Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (10 page)
Authors: Howard Blum
W
e teach him how to fight,” Commissioner Woods boasted with proud good spirit. “How to take on whatever trouble may come to the city.”
The occasion was the police training academy graduation ceremony, and the commissioner, standing on a platform erected at one end of the long gymnasium on the top floor of the headquarters building, was making the commencement address. He was a forceful speaker, and his words this morning were meant to reassure New York mayor John Purroy Mitchel and the other officials in the audience. He wanted them to know that the new officers would be up to the task of protecting New York.
Tom, though, wasn’t so sure. Sitting in the crowd, he had half a mind to jump to his feet and challenge Woods. But neither insubordination nor drama was Tom’s style.
Still, he was in a shaky mood. It was not long after Woods and Scull had sent him off to fight a secret war, and in the frustrating opening battles his confidence had been the first casualty. How can you claim to teach officers to take on whatever trouble may come when you have no notion what that trouble will be? he wanted to scream. What good is teaching men to fight if they don’t know whom to fight?
It was a time when, Tom would recall with a shudder, “I was being kept grimly busy.” Only he had nothing to show for all his activity. Not a single clue. Growing tired and dispirited, Tom lived day and night with a great secret: he was beginning to doubt whether this was a war he could win.
But he was not ready to surrender. Years of walking a beat had reinforced an important truth: a copper never knows what’s waiting around the next corner. There was always the chance, however faint, that if he kept at it, he’d stumble onto something that would help him track down the men responsible for the bombings.
In the first harried weeks, Tom had started handpicking a new team for this new mission. It already included many of the bomb squad veterans, detectives like George Barnitz, Amedeo Polignani, and Patrick Walsh who had proved themselves in the Brescia Circle case. But the unexpected twists and turns of that investigation, all the “cloak-and-dagger stuff,” as he described it with a deadly seriousness, had also driven home a few operational realities.
He would need officers who could work undercover, side by side with the unsuspecting targets, and for this mission that meant detectives who spoke German. No less essential—and this Tom had learned from Polignani’s masterly performance—he required men who could find their own way through sinister worlds, who could work alone for weeks or months with little more than their wits, ingenuity, and steely courage for protection.
Tom was looking for something else, too. The commissioner had said the training academy taught recruits to fight, but that was not enough. Tom needed men who
wanted
to fight. Men who wouldn’t back down, who wouldn’t hesitate to throw the first punch or fire the first shot. He wanted officers who had the grit to stand up to the kaiser’s well-trained spies.
It was the search for men with these qualities that had brought Tom to the academy graduation. The precincts, he was aware, had hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of German-speaking cops on their rolls. But most long-serving officers were, he suspected, immigrants, men who had been born in Germany.
Tom didn’t want to go into battle with doubts about his own troops. He wanted to know where, if his officers were pressed to make difficult choices, their allegiances lay. Tom’s cautious instincts told him it’d be better to recruit from a younger generation, men who’d been raised in German-speaking homes but born in America.
His brief stint as an agent runner had also provided another piece of hard-learned knowledge, and even now just the memory brought back a familiar sinking feeling. The responsibility of sending men off on dangerous missions had left him very uneasy.
His own life, by disciplined choice, had so far been lived without a wife. Why should he complicate it with sickening worries about other men’s wives and children? He didn’t want to have to endure the concerns that had tormented him when he’d sent Polignani, a young husband and father, into the enemy camp. This time he was determined to select unmarried operatives, and it stood to reason that he’d be more likely to find single men among the fresh, still-young recruits.
A week earlier, Tom had spoken with the training academy instructors. He outlined his requirements, but was vague about the actual mission; and the instructors, all longtime cops, had known better than to ask for details. In the end, he had a list of seventeen potential members for his squad.
Each of the candidates had been notified to report immediately following the swearing-in ceremony to an office on the second floor, adjacent to Deputy Commissioner Scull’s. Tom wanted to move quickly, before the men had a chance to settle into the precincts and there’d be loose talk about the German-speaking team Captain Tunney was assembling. The last thing Tom wanted was for some inquisitive reporter on the police beat to get a hint that something was up and rush into print with his scoop. Headlines would only force his prey to burrow down deeper.
Tom made swift work of the interviews. He didn’t try to test the candidates’ ability to speak German; in truth, he didn’t know enough, as he would joke, to order a beer in a Yorkville bar. Instead, he asked a few perfunctory questions and then let the men talk. They spoke about their childhood, their ambitions, why they’d joined the force. He listened, and observed.
Just as when he had selected an officer to infiltrate the Brescia Circle, he was convinced that it was best to work solely on instinct. There’s no test, he’d say, that’ll tell you whether you can count on your partner when you’re outnumbered and an angry mob is circling. But Tom, who had been in that very situation, believed he could take the measure of a man and know whether he’d want him by his side in a fight.
Before the day was over, he’d picked three men. Valentine Corell and Henry Senff were easy choices. Corell, who had grown up in the Bronx, had a street kid’s swagger and a Romeo’s toothy smile. Tom imagined he’d charm his way even into a nest of spies. Senff was a bruiser, over six feet tall and built, it seemed, by the same firm that had put up the Woolworth Building. Another plus: he’d scored high marks on the academy’s shooting range.
Detective Henry Barth.
(Thomas J. Tunney,
Throttled!
)
The third recruit, Henry Barth, was more unlikely. He was moonfaced and doughy, but listening to him speak, Tom detected a keen mind and an easy, lighthearted humor. The way things were shaping up, Tom decided, it wouldn’t hurt to have someone around who could make the men laugh.
His handpicked squad was ready.
T
om had a dozen conflicting theories in his mind, and at a dozen different moments he found himself championing each one. But he quickly came to realize that any investigation into mysterious shipboard explosions would need to center, initially at least, on New York Harbor. He ordered his men to comb the waterfront. Be on the alert, he told them. But if pressed, even Tom would’ve conceded that he had no specific idea what they should be looking for.
There was, though, plenty to observe. The war in Europe had transformed the harbor. It hustled and bustled with a newfound energy. Trainloads of goods poured in from farms and factories all across the country, and Allied purchasing agents, their pockets bulging with money, arrived to make deals for the American supplies. “Any man who owned anything that bore a speaking likeness to a cargo-boat,” Tom noted with a small pang of envy, “suddenly found himself potentially wealthy.” The merchant steamship lines had never been so busy.
The harbor was also crowded, Tom sneered, with “thousands of ardent Boches,” and every one of them, he felt, might be a potential suspect. England’s tight blockade of the seaward channels had left a flotilla of imprisoned ships flying the red, white, and black flag. Their sailors prowled the harbor district, bored and restless.
A postcard depicting Lower Manhattan at night, as viewed from the Brooklyn Bridge, circa 1910.
(Mary Evans / Pharcide)
With nightfall the waterfront, the same as before the war, turned more sinister. The daytime commerce gave way to enterprises that flourished in the shadows. Whores and gamblers, thieves and thugs slunk through the lonely alleys and dark footpaths. Intrigues were the order of business.
Tom’s men had entered a closed, secretive world. It was new territory for them, and their explorations were cautious, even tentative. Yet all the while the pressures to make a discovery kept mounting: the bombings continued.
Tom’s files bulged with new reports. “On January 3,” he complained, “there was an explosion on the steamship
Orton
in the Erie Basin for which there was no apparent explanation. A month later a bomb was discovered in the cargo of the
Hennington Court
, but no one could say how it came there. Toward the end of February the steamship
Carlton
caught fire at sea—mysteriously. Two months passed, and then two bombs were found in the
Lord Erne
. We might have had a look at them . . . if those who had found the bombs had not dumped them overboard rather hastily. A week later a bomb was found in the hold of the
Devon City
. Again no explanation. Nor any reasonable cause why the
Cressington Court
caught fire at sea on April 29.”
Tom had files full of incidents, but little else. “Every ship that left port must have nothing in her hold except hungry rats, parlor matches, oil waste and free kerosene,” he said with stiff exasperation. It was a mystery, and he didn’t know how to pierce its shell.
THEN HE HAD IT.
Not a clue, nothing as substantive as that. But it was the beginning of an approach, a possible entry point that could lead to larger, more valuable discoveries. With no other strategy presenting itself, and spurred on at the same time by a detective’s intuition, he decided it would have to do.
As for the credit, if there would be any—and at this preliminary point that was far from a certainty—it should rightly belong, Tom conceded, to Henry Barth. It was the new, bookish recruit who, in the course of a meandering discussion about the stymied investigation, had glibly quoted Shakespeare: “ ‘There are land rats and water rats.’ ” A cop, he was suggesting, must deal with all manner of villains.
At the time, Tom had simply nodded in agreement. But that night as he lay in his bed in Brooklyn, the memory of Shakespeare’s small wisdom popped up again in his mind. Unable to sleep, he tossed the line around in his mind until he finally established what had caught his attention.
In the morning he gave his order: the team would concentrate its investigation on a water rat.
He had just the man in mind.
I
t wasn’t anything Paul Koenig had done that prompted Tom’s curiosity. Or, at least not anything specific. When Tom gave the order to focus on the Hamburg-American Line’s chief security officer, he was unaware of Koenig’s role in any crimes. But he was beginning to have suspicions.
The British blockade had effectively shut down his steamship line; nevertheless, PK—the initials instantly recognized all over the waterfront—was still very busy. His name kept popping up in the surveillance and background reports the team filed. Tom wanted to know why. He wanted to know what this nasty piece of work, a water rat if there ever was one, was up to.
He assigned a team of watchers, a dozen detectives working around the clock in three four-man shifts, to follow PK. I want to know everything about him, Tom ordered. Where he goes and whom he meets.
Tom had little reason to believe that PK was the head of the group planting the bombs. He was, Tom felt even at that preliminary point in his investigation, not the sort of man the haughty German high command Junkers would select to run their American espionage network. More likely PK occupied some middle rung on the operational ladder, his role that of a rough, intimidating presence, the tough guy who could be counted on to keep order among the underlings.
Tom—and here, too, pure instinct was at work—suspected that while PK was only a minor player in the scheme, he could point them in the right direction. Stick with him, and he’ll lead us to the pot of gold, Tom told his men, unconsciously giving the leprechaun fables of his childhood an operational cast.
Then, even before the investigation had gotten fully under way, it nearly came to an abrupt end. After giving his men their assignment, Tom went across the street to the headquarters building and shared his broad strategy with the commissioner. Woods listened, and then, with his customary politeness, thanked Tom for keeping him informed.
The next day, however, Tom was summoned to Scull’s office. The deputy commissioner revealed that Woods had spoken to him, and after their conversation he had begun to make some inquiries. The Bureau of Investigation, he said, had already given Koenig the once-over. He handed Tom a thin file as he explained that the BI had come up with nothing. Their conclusion: Koenig was not worth following.
Without the slightest trace of rancor, he suggested that Tom might want to reconsider his surveillance, or at least scale it back a bit. Perhaps, he said, it would be better if Tom allocated the majority of his resources elsewhere.
Tom didn’t even pretend to give Scull’s suggestion any consideration. The way Tom’s competitive mind worked, he now had further incentive to focus on Koenig. It had become a matter of professional vanity: he’d show the feds how New York cops build a case.
Trust me on this, he told Scull.
The deputy commissioner nodded in mute surrender. Finally, he asked that Tom keep both him and the commissioner informed on his progress. But by then Tom was already walking out the door, eager to get back to work.
SURVEILLANCE WAS AN ART, AND
a good shadow, like any artist, was born, not made. Twenty years on the job had made this insight one of Tom’s articles of faith, and the weeks spent trailing Paul Koenig only reinforced it.
PK toyed with Tom’s men. Day after frustrating day, he led them on a merry chase to nowhere. Whether his suspicions had already been raised by the feds’ tail, or he was simply blessed with keen animal senses, Tom could only guess. But PK had been on to them from the start. He had proved to be, Tom said with a nod of respect for his adversary, “a slippery fish.”
The watchers would be on the job, two men falling in discreetly behind PK and, as they had been taught at the training academy, another two farther in the rear, backups ready to take over in case the target made the primary team. But PK would lead them into a bustling crowd and then vanish, or so it seemed, into thin air.
Other times he’d head down into the subway, wait until the very last second before the train was ready to depart, and then rush on board. He’d be behind the closed door, the train screeching away, while the irate watchers were left standing outside on the platform.
Or, using a clever variation on that ploy, PK would enter the busy Belmont or Manhattan Hotel. He’d hurry through the lobby and take the rear stairs down to the basement. From there, a winding underground corridor led to a subway station. He’d hop onto the first train and disappear.
But PK’s favorite game was to lull Tom’s pavement artists into thinking that this time they had him fooled. They’d spend hours following him around town, all the time confident that their target suspected nothing. Then PK would hustle around a corner, the men would quicken their pace, sweeping around the same corner in pursuit—and he’d pop out of a doorway as they hurried by, greeting them with a taunting laugh.
Tom realized that he’d need to change his handwriting, to use the operational jargon, if he was to keep an eye on Koenig. He had thrown an obtrusive army into the field when, he now realized, a subtler strategy would have been more effective.
So, with a silent nod to Scull, he scaled back. He assigned one man to shadow and, in a bit of inspiration, another to walk ahead of PK. The new plan was for the two watchers to alternate positions. When the shadow charged ahead, the point man would fall back and take his place; and they’d go on switching back and forth throughout their shift.
As further insurance, he employed a fleet of unmarked cars. The vehicles, alternating positions frequently, would drive unnoticed through the heavy traffic, yet all the time their routes paralleled PK’s travel on foot.
But arguably the most effective change, the one that vastly improved the entire quality of the operation, was Tom’s careful selection of the men he now assigned to the chase. Swallowing a bit of pride, Tom acknowledged that not all the officers on his handpicked team had the watcher’s gift. A man could be an excellent detective yet a poor shadow. It was the ability to look convincing while doing nothing—“a rare combination of artlessness and skill,” as Tom put it—that characterized the successful watcher. Tom made sure that all the men he now put in the field could affect an entirely natural nonchalance that was, of course, pure artifice.
Now when Koenig rushed about the city, Tom’s men followed.
They were taken on a tour of German New York—Pabst’s in Columbus Circle, the German Club on Central Park South, and Luchow’s on Fourteenth Street. Then at the end of each busy day, the winding trail would invariably lead back to the same destination: his office at 45 Broadway.
Yet although the team was now dogging PK’s footsteps, it still had little to show for it. Koenig’s extraordinary caution certainly suggested that he had something to hide—but Tom had no clear idea what that was.
Koenig’s many meetings about town also revealed nothing out of the ordinary. “These were no more than the natural points toward which any German might gravitate,” said Tom, with a professional’s admiration for an agent who keeps to his cover. More frustratingly, Tom moaned, the watchers didn’t dare get close enough to “pick up a scrap of conversation.” Even if intrigues were being plotted across the table, Tom had no knowledge.
He realized he was caught up in a long battle, and there was no end in sight. His mood was low when at the end of another fruitless day one of his team called in to report that PK had returned to his office. Following the usual routine, he’d be holed up for hours, presumably working away at his desk.
Too bad we can’t put a man inside 45 Broadway, the watcher said. It was an idle remark—and a pure impossibility.
“We might as well try to penetrate Berlin with a brass band,” Tom agreed.
But even as he spoke, a strategy jumped up in his mind. It was a simple solution, one that he’d been circling for a while.
“We could listen in on his telephone wire,” he decided.
EVER SINCE THE 1880S, WHEN
Kansas City undertaker Almon Strowger invented what became known as the Strowger switch, it had become easy to listen in on a telephone call. Strowger’s circuit-switched system, an ingenious electromagnetic contraption that clicked and clacked noisily like a telegraph key, did the operator’s work. The Strowger switch automatically connected the relays and slides at the central telephone offices, completing the circuit that allowed people to talk to each other. Twist another wire around the right switch at the central office, and a party line was created: you could hear someone’s conversation and he’d never know it.
Almon Strowger’s switch.
(© Kurt Möbus / ImageBroker / age footstock)
Larceny, though, is the stepmother of invention. It didn’t take long for Wall Street speculators to realize fortunes could be made with the sort of inside information collected by eavesdropping on telephone conversations. If you knew what a financier or mogul was plotting, you could invest along with him. The Metropolitan Telephone and Telegraph Company’s central office at Cortlandt Street in lower Manhattan was crowded with sly men offering hefty fees to the technicians for connecting third-party telephone wires to tycoons’ phone lines.
In 1892, pressured by the indignant financiers who had gotten wind of this scheme, the New York State legislature made telephone tapping a felony. The statute offered no exceptions to this prohibition.
The fact that it was illegal did not concern Tom. Laws, he believed, were made to keep criminals, not cops, in line. Besides, declared or not, this was war. Extraordinary measures were permissible. And, not least, PK’s goading stung. It had become personal.
THE TAP ON KOENIG’S LINE
was up in just one day. Whenever he picked up his phone, a detective in Tom’s office now listened in and transcribed the conversation.
The typewritten pages of daily transcripts soon rose up in a small mountain on Tom’s desk. He pored over them, reading and then rereading, looking for a lead. It was a nightly ritual, and one that grew more and more hapless. At the end of each exhausting day he found himself coming to the same disappointing conclusion: he had found nothing. Not an incriminating word, or even a hint of something worth investigating. Either Koenig was as cautious on the telephone as he was in his travels about the city, the consummate careful professional, or the feds had been right all along. He was that rarest of creatures: a man with nothing to hide.
It was now several months into the case, and Tom’s mind was heavy with the dead weight of failure as he sat at his crowded desk and resumed his reading. He made his methodical way through pages and pages of Koenig’s guarded conversations.
Then something he read caught his attention. It was an incoming call, and only a brief one. Yet it was clear that the caller was very angry. He hurled a furious volley of expletives at Koenig, and then accused him of treating him unfairly. “You’re a bullheaded Westphalian Dutchman!” the caller ranted. That was when PK, whose instincts had led him to suspect his phone was tapped, hung up before something more incriminating could be said.
Nevertheless, Tom was intrigued. He read the frustratingly meager transcript again, only this time more slowly.
There were not many men who’d dare to attack Koenig. He wondered what had caused such animosity.
Two days later the same angry man called again. Once more he lashed away at Koenig, charging that he didn’t deserve what had happened, that Koenig had taken advantage of him. Again the cautious PK, always on guard against eavesdroppers, promptly hung up.
But now Tom made up his mind to find the caller. He wanted to know what Koenig had done to provoke him. The explanation suddenly seemed very important.
