The Mad Bomber of New York (22 page)

“Unquestionably genuine,” said Commissioner Kennedy. Berskon's eyes widened like a child's, his mind formulating the eighty-point boldface banner headline of the next morning's issue. The elation was short-lived. Though the letter had contained good news for anxious New Yorkers— word of a truce—it had also contained a plethora of information, undeniably useful to police analysts, for which time and contemplation would be required. Kennedy thought for a moment and then expressed what Seymour Berkson had already begun to surmise in the pregnant pause of silence: Pending further lab and investigative analysis, the contents of the letter should not, for the time being, be publicized.

The request, one that Berkson found difficult to defy with the stern-faced police commissioner sitting directly opposite him, ran counter to everything he felt as a journalist. Here was a scoop that could easily send readership figures of his paper off the charts, but the risk of alienating his new rapport with the Bomber and the police department itself with an all-out burst of headlines weighed heavily on his mind. The matter was fully discussed between the men, and it was finally agreed, in the spirit of compromise, that the Bomber's letter would not be immediately published so as to give the police time to digest and investigate the new clues presented. A more considered and deliberative approach was called for.

On January 2, 3, and 4, an obscure yet compelling item, composed with the full input and cooperation of the New York City Police Department, appeared hidden in the personals column in the announcements section of the
New York Journal-American
:

WE RECEIVED YOUR LETTER. WE APPRECIATE TRUCE. WHAT WERE YOU DEPRIVED OF? WE WANT TO HEAR YOUR VIEWS AND HELP YOU. WE WILL KEEP OUR WORD. CONTACT US SAME WAY AS PREVIOUSLY.

The mysterious communication was another daring shot in the dark, open for all to read yet intended only for one set of eyes. Its writers could only hope that the scrutiny of those eyes would find its way to the beseeching message.

As the city of New York said goodbye to one year and intrepidly entered the next, the Four Fishermen and the brain trust of the New York City Police Department anxiously awaited word from the Mad Bomber.

With the deluge of hoaxes still plaguing the department—130 from Christmas Eve through New Year's alone—and a slew of bogus replies pouring into the
Journal-American
daily, police detectives sifted through every word of the Bomber's curious response to the open letter, searching for any clue as to the identity of its writer
.
The task of distinguishing the Bomber's genuine communications from the counterfeits was made considerably easier by his idiosyncratic use of pencil rather than ink on a uniquely cut and folded standard stamp-embossed U.S. Post Office envelope with the placement of “N.Y.” on a separate line in the address above the words “Journal-American.” Though Berkson had agreed not to immediately publish the contents of the Bomber's response or the distinctive characteristics of its mailing, the paper did allude, in a general way, to the leads generated by it and from his prior letters, and the police vigorously pursued each.

The Bomber's reference to Lehman, Poletti, and Andrews as individuals possessing some special knowledge of his grievances had caught the eye of police investigators as suggestive of some tangential political involvement in the matter. Herbert H. Lehman had served as governor of New York from 1933 through 1942, and Charles Poletti served as his lieutenant governor. More specifically, the mention of Elmer Andrews, who was the state industrial commissioner under Governor Lehman, reaffirmed the possibility of a workmen's compensation dispute that had been reviewed, perhaps at the upper levels of state government, as being somehow part of the Bomber's feud.

When contacted by police, Andrews recalled an incident around 1935 in which he was forced to discharge an angry and menacing employee of the compensation board for a continuous string of infractions, and that the same individual had once lost another job at Consolidated Edison under the same set of circumstances. Each of the three politicians, however, police discovered, had routinely received hundreds if not thousands of crank letters from disgruntled citizens, none of which could be specifically recollected by either man or his staff as particularly eye-catching or alarming. As for the specific lead provided by Elmer Andrews, the police investigated and then dismissed it as heading them down a “blind alley.”

The spotlight of the investigation then turned to the outskirts of New York City. The telltale Mt. Vernon postmark on the Bomber's letter to the
Journal-American
was from the same general community as his prior letters. Most had come from White Plains or other points north of the city and had led investigators to the conclusion that their perpetrator might reside in or have connections with the affluent suburbs of Westchester County. Dr. Brussel had suggested that the Bomber lived farther north, perhaps in the state of Connecticut, and used the areas outside of the city as a postal way station of sorts, but the supposition reached by the New York police was based upon other compelling evidence uncovered by simple, boots-on-the-ground investigative work.

During the first few days of 1957, detectives had begun questioning a number of plumbers and supply house managers throughout the area to better understand the Bomber's repeated past use of the words “well-coupling” in his letters to describe the lengths of pipe used in the construction of his devices. Investigators had always found the expression somewhat puzzling and foreign, and upon speaking with the local tradesmen, confirmed that the phrase was, in fact, specifically indigenous to the towns in and around Westchester County, as opposed to the term “line pipe coupling,” which was commonly used by plumbers and suppliers within the confines of New York City. Combining this revelation with the telling postmarks on the Bomber's various letters, police quickly honed their search for the Bomber and converged in droves upon the quiet northern New York suburbs of Mt. Vernon and White Plains.

On January 3, 1957, New York City police detectives informed a gathering of seventy-five public officials representing thirty-nine separate police departments in Westchester County that the hunt for the Bomber would now focus within their jurisdiction. Samples of the Bomber's distinctive block printing were circulated to each of the represented departments, and, before long, detectives, sheriffs' staff, and patrolmen descended upon a variety of Westchester County offices in a round-the-clock check of 357,000 automobile license applications, 26,000 court files, 150,000 jury lists, 20,000 pistol permit requests, and 9,000 county clerk judgments for handwriting matches. To aid in this monumental task, thirty veteran New York detectives in the midst of a refresher course at the police academy were abruptly removed from class to join the newly formed Bomb Investigation Unit, twelve of whom were sent directly to White Plains to sift through documents. Meanwhile, the department, on the direct order of Commissioner Kennedy, redistributed a circular with a photograph of one of the Bomber's unexploded devices to all 23,000 members of the force, including those serving in White Plains, together with detailed instructions on what to do if such a contraption were to be found.

Within days of commencing the Westchester County investigation, forty-two possible suspects had been developed on the basis of handwriting analysis and were being watched by the finest trailing detectives on the New York force. Hundreds of possible matches had been revealed from the hundreds of thousands of samples reviewed, and each was sent to Captain Finney at the New York City Crime Lab for further paring. The resulting list of forty-two matches was considered close enough, in each case, to be suspicious, and detectives began compiling detailed dossiers on the private and public lives of every man under surveillance.

On the recommendation of Dr. Brussel and pursuant to the Bomber's own statements that his “days on earth are numbered” and that most of his “adult life has been spent in bed,” investigators began canvassing hospitals and medical professionals, requesting them to be on the lookout for a man fitting the descriptions generated by and for the police department, in the belief that the Bomber was perhaps under the care of a physician, nurse, or psychiatrist. With every promising suspect or enticing lead, however, came a timely alibi or exculpatory detail that brought police back to the investigative drawing board. On the evening of January 10, however, just as the department had begun to doubt the validity of their own current methods, it seemed that perhaps their luck had changed.

With the investigation targeting individuals in poor states of health, word had come to police that a sixty-seven-year-old widower who lived alone in the Bronx near the border of Westchester County—a former metalworker—had died at Fordham Hospital from bronchial pneumonia. The suspect, Andrew Kleewen, had been born in Latvia and spoke in a thick accent easily confused as German, and he generally fit the published description of the Mad Bomber. Upon a check of the dead man's apartment, police found the premises to be in complete disarray, with piles of newspapers, letters, bills, and receipts massed on the floors, upon most of the surfaces, and stuffed in several bureaus. Many of the letters, copies of which Kleewen had retained, had been addressed to high-ranking public officials such as President Roosevelt, Secretary of State John Dulles, various congressmen, state legislators, and the mayor of New York, and almost all complained of this or that wrong perpetrated against the writer. Initial descriptions of Kleewen's handwriting promisingly seemed to contain indications of a Teutonic style, and when a stack of bills from Consolidated Edison Co. going back twenty-five years was found among his belongings, the bomb squad was called into the investigation.

During the fragile period of unease while Seymour Berkson and Commissioner Kennedy cautiously nurtured a tenuous relationship with their newfound correspondent, the
Journal-American
had grudgingly fulfilled their promise to the police not to publish the Bomber's letter until a full analysis of its contents could be conducted. With the Bomber's stated deadline looming, investigators worked feverishly to wring whatever evidence they could from the letter without risking further danger to the public by permitting the reckless publication of pertinent and sensitive information. In a matter of days, however, the inquisitive eyes of an editor from the
New York World-Telegram and Sun
had detected the well-concealed personal ad intended solely for the Bomber, confronted an indiscreet police official with the evidence, and wangled an ill-advised confirmation that the
Journal-American
was, in fact, sitting on a letter authored by the Mad Bomber. The following day, Berkson and Kennedy were dismayed to find a page-one article in the
World-Telegram
titled “Mad Bomber's Letter Hints Brief Truce,” scooping the story of the Bomber's letter to “a New York newspaper” and brazenly publicizing the clandestine efforts of the unnamed paper to initiate communications with their quarry. Instantly, a variety of other news outlets around the city repeated the story and, before long, the
Journal-American
's guarded secret had become the talk of the town.

“We were in the awkward position of being honor-bound not to print a line about [the letter],” Berskon later said. Though he had bristled at the
World-Telegram
's shameless tack of preempting the story and perhaps endangering the police investigation, the
Journal-American
had by no means ceased reporting on the Bomber story during the uneasy truce. They wrote extensively—and responsibly—about the continuing rash of hoaxes and the ongoing investigation in Westchester County, but then, in the first week of January 1957, the paper inexplicably printed a story lambasting the volatile personality with whom they sought a trusting association as a “psychopathic ‘enemy of society,'” quoting a New York deputy police inspector. The inflammatory article, ostensibly placed with the authority of the
Journal-American
's editorial staff, did not miss the eye of the Bomber, and he quickly articulated his displeasure: