Undercover Men

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.

A known detective is useful only in a detective novel. The number of Secret Service operatives and detailed budgets under which they work is never made public. The Secret Service maintains 36 local bureaus, whose heads must necessarily be accessible and known. It is estimated that the service has working for it between 150 and 300 agents. Wild horses would not draw the correct number from Chief William Herman Moran. whose thick shock of white hair hangs over a hawk's nose and eyes, and whose close-cropped mustache covers a firm, silent mouth. He arrives in his office on the first floor of the Treasury Building at nine each morning. Through a barred window he can look across the lawn at the White House. When the lights wink on in the President's living quarters at night, Chief Moran knows that the U. S. executive is as safe as he can possibly be. Then, and not until then. Chief Moran goes home to his wife ("the Madam") in one of the Service's big Pierce-Arrows.

Fortnight ago Chief Moran became 70, the age at which all Government workers must retire. But President Roosevelt was loth to lose the services of the man who had guarded the lives of his five predecessors, who knows more about counterfeiters than any other man in the land. By executive order. Chief Moran's term of office was extended two years.

Proud of his 52 years in the Secret Service, proud that, since its organization in 1861, his secret police system has never had a scandal. Chief Moran is the one man in the U. S. who can, by law, boss the President. He recalls that Woodrow Wilson bridled a bit at first at the precautions taken for him by the Secret Service. But the only Secret Service charge completely to defy the organization to date is Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt. She stead fastly refuses a bodyguard, although her son James's family has one to protect her grandchild.

Directly charged with guarding the President's life are Richard Jervis. chief of the White House detail, and Col. Edward W. Starling. They, and most other Secret Service operatives, were chosen be cause they do not resemble detectives, can wear morning coats and silk hats without looking like politicians in a St. Patrick's Day parade. It will be noticed that when they are photographed with the President they never look at the camera, always at the crowd, with their hands folded across their chests, one gripping the butt of a revolver inside the coat over the heart. Col. Starling's job (he is a Kentucky Governor's colonel ) is the delicate and critical one of being advance man on Presidential trips. He not only examines any room which the President is to enter, but the rooms above and below, all entrances and exits. Every culvert, bridgehead and tunnel through which the President is to pass bears his inspection. His vigilance has often been rewarded. After he for bade President Harding to board an Ohio river boat, the boat sank. A platform he prevented Herbert Hoover from mounting to make a speech collapsed, gutted by termites, not long after.

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