The arrest in this case illustrates forcibly the chief characteristic of successful criminals—­egotism.  The essential quality of daring required in their pursuits gives them an extraordinary degree of self-confidence, boldness, and vanity.  And to vanity most of them can trace their fall.  It seems incredible that Fisher should have returned to the United States after his discharge from prison and immediately resumed his operations without carefully concealing his impedimenta.  Yet when he was run down in a twenty-six family apartment house, the detectives found in his valise several thousand blank and model checks, hundreds of letters and private papers, a work on “Modern Bank Methods,” and his “ticket of leave” from England!  This man was a successful forger and because he was successful, his pride in himself was so great that he attributed his conviction in England to accident and really felt that he was immune on his release.

The arrest of such a man often presents great legal difficulties which the detectives overcome by various practical methods.  Of course, no officer without a search warrant has a right to enter a house or an apartment.  A man’s house is his castle.  Mayor Gaynor, when a judge, in a famous opinion (more familiarly known in the lower world even than the Decalogue) laid down the law unequivocally and emphatically in this regard.  Thus, in the Fisher case, the defendant having been arrested on the street, the detectives desired to search the apartment of the family with which he lived.  They did this by first inducing the tenant to open the door and, after satisfying themselves that they were in the right place, ordering the occupants to get in line and “march” from one room to another while they rummaged for evidence.  “Of course, we had no right to do it, but they didn’t know we hadn’t!” said the boss.

But frequently the defendant knows his rights just as well as the police.  On one occasion the same detective who arrested Fisher wanted to take another man out of an apartment where he had been run to earth.  His mother (aged eighty-two years) put the chain on the door and politely declined to open it.  All the evidence against the forger was inside the apartment and he was actively engaged in burning it up in the kitchen stove.  In half an hour to arrest him would have been useless!  The detectives stormed and threatened, but the old crone merely grinned at them.  She hated a “bull” as much as did her son.  Fearing to take the law into their own hands, they summoned a detective sergeant from head-quarters, but, although he sympathized with them, he had read Mayor Gaynor’s decision and declined to take any chances.  They then “appealed” to the cop on the beat, who proved more reasonable, but although he used all his force, he was unable to break down the door which had in the meantime been reinforced from the inside.  After about an hour, the old lady unchained the door and invited the detectives to come in.  The crook was sitting by the window smoking a cigar and reading St. Nicholas, while all evidence of his crime had vanished in smoke.