Matthew Cox

And then after that, my first duty station was Chicago, where I got assigned to counterfeit.

Yeah, luckily, I had a field training officer that was a third-generation Chicago cop, and so luckily, being a snot-nosed kid, I didn't know much when it came to the streets of Chicago.

So he really did, and that was wonderful for me to be able to kind of start out in that regard.

I mean, we'd still do protection.

I think a lot of people, you know, they hear Secret Service, they think, oh, all you do is protection, right?

We were started in 1865.

It was the actual—the last act—

that Abraham Lincoln signed into law before he went to Ford's Theater, one of the great ironies of history is he got together with Alan Pinkerton and said, hey, the Confederate States of America are literally counterfeiting half the money supply, so they used it as an instrument of a war.

So we need people that can go work undercover cases, that can go in there, work informants, and try to stop this.

And they did a really good job of that.

After that, after a third assassination in 1901 with McKinley, they said, hey, we need to have somebody step in here and kind of stop this type of stuff.

So up to that point, they worked against the Ku Klux Klan.

They worked civil rights.

And nine of our agents actually started, were the first agents to be what ultimately became the FBI.

So it was really investigative-driven work.

up until you know the 1900s when we started taking over protection is mckinley the one that got shot and it was at his speech or a bible or something so that bullet hit yeah so that i believe that was uh peter roosevelt oh yeah and that was an attempt he had an attempt yeah i just happened to be in the right spot to save him yeah

Traditionally, you would see it as an art form.

So somebody would take an offset printing press.

They would actually make the plates.

They would try to procure the paper.