FAMOUS DETECTIVE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 252, 15 June 1932, Page 8

FAMOUS DETECTIVE

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATOR DIES AT SEVENTY YEARS OF AGE.

PASSING OF W. J. BURNS.

Mr. William John Burns, whose death at Sarasota, Florida, at the age of seventy was recently reported, was one of the most celebrated detectives of America. Born at Baltimore to an Irish father who was in the police force of Columbus, Ohio, Burns early began to take an interest in criminal investigation. His first important case was in 1885, when he traced some men who had altered voting papers in the Ohio State elections to procure the return of their candidates. Not long afterwards he secured the conviction of a gang of fire-raisers who had been making large sums out of insurance companies in St. Louis. In. 1890 he was appoir.teu to the Federal Secret Service, workirg in Texas, Arkansas, and the South. Four years later he was transferred to Washington, and received a roving commission to deal with any important case wherever it occurred. In 1896 he tracked down a number of people interested in promotiug a revolution in Costa Rica. They had been forging 100-peso notes with the double object of injuring the existing Government's credit and buying arms for the rising. Mint .Robbers Caught. Another of his successes was the conviction of an assistant superintendent of "the San Francisco Mint, who robbed it of 30,000 dollars. Early in this century he secured the conviction of a United States Senator and iother influential persons for land frauds on an enormous scale, and he also collected the evidence which freed San Francisco from a band of "grafters" who had preyed on it for years. On one occasion he expo^ed the whole municipal council of Atlantic City, who were sentenced for "graft." For many years he conducted an international detective agency, which he founded and called by his name, and which had a staff of 4000. From 1921 to 1924 he was the director of the Bureau of Investigation of the United States Department of Justice. Mr. Burns was not at all like the thin, tall, intellectual looking detective of the Sherlock Holmes tradition. He was short, stout and rosy, with a casual, easy manner. He never carried a revolver, firmly believing that to do so was really a eonfession of incompetence, nor did he use disguise.