Part 10

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.

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_!”

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.