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A
BYTE OUT OF FBI HISTORY:
Catching International Crooks in the 1930s...by their fingertips
03/30/04
| 1910: |
Six
prisoners at Leavenworth Penitentiary jumped the
train engineer in the prison yard and forced him
to steam them out of the prison to freedom. Within
hours five of the men were recaptured. Frank
Grigware, a convicted train robber, remained
at large...for 24 years.
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| 1934: |
A
Canadian by the name of Jim Fahey, down on his luck
in Depression times and hoping to sell some fur pelts
for food, was caught trapping marten foxes out of season.
Although he was a respected citizen of Peace River
in northern Canada and had even served as its mayor,
he was apprehended. Royal Canadian Mounties followed
procedure and sent his fingerprints to Headquarters.
To the surprise of all, his prints registered a hit.
Fahey was wanted by the FBI under the name of...Frank
Grigware. |
An
international exchange of fingerprints at such an early
era? In fact,
yes–thanks to the farsightedness of a Mr. L.C. Schilder
of the Bureau's fledgling Identification Division.
Mr.
Schilder, assigned to that Division after it was created
in 1924 as a national fingerprint repository, was impressed
by cases in the U.S. that were solved through fingerprint
identification. Why don't we formally expand the program
to other countries, he suggested to FBI Director Hoover
in 1931.
Hoover
wasted no time, quickly sounding out major law enforcement
authorities in Europe. Mr. Borgerhoff, Directeur du Service
d'Identification Judiciare in Brussels responded immediately: "[We
are] only too pleased to co-operate." Others followed
suit. And
so 72 years ago this month, in March 1932, the Bureau's
International Fingerprint Exchange program formally began–with
agencies in South America, Central America, the Caribbean,
Europe, and in Canada...at which point Mr. Fahey/Grigware
was identified in that small Canadian town as a convicted
U.S. train robber. And
how does international fingerprint exchange work today? Just
about seamlessly–law enforcement agencies around
the world simply submit requests through Interpol...or
directly request the agency of a specific country. In our
case, international police can send a request to the closest
FBI Legal Attaché for processing.
Take
the case of Top Tenner Hopeton Eric Brown, slain in a shootout with
police in Montego Bay, Jamaica, this month. The Jamaica
Constabulary Force contacted the FBI's Santo Domingo Legal
Attaché office, which forwarded the prints to our
Special Processing Center in West Virginia. A 100% positive
match!
Links: Today's
Criminal Justice Information Services Division | 3/30
Testimony on the FBI's Fingerprint Identification Program
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