Part 9

They were nothing more romantic than fly-by-night stevedores whom the lighter companies engaged at the sugar wharves to load cargoes. They worked by the day, or by the job, there were always plenty loitering around to be hired, and they drew their pay and went their way. No one ever had to wonder who they were or where they came from, for a stout body was all the recommendation a Chenango required. They were a nondescript type of common labor, the same, I suspect, that carried materials for the Tower of Babel, and speaking almost as many tongues. The same face rarely appeared a second time to be hired--not that there was anything particularly unpleasant about the work, but rather that all work is repulsive to a Chenango. He is the hobo of labor and if the same man had been re-hired, no one would have noticed or cared. We paid such attention to them as their variety permitted--followed them to all the points of the compass, and watched them closely while they worked, to see whether any of them seemed to linger aboard in the cargo, or carried any suspicious package. The wickedest thing we found was an occasional pint flask on the hip, which was no proof of any special criminal affairs.

Ever since we had examined the _Kirkoswald_ bomb we had had lines out to follow the sale of chlorate of potash and sulphuric acid--the ingredients of the bomb. We examined reams of sales’ records submitted by explosive and chemical manufacturers, traced dozens of reports from drug stores, and found nothing of consequence. Those two substances are widely and harmlessly used, and rarely purchased in small quantities by any individual whose intentions might excite suspicion. Under our rigid city explosives’ laws investigation of purchases was facilitated for us, but all the facility in the world could not help the case without anything to investigate. So passed September and a part of October, and just about the time when the bomb case was growing dull and the ship fires which were constantly occurring had almost found us calloused, the French Government, with traditional courtesy, helped us out again, and blew our sugar theory into many and small pieces.

Captain Martyn, the French military attaché in New York, telephoned to say that he thought we would be interested in a man who he believed was trying to buy some explosive. What kind? Trinitro-toluol, or “TNT,” one of the most violent propellants used in modern shell. Yes, we would be interested.

A war exporter, Wettig by name, had told Captain Martyn that a fellow with whom he shared office space had asked him to obtain a quantity of TNT--a small quantity, for trial purposes. The purchaser, who was known both as Paul Siebs and Karl Oppegaarde, and who lived at the Hotel Breslin, directed Wettig to deliver the material to a Jersey address and said he would then receive payment. On the axiom that a bomb in the hand is worth two in someone else’s, we were introduced to Wettig, and formulated with him a plan to follow the explosive. So on Thursday, October 21, Detective Barnitz accompanied Wettig to a “dynamite store” at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where the latter bought some 25 pounds of TNT. The two returned to New York with their package. We looked up Mr. Oppegaarde and asked him what he proposed to do with his purchase. He said he really hadn’t the slightest idea: an acquaintance of his, a war broker named Max Breitung, had referred a certain Dr. Herbert Kienzle, a German clock-maker, to him as a likely person to obtain explosives. Dr. Kienzle had placed the order, had wanted it delivered at a garage in Main Street, Weehawken, to a man who bore the name of Fay, and who had assured Siebs that when he had it delivered he would be paid for his services. Further than that he knew nothing. Nobody seemed to know anything, although here was a considerable amount of vicious explosive in which five men were very much interested. We spent the rest of that day in looking up what we could of the players in this little game of “passing the TNT”--from Kienzle to Breitung to Siebs to Wettig to Fay.

Six men were assigned to the case: Murphy, Walsh, Fenelly, Sterett, Coy and Barnitz, and they most admirably stayed on the job. On Friday Detectives Barnitz and Coy took the explosive to the Weehawken garage. Fay was not there, but a man who was there told the detectives he lived at 28 Fifth Street, so the men from the Bomb Squad and their package called at the boarding house where Fay lived. Again he was not to be found, but our men had a chat with the landlady, who told them that Mr. Fay was a real nice gentleman who had lived there with his friend Mr. Scholz for a month, always paid his bills, subscribed to a magazine, and was working on inventions, or at least so she thought, because he used a table to draw plans on. Sociable, too--

They left the TNT for him. I ought to remind the reader that it is harmless unless confined or heated, and cannot be properly exploded without a proper detonating charge. It may have been a bit rough on the boarding house, but we had gone to deliver the goods to Fay; Wettig had told him they would be delivered (though not by whom) and we had to carry out the plan even though Fay was not at home.

At the same hour, across the Hudson Detectives Coy, Walsh and Sterett learned why Fay had not been receiving visitors, for they found him in Siebs’s company in the Hotel Breslin. Effacing themselves until the interview was over, they tailed Fay to the West 42nd Street ferry, then across the river to Weehawken, up the long hill to the town, and to his garage at 212 Main Street. In the early evening an automobile emerged from the garage, driven by Fay and containing another passenger, and wound out of town in a northerly direction along the Palisades. Behind it was a police car. North of Weehawken a few miles where the country is inhabited by installment-plan “villas,” moving-picture studios and scrub-oak trees, Fay stopped his car at the roadside and disappeared with the other man into the underbrush and then into the deeper woods. The police car waited until they returned, and followed them back to their boarding house, where the detectives took up a vigil outside.

A New York policeman has not the power of arrest in another state, and it began to look as though we might have to make an arrest in Jersey, so Chief Flynn assigned Secret Service Agents Burke and Savage to the case and they joined forces with us Saturday morning. Detectives Barnitz, Coy, Walsh, Sterett, Fenelly and Murphy were watching the house in Weehawken. About noon Fay and his companion appeared, and got aboard a Grantwood street-car. The Bomb Squad followed at a discreet distance to the point where the men had dodged into the woods the night before. Barnitz, who was in command, sent Sterett and Coy in after them. But nature was against us, for the fallen leaves carpeting the woods crackled under foot, and to snap a twig was to shout one’s presence through the clear air. Twice Fay turned sharply around and peered through the trees. The two detectives were nearly discovered on both occasions. They finally decided that it would be impossible to approach their men without alarming them, so they returned to the waiting automobile. The police party waited an hour or more, and then realized that Fay and his companion had evidently gone out the other side of the woods and so worked their way back to civilization.

Barnitz thought and acted swiftly. He sent Sterett and Coy at once to New York to cover Dr. Kienzle, on the chance that Fay might get into communication with him--it was a long chance, but the only one that offered, for the men were now lost to us. Barnitz, Murphy, Fenelly and Walsh returned to Weehawken to watch Fay’s house. For two hours nothing happened to interest them, and Barnitz was beginning to wonder whether he would ever see his quarry again when an express wagon drove up and stopped at 28 Fifth Street. The driver presently trundled a trunk out of the house, swung it up into his wagon and drove off. The police car idled along behind him for a mile or so through the Weehawken streets, and the wagon stopped at another house. While the driver was indoors this time, Fenelly, who was roughly dressed and light of foot, slipped up behind the wagon, vaulted into the back of it, took one look at the trunk and rejoined the others. “There’s a plain calling-card on the trunk. It reads ‘Walter Scholz,’” he said. Again the expressman headed a small parade, which terminated when the detectives saw him leave the trunk in a storage warehouse. Barnitz dared not follow it there for fear of arousing suspicion, and he figured that the trunk would probably not be removed during the week-end at least. The detectives once more returned to the boarding house and resumed their tedious watch.

The evening passed, and there was no word either from Coy and Sterett or the lost men. Late fall evenings in Weehawken are cold. Some time after midnight two figures came up the street, and as they turned in to the boarding house we saw they were Fay and Scholz. Out of the shadows a moment later Sterett and Coy slipped up to the car--“I could have kissed ’em both,” Barnitz said afterward. They had covered the office of the Kienzle Clock Company at 41 Park Place, picked up Dr. Kienzle as he left the office, tailed him until five in the afternoon, and then saw him enter the lobby of the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway--where he met Fay and Scholz! The men conversed for a few moments, and Fay excused himself. He went to a telephone booth and closed the door. Sterett went into the next booth. Through the thin partition he heard Fay call the garage, ask whether a package had been delivered to him there, then say “it hasn’t, eh?” and hang up the receiver. He rejoined Scholz and Kienzle and the three went to a Fulton Street restaurant to dine. The detectives went to the restaurant but did not dine, and when the Germans left, and Kienzle parted from the others, they tailed Fay and Scholz to Grand Central Palace, saw them appropriate two young women, dance with them, pledge them in a few drinks, and finally leave them and return to Weehawken.

That trunk episode made us uneasy. It might have meant that they had been frightened and were going to disappear, and it certainly signified their intention of moving. We decided to force the issue, and accordingly in the small hours of Sunday morning we directed Wettig, of whom, of course, Fay had no suspicions, to call at Fay’s house later in the forenoon to arrange to test the TNT. From the automobile, which was parked at the street-corner some distance from the house, the detectives saw Wettig enter, and in a few moments saw him come out-of-doors with Fay and Scholz. They strolled to the street-car line, allowed two cars to pass unsignalled, and then, suddenly, hailed a third. It had closed doors, and when Murphy, Fenelly, and Coy, seeing the men climbing aboard, tried to reach the car themselves, the doors had slammed in their faces and the car was on its way. Somewhere in the shuffle Walsh had been mislaid--he had been last seen up the block covering an alley which led back of the boarding house. There was no time to pick him up, and the automobile followed the car to Grantwood and the now familiar woods. At times the car was out of sight of the pursuers, and they fully expected to lose their men again. But from far in the rear they saw the car stop opposite the woods. The doors snapped open, and the first person to set foot on the ground was Walsh. The second and third were Fay and Scholz, and the last, Wettig. Walsh had seen them climb aboard in Weehawken, and had promptly sprinted for the next corner ahead, where he caught the car! That was good shadowing technique.

The Germans slipped into the protection of the underbrush immediately. Barnitz was not disposed to let them get away again, so he spread out his forces so as to follow the party and finally surround it, and the Bomb Squad, the Secret Service and two members of the Weehawken police entered the wood and wove a circle about their victims. As they closed in they saw Fay enter a little shack in the depth of the brush, and bring out a package, from which he took a pinch of some material and placed it on a rock. With a nice new hammer he dealt the rock a sharp blow, there was a loud report, and the handle snapped in his hand. The detectives closed in at once, and Barnitz said, “You’re under arrest!”

“Who is in charge of you all?” Fay asked.

“I am,” Barnitz replied.

“Well, I will tell you that I am not going to be placed under arrest,” Fay announced. “If I am, great people will suffer! You will surely have war. It cannot be--it is impossible. I will give you any amount of money if you will let me go.”

This was good news, not for its financial content but because we had no previous evidence against this man Fay save that he had TNT in his possession. Here he was, trying to confirm our suspicions.

“How much will you give me?” Barnitz parleyed.

“All you want--any amount!”

“Fifty thousand?”

“Yes, fifty thousand, if you want it.”

“Got it with you?” Barnitz asked instantly.

“No, I haven’t got it all, but I can get it. I’ll pay you a hundred dollars now as a guarantee, and I’ll give you the balance at noon to-morrow.”

Barnitz called two of the other men. “Get this,” he said, and turning to Fay: “All right, where’s your money?” Fay paid him. Then they took him to the Weehawken headquarters, guilty at least of attempted bribery, and Barnitz turned in the cash as Exhibit A.

We suspected that he had something more than the possession of explosives to conceal, and so he had, for a search of his rooms and the garage brought to light the parts for a number of thoroughly ingenious mechanical contrivances which, although they were of a new type, we immediately recognized as bombs. In a packing case at the storage warehouse were four bombs finished and ready to fill. He had apparently intended to manufacture them on a large scale, for in addition to his trial quantity of TNT Fay had twenty-five sticks of dynamite, 450 pounds of chlorate of potash, four hundred percussion caps, and two hundred bomb cylinders. Apparently, too, he had German sympathies, for we found in his rooms a regulation German army pistol, loaded. The discovery of a chart of New York harbor, and the information, which we soon got, that he had a motorboat in a slip opposite West 42nd Street, pointed the finger of guilt toward the waterfront--which after all those months of waiting was the direction in which we were most interested.

Fay told his story. He was a lieutenant of the German Army, detached for special secret service. He ascribed his detachment from his command to his own brilliant realization, as he was on the fighting front in France, that if all the American shells that were being fired at him from French seventy-fives and British eighteen-pounders could be sunk before they reached France they would not cause his countrymen so much annoyance, and also that pushed to its capacity that idea would probably influence the outcome of the war. The fact is that Fay’s career, training, education, languages and character were well known to the secret service in Berlin, and that when they wanted to assign a reliable and desperate man to Captain von Papen in New York, they sent him. They knew that Fay had spent years in America, and that he was trained in mechanics. They gave him $4,000 and a plan of campaign, and said: “Go west.”

It was natural that when he landed he should seek out his brother-in-law, Walter Scholz, who was working as gardener on an estate in Connecticut. It was natural, too, that when he set about getting supplies for his bombs he should call on Dr. Kienzle, who made clock machinery, for Dr. Kienzle had already written to the German secret service in Berlin recommending just such work as Fay had come to undertake. When he came to require explosives, it was only natural that Kienzle should refer him to his friend Max Breitung, with the result which we have seen, and naturally Paul Daeche, who was a good friend of both Kienzle and Breitung (he had tried to return to Germany with both of them on the _Kronprinzessin Cecilie_ when she put out of New York and put in to Bar Harbor in late July, 1914)--naturally Daeche was interested in Fay’s projects and devices, and helped him with them. Daeche was one of those doubtful Germans who had come to America to “study business methods”--in short a commercial spy, willing to make a living.

Fay was crestfallen after his arrest. He worried, first, over what his government would think of him when he had left home promising that not a single munitions’ ship would leave New York and reach the Allies; second, because revealing his commission to destroy those ships would place Germany in a bad light with other neutral nations; third, for fear he might implicate the Imperial German Embassy at Washington. He protected the Embassy for a time, and then admitted that his plans had only been waiting a word from von Papen and Boy-Ed for consummation. His mines were all ready to be set, and the attachés, whom he had met, had not given the word. All his clever craftsmanship had gone for nothing.

The bombs were so constructed that they might be attached under water to the rudder-post of a vessel as she lay at her pier. Inside the bomb case was a clockwork, so poised as to fire two rifle cartridges into a chamber of ninety pounds of TNT. Lieut. Robert S. Glasburn, of Fort Wadsworth, who testified at Fay’s trial, is my authority for the statement that the government requires only 100 pounds of TNT, exploded at a depth of fifteen feet under water, to destroy a dreadnought; Fay’s ninety pounds would have torn the rudder out like a toothpick and ripped away the entire after part of the vessel. The helmsman of the vessel himself was unconsciously to have set the bomb off, for the clockwork was geared to a wire attached to the rudder itself in such a way that each normal swing of the rudder would wind up the mechanism until it fired the cartridge. The bomb chamber was fitted with rubber gaskets so that no water would be admitted before the charge had done its work. Fay was a skilful hand, and had done the assembling himself. Scholz bought the materials at various machine shops about New York, Kienzle supplied the mechanisms and approved the finished product. Breitung contributed 400 pounds of chlorate of potash to make a German holiday, and Daeche just hung around and helped everybody.

Fay knew it was easy to approach a pier from the water-side, for he had spent hours fishing idly in the river to determine that very fact. Just as soon as the military attaché said the word, he and Scholz were to put out into the darkness of the river in their fast motorboat and visit ten ships sailing for England and France, donning a diver’s suit, and attaching a bomb to each rudder. He would first slip alongside the police patrol boats, whose haunts he knew, and steal the guns from them, counting on the swiftness of his own craft to get away from pursuers. He even entertained the possibility of visiting the British patrol cruisers outside the harbor to fix bombs to them--though hardly seriously, I suspect. He had made a different type of bomb, resembling a telescope, in which the carefully timed dissolution of a white powder would release a firing pin on a large quantity of potassium chlorate. This type he proposed to smuggle into the cargo. When he had created such a reign of terror in New York harbor that no ship dared leave, he would go to Boston and Philadelphia and do likewise, then to Chicago and Buffalo to paralyze lake shipping, and thence to New Orleans and San Francisco and home by way of New York or Mexico. It was a great pity, he said, that he had been arrested, for this program had been cancelled. He wished he had got word to start sooner. He had had a few bombs ready for some time. Then there came a slack period, and he sent Daeche to Bridgeport on a little side mission for Germany: to get some dum-dum bullets. These Fay intended to forward to Berlin through von Papen to support a protest from Germany to the United States that we were shipping dum-dum bullets to the Allies. We were not, naturally, but that did not prevent his bringing back a few bullets with the jackets carefully notched by a German agent in Bridgeport.

We had heard enough of what he had intended to do, and of his disappointment. What had he accomplished? What ships had he blown up? Was he responsible for the five fires in the hold of the _Craigside_ on July 24? No. Did he make the bombs found on the _Arabic_ on July 27? Did he cause the fires on the _Assuncion de Larrinaga_, the _Rotterdam_ or the _Santa Anna_, and did he put a bomb aboard the _Williston_? He did not, he assured me.

I showed him the _Kirkoswald_ bomb.

“Did you ever see that?”

“No,” he answered.

“Didn’t you make that?”

“I did not,” he replied, and laughed. “That’s a joke. I see now why they sent me over to this country--they wanted someone to make bombs that would do some damage. That’s crude work.”

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.