“Buy the nastiest skin mag you can find and leave it in the cab of your truck,” I told the narcotics officers.
One of the joys of working at Arizona Department of Public Safety Crime Lab in Tucson in the 1990s was the close relationship between Forensic Scientists and Detectives. On one occasion, a couple of undercover narcs came to me for advice in an unfolding investigation. They were setting up a drug sting operation. In a few days, they were going to sell a drug load (several bales of marijuana that were scheduled for disposal, borrowed from the vault for the sting) to a middleman.
That buyer was going to sell the marijuana to a lower-level distributor in a drug supply chain. The narcs were letting the middleman take their truck with the load. He would meet the second buyer to complete the transaction. The logistics of the operation meant they were probably going to lose sight of the truck for a half hour or so.
The narcs wanted to know if fingerprints could help them determine if anybody else got in or out of the truck during the time it was out of their sight. I thought about it for a minute or two and suggested they go to the “XXX Adult Only” porn store outside of town by the truck stop.
“Buy the nastiest skin mag you can find,” I said, “one of the expensive ones with a glossy cover and glossy pages. Those pages will be easy for fingerprint processing. But buy a copy that’s sealed in a plastic wrapper so you get a brand new, clean copy that hasn’t been fingered by store patrons. Unwrap the magazine while wearing gloves so you don’t leave your own prints. Initial an inside page with tiny initials so they won’t be noticed, but so you can positively identify the magazine later. Then leave the magazine on the floorboard of your truck like it’s been tossed away, maybe even mostly under the seat with just a corner sticking out. Everybody who gets in the truck will pick it up to look at the pictures.”
The narcs did as I suggested, but when they ran the operation several days later and made the busts, the magazine was nowhere to be found. It had disappeared during the half hour or so that the truck was out of their sight. Apparently, the magazine had been taken by somebody who had been in the truck but was not present when the busts were made.
A couple of months later while running a search warrant on an entirely unrelated drug gang, or so they thought, the magazine showed up in the possession of some dealers who were never even suspected of being related to the first bunch. The glossy paper was ideal for the hot-breath and magnetic powder technique. Lifting gently so I didn’t pull the varnish or paper fibers from the glossy pages, I was able to recover several good latents from inside the magazine and link the two drug supply chains for the narcs.
At Arizona DPS Crime Lab, we had a great working relationship with our detectives in all fields of investigations. They frequently sought our advice and took our input into account.