If the life of Petrosino were to be written, it
would be a book unique in the history of criminology and
crime, for this man was probably the only great detective of
the world to find his career in a foreign country amid
criminals of his own race.
I have instanced Petrosino as an example of a police detective
of a very unusual type, but I have known several other men on
the New York Police Force of real genius in their own
particular lines of work. One of these is an Irishman who
makes a specialty of get-rich-quick men, oil and mining stock
operators, wire-tappers and their kin, and who knows the
antecedents and history of most of them better than any other
man in the country. He is ready to take the part of either a
"sucker" or a fellow crook, as the exigencies of the case may
demand.
There are detectives--real ones--on the police force of
all the great cities of the world to-day, most of them
specialists, a few of them geniuses capable of undertaking
the ferreting out of any sort of mystery, but the last are
rare.
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