Franz Von Rintelen was the German tiger who missed his spring. He was the most powerful, the most dangerous, agent of the Kaiser in the United States: and to-day he nurses his hatred of us behind prison bars. But he did not retire to confinement until after our Government completed an extremely difficult and tedious investigation that was made necessary by his care in concealing the insidious work of propaganda and destruction in which he had engaged.
Rintelen was a tiger in the implacable hatred he bore this country and in the ferocity with which he carried that hatred into action. Sent to America in 1915 to hinder the shipment of munitions to the Allies, he sought first to poison the press, then to corrupt labour, and, not content with these things, he finally tried to hire thugs to burn, to dynamite, and to assassinate, where other persuasions failed; and he did succeed in setting fire to thirty-six ships at sea, causing millions of dollars of loss, and imperiling hundreds of human lives.
Rintelen had, however, the other side of the tiger’s character—its graces. When the —— made port at New York on April 3, 1915, it bore as passenger one Émil Gasché, a Swiss. The moment Gasché passed the customs officers Gasché ceased to exist, and in his place appeared handsome young Von Rintelen, unexpectedly arrived in America for his fourth visit and renewing pleasant acquaintanceships in society and in Wall Street. He was “the same old chap,” to quote his own description of himself in one of his letters—rich, of a family long accustomed to riches; well-bred, of a family long proud of its aristocratic connection with the Imperial Court at Berlin (his father had long been the equivalent of our Secretary of the Treasury); young, the youngest of the chief bankers of Germany; handsome, with the good looks that come of regular features and of a slender frame hardened by athletics and made distinguished by the bearing of an officer; a sportsman, who raced his yacht in the Emperor’s regattas at Kiel—an affable, cultivated, witty, accomplished man of the world. No wonder he had been popular on his former visits. On one of them he had opened in New York a branch of the Deutsche Bank, one of the greatest of the government-controlled banks of Germany, and on another he had widened these financial relationships with Wall Street. He had travelled the country over and knew people everywhere; and he knew about hundreds more, even to their private affairs in money and politics and those intimate weaknesses that pass into the gossip of the smoking-room. He spoke the language with only the slightest accent but in its purest form, and was adept in our peculiar kind of humour—altogether, a fine and likable fellow, who liked us.
Until the war. And until the Germans, stung by the lost illusions of a quick and glorious victory, facing the gray outlook of a long and bitter struggle, looking about for some one to blame for their plight, and wearied of “strafing” England, found a new narcotic in a hatred of America. America, that made the cartridges and shells that patched up the unpreparedness of France and Britain and Russia, which Germany had calculated as one of the factors in the equation of victory. America, that—as their rising rage made their voices shriller—“is murdering our sons and brothers on every battlefield from Switzerland to the sea for the sake of blood-bought gold.”
This cry became an article of fanatical faith to the German people. It became likewise a very practical problem to the hard-headed leaders in Berlin. If they could cut off this supply of munitions, the Allies could be beaten. There was no hope of cutting it off at sea—the British Navy would attend to that. It must be stopped at its source: stopped in America, by a made-to-order public opinion, or by corruption, or by violence—but stopped.
“Whom shall we send to America?” was their problem. Rintelen was chosen. He could be trusted—he was a director of the Deutsche Bank, he knew America. He was given credit at the Hamburg-American Line office in New York for $547,000, authority for as many millions more as he wanted, independent powers as great as the German Ambassador’s at Washington, the instructions of the German Government, and the blessing of the Fatherland.
An American traitor in Berlin gave Rintelen his cue for operations in America. This man’s name is known, and will one day be written alongside Benedict Arnold’s, but to disclose it now would interfere with more practical efforts for his mortal punishment. Part of that punishment he is already enduring—he is still in Germany. This traitor told Rintelen that the most useful man in America for his purpose was David Lamar, of New York. Rintelen fixed that name in his memory, and left Berlin.
His first barrier was the old, old barrier to German conquest, the British blockade. Rintelen ran that under cover of the Swiss passport, under the name of Gasché.
Arrived in New York on April 3d, Rintelen lost no time in getting acquainted with Lamar. He disclosed to him his mission to this country and the money he had to execute it. The Tiger of Berlin met the Wolf of Wall Street.
And how the Wolf’s eyes must have glistened, for he was at the leanest of the hungry days which regularly followed seasons of opulence in the ups and downs which varied the career of this extraordinary man. For Lamar was, and is, an extraordinary man. Endowed by nature with a fascinating personality and with a brilliant mind, which he had enriched by study, a man capable of great things, he was possessed by that strange perversity which often afflicts men of exceptional cleverness—he would rather make one dollar by adroit crookedness than a million by unexciting honesty. Perhaps his origin affected his character—he declined, on the witness stand, to give his true name and parentage on the ground that to do so would bring disgrace upon persons still living. He entered Wall Street as a young man from nowhere, and at first gave promise of a brilliant and honourable career. He early made his mark in finance. He was employed by J. P. Morgan & Company and other great banking concerns, and in those days of his legitimate activities amassed a large fortune. But this was dissipated in gambling on the stock market, and then Lamar gravitated to the gutter. For years it was a by-word on the Street that if you wanted a clever man to do a crooked job, David Lamar was the man you were looking for. He had the brains to do it right, he had the presence to “get away with it,” and he would do anything for money.
These traits had got him into trouble shortly before Rintelen met him. When the Pujo Committee of Congress was investigating the “money trust” several years ago, some crooked brokers in Wall Street wanted some inside information that was going to affect the price of certain stocks in which they were interested. They could not get this information by legitimate means, and so they adopted Lamarian means. Lamar knew that a member of Congress was entitled to ask for this information. Mr. Mitchell Palmer was a Member of Congress. Lamar had one of his devious inspirations. He called up a banker’s office, got the man there who knew what Lamar wanted to know, declared that he was Mr. Palmer, and demanded the information—and got it. Lamar repeated the exploit several times. But once too often. He was detected, arrested and tried, convicted, and on December 3, 1914, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for the crime of impersonating an officer of the Government. He appealed the case on the ground that a Representative in Congress was not “an officer of the Government.” When Rintelen met him the following April, Lamar was out on bail pending the decision on this appeal.
Lamar was then in desperate straits. Bad luck had followed him in the Street for two years, and had crowned his misfortunes with this expensive trial and threatened imprisonment. He owed money everywhere for personal expenses; the merchants with whom he traded had stopped his credit; he had descended to borrowing from his friends in sums as small as two dollars at a time. Then he met Rintelen, who was on fire with a passion that blinded him to consequences and who flourished before the eyes of the famished Wolf a half million dollars of real money. Here was manna fallen from heaven.
“Could Lamar help Rintelen!” With his most convincing eloquence, Lamar assured him that he could. Never had Rintelen been better advised, so Lamar declared to him, than when his friend in Berlin had given him his name. For he had friends in Washington, he whispered, men powerful in the Government. And friends among the labouring people, the men whose hands made those munitions Rintelen had come to stop, and whose hands might be paralyzed by the clever use of brains and money. Lamar would supply the brains: Rintelen would supply the money. The Wolf saw good hunting ahead.
Lamar laid before Rintelen a scheme. They would capitalize the American passion for peace: they would capitalize in particular the labouring man’s aversion to war. A section of opinion among labouring men held that wars were instigated by capitalists for gain, and were fought by labouring men who gave their lives to make good the selfish ambitions of the rich. And one of the American people’s deepest convictions was that war was an odious moral crime; and that universal peace was attainable by the pursuit of moral ideals.
Lamar declared, then, that by working through his friends in labour, he could organize the workers of America so that they would refuse to work on the implements of destruction of “capitalistic” war. And that, by working through his friends in the Government, he could create a national sentiment that would force Congress to place an embargo on munitions. But these things would cost money. Lamar never forgot money.
Now we see a sudden transformation in Lamar’s circumstances. The frayed debtor appeared in his old haunts garbed in the most fastidious selections of the tailor; the accumulated debts of years were paid; the subway and the street car gave way to automobiles—and Lamar was particular that the garage should supply only the fine car that was father to the Liberty motor. He moved his family from a cheap apartment in New York to a fine house at Pittsfield, Mass. His own quarters were the hotels Astor and Belmont in New York, the Willard in Washington, the La Salle in Chicago, the Claypool in Indianapolis. Things were looking up.
Lamar carried other men with him on his rising tide of fortune. Frank Buchanan, labour Representative in Congress from the Seventh District of Illinois (North Chicago), likewise became a traveller and the patron of exclusive hotels. Henry B. Martin, who eked out a precarious living in the lobbies of Congress, after a dubious career as an officer of the Knights of Labour in the ’nineties, framed his wizened figure in a new and luxurious setting. H. Robert Fowler, the splendid high light of whose gray life as a half-lawyer, half-farmer, in a country town in Illinois, was expiring in the last days of a term in Congress, was suddenly revived, before his final extinguishment, by the light glittering from anonymous gold. Herman J. Schulteis, whose talents, insufficient for success in the law, had been more profitably employed in the defunct Anti-Trust League (of which more later), rose rapidly in the monetary scale.
These men were the instruments Lamar used in his scheme to stop the munitions industry and to get Rintelen’s money. That scheme was to build up a great political organization of labouring men and farmers. This organization would oppose the making and shipment of munitions; it would exert pressure to compel workers to abandon the factories, and it would exert pressure to compel Congress to declare an embargo on the shipment of arms. This organization was labelled “Labour’s National Peace Council.”
Lamar, fortified with Rintelen’s money, launched his scheme in Washington. This scheme was an inspiration of genius. Able lawyers have declared that no cleverer conspiracy has ever come to their attention. Its beauty was its simplicity. Rintelen dealt with no one but Lamar—the other leaders never saw him, and most of them never heard of him until after the scheme was exposed by the Government. In his turn, Lamar operated entirely through Martin. To Martin he gave his instructions to see labour leaders, to organize the fake Peace Council, to hold its camouflage “convention,” to flood the country with lecturers and printed matter urging an embargo on munitions. And through Martin he paid the bills.
Lamar and Martin were old associates. They had worked together in the Anti-Trust League, another of the creations of Lamar’s restless mind. The Anti-Trust League originated in the feverish ’nineties, when the country had its fears that the growth of great corporations spelled the control of the Government by monopolies. The League had its days of prominence when it was financed by big interests that used it to fight other big interests to get the things they both wanted. But in 1915 the League was a skeleton, consisting of Lamar, Martin, Schulteis, and a few others, held together by the bond of small salaries drawn from some source that preferred to remain unknown.
When Martin undertook to organize Labour’s National Peace Council, under the direction of Lamar, the first man he approached was Frank Buchanan. Buchanan was labour’s leading champion on the floor of Congress. He had been president of the international union of the structural iron workers, and he had earned the confidence of organized labour, and the friendship of Samuel Gompers, the patriarch of organized labour.
Lamar, Buchanan, and Martin, assisted by Fowler and Schulteis, engineered a mass meeting of workingmen in Chicago in June, 1915, at which resolutions were adopted calling for a convention of labourers and farmers at Washington to protest against the traffic in munitions. The same men, with this “mandate” behind them, met in Washington on June 22d, and organized Labour’s National Peace Council. They prepared printed appeals, in the high language of humanitarianism, addressed to the labour unions and the granges, and mailed them by the ton to all parts of the country. They offered to pay all travelling expenses and for lost time to delegates which these bodies should send to a convention to be held in Washington on July 31st and August 1st.
As a preliminary to this convention, Martin paid labour leaders and other speakers to go into all sections of the United States and address labour unions and granges. Probably all these speakers acted in good faith. They were pacifists, and when they got an opportunity to preach their doctrine, they accepted it. The opportunity seemed legitimate enough—the name of Frank Buchanan as a sponsor of the movement was sufficient. Their audiences, too, were sincere. Workmen and farmers had before their eyes the contrast of their own peaceful land with a Europe drenched in blood. The blessings of peace were never more apparent. They sent delegates gladly to a meeting that seemed designed to perpetuate those blessings.
But Samuel Gompers opposed the convention of Labour’s National Peace Council. He, too, was a pacifist—had for years taken a leading part in the movement for international peace. But Gompers was a thoughtful man as well. And experienced. And wise. He told Buchanan some things Buchanan should have told himself. Buchanan came from Chicago to Atlantic City to meet Mr. Gompers and upbraid him for his opposition to the Council. Mr. Gompers gave him some fatherly advice. In effect, he said:
“Frank, you have earned a good name in labour. We are proud of you, and we trust you. You are at life’s meridian, with years of useful service ahead. But listen to an old man, who sees the shadows growing very long, and who has watched many movements come and go. You are in wrong. This scheme is bad. There is too much easy money being passed around in it. Labour hasn’t got money to spend like this. Somebody who has not labour’s interests at heart is putting up that money.
“And take the Council’s aims themselves. Suppose you succeed in stopping the manufacture of munitions—what will happen to labour? Two years ago, our boys were walking the streets, begging for a job. To-day, every man of them has work, and wages are going up. War work has done that. Do you want to stop the opportunity of labour to make a living?”
But Gompers’s eloquence left Buchanan cold. In the face of his pleadings and advice, Buchanan accepted $2,700 from Martin in the following six weeks. He saved his face at the last minute by resigning the presidency of Labour’s National Peace Council the day before the convention met.
The convention met in Washington on July 31st, at the New Willard Hotel. Its members were impressed, as it was intended that they and the country in general should be impressed, by the sonorous voice and important presence of Hannis Taylor, former American Minister to Spain and author of text books on constitutional and international law, such as “The Origin and Growth of the English Constitution” and “International Public Law.” He made an opening address in which, from his heights of knowledge, he solemnly declared that munitions shipments were in violation of international law. His address was largely devoted to assurances to his hearers that he was an authority on such matters and that they could take his opinion as disposing of the legal aspect of this question. Mr. Taylor was there to lend distinction to the gathering, and he left no doubts in their minds that he thought he was doing it.
But when the delegates got down to business, there was trouble. The farmer delegates became suspicious—they had vague fears of the source of the money that was paying the bills; they did not like the company they found themselves in. They first declined to bind their constituents to the resolutions that were offered: then they left the convention.
On the second day, the labour delegates became equally restless. Buchanan had withdrawn. The delegates who used the opportunity of being in Washington to call on Mr. Gompers came away from his office with heavy hearts. Returning to the Willard, they saw the machinery being manipulated by the discredited Martin and Schulteis. “What have these fellows got to do with us?” they asked one another. And then they asked “these fellows” quite bluntly, “Who’s putting up the money for this show?” Martin, backed to the wall of the Willard bar by their insistent demand for an answer, replied with an evasive, “What difference does it make?” And when they shouted that it made a profane lot of difference, he answered defiantly that it was all right “even if it’s German money.”
That finished the labour delegates. They, too, went home.
But the ringleaders had put out a resounding resolution calling for an embargo on munitions. And though the convention had fizzed out, it had done an enormous lot of harm. Thousands of labouring men and farmers had been indoctrinated with a specious pacifism that was reflected later in the attempts to evade the Conscription Act when we entered the war. The Government to-day is contending with the moral antagonisms aroused in certain sections of the country by the orators and writers of Labour’s National Peace Council.
In this moral infection, the work of Hannis Taylor played an important part. He wrote legal opinions for the Council, declaring that the traffic in munitions was unconstitutional. He received $700 for this work. These opinions were printed and distributed broadcast, and did much harm. More recently, Taylor was counsel for Robert Cox, the Missouri draft registrant who sued to restrain General Leonard Wood from sending him with his regiment to France. On his behalf, Hannis Taylor contended that the Conscription Act was unconstitutional, asserting that the only power of Congress to call out troops was under the militia clause of the Constitution which reads: “To execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.” This meant, so Taylor contended, that no citizen could be sent, against his will, outside the United States to fight its battles.
This absurd doctrine, which would force us to fight this war on our own soil instead of allowing us to defend ourselves in Europe against German aggression, was promptly punctured by the Supreme Court of the United States. In his brief before that Court Hannis Taylor used language so violent that the counsel for the Government asked that it be expunged from the record. Taylor in his brief accused the President of being a “dictator,” of seizing powers “in open defiance of the judgments” of the Supreme Court, and of demanding “such an aggregation of powers as no monarch ever wielded in any constitutional government that ever existed.”
The decision of the Supreme Court, affirming the Government’s right to draft its citizens for service overseas, was delivered by Chief Justice White. That stern old veteran of the Lost Cause in our Civil War, speaking with the aloofness and dignity of that august Court, in measured terms expressed an opinion of Mr. Hannis Taylor that is worth repeating. He said:
... we must notice a suggestion made by the Government that because of impertinent and scandalous passages contained in the brief of the appellant the brief should be stricken from the files. Considering the passages referred to and making every allowance for intensity of zeal and an extreme of earnestness on the part of counsel, we are nevertheless constrained to the conclusion that the passages justify the terms of censure by which they are characterized in the suggestion made by the Government. But despite this conclusion which we regretfully reach, we see no useful purpose to be subserved by granting the motion to strike. On the contrary, we think the passages on their face are so obviously intemperate and so patently unwarranted that if as a result of permitting the passages to remain on the files they should come under future observation, they would but serve to indicate to what intemperance of statement an absence of self-restraint or forgetfulness of decorum will lead and therefore admonish of the duty to be sedulous to obey and respect the limitations which an adhesion to them must exact.
In all the operations of Labour’s National Peace Council, including its convention, Lamar kept in the background, as he knew labour had no reason to own him or to love him. Buchanan and the rest supplied the proper colour of propriety. From his retreat in the Willard Hotel in Washington, Lamar was sending ecstatic telegrams, reporting progress, signing the name of David H. Lewis, and receiving in reply approving messages from Rintelen, who used Jones, Miller, and Muller as aliases. The convention seemed a great success. And its preparation and operation had got the German’s money. Of the $547,000 that Rintelen brought, Lamar got more than $300,000. It looked so good to Rintelen that he was ready to get more—from Germany or from his limitless sources of credit here.
But all was not well with Rintelen. He had other lines out besides Lamar’s, and he caught some disquieting fish—some of which he did not identify until later. First, he was playing the social game not wisely but too well. He gave dinner parties; was a guest at others. He should have been more politic than he was. The Lusitania was sunk on May 7th. Instead of adopting the manner of a man deep enough in intrigue to know that he should speak of this crime as a lamentable blunder of his country’s, he justified it. His words gave the gravest offense to his guests. He went further, and threw out hinted threats of other perils that would confront ships carrying munitions—hints that he himself had had a hand in the mysterious fires on ships that were almost a daily occurrence. Some dinner guests in New York took him seriously and reported him to the Government, which had been suspicious of him almost from the day of his arrival in this country.
Also, Rintelen undertook to get newspaper publicity favourable to an embargo on the shipment of munitions. He got himself introduced to “Jack” Hammond, an old newspaper man in New York, and closed with him a contract for syndicate articles in a chain of papers across the country. He met Hammond as one Fred Hansen, a ship captain. (Hammond later testified that Rintelen told him that he “killed” Hansen the day after the Lusitania was sunk.) After sizing Hammond up as worthy of trust, he re-introduced himself as E. V. Gibbons, a purchasing agent, with offices in the building occupied in part by the Transatlantic Trust Company. And at length he confided to Hammond his real importance in the scheme of things German.
Early in this relationship Hammond became sure that this man was planning to violate the laws of the United States, and he reported the matter to the Department of Justice. The Department, already suspicious, asked Hammond to keep up his connection with Rintelen, and through this means it learned a great deal about him. Not enough to cause his arrest—Rintelen never confided that much in any American but Lamar, who had his own reasons for silence.
Out of Rintelen’s multifarious activities arose many of the mysterious fires and explosions in munitions plants, the burning of ships at sea, the attempts on the Welland Canal in Canada, strikes in war industries, and the like. The discovery of Dr. Walter A. Scheele’s part in the incendiary bombs matter, and his connection with Rintelen, began to make the ground fairly warm under Rintelen’s feet. And the Government was taking an uncomfortable interest in Labour’s National Peace Council. Rintelen became uneasy.
His fears were now fed from a new quarter. Andrew D. Meloy became a confidant of his, and Meloy had his own axe to grind. Rintelen had taken an interest in the German activities in Mexico, and almost from the day of his arrival had been intimate in this work with Federico Stallforth, a German banker of Mexico City who joined Rintelen in New York. Stallforth had offices with Meloy at 55 Liberty Street, and when the Transatlantic Trust Company became embarrassed by Rintelen’s presence, Stallforth persuaded Meloy to rent Rintelen desk room. Their acquaintance started there, about July 1st.
Meloy was a well-known engineer and promoter. He had exploited concessions in Mexico—railroad rights of way and gold mines—and in his home state of New Jersey had floated some real-estate “developments.” Meloy saw in Rintelen exactly what Lamar had seen—a lot of real money and an eagerness too great for caution. He began to belittle Lamar’s scheme. Labour’s National Peace Council would never do. It looked good on paper, but it would never stop the shipment of munitions. He even hinted that Lamar had been “playing” Rintelen. Now, if Rintelen wanted a real scheme, certain to succeed, he knew the very thing. Direct action—stop the bluffing and the dangerous intrigues. Buy the whole munitions output of the country. Bid high enough to get it, pay for it outright, and store it. That would cost money, lots of it: but what was money in comparison with the certainty of German victory which this plan would insure?
Rintelen was dazzled. Here was the authentic voice of American big business speaking. A magnificent scheme. He would take it to Germany, take Meloy with him, and get his Government to O. K. it.
But how get back to Germany? He had grave doubts about the Gasché passport being good again. He put the question to Meloy, and Meloy advised against it. There was a better way: get a new passport under a new name. So for a few days Rintelen became “Edward V. Gates, wine merchant, of Millersburg, Pa.” In this guise Meloy introduced him to one of his own real-estate salesmen, and Rintelen took this man to dinner once or twice to work up the illusion. Then, one day, he asked the salesman to go with him to the passport bureau in New York and be his witness to an application for a passport. The salesman went, and in good faith swore that Rintelen was Edward V. Gates. His faith was not so good when he swore he had known him for three years. The application was transmitted telegraphically to Washington. Much to Rintelen’s astonishment and alarm, it was denied.
Meanwhile, Meloy had been working on a devious scheme to protect himself in his mission to Berlin. He must be cloaked in eminent respectability on this errand, for it would be an unpopular one with the British if they knew its real purpose, and he must hide that. First of all, he would take his wife, who did not know what his mission was. She had taken an active interest before the war in the peace movements centring at The Hague, and nothing was more natural than that she should wish now, during the war, to renew her friendships in Holland with an eye to furthering a cause now more than ever vital to the world.
But Meloy was not content with only one companion. He must have others who would expand the picture of innocence abroad. One of his neighbours in the suburb on the Jersey Coast where he made his country home was a wealthy woman known widely in America for her interest both in the peace and suffrage movements. Meloy telephoned to her and asked her to see him at his home. This lady drove over one summer evening in her motor car, accompanied by two women friends. The friends sat in the open car while she sat on the porch talking to Meloy. Meloy is very deaf; the lady had to talk loudly to make him hear. Meloy differed from most deaf people, who usually speak in a lower tone than those who hear well—he went rather to the other extreme, and spoke louder than most folks do. The women in the car heard the conversation, and they heard it a second time when their friend repeated it to them on the way home. And the Government heard it also, from the lips of all three.
The burden of the conversation was this: Meloy was taking his wife to Europe for a vacation; they were going to Holland, where so many forward-looking movements for the good of mankind made their international headquarters; he would be drawn aside a great deal by business affairs and Mrs. Meloy would be lonesome; he was anxious to provide companionship for her, if the lady would accompany them, he would pay all her expenses, he would assure her that her journey would be made de luxe, he would (he put it more delicately) even add a money consideration, he would see that the journey included a visit to war-bound Germany, now so difficult of access, that in Germany she should have entrée to social circles so exclusive that they were inaccessible even to the American Ambassador, and that, to crown all, she should be presented to the Kaiser.
The lady said she would think it over. It was an attractive invitation, but she did not just like it—perhaps it was too attractive. She talked it over with her friends: they advised against it. She telephoned Meloy next day and declined.
Meloy repeated the invitation to several women. All declined. Then, as the Noordam was to sail on August 3d, and he had no more time, he decided to take his secretary, a Miss Brophy.
Rintelen was now thoroughly alarmed. The Government’s refusal to grant his fraudulent application for a passport indicated that it knew about him. The Government was getting “warm” in its investigation of the incendiary bombs. The Government was taking an unpleasant interest in Labour’s National Peace Council. Rintelen felt irresistibly the pangs of Heimweh, the longing for home. He must go, at any risk. He would chance it as Gasché again.
So he sailed on the Noordam, with Meloy and party. He bore with him Lamar’s urgent appeals for more funds for Labour’s National Peace Council, now at the high tide of its success. And he was in the hands of Meloy, who was at the first of his own rainbow of hope of millions with which to buy America’s munition output—on commission.
At Falmouth the Noordam was detained for fourteen hours. The British took a great interest in the Gasché-Meloy party. Gasché’s baggage revealed nothing suspicious, but Gasché was removed to a long residence in an internment camp near London. Meloy was detained for several days. Mrs. Meloy soon appeared to be beyond suspicion. Miss Brophy declared that her baggage contained only personal effects. But at the bottom of her last trunk was found a wallet containing Gasché’s papers. These were seized, and Miss Brophy and Mrs. Meloy were allowed to proceed to Holland, where they were later rejoined by Meloy.
The Gasché papers were most interesting. They contained some of Rintelen’s letters showing his intimacy with well-known New Yorkers, and letters in which he referred to his “official mission” to the United States that were very important, for they proved what Rintelen steadfastly denied, namely, that he was in this country by orders of the German Government. In one of them to a man in Germany, whom he addressed as “Most Honourable Counsellor,” he wrote: “Your letter of the 25th March [1915] was sent after me when I was on an official journey, and I request you to excuse the delaying in replying.” And another letter, from the National Bank Für Deutschland, dated Berlin, 25th May, 1915, and addressed “To the Landed Proprietor, Von Preskow,” contained this sentence: “Director Rintelen, who looked after Major Von Katte’s account, entered the navy on the outbreak of hostilities, and as he is at present on an official journey is not available at the moment.”
With Rintelen’s internment ended Lamar’s golden fortune and Meloy’s golden vision and Rintelen’s dream of destruction. And now began one of the most difficult and one of the longest tasks of the Department of Justice. For, out of the fragments of evidence at its command, and out of the seemingly innocent public acts of Labour’s National Peace Council, and out of the obscure and isolated outrages to ships and factories in the United States, the Department of Justice had to construct a pattern that should prove, by tangible legal evidence, the guilt of Rintelen and Lamar in a plot to violate the laws of the United States.
Above, Rintelen’s photograph on a false passport with which he tried to escape from the United States; left, Andrew D. Meloy; right, David Lamar, “the Wolf of Wall Street”
This long investigation was a fascinating study in human nature. If only Lamar had been a little different in his manners, he might have escaped the clutches of the law. If Rintelen had been as wise as he was clever, he might still be in an internment camp instead of a prison.
Lamar, it may be recalled, had a weakness for automobiles. He hired them on all occasions. They were especially useful to him for conferences with Rintelen. They did not wish to be seen together, so Lamar would drive to an unfrequented spot in Central Park. Rintelen would drive up in another car and get into Lamar’s, and then they would go for a long ride while they discussed their plans. Sometimes they would go for hours on the North Shore of Long Island; sometimes for long excursions in the Pelham region of Westchester County, stopping perhaps at a wayside inn and taking a room for greater privacy in their conferences.
An agent of the Department of Justice spent six weeks making the rounds of the garages in New York. He carried Lamar’s picture in his pocket. He showed it to every chauffeur in every garage. And every chauffeur who had driven a car for Lamar during that summer of 1915 recognized the picture, and every one of them applied the same epithet to its original that Trampas applied to the Virginian in Owen Wister’s book when the Virginian, in response, drew his gun and demanded that “when you call me that, smile!” For Lamar, who was the suave, the gracious, the ultra-polite and charming man to people whom he wished to cajole, was overbearing, fault-finding, and peremptory toward those who served him. His movements in the hotels about the country were several times traced by a rough description completed by a remark about his manner toward servants. No waiter or bell-boy ever forgot him. He was forever “kicking about the service.”
This vivid impression that he made on the chauffeurs contributed greatly to his undoing. They remembered him perfectly, and recalled his companions. They recognized Rintelen’s photograph. And several of them had overheard parts of the conversations that were useful to the Government. Through these men, Lamar’s connection with Rintelen in a conspiracy to violate the Sherman Act by restraining our foreign trade in munitions was established.
One’s laundry, too, may be a dangerous thing. Lamar denied that he had stopped at hotels in Chicago and Indianapolis and elsewhere at the same time that Martin and others were there. But handwriting experts proved that the names “David Lenaur,” “David Lewis,” and the like, on hotel registers on those days were in Lamar’s handwriting. And the conclusive proof of their evidence was that the laundry lists of the hotels on those days showed that the laundry mark on the linen of “Lenaur” and of “Lewis” was the laundry mark of Lamar.
Charge accounts at stores may also prove troublesome. It became necessary to find out where Lamar banked his money. That was discovered through Lamar’s stomach trouble. He was a patron of a druggist in New York who had his pet prescription for his pet ailment. Lamar sometimes wrote, and sometimes telegraphed, for another bottle of this medicine. A telegram of this kind sent the Government agent to the druggist. Did Lamar ever pay by check? On what banks? The answers led to those banks and thence to others and thence to Lamar’s brokers, from one of whom alone evidence was obtained that the whilom bankrupt had lost, in one series of speculations that summer, $38,000 in cash. Whose cash? The Government was able to prove that Lamar had got thousands of dollars from Rintelen, because they produced the men who saw Rintelen pay it, and Lamar was not able to prove that he had got any such sums from anybody else, so the jury took the Government’s theory as fact that Lamar was Rintelen’s man.
The story of this proof is worth telling. On the witness stand at the trial, George Plockman, the treasurer of the Transatlantic Trust Company (the Austrian bank in New York with which Rintelen kept his funds) described the arrangement Rintelen had made to conceal the passage of money for illegal acts. He had instructed the Transatlantic Trust Company, when it received checks drawn by him in a certain form, to cash them without questioning the identity of the bearer and without requiring him to endorse them.
One check of this kind was presented at the bank one day, and the paying teller brought it to Plockman to ask if he should pay it.
“Who presented it?” asked Plockman.
“That dark man over there,” replied the paying teller.
“I thought,” said Plockman on the witness stand, “that this man was a Mexican, but while I was looking at him our vice-president came up and when he understood the situation and saw the man he said: ‘Mein Gott! Dot is de Volf of Vall Street! I hope Rintelen has not got into his clutches!’”
One other incident of the trial should be told. Testimony was brought in that showed how the money for the Peace Council was spent. One item was for funds to pay the expenses of a German preacher from St. Louis to attend the convention at Washington and open the proceedings with prayer. Lamar had never heard of this until he heard it in the courtroom. It was too much for him. When this evidence came out, of the lengths to which his own pupils had out-distanced even their teacher in the art of political camouflage, he burst into roars of uncontrollable laughter which literally stopped all proceedings in court, the tears rolling down his cheeks as he struggled to subdue his mirth.
Out of all the investigations of the Government arose a card index of every man that Rintelen and Lamar had seen during the four months from April 3 to August 3, 1915, of every hotel they had visited, of practically every telephone call they had made and every telegram sent or received, of nearly every dollar they had had and spent. Thousands upon thousands of these cards were made and filed. They convicted both men.
The Government indicted Rintelen, Lamar, Buchanan, Fowler, Martin, Schulteis, and a man named Monnett, for conspiracy to violate the Sherman Act in the operations of Labour’s National Peace Council to restrain our foreign trade. Rintelen, Lamar, and Martin were convicted. The rest got the benefit of a very slim doubt, except Frank B. Monnett, the farmer attorney-general of Ohio, whose reputation in the early suit of Ohio to oust the Standard Oil Company from the state had been used as “stage setting” by Martin. He was freed by the Court before the jury was sent out to deliberate. The convicted men got the limit of the law—one year in jail. Rintelen was likewise indicted for perjury in his application for a passport as Edward V. Gates, and again for another crime against our laws. He was convicted on both charges, and sentenced to several months’ imprisonment on each.
No one realized better than the judges who sentenced him how inadequate these punishments to expiate his crimes. But the laws under which Rintelen was convicted—and they were the only laws under which his acts (all committed before our entry into the war) could be questioned—were enacted in times of peace, when no one dreamed of the world conflict or could have imagined how it would affect us when it came.
Rintelen has completed serving time on the first of his three sentences, and has the other two still to serve. The Tiger of Berlin is securely caged, and not likely soon to be again at large.