BOARDS & BUREAUS
In Brooklyn, Manhattan and Binghamton, N. Y. last week the Government quietly collared ten people who, it charged, had set out to plaster the country with $2,000,000 worth of spurious $5 bills. According to the Government, as side lines the counterfeit ring had issued a number of fake baseball lottery tickets, had bilked Endicott Johnson Corp. (shoes) out of $50,000 by circulating through its Binghamton plant thousands of forged piecework claim tickets. While squads of CCC boys were set to work digging up several acres of land near Riverhead, L. I., where the ring was supposed to have buried $45,000 of "the queer" along with its engraving plates, the identity of the curiously assorted prisoners was made known.
One was the editor of a Polish-language newspaper, accused of collaborating with an Endicott Johnson foreman. Another was a Scranton, Pa. church organist, behind whose organ $1,250 of the bogus bills were discovered. Another was Robert Reidt Jr., son of a Long Island tea shop proprietor who frightened his neighbors in 1925 by proclaiming the end of the world was at hand.
The names and faces of the U. S. Secret Service operatives, and the methods with which they had worked on the case quietly and tenaciously as muskrats for seven weeks, remained, as always, a deep Government secret. Just as unostentatiously, anonymous Secret Service men in Cleveland last week uncovered three more suspect counterfeiters whom they charged with passing $100,000 in forged bills through the East and Midwest.
Secret Service. Best known undercover arm of the Government is the Department of Justice's Division of Investigation, directed by J. Edgar Hoover, whom one is supposed to telephone in case anyone in the family is kidnapped. The Department of Labor has sleuths who track down immigration irregularities, turn up alien wrongdoers. Famed for their relentlessness are the Post Office Department inspectors, prepared to spend a day or a lifetime bringing to justice mail robbers, perpetrators of postal frauds. The Treasury has a bureau of customs to prevent smuggling, a bureau of narcotics to combat dope peddlers. Its income tax intelligence unit ferrets out tax evaders. There are special agents in the Department of Agriculture to investigate violations of the Pure Food & Drugs Act, in the State Department to trace passport frauds, in the Interior Department to detect crimes committed on Indian reservations, in the Interstate Commerce Commission to nab freight rate rebaters and in the Federal Trade Commission to prevent unfair trade practices.
But of all these forces, none is properly entitled to the specific name "U. S. Secret Service." That designation is officially reserved for the investigating corps of the Secretary of the Treasury. The U. S. Secret Service has two main duties: suppressing counterfeiting and the well-known one of protecting the President & family and the "person of the person elected to be President of the United States" (President-elect) and his family.