The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (28 page)

But Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, detective chief Baker and others were not interested in Corbett as hero; they were furious that he had shot Booth before he could be captured. They wanted the assassin alive, to question him and to conduct a show trial, trying to prove that the conspiracy involved Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who had not yet been caught. Some charged that Corbett had acted against orders, others that he fired without orders. He insisted that he pulled the trigger only when he saw the assassin raise his carbine.

On the scene, Corbett had explained simply that “Providence directed my hand.” Days later, he wrote a letter, published by the
New York Times
, refuting “many false reports in the papers charging me with violation of order, &c….” Lieutenant Doherty had cleared him of blame, he said, and commended him to General Grant for his action. Corbett wrote that “when I saw where the ball had struck him—in the neck, near the ear—it seemed to me that God had directed it, for apparently it was just where he had shot the President.”

Corbett was offered one of Booth’s pistols as a keepsake, but declined it. When someone offered him $100 for the pistol with which he had shot Booth, he also declined, saying it belonged to the government. But if the government wished to reward him, he said, it might let him keep his little horse. It was not worth much, but he had become attached to it after riding it through so much history.

The Committee on Claims conducted more than a year of hearings before deciding to award Lafayette Baker and the detective, ex-colonel Conger, $17,500 each from the $75,000 reward posted by the Federal government. That generated so much public protest that the committee’s report was disapproved. But after it was revised, the biggest single share still went to Conger, while the enlisted cavalrymen who chased Booth down, including the sergeant who shot him, got precisely $1,653.85 each.

That did not sustain Corbett long; by some accounts, he was robbed of his share soon after he got it. He returned to New York, back at the downtown prayer meetings where he had spoken before the war. He preached temperance to shipyard workers, and ventured onto the lecture circuit. But that career fizzled because his advertised lectures invariably turned out to be raging sermons instead. In 1869 he found work as a hatter in Philadelphia and became pastor of a Methodist mission across the Delaware River in Camden. Stacked in one corner of his kitchen there, he kept half a dozen rough benches for use by the worshipers who came to hear his nightly sermons. When a reporter asked him about John Wilkes Booth, he said, “I felt I was doing my duty to my God and my country. To this day I feel justified in my course. Were the ghosts of twenty assassins to arise against me, they could not disturb a calm Christian spirit.”

Corbett was Christian, but not calm. Losing his job was not the only reason he left Philadelphia and headed west. He was not pursued by the ghosts of twenty assassins, but he had received threatening letters; he suspected that he was targeted by Confederate sympathizers bent on revenge. He stayed briefly with an ex-comrade in Company L, who wrote that Corbett had “been driven from pillar to post,” that “he preaches with a pistol in his pocket,” that “after he says his prayers he lies down at night with a loaded revolver under his pillow,” that “he moans pitifully” in his sleep. “It almost seems my house was haunted while he was there.”

Although Corbett was “a good man, a pure and devout Christian of spotless life,” his friend went on, “I declare I was glad when he was gone, he was so unhappy, so uneasy, so strange. He is no lunatic. He is no fool. He is a good man in every way. But wherever he goes he says Nemesis pursues him, and the trouble spirits of revenge will not let him rest. He is in constant fear of assassins.”

Corbett made it to Cloud County, Kansas, and homesteaded 80 acres on seemingly worthless land eighteen miles southeast of Concordia. He was convinced that admirers of Booth had created a secret order sworn to avenge him. He built himself a sod and stone dugout, with holes in the walls so he could fire out at interlopers. He lived as a recluse, wandering the countryside on his cherished little black horse Billy. A friend said he always had a “watchful, wary countenance…he always seemed to be on the lookout for something.”

Often when he saw someone approaching, he dismounted, drew his pistol and lay waiting in the grass until he saw who it was. He was a deadly marksman—one Kansan alleged that he had seen him bring down a barn swallow with his pistol. Neighbors said he fired warning shots if they happened to ride across the borders of his claim. Such behavior brought him before a hearing in Concordia, where he whipped out his gun and shouted “Lie, lie, lie!” But because it was Corbett, the authorities sent him back to his shanty with just a warning. He was active with the local Salvation Army, and a friendly judge tried to help him by arranging lectures, but as before he drove audiences away with his “shouting, ranting, street preacher religion—‘Repent and ye shall be saved!’” A Presbyterian minister invited him to talk about his war experiences, and Corbett took the occasion seriously, even buying a new coat and shirt. But what he delivered was another shouted “disconnected exhortation.”

Other war veterans sympathized with Corbett; an old cavalryman and legislator arranged a job for him as a doorkeeper in the Kansas House of Representatives at Topeka. This worked out for a few months, but each day his piety was offended by the doings of the prairie politicians around him. Eventually, on February 15, 1887, he could stand it no more. Just after the morning prayer, he drew his pistol and threatened the speaker of the House, abruptly adjourning the legislature. He kept the floor, waving his weapon and threatening legislators, reporters and staff. There are many versions of exactly what provoked him; one says he was disrespected by the House staff, another that he exploded when he heard pages mocking the opening prayer. As he raged, lawmakers hid under desks and spectators scattered; he held the floor until police crept up behind him, grabbed his pistol and took him away.

After long testimony, a probation judge in Topeka declared Corbett “hopelessly insane” and committed him to the state asylum. A reporter recalled his shooting of Booth, and said sadly that the “bloody deed, which so effectually blighted his life…. has finally followed him into a straight-jacket.”

Sadly, but not finally: Occasionally Corbett threw fits of anger at the asylum, but at other times he was a model patient. He was allowed to join other inmates in outdoor exercises until on May 26, 1888, a friend of the superintendent’s son came visiting, and tied his “smart Indian pony” near the gate. The old cavalryman saw his chance. Dawdling behind his group, pretending to admire the spring blossoms, he leaped into the saddle and galloped away. The patients he left behind shouted excitedly, but this was not unusual at the asylum, so at first attendants did not realize what had happened. They spotted him when he was half a mile down the road, “whipping that pony at every jump” with the rawhide quirt the boy had left hanging on the saddle. “To all appearance the only reason that pony was running was because he couldn’t fly,” said a witness. “At a turn in the road, Corbett looked back and swung his straw hat around his head, and thus waved farewell to the hospital and his late companions.” A few days later, a letter came saying the horse could be reclaimed at Neodesha, Kansas, 75 miles south. Corbett had spent two nights there with an old soldier who had suffered with him at Andersonville. He borrowed train fare, covering it with a draft on the $15 he had left in a Concordia bank. Then he departed, saying he was headed for Mexico.

What happened to him after that is not known, but widely rumored. Every few months some newspaper out west reported that he had appeared in a neighboring county, or was working in the gold fields of Nevada, or had died in a Minnesota forest fire. In 1900, a Topeka patent medicine magnate said a certain John Corbett had been peddling his products up and down Texas and Oklahoma for several years, always being careful not to step over the Kansas line. He was convinced that this Corbett was really Boston. But among other discrepancies, this Corbett stood six feet and weighed 188 pounds; after extensive interviews and depositions, he was convicted of perjury in trying to collect Boston’s abandoned property and $1,300 in accumulated government pension. In 1913, after chasing rumors for a quarter century, state officials concluded that “it is safe to say that no one in Kansas knows the whereabouts of Boston Corbett.” In 1958, Boy Scouts erected a stone monument on Corbett’s homestake, decorated with a plaque and a pair of big pistols.

The phrase “mad as a hatter” was already familiar more than 150 years ago; it appeared in Edinburgh’s
Blackwood Magazine
in 1829, and Thackeray used it in
Pendennis
in 1850, when Corbett was learning the hat trade at which he worked for two decades or more. Through the years, doctors began to recognize the poisonous side effects of the mercury used in many medical treatments and in industrial procedures such as hatmaking. Among the victims’ symptoms they listed irritability, nervousness, fits of anger, anxiety, insomnia, low self control, exaggerated response to stimulation, fearfulness and violent behavior. The worst damage came from mercury made airborne into tiny droplets and breathed into the lungs—exactly what had happened to Boston Corbett.

On December 1, 1941, the U.S. Public Health Service banned the mercury process in hatmaking.

E
RNEST
B. “P
AT
” F
URGURSON
was a Washington and foreign correspondent and syndicated columnist for the
Baltimore Sun
before turning his full attention to American history. In the past two decades, he has done four books about the Civil War
—Chancellorsville 1863: The Souls of the Brave; Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War; Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor 1864;
and
Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War,
all published by Alfred A. Knopf. His work has also appeared in
National Geographic, Smithsonian, Reader’s Digest, American Scholar,
and other magazines.

Coda

This piece on Boston Corbett isn’t based on the kind of traveling, buttonholing reporting that I loved during my first life, as a newspaperman. It’s the result of digging into all kinds of musty paperwork, from the shorthand record of the Lincoln assassins’ trial to pension applications at the National Archives to the Seventeenth Annual Report of the Kansas Historical Society. But many of the juiciest quotes and descriptions are indeed from old newspapers—the
Pittsburgh Leader
and
Titusville Morning Herald
, the
Waterloo Iowa State Reporter
and
Cincinnati Enquirer
, the
Butte Daily Miner
and the
Portland Journal
, not to mention the usual suspects, like the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
and
Harper’s Weekly
. In those hand-set, pre-Mergenthaler days, provincial papers had their own personalities. For me today, coming across a lively piece by some anonymous prairie reporter of the 1800s is almost—but not quite—as much fun as was that first gin & tonic atop the Caravelle after a hot day in the Delta.

FROM
Rolling Stone

I
T BEGAN, AS IT ALWAYS DID
, with a phone call to 911. “Now listen here,” the caller demanded, his voice frantic. “I’ve got two people here held hostage, all right? Now, you know what happens to people that are held hostage? It’s not like on the movies or nothing, you understand that?”

“OK,” the 911 operator said.

“One of them here’s name is Danielle, and her father,” the caller continued. “And the reason why I’m doing this is because her father raped my sister.”

The caller, who identified himself as John Defanno, said that he had the 18-year-old Danielle and her dad tied up in their home in Security, a suburb of Colorado Springs. He’d beaten the father with his gun. “He’s bleeding profusely,” Defanno warned. “I am armed, I do have a pistol. If any cops come in this house with any guns, I will fucking shoot them. I better get some help here, because I’m going fucking psycho right now.”

The 911 operator tried to keep him on the line, but Defanno cut the call short. “I’m not talking anymore,” he snapped. “You have the address. If I don’t have help here now, in the next five minutes, I swear to fucking God, I will shoot these people.” Then the line went dead.

Officers raced to the house, ready for an armed standoff with a homicidal suspect. But when they arrived, they found no gunman, no hostages, no blood. Danielle and her father were safe and sound at home—alone. They had never heard of John Defanno, for good reason: He didn’t exist.

“John Defanno” was actually a 15-year-old boy named Matthew Weigman—a fat, lonely blind kid who lived with his mom in a working-class neighborhood of East Boston. In person, Weigman was a shy and awkward teenager with a shaved head who spent his days holed up in his room, often talking for up to 20 hours a day on free telephone chat lines. On the phone, he became “Lil’ Hacker,” the most skilled member of a small band of telephone pranksters known as “phreaks.” To punish Danielle, who had pissed him off on a chat line, Weigman had phoned 911 and posed as a psycho, rigging his caller ID to make it look like the emergency call was coming from inside Danielle’s home. It’s a trick known as “swatting”—mobilizing SWAT teams to exact revenge on your enemies—and phreakers like Weigman have used it to trigger some 200 false raids in dozens of cities nationwide.

“When I was a kid, a prank was calling in a pizza to a neighbor’s house,” says Kevin Kolbye, an FBI assistant special agent in charge who has investigated the phreaks. “Today it’s this.”

Like a comic-book villain transformed by a tragic accident, Weigman discovered at an early age that his acute hearing gave him superpowers on the telephone. He could impersonate any voice, memorize phone numbers by the sound of the buttons and decipher the inner workings of a phone system by the frequencies and clicks on a call, which he refers to as “songs.” The knowledge enabled him to hack into cellphones, order phone lines disconnected and even tap home phones. “Man, it felt pretty powerful for a little kid,” he says. “Anyone said something bad about me, and I’d press a button, and I’d get them.”

But in the end, those close to Weigman feared that his gift would prove to be his downfall. “Matt never intended on becoming the person he became,” says Jeff Daniels, a former phreaker who befriended Weigman on a chat line. “When you’re a blind little tubby bald kid in a broke-ass family, and you have that one ability to make yourself feel good, what do you expect to happen?”

M
ATTHEW
W
EIGMAN WAS BORN BLIND
, but that was hardly the only strike against him. His family was a mess. His father, an alcoholic who did drugs, would drag the terrified Matt across the floor by his hair and call him a “blind bastard.” His dad left the family when Weigman was five, leaving Matt and his older brother and sister to scrape by on his disability pension and what their mother earned as a nurse’s aide. For Weigman, every day was a struggle. “There were times I hated being blind,” he recalls. At school, as he caned his way through the halls, other kids teased him about how his eyes rolled out of control. “Kids can be cruel, because they don’t understand what they’re doing,” he says. “They can’t even begin to fathom what they’re causing, and that stuff eats at your mind.”

At age four, Matt surprised his mother by making out flashing bulbs on the Christmas tree. After that, he could perceive faint lights—and he exploited the ability for all it was worth. He cooked for himself by feeling his way around the kitchen—eggs here, frying pan there, toaster over there—and refused to stop, even after he burned himself. He shocked his brother by climbing on a bicycle and tearing down the road, using the blurry shadows for guidance. He taught himself to skateboard, too. To build his confidence, his mom’s new husband let the eight-year-old Matt drive his car around the empty parking lot at Suffolk Downs, a nearby racetrack. “It made me feel a lot better,” Weigman recalls. “I thought, ‘I’m doing something that people who see can do.’”

And he could do one thing even better than sighted people: hear. Weigman became obsessed with voices, music and sounds of all sorts. He could perfectly mimic characters he heard on the Cartoon Network, and he played his favorite songs on a small keyboard by ear. He would also dial random numbers on the phone, just to hear who picked up—and what kind of response he could elicit from them. He fondly recalls the first time he called 911, at age five, and duped them into sending a cop to his door.

“You need the police?” the officer asked.

“No,” Weigman replied. “I’m just curious. I wanted to see what the operator would do.”

The cop reprimanded the boy sharply. “I wouldn’t do that no more,” he said.

But Weigman was hooked. In real life, he was gaining weight and dodging bullies, struggling to find a place to fit in. By age 10, however, he had found the perfect escape: a telephone party line. The service—a precursor to Internet chat rooms—allows multiple callers to talk with each other over the phone. Despite the rise of online video streaming, there are still scores of telephone party lines scattered across the country, an odd and forgotten throwback to a pre-digital world. Compared to texting or video chat, the phone lines have a unique appeal: They offer callers a cloak of anonymity coupled with the visceral immediacy of live human voices. Some call to socialize, others for phone sex.

Hoping to give Weigman a social network beyond the confines of his tiny bedroom, a friend had slipped him the number of a free party line known as Studio 55. The second Weigman called, a new world opened up to him. He heard voices. Some were talking to each other. Others piped in only occasionally, listening in as they watched TV or played video games. Weigman found he could decipher each and every ambient sound, no matter how soft or garbled. Many of the callers were social misfits and outcasts: ex-cons and bawdy chicks and unemployed guys with nothing better to do all day than talk shit to a bunch of complete strangers. People without a life. And that’s when it hit Weigman:
No one here could see each other. They were all just disembodied voices.
“We’re all blind right now,” he announced to the group.

Weigman wasn’t a freak anymore. But he was about to become a phreak.

T
ELEPHONE PHREAKING ISN’T NEW
: The practice, which dates back half a century, was the forerunner of computer hacking. In 1957, a blind eight-year-old named Joe Engressia accidentally discovered that he could whistle at the precise frequency—2,600 hertz—used to control phone networks. A pioneering phreak named John Draper later realized that the free whistles given out in Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes also replicated the exact same tone. Kids with a mischievous streak and too much free time were soon competing to see who could achieve the most elaborate phone hack. A tech-savvy student named Steve Wozniak, who would soon invent something called Apple with his friend Steve Jobs, once used a series of high-pitched whistles to make a free international call to the Vatican to prank the pope.

As he listened in on the party lines, Weigman began pressing random numbers on his phone, just to see what would happen. Once he held down the star button and was surprised to hear a computerized voice say, “Moderator on.” He had no idea what it meant. But when he hit the pound key, the voice suddenly began ticking off the private phone number of every person in the chat room. Weigman had discovered a secret tool through which a party-line administrator could monitor the system. Now, whenever someone on the line trash-talked him, he could quietly access their number and harass them by calling them at home.

By 14, Weigman was conning his way through AT&T and Verizon, tricking them into divulging insider information—like supervisor identification numbers and passwords—that gave him full run of the system. If he heard a supervisor’s voice once, he could imitate it with eerie precision when calling one of the man’s underlings. If he heard someone dialing a number, he could memorize the digits purely by tone. A favorite ploy was to get the name of a telephone technician visiting his house, then impersonate the man on the phone to extract codes and other data from unsuspecting co-workers. Once he called a phone company posing as a girl, saying he needed to verify the identity of a technician who was at “her” door. Convinced, the operator coughed up the technician’s company ID number, direct phone line and supervisor—key information that Weigman could later put to nefarious use, like cutting off a rival’s phone line.

There seemed to be no limit to what he could do: shut off your phone service, dig up your unlisted cellphone number, even listen in on your home phone—something only a handful of veteran phreaks can pull off. Celebrities were a favorite target. Weigman claims to have hacked and called the cellphones of Lindsay Lohan (“She was drunk, and my friend tried to have phone sex with her”) and Eminem (“He told me to fuck off”). Last year, during the presidential campaign, Weigman heard a YouTube video of Mitt Romney’s son Matt dialing his dad. Weigman listened closely to the touch tones, deciphered the candidate’s cellphone number—and then made a call of his own. “Mitt Romney!” he said. “What’s going on, dude? Running for president?” Weigman says Romney told him to shove the phone up his ass, and hung up.

In addition to relying on his heightened sense of hearing, Weigman picked up valuable tips on phone hacking from other phreaks on the party lines. One of the most valuable tricks he learned was “spoofing”—using home-brewed or commercial services, such as SpoofCard, to display any number he chose on the caller-ID screen of the person he phoned. Intended for commercial use—allowing, say, a doctor to mask his home phone number while calling a patient—SpoofCard is perfectly legal and available online for as little as $10. Some services let callers alter their voices—male to female—as well as their numbers.

Weigman performed his first “swat” at age 14, when he faked an emergency call from a convenience store down the street from his home. “Listen,” he told the 911 operator, “there’s a robbery here! I need you to show up right now!” Then he hung up and called his brother, who was standing watch outside the store. “Oh, God, dude!” his brother told him. “There’s police everywhere!”

“Really?” Weigman replied in awe. Over the phone, he heard sirens wail in the darkness.

W
EIGMAN BEGAN SPENDING SEVERAL HOURS
a day talking shit on assorted party lines. When someone on the line would challenge him or piss him off, he would respond by faking a 911 call and sending an armed SWAT team to their door. “I probably did it 50 or 60 times,” he says.

He spent most of his time on party lines like Jackie Donut and Boston Loach, which teemed with lowlifes, phreakers and raunchy girls whom Weigman calls “hacker groupies.” Men on the party lines competed to see who could score the most. “A lot of guys on there were looking for free phone sex,” says Angela Roberson, a tongue-pierced blonde from Chicago who got to know Weigman on Boston Loach. The 34-year-old Roberson, who stumbled on the line one night when she was bored and drunk, found its rough-and-tumble community oddly appealing. “You can sit and talk smack to whoever you want to,” she says. “You get to live in a whole different world.” Weigman might be overweight and blind and stuck in his room, but the party line provided him with plenty of opportunities the real world didn’t offer. When asked how much phone sex he had, he says, “Oh, Jesus, man—too much.”

Weigman soon realized that one caller on the party line got his way with the hacker groupies more than anyone else. Stuart Rosoff, a middle-aged party-liner from Cleveland, had started out as a teenager making obscene phone calls and ended up serving three years in prison. Overweight and unemployed, with a hairy chest and thick mustache, Rosoff cruised the party lines for girls, introducing himself as Michael Knight, after David Hasselhoff’s character on
Knight Rider
. He was also a member of a gang of phreaks nicknamed the Wrecking Crew.

When Rosoff didn’t get what he wanted on the party line, he turned ugly. “Stuart was a malicious phreaker,” says Jeff Daniels, the former phreak who hung out on the party line. “He was limited in knowledge, but good at things he knew how to do.” One time, showing off to Weigman, Rosoff singled out a woman who had refused him phone sex and called the police in her hometown, scrambling the caller ID to conceal his identity. The woman, he told the cops, was abusing her kids—causing the 911 operator to dispatch police officers to her door. Having proven his power, Rosoff called the woman back and demanded phone sex again. If she didn’t want to do it, he added generously, he would gladly accept it from her daughter.

“Stuart was like a mentor to Matt,” says Roberson. “They would joke around and threaten to shut each other’s phones off just because they were bored.” It wasn’t long, however, before Weigman surpassed Rosoff as a phreaker. He began to harass the older man, disconnecting his phone and digging up his personal data to use for leverage and revenge. Phreakers call this “the information game,” and Weigman was the undisputed master. Rosoff was soon reduced to groveling on the chat lines, begging Weigman to leave him alone.