Saturday, March 14, 2020

The Mugshot Story


Many years ago I was living next to a police station in Manhattan, right outside Hell's Kitchen. One night my friend and I found two very large garbage bags overflowing with old mug shots outside the precinct. The bags had broken and the mugshots were falling onto the sidewalk. We dragged them inside my apartment and started going through them. They were all from the year 1978 and the person's name, address and other stats were on the back of the photos. I went through them looking to see if anyone was picked up for murder. I only found one out of hundreds of mugshots. These were the days before caller i.d. and *67 on phones so I called one of the phone numbers on the back of the mugshots and and asked for the person it belonged to. The person that answered asked who I was and I told him "I found his name on a mugshot". "Well put it back where you found it" was the answer I got and I quickly hung up. The mugshots were lost in a move, who knows where they ended up!