Part 11

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.