![]() ![]() The clerk asked Will again if he’d ever been to the prison. And their Bertillon measurements were a near match. Turns out, Will and William bore an uncanny resemblance (they may have been identical twins). The clerk took his Bertillon measurements and went to the files, only to return with a card for a “William” West. The clerk at the admissions desk, thinking he recognized West, asked if he’d ever been to Leavenworth. In 1903, a convicted criminal named Will West was taken to Leavenworth federal prison in Kansas. But inevitably a case came along to beat the odds. More popular was the Bertillon system, which measured dozens of features of a criminal’s face and body and recorded the series of precise numbers on a large card along with a photograph.Īfter all, the thinking went, what were the chances that two different people would look the same and have identical measurements in all the minute particulars logged by the Bertillon method? We take it for granted now, but at the turn of the twentieth century the use of fingerprints to identify criminals was still in its infancy. In the summer of 1924, Hoover quickly created an Identification Division (informally called “Ident” in the organization for many years to come) to gather prints from police agencies nationwide and to search them upon request for matches to criminals and crime evidence. One important step in that direction came during Hoover’s first year at the helm, when the Bureau was given the responsibility of consolidating the nation’s two major collections of fingerprint files. But it was beginning to become the organized, professional, and effective force that Hoover envisioned. ![]() In five years, with the rash of firings it had just 339 special agents and less than 600 total employees. When Hoover took over in 1924, the Bureau had about 650 employees, including 441 special agents. ![]() Under Hoover’s direction, new agents were also required to be 25 to 35 years old, preferably with experience in law or accounting. He insisted on rigorous hiring criteria, including background checks, interviews, and physical tests for all special agent applicants, and in January 1928, he launched the first formal training for incoming agents, a two-month course of instruction and practical exercises in Washington, D.C. He did so by weeding out the “political hacks” and incompetents, laying down a strict code of conduct for agents, and instituting regular inspections of Headquarters and field operations. Hoover would go on to serve for nearly another half century.Īt the outset, the 29-year-old Hoover was determined to reform the Bureau, quickly and thoroughly, to make it a model of professionalism. Three years later, Stone named him Director. ![]() In 1921, he was named Assistant Director of the Bureau. Hoover had joined the Department of Justice in 1917 and had quickly risen through its ranks. Not long after the news of these secret activities broke, President Calvin Coolidge fired Harding’s Attorney General Harry Daugherty, naming Harlan Fiske Stone as his successor in 1924.Ī good housecleaning was in order for the Bureau, and it came at the hands of a young lawyer by the name of J. In 1923, in the midst of the Teapot Dome scandal that rocked the Harding Administration, the nation learned that Department of Justice officials had sent Bureau agents to spy on members of Congress who had opposed its policies. It had a growing reputation for politicized investigations. In the early twenties, the agency was no model of efficiency. In the young Bureau of Investigation, things were not much better. And their jurisdictions stopped abruptly at their borders. More often than not, local police forces were hobbled by the lack of modern tools and training. Dealing with the bootlegging and speakeasies was challenging enough, but the “Roaring Twenties” also saw bank robbery, kidnapping, auto theft, gambling, and drug trafficking become increasingly common crimes. On the other side was law enforcement, which was outgunned (literally) and ill-prepared at this point in history to take on the surging national crime wave. By 1926, more than 12,000 murders were taking place every year across America. Rival gangs led by the powerful Al “Scarface” Capone and the hot-headed George “Bugs” Moran turned the city streets into a virtual war zone with their gangland clashes. With wallets bursting from bootlegging profits, gangs outfitted themselves with “Tommy” guns and operated with impunity by paying off politicians and police alike. In one big city alone- Chicago-an estimated 1,300 gangs had spread like a deadly virus by the mid-1920s. There was no easy cure. On the one side was a rising tide of professional criminals, made richer and bolder by Prohibition, which had turned the nation “dry” in 1920. It wasn’t much of a fight, really-at least at the start. The “war to end all wars” was over, but a new one was just beginning-on the streets of America. ![]()
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