Fingerprint Alteration: Background information when reading The Smiling Man

Fingerprint Alteration

This article relates to The Smiling Man

In Joseph Knox's noir thriller The Smiling Man, the police can't identify the murder victim because the man had gone to extremes in order to conceal his identity. Clearly a person in an occupation that required anonymity, he had resorted to perhaps the ultimate means of operating under the radar of law enforcement authorities. He had modified one sure method of identification – his fingerprints.

It is commonly accepted that fingerprints are unique to each individual and that it is nearly impossible to change them. While the former is certainly true, the latter is up for some debate, depending upon the depth of a person's pockets and/or their pain threshold. Motivation, or shall we say, desperation also plays a part.

In the 1930s Theodore "Handsome Jack" Klutas, the leader of a notorious Illinois gang of criminals referred to as The College Kidnappers (known for abducting mobsters and holding them for ransom), sought anonymity by trying to file down the ridges of his fingertips. However, he did not evade capture for long, and was shot to death by police during a raid. In that same era, two members of Kate "Ma" Barker's gang (which terrorized the Midwest for decades in the early 20th century) decided to try plastic surgery, a fairly new medical phenomenon at the time. The gangland physician they hired to do the job was drunk, and essentially botched the procedure. Legendary gangster John Dillinger turned to acid to burn his fingerprints off with some success. Sadly (or not) it did him little good, since he was still caught and killed shortly thereafter.

The internet abounds with advice for the novice fingerprint eradicator, ranging from the choice of Knox's "smiling man"—grafting skin from elsewhere on one's own body or from a donor—to "shaving" the ridges down a little at a time, to burning fingertips with strong chemicals or fire, perhaps with a soldering iron or kitchen range top. However, each procedure comes with its own list of potential dangers, and the FBI has begun instituting countermeasures to track the identities of individuals who have attempted to change their prints. In a 2014 study, the FBI noted 412 instances of "deliberate print alteration," and as such, law enforcement is now instructed to carefully examine a suspect's fingers before taking prints, and to report any anomalies to the Bureau.

Filed under Cultural Curiosities

This article relates to The Smiling Man. It first ran in the March 6, 2019 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.