Forger

“ The man lay still, glaring at the black muzzle of the weapon like one confronting a ghost. Mr. Barron heard the noise of the three falls, and rushed out of the office in time to see Fred aim the revolver at the head of the forger.
"Arrest that man!" he cried. "He is a forger."
A forger is the one criminal most hated in Wall Street, and as soon as it was announced that he was one, the stranger was instantly surrounded and captured. A policeman came in from the street and put the nippers on him. ”

“ A professional forgery band consists of first, a capitalist or backer; second, the actual forger, known among his associates as the "scratcher"; third, the man who acts as confidential agent for the forger, known as the "middle man"; fourth, the man who presents the forged paper at the bank for payment, known as the "layer down" or presenter.
When it is necessary to have a capitalist or backer connected with a band he furnishes the funds for the organization, frequently lays out the plans for work and obtains the genuine paper from which forgeries are made. ”

“ In the detection of two particular types of forgery they are especially useful. Imitations of contemporary work can be very baffling, since the forger works with materials which were or might have been used in genuine work, does not have to give an appearance of age, and works against the same general background as does the artist he imitates. ”

“ One day I happened to read in a newspaper about a big forgery committed by a well-known government official. Then I learned that my indefinite gentleman had been a partner of the forger's brother, and that his name was Strawman. Later on I learned that the aforesaid Strawman used to run a circulating library, but that he was now the police reporter of a big daily. How in the world could I hope to establish a connection between the forgery, the police, and my little man's peculiar manners? ”

“ As a matter of fact, the commonest forgery with which we have to deal is the "raising" of checks, and a forger of this nature generally chooses a check bearing a genuine signature but having very little "filling-in." ”

“ The forger, as a rule, is a bookkeeper or an accountant who grows expert with the pen. He works for a small salary and sees nothing better. He grows familiar with signatures. Sometimes he is a clerk in a bank and has the opportunity to study signatures; he begins to imitate them, often with no thought of forging paper. He does it because it is an art and probably the only thing he can do well. Perhaps some hard luck or an unfortunate venture on the Board of Trade, or in a faro bank, makes him write a check or note. ”

“ One would imagine that a forger would pay sufficient attention to his materials to be on his guard against the blunder which earned the perpetrator of the Whalley Will Forgery penal servitude. He put forward a will dated 1862, written on paper bearing in a plain watermark the date 1870! Another indiscreet person asked the Court to accept [37] a will written and signed with an aniline copying pencil, but dated years before that instrument had been invented. ”

“ The setting aside of that will, and consequent division of property between three which he had intended to take for himself, was sufficient to account for any degree of revenge in such a man as he: and the proclamation exhibits an audacity and ingenuity of falsehood which must consign the man beyond appeal to the order of mere rogues. Enough of the real standpoint of the forger, traitor, and butcher, of whom some would make a hero! ”

“ The danger of an exact duplication is quite generally understood by persons having any knowledge of forgery, and is therefore avoided. Another difficulty is that the very delicate features of the original writing are more or less obscured by the opaqueness of two sheets of paper, and are therefore changed or omitted from the forged simulation, and their absence is usually supplied, through force of habit, by equally delicate unconscious characteristics from the writing of the forger. Again, the forger rarely possesses the requisite skill to exactly reproduce his tracing. ”

“ Afraid they might be beaten
Before the bench of Time,
They turned a trick by forgery
And blackened his good name.
A perjurer stood ready
To prove their forgery true;
They gave it out to all the world,
And that is something new ”

“ Yet from henceforth every mention of cases in which Plebes and clients were opposed, entirely ceases; and this ought to lead us to observe how trustworthy our accounts are. Could a forger of a later age have so accurately discriminated between the positions as implied by the law? A fabulist is always an unlearned man, and even a learned one would have made here some mistake. The clients now appear in the tribes, and therefore in the centuries likewise, as is expressly mentioned, and as we may also partly see from the circumstances themselves. ”

“ I thought he would only tell—about the other crime."
"About the other crime?" said the puzzled man. "What other crime?"
"The thing you did a long time ago," she said in a low voice, "the forgery."
"Forgery?" He could hardly believe his ears. "I never committed a forgery in my life." ”

“ Whoever shall conceal the will of a deceased person, or shall insert any forged matter therein, shall lose whatever property he would have been entitled to, through the bequest of the testator in said will, and said property shall belong to those whom he attempted to defraud; and he shall, besides, bear the infamy attaching to the crime of forgery. Even if he should have little or nothing to gain from such an act, he shall nevertheless be condemned as a forger. ”

“ Every document, apparently ancient, coming from the proper repository or custody, and bearing on its face no evident marks of forger, the law presumes to be genuine, and devolves on the opposing party the burden of proving it to be otherwise. ”

“ All the forgeries are charged on, or supposed to be, the act of one man—the prisoner; yet not only does no single witness trace the faintest resemblance, in any of the alleged forgeries, to the handwriting of the prisoner, or Mademoiselle Le Normand, but an able witness for the Crown, Mr Lizars, negatives such a fact. ”

“ The Protective Committee of the American Bankers' Association held a hurried consultation as soon as the news of the forgery reached New York, and orders were given to get this forger, regardless of expense—he was too dangerous a man to be at large. ”

“ The modern-looking hand and the modern spelling of the pencilled memorandums do not, then, compel the conclusion that there has been forgery, even although they underlie the antique-looking hand and the old spelling; but let us see if there is not other evidence to be taken into consideration. We have before us the privately-printed fac-similes of the eighteen passages in Mr. Collier's folio, above referred to. Perhaps they may help us to judge if the corrector's work is like that of a forger. ”

“ A forged will executed by himself would be sure to be found out—yes, that's it, sure to be found out. The forgery will be palpable—let it be palpable, and then it will be found out, branded as such, and the original will of 1891, so favourable to the young blackguard's interests, would be held as valid. ”

“ The forgery has long ceased to be important. James and his wife, with their wholly different ideas and methods, could not possibly be remoulded now to my purposes. I have educated Walter and Natalie to the headship of the family; I’ve neither time nor inclination to take up a couple of strangers and make an arduous and extremely dubious experiment. ”

“ Forgery of franks was extensively practised, since to imitate a man's writing is not difficult. Mr Joyce tells us that, under the old system, the proportion of counterfeit to genuine franks varied from half to three-quarters of the entire number. Why forgery should be resorted to is easy to understand. ”

“ Well, he has committed forgery. It'll be known all over the country to-morrow, and even now I fear the runners are after him. If he is taken before he marries that girl, things will be only worse than they are. But never mind whether he does or not, perhaps you differ with me; perhaps you think that, if you could find the girl now, you could stop her and bring her home; but you don't know where she is. I do, and if you will give me your solemn word of honour as a gentleman to give him warning that his forgery for five hundred pounds is discovered, I will give you his direction. ”

“ Terrible, too, was the appearance, under dates, of his particular acts of forgery, each set down in a matter-of-fact and methodical manner, and concerning which the total absence of penitence and self-reprobation was less painful to her than the fallacious self-justification in which he had indulged elsewhere. ”

“ FORGERY.—Forgery is the false making of an alteration of a writing to the prejudice of another man's right. Forgery may be committed of any writing, which, if changed, would operate as the foundation of another man's liability. Hence a check may be forged, an assignment of a legal claim, an indorsement on any negotiable document, an acceptance of a bill of exchange, a letter of recommendation, a railroad pass or railroad ticket. ”

“ Nevertheless, I do think my innocence can be established; for, in corroboration of a paper which my father gave me, acknowledging the act as his, and exculpating me, some of the innkeepers at whose houses I staid, while seeking your father in Northumberland and in Wales, must still be living, and can show that I was not, as has been asserted, flying from justice with the money obtained by forgery, but eagerly following a nobleman of unimpeached honour, upon business of importance. ”

“ With the tender pity natural to his rare character, he said that forgery was in his opinion and observation an unconquerable weakness; that a man who committed the crime once, would do the same thing again, whenever the temptation came to him. ”

“ Field; but they took certain steps, under my recommendation; the result of which was that at an early day, an aunt of the Honorable Miss Snape was driven, to save so near a connection from transportation, to sell out some fourteen hundred pounds of stock, and all the forgeries were taken up.
One would have thought that the lady who had thus so narrowly escaped, had had enough—but forgery, like opium-eating, is one of those charming vices which is never abandoned, when once adopted. ”

“ The court, therefore, was crowded as we said before, when a few minor cases having been disposed of, the prisoner for the forgery case was summoned to the bar.
There was nothing in the appearance of the accused which could at first sight strike the vulgar gaze. Neither youth nor beauty to excite the feeling in her behalf ”

“ Any one who takes the trouble to examine the proofs of the charges of forgery brought against him will know that they have often been founded on mistaken premisses, and are in no single instance convincing. ”

“ It will be obvious to the student who has followed the instructions and illustrations already given that this difficulty is brought about by two principal causes: first, by the paucity of material for comparison; secondly, because of the very important fact that a forgery must, by its nature, be a good and close copy of an original. This means that the unconscious tricks and irregularities that often abound in a long letter, written in a more or less disguised hand, are almost entirely absent from a forged signature. ”

“ A forgery of fourteenth-century Italian wood sculpture by Dossena.
An X-ray revealed modern nails in the interior.
That, perhaps, is why forgers have on occasion virtually abandoned the use of models, either wholly or in part, and produced objects different from anything that is known, but which could fit into some particular historical or cultural background. Here, they are exploiting not only ignorant enthusiasm but 13 the desire among the learned to extend knowledge of little-known epochs of human history, or to find material that will justify theories about them. ”

“ I have never been the agent through whom a culprit’s neck has been encircled by a halter. That is an awful responsibility (for fear of mistake) that I have always shrunk from. Frankly, let me say, I would rather have avoided this engagement altogether, and I did, I think, very gracefully escape from personal action in the matter, by showing my visitor a letter enclosing an instalment of one hundred pounds on account of my fee over the forgery case. ”

“ Never in those words. Feisul don't talk or write that way. The letter's a manifest forgery, as I'll prove by confronting Feisul with it. But there's a little oversight that should convince you it's a forgery. ”

“ Ordinary forgers are a dime a dozen, but we employ only the most expert. These are people who are trained in document examination. They know what a document examiner looks for and what tips them off to call something a forgery. For example, if a person is trying to disguise his or her handwriting, they make it bigger, wider, smaller or larger.
"Our forgers, as trained document examiners, look for unique or individualistic handwriting characteristics and make sure these are included in their forgeries. ”

“ Whoever shall forge the will, or any document containing an order, or any instructions, of a person still living, or shall disclose the contents of the same contrary to the wishes of said party, shall be deemed guilty of forgery. ”

“ Johns, the Court held, it was essential to prove a valid subsisting policy.
As to the supposed analogous cases of forgery cited on the part of the prosecution, all cases of forgery necessarily imply, that the instruments are in themselves invalid; that they are false in reality is of the essence of the crime, which consists in the representation of such void instruments to be valid, with intent to deceive somebody. ”