Crime
Cosey was later arrested several times for various crimes, ranging from motorcycle theft to forged checks and carrying a deadly weapon. Cosey used various false names. He served almost ten years in San Quentin State Prison and was released in the late 1920s.
Around 1929, Cosey began to forge documents based on United States history. He stole a pay warrant from Benjamin Franklin from the Library of Congress to practice Franklin handwriting, and sold the forgeries for small sums. He later expanded to other historical forgeries. He used old paper, brown ink and writing implements that the contemporary writer would have used at that time - this made his documents so convincing that they fooled several experts.
Cosey forged documents and signatures of such historical figures as George Washington, James Monroe, Button Gwinnett, and Mark Twain. Several fake letters from Abraham Lincoln were produced, as well as Thomas Jefferson's supposed draft of the Declaration of Independence. Cosey expressed pride in the fact that he never sold his work to amateur collectors.
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Famous quotes containing the word crime:
“The penalty may be removed, the crime is eternal.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“Give a scientist a problem and he will probably provide a solution; historians and sociologists, by contrast, can offer only opinions. Ask a dozen chemists the composition of an organic compound such as methane, and within a short time all twelve will have come up with the same solution of CH4. Ask, however, a dozen economists or sociologists to provide policies to reduce unemployment or the level of crime and twelve widely differing opinions are likely to be offered.”
—Derek Gjertsen, British scientist, author. Science and Philosophy: Past and Present, ch. 3, Penguin (1989)
“There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)