They say that you should set a thief to catch a thief as no one else understands the criminal mind better. Perhaps the most shining example of this idiom is Vidocq, the man who is now hailed as the father of modern criminology. He went from a life of crime spent either on the run or in the prisons of France to establishing a national detective police force that served as the model for Scotland Yard and others that followed it. He employed proto-forensic techniques such as ballistics and casti...
