key,” Abarno muttered. Polignani did so. Abarno opened the trunk and
took out the two bombs. “You take one and I’ll take the other,” he
whispered. “Come on. Put it under your coat.”
When they started down Third Avenue the two shadows--who had also risen
early--disengaged themselves from the doorways where they were idling
and proceeded at an even pace down the Avenue behind the men. A few
hundred yards or so in the rear of the procession was a limousine, and
I was in the limousine. I could spot the men distinctly, and I had to
chuckle when I saw them catch sight of a uniformed officer a block or
so ahead and hastily cross the street. The same thing occurred twice
again in the course of the march. Our parade continued. No one but
ourselves paid any attention to the two laborers who were carrying
lumpy bundles under their coats.
At Fifty-third Street my chauffeur turned west and slipped into high
speed. We were at the Cathedral in a minute more, and I jumped out and
hurried into the vestibule. No one there but three or four scrub-women,
puttering around in the half-light with their mops and pails. Several
hundred worshippers were already gathered in the front of the nave,
where Bishop Hayes was conducting early mass. As I passed into the body
of the church there was no one near except an elderly usher, with white
hair and beard. I stepped into a dark corner and waited.
[Illustration: 1. Detective George D. Barnitz
2. Detective Patrick Walsh
3. Detective James Sterett
4. Left to right: Patrick Walsh, Jerome Murphy and James Sterett]
A matter of two or three minutes passed, though it seemed much longer.
Then I saw Abarno and Polignani enter the vestibule, cross it and enter
the church itself, taking their cigars out of their mouths as they
turned towards the north aisle. Abarno led the way. At the tenth pew
he motioned to Polignani to sit there, and Polignani obeyed, dropping
to his knees in prayer. Abarno continued to the sixth pew ahead. Two
of the scrub-women had deserted their mops, and were dusting the pews
along the north aisle near the newcomers. Abarno rested for a moment in
his pew, with his head and body bent as if in prayer, then rose and
rejoined Polignani. Again he rose, and this time moved toward the north
end of the altar, where he crouched for several seconds, placing his
bomb against a great pillar. With his other hand he flicked the ashes
from the coal of his cigar and touched the glowing end to the fuse. He
had taken perhaps three steps down the aisle again when the scrub-woman
stopped plying her dust-cloth. She fastened an iron grip on Abarno’s
arms and hustled him down the aisle so swiftly that no one remarked the
affair. The scrub-woman was Detective Walsh, disguised. The elderly
usher passed the two and hurried to the spot where Abarno had crouched
by the pillar. He saw the lighted fuse and pinched it out with his
fingers. The elderly usher, underneath his makeup, was Lieutenant
Barnitz. Polignani was promptly placed under arrest and led to the
vestibule with Abarno--for the evidence was not yet all in.
Abarno immediately suspected Carbone of treachery. He protested
violently that the missing conspirator had instigated the whole affair,
that it was his idea, that he had made the bombs, and that he could
be found living with a Hungarian-Jewish family on the fourth floor of
a house at 216 East 67th Street. He was fluent in the accusations he
made against Carbone, and he grew more fluent as he recovered from the
fright of his arrest. So while we escorted the two bombs and the two
prisoners to headquarters, other members of the Bomb Squad visited
Carbone and placed him under arrest.
From them at headquarters we verified the story as we already knew it.
Each man accused the other. Both men exonerated Polignani of any part
in suggesting the plot or in making the bombs for several days after
their arrest. But Polignani’s true identity could not be unknown to
them indefinitely, of course, and when they found out that they had
been confiding in a full-fledged detective--ah, then the storm broke!
Prompted, I suspect, by pseudo-legal advice, they cried “Frame-up!”
until they grew hoarse, but it was too late, for in the possession of
Assistant District Attorney Arthur Train was already a sworn statement
which fixed their guilt by their own confession.
[Illustration: 1. The Dagger Threat to Polignani
2. The Black Hand Threat
3. Frank Abarno
4. Carmine Carbone]
The anarchists rushed to their rescue, but their efforts were chiefly
verbal. At the Brescia Circle, and at I. W. W. headquarters at 64 East
4th Street, it was common gossip that counsel for the defendants were
going to supply 45 or 50 witnesses to swear that Polignani had invited
them to make bombs. This I had enjoined him strictly not to do,
as a newcomer who talks bombs is a suspicious character in anarchist
circles. I know he obeyed. There was organized a “Carbone ed Abarno
Defence Committee” with headquarters at 2205 Third Avenue, which
solicited other neighboring Italian clubs with anarchistic tendencies
for support of the two. Polignani’s photograph appeared presently in a
New York Italian newspaper with this caption:
“The filthy carrion who by order of the Police of New York
devised the bomb plot which led up to the arrest of Abarno and
Carbone, now before the Courts. All of us comrades will keep
this in mind.”
He received several threatening anonymous letters, some bearing the
familiar “black hand,” others sketching on newspaper photographs of him
the point in his anatomy at which he might expect to feel the dagger of
revenge; others mere bombastic defiance. (The anonymous letter-writer
is very often a courageous soul who spells out his messages with
letters and words clipped from newspapers, so that his handwriting will
not betray him.)
What was the reward of those five months invested in patience? The
two prisoners convicted and sentenced to terms of from six to twelve
years, was one result. But a far greater one was a sharp decrease in
bomb-throwing in New York, and perhaps the most gratifying was the
discord which grew in the Brescia Circle. The group was frightened,
and the members began to suspect each other of espionage. One former
anarchist was quoted as saying that he wouldn’t even trust himself--he
had been dreaming the night before that he was a spy. The Brescia
Circle became disorganized, and several other similar groups in the
city suffered the same fate. Their leaders drifted away--and got into
more trouble, as we shall see later.
We never found the original of the treatise on bombs. Carbone said he
had destroyed it. But there are probably other copies from the same
press in the hands of accredited bomb-throwers. If not, they may apply
to the New York police department.
IV
THE HINDU-BOCHE FAILURES
Bret Harte said that “the heathen Chinee” was peculiar. The British
have learned long since that the Hindu, being an Oriental, cannot
help being equally “peculiar,” and it is a great tribute to British
persistence that it has labored so hard and so successfully in the good
government of a people so temperamentally complex. They have studied
the Hindu, and have understood him as well as may be. Understanding him
they have watched him. When war broke out, this great Oriental empire
presented to Britain a grave problem, for as a Hindu editor in the
United States phrased it, “England is Germany’s enemy. England is our
enemy. Our enemy’s enemy is our friend.”
It is not in my intention or power to discuss the methods which England
employed to maintain strict loyalty in the Indian peninsula, but to
outline here the part we played in uncovering a plot which threatened
seriously to complicate her efforts around on the other side of the
earth.
Scotland Yard told us in February, 1917, that Hindus were conspiring in
bomb plots with certain Germans in the United States. If it was true,
it was against the laws of our country. They supplied us with a few
names, but tactfully suggested that inasmuch as it was our country and
our laws which the plotters were attempting to disturb, we would prefer
to develop the case ourselves. Various authorities in this country had
already had strong suspicions of the British claims, but as yet those
suspicions had not grown to proof of any specific act. So we went to
work.
Among other names which were furnished us was that of one Chakravarty,
whose address was 364 West 120th Street, New York. For more than a
fortnight men of the Bomb Squad under Mr. (now Lieut.-Col.) Nicholas
Biddle, as special aid to the commissioner, watched that house. They
hired a room opposite, where through a slit in the window shade they
could keep the doorway under observation. At the hours when working New
York leaves its home to make money, and comes home at night having made
it, the door was rarely used, but sometimes at mid-forenoon, sometimes
in the small hours of the morning, the men on watch saw several
dark-skinned individuals pass in and out of the house. The building
itself gave no sign of suspicious activity. We were on the brink of
war, and as was the case in most of the other houses in the block, an
American flag hung draped in the front window. What went on behind the
camouflage screen we did not know. Now and then our men, hiding in the
shadow of the areaway, would go quietly up into the dark doorway and
listen, but the house never gave out a sound. There was certainly no
indication that these Hindus were conspiring with the Imperial German
Government in dynamite plots.
We knew certain East Indians who could be depended upon, and told them
to call upon Chakravarty. This ruse failed because Chakravarty never
presented to the callers anything but a guileless reception. So far
as they could learn his occupation was that of manufacturer of pills;
he and a certain Ernest Sekunna constituted the Omin Company, which
company packed in aluminum boxes and sold to a limited clientele pills
which like most patent remedies were recommended for any ailment from
indigestion up or down--if the pill sold, then it was a success. This
news did not quiet our impatience, and we decided on a raid.
On the night of March 7, 1917, Detectives Barnitz, Coy, Randolph,
Murphy, Jenkins, Walsh, Sterett and Fenelly called at the house,
Sterett, pretending to be a messenger, and carrying a dummy package,
presenting himself at the front door, and the rest of the party
covering other avenues of escape. The portal was opened by a little
Hindu who looked up innocently to Sterett and said that Dr. Chakravarty
was not in--he had gone to Boston. The detectives announced their
intention of searching the house. The little man protested, and was
given certain short reasons why the search was in order. Surprise,
injured innocence, and irritation crossed his olive-drab face, and
he announced that he was a patriotic American and that he had never
done anything to break the laws of the United States. If we wanted
Dr. Chakravarty, he said, we should go and get him, and not disturb a
peaceful household in this way, and he added that Chakravarty had left
for New England months before, leaving no address. In this the little
Hindu was borne out by the answers which the other occupant of the
house gave to our questions--this was Sekunna, a German of thirty-five
or so. We searched the house, and took the two prisoners and
considerable material to headquarters.
[Illustration: A Handbill, printed in Hindu, used by the Hindu-Boche
Conspirators]
The search disclosed a supply of literature of the Omin Company
describing the properties of its pills, a photograph of Sekunna and
Chakravarty as the turbaned benefactors of an unhealthy world, and a
number of express money-order receipts, deeds and a bank book which
showed the missing Chakravarty to be one who had acquired a good deal
of money during the past two years. The photograph on closer inspection
revealed that the little prisoner was Dr. Chakravarty himself. Sekunna
verified this, and Chakravarty, confronted by it, admitted it.
We asked the prisoner how he had suddenly come by the $60,000 which
his books showed. He said that it was his inheritance from the estate
of his grandfather in India, and that no less a personage than
Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, had paid him, in December, 1916,
$25,000 of the $45,000 due from the estate. About $35,000 had been
given him, he added, by a lawyer named Chatterji, from Pegu, Burma, in
March, 1916.
So far as he gave us his history, it related that he had graduated from
the University of Calcutta, and had lived for a time in London, and
later in Paris, before coming to the United States. He had heard that
there was a warrant out for his arrest in India for sedition, probably
due, he suggested, to his having written several articles on the
subject of British Rule.
“Have you been to Germany recently?” I asked.
“Of course not,” he answered. “How could I get there, with the British
watching for me? They would arrest me if I tried to go. Why do you ask
that?”
“Because I wanted to know,” I answered. I had good reason to believe
that he had been there because among his effects we found several
exhibits which pointed toward such a trip. A letter from a woman in
Florida dated December 13, 1915, said:
“I would never for one moment try to deter you from the effort or
achievement of your lofty ideals and noble aims, for in this as in many
other things my spirit accords with yours. Brother dear, _do_ nothing,
_say_ nothing, _trust_ nobody, without extreme caution. God speed you.
God hasten your return to those who are interested in you, and in all
in which you are interested. Bless you, precious brother.”
This indicated a journey, clearly. A cablegram dated Bergen, Norway,
Dec. 23, 1915, addressed to Sekunna, read, “Safe arrival here,” and
took him as far as the Continent, at least. Three postcards supplied
the rest of the information; they were addressed by Sekunna to
himself at a Berlin address, and bore the instructions, “Return to
Sender, E. A. Sekunna, Omin Company, 417 E. 142nd Street, New York
City”; postmarked Berlin in December and January, they suggested
that Chakravarty had used them as part of a pre-arranged system of
communication with America in which he did not wish his own name used.
I found among the papers a photographic print of Chakravarty wearing
a fez, which I knew was not an orthodox head-dress for a Bengalese.
Furthermore, it struck me that the print was of the size and finish
usually used on passports for identification of the bearer. I showed it
to him, with the remark:
“Why do you tell me you haven’t been in Berlin, when you used this
photograph so you could get a passport as a Persian?”
He bit. “I see you got me,” he replied. “I lied to you. I want to tell
you a different story--the real one. I did go to Germany.”
“Why?”
“To see Wesendonck. He is a secretary for India of the German foreign
office. He wanted to make plans for propaganda for the liberation of
India from British rule.”
Chakravarty sat there and unfolded an amazing story. He touched
gingerly upon his own part in it at first, then evidently sensed the
fact that there were others in the plot guilty of perhaps no less
reprehensible but more violent crimes, and the little doctor’s capture
and confession not only gave clues to the authorities which enabled
them to follow up the outstanding German-Hindu plots in America, but
developed prosecutions of the first magnitude and the keenest general
interest.
[Illustration: 1. Franz Schulenberg
2. Ram Chandra
3. Ram Singh (on the left)
4. Dr. Chandra Chakravarty and Dr. Ernest Sekunna
5. Dr. Chandra Chakravarty in his Persian Dress]
The enterprises must be recounted out of their actual sequence.
The first he claimed to have had little part in--the project of an
uprising in India which its sponsors hoped would repeat the Mutiny of
1857--but with a more successful outcome. Captain Hans Tauscher, the
New York agent of the Krupp steel and munitions works, was in Berlin
when war broke out. He reported for active duty to Captain von Papen,
in New York, as soon as he could cross the Atlantic, and one of his
earliest services was the purchase of a large quantity of rifles, field
guns, swords and cartridges, which he stored in 200 West Houston
Street, New York. On January 9, 1915, he shipped a trainload of arms
and ammunition to San Diego, California. There it was loaded into a
little vessel, the _Annie Larsen_, which had been chartered by German
interests, and the _Annie Larsen_ put to sea, ostensibly for Mexico,
where revolutionary arms were in demand. Her real destination was a
rendezvous off Socorro Island with the _Maverick_, a tank-ship which
had been bought in San Francisco with German money. The _Maverick_
was to trans-ship the arms, flood them with oil in her cargo tanks in
case she might be searched, and proceed by way of Batavia and Bangkok
to Karachi, a seaport in India which is the gateway to the Punjab.
There she would be met by friendly fishing vessels who would land her
cargo, and if all went well, there would be a massacre of the garrison
of Karachi, and hell would break loose over India. The effect of such
an uprising upon Great Britain’s sorely tried military condition of
early 1915 would have been incalculable. The native troops in France
who were helping to stop the breach until England’s great armies could
be trained would have to be recalled, the semi-loyal tribes would have
seen their opportunity, Germany would hardly have hesitated to throw a
Turkish force at the northern passes, and altogether it would not have
been pleasant for the integrity of the British Empire.
The _Maverick_ and the _Annie Larsen_ missed connections at Socorro.
The _Annie Larsen_ wandered about the Pacific for some weeks and
eventually put into Hoquiam, Washington, where the United States
seized the arms. The _Maverick_ blundered from Socorro to San Diego,
to Hilo, Hawaii, to Anjer, Java, by way of Johnson Island, then to
Batavia, Java, where she was received with disappointment by a German
agent and where she was finally sold. The filibuster ended in flat
and costly failure: the arms cost not less than $100,000 and probably
$150,000, the freight to the Pacific Coast some $12,000, the charter
of the _Annie Larsen_ $19,000, the purchase of the _Maverick_ involved
hundreds of thousands, not to mention the individual fees of the
numerous agents employed.
We knew in a general way of this plot, though it remained for the
tireless efforts of United States District Attorney John W. Preston in
San Francisco to unearth the details. In a raid which had been made on
the office of Wolf von Igel, von Papen’s secretary, at 60 Wall Street,
New York, agents of the Department of Justice had found von Igel’s
memoranda of correspondence in arranging the expedition through the
San Francisco consulate. But Chakravarty said that the revolutionary
end of the project had been handled by another Hindu, Ram Chandra, and
denied that he was guilty of any part in it. Ram Chandra had negotiated
with the German consuls in Seattle and San Francisco, and through
them with Tauscher and von Papen. Chakravarty supplied the names of
Hindus who had sailed on the _Annie Larsen_, said that there had been
Filipinos and Germans aboard as well, and added that the Filipinos had
been transferred to a German ship, and had later escaped from her in a
motorboat while she was being pursued by a Japanese cruiser. But, he
said, he had nothing to do with it--it was Ram Chandra who was the real
agent.
It was this Ram Chandra who was editor of the Hindu revolutionary
newspaper _Ghadr_ (Mutiny) published at Berkeley, California. He
succeeded to the editor’s chair in 1914 when his predecessor, Har
Dayal, out on bail after an arrest for ultra-free speech, had fled
across the continent and the Atlantic Ocean to Berlin. There Dayal
established the Hindustani Revolutionary Committee, collaborating with,
taking orders from, and financed by the German Government, under the
direction of Herr Wesendonck of the Foreign Office. Ten million marks
had been placed to their credit, and German consulates throughout the
neutral world had instructions through their parent-embassies to render
all possible assistance to the revolutionary project, and to spend
whatever money might be necessary, charging it to the account of the
Indian Nationalist Party. Three hundred thousand dollars was invested
in China and Java. Hindus were sent through Persia and Afghanistan into
India with German credit to foster unrest, and Afghanistan itself was
full of spies trying to break the Amir’s promise, given to the British
Government at the outbreak of war, that he would maintain strict
neutrality. It was this same Har Dayal who conferred with Chakravarty
when the latter made his visit to Berlin in December, 1915. The reason
for this visit to Berlin came out very soon, and that will lead us in
turn to the second of the German-Hindu plots hatched in America.
[Illustration: The _Annie Larsen’s_ Cash Account
Gupta’s Code Message]
Chakravarty got bail from a surety company without much trouble. Two
or three days after his arrest he called me up on the telephone and
said that a man named Gupta had threatened him. “He says I must give
him $2,000. And there is another man named Wagel. He is a Hindu.
He wants $10,000 from me, otherwise he will do me harm. He already
has had $7,000 from the German Government in Mexico. He has demanded
$20,000,000 of Count von Bernstorff to finish up the revolution in
India.”
“Wait a minute, now,” I suggested. The figures were going to my head.
“Where is Wagel?”
“I do not know,” Chakravarty answered.
“Well, where is Gupta?”
“He is a student at Columbia,” replied the little man.
“All right, doctor,” I said, “we’ll not let any harm come to you.”
Detectives Coy and Walsh at once got on the trail of Gupta. They found
him in his dormitory room at 73 Livingston Hall, Columbia, and brought
him to headquarters. “I saw of Chakravarty’s arrest in the paper,” he
said, “and I thought I might be arrested if he implicated me.” Gupta
knew full well he would be arrested, for there was jealousy between the
two, and he went on to reveal why.
Heramba Lal Gupta was then thirty-two years old. Since his boyhood
in Calcutta he had been all over the world, and had studied in the
United States. In the spring of 1915 he had several conferences with
Captain von Papen in the city in which the military attaché conceived
such confidence in the young Hindu that he gave him $15,000 for
expense money and sent him to Chicago to confer with Gustav Jacobsen,
an ex-German consul. With him went Jodh Singh, another Hindu who had
migrated from Brazil to Berlin and thence to Captain von Papen, and an
art collector named Albert H. Wehde. They were joined by George Paul
Boehm and a German named Sterneck, and two plans were arranged. Gupta,
Singh and Wehde were to proceed to Japan to establish connections and
obtain assistance for fomenting Indian revolt. Boehm and Sterneck
were to go to the Philippines, pick up a third plotter, Chakravarty’s
lawyer-friend Chatterji, proceed thence to Java to meet two escaped
officers of the destroyed German cruiser _Emden_, and thence to the
Himalayan hills north of India, where Dr. Frederick A. Cook, the Arctic
romancer, was on an expedition. There they were to overpower the Cook
party, Boehm was to assume the explorer’s identity and travel about the
hills spreading sedition among the native tribes. This wild plan failed
completely, as the Germans never kept their appointment in Java. (Gupta
believed in preparedness to the extent of taking Boehm to several
shooting galleries in Chicago and practising pistol firing with him.)