WANTED! U.S. Criminal Records Sources & Research Methodology, by Ron Arons, Criminal Research Press. 385 pp. Softcover. $54.00.
Many of us have family members who participated in the dark side of society, but, I suspect, few have thought to find out more about them by locating records of their criminal acts. Ron Arons, author of The Jews of Sing Sing, has now published his second book which identifies resources available to document our notorious American relatives. For each state (plus District of Columbia), he attempts to identify all the records of criminals, where they are located, and how to access them. Federal records are included.
In the introductory portion of the book, Arons states there is a wealth of documents about criminals including prison records, criminal court documents, paroles, pardons, investigative and police files, and even executions. He also notes that criminals frequently commit multiple crimes, so any of the above record types may exist for them. The bulk of the book is a list, state by state, of what records are available; postal and Internet addresses; and other contact information.
I decided to test the quality of the book by searching for the most notorious member of the Mokotoff clan: Max Mokotoff, a first cousin of my father. I did not have a picture of him and hoped that his criminal record might have a mug shot. Max’s claim to fame is that he would marry women and then embezzle their money. He was married at least six times—four times consecutively and twice concurrently. For his first bigamous marriage, he served hard labor and was dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army during World War II. (I have his military records.) For his second bigamous marriage, he served time at Wallkill Correctional Facility in New York.
Searching the New York State section of Wanted! indicated that there were no public records available for that facility, but serendipity won the day. Aron’s website at <http://ronarons.com/advanced_search.php> has a list of Jewish inmates at Sing Sing prison. Max is on the list—perhaps for some other crime—and Wanted! notes that Sing Sing records are located at the New York State Archives in its capital, Albany. Going to the archives website mentioned in the book demonstrated they, indeed, did have records of the Wallkill facility. In fact, the archives has records for numerous penal intuitions not mentioned in Arons’ book. The book suffers from what is true of many first editions of reference works: incompleteness.
Using the information provided in the book, I contacted the State Archives and was informed that the collection for Wallkill was only a very small sampling of the case files, but they were willing to search for me. Subsequently, in a conversation with Arons, he told me he was aware of these sampling collections and also, as noted in the book, there may be privacy considerations with any of the records of criminals.
This book is a valuable addition to the collection of reference works for family history research, but do not assume that the absence of information means it does not exist. Contact the repository to confirm the records either do not exist or do not have public access.
Gary Mokotoff
