Confiding Detectives

Feilding Star, Volume IX, Issue 91, 19 January 1888, Page 3

Confiding Detectives

With regard to forgers, we learn that their number, compared with other classes of criminals, is small, only about two dozen men being recognised as applying their talents as penmen, and engravers to the fabrication of spurious documents. Photography is largely employed by them ; and by the irony of fate, the same art is now used for their identification. Their methods did not differ from those which have been been detailed so of ten in bur own Courts of Justice, so that we need not dwell upon them. We may, however, refer to the clever manner in which one gang of forgers made the English, criminal investigation department play into their hands. This gang had prepared an elaborate scheme for defrauding the English banks by means of counterfeit, circular notes. Shortly after they left New York by steamer m route for Britain; the scheme was discovered and the English police was furnished by Atlantic cable with all its details. The forgers were of course ignorant of this. The audacious leader, upon arriving in London, thought that it would be as well to make himself acquainted with the faces of the chief detectives, and in the character of an American tourist he paid them a visit They were so taken off their guard by the pleasant manner of their visitor that one of the officers not only told him of the impending fraud, but actually showed him the New York telegram, which happened to be lying on a desk. It need hardly be said that the forger, thus warned, did not tarry leng m the metropolis ; he and his gang left London that night. — ' Chambers's Journal.