by David Stout
Chancellor Hitler was even uttering suspicious and hostile words toward the Soviet Union, complaining that the Land of the Tsars posed a security threat to Germany in the East. All in all, there was almost nothing conciliatory in what the German leader was saying. But upon reflection, a reader might find comfort. Surely, the German dictator would not go to war against Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. That would be an unimaginable conflagration.
In the summer of 1935, Doc Barker was shipped to Alcatraz for what was supposed to be a long stay. (He would make his stay a relatively short one, as he was shot dead on January 13, 1939, during an escape attempt.)
But though the Barker-Karpis gang had been dismantled—all but destroyed, really—Hoover could not have been totally content. Alvin “Creepy” Karpis remained at large, traveling from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to New Orleans (or so it was rumored) and venturing north now and then to pull off another heist.
Hoover detested Karpis—detested the cold, defiant eyes, the insolent lips that looked as though a worm might crawl from between them. Given what we have learned about the director over the years, he may well have disliked the very foreignness of Karpis, né Karpowicz, born in Montreal to Lithuanian parents.
If his agents could capture Karpis, the last slimy vestiges of the gang would be eradicated forever. Then the bureau would finally get the full credit it deserved.
In the spring of 1936, the “war on crime” hadn’t gone out of fashion, and Hoover and his men still enjoyed a good public image, mostly. So Hoover felt confident enough to seek a doubling of the FBI’s budget for the next fiscal year.
But not everyone in law enforcement worshipped the FBI. Far from it. Lawmen in other agencies, federal as well as state and local, thought Hoover and his men hogged the credit for a notable arrest whenever possible. And despite his bureaucratic agility and his political in-fighting skills, Hoover made his share of enemies, sometimes because of pure pettiness.
So it was that on the morning of Friday, April 10, 1936, when Hoover walked into a Senate hearing room to push for his huge budget increase, he got a hostile reception. And small wonder: the budget subcommittee chairman was Senator Kenneth McKellar, Democrat of Tennessee, who despised the director. Hoover had ignited the senator’s fury by refusing to hire a pair of Tennessee men backed by McKellar and, when the senator complained, by firing three agents from Tennessee out of spite.
Hoover came into the hearing armed with charts, graphs, statistics, and other data to convince the lawmakers that the bureau was accomplishing a lot—and could accomplish even more with a bigger budget.
But McKellar seemed not much interested in Hoover’s dog-and-pony show. He began with some barbed questions about how the bureau generated publicity for itself. “It seems to me your department is just running wild, Mr. Hoover. With all the money in your hands, you are just extravagant.”153
McKellar grilled Hoover on his qualifications to run the bureau. Hoover noted that he had been with the Justice Department for nineteen years.
“Did you ever make an arrest?” the senator asked.154
“No, sir,” Hoover replied. “I have made investigations.”
“How many arrests have you made, and who were they?”
Somewhat lamely, Hoover replied that arrests were made by “officers under my supervision.”
Then the stinger: “I am talking about the actual arrests,” McKellar said. “You never arrested them, actually?”****155
The silence was deafening. The director was being subjected to the kind of ear-burning humiliation he was used to dishing out but wasn’t used to taking. When he got back to his inner sanctum, he issued an edict: find Alvin Karpis, and fast. And save him for me.
As it turned out, Karpis was relatively easy to find. By late April, he was in New Orleans, and the stage was set for the director’s moment in the limelight.
When FBI agents, aided by postal inspectors, knew with near certainty where Karpis was holed up, Hoover was flown to New Orleans. On the evening of May 1, with Hoover waiting in the wings with a posse of his men, Karpis and an associate and the latter’s girlfriend emerged from their hotel. Agents swarmed about them, and they were taken without resistance.
It has long been debated whether Hoover trained a gun on Karpis or just how close he was physically to the gangster, but no matter.
“Karpis Captured in New Orleans by Hoover Himself” read the headline in the New York Times the next day. “Another Man and Woman Are Also Seized by 15 Agents Under Federal Chief.”156
All these years later, the episode conjures images of bwana sitting under a shade tree, sipping a gin and tonic and rifle at the ready, as bush beaters drive a trophy animal in his direction. But the headline and article beneath it conveyed none of that.
Karpis was soon on a plane to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was under federal indictment for the kidnappings of William Hamm and Edward Bremer. Perhaps hoping for leniency, he agreed just before trial to plead guilty to the Hamm kidnapping alone. But there was no mercy. By late summer, he was on his way to Alcatraz to serve a life sentence. The Barker-Karpis gang had passed into history, at long last.*****
*The account of Volney Davis’s escape is taken from the New York Times, though it is not clear if the dispatch, written in Chicago, was by a regular Times correspondent or a freelance stringer.
**Sawyer would spend nearly twenty years in Leavenworth and Alcatraz. His wife divorced him. He was paroled in 1955 and soon died of cancer.
***Yet the anecdote was too good to be abandoned. When Edward Bremer died in 1965 at the age of sixty-seven, some versions of his obituary reported that he had helped investigators by recalling the church chimes.
****On this occasion, Hoover was, it could be argued, being treated unfairly. After all, the FBI had not even been given the power to make arrests until 1934. And Hoover was supposed to be an administrator, not a gumshoe street cop with handcuffs at the ready.
*****The exchange between Senator McKellar and Hoover was recounted in Burrough, Public Enemies.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
IN THE WORLD’S SPOTLIGHT
Flemington, New Jersey
Wednesday, January 2, 1935
The spotlights of the nation and the world were trained on the quiet little borough of Flemington in Hunterdon County. It was there, in the century-old county courthouse, that Bruno Richard Hauptmann went on trial for the murder of the Lindbergh baby. Reporters, photographers, and movie-newsreel crews from around the globe were there to chronicle what will always rank as one of the most sensational criminal trials in American history.
Nowadays, many months might elapse between the arrest of a suspect in an infamous crime and the beginning of the trial. But Hauptmann was brought before the bar of justice just three and a half months after he gave the service station attendant the gold note that brought about his arrest.
Charles A. Lindbergh was there as jury selection began, sitting in front of the railing that separates the audience from those involved in the trial proceedings. The New York Times noted that he was only several seats away from the defendant. Astoundingly, Lindbergh was able to enter the courtroom while carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster, the weapon clearly visible when he leaned forward to talk to prosecutors. (The Times explained matter-of-factly that the colonel had carried a weapon for several years, since receiving death threats.)
With remarkable speed, eight men and four women were selected for the jury. Testimony began on January 3, after opening statements by the prosecutor, state attorney general David Wilentz, and the chief defense lawyer, Edward J. Reilly, who asserted that the crime was conceived and carried out entirely within the Lindbergh home—though not by anyone in the Lindbergh family. Was he trying to take advantage of the suicide of Violet Sharpe, who had come under suspicion early on?
Bizarrely, he said the defense would show that a gang of five people carried the baby from the house and that the ladder found at the scene had nothing to do with the crime. Nor, he insisted, did
his client, whose connection with the ladder had seemingly been established, have anything to do with the crime.
“I have an awful lot of questions to ask Colonel Lindbergh, an awful lot of things I want answers to,” the defense lawyer asserted cryptically in a radio interview. “An awful lot of questions.”157
David Wilentz’s position was far less mysterious. He said the state would show that Hauptmann used the ladder he had made to burglarize the Lindbergh home and that he took the baby and fell off his ladder on the way down, a plunge that killed the baby, whose corpse Hauptmann concealed a short distance away.*
Wilentz was disdainful of the defense notion that several people were involved. The crime was a one-man job, he said, and that one man was Bruno Hauptmann, who should be convicted and sent to the electric chair.
Charles and Anne Lindbergh testified early on, with the colonel recalling the wood-clattering noise he and his wife heard the night of the kidnapping, how he remarked to his wife, “What is that?” He recalled how they dismissed the sound as possibly coming from a falling orange crate in the kitchen—or from the wind outside. The colonel spoke in a clear, seemingly unemotional voice, not betraying whether he reflected on the fact that the clattering noise might have coincided with the end of his firstborn’s life.
Lindbergh recalled how, upon learning that the baby was not in his nursery, he picked up a phone, half expecting that that the phone line had been cut by whoever took the baby. But it hadn’t been, so he called local police. Then he grabbed a rifle he kept in the house and went outside, walking on the road in front of the house for perhaps a hundred yards but seeing nothing.
“It was extremely dark that night,” Lindbergh recalled. He said the ladder was discovered by the Hopewell police chief, Charles Williamson, one of the first lawmen to reach the scene, who shined his flashlight on the ground near the nursery window.
Before long, Lindbergh said, the grounds outside his home were swarming not only with lawmen of several jurisdictions but with members of the press, who were “absolutely out of control” as they tromped all over the grass.
His wife, though composed, was more soft-spoken. She kept her self-control even as she described taking a walk outside the house hours before the kidnapping. Knowing that nurse Betty Gow was with the baby, Mrs. Lindbergh recalled tossing a pebble against the nursery window to get the nurse’s attention, “and then she held the baby up to the window to let him see me.”158
She even maintained her calm in what must have been one of the most painful moments for her, when she identified the sleeping suit the infant had worn the night he vanished.
The defense lawyer, Edward Reilly, had the good sense not to cross-examine a grieving mother, who uttered a quiet “thank you” as she was told she could step down.
Reilly was rougher on Lindbergh himself. Was the colonel really certain that the voice he heard in St. Raymond’s Cemetery the night he went there with John Condon was that of Bruno Hauptmann?
Yes, Lindbergh responded, recalling that the mysterious man in the cemetery called out to Condon “in a foreign accent, ‘Hey, doctor.’”**
The heart of Reilly’s cross-examination was the attempt to show that the household help at the Lindberghs’ home had not been properly vetted. “Thundering at the witness, Mr. Reilly demanded whether he had not made any effort ‘as a father’ to ‘find out the backgrounds of the people that were in the house the night your child was snatched away,’” the New York Times reported.
Lindbergh coolly replied that, of course, he had placed his “entire confidence” in the police, who offered suggestions on whom to hire.
“Well, Colonel, as a man of the world, you certainly must have known that some of the police are not infallible, did you not?”
“I think we have very good police,” Lindbergh replied.
The Times reporter made it clear who he thought had won the courtroom duel and where his own sympathies lay, observing how “the heavily built and red-faced defense counsel strikingly contrasted in figure with the tall, slim boyish-looking aviator” and how whenever Lindbergh “scored a neat rapier thrust against the lawyer’s bludgeon” the crowd of several hundred people “burst into laughter at the lawyer’s expense,” finally prompting the judge, Thomas W. Trenchard, to admonish the audience.159 (This was not the only instance in which the Times violated its standards of dispassionate objectivity. At another point in the trial, the newspaper noted that Hauptmann was dressed “as he had been every day in a suit, the color of which closely approximates the field gray of the German wartime uniform.”160
The second week of the trial brought more damaging testimony against Hauptmann. A Bronx cab driver identified the defendant as the man who paid him a dollar one night in March 1932 to deliver a message to John Condon, the eccentric Bronx educator who had insinuated himself into the ransom negotiations. “You’re a liar,” Hauptmann muttered at the cab driver.161
And Amandus Hochmuth, who was eighty-seven and lived in Hopewell, swore that he saw Hauptmann the day of the kidnapping driving by his home and in the direction of the Lindbergh estate with a ladder sticking out of the car. After Hochmuth identified him, Hauptmann turned to his wife, Anna, seated a short distance away and said in German, “The old man is crazy.”
If defense lawyers thought they could undermine John Condon, they were mistaken. Still vigorous at seventy-four, Condon was not unnerved at testifying before several hundred people in one of the most publicized trials in the nation’s history. On the contrary, he obviously relished it.
Prosecutor David Wilentz asked him to whom he talked on the night of March 12, 1932, in Van Cortlandt Park and to whom he gave the ransom money on the night of April 2, 1932.
“It was John,” the witness replied.
“And who is John?”
“John is Bruno Richard Hauptmann!” Condon boomed.162
The Times account had Condon remaining unshaken through cross-examination and even enjoying the back-and-forth with defense lawyer Reilly. That evening after court, Reilly insisted that Condon had been mistaken about his encounters with the man once dubbed “Cemetery John,” that the phantom-like figure was not Hauptmann but Hauptmann’s friend Isidor Fisch, who had returned to Germany, where he died. (Whatever Reilly asserted outside of court wasn’t supposed to matter if the jurors were heeding the judge’s instructions not to read or listen to news accounts of the trial.)
The prosecution produced eight handwriting experts to testify that there was no doubt at all that the ransom messages were written by Hauptmann. They based their conclusions on comparisons between the writing on the notes, handwriting samples that Hauptmann gave after he was arrested, and earlier specimens of the defendant’s penmanship, like those submitted with his application for a driver’s license.
On the twelfth day of the trial, FBI agent Thomas Sisk, whom Hoover had put in charge of the bureau’s contingent assigned to the case, testified on how Hauptmann, as he was questioned in his apartment, glanced furtively out the window toward his garage where the money was hidden. Suddenly, Hauptmann leaped from his chair and shouted, “Mister, mister, you stop lying!”163
The next day, Anna Hauptmann echoed her husband’s outburst as a former neighbor testified that a day or two after the kidnapping, Bruno Hauptmann was limping noticeably. Her testimony buttressed the state’s contention that Hauptmann had fallen from his ladder after taking the baby.
“You’re lying!” Anna Hauptmann shouted.164
The prosecution added to the growing mound of evidence against the defendant by introducing a closet door from Hauptmann’s apartment on which the address and phone number of John Condon had been written in pencil. An investigator testified that Hauptmann had offered a lame explanation for writing down the number, saying that he did so simply because he’d been following the case with interest. Yet with everything seeming to go against him, Hauptmann issued a statement through one of his lawyers. He expected to be acquitted, he said, because “the state has fai
led to prove its case.”165
“I have no fear of cross-examination,” he said. “I will tell the truth.” And after he was found not guilty, “I hope the world will forget all about me and that I will be allowed to live quietly with my family.”
But Wilentz was about to call his final—and most devastating—witness. He was Arthur Koehler, head of the U.S. Forest Service’s laboratory, who had traced the origins of the wood the kidnapper had used to fashion his ladder. Wilentz asked Koehler to relate how he had traced some of the wood to the lumber mill in South Carolina.
“It’s a long story,” the witness said.166
“Let’s hear it,” Wilentz said. “We want the long story.”
Wilentz had assumed that the jurors would find the “long story” an enthralling one. He was apparently correct, as the jurors leaned forward in their chairs as Koehler told of finding the South Carolina mill with its telltale machinery that left distinctive, if nearly invisible, marks on the finished lumber—marks that were photographed and shown enlarged in the courtroom.
Hauptmann listened white-faced as Koehler explained how he had matched some boards in the ladder—those that had been used before, as shown by nail holes—with the boards in Hauptmann’s attic and how the nail holes perfectly matched the holes in the attic joists.
The witness said the chisel found on the ground near the Lindberghs’ home was from Hauptmann’s own tools—and was the only tool missing from the set.
Just as damningly, he testified that an examination of Hauptmann’s hand plane (a carpentry tool used to smooth edges on wood and to shave boards down to near-exact size) showed that it had been used to shave a board on the ladder.
“Have you the plane and will you give us a demonstration?” Wilentz asked.167
“Yes,” Koehler said. “I employ a very simple method that I learned as a youngster. I used to put a piece of paper over a coin and rub a pencil back and forth over the paper and get an impression of the coin on the paper.”
