Bullets from Same Gun Linked By Camera

PHOTOGRAPHIC evidence as to whether or not two bullets were fired from same gun is irrefutably supplied by a new comparison camera invented by Dr. J. H. Mathews, University of Wisconsin professor and criminologist.

The camera marks a sensational advance of science in the war against crime. By taking pictures of opposite sections of the two bullets being checked, the camera reconstructs a composite bullet of the two sections. The resulting photographic reproduction is enlarged between 64 and 256 times the size of the bullets, permitting positive identification before a courtroom jury.

The camera is really two cameras merging into one at the single plate holder. The bottom camera takes a photo of the base of one bullet while the upper camera registers the top section of the second bullet, the two halves appearing on the print as one.

Novel Door Lock Stops Gangsters
AN AUTOMATIC electric clock built for revolving doors such as are used in banks and department stores was designed by three Minneapolis inventors to thwart gangster attempts at wholesale robbery.

The device is concealed in the wall just above the axis of the door. In case of a holdup any employee can press the alarm push button. A small electric motor immediately engages notched clutches which prevent the door from turning.

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VENT SAVES Bank Vault PRISONERS

“STICK ‘EM UP!”

“Now waltz into the vault!”

These commands, ripped out to hapless bank employees as they look into the muzzles of awesome revolvers, will no longer hold the old-time terror.

For to be locked in a vault equipped with the new ventilation device invented by Carl W. Olson, president of the Olson Utility Equipment Corporation of Minneapolis, will not mean danger of lingering death before the time lock can be opened.

Mr. Olson’s device, which can be set into operation from inside the vault in a few seconds, will insure enough live air being drawn inside and sufficient carbon dioxide to be expelled to permit a dozen persons to live in the steel prison for 24 hours without feeling any ill effects.

Mr. Olson, who was for four years patent engineer in the Swedish patent office at Stockholm, but who for the past fifteen years has been engaged in perfecting bank protection and burglary-proof vault devices in Minneapolis, has solved the problem of devising a practical and efficient ventilation system without lessening the burglar proof or fireproof qualities of vaults, or increasing the insurance rate.

Two l^-inch channels are made through the vault wall and into them are inserted rods or plugs of steel which seal them hermetically, but which may be removed from the interior by a slight twist of the connecting levers which automatically set in motion a Zirocco type motor with a special siphonic attachment which draws in pure air from the outside through one opening and expels the impure air through the other. The rods are so firmly held in place by a special locking device when the ventilator is not in use, that they cannot be driven or twisted out of position from the exterior.

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Installment Buying Landed Me In Jail

She was imprisoned, beaten and twice carted off to a mental hospital—as a result of buying a TV set—that didn’t work!

By SHARY O’HARA

I WAS THROWN INTO JAIL, beaten almost to death, and twice sent to a mental institution as insane—all because I bought a television set on installments.

This sounds fantastic, I know. But my hand trembles as I write this. I want to close my eyes and cry a five-week nightmare from my mind. But I must tell my story to someone—to someone who may have forgotten that a citizen’s rights are the most precious, most wonderful rights in the world.

Most of my life I have been an entertainer, performing with the darling creatures of Nature. I was known as “The Bird Woman” for my talent in training mynah birds and parrots and other pets, training them to talk, laugh, giggle and sing. Thousands of people have been delighted by my novelty act. Though I’m a bit past thirty years old, I still have my “show girl” figure; my natural blonde hair still has a golden hue. My eyes are sky blue and I have been considered more than attractive.

My past, as an entertainer and a citizen, was unblemished up until that day when I bought a secondhand combination radio, record player and television set.

I had gone to Hallandale, Florida, with a dear friend of mine, a school teacher to whom I was about to become engaged. We noticed an eye-catching display of second-hand television sets in Wright’s radio & appliance store. Although I already owned a television set, it played badly and my friend suggested, “Why not look them over?” I agreed.

I picked out a handsome Zenith priced orginally at $1,500 and marked down to $349. I let my friend make the financial arrangements because I have no head for figures. It worked out that I would get $100 trade in for my set and the balance, $256.47 (tax included), would be paid in installments. Mr. Wright said that a finance corporation would take over my account.

Even though that seemed simple enough, it was as though a shadow had passed over my heart, warning me that something terrible was going to happen. But I shrugged the bad feeling away, telling myself I was being childish.

On the third day the set went bad.

I called Mr. Wright and a repair man took the set to the shop. When the set was returned it went bad again. I sent it back again, and when it was returned, in no time at all, it again went bad. The fifth time Mr. Wright himself came for the set. By that time my 90-day guarantee was used up. All I had gotten for my money was misery, inconvenience, and only a few hours of clear television viewing.

Two months passed and Mr. Wright hadn’t returned my set. By that time I was preparing to move to Del-ray Beach to put on a few shows with my birds. I told this to the finance company when I gave them my monthly payment. Then, by pure chance, I happened to meet the repairman at Wright’s and he told me, confidentially, that my set was a lemon.

“It’ll cost you from $60 to $70 to rewire it and then it probably won’t work right. They haven’t even started on it yet- Besides, your record player is also on the bum. They want you to make a deposit before they start work on it.”

Before I moved to Delray Beach I wrote to Mr. Wright asking him to return my television set. His answer finally came to me when I had finished the shows and moved to Wilton Manors. Mr. Wright said: “. . . contact us immediately regarding your TV set.

Unless set is redeemed we will dispose of it.”

Then the finance company began to hound me. They hounded me until life became unbearable!

They telephoned me at all hours of the day and night, demanding their money, slandering me, abusing my reputation, condemning me—day after day—until my nerves were frazzled and every sound made me jump. I kept telling them, “I’ll make the payments, gladly, but first return my television set”—but they never listened. They kept hounding me until my gallstone condition became so aggravated I became terribly sick.

Then the finance company sent a collector to my home.

He was tall and heavy-set and had a coarse voice like a mean tiger. He became abusive and vulgar, calling me vile names and threatening me with bodily harm. He jabbed his thumb at my face and I swear to God, he said exactly this: “I’m warning you, Shary. You’ve heard of people’s bodies floating in the bay, haven’t you. Well, they didn’t jump in, see. They owed finance companies money and that’s how we handle people who give us trouble!”

I was so terrified that I screamed at him to leave or I would call the police. When I said “police” he left— and my terror was so deep that I fainted. I fell to the floor in a dead faint, hitting my head hard.

The next door neighbor called the police and they took me to a hospital, then to a private doctor. When I told him what had happened, he was shocked. When I was well enough to leave for home, I couldn’t sleep. I was afraid the collector would come back, that he would disfigure me, that he would hurt my birds and pets out of revenge. It was the beginning of a nightmare I thought never would end.

When I told my school teacher friend of the horrible incident, he assured me that I had no reason to be frightened. I couldn’t be jailed for non-payment of .a bill. Especially since I hadn’t ever gotten the TV set back and when I did have it—it was just a pile of junk.

I felt easier then—but not much.

And then the two other men from the finance company came to my new home in Wilton Manors. The two burly men pounded and kicked the front door, demanding that I step outside, demanding their money, shouting vile names at me, using profanity that drunken sailors wouldn’t use—promising me the most horrible physical harm if I didn’t let them in. In desperation I pleaded with them.

“I haven’t got your television set. Mr. Wright has it. But you can take everything else, the stove, the refrigerator, all my furniture, only leave me in peace.”

But they kept pounding the door and cursing me, claiming they weren’t in the second-hand furniture business. “We want our money!”

People from all over gathered. Traffic stopped to watch what these two men were doing to me, how they were humiliating me, shaming me before everyone who knew me as a respectable woman. The disgrace was terrible. I finally screamed.

“If you don’t go away, I’ll call the police.”

They pounded the door a bit more, and cursed me, then shouted up.

“If you don’t have a payment by Friday, we’re going to dump you in jail!”

On Friday, at 3:30 in the morning, two sheriff’s deputies from Hollywood, Florida, and one policeman from the Wilton Manors police force started beating on my door, demanding that I come out. Police car sirens began screaming all around me and the men started taking out the windows to get in. My heart was pounding like a hammer and I was frantic with fear.

The Wilton Manors policeman finally opened the door with a skeleton key and they charged up stairs into my bed room. I was in my pajamas. My knees buckled and I fell to the floor in terror. No one moved to help me.

They claimed to have a warrant for my arrest for hiding and concealing the property of the finance company. I tried to explain the situation but they demanded that I dress and be escorted to the police station.

They wouldn’t let me dress in private, saying I might run away. They made me feel cheap and disgusting as they watched me dress.

I was taken to the Broward County Jail, but wasn’t booked as should have been done if I was to be arrested. They allowed me to call my friend and when he tried to bail me out, they wouldn’t let him.

“You can’t bail her out,” they claimed. “She’s insane. The doctor said so. She’s going to be sent away for treatments.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was taught to obey and revere the law—to honor the ideals of the law—and now the law was committing a terrible crime against me. If someone had smashed me with a rock, I couldn’t have been more frightened, and dazed.

I spent three days in a jail that was like a ghastly dungeon. The mattress was like tissue paper and crawling with all kinds of vermin. When I managed to doze off I was awakened by a terrible squealing. It was a rat caught in a trap that was gradually crushing its head and neck. That went on all night. I couldn’t bathe or even read the newspaper. What little money I had I gave to the other prisoners for candy and cigarettes. I felt so sorry for them. The only moment of relief I had was when a doctor examined me for my mental condition—but that relief turned out to be just another form of torture. He asked me questions about sex and perversion and immorality and then he judged me “insane!”

I was taken back to my cell, my heart leaden with despair and hopelessness. They kept opening the door to my cell at all hours of the day and night and tossing in women of the worst kind. Drunks, whores, fanatics, drug addicts, women who were banged up and bloody from beatings and street fights, women with sores and rashes all over their faces and bodies. “Dear God,” I prayed. “Please get me out of here. I committed no crime. All I did was buy a television set on installments. Please, dear God, get me out of this torture chamber!”

After three days my case came up and I stood before the bar of justice. I was asked, “Guilty, or not guilty?” I pleaded, “Not guilty!” and explained my story. I told how I begged the finance company to take back their property. I wasn’t hiding or concealing it. I told how they hounded me, shamed me, violated my person, disgraced me before my friends and neighbors. I expressed my anxiety to get home because my animals and birds needed attending or they would die, and said that I wasn’t a healthy woman and was under a doctor’s care.

Judge Devoe said, “I’m dismissing the case against this woman.”

The bailiff stepped to me. I cried with joy. Tears of happiness ran down my face. I could go home to my pets and beautiful birds and carry on my •work and once again live like a respectable woman, trying to forget this dreadful experience.

Outside the courtroom I asked the bailiff if he would be good enough to loan me the bus fare to get to Wilton Manors as I had given all my money to the other prisoners. He said that first we had to go upstairs, and then I would be given the carfare. I told him: “No, thank you. I would rather die first. I’ll hitch a ride back to Wilton Manors.”

The bailiff grabbed me savagely, and. dragged me to the elevators. I was too stunned to resist. This was unbelievable. Judge Devoe had freed me.

At the elevators I tried to pull away but the bailiff nearly tore me in half to drag me back. While I was struggling another policeman came in, hauling a woman who claimed she wasn’t drunk and wanted to be with her husband. The policeman smashed the woman’s face, knocking her down and breaking her arm. (I heard later that the woman died.) I went with the bailiff because I was terrified that I would be smashed in the face. I was shoved into a cell that was like a huge pail—it was a solitary confinement cell. But they didn’t shut the door.

“Why, dear God, why?” I prayed. “Why am I being persecuted and hounded, abused and violated? Why? Doesn’t the law protect innocent people? Why am I being sinned against by the law? Why?”

But now I was treated with even greater abuse. I was considered a trouble maker—merely because I had asked for my rights as a citizen. My health was getting worse and I was subject to terrible pains. Though I was supposedly in solitary confinement, they kept shoving other prisoners into my cell. Drug addicts, drunks, prostitutes.

Later on I was taken to another psychiatrist who asked the same questions asked of me by the other doctor. All about sex with men and sex with women, sex, sex, sex, as if the only way to tell whether a person was sane or insane was by asking questions about sex. This psychiatrist said that I was going to be sent to the Jackson Memorial, but when I was finally taken from the jail, I was sent to the Miami Retreat, a sanatarium for mentally disturbed people.

I, Shary O’Hara, who had been a good woman, a fine entertainer, a respectable citizen who had never committed one infraction against the law, was sent to a place where they treat the insane—and they hadn’t even issued a “sanity warrant” that entitled them to commit me.

I stayed at the Miami Retreat for three days. I demanded that I be examined for my sanity but the doctors said they couldn’t examine me because they hadn’t a “commitment order.” I raised such a fuss, insisting that they examine me, that they finally did and found me to be absolutely sane. They gave me a paper stating that I was sane and competent.

I was taken from the Miami Retreat and escorted back to the Broward County Jail to wait for my trial. That same night while I was standing on a chair by the window, looking up at the sky and praying to God for help, the chair was suddenly kicked from under me and I fell to the floor, bruising my arms and injuring my back. They had thrown a crazy woman into the cell and she was taken with a fit and I was the one who suffered the brunt of her insanity.

While waiting for my trial, not one day passed without something dreadful happening to me. I was kicked and pinched and solicited by perverts, struck by drug addicts who used me to vent their anger. In order to get some help before my entire state of mind collapsed, I began writing letters and tossing them out the window of my cell, hoping some passerby would find one and read it and try to help me. I even tried to smuggle some letters to the newspapers to tell them of the horrors that were happening to. me. One of those letters nearly caused my death.

I was with some prisoners watching morning television when a matron, charged over to me. She was a thin woman with a mean face and gimlet eyes. She shouted at me and pointed toward the cell block.

“You get into that cell!”

I was startled and didn’t know what to do.

“What happened? What did I do?” I asked her. She sneered at me, and I’ll never forget her yellow, ugly teeth.

“You get in there and you’re not getting out any more. You’re going to be sent away for good!”

I shook my head, deathly afraid. “I’m not going in there. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

She suddenly grabbed hold of me, cursing, “I’ll teach you to write letters!” Then she grabbed me by the hair and I screamed with pain while she dragged me back to my cell and flung me onto the floor. I felt a snap in my neck and I started to faint but she heaved me onto a bed and began whacking my face until I thought my head would come off. She finally let me alone and I spent all night in pain.

I was sent to a third psychiatrist who began asking me questions about sex. Have I ever done this or that? With this kind of a person or that kind of a person? Did I enjoy it or hate it or not care one way or another? Sex, sex, sex—as if all the people in the world lived in one big, dirty bedroom. I answered as best I could and was sent back to my cell. A while later I learned that he had sent in a report saying that I was incurably insane, a paranoid.

I was not allowed to see anyone after that. But I kept writing letters and tossing them out of the cell window, vainly hoping someone would come to my help. I was being driven out of my mind by the roaches and other bugs, by the rats in my cell. One day, for no reason at all, I was beaten up by two prisoners. When I recovered I asked why they had beaten me up and another prisoner answered: “That’s how they are. They’re crazy.”

It was only through the help of the Assembly of God church people— the people who visit the prisons to pray for the unfortunate inmates— that the first ray of hope shone for me. While they prayed for me, I told them my story and begged them to help me before an innocent soul was cast into hell for no reason at all. They said they would try to help me, and soon trickles of newspaper items began to appeal-.

I was never given what I call a trial, but I was permitted to have a hearing—a hearing that was e,ven more unbelievable than what had already happened. .

At the hearing a letter was read— a letter from the finance company written to the State’s Attorney—asking for my release. They said they wanted to drop the charges because they couldn’t stand the adverse publicity that my case was causing them. But the State refused to release me. They brought two psychiatrists to testify against me. They said that I was criminally insane and if I were to be released, I would probably commit a terrible act of violence— even murder.

I had them bring out the certificates of competence and sanity given to me by the doctors at the Miami Retreat, proving that I was not only normal, but of a superior emotional stability and mentality—but the certificates on my behalf were ignored.

When the one-sided hearing was over, I was soon shipped to the Miami Retreat and I was honestly glad to go there instead of having to stay in the prison cell. Even if the Retreat was for the mentally disturbed, the cells were clean and the food was digestible. Then the news- papers started to hammer at the State’s Attorney and the public. I was returned to the Broward County Jail. The Fort Lauderdale Daily News ran a front page story about my suffering and even sent a photographer to the jail to take my picture—to show the public what was happening to an innocent person.

Then, by a strange miracle of circumstance, one of the prisoners in Broward showed me a newspaper which said that the “O’Hara woman was released today.” I READ THIS WHILE I WAS STILL IN JAIL!

The State’s Attorney had released a notice to the newspapers saying that “the O’Hara woman” was being released because she had served the maximum sentence she would have served had she been found guilty. I thought I was dreaming. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

In a little while my cell was opened and I was allowed to go free. The nightmare was over and my heart was racing so fast I thought it would burst from my body. The nightmare was over—yes—but the waking up from a nightmare can be just as terrible.

When I returned home it was like stepping into a funeral parlor. Most of my birds and animals had died. When I saw their tiny, dead bodies, my heart broke and I cried for hours. My only friends had starved to death. The loveliest, gentlest, most loyal of God’s creatures had died while waiting for me to return. Oh, how I prayed that their sweet souls were resting in peace.

Later on, the finance company sent the sheriff’s men and they foreclosed on my mortgaged belongings—refrigerator, a stove, chairs, a chaise longue—as payment for the remainder of my debt.

I was left destitute and had to quit show business to find work as a waitress in order to survive.

I had to tell this story.

And there are so many other gruesome details that I’ve had to leave out because, to this day, I still can’t bring myself to remember the full horror of what happened to me.

But I had to tell this story to let it serve as a warning to the people who fool themselves into believing that they have rights that will always be protected when they come face to face with the law—or have to deal with a finance company they know nothing about.

Take warning from me. Be sure you know what you’re doing.

I’m free now, yes. But there are scars on my heart and soul that I know twenty lifetimes could not heal —there are brutal memories that I will take with me to my grave. And why? Why was I put through weeks of nightmares? I’m not sure I really know—unless I was made to suffer only so I could write my story to warn others to be on guard.

But this much I do know: Before I buy another bit of merchandise on installments, I’ll commit myself as crazy, because—after what I’ve gone through—only a truly crazy person would risk going through those horrors again. • • •

Bullet-proof Shield Protects Police Officers in Gun Battles

COLLAPSIBLE armored shields to protect the bodies of police in gun battles have been invented to aid Uncle Sam in his war on crime. The shields were designed following the slaying of four officers in front of the Union station in Kansas City, Missouri.

The collapsible armor permits free movement of the body. The shield is made in three sections, the two end sections hinging to the center body piece. At the top is an opening fitted with bullet-proof glass through which the officer can see ahead.

The center section has an opening at the right through which the gun barrel projects. A strap hung over the shoulders holds the shield in place, while the left hand keeps the shield at the desired distance from the body. The shield leaves only the legs from the knee down exposed to gun fire.

Gas Replaces The Noose
FOLLOWING the lead set by Nevada, Arizona and Colorado in the quick and painless method of executing criminals by gas, Wyoming has installed a lethal gas chamber to replace the noose, a now fast disappearing method of capital punishment. The Wyoming death chamber, manufactured by a Denver, Colorado, firm, is claimed to be the most humane yet devised. Several other states are said to be considering the adoption of gas chambers for legal executions.

CAMERA BALKS FALSE ALARMS

SILENT SENTRY is trained on alarm box, shoots picture when alarm is pulled. Twelve of these installations in Oakland, Calif., have cut false alarms at protected boxes to zero—chiefly as a result of publicity given the new devices. Cameras were posted at trouble spots—a number being in high school neighborhoods.

Light Beam Stands Guard on Prison to Quell Jailbreak

A LIGHT beam as a prison deadline—a beam that when interrupted by a felon bent upon making his get-away operates a machine gun pointed directly at the victim —is the latest addition to prison jailbreak safeguards. The apparatus, consisting of a beam transmitter which shoots a small invisible ray along the prison wall, and a beam receiver which picks up and records any breaks in the light, and at the same time fires a machine gun, is being installed in many prisons housing intractable criminals. And owing to its deadliness, its reliability, its silence and invisibility, the contrivance is doing much to cut down the prevalence of prison breaks.

The beam transmitter is an instrument, similar in most ways to a motion picture machine, and has mounted on it a machine gun of the Lewis type. The transmitter projects a small beam alongside the wall close to the top which is picked up at the other end of the wall by the beam receiver, otherwise known as the “Electric eye.” The heart of the receiver is the light sensitive lube, shown in the insert in the photo at the top of the page, which registers the projected beam. At any interruption of the beam impulses are set up in the tube which are amplified to an intensity that they actuate the firing mechanism of a machine gun mounted atop the transmitter.

The machine gun is trained along the path of the beam, and when a prisoner, attempting to climb the wall to escape, crosses the path of the beam, the electric eye operates instantaneously, firing the machine gun and thus cutting down the would-be jail-breaker.

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Copter Cops

By Frank Tinsley

TODAY’S high-speed turnpikes require ground-bound traffic police to take to the air and graduate to the status of “Copter Cops,” mounted in a vehicle that could speed safely above the car-choked roads and provide a bird’s eye view of driving conditions and dangers. Such a vehicle could go far beyond the utility of the present patrol car. It could control traffic speed, clear jams at bottle- necks, perform emergency rescue work and provide fast aerial ambulance service, plus offering a more efficient pursuit of criminals.

Mi’s paddy-wagon for Copter Cops is based on the Army’s specifications for a compact, high-lift aerial jeep. It takes the form of a stable “flying platform,” built around three ducted-fan units. Each of these is fitted with a pair of contra-rotating propellers spinning on a horizontal plane to drive a column of air downward. The force of this airstream provides the machine’s lift. Power is provided by twin gas turbines.

The vehicle is designed to carry three policemen, the minimum crew for efficient patrol work. In the event of a wreck, as shown, it lands on the central safety island with one of the crew clearing a space by directions called through an electric “bull horn.” Upon landing, one of the men takes over traffic control while the other two place the injured on litters and lock them safely in place in the enclosed “Utter wells” on either side of the copter’s cabin.

The pilot then takes off for the nearest hospital, leaving his mates to superintend activities at the accident scene. Upon the patrol vehicle’s return, a cable is hooked to the wreck and it is dragged or lifted to a safe spot off the highway.

With its inflated pontoon rim, Mi’s copter is capable of landing on land, water or in deep snow. A kit of emergency tools is carried and the crew is armed with rifles and sub-machine gun. Floodlights are set in the lower surface and a built-in loud speaker can be used to flag down an offending vehicle. •

CAMERA COP In Tokyo can take flashbulb picture of traffic violations (for use as evidence) by touching button on handlebar. Any 35mm camera can be used with the mechanism; no photo skill required.

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Train Robbers Routed by Science and Brawn

ALL the world . loves detective stories. Here is one that deals with real men and tells the thrilling truth about their fight to save millions of dollars in stolen goods. Ten years ago American railroads were losing $13,000,000 a year to box car bandits. On one road, scientific methods and the careful training of road police have now cut off about ninety-nine percent of this loss. In this story you see how these men do their work.

By BOYDEN SPARKES

I LIKE detective stories. Best of all I like stories of real detectives. Consequently when Professor Charles P. Berkey, Columbia University geologist, told me that a pile of rocks on his table was a clue in a mysterious robbery I pleaded for details.

“I’m just a helper on this job,” said Professor Berkey. “The real detectives are members of the New York Central Railroad police force. I am not at liberty to tell you about this case, but if you see Carl Jellinghaus, the railroad’s superintendent of Property Protection, perhaps you can get the whole story.”

I did see Jellinghaus and I got the whole story of the rocks. Better still, I got other yarns that made my blood course faster than any tales ever told of scientific detectives of fiction.

To get the full measure of a great railroad system’s fight with thieves it is necessary to consider the state of affairs that existed at the close of 1920. In that year robbers had taken from the trains and stations of the New York Central a total of $2,596,560. The Central was not the only road that was suffering from these bold criminals. For a long while conditions had been growing steadily worse until in 1920 the total loss by robbery on the rail- roads of the nation was $12,726,947. Last year the robbery loss of all the railroads was less than $1,000,000.

Affairs were in such a state that something had to be done. How well it was done on the New York Central may be shown by another total. Remember that the robbery loss in 1920 was $2,596,560, and then contrast with that the total loss for 1930, which was $2 7,936. When Jellinghaus gave me those figures he grinned. Then he wrote down another figure.

“This,” he said, “is the proportion to which the robbery loss has been reduced in ten years.”

I LOOKED at what he had written. The figure was 1.1 percent. That comes pretty close to being a perfect score.

“That change was not worked by keeping books,” I said. “How was it done?”

“Well,” he said, “some men were killed; some were wounded; a lot went to jail— car burglars, pickpockets, sneak thieves, crooks of all kinds. Our lines ten years ago were infested with thieves. Now it is different. Hoboes avoid our lines as carefully as they avoid work, and as for pickpockets, when one of them is seen around one of our stations he is pretty likely to keep his hands in his own pockets.”

“But how?” I persisted. “How about those rocks and Professor Berkey?”

The answer to that was an interesting revelation of the growing use of scientific knowledge in detective work. The rocks I had seen on Professor Berkey’s table had been found by an amazed grocer when he opened a packing case that was supposed to contain cheese from a Mediterranean port.

Other complaints began to pour in from other merchants who h?.d found rocks in boxes supposed to contain cheese. If the substitution had occurred anywhere along the New York Central the railroad would be liable to the shipper for the full value of his cheese. Who could say where those rocks came from? Well, a geologist might, and consequently specimens were taken to Professor Berkey.

“This is lava,” said the distinguished Columbia geologist. “It is a peculiar form of lava and I can guarantee that it came from just one place. Mt. Vesuvius.”

THAT was one robbery about which the New York Central could cease to trouble itself. The ship that had carried a cargo of cheese across the ocean to New York had stopped en route at Naples. Obviously the substitution had occurred there. The railroad was not responsible.

The switching of rubbish for merchandise is a common trick of freight thieves. The motive is always the same—to delay discovery of the crime as long as possible; and, of course, an empty box would arouse the suspicion of the first person to handle it. Among railroad men this sort of thing is spoken of as a concealed loss.

Sometimes it happens that the rubbish exchanged for stolen goods leads the detectives unerringly to the thieves. Once a ship that had left the Amazon loaded with crude rubber was discovered, when preparations were made to unload her, to be partially filled with rocks. Where had the substitution occurred? The ship was tied up at a railroad pier, but in her log was written the record of a five-thousand-mile journey. Were the thieves in South America, the West Indies, New York, or aboard ship?

Specimens of the rock were submitted to Professor Berkey. He identified them as pieces of concrete, and the concrete had been made from Long Island sand. The trail was hot! A concrete pier was being demolished in the immediate vicinity of the ship’s berth. That was bringing the crime pretty close to the men responsible.

OCCURRENCES of this sort illustrate a most important factor in the lowering of the robbery losses of the New-York Central and other American railroads. The railroad police have learned how to localize crimes.

There had always been a force of railroad policemen, and some of the individuals were first-rate men. But there were not enough of them and they were not well organized. There had always been a simple way of telling approximately where the robbery had occurred, but it had not been used. Every freight car when loaded is sealed with a string of tin looped through staples on the sliding door and doorframe and fastened with a small ball of lead.

A CHILD might break that seal, but once broken no amount of ingenuity could disguise the fact that it had been tampered with. But what was the good of discovering, at the end of a freight car’s journey, that it had been tampered with somewhere on the American continent? The problem was to discover at what points freight cars were being looted.

That was one of the first things to be done in clearing up the mystery of the annual disappearance of all manner of goods, silk, cigarettes, automobile tires, canned food, and other kinds of merchandise worth millions of dollars. Consequently arrangements were made to have freight trains moved through a corridor of police inspections.

Between Chicago and New York a tram might stop several dozen times. Nevertheless it was provided that each time there was a stop every seal had to be examined. If a policeman at one stop reported all seals intact and the one who made the next examination discovered that several were broken, that bit of information was a vital aid in recovering the stolen goods and capturing the robbers.

EAST of Buffalo the New York Central police are under the command of Chief James D. Roosa, who weighs about 220 pounds when he is in condition, as he generally is. For some time all his men had been getting regular pistol practice. At night before they rolled into bed, and in the morning as their feet touched the floor, they would practice. They would draw their guns in a manner taught them by an expert, aim at the doorknob, and then squeeze the trigger. Of course they always went through these exercises with unloaded guns. The point is they practiced as faithfully as old-time gunmen of the West. Also they were given frequent opportunities to fire their guns on a range using as a target a swinging silhouette fashioned in the shape of a man.

On a farm in the hilly region south of Niagara Falls, N. Y., there was a man who also practiced with pistols and rifles incessantly. This supposed farmer’s hired hands also practiced. The man’s name was Perry. He was a Westerner and something of a sinister mystery to his neighbors; but he was no longer a mystery to Chief Roosa and some of his detectives.

They were convinced that this man was the leader of the most daring gang of freight thieves in the United States. Almost any one of the daring freight robberies within a radius of one hundred miles from Perry’s farm might justly be attributed, they felt, to this toughest of all car burglars. But how to catch him?

Chief Roosa stopped shaving for a couple of days; so did ten of his best men. Then, when they closely resembled a collection of tough hoboes, they started north for a section of the railroad known as the Falls Road. It runs from Oswego to Niagara. In some manner Chief Roosa had learned that an attempt was to be made to rob a particular freight car loaded with costly furs.

IT WAS a dark night when that fur car was shunted back and forth in the railroad yards until it had become part of a freight train. Secreted within the car were a couple of tough looking citizens who rode silently in nests they had formed for themselves in the bales and boxes of freight.

Hours later the men within the sealed car heard above the clamor of its thirty-mile-an-hour speed the sound of feet on the roof. Then a heavy body scraped against the side of the car. They waited tensely. The door was pushed open. A strip of blue light relieved the gloom of the car interior. The shooting began at once. It was by no means a one-sided battle.

The invader answered them shot for shot for a space. Then for a second or two that passed as slowly as hours there was no firing. The two men in ambush heard a body crash heavily to the floor. Again they heard steps on the roof, fired up, and waited expectantly. But nothing happened. That other thief had jumped from the moving train into the darkness.

When the freight train stopped at the next station two more of Chief Roosa’s men joined the pair in the car. The man with whom they had fought was dying.

Chief Roosa’s men hastened back to the point on the right of way where the gun fight had begun. There they found and made a prisoner of a dazed person they identified as an old car thief known as Shanahan. Him they locked in jail, but where was Perry?

Perry, the prosperous farmer, came to the jail boldly to see about getting the release of his hired man and was promptly locked up. Sufficient evidence was dug up to bring a conviction and a prison sentence.

Perry, Shanahan, and a fourth man were given long terms in Atlanta penitentiary because in robbing a shipment in interstate transit they had committed a Federal offense.

Silk was one of the great prizes luring car burglars ten years ago. In 1920 the value of the raw silk stolen from cars or stations of the New York Central was $426,965. During the last five or six years not a dollar’s worth of silk has been lost by the road. This is in spite of the fact that a small bale of silk, easily carried by a man, is worth about S500 and there have been times when that value was $900. All this thievery was stopped completely by policing shipments of silk.

THERE were some bottles containing brilliantly colored powders standing on the desk of Chief Roosa when I was in his office recently.

“Are you going in for chemistry?” I asked him.

“No,” he replied, “but sometimes chemistry helps us.”

Then he explained about the bottles. A railroad with scores of thousands of employees and with many other thousands of persons, messengers, truckmen, and other visitors having access to its premises, may suffer from sneak thieves. Sometimes they take baggage; sometimes they rifle desks.

The sum of their activities if uncontrolled might make a serious dent in the income of a railroad. Consequently such characters must be frightened into good behavior. The railroad has not the time to reform all the pilferers in the world. It has to be satisfied to keep them from stealing.

“Our method,” explained the chief, “is quite simple. We always catch them.

“If we get a few complaints about objects disappearing from baggage, and everything that vanishes even though it is worth only a few cents is reported to us, we get busy with those little bottles. We place some of the powders in those bottles in the desks that are being looted; or rub it on baggage placed as bait.

“Usually the thief is not a very daring person anyway but what nerve he has vanishes when he discovers that his fingers have become stained with indelible marks that will not wash off, scrub them as hard as he may. Then along strolls a railroad policeman. All he is looking for is someone with stains on his fingers. Usually a thief trapped in that manner hasn’t enough nerve left to lie about the matter.”

Record keeping can be a science, and the localizing records of the New York Central police are certainly kept in a scientific manner. Sometimes the property of passengers disappears from coaches or Pullmans. The missing articles are catalogued in two ways by a sort of cross indexing that may be reached through a reference to the type of article or the place on the train where the happening occurred.

IT would not be fair to say too much about this system, but one illustration will serve to show its effectiveness. Several passengers on trains running in and out of New York had reported that their money had been stolen while they were sleeping in their berths.

The robberies were not confined to the same Pullman nor even to the same train. Nevertheless the records in Chief Roosa’s office indicated that a certain colored porter might be responsible. It was revealed by those records that he had been aboard every train on which a robbery had occurred. Sometimes he had been the porter of a car in that train, but the robberies never occurred in his car. At other times he was a dead-head passenger. Finally he was dismissed. Then another robbery occurred.

A wealthy man woke up one morning and began to squawk because his trousers were missing. They were found beneath a berth farther down the car. The pockets were empty. The man said they had contained $115. One of Chief Roosa’s men was aboard the train. He spotted the dismissed porter riding on the train as a passenger and took him into custody. The man was carrying a revolver and that made it possible to arrest him. In his pockets $115 was found. New bills, unwrinkled.

THE colored man protested with heat that it was his money. While he was serving out a six-month sentence for carrying a revolver without a license, the railroad policemen kept on investigating. They went to the bank of the man who had been robbed. The cashier remembered that this rich man was always cranky about getting new bills when he cashed a check.

The bank records revealed that the money had been paid from a bundle received from the Federal Reserve Bank. A check-up revealed that the serial numbers of the bills in that bundle had included the same serial numbers of the bills found in the colored man’s pocket. In the face of that evidence he decided to confess.

It is in that painstaking investigation and preparation of evidence that you can find a portion of the answer to the question as to how the New York Central with its property spread over half the continent has been able in the last few years to protect that property against thieves. It has protected it and is protecting it while all the cities through which the lines of the New York Central run have been suffering as never before from the depredations of thieves. Science has helped; so has the freedom of the railroad’s police from the interference of gang politics; likewise marksmanship.

There have been plenty of gun fights in the last dozen years but now that it is pretty generally known that the railroad policemen have become crack shots there is less and less necessity for shooting. The pistol expert who teaches these men, traveling all over the lines to do so, is Captain Jack Smith, who formerly worked with Annie Oakley and traveled as an expert shot with the 101 Ranch Show.

It is not uncommon for communities along the New York Central to appeal for the aid of one of the company’s crime specialists in emergencies. All of them are officers of the states in which they operate.

LIEUTENANT Joseph Genova of this A unusual force of industrial policemen is so accomplished in tracking murderers that his services are often loaned to small towns bewildered by a mysterious crime.

One puzzling mystery solved after painstaking work by the New York Central men concerned a dynamite explosion at a mine tipple. A box of caps found at the scene of the explosion was traced to a place many miles away where dynamite had been stolen. The man who was arrested for the dynamiting had thought he had a pretty good alibi. At the moment the explosion occurred he had been talking to the local chief of police. How he arranged that was explained when it was revealed that with the dynamite he had taken 250 feet of fuse. While that was burning he had had ample opportunity to stroll into town and engage the chief in conversation.

Heat Waves Set Off New Thief Alarm
THE heat from a burglar’s body, even the gentle warmth of his breath, may now be detected by science’s latest contribution to crime prevention, the “heat radio.”

The heart of the “heat radio” is a very tiny and very delicate thermocouple, which is mounted at the focal point of a large metallic reflector. This reflector, shown in the accompanying illustration, collects the feeble heat waves and concentrates them on the super-sensitive thermocouple.

An amplifier connected to the thermocouple amplifies the current generated about one million times, making it strong enough to operate a recording instrument at police headquarters or an alarm bell.

New Burglar Alarm Set Off by Vibrations of Heartbeat

THERE have been numerous inventions to foil bank bandits in their hold-up attempts but the latest one is the most original. The vibrations of the human heart-heat set off an alarm bell.

The device, shown in photo at the left, incorporates principles of electricity and accoustics to do its detecting job. It is the result of three years of work by the inventors.

In appearance, the burglar alarm resembles a miniature radio. If any would-be bandit approaches close to the cage, his heartbeat, working faster than usual because he is under a high nervous tension, will set off the boisterous alarm bell that can be heard a block away.

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Tricks of the Rum Runners

A Chicago bootlegger recently remarked that there was at least one honest official in that town—Pat Roche, chief investigator for the State’s Attorney—who couldn’t be “fixed.” For eight years Roche was a special agent for the treasury on the trail of crooked dry agents. He tells here the inside story of the rum runners, and why they flourish.

by PAT ROCHE

Former Special Agent – U. S. Treasury

IN TWO weeks’ time a few years ago, on the strength of a set of credentials purporting to show that I was a prohibition agent, I had $85,000 in bribes handed me as my share of the money being paid a small ring of dry agents in New York.

“Important money,” as the gangsters call thousand dollar bills when handed out in fist-fuls, can be had at any time, usually without even the asking, by any official of the prohibition or customs services. Less important money can be had by any of untold thousands of policemen, sheriffs, deputies, highway patrolmen, state policemen, township constables and politicians—everybody, in fact, who comes in contact with the vast business of transporting and selling liquor.

Is it any wonder that enough of them fall for the graft to make the liquor business a fairly safe gamble? Most of the men who can make anywhere from $100 to $100,000 by turning the head or being in the wrong place at the right time are earning in the neighborhood of $50 to $75 a week.

I was never a bona fide prohibition agent, but for eight years I was a special agent of the treasury department working, chiefly, to trap crooked dry agents. To do that we usually had to trap the bootleggers and rum runners with whom they dealt, so I saw plenty of the inside of the rum game.

If you draw a line around the United States, about 250 to 300 miles back from the border, you have marked off the chief rum running territory. In the vast hinterland the local moonshiner, the cheating druggist, the home brew maker, and the peddler of poisonous extracts and concoctions is the chief source of supply for intoxicants.

But within a night’s automobile ride of the rum ships along the coast, the export docks of Canada—which are now going out of business—and the Mexican border is the habitat of the rum runner and the big time bootlegger.

It costs, or has cost while the export docks along the Detroit river flourished, about $20 to grease the way for a case of liquor to reach Chicago. Five dollars went to the boatman who ferried the case across the river; $5 to the guard who let it slip past the border, and $10 smoothed the way through Michigan and Indiana into Chicago.

A case of standard brands of Scotch, in 40 ounce, imperial quarts, commission wrapped—that is, bearing the seals and wrapping of the Quebec Liquor Commission—costs $65 in Canada. Add $20 for graft, and the cost of running the liquor down by automobile, 20 cases to a load, and the case costs about $87, delivered in Chicago. The market price is around $125 to $135, depending on the supply.

But you can buy commission wrapped Scotch in Chicago for $55 to $65 a case! The answer is cutting plants, fake labels, fake stamps, and fake wrapping. The Quebec Liquor Commission has a special wrapping paper, with red, blue and green threads woven into it, just like the American treasury notes. But we have seized vast quantities of counterfeit paper that couldn’t be told from the genuine if we didn’t know the liquor commission controlled all the genuine supply.

The cutting plant buys large quantities of genuine liquor from the runners, opens the bottles, and adds an equal part of alcohol and an equal part of water, making three cases out of one. Flavoring and coloring matter also are added to bring the taste and appearance up to the original. Bottles, either purchased new from glass plants which make them to order and duplicate any foreign product in shape, size and appearance, or bought from old bottle dealers who have built up a market for empties, are used. The finished product can not be told from the original.

If the alcohol used in cutting is pure grain, the product itself is no more harmful than the original pure liquor. If it is re-cooked denatured alcohol its harmfulness depends on the skill of the cooker and the state of his equipment. Nobody can remove the government formula denaturants completely, for their evaporation point is too near that of pure alcohol, and some is bound to pass over with the alcohol vapor to be condensed.

An expert cooker can produce a product that is virtually harmless, but so few of them are expert, and, working in dirty basement hideaways, with dirty equipment, they actually cook into the product poisons that were not there before.

Low grade alcohol, produced from corn sugar or other sources, is also largely used in faking real liquor. There again the dirt and poisons from insanitary equipment are the chief source of danger.

Counterfeit American brands have virtually disappeared, and with them has disappeared the counterfeiting of internal revenue strip stamps on a large scale. A certain amount is still made, and only yesterday 17 men, including 11 from Chicago and three from New York, two from Milwaukee and one from Rock Island, were sentenced in a Chicago federal court for that crime.

I broke up one of the biggest counterfeiting rings in history here in Chicago a few years ago and for a time put fake strip stamps off the market.

The tricks by which liquor is slipped past the borders and moved to the nearby cities are legion. It’s a pretty safe bet, though, that tricks alone don’t move one case in 100. Somewhere along the route graft must be paid.

Automobiles are largely used to bring liquor into Chicago. Standard sedans are turned over to expert body builders who specialize in building hidden compartments. A standard five passenger sedan can be altered to hide twenty cases of 12 bottles each, without any of the secret compartments being visible, even under close scrutiny. That’s 240 quarts, and it seems almost impossible to hide that many bottles in the backs of the seats, the sides and the roof of a car without causing undue bulging, but it is being done right along.

The tricks along the sea coast are equally unique. Just the other day a fishing boat came into New York, apparently with a solid concrete ballast in the hold. Dry agents who ripped out the concrete found it was only a thin floor, with a fortune in liquor under it. Some liquor, after it reaches this country, is shipped by rail as freight in large lots, or as express in small quantities. The usual express dodge is to pack six bottles in a tin can, solder it tight, so if one is broken it can’t leak, and pack two tins to a box. The shipper has labels printed purporting to show he is a dealer in radio parts, printing plates, or some similar product that would be shipped in boxes of about that size and weight. The buyer pays cash in advance. If the shipment is detected and confiscated by government agents, it is the buyer who loses his money.

Lens Detects Bogus Coins in Subway

THE days when iron slugs and Chinese taels could safely operate the turnstiles of the New York subways is past, for the transit company has recently equipped the coin boxes controling the turnstiles with lenses that magnify the coins to twice the size of a silver dollar. This makes it possible for inspectors to detect spurious coins at a distance of 15 feet from the machine.

When the transit company discovered that more than one per cent of the passengers were using all manner of cheap substitutes for the nickel, causing an annual loss of $200,000, the mechanical detector was installed. Regularly appointed inspectors now closely watch the magnifying lenses.

When a nickel is dropped in the slot, releasing a catch that holds the turnstile, it is grasped by two arms that carry it into position in the rear of the lens. Light from an electric lamp is reflected upon the coin, illuminating it sufficiently to bring out the highly magnified details of the surface in bold relief, and thus expose any fake.

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• Senate Subway Is Safest In U. S. (Apr, 1923)

Glass Banks Will Foil Hold-Ups

BANK hold-ups may soon become things of the past if the common-sense but revolutionary ideas of Francis Keally, New York architect, are put into effect. He suggests that banks be constructed with glass walls and that office partitions within the building likewise be transparent, so that a clear view of everything that is happening inside the bank will be afforded from all angles at all times.

The glass wall would be double, with an air space between which would be maintained at even temperature to keep the surface clean of frost and steam. Tellers would not be caged behind barred wickets or bullet-proof windows, but would transact business over an ordinary counter, keeping a minimum amount of currency at hand. Cash reserves of the bank would be kept in a huge basement vault, connected by a pneumatic tube system for carrying money to and from the tellers. The money vaults would be windowless and admittance would be barred by massive doors, but workers would be provided fresh air by means of modern ventilating systems.

Robot Guards Foil Uprising in Biggest Jail

WITH one foiled jail break to its credit, a new electrical communication and alarm system installed recently in the five-story county jail at Los Angeles, Calif., is believed to make the institution proof against an uprising of prisoners or an assault by armed gangsters from without.

This ultra-modern skyscraper jail, called the largest in the country, occupies the top of a tall building whose lower floors are used as courtrooms. A prisoner attempting escape has the choice of a sheer drop of ten stories, or a desperate dash for freedom through the corridors and elevators. To make the chance of success by either means even more remote, Clem Peoples, chief jailer, invented and installed the jail’s remarkable electrical system.

Through its operation, secret signals from colored lights and buzzers aid jailers in their watch; sliding cell doors are operated through remote control so that guards need not expose themselves to attack, and even the elevators can be stopped instantly in an emergency.

Heart of the whole robot patrol system is a central control panel. Through it, an operator may get in touch with any officer in the jail by means of a buzzer system. Each officer has an individual code signal, and when it is sounded by buzzers installed throughout the building he steps to the nearest phone and reports. At night the buzzers are stilled and green lights, installed in pairs with red ones, are used for signals. In case of emergency, the central operator flashes on the red lamps through- out the corridors and raps out two code dashes on the buzzer, sending every available guard rushing to a telephone for instructions. This alarm was sounded recently when five prisoners were surprised in a daring attempt to overpower a turnkey and escape from a window with a rope improvised from bedding. Acting on telephone orders, guards closed in and had the prisoners back in their cells within four minutes.

To make it impossible for such an attempt to go undetected, felt-slippered guards, called “prowlers,” patrol the corridors during the night, telephoning the central operator at the first suspicion of trouble. So that prisoners cannot learn his habits, a prowler never follows the same route twice. As he goes from cell block to cell block, he punches signal buttons, causing corresponding red lights on a glass screen in the central switchboard to mark his progress. Should a light remain stationary too long, the operator calls the guard back; if he does not respond, other guards hasten to the scene, ready for action and warned that an emergency has undoubtedly arisen.

Since elevators afford the only access to the jail, outlaws attempting to storm it and effect a jail delivery would find themselves in a trap of their own making. Armed guards, warned over the alarm system by the elevator operator and barricaded behind steel doors, would meet the entering gangsters, while deputies downstairs would cut off their escape. Meanwhile, cell blocks, automatically locked, would prevent prisoners from participating in the conflict.

Suicide or Murder? ~ Science Tells Which

NO LONGER can a murderer defeat justice by placing the gun in the hand of the victim to mislead the coroner’s jury into returning a verdict of suicide. On the other hand, it will no longer be possible for an innocent man to be convicted of murder on circumstantial evidence if the deceased fired the shot which ended his own life, for science can now identify positively the hand that fired the gun. Whenever a firearm explodes, the generated gases expand and blow backward as well as forward. No firearm has yet been built in which some of these gases do not escape backward.

As these gases blow backward they carry with them ultra-microscopic particles of the burning powder with force enough to imbed them in the skin around the bases of the thumb and forefinger, as well as back along the wrist, of the hand that pulls the trigger.

These tiny particles of decomposed nitrates are invisible to the unaided eye. Indeed, there are very few microscopes which will reveal them with any certainty. But warm paraffin, placed over the skin, picks them up. Still, they are invisible, even against the dead white of the paraffin. But when the cast or mold is cooled and hardened, and Guttman’s reagent poured into it, the ultra-microscopic particles swell and turn blue, forming a cloud-like mass of “dust”.

The proof is not complete until the nitrate particles turn purple under Lunge’s reagent, and stretch out into lines. Once this color and form appear it is known that the hand tested fired the fatal shot. If such “nitrate writing” does not appear on the hands of the victim the case passes from possible suicide to certain murder.

“Alarmball” Warns of Burglars

THE “alarmball,” illustrated in accompanying photo, is a clever little device to prevent burglaries. Placed against a door or a window, its own weight pushes the three small legs down and stills a bell, which is controlled by a clock-like arrangement within the walls. The least little movement of door or window upsets device causing the legs to thrust outward, ringing the bell and warning its owner that there’s a burglar on the premises.

Bank Teller’s Cage Has Fourteen Ways To Foil Holdups

No matter what tactics a robber may attempt, the teller in the special bank cage pictured at the right has a card up his sleeve to foil him. Installed in the demonstration room of a company manufacturing protective devices for banks, stores, warehouses, and other places of business, the cage is equipped with fourteen separate electrical devices, most of which are hidden and capable of secret operation while the teller apparently obeys the orders of his armed “customer.” In the photograph, the teller is shown operating an alarm button under the counter with his left hand while handing over cash with his right.

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Beating the Thug to His Own Gun

Chicago Police, Trained to Handle Armed Men, Show, in Series of Pictures, How Weapons Can Be Wrested from Footpad

WHAT TO DO AND HOW. Photos on this and following page give a good idea of how officers are taught to disarm a thug even after he has them covered. Above, Sergeant John Leonard, right, and Detective William Foley, of the Chicago Police Department, pose for the first of the pictures in the series that proves that an armed man has not an unbeatable advantage even though he has his weapon in his hand and is desperate enough to use it.

GRABBING THE GUN. Instead of throwing up his hands at the command, the victim, right, with one swift movement, hooks the barrel of the pistol with his right thumb, grips the wrist of the gunman with his left hand, and then, as above, forces the thug’s hand back over the shoulder, twisting the weapon out of his grasp. If he puts up a struggle the trigger guard of the revolver will break his finger. Experts move so rapidly that they can escape injury.

BEATING A KNIFE THRUST. Speed is the first requisite in meeting an attack of this kind. The left hand darts under the blade and grasps the wrist of the assailant to check and turn the blow to one side.

RIGHT ARM MUST HELP. Then the right hand is thrust quickly under the crook’s knife arm above the elbow so that, as the wrist is pushed back, the arm is twisted at the shoulder (see opposite page).

ATTACK FROM REAR. When a gunman thrusts a revolver into his victim’s back, he apparently has an unbeatable advantage.

KNIFE GRIP IS BROKEN. In the position above, the knife hand is forced so far back that the crook has to let go of his weapon.

SPEED AND STRENGTH WIN. At the attack from behind, the victim swings his body suddenly to the right so that his right arm, held stiffly away from his side, strikes the wrist of the thug, throwing it to one side as shown above. Then, at left, is seen the off-balance position into which this maneuver throws the criminal. The victim’s right arm continues around the gun arm and his fingers grip above the elbow. At the same time, with his left hand he seizes the barrel of the revolver. Below, this leverage makes it possible to twist the hand so far back over the robber’s shoulder that he can no longer keep his grip on the butt of the gun and it is easily taken away by his intended victim. Each of these movements, of course, calls for the greatest possible speed and sufficient strength.

“Water Auto” for Police Hits High Speed

Like a streamline automobile without wheels, the odd “water auto” shown above in a trial run along the Thames River in England, can hit a top speed of thirty-five miles an hour although it is driven by a motor rated at only nine horsepower. Designed especially as a police patrol boat for emergency work on the waterfronts of large cities, the craft has its engine forward and a three-place passenger cabin perched over the stern. The center windshield section forms part of a hatch through which entrance is made into the cabin, which provides all the comforts of a luxurious motor car.

Latest equipment for the English bobby is a miniature radio receiving set with which he picks up instructions from police headquarters while on duty. The set is so small that the policeman carries the complete outfit in his pocket.

Cops get a dome light
Japanese motorcycle cops are being outfitted with these new helmets, which have a flashing light on top. Police can use the light to flag down drivers or to control traffic on heavily traveled city streets.

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How Science Will Foil the SKYJACKERS

To see how new techniques and technology will thwart a potential air pirate, start here

By PAUL WAHL
ILLUSTRATION BY ROY DOTY

Ninety-seven passengers showed up for the flight, but 96 were on the Miami-bound plane when it took off from a New York airport one recent evening. Left at the gate, in the custody of two deputy U.S. marshals, was a gun-toting traveler. They nailed him after the loaded .38 revolver in his shoulder holster triggered a new weapons detector—one of the ingenious countermeasures devised by science to keep in-flight crime from getting off the ground.

Since 1968, when it became epidemic, the chronic disease of air piracy has grown into a worldwide problem of frightening proportions. Being aboard a plane shanghaied to Havana by an individual with a grudge is bad enough; being held hostage by terrorists who skyjack your plane as a form of political blackmail, as in the recent spate of Mideast incidents, is far worse.

The only real defense now at hand is the anti-hijacking system developed last year by a special task force of the Federal Aviation Administration and currently used by several U.S. airlines. How can it stop a potential air pirate before he can board the plane? The technique is illustrated on these pages.

The personal approach. This anti-hijacking system relies heavily on behavioral screening of passengers. Psychological studies by the FAA’s Office of Aviation Medicine show that skyjackers have certain behavior patterns, readily spottable with simple techniques. Since general awareness of these behavior-detection procedures might ruin the system’s effectiveness, the details are closely guarded.

New Orleans International Airport was the first at which all commercial flights were screened for potential air pirates. Specially trained observers, posted in various parts of the terminal or circulating in the crowd, watch passengers for signs of skyjacker behavior. When a suspicious character is spotted and reported, airport offi cers ask him to walk through one of 13 weapons-detection stations.

If he is carrying a mass of ferrous metal that could be a concealed weapon, a blue light flashes and a dial indicator jumps. The suspect is then interviewed and asked to identify himself and produce the metallic object. Should he refuse to cooperate at any point, he is denied boarding privileges. Deputy U.S. marshals make a personal search of the suspect and arrest him if he is armed.

Some airlines, at other airports, use the FAA anti-hijacking system on a limited basis (not all flights are covered), with a slightly different weapons-screening procedure. At the boarding gate, all passengers for a given flight must walk single file through a weapons-detection station. If a passenger, previously spotted as fitting the skyjacker behavioral pattern, also triggers the weapons detector, he is detained.

The FAA says that although nearly 50 percent of air travelers carry enough ferrous metal (usually harmless iron or steel items) to set off the weapons-screening device, fewer than 0.5 percent simultaneously exhibit skyjacker behavioral characteristics and trigger the detector.

Reportedly, no U.S. flight whose passengers were given this preboarding screening has ever been skyjacked. Operation of the system, however, seems to be a sometime thing with U.S. airlines that have adopted it. In each of several recent incidents of air piracy, it was explained that the anti-hijacking system was not in use on that particular flight.

The weapons detector. In the FAA system, this is a magnetometer specially adapted as a walk-through station. It consists of a monitor connected to two detector “towers”—slender aluminum poles 72 inches high—at either side of a passage 36 inches wide. Inside each tower are four sensors (magnetic detectors).

Unlike other metal detectors, this magnetometer is a passive device—it generates no energy of its own. Any iron or steel object between the towers creates disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field, which, together with the field radiating from the ferrous mass, are sensed by the detectors and transmitted to the monitor control. Signals amplified by the monitor power supply drive a meter read-out and trigger an alarm circuit to flash a blue light.

The magnetometer is fine-tuned to detect weapon-size masses of ferrous metal. It cannot, however, discriminate between a concealed weapon and an innocent iron or steel item of like mass.

Infinetics Inc., of Wilmington, Del., makes the Friskem Walk-Thru Station, the magnetometer weapons detector selected for the FAA anti-hijacking system. It sells for less than $1,000. Recently, the Schonstedt Instrument Co., Reston, Va., started marketing a similar magnetic detection device, the Searcher.

All-metal detectors. In Japan, they’re installing a home-grown weapon detector, the Densok Magnetic Eye, at airline boarding gates. First used by Japan Air Lines at Tokyo International Airport last July, it is an active-field all-metals detector. Passengers walk through a rectangular pipe frame—39 by 94 inches—that is actually a coil creating a weak electromagnetic field. If any metal object of a size within the system’s sensitivity range is carried through, it will vary the inductance of the detector coil and trigger the alarm unit.

Mounted on the ceiling above the detector, the alarm unit has three red lights like the stop signals on a car.

One lamp lit indicates a knife; two lamps, a pistol; three lamps, a large firearm such as a shotgun. In each case, of course, it might be some other metal object of equal size.

A product of the Densoku Measuring Instrument Works, Tokyo, the Densok Magnetic Eye costs $1,200 in Japan.

The British-designed Diver anti-hijack system—like the Densok, an active-field all-metal detector—has the most elaborate signal array of any weapons-screening device now made.

Its two detection pillars, six feet high and 33 inches apart, flank the departure gate. Any metal object brought into its magnetic field is measured by the detection pillars, whose signal is converted by the amplifier into a meter reading and visual/audio alarm.

Location of the metal object on a subject’s person is indicated by a flashing red signal light ( there are four) at the appropriate level on one of the detection pillars and by illumination of the corresponding area of a human figure outlined on an adjacent screen. In addition, an alarm sounds. These simultaneous signals are triggered at a predetermined level of calibration for a weapon-size metal object.

Diver Detection Devices Ltd., Griff Clara/Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, prices the system at upwards of $2,500.

Since the Densok and Diver weapons-screening devices are sensitive to nonferrous as well as ferrous metals, it would seem that its false-alarm rate may be even higher than that of the magnetometer, which detects only steel (the usual weapon metal) and iron. Neither the active-field metal detector nor the passive magnetometer can tell a weapon from a piece of harmless hardware of the same size. There is, however, a new detection system that doesn’t share this shortcoming.

The X-ray eye. In Mahwah, N.J., at the Philips Broadcast Equipment Corp., I was given a preview demonstration of their short-pulse X-ray detection system.

An ordinary overnight bag was packed with clothing, a shaving kit, a book—and a revolver. The bag was shoved into the slot of a mock-up airline check-in counter, a button was pushed, and an X-ray image of the bag and its contents instantly appeared on a TV monitor screen. The picture was remarkably sharp and clear—there was no mistaking the revolver. Results with other luggage containing a simulated dynamite bomb were equally impressive.

Here’s how this short-pulse X-ray technique works: The weak momentary image on a fluoroscope-type screen is viewed by a TV camera having a light-boosting image intensifier (similar to those in the Army’s night-vision Starlight Scope) ahead of the camera tube. Electronic switching is used to trigger the recording of one TV frame on a video recorder during the period of peak image level. The stored frame is then viewed directly on a TV monitor.

Exposure time is 50 nanoseconds (50 billionths of a second) and the radiation required to produce these images is approximately 0.2 milli-roentgen. This is harmlessly small-well below the level of radiation you receive daily from naturally occurring sources in the environment. Incidentally, unlike conventional X ray, this short-pulse, extremely low-dosage X ray will not damage photographic film.

The image appears on the screen within a second after the system is activated, and lasts 10 to 15 minutes unless erased sooner. Time from erasure to installation of the next frame is less than one second.

Because the system has such low X-ray emission, costly and cumbersome shielding isn’t needed, and it can be adapted to a variety of installations.

Although the prototype is a baggage-screening device—a most practical application, especially in conjunction with a conveyor system—Philips’ short-pulse X-ray detector could safely and effectively screen air passengers in a walk-through weapons-detection station.

For example, with metal detectors on all gates, those who triggered this first stage of the preboarding screening process could be diverted past a short-pulse X-ray unit for a quick, positive search. With this system, security officers would actually be able to see a concealed weapon or explosive device.

Research toward production of more effective deterrents continues on a wide scale, especially in the area of explosives detection. While no details have as yet been released, one of the more promising systems is said to be a neutron activator that is now under development by North American Rockwell.

“Bomb sniffers.” Also under consideration are chemosensing devices able to monitor for the presence of extremely small concentrations of vapor characteristic of certain materials. Some explosives continually emit such vapors.

A chemosensor device has been constructed that cyclically samples air for the vapor of ethylene glycol dinitrate ( EGDN) —which is characteristic of dynamite and technical nitroglycerine—and register its presence. An experimental bomb sniffer of this type reportedly has already been tried out by El Al, Israel’s national airline.

Further research in chromatography and olfatronics may even provide a weapons detector capable of reacting to the characteristic vapors of gunpowder and its residues, bullet lubricant, gun oil, powder solvent, and similar substances present in a concealed firearm.

Perhaps the detective capabilities of the human nose should be considered, too. In Tashkent, the Russians employ a woman whose superb olfactory sense sniffs out passengers smuggling hashish. How about doing that with explosives?

Gunfights while airborne. Work on foiling skyjackers and bombers has focused on stopping the perpetrator on the ground. What about the even knottier and more controversial problem of defense while aloft?

Under review are such ideas as the secure (bulletproof and invasion-proof) cockpit and the use of armed guards and/or armed flight crews. (The United States is now stationing government agents aboard planes on some flights.) One misconception needs correcting: Although the hazards of a gun-fight aloft to passengers and crew are very real and serious, there is virtually no danger that a stray bullet might destroy the aircraft, should it penetrate the fuselage, by explosive decompression of the pressurized cabin at high altitude. According to Boeing engineers, one of their airliners can sustain a hole as large as a cabin window (10 by 14 inches in a 747) without exceeding the capacity of the pressurization system to compensate. Chances of a bullet severing a vital control linkage are remote, and, even if it did, all essential systems are well backstopped.

Obviously, the best place to stop the skyjacker is at the gate, not simply here, but everywhere. The hardware to do the job exists. Can any nation along the air lanes afford not to put it to use.

Off to Prison Convicts Ride in Rumble Seat “Jail” Cage

Oklahoma has a jail on wheels to take its convicts to prison. Instead of a rumble seat, the prison transfer car has a barred steel cage mounted behind the coupe body. Alex Watson, in charge of the transfer of prisoners, can watch his wards in the cage by a mirror from the driver’s seat. The traveling jail accommodates four convicts, having a padded seat on each side. The floor is carpeted and the back door is covered by a drop curtain of heavy duck for protection from the weather.

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Solving Crimes By Hypnosis

By George J. Barmann

TWENTY YOUNG POLICEMEN were sitting in the bright, comfortable classroom of the County Coroner’s Building, on the campus of Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, listening to a lecture on methods of questioning witnesses to a crime.

A psychotherapist, Dr. Dezso Levendula, was conducting the lesson in scientific law enforcement, one of the regular courses given by the university’s noted Law-Medicine Center. He was speaking that morning about the difficulty of getting witnesses to recall accurately what they have seen. Behind him, on a sofa facing the class, were two stenographers, busily taking notes on the lecture. The audience of patrolmen and several guests was attentive, but relaxed. Only the occasional hum of an automobile outside the windows cut into the professor’s talk.

At a desk near the stenographers sat Dr. Samuel R. Gerber, the county coroner. Now and then Dr. Gerber glanced around the room and scribbled on an envelope.

Suddenly, there was a commotion, and Dr. Levendula turned to see what was happening.

The stenographers were arguing and getting up from the sofa. In a second, they were grabbing at each other’s hair and tussling over a handbag.

“Stay out of my purse!” the blonde shouted. “You’re stealing my money!”

“No, I’m not. I’m only after your cigarette lighter,” the brunette snapped. “You keep your hands off me!”

The women struggled. Something red flashed in the hand of the dark-haired one. She swung at her opponent, who screamed, clutched her left side and doubled up on the sofa.

“Oh, my God, what have I done?” the brunette cried, and ran out of the door.

Quickly, before the stunned audience could move, Dr. Gerber rapped his desk for attention.

“All right, class,” he said, “let’s all take it easy. What you just saw was only an act. This was a fake murder. We staged it, we’re doing an experiment. Now, if you’ll sit back, we’ll have something new in our lesson.”

After everyone had calmed down, Dr. Gerber, who is a physician, attorney and co-director of the Law-Medicine Center, which counsels in legal, medical and police problems, told the lecturer to go on. Dr. Levendula resumed his talk where he had left off—the questioning of witnesses with the help of hypnosis.

Dr. Levendula explained that the “crime” followed a carefully rehearsed script. He wondered how many details of this “murder” the class could recall. The psychotherapist, who is president of the Cleveland Society of Clinical Hypnosis and an authority on the medical uses of hypnotism, suggested that hypnosis might sharpen their memories.

Five of the patrolmen volunteered for a unique test which may add significantly to the science of criminal investigation.

First, the policemen were asked to write down all they had seen, just as they would for any routine police report. After this, they were hypnotized by Dr. Levendula; then, upon awakening, they made their observations orally to a tape recorder. They were hypnotized a second time, and now gave oral statements while under hypnosis. Finally, they were brought out of this trance and requested to write new reports.

As the patrolmen moved along in the four-stage test, their ability to recall events improved surprisingly. Dr. Gerber and Dr. Levendula compared the two written reports so there would be no chance of a mix-up, the one before hypnosis had been written on white paper, the other, after hypnosis, on blue paper. The doctors found that the results were remarkable.

The first reports were all matter-of-fact, somewhat sketchy. But in the last reports, even some of the fine details of the classroom incident were vividly described. And, as law enforcement authorities know, those little details often break a baffling case wide open.

The violent scene—the two stenographers arguing on the couch, one rifling the other’s purse and removing the lighter and a $5 bill, the fight ending in the stabbing with the phony ice pick—took only ten seconds.

In the reports, the patrolmen reveal how hypnosis helped them to recall this event.

Before he was hypnotized, Patrolman Foster Lockhart wrote that the weapon “looked like a screwdriver.” But after hypnosis, he remembered that the instrument had a red handle—which was correct. He also was able to recall another important fact that he hadn’t before — there was a faint scar on the blonde’s upper lip. He now remembered, too, that when she collapsed, “she put her head on the arm of the sofa.” That was right.

Patrolman Anthony R. Lutz, in his first try, said the crime was committed with an “unknown instrument.” However, when he awoke from hypnosis, he wrote: “The dark-haired girl pulled from her purse an object that looked like it was rounded on the end and circular throughout, because the cap which fits over the end of the wooden handle appeared to be round. I did not see the blade, but I caught a reflection of light, which leads me to believe that it was either highly polished, or plated. This object looked like it was about seven inches in overall length.” A pretty good description.

The patrolman also said that the pencils the stenographers used were yellow and had erasers—details he had missed before. And, most important, he wrote, “This fight lasted about ten seconds.” He hit the time right on the nose.

In first discussing the women, Patrolman Joseph Pokrandt gave what Coroner Gerber calls an “adequate” description. Later, the policeman listed camera-eye details— the blonde had “long hair touching the shoulders;” the brunette’s hair was upswept, “with loose ends about the region of the upper ear.”

Another patrolman, Lloyd J. McKenna, Jr., was able to reproduce some of the fastest dialogue just before the stabbing occurred, almost as if he had been the author of the script. And the fifth patrolman, James Painter, in his final statement, added a footnote about the killer’s shoes. He said, rightly, that they were toeless.

“The results of our work offer a strong argument for the use of hypnosis in police investigations,” says Dr. Gerber, who has lectured on criminology to physicians and Scotland Yard men, in London. “Everybody knows that one of the big problems in checking a crime, or just a simple traffic accident, is in getting full and accurate information. You get skimpy and conflicting accounts of what happened from eyewitnesses. Even from the honest and most intelligent ones.

“Many times, people would really like to recall events to help the authorities, but they can’t. The power of human beings to remember precisely is, at best, rather faulty. In fact, after witnessing violent and tragic happenings, a person usually tries to forget, because it pains him to remember. Actually, the subconscious mind suppresses such pictures; it tries to bury and hide them. We all choose to recall nice, pleasant things in this world; that’s why we like to think about the ‘good old days.’ ”

Dr. Gerber believes, therefore, that hypnosis could be used to unlock many secrets for police and detectives.

Dr. Levendula, who uses hypnosis successfully in his own private medical practice, says that many persons who themselves have been victims of a crime often are poor witnesses. They are shocked psychologically, for example, by fear, excitement, horror, grief. “In such cases,” he remarks, “hypnosis could be very helpful, permitting the person to relax and remember.”

The doctor explains that men and women may be entirely innocent of any wrongdoing, yet they are hostile to inquiring police “merely because authority to them means force. He thinks that hypnosis could help to unburden this kind of witness, also.

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” he says, “that hypnosis, by stepping up the brain’s ability to recall, could be most valuable in solving crimes.”

Dr. Levendula says that hypnosis today is still surrounded by “mysticism, misconceptions and misunderstandings.” It is not an unconscious state. It simply releases the subconscious mind, the storehouse of memory. The hypnotist puts you “under” by concentrating on some repetitive stimulus —”You are so sleepy, so sleepy, so sleepy” —and then makes you act by suggestion. Hypnosis, in itself, is harmless. And almost anyone can be hypnotized.

“By its very nature, hypnosis is a logical tool for the criminologist,” says William Mayers of Washington, D. C, a consultant to the Department of Defense in World War II. “It amazes me that more has not been done in the field.”

In the quarterly magazine, “Hypnosis,” the official journal of the Association to Advance Ethical Hypnosis, he tells of instructing Army Intelligence investigators on how to use hypnosis in questioning Japanese prisoners and recommends it, not only for witnesses, in police work, but also for crime suspects, if the law allows.

“Possibly one reason why hypnosis has not been more widely used by detectives and other investigators,” he writes, “is the belief that a suspect can resist being hypnotized. While this is generally true, there are methods for hypnotizing people without their knowing it. This still does not mean they can be hypnotized against their will. It simply means the trance can be induced in an indirect or disguised manner.”

This “intense inter-personal relationship between two people” is brought about most readily when the subject is willing. But a person can be put into a trance before he realizes what is happening.

The experts say, too, that a suspect might try to fake a trance. He could pretend he was hypnotized and go right on lying. But he would not often fool a skillful hypnotist.

In Cleveland, Dr. Gerber feels that the time is coming when police will rely on hypnosis as frequently as they now lean on the lie detector. He thinks, however, that it will be used exclusively on witnesses to develop cases, to uncover “leads.” The courts may never approve it for suspects. “If you hypnotize someone suspected of a crime, get a confession, then take it into court,” he says, “you’d be stopped right there. They’d say you were taking unfair advantage of him, that you got your evidence illegally from him when he had a constitutional right to say nothing.”

A confession, obtained under hypnosis, was knocked out of the recent “Lady in Red” murder case in Miami, Fla. In the county jail, the 20-year-old suspect, Rudolph Valentino Herring, had written a note to detectives: “Help me to remember.” At their instruction, he had been put in a trance by a Miami teacher of hypnotism, Julian A. Arroyo, Jr. He admitted the crime.

This unusual procedure was immediately attacked, and defended, by Florida authorities.

The prosecuting attorney, Richard Gerstein, denounced the method of obtaining the confession as “most irregular,” and went on to say: “Any statement extracted under hypnosis is unorthodox and might be viewed with suspicion by a jury.” Dr. Bruce Alspach, president of the Greater Miami Society of Psychiatry and Neurology, cautioned that such stories told during hypnosis may be completely false.

On the other hand, Dr. Ben J. Sheppard, who has been Dade county’s medical-legal adviser, and Sheriff Thomas J. Kelly both asserted that the confession was valid. Dr. Sheppard, who had been present when the prisoner was hypnotized, said he believed that Herring had amnesia and that hypnosis “opened the door” to his memory.

The youth was indicted by the grand jury, but before his case, and the hypnosis controversy, could be tried, he was sent to a mental hospital. Anyway, the homicide squad obtained a murder warrant for him if he is released.

The question of whether a person can be hypnotized and forced to commit a crime also has been before the courts. Some authorities say that it can be done; others insist that it can’t.

Perhaps the most dramatic case of this kind occurred in Copenhagen, Denmark, a few years ago. An ex-convict robbed a bank and killed two employees. He was caught, and pleaded guilty. But he testified that his former cellmate had hypnotized him and told him to commit the deeds. He was sentenced to a home for psychopaths. Then the cellmate was tried, found guilty of inciting the crime, through hypnosis, and sent back to prison for life. The legal-medical battle lasted more than six years.

You don’t need to know medicine or psychiatry to hypnotize; neither do you have to be Mandrake the Magician. Hypnotists, of one kind or another, are teaching the art these days to Americans of many occupations. The American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, and the organizations in the field, are constantly warning against any misuse of hypnosis. Several communities have been considering regulatory laws.

Dr. Gerber, who is one of the few coroners with both medical and legal degrees, says that police departments will want to use only the best men, properly trained medical people, either those on the staff or on call, as hypnotists. To be truly effective, they must know a great deal about law and the problems of evidence, as well as about medicine and human behavior. “I would wish to see only those of the highest ethics and competence in this work,” he says.

An instance of a hypnotist’s skillful work is related by Harry Arons of Irvington, N. J., executive secretary of the Association to Advance Ethical Hypnosis.

A man whose mind was blanked out by amnesia walked into the sheriff’s office in Orlando, Fla., and asked for help in finding out who he was. Deputies summoned a hypnotist, who put the man into a deep trance. He then revealed his name and age and said he had come from Hattiesburg, Miss. He had lost his memory when he was struck by a small foreign car. Under hypnosis, he not only identified himself but went on to recall minute events several years back. He returned to his family.

Valuable as Aid to Recall Hypnotism creates, as one of its characteristics, what doctors call “hypermnesia,” which is the power to recollect seemingly forgotten incidents and details. Apparently the deeper the trance, authorities say, the better the recall.

In the experiment at Western Reserve University, the five policemen were put into a shallow trance, since the event they were trying to remember had happened only moments before. Dr. Gerber believes that they could have gone into greater detail about the “murder” if the trance had been deeper. When these patrolmen were hypnotized, they were simply told that, upon awakening, they would recall more about the case.

Dr. Gerber is not ready to say that any quick way has been found to help solve crimes. Much more research is ahead.

“I am certain, though, that our studies, and those of—200—others, are going to contribute importantly to hypnosis and criminology,” he says. “I can see the time when the science of hypnosis will become just as valuable in our fight against crime as fingerprinting is today.”

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SPIES OF INDUSTRY IN ACTION

A Former Operative Reveals Espionage Methods of Unusual But Important Phase of Detective Work Often Required to Keep Up With Procession in Bitter Business Rivalry, FOR several years I was one of those individuals who style themselves “process investigator,” but which in most cases is only a polite name for an “industrial spy.” The structure of our industrial business is such that large manufacturers must know not only what his competitor is doing in order to keep pace with him; but he must also know whether that competitor is using any processes patented by the former.

A friend of mine has printed on his letterhead in big red type: “ARE YOUR PATENTS BEING INFRINGED? HOW DO YOU KNOW?” To find out whether patents are being infringed and, if so, to get the full details, represents a large part of the work of the industrial spy. For the facts must be known before a suit is filed. Occasionally, too, application for a patent will be filed in the Patent Office at the same time by different parties. In which case all those interested are likely to put spies to work to find out the true facts concerning the development, date of reduction to practice, etc., of each other’s invention. It’s quite an advantage to know if your opponent is telling the truth!

There are two general methods for getting information. The one necessitates the spy going into the plant either as a visitor, or by stealth, or by actually obtaining a job in the plant. The other involves buying this information from disloyal employes or wheedling it out of them by entertainment, cajolery, etc. The most satisfactory means is for you, yourself, to work at the machine or process being operated illegally, for your testimony from the witness stand then carries much weight. This is assuming you cannot get to the witness stand an employe of the infringing company who would be willing to tell the facts.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But I assure you that the word demands the skill, ingenuity, resourcefulness and cleverness of a war-time spy. Like the military intelligence, some companies have a net-work of connections over the country to feed information to headquarters. For example, I was established in business as a “Consulting Engineer” in a western city. Two of my associates in this investigational work, all of us employed by the same company, were located in two different cities along the Atlantic seaboard. Each of us had different contacts with scores of men in various plants over the country, and from them received regular reports as to what was going on in each plant. The substance of this information was then passed on by each of us to our “boss.”

Photographs are especially valuable as evidence when an infringement suit comes to trial. The problem of getting such views is a difficult one if it is impossible to bribe a disloyal employe to obtain the pictures. As a casual visitor to the plant, you can often get permission from an unsuspecting company to take the photographs you desire with your own camera. If permission to take pictures is forbidden, but you are allowed in the plant, small watch size cameras are used to take photos unknown to your “host”—in reality your opponent. A small motion picture camera, if a chance is given to use one, provides irrefutable evidence.

Large manufacturing companies, as a rule, are highly skeptical of persons seeking admittance when that person has a camera in plain view. Which reminds me of how an acquaintance of mine, a foreigner, and an industrial spy for foreign oil interests, “fooled” an American oil company that had strict rules about cameras, strangers seeking admittance, etc.

For convenience, let’s call this foreigner “X.” Incidentally, he’s no longer in the “game” but now holds a responsible position with an American oil company.

“X” was sent to America to get, among other things, full information concerning the process and equipment that had been perfected by a certain company for “cracking” cheap low-grade oil to make gasoline. He knew that the American company, whose plant he wished to enter, was very secretive about this particular process. So he made his plans . . .

At the office of the head of the refining department of the American company there appeared one day an earnest, convincing young foreigner, who spoke English with difficulty, but who undoubtedly was an expert on the vacuum distillation of oil—the direct opposite of “cracking” which involves distillation under pressure. “He certainly knows his stuff,” said the department head to his assistant in speaking of “X.” “Why, you know, he’s got a patent on a vacuum distillation process we could use; and he’s a graduate of ———and studied under Dr. Gurwitsch at——–.

Let’s offer him a job at $150 a month and send him down to our southern plant to make some experiments.”

Which offer “X” gladly accepted. They had swallowed his bait and he had obtained exactly what he wanted. “X” worked fast. Within three days he knew the smallest details of the construction and operation of the “cracking” stills at this plant. His badge permitted him to pass the gate watchman after working hours and his seemingly foolish questions and general attitude of dumbness, together with his broken English, completely fooled the still operators. They answered all his questions, and let him wander about the units as he pleased. This gave him the chance not only * to corroborate the information given him, but also to photograph all essential parts with a camera he had smuggled past the gateman. He developed his negatives in the darkened closet of his hotel room. His mission was completed.

It was not until three months later when “X’s” progress on his vacuum distillation experiments was just about nil, and he was found out to be spending five or six times his salary, that the company became suspicious. “X” sensed their change in attitude and left town overnight, without bothering to get salary due him, and before they had a chance to fire him. I was working for the duped company at the time, resigned to take another position shortly before “X” left, and got the whole story a year or two later when I encountered “X” in a western state.

Women have flirted with me in an attempt to rob me of important affidavits. The reverse of this is charged in the current Philco suit in Philadelphia against the Radio Corporation of America. The plaintiff contends agents of the rival firm obtained secrets by wining and dining young women workers. The defendant denies the charge.

Companies that have drafting or photostatic work done by outside interests run a bigger risk of having information reach their rivals than do concerns who have such work done within their own plant. The reason is logical; employes of commercial photostatic and drafting firms have no personal interest in their firm’s clients, usually receive a comparatively small pay, and are therefore more easily tempted by the offer of a bribe. The photostatic machine is an especially valuable aid to the work of the industrial spy. I have gotten the operator of such a machine for a commercial establishment out of bed at midnight and worked him till dawn, photostating material that had to be returned to company files by 8 a. m.

Model-making ability is a specially desirable requisite for a successful industrial investigator. Photographs are not always clearly understood by a judge, whereas a model may show him at once just how the defendant is or is not infringing the patent in question. My friend S——— once spent six weeks making a several hundred pound model of a very intricate device and process, based both on what he himself had actually seen and on information furnished him by an employe of the company using the device and process in question. He was able to complete his model before being suspected, but a small army of detectives was on his trail before he was able to ship the model out of town.

S———wired his “boss” for help, and soon wits were matching wits. S——— and his associates won the skirmish by carrying the model at night in a high-powered open top car from its place of concealment to a neighboring town, where it was turned over early the next morning to an express company and a valuation of $10,000 placed on it. S——— lost 20 pounds on that job, and later spent some weeks in the hospital as a result of an injury incurred when the then uncompleted model fell on him one night and he was forced to lie for hours in a strained position to prevent the complete destruction of his work—but the memories of a job well done, he told me, more than repaid him for all the worry and pain he had suffered.

On the defense, companies employ the counterspy system—just as it is employed in modern warfare. The best defense at all times is to have 100 per cent loyal and satisfied employes. Loyal workers will advise their employers as soon as they are broached by strangers seeking information. But sometimes companies do not take even their employes into their full confidence. I recall the experience of my associate B——– who found, when investigating a process the success of which depended upon the temperature used and which was patented by B———’s employer, that the thermometers in use were several hundred degrees “off.” B——– got a job in this plant, suspected what was being done, “accidentally” broke one of the thermometers in use and substituted one of his own. You can easily appreciate what effect B———’s testimony from the witness stand created among the defendant’s lawyers! This same B———did some very celver work a few years ago when he was able to prove through witnesses that a notebook containing alleged evidence of experimental work had not even been printed at the time of the dates recorded in the book! Can you imagine the feelings of that supposedly reputable scientist when that evidence was presented?

Like the war-time spy the “game” is not without its thrills. I have participated in tracing down the facts in legal cases where not one million dollars but twenty million dollars was involved. I have had not one detective watch me, but nine detectives—three to a shift, three shifts a day— and have eluded them to go about my business of hunting up prospective witnesses. I have tried to get the essential facts from men who knew the truth, but who feared being murdered (I do not know how rightfully) if the truth were told. I have had my car forced to the side of a muchly traveled road and in less than two minutes been terribly beaten up by four negro hirelings of the company I was then investigating, and none too politely been told to get out of town. I have escaped from traps that have been set for me, sometimes because I was cautious, often for no other apparent reason than that “Lady Luck” was smiling at me.

Detectives have registered at hotels in my name for the purpose of getting my mail. My brief case has been stolen as baggage was being unloaded from a train, and recovered only after a flying tackle on my part that brought down the “detective thief.” . . . Sounds like fiction, doesn’t it? But more often than we think, truth is stranger than fiction!

Cops’ COLD FEET Heated by electricity

CLOTHED in a new electrically heated uniform, recently developed by the General Electric Company, a policeman can stand at street intersections directing traffic all day long in the coldest weather and keep as warm as if he were inside.

Several thin rubber strips about 1/2 inch wide and very flexible, with a heating element vulcanized inside, are sewed into the uniform, and thin insoles of the same material are fitted in the shoes. These are connected by small insulated wires to metal plates attached to the heels of the shoes, the positive wire leading to one foot and the negative to the other.

If cold, the officer merely steps on two insulated plates set flush with the pavement. One plate is connected to the positive terminal of a 12-volt storage battery placed in a box below the plates, and the other to the negative terminal. The sole plates form the contacts and within 15 seconds the heating units begin to warm up.

Trained to Get Their Man on the Run. Members of the Berlin, Germany, police force are taught to shoot at running objects by pictures thrown on a screen by a movie projector that gives an illusion of life to the targets. Sharpshooters are required to make good scores at this practice work before they can join the regular squad. Animals racing across a small screen are difficult to hit even at short distances, us here.