by Charles Lane
Prosecuting the case for the United States was Edwards Pierrepont, an eminent Republican lawyer and leader of anti-Tammany political forces in New York. He had stepped down as the city’s federal prosecutor in 1870, but was filling in for his successor, who had recently experienced a death in the family. Whitley had urged Pierrepont to substitute, to avoid any delay.47
Pierrepont’s opening argument to the jury took up an hour on the first day of the trial. He cast Joshua D. Miner’s crimes as anything but victimless, and the defendant as anything but the Robin Hood of much local lore. The harm from fake money, Pierrepont explained, “was done to the community, falling upon the more moderate and humbler classes of society.” Meanwhile, the beneficiaries tended to be wealthy and privileged, because counterfeiting “required great skill and capacity and a great deal of money. No poor man could manufacture counterfeit money.” What’s more, Pierrepont noted, anticipating defense objections to the government’s bargains with low-ranking criminals, the only way to tackle such powerful, adroit, and secretive offenders was to offer underlings immunity from prosecution in return for their testimony. This strategy, he told the jury, had been personally approved by the top officials of the Treasury Department.48
With that, Pierrepont called Harry Cole to the witness stand, and, over the next two days, led Hiram C. Whitley’s coerced informant through the story of his years-long involvement with “Jot” Miner, culminating in their rendezvous that rainy night on the Boulevard. William Kennoch, the first of Whitley’s undercover men to tackle Miner, followed Cole, on the third day of the trial. Kennoch confirmed that he searched Cole prior to his departure for the meeting with Miner and found nothing on him except the $1,500 Whitley had given him to pay Miner.
This was important: it anticipated what was likely to be the defense’s main argument: that Cole had not received the plates from Miner but had brought them to help the Secret Service’s duplicitous detectives stage a put-up job against Miner. Kennoch acknowledged that Miner did not have the $1,500 when he returned to Bleecker Street after the sting. He explained that Miner threw the cash away in a desperate attempt to get rid of evidence as he fought with the Secret Service men. Kennoch testified he and a colleague later returned to the scene and crawled around by lantern light until they recovered the bills Miner had scattered.49
On December 14, Hiram C. Whitley testified. Under Pierrepont’s guidance, he recounted every detail of his steady assembly of a case against Miner, from the arrest of Bill Gurney to the tense negotiations with Harry Cole. Pierrepont dramatically presented him with a stack of special fiber paper for making currency, and Whitley confirmed that he and his agents had discovered it in Thomas Ballard’s workshop. He swore that his arrangement with Cole to set up Miner was not a put-up job, but a well-designed tactic that served “the ends of justice,” and enjoyed the approval of the government’s top lawyers, just as Pierrepont had said in his opening statement.50
Whitley spoke serenely, almost triumphantly, betraying not the slightest doubt that Miner was guilty, and that the jury would agree. Matters were not quite so simple, however, as he was about to discover, once Miner’s lawyers began their cross-examination. The Secret Service had infiltrated “Jot” Miner’s operation, but the wily counterfeiter had managed to infiltrate the Secret Service, too.
* * *
Abraham Beatty served in a New York regiment during the Civil War, and eventually became the pilot of the small steamboat Union General Ambrose Burnside used as a floating headquarters during campaigns in the Virginia Tidewater.51 In September 1865 Beatty had a brush with the law on Long Island: he attacked and beat a man who, in Beatty’s estimation, had been paying too much attention to Beatty’s girlfriend. The man died, but a court convicted Beatty only of assault, not murder: two expert witnesses, doctors paid by Beatty, testified that the wounds he inflicted could not have been fatal. He paid a fine and went free.
That blot on Beatty’s record did not damage his good relationship with the police in New York, for whom he had briefly worked after leaving the United States Army; and, in early 1870, a high-ranking inspector recommended him to Hiram C. Whitley at the Secret Service. Beatty quickly became one of Whitley’s favorite assistants, initially specializing in tracking tobacco and wine smugglers before graduating to the division’s most sensitive anti-counterfeiting missions. It was Beatty who posed as “Jake Buck” and set up the arrest of Bill Gurney; and it was Beatty whom Whitley sent to retrieve Joshua D. Miner’s trunk full of engraving plates.
Among many talents, Whitley was a master of disguise. In the arrest of counterfeiter Bill Gurney, he posed as a clergyman (center), accompanied by Secret Service detectives Abraham Beatty (left) and Michael G. Bauer (right). (Memoirs of the United States Secret Service)
Like Whitley’s other employees at the Bleecker Street office, Beatty earned extra income by claiming a share of negotiated settlements the government routinely reached with the various smugglers and traffickers they caught in possession of contraband. Secret Service men would take guilty parties to the United States attorney, who offered to drop the charges against them in exchange for a “fine,” plus forfeiture of the captured cigars, wine, or jewelry. Up to half of the proceeds would go to the detectives, a reward known as a moiety. Until abolished by a new federal statute in late 1872, moieties were a perfectly legal, if uniquely American, practice, instituted by the First Congress, and considered necessary to encourage collection of desperately needed tax revenue and custom fees.52
Whitley himself received moieties on top of his $3,000 annual salary. He devoted much of 1871, in fact, to a highly public, if thoroughly tawdry, court dispute over the moiety on a particularly lucrative illicit shipment of diamonds.53 Whitley’s innovation was to require his detectives to split their moieties with him. He kept some of the money in a “special fund” for official purposes, such as supplying cash for sting operations, and pocketed the rest.54 Neither a smoker nor a drinker, he allowed his detectives—as well as New York’s policemen and journalists—to dip into a hoard of confiscated Cuban cigars and European wine in the back room of his headquarters. The best smokes were set aside for Solicitor Banfield, and shipped to him at the Treasury Department in Washington.55
None of this was strictly by the book; contraband was supposed to be turned over to the United States Marshals for auction. Whitley assured his men that, as he told one detective, “the government doesn’t care about this sort of thing; all it wants to do is stop the frauds.”56
These arrangements ultimately caused a falling-out between Whitley and Beatty in April 1871. Whitley caught Beatty taking much more than his share of a confiscated shipment of wine: ninety out of three hundred bottles, instead of three or four. Even more irksome to Whitley, Beatty subtracted the bottles before the United States attorney had settled with the smuggler, reducing the potential value of the seized merchandise, upon which their moieties depended. Whitley fired Beatty, claiming publicly that it was because Beatty had stolen the wine, blackmailed merchants, and concealed his criminal record.
Six months later, when the Secret Service arrested Joshua D. Miner, Abraham Beatty was still stewing over Whitley’s treatment of him. With revenge on his mind, he approached Miner’s lawyers and offered to provide them inside information on Whitley’s methods, as well as to dig up any new dirt they might require.
Miner’s lawyers listened eagerly as Beatty described how Whitley had schemed to profit from Miner’s surrender of the trunk full of engraving plates. According to him, self-enrichment had motivated the Secret Service chief’s pursuit of Miner all along; Whitley assumed the National Shoe and Leather Bank would pay a handsome reward to whoever took the counterfeits of its notes off the street. And, Beatty said, Whitley concocted a plan to make sure they did.
Though recovering the plates had been a simple matter of retrieving the items from storage in New Jersey, Whitley planted a story in the New York Herald portraying it as the r
esult of arduous surveillance conducted over nearly two weeks.57 Next, he took Beatty to the National Shoe and Leather Bank, boasted to the management that this was the man who had conducted the undercover work, and informed them it was “customary” for banks to provide a cash bonus for such heroism. Prior to doing so, Whitley had told Beatty he expected half of whatever the bank decided to give Beatty.
Beatty also served up sordid details of his former colleagues’ backgrounds. He told Miner’s defense team that William Kennoch, the first Secret Service man to tackle the counterfeiter on the Boulevard, had been a crew member on illegal slave ships prior to the Civil War, and on cigar-smuggling vessels more recently. Kennoch started working for the Secret Service only after the division captured him and blackmailed him into serving as an infiltrator among his former criminal associates.58
Beatty traveled to Boston, paid by Miner’s lawyers, to gather evidence of Whitley’s checkered business career in that city, quickly learning about his feud with R. M. Campbell before the Civil War, and the brief stint as a pawnbroker after the Civil War, which ended in Whitley’s being stripped of his license.
* * *
Armed with this information, Miner’s defense lawyer, William S. Fullerton—a brilliant former state court judge whose client list included shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt and “Boss” Tweed himself—set out to thwart the prosecution.
First, Fullerton cross-examined William Kennoch, forcing the detective to acknowledge that he had been arrested in 1858 as a crew member of a slave ship, and that his Secret Service career began when Ichabod C. Nettleship caught him with forty-eight hundred bootleg cigars but dropped the charges in return for his turning informant. And yes, Kennoch had done some jail time for his part in a brawl, though he insisted he had only been “protecting my mother from an assault.”59
This was a mere warm-up for the attack Fullerton launched on Hiram C. Whitley after the Secret Service chief finished his direct testimony. Miner’s lawyer confronted Whitley with the embarrassing fact that the prosecution had introduced into evidence only the serial numbers of the $1,500 in legitimate bills Harry Cole paid Joshua D. Miner, not the actual cash. What happened to the money? Fullerton demanded. Whitley admitted he spent it. “I used the money because it was mine and I had a right to it,” he snapped.
Fullerton presented Whitley a copy of a newspaper containing his concocted story about a supposed Secret Service surveillance operation to capture the twenty-dollar engraving plates, the one he had planted to support his scheme to talk the National Shoe and Leather Bank into giving Abraham Beatty—and Whitley—a reward. Whitley claimed he did not recall telling the reporter that false story.
Fullerton insisted, “Will you swear you did not give such information?”
“I will not,” Whitley admitted. “Well, I remember that I promised Miner to cover it up in the papers, and I may have given the story a little different from what the real facts were.”
“Then you told an untruth,” Miner’s lawyer parried.
“I would not call it an untruth,” Whitley muttered.
Fullerton demanded to know if it was true that he had told the cashier of the National Shoe and Leather Bank that Beatty deserved a reward.
“I do not remember that,” the Secret Service chief replied, claiming that he had heard later that Beatty did receive a bonus from the bank, and that he admonished him not to accept it.
Fullerton took Whitley back to the 1867 revocation of his pawnbroking license in Boston. “There was some investigation in reference to a watch,” Whitley conceded. “I was not there at the time.”
Hadn’t he also swindled a man out of an apothecary shop in Boston? the lawyer asked. “I forget what the charge was,” the Secret Service chief responded.
What about R. M. Campbell? Didn’t that businessman fire Whitley for stealing from his restaurant back in the 1850s? “No, sir, never,” Whitley snapped.
The grueling review of Whitley’s past went on for hours, over the course of two days. For the finale, Fullerton dredged up the darkest chapter of all: the day in January 1859, when twenty-six-year-old Hiram C. Whitley had helped waylay the abolitionist John Doy and his party of freedom-seeking African Americans outside Lawrence, Kansas.
How, exactly, Fullerton learned the details of that duplicitous deed was unclear. Whitley’s role, while not widely known, was not a secret, either. The case made the news in 1859, and press accounts described Whitley’s subsequent confrontation with the abolitionists in Lawrence; John Doy, too, had published a memoir in which he mentioned Whitley’s pointing a gun at him.
Hadn’t the Secret Service chief been charged with crimes for his part in the Doy ambush? Fullerton asked.
Stunned at having this long-ago treachery thrown back in his face, Whitley lied. “I was in the service of the marshal there,” he asserted, “and assisted in the capture of fugitive slaves. I was not charged with cruel treatment of the slaves.”60
He made no mention of his conspiring with the Missouri-based slave catchers for weeks prior to the ambush, much less of the fact that two of the people he helped to kidnap were not slaves at all, but free men of color.
With that burst of denial, Whitley stepped down.
The prosecution quickly fired back, producing several Ohio officials to testify to Miner’s record as a convicted counterfeiter in that state. Yet Fullerton had made his point. The jury, twelve men drawn mostly from the ranks of Manhattan’s shopkeepers and small-time merchants, had already seen and heard plenty to make them wonder whose record was more disreputable: the defendant, or the lawman who had investigated him.
“This whole case is surrounded by fraud, imposture, and falsehood,” Fullerton’s assistant told the jury when Whitley and the other prosecution witnesses had finished testifying.61 Then the defense began trying to conjure reasonable doubt through the testimony of Joshua D. Miner’s friends and relatives. Some of them swore, falsely, that they had witnessed Harry Cole drop and pick up a package—by implication, the engraving plates—prior to meeting Miner on the night of October 25, 1871. Others, including a parade of pompous Tammany Hall worthies, testified to the defendant’s good character.
Edwards Pierrepont’s closing argument for the prosecution reminded the jury of how difficult it was to prove a case of counterfeiting, and that the government therefore had little realistic alternative to using “peculiar, though not dishonorable means...to get such proof.” The defense’s denunciation of Whitley had been “unfair,” given the detectives’ undeniable “success in capturing Miner and fixing his guilt upon him.”62
Yet there was no getting around the fact that the case could hinge on the credibility of the government’s witnesses, led by Whitley, and his informant, Harry Cole. And the man presiding over the trial, Judge Charles Linnaeus Benedict, thought the jury had every reason to doubt them. A Republican former state assemblyman who had been appointed to the federal bench by President Lincoln in 1865, Benedict was no friend of Tammany Hall, or of Joshua D. Miner. He was, however, an old-fashioned gentleman, the son of a college professor born and educated in stern, puritanical Vermont.63
On the trial’s twelfth and final day, December 26, 1871, Benedict instructed the jury on the law, pointing out that they could convict Miner if, and only if, the government had convinced them of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In making that determination, the judge said, they should consider not only the evidence against Miner, but what sort of people procured and presented it.
Harry Cole, he emphasized, was a known criminal who helped ensnare Joshua D. Miner in return for Whitley’s promise of leniency. Cole could be believed—if others corroborated his testimony.64 The only corroboration, however, came from detectives. As for them, Judge Benedict told the jurors,
I but repeat what has often been said—that as a class their evidence is always to be scrutinized and accepted with caution. I do not say that
detectives never tell the truth upon the stand. I do not say that they always misstate upon the stand. What I do say is that, from their occupation, from their calling, and living a life of deceit, constantly engaged in the manufacture of this and that and the other story, their statements on the witness stand are not entitled to the same weight as that of ordinary witnesses of good character taken from the mass of the community.65
Whitley, watching the proceedings with his detectives, could hardly believe his ears. The judge was practically urging the jury to acquit Miner based on what he saw as the dubious character of the government’s investigators. The Secret Service chief was perfectly aware that he had been less than candid under cross-examination. To him, however, that had nothing to do with the matter at hand, which was that Joshua D. Miner had been caught red-handed selling counterfeit engraving plates, months after promising Whitley he would have nothing more to do with the coney trade. What were white lies Whitley might have told to cover his own youthful indiscretions compared to an entire defense composed of perjury?
Whitley continued to believe a conviction was coming even after the jurors, who retired to deliberate at 3:00 p.m., twice returned to the courtroom—at 4:40 p.m. and again at five minutes before midnight—to say they were deadlocked. Each time, Judge Benedict instructed them to keep trying for a unanimous verdict. At five minutes before one o’clock in the morning of December 27, they finally informed the court that they had reached one.
Joshua D. Miner nervously stroked his chin as the twelve men filed back into the court, looking “fearfully solemn,” in the words of one journalist.
