The Best American Crime Writing (48 page)

Coast Guardsman John Cullen was the first witness. After recalling the events of his encounter with the Germans, Cullen said he could identify Dasch only if allowed to hear his voice. When Dasch said, “What is your name?” Cullen positively identified him. In his cross-examination of Cullen, Colonel Ristine noted that Dasch had never attempted any violence against Cullen. After Cullen left the stand, Warren Barnes, the chief of the Amagansett Coast Guard station, identified all the objects found on the beach, including the clothes Dasch’s men had buried. Next an FBI munitions expert testified as to the type of the explosives.

The next two FBI agents to testify seemed to strengthen Dasch’s
case. Special Agent Charles Lanham stated that Burger had confessed that he and Dasch had never planned to follow through on the sabotage but instead had wanted to fight Hitler. Special Agent Norval Wills testified to the promise of a presidential pardon for Dasch in return for pleading guilty.

Royall later called each of the Germans to testify in his own defense. Haupt testified that he had planned all along not to go through with the sabotage and to turn the others in on July 6, when he would know where they all were. Neubauer swore that he and Kerling had almost immediately come “to the conclusion that we would not have a chance to go through with our orders.” Quirin claimed to have developed doubts about the mission “on the submarine.” Thiel claimed that he would never have carried out acts of sabotage. During the trial, under interrogation by Biddle, Thiel and Neubauer claimed that they hadn’t turned themselves in to the FBI for fear of the alleged Gestapo infiltration, which would have resulted in dire harm to their families in Germany. Heinck admitted that even before going to the training farm he had understood that the work he was about to do in America was definitely sabotage.

Meanwhile, the question of Dasch’s and Burger’s special status as collaborators with the U.S. government was also being discussed outside the tribunal. On July 16 Biddle wrote in a memorandum to Roosevelt,

Dasch and Burger finally did testify. Dasch claimed that the sole reason he had entered sabotage school was to escape Germany, and Ristine again pointed out Dasch’s failure to harm Cullen, despite the orders he was under to subdue and take back to the submarine anybody he encountered. Burger was the last to testify; he said that he was an American citizen who had served in two National Guard units, earning two honorable discharges. After his return to Germany, he said, he quickly became disillusioned with the Nazi Party and began to plot a return to the United States. The lawyers defending him pointed out that he had cooperated with the FBI agents when they came to his hotel room, and that his interrogation had actually been more useful than Dasch’s, with far more detailed descriptions of the school for saboteurs and of his colleagues.

After sixteen days in session the defense rested on July 27, and the six men other than Dasch and Burger signed a statement expressing appreciation for having been given a fair trial. In it they wrote, “Before all we want to state that defense counsel has represented our case unbiased, better than we could expect and probably risking the indignation of public opinion. We thank our defense counsel.”

But Royall wasn’t finished. Determined to challenge the President’s proclamation that the men should face a military tribunal, he sought to win his clients’ freedom by demanding a writ of habeas corpus. Though the Supreme Court had been adjourned for the summer, it convened in a special session on July 29 to consider the matter.

Royall argued that Long Island and Florida beaches could not be characterized as “zones of military operation.” There had been no combat there, and no plausible threat of invasion. Royall argued that the civil courts were functioning, and under the circumstances they were the appropriate venue for the case to be heard. Biddle argued that the United States and Germany were at war, and cited a law passed by Congress in 1798 that stated, “Whenever there is a declared war, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all native citizens, denizens or subjects of the hostile nation shall be liable to be apprehended … as alien enemies.”

On July 31 the Supreme Court unanimously denied Royall’s appeal, writing, “The military commission was lawfully constituted … petitioners are held in lawful custody for trial before the military commission and have not shown cause for being discharged by writ of habeas corpus.”

The members of the tribunal then deliberated for two days before reaching a verdict. Finally, on August 3, in accordance with instructions, the tribunal’s verdict was delivered—by Army plane—directly to Roosevelt, at Hyde Park, in four thick manila envelopes. It found all eight men guilty and recommended death by electrocution, but added, “In view of the apparent assistance given to the prosecution by defendants Ernest Peter Burger and George John Dasch, the commission unanimously recommends that the sentence of each of these two defendants … be commuted from death to life imprisonment.”

On August 7 General Cox, the tribunal’s provost marshal, received instructions from President Roosevelt: All but Dasch and Burger were to be electrocuted at noon the following day.

Early in the morning of August 8, after the Germans had been fed a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast at the District of
Columbia Jail, General Cox and an Army chaplain entered the cells of the condemned men and informed them of their fate. Each man turned pale and seemed stunned. None said a word. Burger was reading a copy of
The Saturday Evening Post
when Cox and the chaplain entered and told him he had been spared. Burger responded simply “Yes, sir,” and returned to his reading.

As the morning progressed, military officers, Army doctors, the city coroner, and Army ambulances arrived at the jail. People moved quickly and said little. The mood was somber. Final adjustments were made to the electric chair—a red-oak device situated in a 12-by-18-foot execution chamber located on the top floor of the jail. Each condemned man would face a glass panel that appeared to him to be opaque, behind which would sit representatives of the tribunal and other officials. The witnesses were to include Major General McCoy, Hoover, and representatives of the War and Justice Departments. In alphabetical order, beginning with Haupt, the condemned men would be walked into the chamber and executed with 4,500 volts of electricity.

The process began at noon. Each execution took no longer than fourteen minutes—the time required to administer the sentence, establish a time of death, remove the corpse, and ventilate the room for the arrival of the next man.

After the final execution the tribunal reported to President Roosevelt that his orders had been carried out. Just before 1:30
P.M.
an announcement was made by the White House press secretary, Steve Early, who reported that six executions had taken place. The six bodies were buried in a pauper’s cemetery at Blue Plains, in the District of Columbia, a site adjacent to the House for the Aged and Infirm and the Industrial Home School for Colored Children. Six wooden headboards—marked simply 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, and 281—identified the graves.

Early also announced that by “unanimous recommendation by the commission concurred in by the Attorney General and the
judge Advocate General of the Army,” the President had commuted the sentences of Dasch and Burger. “The commutation directed by the President in the case of Burger,” Early said, “was to confinement to hard labor for life. In the case of Dasch, the sentence was commuted by the President to the confinement at hard labor for thirty years. The records in all eight cases will be sealed until the end of the war.”

Dasch and Burger spent some six years in U.S. prisons and then were deported to Germany in April of 1948. Burger subsequently disappeared and is rumored to have fled to Spain. In 1959 Dasch published
Eight Spies Against America
, a self-promotional and little-noticed account of the whole affair. He spent his final years working as a travel agent and a tour guide in Germany and enduring regular harassment in the places he lived, because of his role in the betrayal of his colleagues. In 1983 he was tracked down by an American college student named Jonathan Mann, who reported that Dasch “got all teary-eyed talking about how he facilitated the deaths of ‘those boys.’” Late in his life Dasch befriended Charlie Chaplin, who was living in exile in nearby Switzerland, and the two often compared notes on how J. Edgar Hoover had ruined their lives.

Until his death, in 1992, in Germany, Dasch remained hopeful that he would receive the presidential pardon promised to him decades before. It never came.

The editors at
The Atlantic Monthly
commissioned the “Keystone Kommandos” just after Bush signed the order allowing military tribunals to try foreigners charged with terrorism after September 11. Bush copied some provisions straight from President Roosevelt’s order, including closing the trials to the public, judgment by a two-thirds vote of the military commissioners, and no appeal
.

But legal scholars, members of Congress, and civil rights activists
questioned whether Bush’s order was constitutional, pointing out that the legal precedent for tribunals is only during formally declared wars
.

My story had no political motivation; it was just meant to be a historical tale about the last time a military tribunal was convened. I think what I found most compelling were some of the parallels between the Al Qaeda terrorists and the hapless Nazis of 1
942—
their youth and inexperience, the rigorous training for the mission, even the fact that both sets of men seemed to enjoy their brief time in America. But history does not always repeat itself

T
he
Seamaster
anchored in the wrong place. Claudio, on duty at the harbormaster’s office, watched it pull right past him. It moved past Alvaro, who was sitting on an overturned canoe, enjoying a morning bottle of wine, and João, who was loading a boat with cases of Coke and was soaked in sweat. It was ten o’clock on the morning of December 5, 2001, and the sun was already bleaching out the world. The
Seamaster’s
sails were down, and its motor was churning up deep contrails of white water as the 112-foot aluminum schooner plowed through the Brazilian Amazon, past Rita as she pinned up laundry along the river, and a man known as the Pig Farmer, who was buying lima beans at the grocery near the port. The
Seamaster
, with a crew of nine plus the skipper, Sir Peter Blake, was supposed to motor on to Macapá, a few minutes downriver. But they didn’t receive that message from the harbormaster because they were tuned to the wrong radio frequency. Instead they pulled into the port of Santana, the worst neighborhood in maybe two hundred miles. The
Seamaster
was anchored there for only a half hour before an officer from the port authority told them this was not a safe place to be, and the boat moved on to Macapà. But the
Seamaster’
s shipping agent, a fat and perpetually sweating man whose name is José Sansão Souza Batista, but who likes to be called Sam, says that their mistake changed the whole course of events. “I would think, if I was a spiritual person, that everything was
concurring for this boat to have an encounter with death,” Sam says, with the benefit of hindsight.

“Everyone knows the boats that come in and out of here,” says Alvaro, who was drinking the wine. “We all pay attention. This is what it is to live in this town.” João, who was loading the Coke, says there was a lot of talk about the
Seamaster
. “We have yachts come through here all the time, but this was a strange-looking one. Everyone thought, This person is very rich.”

Among the others who took an interest in the
Seamaster
were six men who would later be called pirates in newspapers all over the world: Ricardo, Isael, José, Reney, Rubens, and Josué. They were known to hang around the docks, where they’d pick up the odd job or smoke a few cigarettes or get drunk in the saloons at night. Ricardo, a 22-year-old from Santana, would later say, “We saw the boat and we were thinking, This is a rich tourist. There will be a lot of American dollars. And so we thought, Let’s go see this boat.”

Santana is not geared for tourists—there are lots of boats moving through the port, but almost none of them are yachts carrying foreigners looking for rum drinks and beaded necklaces. The only regular visitors are the crews of giant, rusty freighters that stop to load wood pulp or manganese. A bartender at one of the dirty saloons that crowd the port area says he makes a good deal of his money from Greek and Russian sailors. He says there are ten people ready to sell them a beer the second they descend the gangway, and at least as many ready to charge them for sex, rob them, or both. At night, you can see the whores congregate around the port wearing the international whore uniform: cheap, high plastic pumps and brightly colored short skirts.

Macapá, population 250,000, is the capital of Amapá, the most godforsaken of the Brazilian states. The only way in or out is by plane or boat. They tried to build a road to the city of Manaus, a thousand miles away, but a couple hundred miles out the thing sank into the Amazonian swamp. Santana is ten miles from downtown
Macapá, and the intrastate epicenter of crime. Most weeks, says a doctor at the Santana hospital, a dozen people are murdered. “Mostly it’s by machete. I had to help a guy yesterday who had had seven hacks taken out of him. It was because he’d killed the attacker’s brother the week before. Neither of them has been arrested.”

On the Sunday after I arrive, my translator, Marcelo, and I are approached by a drunk guy with a puffy face and a T-shirt that says Santana will be AIDS-free by 2001. He asks for money, and when we say no, he pushes Marcelo. A shipping porter comes over and chases him away before anything else happens. The porter and Marcelo say this is by far the most common kind of robber: a sort of aggravated begging. Santana is a place where you need to know where you are all the time, Marcelo says, and it’s good to be able to tell when the mood of a place is changing.

Late one night, I can’t sleep and decide to take a walk around the neighborhood, though I’ve been warned against it. On the front porch of my hotel, I meet a woman named Rose, a Mormon missionary. She has soft lines on her face, gray hair, and a low-wattage beatific smile. As it turns out, she is a first-rate insomniac and has stood watch over the darkling streets of Johannesburg, Manila, and New York, among others. I ask her why Santana seems to be such a dangerous place and she says that poor rural villages the world over are pretty safe. It’s the poor people in the cities, the transients, the have-nots in plain sight of the haves, who become antisocial.

When I leave for my walk (which lasts about thirty-seven seconds), Rose puts her hand on mine and says, “Careful, dear, they’ll shoot you in the face.”

When Sir Peter Blake pulled his boat into Macapá, it was the last day of the
Seamaster’s
two-month mission through the Amazon basin. The crew had sailed 1,200 miles upstream and back again, making a documentary about the Amazonian ecosystem to teach
the world, as Blake said, that “the earth is a water planet: good water, good life; poor water, poor life.” The size of the crew fluctuated between ten and twenty people throughout the expedition, but the core was men Blake had known for years—Don Robertson, his best friend; Errol Olphert, who had sailed with Blake on his America’s Cup team—and for whom the
Seamaster
voyage was a kind of reward.

Things on the Amazon hadn’t gone exactly as Blake had planned. He had hired a diver to do some filming, but the Amazon was so murky with silt that they’d been unable to get any good footage. Plus, says Robertson, “With wildlife, it’s not like the zoo; the animals don’t just line up so you can take their picture.” But they did see a few pink dolphins—strange, shy animals that live more than a thousand miles from the ocean. Throughout, Blake ran the expedition with an abiding professionalism—the crew rose at dawn each morning to clean the boat, chart the course, set up for the filming.

Blake was possibly the greatest sailor who ever lived. There are people who would argue this point—some would say it was Dennis Conner, or maybe Sir Francis Drake—but there are about four million people who wouldn’t. Blake was from New Zealand, and after winning the Whitbread around-the-world race in 1990, the Jules Verne Trophy in 1994 (in the process breaking the record for circumnavigating the globe), and, most famously, the America’s Cup in 1995 and 2000, he became a national hero. “Most kids in New Zealand will have a bit of a grasp on who the heroes are,” says Don Robertson. “And they’ll tell you it’s Edmund Hillary and Peter Blake.”

Blake did not become the greatest sailor in the world by being the best technical sailor. It was a greatness achieved more by force of personality. He was an extraordinarily striking person to meet. He stood six feet four inches tall (his friends sometimes called him Six Four) and had worn his hair in a Beatles-esque mop since the seventies.
Steve Fossett, who holds world records for sailing and ballooning, says it made him look like a Viking. People who met Blake say he possessed a spiritual energy, as if he were sprinkled with a kind of fairy dust that could make almost anyone a true believer. Michael Levitt, who’s written eleven books on sailing, tells this story: “I met him in Philadelphia when he took one of his early Whitbread boats around. He’d put this project together, built this boat, and he was off to win this race, and you could just
see
it in him. You didn’t know what to make of it then, because he hadn’t actually accomplished anything yet. But he just radiated.”

Blake had an uncanny ability to get very rich men to give him millions of dollars to build and race boats in exchange for a company logo painted on the hull, and to convince the best yachtsmen in the world to sail with him. David Alan-Williams, who crewed with Blake on his record-setting around-the-world voyage in 1994, says, “There were a lot of us who used to say that if Peter came to us and said he was going to sail a boat to the moon, we’d go, ‘Okay, when do we start?’” Levitt thinks people became devoted to Blake partly because he acted as if he had never in his life experienced a moment of doubt.

Blake endured a great deal to be a long-distance sailor. In an ocean race, you are expected to shrink your existence to its smallest and most portable form. Peter Blake was not designed for the quarters on racing yachts; the ceilings on the ENZA
New Zealand
, for instance, were less than six feet high. So Blake spent thirty years of his life on metal schooners and catamarans doing thirty knots, bent at the waist, sleeping in beds in which maybe 80 percent of him fit comfortably. And most of those races he did not win—he lost the Whitbread four times before he won it. “Every time I’ve done a round-the-world race, I’ve said it’s the last,” Blake said in 1987. “It’s the highlight of your life, but it’s crazy.” At some level, Blake was carrying on a war of attrition against the Big Forces of the world: weather, ocean, time. His greatest skill may have been his ability to
ignore conditions, failure, and, according to the sometimes dismal logs of his races, broken masts, disintegrated hulls, and spells of hypothermia. The will to move forward was possibly Blake’s most basic impulse.

The
Seamaster
was a retirement from professional racing. Blake felt he’d accomplished everything he could. (As Don Robertson says, “Would Hillary climb Everest twice?”) Instead of puttering about in the garden or sinking into a fit of drinking and self-pity, as some retired athletes do, he decided to launch the
Seamaster
. “I sailed all over the world,” Blake said, “but I never got to slow down and look at anything.” He was able to convince the Omega watch company to give him the money to buy a boat from the Cousteau Society, which he painted, stamped with the name
SEAMATER
, after Omega’s $3,000 flagship watch, and launched under the imprimatur of Blakexpeditions, which he figured on building into his own Cousteau Society. Not that retirement didn’t have its benefits. Instead of eating freeze-dried soy protein, as he had when he raced, on the
Seamaster
he had a full-time cook, a Brazilian named Rizaldo. When they brought the boat to South America, the crew built canvas shades against the tropical sun, and stocked the fore freezer with loads of meat and the aft refrigerators with greens and tropical fruit and milk and cold beer. Robertson says, “The conditions were positively luxurious compared to the other boats we’d sailed on.”

Because they didn’t really have anything to document in Macapá (the main tourist activity is straddling the equator, which runs through town, at the visitors’ center), the
Seamaster’
s crew had designated the day for running errands and generally screwing around. Sam, the shipping agent, drove them to the big grocery store in town, where they bought fruit, gas for the grill, and bottles of local
rum. Blake and six of his crew spent a few hours at a restaurant at Fazendinha Beach, across from their new anchorage, eating fish and rice and drinking caipirinhas.

“Mr. Peter docked his dinghy right there and stayed from 5:30
P.M.
until 8:00
P.M.
,” the waiter who served them tells me. “He was a very tall man, much taller than us, very white and very strong, much stronger than us. It was easy to see he was the leader. All the attention was on him.”

Around Blake at the table were most of the crew of the
Seamaster
, who were also his good friends. Leon Sefton, the cameraman, was his longtime business partner’s son. Blake had invited Robin Allen, because at 19 he was a promising young sailor, and Rodger Moore, an Auckland plumber with little sailing experience, because Blake had worked with his son. Don Robertson was staff photographer.

“We were all quite relaxed because it was the end of the trip,” Robertson says, “and all we had to do was sail around the corner and up to Trinidad and Tobago, where some of us were going to have a Caribbean Christmas.”

The waiter says, “They had a very good time, laughing always. They drank, too. They had ten caipirinhas and fourteen six-hundred-milliliter bottles of beer between seven of them. You see that waitress over there? She served him.” He calls the waitress over. She’s in her forties and wearing stained yellow spandex pants and a white shirt that laces up the front. “We danced together a little bit, and I gave him his last kiss, on his cheek, of course,” she says.

When the crew got back to the boat that night, Blake and the others turned on the CD player, opened a few beers, and installed themselves in their hammocks. The cook began preparing a light dinner.

“The night in Macapá started so great,” says Robin Allen, who lives near the Blakes’ home in Hampshire, England, and is close with their children (James, 15, and Sarah-Jane, 18). He says, “You
know, there was absolutely no alcohol allowed while we were under way. Peter would kick you off for that. The main partying took place when he would say, ‘Okay, tonight is for having a good time.’”

“They had a nice party,” Sam, the shipping agent, says. “They drank beer. If there was one thing they had a lot of, it was beer. When I came on the boat later, I saw a bucket with fifty empty beer cans in it. But this was a party, and we know we can’t just have two beers when we are having a party.”

At nine o’clock, six men met at the port in Santana: Ricardo, Isael, José, Reney, Rubens, and Josué. They were local guys, between 20 and 30 and mostly unemployed. Ricardo had been working as a receptionist at a computer school his cousin owned, until he was fired the month before. Reney sometimes helped his father with electrical work. Most of them had a history of crime, especially armed robbery. Isael had been out of prison for only two months and seven days.