Authors: Howard Blum
T
here had been much to keep Holt busy during his final term at Cornell. He taught two classes of undergraduate French while also finishing, in marathon writing sessions that had him going without sleep for days, his doctoral thesis.
Life at home was no less exhausting. He was now the father of two children, the older only a little more than two years old. To his wife’s great joy, he had accepted a professorship to teach Romance languages at Southern Methodist University in her hometown of Dallas, Texas. He’d start in the fall, and they had somehow managed to find time to plan the dream house they’d soon start building close to campus on a lot they’d purchased sight unseen for $600.
Rippling with restless, manic energy, Holt also kept up his hobby—collecting stories on murder and insanity. He maintained a thick scrapbook crammed with neatly clipped reports. “The Rare Case of the Insane,” “Suffers for Brother’s Crime,” “Admits Killing Stepchild,” “Slain in Defense of Woman”—he’d found hundreds of similarly themed articles while obsessively going through newspapers and magazines from all over the country.
And still, with all that was crowding his professional and personal life, Holt, the curious and loyal friend, had made time to read Hugo Munsterberg’s new book,
The War and America
.
His former Harvard colleague’s book was a revelation. It was a proudly combative argument that insisted on nearly every page that Germany occupied the moral and legal high ground in the European war. The book was dedicated “to all lovers of fair play,” and in chapter after unyielding chapter it continued to reiterate that America’s prejudicial treatment of Germany was “a baffling injustice.”
The professor’s irrefutable proof of America’s “anti-German sentiment” was the nation’s continued shipments of arms and munitions to the Allies. “It is a sin against the spirit of fair play,” he argued, that Allied soldiers went into battle firing American bullets while the British blockade prevented the Fatherland’s troops from receiving supplies.
Holt read these words and felt as if Munsterberg were once again talking directly to him, urging him on. Years ago the psychologist had provided Erich Muenter with the secret faith that he could get away with murder. Now the Harvard professor’s words were a call to action for Holt, the man Muenter had become.
Since the outbreak of the war, Holt’s emotions had been with the Fatherland, but in only an instinctive, native son’s way. The professor’s book reinforced these airy sentiments with girders of steely intellectual rigor. Holt now understood that this was a crucial moment in history. An epic battle between good and evil raged in Europe. A German defeat would be a blow to the future of civilization.
The tighter the professor’s argument gripped his thoughts, the clearer it became that once again Munsterberg was imploring him to make a contribution. It was incumbent on men like him, men who dared to have the necessary moral courage, to act. It was his duty to force America to realize its mistakes. He would restore fair play in the world.
When the term ended in June, Holt gave his wife nearly all the money he had saved, almost $400, and sent her and the children off to Dallas. They would live, it was agreed, with her father until he joined them. In the meantime, he would go to New York. He needed to do, he explained, “some special research.”
With only $20 and some loose coins in his pocket, he took the train to Manhattan. He had no plan, and no resources. Yet he was confident that he had embarked on a secret road that would lead to glory.
A
walk-in always put those in the spy trade on edge. One fear was that the stranger volunteering his services was too good to be true. He might be a double, an operative sent by the opposition to infiltrate and gather intelligence. Another concern, also quite probable, was that the amateur showing up at the door, his head full of big ideas and grandiose schemes, would be impossible to control. Every professional had heard too many hand-wringing stories about how a single loose cannon had brought down an entire network.
As a consequence, the general rule was not to recruit anyone who made the initial approach. Yet when this would-be asset had something tantalizing to offer, rules could be broken. When the balance between risk and opportunity was not clear, a decision had to be made about which way to jump.
That was the dilemma dividing the case officers of the Abteilung IIIB network in New York when Frank Holt approached them. During the weeks when Tom was grappling with the enigma of von Rintelen, trying to understand whether the suave financier was who he claimed to be, they were tugging at their own riddle.
Holt had presented a bold plan. It was nothing less than a way of putting a definitive end to the American munitions and supply shipments.
For the past year, the network’s attacks had been sporadic, their effectiveness short-lived. Cigar and rudder bombs targeted single vessels; no sooner had one ship gone up in smoke than another sailed off in its place.
This operation would be much more ambitious. With a single daring act, it would destroy the enemies’ ability to outfit their armies. It would cut off the unending flow of money that paid for the Allies’ orders. And at a time when von Rintelen had already railed to associates that “Morgan ought to be put out of the way,” it held the promise of not just retribution but a wish fulfilled.
There were nevertheless many reasons to reject the walk-in’s proposal. Holt would fail, and once captured he’d trade the valuable secrets he had acquired while serving the cause—names, locations, tradecraft—in return for leniency. Or Holt would succeed, and the audacity of his act would so infuriate the American president that Wilson would at last find the resolve to lead the nation into war. Either way, the consequences for Germany would be disastrous.
There was, however, a way of limiting the risk. Keep the walk-in at arm’s length—
semiconscious
was the specific jargon in the secret world—and deniability would be possible. Supply him with money, guns, dynamite, whatever resources he required. Even share a bit of operational guidance. Then let him go off and do the rest on his own.
The walk-in’s fanaticism would be an operational blessing. There was no need to wind Holt up; he couldn’t get any tighter. One conversation, and it was obvious Holt was a time bomb set to explode. His crazed zeal, in fact, painted the entire mission with a natural cover: Holt was the perfect fall guy.
People would see only the marionette prancing about wildly onstage; the strings of the puppet masters would go unobserved. Blame would fall on the unbalanced lone gunman; there’d be no compelling reason to look any further. When the operation was considered in that shadowy light, the decision to go forward was an easy one.
Or that was what Tom, trying to put all the disparate pieces together in the aftermath of headline-making events, would later imagine had happened. He had spent a detective’s rigorous lifetime boiling cases down to the hard facts, the times when, he said, “two and two makes four.” But this was another sort of investigation entirely. The web of conspiracy had been woven too tightly. The entirety of the plot could never be known, and, Tom grudgingly conceded, it would therefore be “valuable in speculating on what probably happened.” “A flight of imagination,” he went on, was required to fit the tangible pieces into a fully assembled puzzle.
As for the initial pass, Tom could only speculate on how it had played out. One theory got its inspiration from an undercover sting Barnitz had run.
That June, Madison Square Garden hosted a week of pro-German rallies. On almost every night that same month speakers also crowded Herald Square, bellowing passionately about the Fatherland and providing earnest justifications for the kaiser’s decision to go to war. When Felix Galley, hoarse and exhausted, finally stepped down from his soapbox one evening at Herald Square and headed up Broadway on his way home, a man from the crowd followed.
It was unnerving, footsteps echoing on the sidewalk, a solitary presence trailing behind him in the darkness. Galley prepared himself, ready for a fight.
Yet when Harry Newton caught up, he burst out with a fervent declaration: “I want to help Germany win the war!” To prove his commitment, he was prepared to dynamite the Brooks Locomotive Works in Dunkirk, New York. And that was for starters. He was also ready to place bombs in the federal building and police headquarters. Would Galley, he implored, introduce him to a German official who’d know how to make use of his services?
Galley agreed to consult “the chief.” But he was secretly shocked by the intrigues the stranger had suggested; and Newton’s jittery intensity had only added to his sense that this was someone to avoid. Galley was a loyal supporter of the Fatherland, yet the chief he rushed to speak to was the chief of police.
The case was passed on to Tom, who assigned Barnitz to investigate. Playing the role of a burly, formidable German agent, Barnitz met with Newton in the man’s narrow, white-walled crib of a room at the Mills Hotel No. 3 on Thirty-Sixth Street.
“I’m in a hurry,” Barnitz, the busy spy, began brusquely. He immediately offered the walk-in $5,000 if he’d “smash the Welland Canal or blow up the Brooks Locomotive Works.” Newton was gung ho. In fact, he revealed, he already had the necessary equipment. He’d left a suitcase packed with bombs he’d built in the baggage room of the New York Central Railroad.
“Fine,” said Barnitz. “You are under arrest.”
Holt’s initial approach could have gone down very much like that, Tom suspected. A sidling up to a speaker at the Garden or Herald Square, and a whispered name passed to the would-be agent. Only instead of Barnitz, the sit-down would have been with a genuine Abteilung IIIB hood.
Although, Tom also hypothesized, it was no less possible that the walk-in had simply marched into the German Club on Central Park South or, for that matter, the German consulate on lower Broadway and announced that he wanted to offer his services. Someone would’ve passed his name on to Koenig.
Within days, the security chief would’ve sent word to the prospect scheduling a meeting at any of a dozen clandestine spots he used around town—say, for example, the Turkish Bath up in Harlem. Once the higher-ups had made their decision, Koenig, dusting off one of his many aliases, would have run the asset, pushing him forward, guiding him as he went off on his mission.
But while many of the particulars remained beyond Tom’s grasp, it was undeniable that days after a nearly penniless Frank Holt arrived from Ithaca and checked into a thirty-cents-a-night room at the Mills Hotel, he embarked on a well-financed, operationally sophisticated mission of murder and destruction that shook America.
L
ater, after much detective work, Tom succeeded in reconstructing many of the events that kept Holt busy as he moved around New York during the final three weeks of June 1915. Each new revelation left him convinced the case “was becoming more interesting every minute.” Still, he also couldn’t help feeling that for all his efforts he had uncovered only part of the tale, the iceberg’s proverbial tip. And what remained forever submerged, he believed, concealed a powerful corollary story. The substantiated facts, however, were these.
On June 8, Holt checked into the Mills Hotel No. 3 (the same low-cost barracks, Tom noted with interest, where Barnitz had bagged the would-be saboteur and where the German passport scam had, for $20 a head, recruited its stooges). He’d arrived alone, having walked from the train station carrying one small valise and a typewriter. The hotel was crowded, nearly all its 1,875 rooms booked, but the clerks would remember Holt.
Three days into his stay, the letters started arriving. The Mills was the sort of down-and-out establishment where the occupants usually didn’t get mail, so when the envelopes addressed to Mr. Frank Holt began coming in, sometimes three or four delivered throughout a single day, the clerks took notice. Someone—or several persons, for all the clerks knew—was staying in constant touch with this guest. Then the police came.
During his years at Cornell, Holt had played the mild-mannered, bookish academic. His time in Texas too, as well as at the succession of colleges where he’d taught, had passed without any public outbursts of anger. But during his second week in New York, his discipline snapped. All the control he’d previously summoned to help conceal the secrets of his past was abandoned. Never a man known to throw a punch, let alone the first blow in a fight, Holt suddenly began pummeling another guest.
Critical comments about Germany were the ostensible provocation. There had been only a few words, but they ignited a blazing rage. Holt was all over the helpless man, punching and kicking wildly. The police were called, and when the victim refused to press charges, they let Holt off with a stern warning.
But an incident report was filed. And it was the evidence many authorities would later cite to demonstrate that during his stay in New York Holt’s carefully constructed persona had begun to unravel. Or it could just as well have been, Tom found himself suspiciously thinking, a deliberate attempt by the enemy secret service to get it on the record that Holt was a violent pro-German lunatic.
Yet while his mood might have been unsteady, Holt’s attention was focused. He spent those three weeks in June busily obtaining supplies and conducting reconnaissance for his mission. The professor worked with the skill and the resourcefulness of a professional, and money was suddenly no object.
He went to Jersey City, where he found a hardware dealer who sold guns. How a Cornell professor found his way across the Hudson to a New Jersey gun shop and how he got the money for the trip, not to mention the gun and ammunition, were never clarified. He studied the glass case filled with rows of rifles, but a .38-caliber Iver and Johnson revolver caught his eye. Does it come with a guarantee to “work every time”? he asked the clerk.
John Menagh frowned. Revolvers don’t come with a warranty, he grumbled.
Nevertheless, Holt purchased the gun along with a box of cartridges. Then he decided that he’d better buy another revolver, too.
The .38 was the last handgun in the store, so Menagh suggested he go across the street to Joseph Keechan’s pawnshop. There he bought a used .32-caliber revolver. Adding a new alias to his growing list, he signed “C. Hendricks” on the sales slip.
The next day, Holt was out in the Long Island North Shore farm country, poking around a bucolic community then known as Central Park but soon to be incorporated as the town of Bethpage. Only now the previously destitute college teacher was calling himself Mr. Patton, driving a black Ford, and giving the impression to Louis Ott, a local real estate broker, that he was a man of means.
His physician, Patton explained gravely, had ordered him to move to the country for his health. He was looking for a quiet place, off the beaten track, where he could rest.
Ott found him a secluded two-room bungalow, far from the main road and hidden by a stand of tall trees. Just what I’m looking for, Patton decided at once. He paid a month’s rent in cash. He would still keep his room at the Mills, but the bungalow would be his operational headquarters, a place where he could lie low, hide his weapons, and plan his attacks.
But first he needed dynamite. He made inquiries in New York, and when those were unproductive, his hunt took him to New Jersey and then on to Pennsylvania. He finally found a company on Long Island that could sell him the explosives he needed, he volunteered to the salesman, to “get rid of some tree stumps.” He asked that the shipment be freighted to the train station at Syosset, a town near Central Park; he’d pick it up at the railroad freight office.
Railroad safety regulations required that explosives must be carried on special trains, ones without passengers or other freight. It could take a few days, the salesman advised. Maybe more.
Still, the next day, and then every day for the following week, Holt went to the station on Jackson Avenue to inquire if a shipment for Henderson—the new name he was using—had arrived. And each day the freight agent, George Carnes, would tell him sorry—nothing for Henderson. But the persistent Henderson wouldn’t take no for an answer, and would invariably ask Carnes to check again.
It got so irritating that one morning Carnes barked back, telling Henderson to calm down and relax or get out of his office. And when something finally arrived for Henderson, it wasn’t the dynamite but a big black trunk shipped from New York and weighing thirty-six pounds, according to the shipping invoice.
Henderson seemed glad it had arrived, but he let Carnes know that he was still waiting for the explosives he needed to remove an ugly stand of tree trunks. “It’ll come when it comes,” Carnes told him.
So he waited. He nailed a bull’s-eye target to a tree behind the bungalow and began practicing with the revolvers. He was good with guns, and the target’s inner circles were soon perforated with holes. And when he wasn’t shooting or pestering the freight agent, he went off and did reconnaissance.
LIKE A GOLDEN ARROW POINTING
the way, East Island on a bright June day was a shining narrow peninsula of land jutting straight out toward the shimmering blue waters of Long Island Sound. The Gold Coast town of Glen Cove was famous for its great estates, mansions as big as the Ritz surrounded by fields of shaved green lawns. But most locals would enviously agree—especially those who were weekend sailors—that Matinicock Point, the estate house situated at the center of East Island, was special.
It wasn’t that the house was particularly large, although as with nearly every estate on the Gold Coast, there was enough room to bivouac a battalion. Nor was its architecture distinguished, or even graceful. It was a squat, dormered two-story redbrick mansion, its front door flanked by a fatuous pair of Ionic columns. And if you believed the old saw that people choose houses that reflect their personalities, at first glance you’d guess that this was a banker’s home—solid, uninspired, and forbiddingly dull.
But what rescued Matinicock Point, what transformed a stolid redbrick fortress into something more lively and unique, was the boldness with which it had been sited. It rode the tip of the peninsula like a figurine carved on the prow of a pirate’s ship. Every room not only looked out on the water but offered open vistas that conspired to make the sound—its whitecaps, its roar, the pounding rhythm of its waves—a nearly palpable presence. It was breathtaking.
Matinicock Point was J. P. Morgan’s home. In mid-May he’d take up residence, commuting to Wall Street by automobile or steam launch across the sound; and, except for a precious few days at the family camp in the Adirondacks, he would stay on Long Island until the annual August trip to his farm in the English countryside. His oldest child, Junius, had married that spring, but his three younger children and his wife, Jane, had settled into Matinicock Point for most of the summer.
Holt spent days surveilling the estate. In an inspired bit of cover, he posed as Thomas Lester, a representative of the
Society Summer Directory
, even flashing an embossed card with his name and title to confirm his identity. Gold Coast matriarchs, with snooty humor, called the
Society Directory
“the Good Book” and kept it by their phones. It listed the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the only families with whom one would need to speak, along with other necessary information such as club and university affiliations. As a result, its representative was greeted with courtesy and offered the sort of discreet information that would never normally be shared with an outsider.
Lester politely knocked on mansion doors throughout Glen Cove and, without pressing too hard, succeeded in gathering a good deal of intelligence about Morgan, his family, and even his servants. It was such resourceful fieldwork that Tom, mulling over it all after the fact, had to admire Holt’s skill. At the same time, he also wondered how a college professor with no apparent knowledge of the smart set had the inspiration to pass himself off as a
Society Directory
representative, down to the impressively embossed card.
TWO CRATES ARRIVED AT THE
Syosset station for “C. Hendricks” on June 28, holding 120 pounds—two hundred sticks—of 60 percent dynamite. The standard formulation contained 40 percent nitroglycerin, but this batch was considerably more powerful. Holt was elated to discover that at last his shipment had been delivered. With great care, he loaded the wooden boxes into his Ford and drove off.
Another crate arrived the following day, packed with blasting caps and fuses. But when Holt banged on the locked freight office door at 6:00 p.m., the crotchety Carnes roared that the office was closed. He should come back tomorrow.
Holt refused to leave. He begged that he really needed to get the crate. He even apologized for all his incessant pestering.
Carnes couldn’t see why there was so much rush to blow up a few tree trunks, but it’d be easier to get things done and over with than to keep on arguing. He opened the door and gave the man his crate. It was only as Hendricks was driving off in his Ford that Carnes noticed he’d signed the receipt “Hendrix.” Which was odd, but then again, he told himself, everything about that fellow was odd.
Holt spent the next two days in New York. The clerks at the Mills later told Tom that he’d leave by nine in the morning and wouldn’t return until after dark. Did he walk the streets aimlessly? Was he gathering up his courage? Did he meet with his control? Tom could only guess.
But Tom did establish that on Thursday, July 1, Holt arrived in Glen Clove on the 3:00 p.m. train from Manhattan. He found a taxi and instructed the driver, Matthew Kramer, to take him to the Morgan estate.
Kramer had grown up in the town and was proud of knowing everyone, including all the grand families. There was little he liked better, in fact, than letting people know how deeply he was tied into the gilded community. And talking helped to break up the tedium of sitting behind the wheel of his cab. When his passenger started asking questions about Mr. Morgan, Kramer was only too happy to let him know that he was speaking to the right man.
The taxi driver cheerily confided that this was going to be a big holiday weekend up at the house. On Saturday the
Resolute
, Morgan’s yacht, would be racing the
Vanitie
in the America’s Cup trials. And then that night there was a party in honor of Junius, Morgan’s oldest son, and his new bride. There were lots of people coming, he said knowingly. Even the British ambassador.
As Kramer talked on, the plot took final shape in Holt’s mind. The timing, he had to realize, couldn’t be better. The July 4 weekend offered the perfect opportunity.
When the taxi reached the causeway that connected East Island to the mainland, he told the driver to stop. From his seat, Holt had a clear view past the tall wrought-iron gate and the manicured lawn to the redbrick mansion. He stared at the house in silence. Morgan lived like a king; and he’d die like one, too.
At last he gave the driver the address of the bungalow in Central Park, and ordered Kramer to take him there.
The next morning Holt left on the 7:09 train to Penn Station. He had hired the young son of a local livery operator to wheel a large brown trunk to the train, while he carried two small suitcases, one in each hand as if for balance. Once he reached Manhattan, he arranged for the trunk to be sent to a storage warehouse on Fortieth Street, just off Seventh Avenue.
Then he boarded a train to Washington, D.C. His mission had begun.