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.
[Illustration:
_Copyright, by Underwood and Underwood, N. Y._
Lieutenant Fay’s Motor Boat]
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.”
[Illustration:
_Copyright, by Underwood and Underwood, N. Y._
The Rudder Bomb
A Closer View of the Rudder Bomb]
His answer was truthful. We had to admit it for there was absolutely no
evidence to connect him with any specific act outside his confession,
and we had to find comfort in the fact that he was guilty at least of
having intended to continue the reign of terror along the wharves.
Bombs had been found or fires had broken out on no less than twenty-two
vessels bound out of New York up to the time we closed on Fay--and not
one was his prey. He was tried with Scholz and Daeche. The only law
then applying to his case, and the one under which he was tried,
charged him with “conspiracy to defraud the insurance underwriters”
who had insured cargoes on certain ships. When the charge was read to
him, Fay innocently asked: “What are underwriters?” He found out. Fay
went to Atlanta for eight years, Scholz for six, and Daeche for four.
Kienzle and Breitung were not brought to trial and after we went to
war were invited to join various other Germans in an internment camp.
Fay had been at Atlanta a month when he escaped. German friends gave
him clothes and helped him to Baltimore, where Paul Koenig met him and
paid him $450, with injunctions to go to San Francisco and get more.
For some reason the fugitive feared that there was a plot against his
life in San Francisco, although he had protected the “great people,” so
instead of going west he fled immediately to Mexico. From there he fled
to Spain, and it was not until the summer of 1918 that he was caught
there.
He was a bold and important criminal in his field, and we were glad
to have brought him in. He was not the one we wanted most, not if our
sugar theory was sound. The pursuit of Fay had certainly scared that
theory up an alley. It was high time we got out of the alley and back
into Main Street.
VII
ALONG THE WATERFRONT
II
“_Damn Him, Rintelen!_”
The pursuit of Robert Fay unearthed what trial lawyers delight in
calling “not one scintilla of evidence” that he had actually set fire
to a ship. Fay was punished for what he intended to do and not for any
real achievement for the German cause.
Yet the thought persisted in our minds that he knew who was making and
placing ship bombs. He professed ignorance. “I do know this much,” he
said, after a long session of futile questioning, “I do know that a
certain man paid another man $10,000 to make those bombs. I won’t tell
you who he is, because I think he is now a prisoner in the Tower of
London, and he might get into more trouble. You can make what you like
out of that.”
We made this out of it--that the prisoner then in the Tower to whom
Fay referred was probably Franz Rintelen. He was a German of prominent
station who had had a vision quite like Fay’s--a vision of interrupting
American shipping, and so damming the flood of war supplies. In early
1915 he had come to America equipped with plenty of authority and a
bank credit limited only by the resources of the German Empire, and
had spent six months here trying to exercise that authority and spend
the money in numerous ways. He had tried to buy rifles of the American
government, he had fostered peace demonstrations, promoted strikes,
lobbied for an embargo on munitions and made himself busily useless in
numerous other ways, only to sail for home in the fall of the year--and
fall into the hands of the British.
But the charges which I have just cited, and which are now fully
confirmed against this man, were not then known to us, and Fay’s tip
was too ambiguous to help us at the moment. Instead of ceasing after
his arrest, the fires continued. The day after we caught Fay in the
woods the steamer _Rio Lages_ which had sailed a few days previously
took fire out at sea. A week later a blaze started in the hold of
the _Euterpe_. The _Rochambeau_, of the French line, caught fire at
sea on November 6, and the next day there was an explosion aboard
the _Ancona_. The _Tyningham_ suffered two fires on her voyage east
during early December. There was a maddening certainty about it all
that suggested that every ship that left port must have nothing in her
hold except hungry rats, parlor matches, oily waste and free kerosene.
Never in the history of the port had so many marine fires occurred in
a single year. Marine insurance was away up and our patience was away
down.
The steamship companies put on special details of guards to watch the
vessels from the moment they entered port until they sailed again.
We resumed patrolling the river in various disguises. Fay’s swift
motorboat had disappeared, but there were plenty of others, and the
men of the Bomb Squad suffered real hardship in all sorts of inclement
weather. It seemed as though every item of cargo was watched as it
passed into the hold, and every stranger about the piers carefully
followed, but there was absolutely nothing to excite suspicion. So we
returned to our sugar theory and the Chenangoes.
I mentioned the fact that they were a floating tribe in more senses
than one, and that the same man rarely came back twice for employment.
A few familiar faces, however, could occasionally be spotted in the
crowd at work loading the lighters. We made it our business to study
these steady workers and found them for the most part a harmless lot of
Scandinavians.
Those who came, worked once, and vanished, were of all nationalities,
with a considerable German representation. Some of them used to come
from Hoboken, and by a process of elimination we found that certain of
the Hoboken delegation were sailors from the idle North German Lloyd
and Hamburg-American ships. We followed them and asked enough questions
about them to learn the entire history of any civilized people, but
nothing in the form of legal evidence resulted. A friend who knew the
methods taught in the Wilhelmstrasse for destroying property said it
would be futile for us to follow those men anyway, for the destroying
agent himself rarely knows the men higher up, the real conspirators.
So it began to look as if even the arrest of a guilty Chenango would
not supply the background necessary to picture the bomb system in its
entirety.
On one of the early days of 1916 Detectives Barth, Corell and Senff
reported for duty and were assigned to Hoboken. They were instructed
to hang about the restaurants, saloons and hotels where the officers
and petty-officers from the German ships were accustomed to gather,
and posing as confidential German agents they were to fish about for
whatever might take their bait. All three men are fine Americans of
German descent, with an excellent command of the German language, so
they got on well with the longshore folk they met in the “stubes” of
Hoboken. They occasionally suggested in a vague way that they Were
the picked servants of the Kaiser, and aroused some interest and no
suspicion among their new acquaintances. Every man has more or less
desire to be a “secret service man” and in looking back on the German
antics in America during the war I think one may attribute as much of
their activity to the dramatic instinct, as to their cupidity or their
real patriotic zeal. (Paul Koenig is an exaggerated example of what
I mean.) And so it was with those to whom the three Bomb Squad men
talked: a nod here, and a wink there, a whisper and a wag of the head,
and they took on some importance.
[Illustration:
_Copyright, by International Film Service, Inc._
Franz Rintelen]
Their reward came when a German whom Barth had picked up suggested
quietly that he knew a man who had been doing work for the government
(German) and wouldn’t Barth like to meet him? Barth would. So with
some ceremony Barth was introduced as one of von Bernstorff’s special
agents to a funny little old man who looked like a cartoon of the late
Prussian eagle. He was Captain Charles von Kleist of Hoboken. The three
lunched together in Hahn’s restaurant, in Park Row, New York, and von
Kleist found Barth agreeable. He was very glad to meet a real agent,
for he had a grudge against a fellow over in Hoboken who said he was a
member of the German secret service.
“You can’t be too careful of those fellows,” Barth said. “There are a
lot of fakes around. What’s he done to you?”
“This Scheele, he has a laboratory, where he has been doing work,
making some things. I was his superintendent now for a long time, and
he owes me several hundred dollars, but he does not pay me. I think von
Igel ought to know about it, and perhaps Captain von Papen himself.”
“So do I,” said Barth. “I’ll see that it gets to him. What was it you
were doing over there?”
Von Kleist was a chemist. Dr. Walter T. Scheele had been employing him
in his laboratory at 1133 Clinton Street, Hoboken, in a factory which
was ostensibly for the manufacture of agricultural chemicals. The real
business they transacted was the manufacture of bombs. Ernest Becker,
the chief electrician of the North German Lloyd liner _Friedrich der
Grosse_, and Carl Schmidt, her chief engineer, had made the containers
out of sheet metal. These Becker had delivered to Scheele, and up in
the laboratory the containers had been filled with explosive. Becker
would come then and take them away, and the bombs had been used to
great advantage, von Kleist continued, in harassing the shipping. But
what good did it do him, he asked Barth, if he got no pay for it?
“You wait,” returned the “secret agent.” “I’ll get you fixed up. I know
a man who is close to von Igel, and I’ll have him meet you. If what you
say is true, you certainly have something coming to you. Wait till I
get this other man.”
A few days passed. Then von Kleist came again to Hahn’s restaurant, and
was introduced to “Herr Deane,” who Barth said spoke no German, but
was a good man in spite of the handicap. A trace of suspicion crossed
the old chemist’s face, and Barth hastened to add: “We have to use all
kinds of people to fool these stupid Yankees, see?” This bit of heavy
satire reassured von Kleist, and he found Deane a likable person, who
seemed interested in his case against Scheele. He went over the ground
again. “If you want any more proof I’ll show you,” he concluded. “Come
to my house.” “Deane” (who votes under the name of George D. Barnitz,
of the Bomb Squad) joined Barth and accompanied von Kleist to his house
at 1121 Garden Street, Hoboken, and out of the muddy back yard the old
man dug up an empty bomb container, _almost an exact duplicate of the
“Kirkoswald” bomb_! “There is one of them--and I have filled dozens
like that,” he said.
“Let’s go for a ride,” Barth suggested. “We can go down to Coney
Island and have supper--the hotel has opened up--and we’ll talk things
over.” The old man felt very amiable towards his new friends, and was
a talkative and appreciative guest. They dined at the Shelburne and
later Barnitz wrote out a statement of von Kleist’s services as the
latter outlined them. “This is just for the sake of regularity, you
understand. I have to have a written report to give to the chief, or
else you won’t get yours. You can sign this as your formal statement.”
“All right,” von Kleist agreed, and signed. “How long do you think it
will be before I could get some money?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that part of it,” Barth said. “I tell you what
we’ll do. We’ll all three go up to see the chief now--I want him to
meet you anyhow, and you can supply any more facts that we may not have
down.”
So they came up to my office--not von Igel’s. Barnitz and Barth said
his expression changed when he entered headquarters and knew he had
been betrayed. He said, “I see now why you have been so good to me.”
The prisoner was docile. He said he knew he was caught and he wanted to
help us round up the rest. I showed him the _Kirkoswald_ bomb, and told
him where it had been found. “Yes,” he said, “Captain Steinburg and
Captain Bode came to the laboratory after they saw in the paper that
the bomb had been found in Marseilles and they gave Dr. Scheele the
devil because it had not gone off. It was supposed to explode within
four days, but it didn’t explode in twelve.” “How many did you make?”
I asked. “I don’t know how many,” the prisoner answered. The ones that
were put on the _Inchmoor_ and the _Dankdale_ went off all right, and
there were two fires on the _Tyningham_. “I gave one box of thirty
of them to two Irishmen from New Orleans, O’Reilly and O’Leary. They
took them down there to set fire to ships with them.”
“Did you give the rest to Becker?”
“Yes. And he gave them to Captain Wolpert. Wolpert is superintendent of
the piers of the Atlas Line over in Hoboken. Captain Bode, he is also
a superintendent, for the Hamburg-American Line. Captain Steinburg I
don’t know much about, but he is in Germany now.”
[Illustration: Henry Barth, U. S. Army, who posed as the German Secret
Service agent in the von Rintelen ship bomb cases]
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.