Years ago, before smartphones and at a time when the Internet was not such a significant part of our lives, a young prosecutor drafted a search warrant for a "chop shop" that was using the front of a legitimate secondhand dealership, otherwise known as a junk yard, to steal, dismantle and traffic in the stolen parts trade at an enormous profit. The warrant was duly endorsed and issued by a New York City Criminal Court Judge. The detectives of the elite NYPD's Auto Crime Division, risking life and limb in the intentionally dilapidated premises, executed the warrant early one morning, resulting in the subsequent laborious endeavor for the prosecutor—the review and inspection of thousands of seized documents to match the recovered identifiable parts with the cars reported stolen against the business' "police book," that is, the inventory parts logbook.

20th Century Document Dump

At the time there was limited use of computers. In the District Attorney's Office, the only computers were used for word processing. In the yard, a computer did not meet the specific needs of the "connected" business owner, so nothing was computerized. The owner of the yard, a ranking member of one of the five organize crime families that have their headquarters in New York City, had apparently gotten his staff special training in accounting principles from the family-friendly but unlicensed CPA. As a result, when the police executed the warrant, they discovered that "records" of most of the business' transactions and sales receipts were conveniently "stored" in a rather large, sturdy old cardboard box which once contained a brand new washing machine. The yard owner definitely had a sense of humor. Some of those transactions found their way into the required police book (euphemistically called a "police book" because under the law, Vehicle and Traffic Law §415-A, the authorities could enter and request to inspect the book and a sampling of parts for accuracy). Of course, when dealing with an organized crime front, those false ledger entries were usually subsumed under some creative bookkeeping methodology that usually required a forensic document decipher.