Chapter V: Part 5

His answer was truthful. We had to admit it for there was absolutely no evidence to connect him with any specific act outside his confession, and we had to find comfort in the fact that he was guilty at least of having intended to continue the reign of terror along the wharves. Bombs had been found or fires had broken out on no less than twenty-two vessels bound out of New York up to the time we closed on Fay--and not one was his prey. He was tried with Scholz and Daeche. The only law then applying to his case, and the one under which he was tried, charged him with “conspiracy to defraud the insurance underwriters” who had insured cargoes on certain ships. When the charge was read to him, Fay innocently asked: “What are underwriters?” He found out. Fay went to Atlanta for eight years, Scholz for six, and Daeche for four. Kienzle and Breitung were not brought to trial and after we went to war were invited to join various other Germans in an internment camp. Fay had been at Atlanta a month when he escaped. German friends gave him clothes and helped him to Baltimore, where Paul Koenig met him and paid him $450, with injunctions to go to San Francisco and get more. For some reason the fugitive feared that there was a plot against his life in San Francisco, although he had protected the “great people,” so instead of going west he fled immediately to Mexico. From there he fled to Spain, and it was not until the summer of 1918 that he was caught there.

He was a bold and important criminal in his field, and we were glad to have brought him in. He was not the one we wanted most, not if our sugar theory was sound. The pursuit of Fay had certainly scared that theory up an alley. It was high time we got out of the alley and back into Main Street.

VII

ALONG THE WATERFRONT

II

“_Damn Him, Rintelen!_”

The pursuit of Robert Fay unearthed what trial lawyers delight in calling “not one scintilla of evidence” that he had actually set fire to a ship. Fay was punished for what he intended to do and not for any real achievement for the German cause.

Yet the thought persisted in our minds that he knew who was making and placing ship bombs. He professed ignorance. “I do know this much,” he said, after a long session of futile questioning, “I do know that a certain man paid another man $10,000 to make those bombs. I won’t tell you who he is, because I think he is now a prisoner in the Tower of London, and he might get into more trouble. You can make what you like out of that.”

We made this out of it--that the prisoner then in the Tower to whom Fay referred was probably Franz Rintelen. He was a German of prominent station who had had a vision quite like Fay’s--a vision of interrupting American shipping, and so damming the flood of war supplies. In early 1915 he had come to America equipped with plenty of authority and a bank credit limited only by the resources of the German Empire, and had spent six months here trying to exercise that authority and spend the money in numerous ways. He had tried to buy rifles of the American government, he had fostered peace demonstrations, promoted strikes, lobbied for an embargo on munitions and made himself busily useless in numerous other ways, only to sail for home in the fall of the year--and fall into the hands of the British.

But the charges which I have just cited, and which are now fully confirmed against this man, were not then known to us, and Fay’s tip was too ambiguous to help us at the moment. Instead of ceasing after his arrest, the fires continued. The day after we caught Fay in the woods the steamer _Rio Lages_ which had sailed a few days previously took fire out at sea. A week later a blaze started in the hold of the _Euterpe_. The _Rochambeau_, of the French line, caught fire at sea on November 6, and the next day there was an explosion aboard the _Ancona_. The _Tyningham_ suffered two fires on her voyage east during early December. There was a maddening certainty about it all that suggested that every ship that left port must have nothing in her hold except hungry rats, parlor matches, oily waste and free kerosene. Never in the history of the port had so many marine fires occurred in a single year. Marine insurance was away up and our patience was away down.

The steamship companies put on special details of guards to watch the vessels from the moment they entered port until they sailed again. We resumed patrolling the river in various disguises. Fay’s swift motorboat had disappeared, but there were plenty of others, and the men of the Bomb Squad suffered real hardship in all sorts of inclement weather. It seemed as though every item of cargo was watched as it passed into the hold, and every stranger about the piers carefully followed, but there was absolutely nothing to excite suspicion. So we returned to our sugar theory and the Chenangoes.

I mentioned the fact that they were a floating tribe in more senses than one, and that the same man rarely came back twice for employment. A few familiar faces, however, could occasionally be spotted in the crowd at work loading the lighters. We made it our business to study these steady workers and found them for the most part a harmless lot of Scandinavians.

Those who came, worked once, and vanished, were of all nationalities, with a considerable German representation. Some of them used to come from Hoboken, and by a process of elimination we found that certain of the Hoboken delegation were sailors from the idle North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American ships. We followed them and asked enough questions about them to learn the entire history of any civilized people, but nothing in the form of legal evidence resulted. A friend who knew the methods taught in the Wilhelmstrasse for destroying property said it would be futile for us to follow those men anyway, for the destroying agent himself rarely knows the men higher up, the real conspirators. So it began to look as if even the arrest of a guilty Chenango would not supply the background necessary to picture the bomb system in its entirety.

On one of the early days of 1916 Detectives Barth, Corell and Senff reported for duty and were assigned to Hoboken. They were instructed to hang about the restaurants, saloons and hotels where the officers and petty-officers from the German ships were accustomed to gather, and posing as confidential German agents they were to fish about for whatever might take their bait. All three men are fine Americans of German descent, with an excellent command of the German language, so they got on well with the longshore folk they met in the “stubes” of Hoboken. They occasionally suggested in a vague way that they Were the picked servants of the Kaiser, and aroused some interest and no suspicion among their new acquaintances. Every man has more or less desire to be a “secret service man” and in looking back on the German antics in America during the war I think one may attribute as much of their activity to the dramatic instinct, as to their cupidity or their real patriotic zeal. (Paul Koenig is an exaggerated example of what I mean.) And so it was with those to whom the three Bomb Squad men talked: a nod here, and a wink there, a whisper and a wag of the head, and they took on some importance.

_Copyright, by International Film Service, Inc._

Franz Rintelen]

Their reward came when a German whom Barth had picked up suggested quietly that he knew a man who had been doing work for the government (German) and wouldn’t Barth like to meet him? Barth would. So with some ceremony Barth was introduced as one of von Bernstorff’s special agents to a funny little old man who looked like a cartoon of the late Prussian eagle. He was Captain Charles von Kleist of Hoboken. The three lunched together in Hahn’s restaurant, in Park Row, New York, and von Kleist found Barth agreeable. He was very glad to meet a real agent, for he had a grudge against a fellow over in Hoboken who said he was a member of the German secret service.

“You can’t be too careful of those fellows,” Barth said. “There are a lot of fakes around. What’s he done to you?”

“This Scheele, he has a laboratory, where he has been doing work, making some things. I was his superintendent now for a long time, and he owes me several hundred dollars, but he does not pay me. I think von Igel ought to know about it, and perhaps Captain von Papen himself.”

“So do I,” said Barth. “I’ll see that it gets to him. What was it you were doing over there?”

Von Kleist was a chemist. Dr. Walter T. Scheele had been employing him in his laboratory at 1133 Clinton Street, Hoboken, in a factory which was ostensibly for the manufacture of agricultural chemicals. The real business they transacted was the manufacture of bombs. Ernest Becker, the chief electrician of the North German Lloyd liner _Friedrich der Grosse_, and Carl Schmidt, her chief engineer, had made the containers out of sheet metal. These Becker had delivered to Scheele, and up in the laboratory the containers had been filled with explosive. Becker would come then and take them away, and the bombs had been used to great advantage, von Kleist continued, in harassing the shipping. But what good did it do him, he asked Barth, if he got no pay for it?

“You wait,” returned the “secret agent.” “I’ll get you fixed up. I know a man who is close to von Igel, and I’ll have him meet you. If what you say is true, you certainly have something coming to you. Wait till I get this other man.”

A few days passed. Then von Kleist came again to Hahn’s restaurant, and was introduced to “Herr Deane,” who Barth said spoke no German, but was a good man in spite of the handicap. A trace of suspicion crossed the old chemist’s face, and Barth hastened to add: “We have to use all kinds of people to fool these stupid Yankees, see?” This bit of heavy satire reassured von Kleist, and he found Deane a likable person, who seemed interested in his case against Scheele. He went over the ground again. “If you want any more proof I’ll show you,” he concluded. “Come to my house.” “Deane” (who votes under the name of George D. Barnitz, of the Bomb Squad) joined Barth and accompanied von Kleist to his house at 1121 Garden Street, Hoboken, and out of the muddy back yard the old man dug up an empty bomb container, _almost an exact duplicate of the “Kirkoswald” bomb_! “There is one of them--and I have filled dozens like that,” he said.

“Let’s go for a ride,” Barth suggested. “We can go down to Coney Island and have supper--the hotel has opened up--and we’ll talk things over.” The old man felt very amiable towards his new friends, and was a talkative and appreciative guest. They dined at the Shelburne and later Barnitz wrote out a statement of von Kleist’s services as the latter outlined them. “This is just for the sake of regularity, you understand. I have to have a written report to give to the chief, or else you won’t get yours. You can sign this as your formal statement.”

“All right,” von Kleist agreed, and signed. “How long do you think it will be before I could get some money?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that part of it,” Barth said. “I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll all three go up to see the chief now--I want him to meet you anyhow, and you can supply any more facts that we may not have down.”

So they came up to my office--not von Igel’s. Barnitz and Barth said his expression changed when he entered headquarters and knew he had been betrayed. He said, “I see now why you have been so good to me.”

The prisoner was docile. He said he knew he was caught and he wanted to help us round up the rest. I showed him the _Kirkoswald_ bomb, and told him where it had been found. “Yes,” he said, “Captain Steinburg and Captain Bode came to the laboratory after they saw in the paper that the bomb had been found in Marseilles and they gave Dr. Scheele the devil because it had not gone off. It was supposed to explode within four days, but it didn’t explode in twelve.” “How many did you make?” I asked. “I don’t know how many,” the prisoner answered. The ones that were put on the _Inchmoor_ and the _Dankdale_ went off all right, and there were two fires on the _Tyningham_. “I gave one box of thirty of them to two Irishmen from New Orleans, O’Reilly and O’Leary. They took them down there to set fire to ships with them.”

“Did you give the rest to Becker?”

“Yes. And he gave them to Captain Wolpert. Wolpert is superintendent of the piers of the Atlas Line over in Hoboken. Captain Bode, he is also a superintendent, for the Hamburg-American Line. Captain Steinburg I don’t know much about, but he is in Germany now.”

I thanked him for his information, and asked him if he would tell me everything about the plot, from its beginning up to the moment. He said he would; that he was going to help the United States now. I excused myself for a moment and left the room.

Von Kleist saw an electrician in a rough shirt and overalls repairing the lights in the room, and struck up a conversation with him. The electrician’s English carried a slight German accent, and von Kleist said:

“Sie sind deutsch, nicht wahr?” (You’re German?)

“Ja,” replied the workman.

Still using the mother tongue the prisoner asked the workman to do him a favor. “Deliver these notes for me, will you? I can’t go out of here, and I would like to send word to some people.” And he wrote on two messages, one addressed to Wolpert and Bode, the other to Schmidt and Becker. The substance of both was the same: “Beat it--I’m pinched.” Detective Senff had been disguised as an electrician and stationed in the room for the express purpose of getting any statement the prisoner made--a practice not usually necessary, but this was a serious case. Evidently von Kleist’s profession of transferred loyalty to the United States was only a scrap of paper. We locked him up.

That night Walsh and Murphy watched Captain Bode’s house in a New Jersey suburb, while Sterett and Fenelly covered Wolpert’s house nearby. Both men reported at their respective piers for work the next morning, and both were invited by the detectives to come over to headquarters “to consult with us in a little waterfront investigation we were carrying on.” Senff went to the North German Lloyd piers to call on Becker. The guard at the pier-head put through a telephone connection, and Senff told Becker he wanted to see him on an urgent matter. Presently Becker appeared at the pier gates, and through the bars Senff whispered: “Von Kleist wants to see you. Trouble--” Becker returned in an instant with his hat and came to headquarters. A little later in the day the net caught Schmidt, and after a year and a half of waiting we had rounded up in twenty-four hours five promising prisoners.

Von Kleist, we knew, was not altogether reliable; Bode was positively robust in his denial of any knowledge of the affair. Becker, a thin blond youth, made a complete confession. Yes, he had made the bomb containers--several hundred of them, under Schmidt’s orders. He had filled them with chlorate of potash and sulphuric acid at the Scheele laboratory and had seen Captain Wolpert take them away. At that moment Wolpert, a hulking red figure, who had been conversing fairly freely, shut up tight, and refused to answer further questions. Becker acknowledged that he had made the _Kirkoswald_ bomb, and added that the later cases were larger than that.

“Captain Wolpert,” I said, “don’t you think you’re doing Germany more harm than good by doing this sort of thing?”

“Damn it!” he exploded. “I gave it up June first. But you’ve got to do what those bull-headed fellows tell you, haven’t you?”

“Did you know Robert Fay, Captain?” I asked.

“Yes--I met him one time in Schimmel’s office with Rintelen,” he replied.

“You mean _von_ Rintelen?” I asked, using the aristocratic prefix which Rintelen had assumed.

“No!” bellowed Wolpert. “Not _von_, damn him--_Rintelen_!”

_Copyright, International Film Service_

Ernest Becker

_Copyright, International Film Service_

Captain Charles von Kleist (left) and Captain Otto Wolpert (right)]

The result of our first examination of the four was the arrest of Carl Schmidt, chief engineer of the _Friedrich der Grosse_, and three of his assistants, Georg Praedel, William Paradies and Friedrich Garbade. We covered the laboratory, but Dr. Scheele had fled, to Florida. There he received a telegram telling him it was safe for him to return to New York. He had traveled as far as Baltimore when another telegram informed him of the arrests, and he fled to Cuba, and it was March of 1918 before he was arrested by the Havana police and extradited to New York. The laboratory was in a secret room on the top floor of the factory, accessible only through a trap door, and the trap itself was pierced with eyeholes so that anyone at work inside could see who was outside. We found a rich store of explosive and incendiary chemicals--all the ingredients of the bombs, which Lieutenant Busby brought back as evidence. Scheele was a finished chemist, and a German spy of 23 years’ standing. It had never occurred to him that von Kleist would squeal for want of money. “How good a German are you?” he had asked von Kleist when he engaged him in March, 1915. (The first project of the two was to saturate fertilizer with lubricating oil and thus smuggle the oil into Germany.) “I’m as good a German as you ever pretended to be,” von Kleist answered. “You are not,” said Scheele, “or you wouldn’t have taken out naturalization papers here. I didn’t do that.” “Well, I couldn’t have got my captain’s sailing license if I hadn’t,” said von Kleist.

Loyalty to Germany alone had not satisfied the appetite of von Kleist, for he had caught a glimpse that night of the check for $10,000, signed “Hansen” which Scheele proudly waved as evidence of what Germany thought of his ship-destroying ability. In the Austrian-subsidized Transatlantic Trust Company, where von Rintelen had deposited a large amount of money on his arrival from Germany, he had an account in the name of Hansen. Here then was the explanation of Fay’s remark about his friend who was a prisoner in England.

So far, so good. We knew that Becker, Schmidt and the other engineers had made the bombs, and that Becker and Scheele had filled them. On the evidence the four were convicted; Becker and von Kleist were sent to Atlanta for two years, and the other four to the penitentiary for six months. We were satisfied, but could not prove, that Wolpert and Bode had disposed of the bombs where they would do the most damage. They refused naturally to convict themselves, were admitted to bail of $25,000, which was provided by friendly Germans, and were interned when we went to war. The four assistants served their terms and then were extended the privileges of internment camps as dangerous enemy aliens.

So far, so good, but the snake was not yet dead--we had only cut off a section of his tail. To be sure, he could not get about with his former vigor. The ship fires, which had continued through February, stopped, and one can count on his fingers the fires that broke out on ships after that date. Our theory had served its purpose--but who were the men higher up?

When Paul Koenig had been taken into custody in late December, 1915, we had found in his house in West 94th Street an address book containing some hundreds of names of folk with whom he apparently did business. The memorandum book is mentioned elsewhere in this volume in detail, but the present case may show just what specific use we made of the catalogue of spies which the obliging Koenig had left in our hands. Among other entries was this:

“Boniface during the day--3396 Worth--ask for

Boniface at night 1993 Chelsea--Never home until 10:30 P. M.”

We had gone systematically through the book, checking up our knowledge of each person mentioned, in order to see whether the trail of Koenig, von Papen, Boy-Ed and the Hamburg-American interests might not lead us to other unexpected outrages, and so we were seeking this Boniface who was “never home until 10:30 P. M.” For months he proved elusive, but not long after the arrest of the Hoboken bomb-manufacturers we located a certain Bonford Boniface.

He had only a single room for lodgings, and we called there one day while he was known to be elsewhere and made a careful examination of its contents. Our first signal that Boniface might be off-color was the discovery of a file of clippings from newspapers describing the arrest of von Kleist and his crew. Apparently he was interested in German bombs. There was no evidence of the reason for his interest, however, and the detectives were about to ‘leave the room as they had found it when they ran across two letters signed “Karl Schimmel,” one postmarked Buenos Aires and one from Holland. Both were colorless messages asking how fortune was treating Boniface.

Now a cat may look at a king, and a man may receive friendly notes from the Argentine and Holland without molestation, but I recalled something of this name Karl Schimmel. He had come under suspicion before, first, when the so-called “Do-Do Chemical Company” of 395 Broadway had applied to the fire department for permission to store dynamite on the premises of its executive, Karl Schimmel, at 127 Concord Avenue, the Bronx. The application had been denied, and the fire department had asked the Bomb Squad to look up the Do-Do Chemical Company and its officers. It had no factory, no visible business, and as we presently found out no Karl Schimmel, for he became alarmed at our investigations and fled to Mexico, and South America, and then, with the aid of Count Luxburg he made his way back to Germany. Again, Wolpert had spoken of having met Fay in Schimmel’s office with Rintelen--but Wolpert would not talk. There was a reasonable margin of doubt in our minds of Schimmel’s behavior--enough to warrant Barth’s going to Boniface and asking him to come to headquarters.

Schimmel, Boniface told us, had employed him for a time at $25 a week. And what had he done in return? Nothing more than provide Schimmel with a list of weekly sailings of all steamships leaving New York for Europe, together with a description of their cargoes. Why had Schimmel, a lawyer, been interested in sailings and cargoes? Boniface said he did not know. How had Boniface compiled the list? At first, he said, by scouting along the waterfront, picking up scraps of conversation here and there and keeping an observant eye on the trucks bound for the piers. Pier-guards began to notice him a trifle too attentively, the waterfront was too many miles long, twenty-five dollars a week was only twenty-five dollars a week, and Boniface, it must be remarked, was racially thrifty. So he adopted the much simpler expedient of buying each morning a copy of the _New York Herald_, a newspaper which pays some attention to shipping, net cost in those days one cent, copying sailing dates, hours and destinations from its columns, and conjuring the cargoes out of his imagination.

Where had he delivered his reports? To Schimmel in his office at 51 Chambers Street. Whom had he seen there? Why, Rintelen, once, but he didn’t know what his business there was. Another time a man named Herman Ebling. (Ebling, it developed later, had been directed by Wolpert, who had had his orders from á Captain Steinburg, to take a tube of glanders germs and a dipping stick, seek out the wharves where horses were being shipped abroad for artillery and transport, and insert the germ-soaked stick into the nostrils of every third horse he could reach, in order that a serious epidemic might presently break out. Ebling claims he threw the tube overboard without fulfilling his mission.) Where was Ebling? Boniface professed not to know. Whom else had he seen? Well, there was another German lawyer, Martin Illsen, counsel for the _New Yorker Herold_, a German daily.

We sent for Illsen and questioned him of his dealings with Schimmel. He had written an article which he sent to the newspapers protesting against the shipment of arms and ammunition to the Allies, for which Schimmel had paid him $100. That he said was the extent of his service.

“Did you ever see this man Ebling there?” I inquired, feeling that in Ebling we might find the missing link between the bomb-makers and the fires. “Yes,” Illsen replied. “Where is he now?” Illsen did not know. “Do you remember meeting anyone else in the office?” “Yes, there was a lithographer. His name is Uhde. He comes, I think, from Brooklyn but I do not know where he is.”

It is our business to find out where people are, and as the reader may already have observed, to follow a case through from one man to another if we have to question a thousand individuals on the way to our goal. We took up the search for Uhde, and investigated everyone of that name in Greater New York. More months had passed before we finally found the man we were after--Walter Uhde. We pounced on him without the formality of an examination, and searched his room, to find some correspondence with Schimmel and more newspaper accounts of the arrest and trial of the Hoboken gang. It was this evidence and the pressure which it brought to bear upon his conscience that made Uhde give up evidence enough to picture the bomb plot in its entirety.

It began, as the outbreak of the ship fires already had indicated, in the early months of 1915. One winter night there was a secret meeting in the restaurant of the Brooklyn Labor Lyceum. In a private dining-room sat Dr. Scheele, the chemist, Captain Wolpert, the dock-superintendent, Karl Schimmel, the lawyer, Uhde, the lithographer, Eugene Reistert, the proprietor of the restaurant, and a certain Captain Steinburg. This man was particularly dangerous to the welfare of the United States. His real name was Erich von Steinmetz, and he was a captain in the German navy. At that time he had just come to America by way of Vladivostock, dodging the immigration examiners by travelling in woman’s dress, and evading the quarantine authorities by concealing in the fold of the dress the same tubes of glanders germs with which he sent Ebling to inoculate the horses for the Allies. Steinmetz was Rintelen’s first and ablest assistant, and Schimmel was his second. The two men outlined to the dinner party a plan to manufacture and plant the bombs. The sailors would make the containers, Scheele would see that they were filled and would act as paymaster for the group, Schimmel and Wolpert would keep in touch with the sailings and cargoes, and Wolpert, Uhde and Reistert would deliver them to the small fry who could be hired to place them in sugar-bags and other freight.

How well the plan succeeded we already know. Wolpert distributed the bombs to several local points of German operation in the greater city, and even Scheele had on one occasion carried a box full of bombs packed only in sawdust from the laboratory over to the Labor Lyceum. Reistert and Uhde tested a few of the infernal machines in the rear of the building, and Uhde fancied them so much that he kept one as a souvenir, stowed away in the toe of an old boot in his locker at the Turn Verein, where Detectives Barth and Jenkins found it. The conspiracy had originated in March; the first day of May, Wolpert gave a bomb to a Chenango who smuggled it aboard the _Kirkoswald_, with the result which we have followed. On May 7, 1915, the glorious _Lusitania_ was torpedoed, and on the following morning, Karl Schimmel, coming into his office and finding Illsen and Boniface there, exclaimed:

“Ah--that U-boat commander has done well enough, but he has stolen all the glory away from me. I had nine cigars on the _Lusitania_.” (For “cigars” read “bombs.”) “If they had not torpedoed her the cigars would have done the work!”

He may have told the truth. His secret is at the bottom of the Atlantic now, along with what shreds of respect the civilized world might otherwise have had for Germany. It is certain that Schimmel tried to place his “cigars” aboard the vessel, for Reistert had given Uhde $100 and a little man named Klein a package of bombs with instructions to go to a saloon in West Street near the White Star piers. There they were to meet a third man, to whom they would deliver the package, and that man would see them safely aboard the ship. The man did not appear at the appointed hour, so they left the package with the bartender, and went to the missing man’s house in Harlem, where they paid him his fee. It was the same Klein who had been carrying a bomb in his pocket one afternoon when Schimmel had sent him to South Ferry to place it aboard a ship. But the bomb caught fire, and before he could rid himself of it it had burned through his clothing, so Schimmel magnanimously gave him $20 for a new suit and his trouble. And it was the same Klein whom we found dead of disease in a hospital, beyond the law’s reach, when we finally were tracing him for arrest.

The stories of the culprits combined to lay at their door the origin of most of the ship fires with which we had been afflicted for the past two years. If nothing else had proved it, the cessation of the fires would have been enough. We were anxious, after our twisting, winding search, rather to have the guilty men convicted and placed in safe-keeping than to fix definitely upon them the guilt for all of the fires--that would have been practically impossible--but the very fact that the fires ceased is sufficient evidence of their complete guilt. It was not until October 17, 1917, six months after the United States had gone to war, that our long hunt came to an end, and we arrested Boniface, Reistert, Uhde and one Peter Zeffert. It was Zeffert who confessed to having gone to Schimmel’s office one afternoon to help him fill the bomb containers with chemicals. Reistert was there, and the three took the bombs away in a taxi-cab to meet a destroying agent in a waterfront saloon. The agent did not show up, and Messrs. Schimmel, Reistert and Zeffert thereupon returned to the Chambers Street office and unloaded the tubes.

I am sorry that our laws were not at that time drastic enough to punish the men as they deserved. James W. Osborne, the assistant United States Attorney who tried the case, wove an admirable prosecution, and Judge Harland B. Howe turned a stern face upon the prisoners. Wolpert had been haled from Atlanta to answer to the new charge, as had von Kleist and Becker. The engineers were brought out of their internment camps. And last, and foremost of all, Franz Rintelen was there--returned to us by the British to answer to a series of charges which he had tried hard and expensively to conceal. The best our laws of the moment could do for these men who had defiled our hospitality and destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of property on our soil was to sentence them to one-and-one-half years in Atlanta. It is to the everlasting credit of Judge Howe that Rintelen, Wolpert, von Kleist, Becker, Praedel, Paradies and Garbade received the maximum prison term, and the maximum fine of $2,000 each. Under the espionage act later adopted each of them could be sentenced to twenty years and fined $10,000.

Popular consent would have made short work of these men’s lives. Justice had to preside over their trials, however, and they were punished to the full extent of an inadequate law. A more drastic criminal code would probably have frightened the German spies in the United States, and it is equally true that German agents who were caught in the net of the law laughed up their sleeves as they made use of one after another of the law’s technical provisions and privileges to avert what would have been certain and swift death had they worn the field-gray uniforms of their nation. They have not suffered in proportion to their crimes. But their nation is paying the price.

There is something in the spectacle of Rintelen serving his sentence at Atlanta--a long sentence, which he tried numerous tricks to evade--that is peculiarly German, and that comes more nearly satisfying our popular desire for retribution than the plight of any of his wretched employees. He came to America arrogant, rich, defiant, cruel, and sly--to wage war upon us. One of his first acts was to sign his check for $10,000 to manufacture bombs to destroy our shipping. When certain Americans crossed his reeking trail he ran away in terror. By great good luck he was captured, discovered, and returned and by considerable persistence and patience on the part of the Bomb Squad one of his trails was laid bare. (He had many others.) He suffered great indignity, as he thought, at being tried with the manual laborers whom he had employed and left in trouble. He was convicted and sent to prison. He pleaded ill-health, though he was a strong man, and he tried to be transferred to a more lenient prison. He invoked the aid of his crumbling government, who informed Washington that unless he were surrendered to Germany that nation would take the lives of American soldiers captured in battle. Every trick failed, and Franz Rintelen, tried not as a prisoner of war for what morally were acts of war against the United States, but by our peace courts, and under our lenient peace laws, must now serve out his term in an American prison, although his nation has given up the war and begged for clemency.

Rintelen used to suggest that he was an illegitimate relative of the late Kaiser. It may be true: the two have something in common. The Kaiser has become plain Hohenzollern, and the chief German bomb-plotter in the United States, is, as Wolpert angrily said that day at headquarters, “not _von_ Rintelen, damn him--_Rintelen_!”

VIII

MR. HOLT’S FOUR DAYS

The facts were apparently unrelated to each other. Only a flight of imagination would have connected them, and imagination, though it is often valuable in speculating on what probably happened, is not court evidence of what did happen. In the order of their occurrence, the facts were these:

1. On April 16, 1906, Leone Krembs Muenter, wife of Erich Muenter, an instructor in German in Harvard College, died, soon after the birth of her second baby. The circumstances of her death were suspicious, and the Coroner directed that the stomach of the body be taken to the Harvard Medical School for examination. Dr. Muenter, on the following day, requested that he be allowed to escort the remains from Cambridge to Chicago for burial, and this permission was granted. With the children he made the gloomy pilgrimage west. The body of the dead wife was cremated. Dr. Muenter wrote at once from Chicago to the New York Life Insurance Company directing that the policy on his wife’s life be made payable to her sister, instead of to himself. The examination of the lining of the stomach had indicated slow arsenical poisoning and a warrant was issued at once for the husband. But it reached Chicago to find him gone--no one knew where.

2. In a corridor of the main floor of the Senate wing of the United States Capitol at Washington used to stand a telephone switchboard. On the night of Friday, July 2, 1915, an explosion near it blew fragments of the board through the walls of the telephone booths adjoining. No one was about, which was lucky, for the wrecked switchboard was not the only damage done: plaster rained from the walls and ceilings, every door nearby was blown open (one was a door into the Vice-President’s office which had not been in use for forty years), the east reception room was wrecked, a gaping hole was torn in the stonework of the wall, and fragments of windows, mirrors, crystal chandeliers and telephone apparatus flew in every direction.

3. In his country home on East Island, where Long Island reaches out into the Sound to form Glen Cove, John Pierpont Morgan was having breakfast on the morning of Saturday, July 3, 1915. It was nearly half past nine, and the members of his family, together with several holiday guests, were in the breakfast room, which is on the eastern side of the house. An automobile drove up to the front door, and the butler was confronted by a man of dingy appearance who asked, in an accent suggesting German, to see Mr. Morgan. He presented a card bearing the legend “Society Summer Directory: represented by Thomas C. Lester.” The butler wanted better credentials and asked for them. The stranger pulled a revolver from his pocket, covered the butler with it and stepping inside the door demanded, “Where is Morgan?”

With good presence of mind the butler answered, “In the library,”--the library being in the west wing of the house, and away from the breakfast room--and stepped toward the library door. Unfortunately it was open, and the intruder, who was following with his gun aimed, saw that the room was empty, and that the butler had lied. At the same moment Physick, the butler, realized that his ruse had not worked. He shouted, “Upstairs, Mr. Morgan! Upstairs!” hoping by the urgency of his cry to convey to the banker a warning that something was distinctly wrong and at the same time to get him out of range. Mr. Morgan at once hurried up a rear stairway and began to search for the trouble. A moment later Mrs. Morgan joined him. They proceeded from one room to another, found nothing, and asked a nurse what was wrong. As the little search party reached the head of the main staircase, with Mrs. Morgan in the lead, she caught sight of a strange man with a revolver in each hand. Lester had come up the front staircase. Mr. Morgan saw his wife between himself and the guns, brushed her aside, and charged. The man fired twice as the two went to the floor, grappling, and the hammer of his revolver clicked twice more on caps that did not explode. Two wounds, one in the front of the abdomen, and the other in the left thigh, did not prevent Mr. Morgan, from overpowering his assailant: he lay with the full weight of his 220 pounds on the man’s body, pinning down the revolvers to the floor. One of the guns Mrs. Morgan and the nurse wrenched from the man’s hand; the other Mr. Morgan captured. Physick had meanwhile roused the servants, and he stunned the intruder with a lump of coal as he lay on the floor. Lester’s unconscious form was then trussed up and taken to the Glen Cove jail.

There, briefly, were the facts. The Morgan shooting I have recounted in some detail to show the desperation with which the stranger trespassed, and attempted murder. It was not an affair which suggested a motive of robbery, but apparently a cold attempt at assassination. The Capitol explosion had been fruitless in its results so far as the loss of human life was concerned, and its origin was at that time a complete mystery. The Muenter affair had long since passed out of my memory. How to get evidence to establish motives for the crimes, fix the entire responsibility, and punish the offenders?

Never, probably, has long-distance communication played a swifter or more helpful part in a case. In order to show just how a nation which has been called to the hunt can enter into the pursuit, let us follow the developments in their strict chronological order.

At seven o’clock Saturday morning, before Lester had appeared at the door of the Morgan house, the newspapers in Washington received a typewritten form letter, signed “R. Pearce,” protesting in excited terms against the shipment of munitions to the nations at war. Its second paragraph read:

“In connection with the Senate affair would it not be well to
stop and consider what we are doing?”

The writer stated further:

“Sorry, I, too, had to use explosives (for the last time I
trust). It is the export kind, and ought to make enough noise
to be heard above the voices that clamor for war and blood
money. This explosion is the exclamation point to my appeal for
peace.”

Again he wrote:

“By the way, don’t put this on the Germans or Bryan. I am an
old-fashioned American...”

And he added, in a penned postscript:

“We would, of course, not sell to the Germans if they could buy
here, and since so far we only sold to the Allies, neither side
should object if we stopped.”

At half-past nine o’clock the shooting occurred at Glen Cove. About the same time Dr. Charles Munroe, consulting expert of the Bureau of Mines, was called to the Capitol to make an examination of the wreckage of the explosion. He soon arrived at the conclusion that the shock had been caused by no spontaneous combustion, but by a fair quantity of high explosive.

While he was prying about among the débris, Lester was being lodged in the Glen Cove jail. His bonds were loosened, leaving him a very sore set of ankles and wrists, his cut forehead was bound up, and when he was questioned, he gave out the following statement:

“I, Frank Holt, of Ithaca, N. Y., and lately professor of
German at Cornell, do hereby freely make to William E. Luyster,
justice of the peace, the following statement of the facts
concerning my visit to the home of J. P. Morgan at East Island,
Glen Cove, N. Y.

“I have been in New York City about ten days and had made a
previous trip to the home of Mr. Morgan last week. My motive in
coming here was to try to force Mr. Morgan to use his influence
with the manufacturers of munitions in the United States, and
with the millionaires who are financing the war loans, to have
an embargo put on shipments of war munitions, so as to relieve
the American people from complicity in the death of thousands
of our European brothers.

“If Germany should be able to buy munitions here we would of
course positively refuse to sell to her. The reason that the
American people have not as yet stopped the shipments seems
to be that we are getting rich out of this traffic, but do we
not get enough prosperity out of non-contraband shipments?
And would it not be better for us to make what money we can
without causing the slaughter of Europeans?

“I am very sorry that I had to cause the Morgan family this
unpleasantness, but I believe that if Mr. Morgan would put
his shoulder to the wheel he could accomplish what I have
endeavored to do. I wanted him to do the work I could not do.
I hope that he will do his share anyway. We must stop our
participation in the killing of Europeans, and God will take
care of the rest.”

Lester, then, was not Lester at all, but Frank Holt.

Meanwhile I knew nothing of what had transpired. I had risen that Saturday morning looking forward to a day of relaxation and pleasure, for there was to be a field day for the police at Gravesend Bay. On the way down to the track I read with some interest of the explosion in the Capitol, and then dismissed it from my mind: the newspapers, which had been printed about one o’clock of that morning, carried no news except a description of the effects of the explosion. Furthermore, it was a holiday, with another to follow, and I proposed to enjoy it.

About noon Police Commissioner Woods called me to the telephone, told me hurriedly that Mr. Morgan had been “shot by a German,” and told me to get down to Glen Cove as fast as possible. “Find out the man’s motives and any accomplices he had,” the commissioner said. “Keep in touch with me.” And hung up. I found Detective Coy of the Bomb Squad, and a patrolman who knew German in case we should need an interpreter, and after some delay in getting a car, we hastened to the little Glen Cove jail.

Then, at four o’clock, for the first time, I was told the facts as Glen Cove knew them. A search of Holt’s person had disclosed two revolvers, three sticks of dynamite, a number of loose cartridges, a cartoon clipped from a Philadelphia newspaper, an express receipt, and a scrap of paper bearing the names in pencilled handwriting of Mr. Morgan’s children. Frank McCahill, the constable in charge, showed me the statement Holt had made, and supplied the further information that Holt had been identified by some of Mr. Morgan’s employees as a man who had been seen on the estate two days before--on Thursday. Glen Cove had been in a turmoil since the shooting. Newspaper reporters and photographers had flocked to the jail, had taken photographs of the prisoner, and already prints of the photographs were on their way to every large newspaper in the country. His statement, as well as a description of the man, had been telegraphed over the Associated and United Press wires in every direction. So I decided to have a talk with the prisoner himself.

He was brought out of his cell, and we sat in comparative privacy on two camp-stools in the corridor. He was a frail, slight fellow, with deep eye-sockets, a prominent hook-nose, and a retreating chin. His accent was certainly German. His name, he said, was Frank Holt, and he was born in the United States. He told me he was forty years old, that his father and mother had been born in America, although they had both French and German ancestors, and that his wife and two children were in Dallas. For several years, he said, he had taught in Vanderbilt University, and during the year just past had been instructor in German in Cornell University, at Ithaca. He had left Ithaca two weeks before, and had stopped at a Mills Hotel in New York before coming down to Glen Cove.

“What did you try to kill Mr. Morgan for?” I asked.

“I didn’t intend to kill him. I want to persuade him to use his influence to stop the shipment of ammunition to Europe.”

“Well, you chose a pretty strong means of persuading him, didn’t you? What was the dynamite for?”

“I was going to show him what was causing all the trouble--explosives.”

He answered frankly, but not completely. The scrap of paper bearing the names of the Morgan children, he said, was only a memorandum; he had intended to hold them hostage until Mr. Morgan promised to exert himself to stop the export of supplies to the Allies. No amount of questioning would bring an answer as to where he had bought the dynamite, but he readily volunteered the approximate addresses of the shops where he had purchased the revolvers and cartridges. These facts gave me something to work on, and I went outside to a telephone while he was locked up again.

Meanwhile the whole United States had been taking a keen interest in the case. Holt’s statement had reached Washington on the Associated Press wire, and was delivered to Captain Boardman of the Washington Police. Captain Boardman had been busy all morning throwing out lines on the Capitol case, and attempting to trace the author of the R. Pearce letters, which had been mailed in the city about nine o’clock of the previous evening. He read the Pearce letter over several times in search of some clue to the writer. Presently the Holt statement came in. From the two communications these sentences met the Captain’s eyes:

_Pearce_

“We would, of course, not sell to the Germans if they could buy
here, and since so far we only sold to the Allies, neither side
should object if we stopped.”

_Holt_

“If Germany should be able to buy munitions here we would, of
course, positively refuse to sell to her.”

Captain Boardman’s next move was to wire to his chief, Major Pullman, who happened to be in New York to attend that same field day that Coy and I had missed. His message, dated 2 P. M. (while we were on the way to Glen Cove), read:

“Ascertain from F. Holt, in custody at Glen Cove, N. Y., for
shooting J. P. Morgan, his whereabouts Thursday and Friday, as
he may have placed the bomb in the Capitol here Friday night.”

This message, sent in care of Inspector Faurot, was relayed to us at Glen Cove by Guy Scull, deputy commissioner, but not until after the Associated Press man at the jail had had a tip telegraphed from his Washington office to ask Holt the same question. Holt denied that he had been in Washington, flatly. But McCahill knew he had been in Glen Cove Thursday, so at 5 P. M. he telegraphed Captain Boardman:

“F. Holt was in Glen Cove Thursday, July 1, P. M.”

I telephoned headquarters the numbers of the revolvers, and the neighborhood in which Holt said he had bought them. Several members of the squad started out from headquarters to identify the pawnshops, and to find out what they could of the history of three sticks of dynamite marked “Keystone National Powder Company. 60 per cent. Emporium, Pa.”

Holt had proved obstinate to all questions of the source of his supply of dynamite. The man was getting tired: he had had a hard day, had been considerably battered, had been interviewed, photographed, harried with questions, his ankles and wrists ached, his head throbbed, and his mind, which though alert and active, was none too stable, was showing signs of exhaustion. His condition suggested that he might be in a mood to supply some of the further information we needed, so I suggested that we take an automobile ride and he could show me where he had been the day before. He protested at once.

“No! My head is aching, and you want to take me on a ride and make a show of me to the morbid crowd. I will not tell you--not until later. Later perhaps, but not now!”

“All right,” I answered. “Later.”

Then I decided we had better get our information down on paper in a formal examination.

The meeting convened at once, with Coy, McCahill, a county detective from Mineola, two deputy sheriffs, two patrolmen, a stenographer and myself as board of inquiry. It may serve to describe the fellow’s manner, as well as to bring out what the examination further disclosed, if we make use here of extracts from the proceedings:

_Question._ Where were you born?

_Answer._ Somehow my brain is in such a shape that I can’t remember--Wisconsin, I know. I don’t know what it is that affected me--something inside of me--maybe it is the shock I got from that.

_Q._ You speak with a German accent. Were you born in Germany, or in any of the European countries--tell me the truth.

_A._ Now listen. That has been said before--that I speak with a foreign accent. That is because I speak several languages. I speak French, German, Spanish, and all that. That is the cause of that, you see?

_Q._ We will eliminate the trouble of asking you questions if you will tell us the town or city in which you were born.

_A._ Yes. Now I am trying to think (a pause) I will have to disappoint you.

_Q._ Your memory is very clear on other things.

_A._ As I told you, I have been lying there, thinking, thinking.

I took up the matter of the express receipt found on him:

_Q._ On June 11, 1915, you shipped a box by the American Express Company to D. F. Sensabaugh, 101 South Marsalis Street, Dallas, Texas. What did that box contain?