How G-Men are Trained

Title

Language

English

Year

1939

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

1!The best policemen on earth. HE>W G-MEN ARE TRAINED EVERY 39 minutes a murder is committed in America. Through plunder, loot, killing· and blackmail the direct and indirect monetary cost of the nation's crime reaches P30,000,000,000 yearly. Responsible is an army of 4,500,000 criminals. • Desperately grapping with this costly octopus are the P.Olice of the 48 States and the "G-Men" of J. Edgar Hoover's over-riding Federal Bureau of Investigation. Once an obscure Washington official, Hoover, 4 3 years old, was recently voted America's most popular boys' hero. A few years ago Public Hero No. 1 was Machine-gun I<elly. · G-men cost the taxpayer Pl 0, 160,000 a year, but from recovered loot and fines on criminals they retrieve more than seven times that anfount. How they do it was told in an interesting book, G-Men at Work, written by Irish-born reporter Dick O'Connor. O'Connor is a hot headHnehunter who earned war-wounds fighting for Britain and was bedded for years. On his discharge from hospital he was told he had six months to live. Instead, as a reporter and FedeAPRIL, 1939 ral agent he has seen every important gangster· from Machinegun I<elly to Al Brady, killed or jailed. With the help of information supplied by Chief Hoover, he tells the raw stories of "Pretty Boy" Floyd, "Baby Face" Nelson, the "Scarlet Lady" who put Dillinger on the spot, the drive against the White Slave and Numbers rackets. But to Britain's amateur criminologists the most interesting part of his story is his firsthand account of how the Federal "Academy of Crime" works. G-men challenge even Scotland Yard's record of getting their men, and boast that 9 5 per cent of all men against whom they lay charges are convicted. Each agent has his own choice of guns, and once he has made his selection he has to practise constantly so that he goes out on the battle-field a first-class sniper. About 85 per cent of agents are trained lawyers and the rest university men with impeccable private lives and first-class physique. In their science-training, they learn: the use of "dragon's blood," the dust which brings out finger-prints; how to bring out prints on cloth by using 11 iodine vapour; how to make plaster of Paris casts of footprints, type-marks and bulletholes, and deathmasks from moulage wax. Experts teach them to link death bullets with guns, and they are trained in explosives, toxicology, photography, electricity, ultra-violet and X-rays. They learn the trick of using a powdered dye on letters written in answer to an extortion note, so that the dye acts on the hand's moisture and blackens the blackmailer's fingers for at least a week. Within a week a G-man can tell where almost any suit or shirt in the world was made. At head office are kept for reference purposes 1,835 different kinds of ammunition, 2,656 types of tyre tread, 3 6, 4 2 2 water-marks on paper, 695 typewriter standards. More than 8,000,000 filed fingerprints, microscopes, test-tubes, spectrographs, refractometers and other precision instruments help to track murderers. An analysed blood-stain has helped hundreds of times in a criminal's doom. Hairs and scrapings from fingernails, so minute as to defy microscopic 12 examination, have been burnt and photographed through the spectrograph, an d identified with paint found on an opened safe-door. Each year about 35,000 specimens of evidence are thus examined. In Washington the FBI is a popular tourist centre. On the Department of Justice's fifth floor visitors enter an ante-room to view John Dillinger's deathmask, the straw hat he was wearing when killed, the crumpled snapshot of a girl he was carrying in his pocket, and the silver-rimmed glasses which he hoped would help disguise him but which were smashed by a bullet. Visitors are asked to leave their finger-prints-all making future crime-detection easier and rallying taxpayers to the banners of the anti-crime crusade. No G-man is known by name to the public except Edgar Hoover. To him America owes the fact that kidnapping as a paying crime is ended, that no gangster today is worth the title Public Enemy No. 1. "Today," says Hoover, "Public Enemy No. 1 is Politics." At home Hoover collects stamos. -News Review. · PANORAMA

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