In 1916, when Washington could no longer ignore rumors of corruption at Angel Island, the federal government appointed John Densmore, a labor attorney, to head a special investigation. Densmore discovered a smuggling ring and system of graft within the Immigration Service that had been thriving since as early as 1896. “This business had been going on for a number of years and had mounted to colossal proportions in the number of Chinese illegally admitted and official records destroyed, and the amount of graft money involved in these transactions runs into hundreds of thousands,” one report of the investigation asserted in 1917.

The graft business was a lucrative enterprise, with payoffs around the globe. Some American immigration authorities garnered as much as $100,000 a year by charging $1,400 to admit each illegal alien. The participants included not only high-ranking U.S. government officials but attorneys, notaries public, photographers, and Chinese merchants. The system entailed theft of documents, sale of biographical information, destruction or mutilation of data, creation of new records, substitution of photographs, and counterfeiting of official seals and stamps. So extensive was this Immigration Service racket that it even encompassed a special paper-son tutor school in Hong Kong, where prospective Chinese émigrés were coached on how to answer questions upon their arrival in San Francisco.

The Densmore investigation resulted in numerous arrests, as well as the discharge of some forty people from the Immigration Service. Transcripts of telephone conversations, secretly taped in 1917 by investigators, exposed the inner workings of collusion between Chinese smugglers and white officials. (Chang 155)