AMERICA'S GREATEST TEC.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVI, Issue 12, 14 June 1913, Page 10

AMERICA'S GREATEST TEC.

STORIES ABOUT WILLIAM J. BURNS. America's greatest detective, Mr. William J, Burns, arrived in London recently in quest of hundreds of thousands of dollars, the proceeds of a recent great bank fraud in America. The principals in the fraud are under arrest, the detective having secured them in New Orleans before he hurried to London in search of the gold. Mr. Burns has the valuable asset—for a detective—of ,- not looking like his job." He is stout, florid and prosperous-looking, and he talks with a frankness and candor which is. delightfully refreshing in a man whose frame for tracking criminals has gone round the world. There is none of the stereotyped detective nonsense about him —no disguises, or false whiskers, or blue goggles, or other detective properties—and there has been. When he worked in San Francisco, in the famous municipal bribery scandals, all the "grafters" in the western city knew Detective Burns. In the United States, at the present time, all the "crooks" know his prosperouslooking figure, and one at least has de- , .'fared that he "likes Burns too well to kill him." Having built up a reputation by a series of smart arrests, Mr. Burns was appointed to the United States Government Secret Service Corps in 1890. and specialised in frauds against the Treasury. One of his early discoveries in New York was a conspiracy for the manufacture of Costa Rica notes, with the double purpose of financing a revolution in that country and discrediting its monetary system. It was in order that he might be free to probe the San' Francisco "graft" scandals that Mr. Burns resigned from the Government service. His most dangerous and delicate task was the tracking and capture of the dynamite conspirators connected with American trade unions. In 1006 and 1908 there were numerous dynamite outrages in different parts of the country, and Mr. Burns got on the track of the criminals by finding the man who had supplied the nitro-glycerine. Recently he J developed into a playwright with a play which will probably be seen in London shortly.