Journalist and writer Mikhail Shevlyakov personally knew Ivan Dmitrievich Putilin, who for a long time headed the St. Petersburg detective police. Shevlyakov listened, wrote down, and was the first to tell about Putilin’s investigations: about clever swindlers who managed to sell the state-run Semyonovsky parade ground and the building scaffolding of St. Isaac’s Cathedral; about tricksters who posed as a paralytic penitent sinner and even an agent of the detective police…