PAUL KOENIG
Justice and Metzler--Koenig's personality--von Papen's checks--The
"little black book"--Telephone codes--Shadowing--Koenig's
agents--His betrayal.
In a narrative which attempts so far as possible to proceed
chronologically, it becomes necessary at this point to introduce Paul
Koenig. For, on September 15, 1914, he sent an Irishman, named Edmund
Justice, who had been a dock watchman, and one Frederick Metzler to
Quebec for information of the number of Canadian troops in training. On
September 18 Koenig left New York and met Metzler in Portland, Maine.
He received his report, and on September 25 was in Burlington, Vt.,
where he conferred with Justice, and learned that the two spies had
inspected the fortifications in Quebec, and had visited the training
camps long enough to estimate the number and condition of the men.
(Their information Koenig reported at once to von Papen, and it is
possible that it dictated Papen's recall of Goltz from Buffalo the next
day.)
Who was Paul Koenig? His underlings knew him as "P. K.," and called
him the "bull-headed Westphalian" behind his back. He had a dozen
aliases, among them Wegenkamp, Wagener, Kelly, Winter, Perkins,
Stemler, Rectorberg, Boehm, Kennedy, James, Smith, Murphy, and W. T.
Munday.
He was a product of the "Kaiser's Own"--the Hamburg-American Line. He
had been a detective in the service of the Atlas Line, a subsidiary
of the Hamburg-American, and for some years before the war was
superintendent of the latter company's police. In that capacity he
bossed a dozen men, watching the company's laborers and investigating
any complaints made to the line. His work threw him into constant
contact with sailors, tug-skippers, wharf-rats, longshoremen, and
dive-keepers of the lowest type, and there was little of the criminal
life of the waterfront that he had not seen.
He had arms like an ape, and the bodily strength of one. His expression
suggested craft, ferocity, and brutality. Altogether his powerful frame
and lurid vocabulary made him a figure to avoid or respect. Waterfront
society did both--and hated him as well.
[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_
Paul Koenig, the Hamburg-American employe, who supplied and directed
agents of German violence in America]
Von Papen saw in Koenig's little police force the nucleus of just such
an organization as he needed. The Line put Koenig at the attaché's
disposal in August, 1914, and straightway von Papen connected certain
channels of information with Koenig's own system. He supplied
reservists for special investigations and crimes, and presently Koenig
became in effect the foreman of a large part of Germany's secret
service in the East. As his activities broadened, he was called
upon to execute commissions for Bernstorff, Albert, Dr. Dumba, the
Austro-Hungarian ambassador, and Dr. Alexander von Nuber, the Austrian
consul in New York, as well as for the attachés themselves. He acted as
their guard on occasion, served as their confidential messenger, and
made himself generally useful in investigation work.
The guilt-stained check-book of the military attaché contained these
entries:
March 29, 1915. Paul Koenig (Secret Service Bill) $509.11
April 18, Paul Koenig (Secret Service Bill) $90.94
May 11, Paul Koenig (Secret Service) $66.71
July 16, Paul Koenig (Compensation for F. J. Busse) $150.00
August 4, Paul Koenig (5 bills secret service) $118.92
Those entries represent only the payments made Koenig by check for
special work done for von Papen. Koenig received his wages from the
Line. When he performed work for any one else he rendered a special
bill. This necessitated his itemizing his expenditures, and this
Germanly thorough and thoroughly German system of petty accounting
enabled our secret service later to trace his activities with
considerable success. Koenig and von Papen used to haggle over his
bills--on one occasion the attaché felt he was being overcharged, and
accordingly deducted a half-dollar from the total.
"P. K." also had an incriminating book--a carefully prepared notebook
of his spies and of persons in New York, Boston and other cities
who were useful in furnishing him information. In another book he
kept a complete record of the purpose and cost of assignments on
which he sent his men. He listed in its pages the names of several
hundred persons--army reservists, German-Americans and Americans,
clerks, scientists and city and Federal employees--showing that his
district was large and that his range for getting information and for
supervising other pro-German propaganda was broad. For his own direct
staff he worked out a system of numbers and initials to be used in
communication. The numbers he changed at regular intervals and a system
of progression was devised by which each agent would know when his
number changed. He provided them with suitable aliases. These men had
alternative codes for writing letters and for telephone communication
to be changed automatically by certain fixed dates.
Always alert for spies upon himself, Koenig suspected that his
telephone wire was tapped and that his orders were being overheard.
So he instructed his men in various code words. If he told an agent
to meet him "at 5 o'clock at South Ferry" he meant: "Meet me at 7
o'clock at Forty-second Street and Broadway." His suspicions were
well-grounded, for his wire was tapped, and Koenig led the men who were
spying on him an unhappy dance.
For example: he would receive a call on the telephone and would direct
his agent, at the other end of the wire, to meet him in fifteen
minutes at Pabst's, Harlem. It is practically impossible to make the
journey from Koenig's office in the Hamburg-American Building to 125th
Street in a quarter of an hour. After a time his watchers learned that
"Pabst's, Harlem" meant Borough Hall, Brooklyn.
He never went out in the daytime without one or two of his agents
trailing him to see whether he was being shadowed. He used to turn a
corner suddenly and stand still so that an American detective following
came unexpectedly face to face with him and betrayed his identity.
Koenig would laugh heartily and pass on. Thus he came to know many
agents of the Department of Justice and many New York detectives. When
he started out at night he usually had three of his own men follow him
and by a prearranged system of signals inform him if any strangers were
following him.
The task of keeping watch of Koenig's movements required astute
guessing and tireless work on the part of the New York police. So
elusive did he become that it was necessary for Captain Tunney to
evolve a new system of shadowing him in order to keep him in sight
without betraying that he was under surveillance. One detective,
accordingly, would be stationed several blocks away and would start out
ahead of Koenig. The "front shadow" was signaled by his confederates
in the rear whenever Koenig turned a corner, so that the man in front
might dart down a cross-street and manoeuvre to keep ahead of him. If
Koenig boarded a street car the man ahead would hail the car several
blocks beyond, thus avoiding suspicion. In more than one instance
detectives in the rear, guessing that he was about to take a car, would
board it several blocks before it got abreast of Koenig. His alertness
kept Detectives Barnitz, Coy, Terra, and Corell on edge for months.
It was impossible to overhear direct conversation between Koenig and
any man to whom he was giving instructions. Some of his workers he
never permitted to meet him at all, but when he kept a rendezvous it
was in the open, in the parks in broad daylight, or in a moving-picture
theatre, or in the Pennsylvania Station, or the Grand Central Terminal.
There he could make sure that nobody was eavesdropping. If he met an
agent in the open for the first time he gave him some such command at
this:
"Be at Third Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street at 2:30 to-morrow afternoon
beside a public telephone booth there. When the telephone rings answer
it."
The man would obey. On the minute the telephone would ring and the
man would lift the receiver. A strange voice told him to do certain
things--either a definite assignment, or instructions to be at a
similar place on the following day to receive a message. Or he might be
told to meet another man, who would give him money and further orders.
The voice at the other end of the wire spoke from a public telephone
booth and was thus reasonably sure that the wire was not tapped.
And Koenig trusted no man. He never sent an agent out on a job without
detailing another man to shadow that man and report back to him in full
the operations of the agent and of any persons whom he might deal with.
He was brutally severe in his insistence that his men do exactly what
he told them without using their own initiative.
Koenig had spies on every big steamship pier. He had eavesdroppers
in hotels, and on busy telephone switchboards. He employed porters,
window-cleaners, bank clerks, corporation employees and even a member
of the Police Department.
This last, listed in his book as "Special Agent A. S.," was Otto F.
Mottola, a detective in the warrant squad. The notebook revealed
Mottola as "Antonio Marino," an alias later changed to Antonio
Salvatore. Evidence was produced at Mottola's trial at Police
Headquarters that Koenig paid him for investigating a passenger who
sailed on the _Bergensfjord_; that he often called up Mottola, asked
questions, and received answers which Koenig's stenographer took down
in shorthand. Through him Koenig sought to keep closely informed of
developments at Police Headquarters in the inquiry being made by the
police into the activities of the Germans. Mottola was dismissed from
the force because of false statements made to his superiors when they
questioned him about Koenig.
Koenig's very caution was the cause of his undoing. The detectives who
shadowed him learned that he "never employed the same man more than
once," which meant simply that he was careful to place no subordinate
in a position where blackmail and exposure might be too easy. To this
fact they added another trifling observation; they noticed that as time
went on he was seen less in the company of one George Fuchs, a relative
with whom he had been intimate early in the war. They cultivated the
young man's acquaintance to the extent that he finally burst out with
a recitation of his grievances against Koenig, and betrayed him to the
authorities.
"P. K." was defiant always. "They did get Dr. Albert's portfolio," he
said one day, "but they won't get mine. I won't carry one."