden.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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