CLPEX Chat Board

The subject, Jose Izquierdo, was a Cuban refugee. It is theorized that he entered the United States by boat in the early 1980s a time during which Castro decided to purge his country of the “cream of the crop”. . .criminally speaking. Jose was arrested by Miami police officials in 1985 on five counts of various drug charges. He was released on bond and fled the country before a sentence of 25 years could be imposed. At some point between 1985 and 1995, Jose had his fingerprints mutilated. It is believed that he visited Mexico and had the surgery performed by a local doctor. In 1995, Florida officials arrested a man by the name of Alexander Guzman for possession of a false passport. It was the mutilated fingerprints of this man that were forwarded to the FBI. Tommy Moorefield was then assigned the near impossible task of finding a match. This would involve discovering and analyzing what had happened by reversing the mutilation process using photographs of the fingerprint card, and reassembling the pieces with enough accuracy to be able to classify them. This classification had to be accurate enough so that the technical section could find his original set of prints among those of 71 million other people. The reconstruction also had to be precise enough so that the FBI’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System for ten print cards, in use since 1983, would be able to plot enough points in their correct relative position to find a match. Unfortunately, these were the only two ways to link him to any previous criminal activity, so FBI officials began the two week search for the original fingerprints of a man who now called himself Alexander Guzman. The project proved to be quite successful. Over the course of a holiday weekend, Moorefield had pieced photographs of the mutilated fingerprint card back together as accurately as he could. After approximately 170 hours of manual and computer searching, the technical section announced it had found a match. Moorefield immediately informed Florida officials of the link between Jose Izquiredo and Alexander Guzman and federal agents were sent to take their fugitive into custody. Jose was convicted in federal court for the original drug charges and is living happily ever after . . . in the pen.