Part 25

The rookie agents spend their first months in service receiving on-the-job training by working with experienced officers. Then they are sent to the Treasury’s Law Enforcement School for six weeks of study in basic courses such as how to make searches and seizures, how to conduct a surveillance, how to plan a raid, how to photograph the scene of a crime, how to take latent fingerprints, how to interview witnesses and interrogate suspects, and how to conduct themselves in a courtroom under cross-examination.

The Treasury school was established permanently in Washington in 1951 and has now graduated more than 15,000 agents. It is headed by Director Patrick O’Carroll, a forty-two-year-old former Narcotics agent who was reared in New York City. O’Carroll was graduated from Fordham University in 1944, where he majored in psychology. Dark-haired, handsome Pat O’Carroll guides a staff of fifty instructors, who give the basic training to rookies and also instruct veteran agents in specialized courses involving administrative duties. At present the school is conducting six 6-week courses a year for rookies, with an average of eighty students in each class. There also are a scattering of foreign students, sent by their governments to study American police methods.

O’Carroll and his aides strive to make the instruction as realistic as possible by providing problems which simulate actual situations the young agents will face in their everyday work. In the 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. classes, held five days a week, the men spend about half their time working on practical law enforcement problems. The other half is spent in listening to lectures by agents, police administrators, college professors and attorneys. The lectures cover such subjects as constitutional law, civil rights and rules of criminal law procedure.

Toward the end of the course, the students are divided into squads of five men and given the problem of arresting a suspected criminal, searching his apartment for evidence, preparing the case for presentation to a grand jury, and appearing in court as witnesses.

On the fourth floor of the school building is a furnished room in which have been hidden narcotics, counterfeit money, betting slips, jewels and other incriminating evidence. The room is occupied by a veteran agent posing as “Richard Roe,” the suspected criminal.

Roe gives them a rough time. He complains of a serious heart condition and asks to be given medicine from a bottle on a table. He accuses the agents of stealing money and a diamond ring from a desk drawer. He continually demands to see his lawyer. A postman delivers a registered letter and Roe challenges the right of the agents to open the letter after he has signed for it. He tries everything short of violence to impede the search.

Sometimes the young agents refuse to give Roe his medicine. They ignore his accusations of theft. Or they accept his argument that they have no right to seize the registered letter.

If the searching party fails to find at least 80 per cent of the items concealed in the room, they do not obtain a “conviction.” Then experienced agents carefully explain where they made mistakes in the handling of the suspect.

When Roe claimed he was ill, the agents should have called his doctor to determine the truth. Upon their entering the room, Roe should have been advised to collect any valuables so that an inventory could have been made on the spot to be signed by him. When Roe signed for the registered letter, then it legally could be seized with no invasion of his privacy. Roe’s rights were not violated when his requests for an attorney were ignored during the search, prior to his arrest.

In a mock courtroom scene, an agent who formerly was a U.S. attorney acts as the defense counsel. He grills the rookies on every move made in Roe’s apartment, seeking to confuse them while driving home the point that months of careful police work may be wasted by an inept or careless presentation of facts in court.

The school has proved to be such a success that it is now supported enthusiastically by all the Treasury agencies, which prorate the cost and make their best men available as instructors. But for many years a few men struggled to keep the school going in the face of apathy and even active opposition.

The man who perhaps contributed most to keeping alive the idea of a professionally directed school for Treasury agents was Harry M. Dengler, a retired Internal Revenue agent who now lives in Washington, D. C. A short, plump man of enormous energy, Dengler joined the Internal Revenue Service in 1918 after a dozen years of teaching in high schools in southeast Virginia and Montana. He was thirty-six at the time he was assigned to the IRS’s Intelligence Division, working on internal police problems and on tax conspiracy cases.

The Treasury school stemmed from the fact that in 1927 the Bureau of Prohibition’s enforcement of the Volstead Act was a mess. Part of the mess was due to the lack of trained enforcement officers. Illegal searches and seizures by Bureau agents aroused public indignation. Also, they created a serious problem in obtaining convictions of rumrunners and bootleggers.

L. C. Andrews, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, became so concerned over the situation that he persuaded Dengler to join the Bureau of Prohibition and to start an enforcement school for the Bureau’s agents. Dengler had argued for years that Federal law enforcement officers should be schooled in their work to be effective and to deserve public confidence.

Dengler selected a few aides and they put together a course of instruction to be given to some 2,500 prohibition agents. Two men were chosen from each of the Treasury’s eighteen districts throughout the country to come to Washington for four weeks of intensive schooling in proper law enforcement procedures.

The theory was that these thirty-six men would qualify themselves as instructors and then return to their home districts to teach what they had learned to other prohibition agents. But the system soon broke down because the district supervisors sabotaged the school.

“I know how to enforce the law without any help from Washington,” one supervisor announced. He had the support of other supervisors.

The truth was that the supervisors were jealous of the men who had been brought to Washington for special training. They also were fearful that they would lose their jobs to the men with superior backgrounds in law enforcement. The result was that the schools were doomed even before they started. By the end of the year, the schools had been discontinued.

Dengler clung stubbornly to his belief that every Federal law enforcement officer should be trained for his job. He persuaded his superiors to let him organize a correspondence course, with the study to be voluntary. Hundreds of agents applied, convincing Dengler that the agents themselves were eager to know more about professional law enforcement.

The idea of a school was resurrected in 1930 by Amos W. W. Woodcock, when he became head of the Prohibition agency. Dengler again went to work to set up a course of study. But when Woodcock left office a few months later, his successor broke up the schools with the remark: “If a man is smart enough to get a job with us, he doesn’t need any training.”

Dengler confided to a friend later, “That was one of the low points of my life. These schools were badly needed by the government to improve the quality of Federal law enforcement. Hardly anyone seemed interested.”

Indeed, for several years it seemed that no one was interested except Dengler and a few of his friends. But in 1937 Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau recognized that a major weakness in his department was the lack of organized training for new agents. He issued an order for all agencies within the Treasury to participate in a school program.

The first Dengler heard of the order was when Harold N. Graves, assistant to the Secretary, called him to his office. Graves said, “Harry, how long will it take you to get a course of instruction underway for our agents?”

“I can do it within sixty days,” Dengler said.

Graves was dubious. “I don’t think you can do it within that time,” he said.

“I can do it,” Dengler replied. “I’ve kept a group of instructors together. We’ve been giving some training to new men in our spare time. We’ve got a course of instruction already outlined. It won’t take much work to bring it up to date.”

Graves said, “Then get going. Bring your men in here this afternoon and we’ll decide on the next move.”

The decision was to open a pilot school in Boston. The first class met on March 15, 1937, and the course of instruction ran for four weeks. When it was ended, Graves was satisfied. He ordered a schedule of instruction for each of the Treasury districts. Attendance was not voluntary this time. Each man was required to attend classes, and to pass a written examination. Instructors were drawn from all the Treasury agencies.