J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (23 page)

Like many others in Washington, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes kept a “secret diary.” In his entry for May 2, 1933, Ickes reported that Attorney General Cummings had shocked the Cabinet with a dramatic announcement:

“The attorney general said at the Cabinet meeting today that he was informed that a strict espionage was being maintained of Cabinet members and other officials high in the Government Service. This work is under the charge of Lawrence Richey, one of the secretaries to former President Hoover, and is supposed to be in the interest of [Herbert] Hoover particularly, and of the Republican Party in general.”
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Although the ex-president had left Washington after the inauguration, Lawrence Richey had remained behind, entrusted with “a mysterious assignment.” Apparently it did not take J. Edgar Hoover long to discover what it was.
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AG Cummings, Ickes wrote, “warned all of us to be on our guard against people who might thrust themselves upon our notice and he said that the same precaution should be taken by our wives and members of our families. His information is that some women are being employed to worm themselves into the confidence of our wives.”
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What Homer Cummings did not tell the Cabinet, although he did confide the information to Hoover, was that a private detective, apparently in the employ of Richey, had been poking into his own personal life, attempting to prove that he was “very intimate” with the wife of a friend.

An experienced politician, Cummings probably hoped to defuse the charge—which he vehemently denied—by telling Hoover before someone else did. Hoover, of course, promised to keep the matter confidential, and immediately dictated a memorandum for the files.

In preparing the ransom for the Lindbergh kidnapper(s), Elmer Irey, the Treasury Department’s chief law enforcement officer, had included a large number of gold certificates, as an aid in identification.
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In April 1933 President Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard and directed that all such bills be exchanged for other forms of currency on or before May 1.

This was the first big break in the case, and everyone involved in the hunt was convinced an arrest was imminent. During the week before the deadline, fifty of the $10 gold certificates used in the ransom were redeemed at two separate New York City banks. Neither teller, however, had checked the 57-page list of the ransom bills at the time of the transaction, nor could either identify the person who exchanged them. On May 1 another $2,980 was redeemed at still another New York bank, with similar lack of attentiveness. Though more ransom bills were passed, mostly in individual transactions, the case seemed to have come to a standstill.

Hoover saw his chance. New Jersey’s state police chief, Schwarzkopf, and his fancy-dress cops had proven they didn’t know what they were doing,
Hoover told Attorney General Cummings. Moreover, the tremendous duplication of effort by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies was hurting, rather than helping, the effort to solve the case. Since the passage of the Lindbergh Law, the Bureau of Investigation had solved every kidnapping case it had entered except two (in both, the victims’ families had been uncooperative). Also, unlike the other agencies, the Bureau had at its disposal both a modern scientific criminology laboratory and the world’s largest collection of fingerprints.

Himself persuaded, Cummings convinced Roosevelt that Hoover should be placed in charge of all federal aspects of the investigation, and on October 19, 1933, a presidential directive was issued to this effect, greatly angering Elmer Irey, whose Treasury agents were pulled off the case. By now realizing it was better to share criticism than take the brunt of it alone, Schwarzkopf pledged his grudging cooperation and finally opened his files to both the BI and the New York police.

Nearly a year passed, however, before the real break came, and it was due not to superior sleuthing but rather to the alertness of a filling-station attendant. On September 15, 1934, a motorist purchased five gallons of ethyl from a station in upper Manhattan, paying with a $10 gold certificate. Before making change, the attendant jotted down the vehicle’s license number—4U-13-41, N.Y.—on the back of the bill. Three days later a teller at the Corn Exchange Bank and Trust Company compared the bill’s number to those on the ransom list and called Thomas Sisk at the New York field office.

A check of the New York Motor Vehicle License Bureau disclosed that the car, a dark blue Dodge sedan, belonged to a Bruno Richard Hauptmann, of 1279 East 222nd Street, in the Bronx.

Hauptmann, an unemployed carpenter, was placed under surveillance. Hoping to catch Hauptmann in the act of passing one of the bills, Hoover and Sisk wanted to delay the arrest, and, for a few hours, the police seemingly agreed. However, well aware of Hoover’s penchant for publicity, and probably suspecting that he was planning something similar, they apparently decided to stage their own capture. The following day one of the New York police cars suddenly pulled out of the cavalcade of local and federal law enforcement vehicles that was tailing the Dodge and, forcing it over to the curb, dragged out Hauptmann and placed him under arrest.
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In the jurisdictional melee that followed, the police refused to let the feds search either Hauptmann’s person or his car. But one enterprising BI agent managed to “lift” Hauptmann’s wallet long enough to extract a handwritten shopping list. Later the same day, Turrou obtained photocopies of Hauptmann’s driver’s license applications from the Motor Vehicle License Bureau;
still later, he and the police persuaded Hauptmann to copy in longhand the text of several newspaper articles. He then rushed all these handwriting samples to Charles Appel in Washington. Working all night in the lab, Appel compared the exemplars with facsimiles of the ransom demands.

Turrou had fallen into an exhausted sleep on a cot in the New York field office when Appel called at eight-thirty.

“There was nothing musical about Charlie Appel’s voice,” Turrou would recall, “but that dreary morning it couldn’t have sounded more lyrical if played to a background of angels’ harps and elfin woodwinds. ‘It checks,’ he said simply. ‘Congratulations.’ ”
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On learning of Hauptmann’s arrest, Hoover had taken the first train to New York. He was present later that morning when Hauptmann was put in a lineup with a dozen detectives. “It wasn’t much of a deception,” Turrou remembered. “The detectives were shaved, bright-eyed six-footers. Hauptmann looked like a midget who had wandered through a Turkish bath for two sleepless days and nights.”
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Only one man had actually seen and talked to the recipient of the ransom, the publicity-hungry John F. Condon. But, even with a lineup consisting mostly of obvious cops, Condon refused to make a positive identification, much to the disgust of Hoover, Colonel Schwarzkopf, and representatives of the New York Police Department, who had already scheduled a press conference for that afternoon. They held it anyway, announcing, “We now have in custody the man who received the ransom money.”
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And that was about all they had. “At this point our legal case was shakier than a house of cards,” Turrou later observed.
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Although one of the ransom bills had been found on Hauptmann’s person at the time of his arrest, a “thorough” search of his home by the New Jersey State Police had failed to turn up anything incriminating. Hoover and the entire Lindbergh squad were convinced, however, that the money was in the house or somewhere near it, that “Hauptmann’s dull mentality would not permit another hiding place.”
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Although Colonel Schwarzkopf at first protested, vociferously, he finally agreed to let the BI agents make their own search.

They found, in a badly concealed compartment in the wall of the garage, $1,830 in $10 gold certificates, all of which were on the ransom list.

However, since no member of the household was present at the time of the search, the money was not legally admissible as evidence. To remedy this defect, the money was returned to the wall, Mrs. Hauptmann was brought in, and the money was again “discovered.” A second and third cache were later found in the garage, bringing the total amount recovered to $14,600. Confronted with the money, Hauptmann claimed that it had been left with him by one Isidor Fish, who had since died.

With what must have been a tremendous sense of relief, on October 10, 1934, Hoover called a press conference to announce that the Bureau had withdrawn from the case.

After what Leon Turrou characterized as “a mockery” of a trial, Richard
Bruno Hauptmann was convicted of the murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., and on April 3, 1936, he was electrocuted.

The case left a legacy of doubt, as a series of long-suppressed inter-Bureau memorandums reveals. Two days after failing to identify Hauptmann in the lineup, Dr. Condon told Turrou, “He is
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the man. But he looks like his brother.” Hauptmann was “much heavier” than the man he passed the money to in the cemetery, Condon said, “had different eyes, different hair, etc.”
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Four days later Condon changed his mind, and by the time of the trial he was positive in his identification. So was Colonel Lindbergh, who identified Hauptmann by his voice. Although the jury found his testimony convincing, Turrou was more skeptical: “Many, including myself, thought it remarkable that Colonel Lindbergh, sworn to truth, could recognize a voice heard for a few moments in a dark wood after a lapse of two years.”
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There was good reason for skepticism: in appearing before the grand jury some months earlier, Lindbergh had testified that he couldn’t “say positively” it was the same voice.
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Another key witness, a neighbor of the Lindberghs, identified Hauptmann as a man he’d seen near their house. One BI memo, however, characterized the neighbor as “a confirmed liar and totally unreliable” and noted that when he was first questioned by the Bureau he’d denied seeing anyone near the house.
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Charles Appel was positive that Hauptmann wrote the ransom notes; but, as Hoover himself admitted in a memo of September 24, 1934, Hauptmann’s fingerprints did not match “the latent impressions developed on the ransom notes and the ransom money.”
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The agents were also split on the question of whether Hauptmann had acted alone or had one or more accomplices. In a memo written on the day the Bureau withdrew from the case, Hugh H. Clegg summed up the differing views of the members of the Lindbergh squad by noting, “There are logical reasons which would point to the presence of someone else but there are an equal number of reasons why there is only one person.”
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Even Hoover himself had doubts, remarking in one secret memo, “I am skeptical as to some of the evidence.”
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There were other legacies. At the time of the trial, Charles Lindbergh told Elmer Irey of the Treasury Department, “If it had not been for you fellows being in the case, Hauptmann would not now be on trial and your organization deserves full credit for his apprehension.” Hoover would never forgive Lindbergh for that remark.
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Although Lindbergh credited Irey and his men, history, as interpreted by Crime Records, gave full honors to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Anyone who took the famed FBI tour left it with the impression that the Bureau, acting alone, had solved the Lindbergh case, while Irey’s insistence that gold certificates be included in the ransom money went unmentioned in Bureauauthorized accounts.

“Irey was a good Christian who didn’t cuss,” observed his longtime assistant Malachi Harney, “but the air would be blue when the subject of the Lindbergh kidnapping case came up.”
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