How to Become a Federal Criminal Chapter 1
HOW TO BECOME A FEDERAL CRIMINAL
BY MAIL


As early as 1865, Congress passed a law providing that “no obscene book, pamphlet, picture, print, or other publication of a vulgar and indecent character, shall be admitted into the mails.” In 1873, Congress passed the Comstock Act, which went even further by completely banning anything related to contraception or abortion from the mail. In 1920, the postmaster general supposedly had to tell postal workers not to accept human beings as mail after a few child-mailing incidents.1
CRIME BY MAIL
Even before the United States of America became a country, there was the Postal Service. It was established in 1775 and got its own clause in the Constitution a few years later. By 1792, Congress passed a statute giving postmen a monopoly on carrying letters. Since that time, anyone who has dared to compete with the Postal Service has risked federal prison.

The mail has always been serious business in America. In the late 1700s, Congress even made the death penalty available for anyone caught stealing mail. Believe it or not, the Postal Service used to deliver things even more exciting than credit card preapprovals and extended car warranty offers. People actually sent important things to one another, like love letters, which was basically sexting but slower.

Americans liked their mail and they didn’t want to see it go missing. Sure enough, in 1830, two men were convicted of mail theft and sentenced to death by hanging. One of them, James Porter, was hanged right away. But his accomplice, George Wilson, had well-connected friends who were able to convince President Andrew Jackson to grant Wilson a presidential pardon. In an unexpected and unprecedented move, however, Wilson refused the pardon and chose instead to be hanged. It was probably the overwhelming guilt of having stolen mail.2

Aside from teaching us all that it’s actually possible to refuse a presidential pardon and force the government to kill you, federal mail crimes have also served as a buzzkill in lots of other ways. For example, 18 U.S.C. § 3061(c)(4)(B) and a corresponding regulation, 39 C.F.R. § 232.1, make it a crime to go into the post office while drunk or high, or to smoke a pipe inside, climb onto the roof, or gamble while you’re there.



In fact, even not going to the post office can be a federal crime under the right circumstances. Consider 18 U.S.C. § 1700, which provides:

Whoever, having taken charge of any mail, voluntarily quits or deserts the same before he has delivered it into the post office at the termination of the route, or to some known mail carrier, messenger, agent, or other employee in the Postal Service authorized to receive the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

In other words, if you take someone’s mail, agree to bring it to the post office, and don’t follow through, you can be charged with a federal crime. And while the crime has mostly been used to prosecute fed-up letter carriers, there’s no reason it can’t be used to put a bad friend in prison. (See Fig. 1-1.)
Wear a Postal Uniform if You Aren’t a Postal Worker
There are only a few clothing choices made criminal by federal statute. One of them is the federal ban on non–postal workers wearing the uniform of a United States letter carrier.

Specifically, 18 U.S.C. § 1730 provides that “whoever, not being connected with the letter-carrier branch of the Postal Service, wears the uniform or badge which may be prescribed by the Postal Service to be worn by letter carriers, shall be fined . . . or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.” That means you can get up to six months in prison for stolen postal valor.

By its terms, the statute doesn’t require that the uniform wearer do anything nefarious while playing dress-up. The crime is in the wearing. As one federal judge remarked: “The very act of impersonating a letter carrier is by nature an act of deceit.”3 When Americans see those little blue shorts and tube socks strutting down the sidewalk, we want to know we aren’t getting duped. To be a crime, however, the offender must wear the officially prescribed uniform for letter carriers. That requires some attention to detail. (See Fig. 1-2.)



THE ACTOR EXCEPTION

From the time it was enacted in the 1880s until the late 1960s, the prohibition on civilians wearing postal uniforms was totally unforgiving. Any non–letter carrier wearing a postal uniform could be convicted no matter the circumstances. In 1967, however, the U.S. Post Office Department (the predecessor to the U.S. Postal Service) asked Congress to carve out a narrow exception that would allow screen and stage actors to portray like postal workers without risk of indictment.

According to the Post Office Department, actors had periodically requested permission to wear postal uniforms, but the department was forced to refuse because Congress wrote a law with no exceptions. When a House subcommittee held hearings on a proposed amendment to the law in August of 1967, the department’s assistant general counsel testified:

In recent years we have had a number of inquiries and we felt this is a problem where people are probably disregarding the law. There is no public policy that we can see which would be served by continuing the prohibition against the wearing of the uniform in theatrical performances. Rather than have the law ignored, we think it would be better to have it amended.4

Rather than be embarrassed by pretend postal workers thumbing their noses at the law, the department proposed an amendment that would allow actors to wear the uniform “if the portrayal [did] not tend to discredit that service.” That is, actors could play letter carriers, but not bad letter carriers.

That led one lawmaker to ask what kind of portrayal might still be prohibited under the new law. The lawyer for the Post Office Department suggested:

I would suppose if the carrier were portrayed systematically opening people’s mail or engaging in that type of activity we would certainly think that would be within this particular prohibition.

Of course, that was before the internet, so the full range of unsavory things people in postal outfits might be shown doing on film hadn’t been fully explored. The law was ultimately amended as proposed, allowing actors to play well-intentioned mail carriers.

Three years later, however, the Supreme Court struck down a similar provision in a statute concerning military uniforms. In that case, Daniel Jay Schacht was sentenced to prison for wearing an army uniform in a skit critical of the Vietnam War. When the case reached the Supreme Court, Justice Hugo Black wrote that “an actor, like everyone else in our country, enjoys a constitutional right to freedom of speech, including the right openly to criticize the Government during a dramatic performance.” The court struck down the statute as an unconstitutional abridgement of freedom of speech, at least to the extent it required theatrical performances to be favorable to the military.

In 1990, about twenty years after the decision in Schacht v. United States, Congress finally got around to removing the same language from the postal uniform statute. Actors were now free to play even despicable postal workers. The following year, Newman made his first appearance on Seinfeld.



Although performances are no longer required to cast the Postal Service in a positive light, the only non–mail carriers who are expressly permitted to wear the postal uniform with impunity are actors. There remains no Halloween costume exemption—even for “sexy” letter carriers.
Paint a Car to Look Like a Mail Vehicle if It Isn’t One


It’s not only a crime to dress like a postal worker, it’s a crime to drive like one too. 18 U.S.C. § 1731 makes it a federal crime to paint, print, or otherwise put the words “United States Mail” on any vehicle that isn’t actually used to carry the mail. Logos, abbreviations, and any other markings that falsely suggest a vehicle is a mail vehicle are also prohibited. Violators can be fined, imprisoned up to six months, or both.

But unlike impersonating a police officer, driving around in a fake mail truck doesn’t have many perks. It won’t let you do fun things like pull people over or run red lights. And forget high-speed chases. Actually, forget high-speed anything in a mail truck. At best, you might be able to get away with driving on the wrong side of the road at three miles per hour with your hazards flashing. Not bad, but plenty of people already do that every day in Florida with regular old Buicks.

The fake-mail-vehicle statute makes no distinction between offenders with sinister motives and those who just have a bizarre affinity for all things postal. In other words, driving around and delivering or picking up mail isn’t required for a conviction, and other statutes prohibit those things already.

The law also doesn’t require a fake mail vehicle to look even remotely convincing to be a crime. (See, for example, Fig. 1-4.) That makes it a little easier for postal imposters, because mimicking a real mail vehicle with a civilian automobile has been almost impossible since the 1980s. That is, unless you happen to get your hands on one of those boxy charmers known as the Grumman Long Life Vehicle, or “LLV” for short:



From 1986 to 1994, the Postal Service bought more than 140,000 LLVs, which have dutifully served as America’s iconic mail truck ever since. In 2015, however, the Postal Service announced it would be putting the LLV out to pasture, replacing its fleet with newer, more efficient vehicles. And that makes sense, because at ten miles per gallon and around $500 million in annual maintenance costs for the fleet of LLVs, things can really add up.5

Still, just because a certain kind of mail vehicle has been retired from service doesn’t mean it can’t be used as an imposter vehicle. To this day, Section 1731 expressly prohibits falsely labeling stagecoaches and steamboats as postal vehicles, both of which were used as postal vehicles in their day. The retirement of the LLV may present new opportunities for aspiring postal imposters to acquire decommissioned mail trucks, a technique some offenders have reportedly already used to steal mail. But the law can also be violated with vehicles never before used by the Postal Service, like gyrocopters. In fact, it was under those exact circumstances that a gyrocopter once found its way in front of Congress.

No, literally—in front of Congress. Like, on the Capitol lawn.

THE MAILCOPTER INCIDENT

On April 15, 2015, an actual postman from Florida named Doug Hughes was completing the final leg of his solo gyrocopter flight to Washington, D.C. On board, he had two mail bins filled with copies of a letter he’d written to Congress urging lawmakers to take big money out of politics and implement campaign finance reform.

Rather than lick all those stamps, Hughes decided he’d just fly them straight to Congress.



Shockingly, Hughes wasn’t blasted out of the sky by NORAD. He managed to fly under the government’s radar. When he touched down just outside the Capitol Building, however, he was promptly arrested. His gyrocopter and its cargo were also seized, though not before a bomb squad had conducted a thorough sweep. At first, Hughes was charged with violating national defense airspace and released. But after taking a closer look at his gyrocopter, the feds realized his crime was even more serious: he had dared to affix the United States Postal Service’s “sonic eagle” logo to the rudder of his gyrocopter.

A grand jury in the District of Columbia indicted Hughes on additional charges, including falsely labeling a vehicle as a postal carrier in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1731.6

As count six of the indictment read:

On or about April 15, 2015, within the District of Columbia, DOUGLAS HUGHES, also known as Doug Hughes, knowingly and willfully operated and owned a vehicle and conveyance, and placed and attached words, letters, and characters on the vehicle and conveyance of like import to “United States Mail,” to wit, the logo and emblem of the United States Postal Service, when the vehicle and conveyance was not used to carry United States Mail.

Aside from having what might be the most innocuous alias to ever appear in a criminal indictment, Douglas (a.k.a. “Doug”) Hughes was the first person to ever be charged with falsely identifying a gyrocopter as a mail vehicle. He will probably also be the last.

Hughes eventually pleaded guilty, but to a different count of the indictment. He was sentenced to 120 days in prison and agreed to forfeit his gyrocopter to the government, which the feds announced they would destroy. The government has yet to successfully convict anyone of falsely labeling a gyrocopter as a postal vehicle.
Reuse a Postage Stamp
Title 18, Section 1720, of the U.S. Code prohibits reusing postage stamps. The crime begins with a piece of already-sent mail and can be committed in just two steps:



Understandably, these images may be hard to look at. They depict a serious federal crime punishable by up to a year in prison for civilian stamp reusers and up to three years for postal workers who traitorously reuse stamps. But that’s what you get if you try to bilk the government out of a few cents at a time.

OTHER STAMP CRIMES

You may be surprised to learn that federal law allows people to perform philately in public. Some may be surprised that “philately” means stamp collecting and not whatever their sick mind thought it was. But for every good philatelist, there’s someone out there misusing stamps, making these other federal stamp laws necessary:

Stealing Stamps and Using Them to Pay Debts

Under 18 U.S.C. § 1721, postal employees are prohibited from knowingly and willfully using postage stamps, stamped envelopes, or postal cards entrusted to them “in the payment of debts” or to buy other stuff. If they do, they face up to a year in prison.

Making Fake Stamps

Federal counterfeiting laws don’t just prohibit making fake money; they also prohibit making fake postage stamps. Specifically, 18 U.S.C. § 503 makes forging or counterfeiting a postage stamp punishable by up to five years in federal prison.

Putting Unstamped Mail in a Mailbox

Even without a stamp, it’s possible to become a federal criminal:


Mail a Gun
If you feel like nothing exciting ever comes in the mail, blame Congress. They’ve made it illegal to put all kinds of things in the U.S. mail. That includes guns.

More specifically, 18 U.S.C. § 1715 makes it a crime to mail “pistols, revolvers and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person.” Giving it a quick read, the law wouldn’t seem to apply to rifles, shotguns, or other “long guns” bigger than a pistol. When it comes to federal criminal law, however, things are never quite what they seem.

In United States v. Josephine M. Powell, the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether mailing a twenty-two-inch-long sawed-off shotgun violated the gun-mailing statute. Having been convicted for doing just that, Josephine Powell said no; after all, the statute spoke specifically of pistols and revolvers. Surely, she thought, firearms “capable of being concealed on the person” didn’t include shotguns. They’re too big to conceal on one’s person. Aren’t they? And if the statute could be read to include them, isn’t it unconstitutionally vague?

The Supreme Court didn’t think so. In its view, a “concealable” firearm was one that could be hidden on “an average person garbed in a manner to aid, rather than hinder, concealment of the weapons.” The justices were satisfied that a sawed-off shotgun almost two feet long could be concealed on an average person if they dressed appropriately—which is pretty rich, coming from nine people who wear flowing black robes to work.7



In any event, it’s safe to say that the standard for concealability isn’t what you can hide in a pair of yoga pants. After Powell, the analysis for a gun mailer is simple: Could an average-sized person—however creatively—hide the gun somewhere on their body with the appropriate wardrobe? (See Fig. 1-9.) If the answer is yes, it’s a crime to mail.

THE DAY THE MAIL WENT POSTAL

Although the defendant in Powell mailed quite a care package—including a sawed-off shotgun, some shotgun shells, and “20 or 30 hacksaw blades” for good measure—at least the gun was unloaded. Compare that to the Idaho woman who in 2015 pleaded guilty to mailing a loaded .357 Magnum that managed to fire off a shot when a postal worker picked up the package at a processing facility.

Luckily, according to the Department of Justice’s press release, nobody was hurt when the mail started shooting at people—not badly, anyway. One postal worker sought medical attention for ringing ears and stinging hands. The defendant was sentenced to two hundred hours of community service, $3,397.28 in restitution and a $1,000 fine. Powell, by contrast, was sentenced to two years in prison.

While the law doesn’t distinguish between loaded and unloaded guns sent through the mail, the law does exempt certain people from criminal liability. Licensed gun dealers and manufacturers, as well as certain government employees, are allowed to mail handguns for approved purposes.


MAILING NINJA WEAPONS INSTEAD
Congress hasn’t always succeeded in banning weapons from the mail. In 1986, for example, Senators Ted Kennedy and Strom Thurmond cosponsored a bill to “prohibit the use of the mails to send dangerous martial arts weapons.” The bill was left to die in committee and failed to become a law. But had it been enacted, it would have criminalized mailing ninja weapons into any state where those weapons were banned by state law. That included nunchaku (also known as “nunchuks”), shuriken (also known as “throwing stars”), and manrikigusari, which the bill described as “fighting chains” with weighted ends.

In hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, some members of the martial arts community opposed the bill.8 They argued that the proposed law was discriminatory against Asian culture and posed a threat to the future of martial arts.

Other witnesses, however, said the bill didn’t go far enough. Victoria Toensing, then a deputy assistant attorney general, testified that banning martial arts weapons from the mail was too narrow a prohibition. She argued that the law should be more like the Federal Switchblade Act, which broadly prohibited moving switchblade knives in “interstate commerce.” Toensing explained that the martial arts weapons bill, if it were to become law, would leave companies free to circumvent the restriction by delivering throwing stars to kids through UPS or other commercial carriers. At least they’d be able to track their packages.

But how big of a problem was ninja mail? A member of the Boston Police Department testified that the risk posed by mail-order ninja weapons was real. He had recently been approached by a father who discovered his twelve-year-old son’s cache of “throwing stars, nunchakus, and a double-edged throwing knife.” When asked how he’d acquired them, the boy told his dad that he had simply “saved his allowance, filled out a coupon in a magazine and sent cash through the U.S. mail in return for [the] weapons.” Another member of the Boston police force testified that he and his fellow officers had even come face-to-face with throwing stars in the line of duty. In 1974, during demonstrations against mandatory busing of schoolchildren to end segregation in schools, groups of angry youths had clashed with police and thrown shuriken at them.

And let’s be honest: Who wouldn’t have predicted that the weapon of choice for segregationist youth in 1970s New England was the Japanese throwing star?

The 1980s brought along a so-called ninja mania. The Karate Kid was a box-office hit. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles debuted on TV. Throwing stars were even turning up in grade-school backpacks.

This inspired a man named Larry Kelley to fight back against easy access to these weapons. Kelley was a black belt in karate, owner of a karate school in western Massachusetts, and voted “Best Kicker” in Sport Karate magazine. To get Congress’s attention, he mailed a throwing star to each U.S. senator in an envelope that read “Illegal weapon, legally enclosed.” When he was invited to Washington to testify in support of the bill, Kelley did what anyone would do: he gave the Judiciary Committee a live nunchaku demonstration in response to Senator Kennedy’s request:

SENATOR KENNEDY: Do you want to just explain about the nunchaku, to the extent that it is dangerous?

MR. KELLEY: Would you mind?

SENATOR KENNEDY: Sure, get up and show us. I do not see a volunteer Senator for you to demonstrate with—if there are any Republicans in the room. [Laughter.]

MR. KELLEY: These [demonstrating] can attain speeds of 100 miles per hour. So if you catch one of these in the side of the head—which I will probably be doing in 1 second for you—and the thing is, if you are standing there like this, and a police officer walks up and sees you from this perspective, all he sees is about a 12-inch club. So the officer figures, “Well: I’m safe as long as I am 24 inches away, because that is only a 12-inch club”—and then, bang.

Surprisingly, Ted Kennedy didn’t invite Kelley to demonstrate the throwing stars on any Republicans. But Kelley did explain that anyone capable of throwing a Frisbee could throw one and “it takes no skill whatsoever to make them stick.” To really drive home how serious the problem was, Kelley held up a throwing star and told Congress that he had recently read in a magazine that ninjas “used to dip this in solid excretal waste in order to cause massive infection when it stuck in.” He feared that with this information being made public “now all the little kids will be doing that.”

Despite all of this, the bill failed to become law. Even so, America has somehow managed to avoid the plague of little kids going around dipping ninja stars in fecal matter and throwing them at people as Kelley had warned. So far, anyway.




Mail a Threatening Letter to the Circus
Also known as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), 18 U.S.C. § 43 prohibits all kinds of violent and threatening acts directed at “animal enterprises”—that is, businesses like animal research facilities, zoos, aquariums, and pet stores.

The law was passed in 2006 to strengthen an existing statute that already made it a federal crime to physically disrupt and cause economic damage to animal enterprises. According to lawmakers, animal rights activists had been exploiting a loophole in the existing law, directing their acts of intimidation and vandalism at employees and family members rather than the protected businesses themselves. The new law extended protections to these “secondary targets” and broadened criminal penalties for interfering with animal enterprises. Plus, the statute’s new name allowed the government to call a whole new group of people “terrorists,” which is one of its favorite things to do.

Given its history, most prosecutions under 18 U.S.C. § 43 have predictably involved animal rights activists. They have been charged for things like releasing thousands of minks from a mink farm and holding threatening demonstrations outside research facilities. But the law is broad enough to apply whether the offender has a pro-animal bent or not. It protects rodeos, fairs, and, yes, circuses. That means anti-clown radicals can also be charged.



Under subsection (a)(2)(B) of the statute, an offender can commit this crime by mailing a threat to anyone associated with an animal enterprise, their immediate family members, spouse, or intimate partner. The threat only needs to place its recipient in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury. It must also be sent for the purpose of interfering with an animal enterprise. For example, threatening a circus employee to the point where the show can’t go on would constitute an AETA violation, whereas threatening that person’s cousin or platonic roommate would have to be charged under a different statute. (See Fig. 1-13.)

Of course, criminal circus threats have become much more difficult and unlikely ever since the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus closed its doors in 2017. Animal rights activists have also turned their focus to more pressing matters—like forcing Nabisco to redesign its animal cracker box to depict the cartoon animals freely roaming in cartoon habitats, rather than trapped in cartoon cages. Still, they can’t stop you from slowly nibbling off the animal crackers’ feet before biting off their heads. Never.
Mail a Miniature Spoon
21 U.S.C. § 863(a)(2) prohibits sending anything by mail that is determined to be “drug paraphernalia.” This includes obvious things like bongs and “cocaine freebase kits” (they come in kits, apparently). It also includes other things that are less clearly intended for drug use—things like “miniature spoons with level capacities of one-tenth cubic centimeter or less,” which are specifically identified as potential drug paraphernalia in the statute.

Adorable as they may be, it turns out that tiny spoons have a reputation as a convenient way to measure and snort cocaine. In fact, congressional testimony suggests that even McDonald’s once ceded to the demands of antidrug paraphernalia lobbyists by discontinuing its popular spoon-shaped coffee stirrers of the 1970s for precisely this reason.



In 1979, Joyce Nalepka of the “Coalition for Concern about Marihuana Use in Youth” testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Criminal Justice. She described all sorts of makeshift drug paraphernalia that kids could readily get their hands on, including makeup mirrors, toilet paper rollers, a shoebox, and yes, “a coffee stirring spoon from our all-American McDonald’s.”9 Although Nalepka didn’t describe exactly how to use a toilet paper rollers or a shoebox to do drugs (there was no demonstration on the Senate floor this time), she proudly announced the impending death of the “McSpoon,” telling lawmakers that “last evening at 6 o’clock Mr. Edward Schmidt, president of McDonald’s Restaurants, gave me permission to announce to you that McDonald’s will either redesign or discontinue the item altogether.”

That’s how it came to be that we now stir our coffee with tiny little straws that could never, ever, ever be used to do drugs of any kind. Even though the McSpoon died in 1979, it wasn’t until 1986 that Congress finally got around to enacting the Anti-Drug Abuse Act. The new law made it a federal crime to mail drug paraphernalia like mini-spoons and “roach clips.” (See Fig. 1-15.)



There are, however, ways to mail each of these things without becoming a federal criminal. In determining whether an item truly is drug paraphernalia, the statute considers a number of factors, including:

• the instructions provided with the item concerning its use;

• how the item is described, advertised, or displayed for sale;

• whether the owner is a legitimate supplier of like or related items to the community; and

• the existence and scope of legitimate uses of the item in the community.

Thus, mailing a miniature spoon with instructions that make clear the spoon is only to be used for eating miniature food would tend to weigh against a finding that it is drug paraphernalia. If it can be established that lots of people in the community use miniature spoons, the offender’s defense just got even stronger.

Or consider roach clips, which are defined by law as “objects used to hold burning material, such as a marihuana cigarette, that has become too small or too short to be held in the hand.” Things like bobby pins, surgical hemostats, “alligator clips,” and other items resembling tweezers may each be presumed to be roach clips, but each has a legitimate, lawful use as well. Each can be mailed as non-paraphernalia depending on its true purpose.

The same is true of other items presumed to be drug paraphernalia. Take, for example, this totally legit flower vase:



Supposedly, flower vases like the one shown above can also be used to smoke tobacco or even other things. That’s what people say, anyway. But you can’t trust everything you learn in college.
SCORPIONS AND OTHER NONMAILABLE MATTER
Federal law also makes it a crime to mail certain other things classified as “nonmailable matter.” This includes poisons, “infernal machines,” “disease germs or scabs,” and really anything that could kill or injure someone. Although an “infernal machine” may sound cool, it’s really just a fancy way of saying “bomb.” And while you might be wondering why a person would want to mail germs or scabs, the law allows doctors and scientists to send microbiological specimens to each other for research. But you’re no scientist and you probably belong in prison if you’re picking off scabs and mailing them to people.

But the injurious mail statute does have one exception that is sure to haunt your dreams. It permits live scorpions to be sent through the mail. That’s right. Live. Scorpions.

Title 18, Section 1716(c) of the U.S. Code provides that “the Postal Service is authorized and directed to permit the transmission in the mails, under regulations to be prescribed by it, of live scorpions which are to be used for purposes of medical research or for the manufacture of antivenom.”



Apparently recognizing that scorpions have no place in a civilized society, postal rules require scorpion shipments to be made in packaging that can’t be punctured by a scorpion. All live scorpions must also be mailed in a box clearly marked “Live Scorpions,” and that box must be placed inside yet another box that’s also labeled “Live Scorpions.”

Although most would agree that any box containing live scorpions should be securely sealed and promptly set on fire, the law doesn’t go quite so far. Still, for purposes of federal law, live scorpions mailed in packaging that isn’t scorpion-proof or isn’t properly marked are considered nonmailable matter and, under Section 1716(j), mailing a noncompliant box of scorpions is punishable by up to a year in prison.
Mail a Mongoose
Mongooses are probably best known for their long-running beef with snakes. Less well-known is their decades-old feud with the federal government. Since the year 1900, the Lacey Act has classified mongooses as “injurious animals” and has banned them from importation into the United States. Some animals have come and gone from the Lacey Act’s blacklist, but Congress has remained firm on its no-mongoose policy from the beginning.

One postal statute, 39 U.S.C. § 3015(a), provides that any injurious animal prohibited from importation under the Lacey Act is “nonmailable matter.” Another statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1716D, makes it a federal crime to mail one. Mongoose mailers are subject to as much as a year in federal prison. That’s twice the maximum sentence available for mongoose importers.

Committing this crime may seem simple enough: get a box, some postage, and a mongoose, then head to the post office. (See Fig. 1-18.) Avoiding this crime may also seem straightforward: just don’t mail a mongoose. In fact, under the explicit text of the Lacey Act, only “the mongoose of the species Herpestes auropunctatus” is identified as an injurious animal, so maybe it’s still okay to mail some mongooses, right?

Probably not, actually. A regulation issued under the Lacey Act prohibits the importation of “any species of mongoose or meerkat of the genera Atilax, Cynictis, Helogale, Herpestes, Ichneumia, Mungos, and Suricata . . .” For those who are rusty on their taxonomy, it’s probably safest to avoid mailing any mongooses or meerkats—and, honestly, prairie dogs, feral cats, and big squirrels may be better hand-delivered just to be safe.



This isn’t to say that the feds can’t be convinced to look the other way when it comes to mongoose crimes. In 1963 the secretary of the interior even issued a formal pardon to a mongoose named Mr. Magoo who had been imported to the U.S. mainland by a merchant seaman. When federal authorities caught wind that he was in the country, they threatened to deport him back to India or even to put him to death (the mongoose, not the merchant seaman). Following his pardon, Mr. Magoo lived out the rest of his days in the Duluth Zoo. The seaman remains at large.
Run a Mail-Order Denture Business


In the midst of World War II, dentists were fighting their own battle here on the home front. False teeth made by mail-order denture companies were freely flowing across state borders, and dentists were getting sick of it. At the time, forty-seven states prohibited denture-making by anyone but a dentist licensed in the state. Even though no state law expressly prohibited mail-order dentures, the whole thing was making dentists nervous.

Seeking to restore order, a collective of dentists lobbied Congress for a federal law. After days of congressional hearings, including tales of ill-fitting dentures showing up in mailboxes everywhere, the House and Senate agreed that the plight of dentists and America’s toothless citizens was sufficiently serious to warrant an Act of Congress.10 On Christmas Eve 1942, Congress approved the enactment of a federal statute making it a crime to mail dentures into a state if the dentures had been made by a person not licensed to practice dentistry in that state. To this day, the law, which appears at 18 U.S.C. § 1821, provides for a prison sentence of up to a year.

The law, however, was not without its skeptics. Before its enactment, Senator D. Worth Clark of Idaho questioned whether this type of denture-making by laypersons really needed to be a federal crime, particularly where mail-order dentures weren’t actually violating any existing law. He thought Congress should give more consideration to a matter before making it a federal crime. He remarked:

I think we are asked to write a very definite criminal statute under which and for violations thereof a man could be committed to jail. Apparently, such a statute is needed, or is asked for, because no law on the statute books today is being violated, at least no law under which a prosecution could be conducted. If you are going to put people in jail for doing something which they are doing legally now, you must write a new law. If you enact a law which will put a man in jail for doing something which he is doing legally now, I think you have to go into the entire merits of the subject.

Other senators were a little more relaxed about making new crimes. Senator Clyde Reed of Kansas explained that the law simply looked to the states to determine what denture mailings would be prohibited within their borders. If a state outlawed dentures made by a layperson, then the federal statute would permit a federal prosecution for mailing amateur dentures into the state.

Clark, however, urged a more discriminating approach to creating federal crimes. He asked:

SENATOR CLARK: Let us suppose that a State enacted a perfectly outrageous statute. This happens to be one of the things that is on the border line. Suppose the State of Idaho or the State of Kansas should prohibit something that was clearly outrageous. At least, in the opinion of some people, States have enacted such statutes. Suppose such a statute were enacted and we were called upon to write a Federal statute which would make it unlawful to transport in interstate commerce what a State said was unlawful to do in its own borders. In that case wouldn’t you want to go beyond just merely the fact that the State had a law? Wouldn’t you want to examine into the matter before you wrote a Federal statute?

SENATOR REED: I think not.

SENATOR CLARK: Then there is a sharp divergence of view.

Among the evidence submitted to the 77th Congress in support of the mail-order denture ban was an advertisement by the “United States Dental Company” based in Chicago. The company advertised various models of dentures, including “The President,” “The Vice President,” “The Ambassador,” and a bold marketing choice for the early 1940s: “The Dictator.” A full set of “Dictator” dentures cost $16.50, whereas “Ambassador” teeth ran as much as $87.50, presumably because Americans value diplomacy over autocracy or something.



The real magic of any mail-order denture business, however, was the process for taking an impression of the customer’s mouth. As summarized by Philip Traynor, a U.S. representative from Delaware and himself a dentist:

Their scheme is to send a gob of wax to a person who answers their advertisement and let him take his own impression . . .

The patient is instructed to take the gob of wax, put it in hot water for a few minutes, then take and put it in their mouth and hold it in their mouth for a minute and a half, thereby supposing that they get the first impression that they can work with. That is sent back and with instructions they are supposed to send $2 with that gob of wax that has been in their mouth. I do not know whether it is worth $2 to put it in their mouth or not; but they send on the impression, and then they will send more wax with instructions to go ahead and take the second impression, from which they go ahead and make the set of teeth.

Written submissions to Congress claimed that “if a patient obtains satisfactory dentures by his own manipulations, the result is due to pure chance.” Actual customers, however, begged to differ. In a letter addressed to a Cleveland mail-order denture company, one bedentured Brooklynite said of his dentures that he “would not part with them for a thousand dollars.” The customer did confess, though, that when biting into the heated gob of wax “[i]t stuck to the roof of [his] mouth so tight that [he] was terrified . . .” And that’s saying a lot, because a person who’s perfectly happy to take a gob of wax that shows up in his mailbox from a stranger, heat it up, and cram it into his mouth isn’t usually the type to scare easily.



The Chicago-based United States Dental Company wasn’t only a pioneer in the marketing and naming of false teeth; it was also the first to test out the new criminal denture statute less than a year after it became law. In 1943, federal prosecutors charged Margaret Johnson and Mary Layton, both executives of United States Dental Company, with mailing prohibited dentures from Illinois to Delaware.

But the case had one wrinkle. It was prosecutors in Delaware, not Illinois, who brought the case. Johnson and Layton argued that the new denture law didn’t permit prosecution in the district where the offending dentures were received but only in the district where they were put in the mail. The text of the law prohibited the “use” of the mails to send prohibited dentures, not the “transportation” of them. They moved to dismiss the charges and won.

In a humiliating defeat, the government had lost its first-ever prosecution under the mail-order denture law. The government appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court and lost. Johnson and Layton were free to mail dentures another day.

Eventually, however, the law caught up with them. They were charged in Illinois, convicted, and fined $1,000 each. On appeal, the Seventh Circuit Court admonished them for failing to see “the necessity for intelligent and skilled construction of artificial teeth” and noted that the wisdom of the Denture Act was obvious. The court explained that “it falls within the category of legislation for the public health which is a prime, as well as a worthy, purpose of government. That the Federal Government, under its interstate commerce power may aid such state legislation, is not debatable.”11

This time the Supreme Court wasn’t interested in their appeal and declined to hear their case, leaving their denture-mailing convictions undisturbed.