Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (24 page)

Q.
How many times have you been in Philadelphia?

A.
No time.

Q.
You came to New York from Ithaca?

A.
Yes.

Q.
Do you mean to truthfully answer my question by saying that you have not been to Philadelphia at any time since you left Ithaca?

A.
At no time.

Q.
You have a clipping of a Philadelphia newspaper in your possession. Where did you get that?

A.
I think I got that out of a Philadelphia paper of course, that I found lying around.

Q.
Were you not in Philadelphia when you purchased that paper?

A.
I did not purchase that. I saw that lying around somewhere, probably in the Mills Hotel.

This was the moment, Tom decided. A leap had to be taken, and now was the time. There was no pause, no alteration in his voice, nothing to signal that this wasn’t the most casual of questions.

Q.
Where did you sleep last night?

As soon as the question was asked, Holt realized he had been led into a corner. Desperate, he tried to create a distraction, his tone haughty and superior.

A.
Now, I will tell you. A reporter from the Associated Press asked me about this Washington business, and he was trying to connect me with that. I suppose that is what you are trying to do.

It was Tom’s turn to be indignant; and he let his genuine anger goad him on.

Q.
I am not trying to connect you with anything. I want truthful answers. I am very frank and honest with you. I will fairly investigate every answer that you make.

Tom sensed that Holt was drained. The walls he had erected were tumbling down, and even the madness offered no more sanctuary. The prisoner let out a long, thin sigh, and surrendered.

A.
I think it is just as well to say that I wrote that R. Pearce letter.

I was in Washington yesterday and came back on the train. I think it is just as well to say it.

Tom’s demeanor betrayed no sense of triumph. He continued in his deliberate, thoughtful way to press for details about the Washington attack. But McCahill listened to only a few more of Holt’s valiant attempts to pass off what he’d revealed as really nothing extraordinary at all before he rushed out of the room to send a telegram to Captain Boardman in Washington:

Frank Holt placed dynamite in Capitol building at 4 p.m. yesterday. Left Washington on midnight train for New York. Will wire particulars later.

AT HALF PAST SEVEN THAT
night, Holt was moved to the county jail in Mineola. Tom had insisted. It was just a precaution, he told McCahill. And only later did the constable realize he had never asked the broad-shouldered New York police captain who he feared might come looking for the prisoner. Only later did he realize Tom had suspected a larger plot.

Front page of the
New York Tribune
on Sunday, July 4, 1915, after Holt’s attempted assassination of J. P. Morgan Jr.

(
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers,
Library of Congress [http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1915-07-04/ed-1/seq-1/])

Chapter 48

I
n the course of a long and busy career, a veteran detective would handle so many investigations that once a case was solved, it’d be shoved into a file and quickly forgotten. But for most officers, unsolved cases could not be so easily dismissed. These mysteries would linger, churning away restlessly below the surface and rising up at odd, unexpected moments. And as Holt settled into his first night in the Mineola jail, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, police detective, Patrick Hurley, found himself suddenly thinking about a nine-year-old case.

He had been reading the description in the evening paper of the man accused of trying to assassinate J. P. Morgan when a single phrase unlocked his memory as if it were a key. The assailant was described as having “a shambling walk.” These were the exact words he had used back in 1906 when he’d sent out the description of Erich Muenter, a Harvard instructor who had fled after poisoning his wife.

But even as Captain Hurley relived the anger and frustration he had felt at the time over Muenter’s getting away with murder, he chided himself for jumping to conclusions. There must be thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of people who had loose-jointed, shambling gaits; tuberculosis of the bones, the detective had discovered back when he was actively trying to track down the fugitive professor, was not an exceedingly rare condition. Still, he had a hunch.

He reread the newspaper description of Frank Holt, and he might as well have been holding up a mirror to the image in his mind. Every detail corresponded to his memory of Muenter: five feet ten inches tall; dark hair; long, thin face; high forehead. And a shambling walk.

That night he dispatched an express telegram to Chief Constable McCahill in Glen Cove. “Reason to believe,” he wired, “Frank Holt is fugitive Erich Muenter wanted by Cambridge Police for murder.” He advised that he would send a photograph of Muenter in the morning.

IN TOM’S WORLD, INDEPENDENCE DAY
came, but it was not the holiday Sunday he’d been anticipating. He was up early, and soon on his way back to Mineola to interview Holt again. He had spent a fitful night assembling an inventory of his concerns, and on the ride out to the Long Island jail he found himself replaying them in his mind.

Yesterday, Holt had given him an account of how he’d made the bomb used in the Capitol blast. He’d taped together three sticks of dynamite, hollowed out a depression at the end of one of the sticks into which he’d fitted matches, and then placed a corked vial filled with sulfuric acid above the matches. When the acid ate through the cork, drops fell onto the match heads and caused a flame, which ignited the dynamite. It would have been an impressive device, Tom realized even while he was listening to the prisoner’s earnest recitation, except for one thing: it would never have worked. During his years with the bomb squad, Tom had picked up a good deal of hands-on knowledge about the manufacture of bombs, and he had no doubt that everything Holt had told him was a lie. Sulfuric acid would take weeks to eat through a cork, and even then the drops of acid would not cause matches to burn. Holt, Tom was convinced, didn’t know the first thing about making an explosive device.

But if Holt hadn’t made the bomb, then who had? Were the bomb makers the same individuals who had given him the dynamite—and the money to fund his travels? And was there additional dynamite hidden away somewhere? They had recovered three sticks from his jacket and suitcase, and Holt said three sticks had been detonated at the Capitol, but Tom had “a feeling that Holt had bought more explosives.”

In fact, little of what Holt had said made any sense—unless he was trying to cover up the fact that he had not been alone. Tom had tried to pursue that possibility yesterday, but Holt had been dismissive. “I think that can be easily figured out that I could not have anybody else with me,” he had snapped at Tom in his now familiar superior voice. But after the long, restless night’s calculations, Tom still found himself returning to the same provocative conclusion: “I felt confident that he had accomplices.”

As soon as Tom arrived at the jail, he was handed a message to call Sergeant Barnitz. The Jersey City gun shop clerks, the sergeant reported, had found the sales slips. Holt had given his name as “Henderson” and his address as Syosset, Long Island.

Armed with this new information, Tom was escorted into a room where Holt was already seated. The prisoner seemed to have aged a decade or two overnight. He had not shaved, and his jailers had taken his suit as evidence, replacing it with a blue one that could easily have fitted a man twice his size. The sleeves stretched past his fingers, and the jacket swam about his thin, childlike chest. Tom saw his advantage, and swiftly attacked.

Why had he given this particular fictitious name and address? Tom demanded. He hoped Holt would be impressed that they had uncovered this intelligence after only hours on the case. Perhaps he would appreciate the resources aligned against him, and begin to cooperate.

Holt merely shrugged. The name Henderson had simply “popped into my head.” As for the address, he had happened to see Syosset on a railroad timetable and the location had stuck in his mind. It was all—he sighed—of no consequence.

Tom returned to the dynamite. Where had he gotten it? How much did he have? Where was the rest of his cache?

In the course of Holt’s own long night, Tom later suspected, the prisoner had worked out what he would say when these questions would inevitably be raised. Tom had kept tapping at them during the first day’s session, and Holt had to realize he would not give up until he received answers. So Holt had devised a strategy to keep Tom off balance.

He announced that he would answer those questions on July 7.

Why July 7? Tom asked. What happens in three days?

But Holt would not yield. “Everything will be revealed on July 7,” he repeated with a small, tight smile.

Tom had no doubt that Holt was enjoying the power his riddle had given him. He was a prisoner, handcuffed, beaten, humiliated, but now he had turned the tables on his interrogator: Frank Holt was once again in control.

Tom, exhausted, despairing, found himself silently conceding that Holt suddenly had an advantage. Either July 7 was more madness, a meaningless date provocatively tossed out to tantalize the authorities, or it was something more sinister. But what? Was it the date when his accomplices—German agents? antiwar activists?—would have completed their escape from America, and their existence could be revealed? Or was it the date of another round of attacks? Another assassination? Another bombing?

Either way, it was a mystery that Tom had to solve. He told the jailer to take the prisoner back to his cell. He needed time to think.

What would happen on July 7? He kept turning the question over and over, but he was unable to latch onto a persuasive answer. He called Barnitz, then Woods, but neither had a solution. So Tom decided to go for a drive. Perhaps, he hoped, escaping from the dismal jailhouse with its tight, airless spaces would free his mind. He drove for hours around the Long Island countryside. He had dozens of theories, and yet not a single one in which he had any faith.

When he returned to the jail, he discovered that the already complicated case had in his absence taken off in a whole new and completely unexpected direction. McCahill, following up on the telegram from Cambridge, had brought the Nassau County district attorney to the jail. The DA, in a stroke of luck, had studied German at Harvard with Muenter, and after a long look he decided that the prisoner was indeed his old college acquaintance. While in Chicago, the police had shown a news photograph of Holt to the two spinster sisters of the fugitive professor, and they offered an unqualified identification: he was the brother who had vanished. “The news will kill our mother,” they worried.

It was a case, Tom was beginning to understand, in which the peeling away of one secret served only to reveal a new one. “This Pearce-Lester-Holt-Henderson-Muenter was becoming more interesting every minute,” he decided with a new appreciation of the deceptively frail and downtrodden prisoner. “Wife-poisoner, dynamiter, gunman—what next?”

AS THE NEW WEEK UNFOLDED,
Tom and his men scurried about, trying to discover what would be next. They needed to know what was going to happen before they were caught once again by surprise.

Tom went to Syosset to interview the freight agent. The conversation led him to the bungalow in Central Park. While there, he spoke with the boy who had pushed a wheelbarrow carrying a heavy trunk to the train for Holt. The stationmaster went through his records and found that the trunk had been shipped on to New York. He had a shipping number, but there was no record of where the trunk had been delivered.

Then all at once the mystery of the missing trunk took on a new urgency. The Aetna Powder Company reported that its books showed a C. Henderson as having ordered two hundred sticks of 60 percent dynamite, plus another separate order for two hundred sticks of 40 percent dynamite. A total of four hundred sticks had been sold to Holt. Tom felt the explosives could be in the trunk. But he no idea where the trunk was. And July 7 was Wednesday—two days away.

Desperate, he played the only card he had: he went to see Holt. But when he repeated his questions about the dynamite, Holt remained obstinate. “I will tell you Wednesday,” he said infuriatingly.

Tom’s patience had worn thin. He had tried everything with Holt, and it had all been futile. The prisoner gave only what he was prepared to give. Holt was playing Tom, and the realization of his own helplessness stung his pride.

“Look here,” Tom at last exploded. “That dynamite is in the trunk. It’s liable to go off any minute and kill a lot of people. You better tell me quick where you left that trunk.”

And just like that, Holt agreed. “All right,” he decided. The trunk, he said, had been sent to a warehouse near Fortieth Street and Seventh Avenue.

Sirens blaring, Tom and his men drove like madmen to the warehouse. The only person on duty in the evening was a watchman, and he had no knowledge of how items were stored. With an indifferent shrug, he told Tom that they were just going to have to search until they found a trunk with a number matching the one on the shipping invoice.

The warehouse was eight stories high and spread out over an entire city block. Led by Barnitz, six of Tom’s men began the daunting search. They went one floor at a time, starting at the bottom and determined to work their methodical way up. Tom, meanwhile, went to call headquarters to report that they might have located the dynamite.

The desk officer had a message for him. “Commissioner Woods just called and wants you to call him at the Harvard Club.”

“Get that trunk as fast as you can and find out exactly what’s in it,” the commissioner said as soon as he came to the phone. “Washington just called me to say that Governor Colquitt down in Dallas just wired them. He says Holt’s wife got a letter from Holt dated July 2 that he’s put dynamite on a ship now at sea. It will sink on the seventh.”

So that’s what would happen in two days: a ship would blow up! But which ship? And, just like Holt’s last operation, where the Capitol bombing preceded the assassination attempt on Morgan, would this explosion be the opening salvo in a two-part attack? But Tom understood that those questions would need to wait. First he needed to find the dynamite. And if something happened while they were opening the trunk, there’d be no need to call in a report to Woods. Sitting in the Harvard Club on Forty-Fourth Street, the commissioner would be rocked by the blast.

More than two hours later they found the trunk in a dark corner of the fifth floor. There were a dozen other trunks on top of it, and they took care snaking it out of the pile and then carrying it down four flights of steep stairs. They wanted to open it in the well-lit ground-floor office.

With a single, precisely aimed swing of an ax, Barnitz snapped off the lock. Tom lifted the cover slowly.

Inside were, they counted, 134 sticks of 60 percent dynamite. The Glen Cove police had recovered 6 sticks.

Which meant 60 sticks of 60 percent dynamite were still missing.

As were the 200 sticks of 40 percent dynamite.

Tom suddenly understood why Holt had decided to reveal the location of the trunk. Once again, he had provided only a small corner of the entire story. He had held on to the rest, guarding it. The location of the 260 sticks—enough TNT to take down a skyscraper or a factory or police headquarters—remained a mystery. Tom’s only hope would be to return to Mineola tomorrow and once again try somehow to get Holt to talk.

New York commissioner of combustibles Owen Egan displays Muenter’s trunk of explosives in the aftermath of Tunney’s discovery.

(© Bettmann/Corbis)

He called the commissioner at the Harvard Club to report the discovery of the dynamite, and the disturbing fact that 260 sticks were unaccounted for.

Woods listened, then invited him to come to the club. He said he expected that Tom could use a drink.

Twenty minutes later, a welcome beer in front of him, Tom was seated in the high-ceilinged lounge across from Woods and Scull. Their talk was fixed on Holt. He remained a mystery, but they were determined to tug persistently away at the few sparse facts they had. The three police officers wanted to believe that a solution was possible if they put their minds to it. As they kept at it, a white-coated waiter came over and said the commissioner had a call.