Walter Jamison, aka Walter Kelly, Harry Benson and countless other names, would have been used to getting his mug shot taken by the time he sat for this one, as he’d spent a good deal of his adult life either in prison or doing something that would soon put him there. This mug shot happens to commemorate his 25th year as a professional forger and chronic jailbird. In 1911, when he was 19, he and his friend, John Simpson, were arrested for passing forged cheques in New Castle, Youngstown and Erie for sums of between $7.50 and $18.40. Walter had signed them, variously, "BD Wilson, superintendent of the Youngstown Foundry company", "EJ Wilson, secretary of the Youngstown Foundry company", "AC Dickson, secretary, Youngstown Foundry Co" and, presumably just to break the routine, "HB McClurg". Walter's friend denied passing most of the cheques -- Walter had done everything himself, according to him -- but confessed to having passed one in New Castle. The victim in that case, a Mrs Hoyland, took pity on him and decided not to press charges. The mayor of New Castle gave him a suspended sentence, "so that he will have to walk straight in the future or it will go hard with him." Walter wasn't given a chance to prove he could walk straight, and was found guilty of his string of crimes. There's no record of his sentence, but whatever it was, it was over by 1916, when he stole a horse and buggy from a livery stable in New Castle and vanished from town. He remained at large for five years, until he returned to New Castle in the summer of 1921 and was arrested for passing a forged cheque. Walter received concurrent sentences of two years for forgery and three-and-a-half years for horse theft, while the policeman who arrested him received a reward of $20 as part of an old Pennsylvania horse thief law. After he got out, he yet again made no attempt to walk straight, and immediately returned to forging cheques. In 1927, he was arrested on a charge of forgery in Mercer County and sent to the Allegheny workhouse. While there, he was connected with open forgery cases in New Castle and Ohio, and he was rearrested at the end of his sentence by the Pennsylvania authorities, prosecuted and jailed again. Once that sentence was over, he was escorted to Ohio to be prosecuted there, and was jailed once more. This shuttling between penal institutions occupied the rest of Walter's 1920s and, by the start of the new decade, he found himself locked up in the Ohio state penitentiary, looking at 20 more years in jail. However, he didn't aim to stay in that long. On June 13, 1930 -- just a month after a terrible fire in the jail had killed more than 300 men who were trapped inside by a cordon of armed guards and soldiers outside the walls -- Walter somehow simply walked out of the prison and disappeared into the streets of downtown Columbus. Either we believe the story that appeared in the papers, which was that a new guard had trusted Walter, who was working in the prison kitchen, to step out for a minute to get a bottle of milk from the dairy across the street and had been shocked and amazed when the prisoner didn’t return, or we assume that Walter bribed the guard. (Bribery appears to have been something of a scandal in the facility over the previous decades.) Walter fled across Ohio in the direction of New Castle, surviving by "swindling small tradespeople" out of several thousand dollars-worth of goods, which he paid for with bad cheques in the name of a fictitious cashier of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. (In order to give his forgeries a degree more plausibility, he invested in a little rubber stamp with the name of the railroad on it.) Naturally, the railroad put detectives on the forger’s trail and, two months after he escaped from prison, they tracked Walter down in his room at the Ohio hotel in Akron, having doggedly travelled from town to town, comparing the signatures on the forged cheques with the signatures in the registers of cheap boarding houses until they found a match. On August 15, 1930, Walter was sent back to the penitentiary, and the New Castle News ran a story with the headline: "JAMISON BACK IN OHIO PRISON AFTER RECAPTURE; PRISONERS ARE GRATIFIED". Why were they gratified? Because, apparently, Walter was "the best doughnut baker ever incarcerated in the prison". The prison authorities greatly cheered the inmates by announcing that Walter would be placed back in the prison bakery as soon as he served his time in solitary confinement for escaping, and that he'd have to serve an extra 24 months, which meant that they were guaranteed great doughnuts for years to come. He was out of jail and back to his old game by 1946, when he was arrested in New Castle for "uttering a forged instrument" (passing a bad cheque), and had to pose for the mug shot above. He got a two-year sentence, which means that he'd have been

MIA: Have you ever fantasized about being beaten up by a girl? VINCENT: Sure. MIA: Who? VINCENT: Emma Peel on "The Avengers." That tough girl who usta hang out with Encyclopedia Brown. And Arlene Motika. MIA: Who's Arlene Motika? VINCENT: Girl from sixth grade, you don't know her. - Pulp Fiction