The Customs Officer and the Paper Trail
A San Francisco dispatch accuses a former Port Townsend customs inspector of leading a ring that forged Chinese immigration certificates. His neighbors call it a smear.
Port Townsend, March 30.—Special.—R. Green Todd, the ex-customs officer who was mentioned in the San Francisco dispatches yesterday as being the leader of a set of criminals who were preparing to flood the country with bogus Chinese certificates, was in the customs service in this district for three years. At present he is employed by a grocery company in Tacoma to solicit business from shipping.
Todd came here six years ago from Kansas City, where he said he was a member of the police force, and upon that showing was given similar employment here. Along in 1890 he resigned and was appointed inspector of customs by Collector Bradshaw and is said to have done some clever work for the government. Later Collector Wasson transferred him to Vancouver, B.C., where he remained for a year or more, and then reported here for duty. About this time, May, 1893, several serious charges, the purport of which are unknown, were filed with the department and the secretary ordered his dismissal. No effort was ever made to have the matter judicially investigated. Since then Todd went to Tacoma and is said to have worked hard at building up a profitable trade in the grocery business.
Few people here place any credence in the report and many opine that it is but another effort to blacken an ex-customs officer's reputation, as was attempted in the recent proceedings against ex-Immigration Inspector Fisher upon a trumped-up charge of alleged forgery.
“Few people here place any credence in the report and many opine that it is but another effort to blacken an ex-customs officer's reputation.”
The “Chinese certificates” at the center of the accusation were immigration papers under the Chinese Exclusion Acts, a racist regime that criminalized Chinese migration and created a black market in documentation. Then as now, accusations of document fraud could ruin a public officer's reputation before any court weighed the evidence.
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