Freedom's Detective

by Charles Lane

  Others in Washington were not so sure that the results Whitley claimed justified the means by which he obtained them, or, indeed, the means by which the government had created the Secret Service in the first place. The critics, mostly Democrats and anti-Grant Republicans, insisted their objections were not partisan or political, but traditional American civil libertarian concerns about the accumulation of unchecked power in what was, after all, a semiclandestine bureau of the executive branch. Appletons’ Journal might consider it a compliment to refer to the Secret Service as the “national police.” The obvious rejoinder, which opponents made at every opportunity, was to ask whether the Constitution authorized Congress to establish such a force, much less to do so by implication, through an appropriations measure.

  The Secret Service’s most insistent adversary in Congress was Representative James B. Beck. The Kentucky Democrat had despised Whitley since the Ashburn murder case, when the detective helped to establish the culpability of Beck’s friend, Columbus Klan leader William D. Chipley. In speeches on the House floor, Beck and other Democrats alluded to Judge Benedict’s jury instructions in the Joshua D. Miner trial, to support their argument that detectives who could not be trusted to testify against counterfeiters could not be relied on to investigate respectable white Southerners.10 In their dissenting addendum to the Ku Klux Committee’s February 1872 report, Beck and another Democrat condemned the use of the Secret Service against the Klan, contending that “such agencies are certainly dangerous in the administration of justice.”11 Later that same year, Beck warned North Carolina that “gangs of spies and informers” led by Whitley and Joseph G. Hester would “flood” the state before its August election.12

  Throughout Reconstruction, Democrat James Burnie Beck of Kentucky defended white supremacy and opposed federal investigations of Ku Klux Klan violence. (Library of Congress)

  In February 1873, as the House considered the Department of Justice’s appropriation bill, Beck offered an amendment requiring the Secret Service to account publicly for its spending.13 On its face, the proposal was a reasonable exercise of legislative oversight. Republicans could not view Beck’s bill in isolation from his motivations, however. They saw it as payback, even sabotage, anything but a good-faith accountability law.

  The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Republican Representative James A. Garfield of Ohio, warned his fellow lawmakers that the secretary of the Treasury, George S. Boutwell, had told Garfield he would “lose his means of detection” if Beck’s bill passed. The House voted it down.14

  Whitley’s response to this latest round of political pressure was to reassure his nominal supervisors in the executive branch that the Secret Service was, indeed, a professional operation. In May 1873 he composed a “Circular of Instructions” for his detectives, pocket-size and bound in blue leather, and intended to be read not only within the ranks but throughout government circles.

  The booklet contained strict new rules for Secret Service spending, a perennial sore point both with Whitley’s executive branch supervisors and with Congress. Detectives were to record their movements and their expenses on a daily basis, then report them weekly to Bleecker Street. And, for the first time, Secret Service detectives would have to prove their identity to those with a right to know it, by carrying a numbered metal badge.15

  Previously, they relied on paper credentials. This nearly led to a disaster in 1872: a man arrived at the Secret Service’s San Francisco office claiming to have been appointed to replace the chief operative there, Henry F. Finnegass. He presented a letter purportedly signed by Secretary Boutwell. Finnegass, suspicious, discreetly telegraphed Whitley. Whitley responded that the man was an impostor. Finnegass arrested him; he confessed that he had chemically altered a legitimate but routine letter on Treasury Department stationery.16

  Whitley’s new rulebook also sought to institutionalize the cutting-edge police methods he had borrowed from Europe. The first was the use of photography as a tool of identification. As of mid-1873, many, but not all, of the Secret Service’s hundreds of dossiers on counterfeiters and smugglers included photographs. Henceforth, the Circular of Instructions said, detectives would be required to photograph everyone they arrested, and to note the suspect’s name, age, and full physical description on the back of each print.17

  The bulk of the Circular, however, described Whitley’s ethical requirements for his men. “He who seeks to make it his vocation should be a man of sincere motives and undoubted integrity,” he wrote of detective work. No Secret Service employee should risk conflicts of interest by taking gifts or incurring debt. All must possess “temperate habits,” “sound judgment,” “large powers of observation,” and “knowledge of human nature.” They must also respect the rights of the accused: “That which is favorable to the criminal must be stated with fairness, and that which is against him without bias or exaggeration.”

  Inevitably, though, there were limits to how much transparency Whitley could prescribe, given that the division’s mission required its detectives to deceive or, as Whitley referred to it, “assume the criminal role.” Whitley’s clearest directives related to secrecy, which employees “must observe...in all transactions relating to the business of the service.” If it were up to him, the Secret Service chief explained, government undercover agents would be nearly everywhere. “It would be of infinitely greater consequence to the public good,” he wrote, “if criminals were so closely followed by the detectives as to inspire them with the fear that, the moment they attempted to commit a crime, that moment they were liable to arrest and punishment.”

  Nor was Whitley truly inclined to share power over the Secret Service, even if it might be politic to pretend otherwise. Evidence for this was right on the blue leather cover of the Circular of Instructions, where Whitley’s name appeared above that of his nominal supervisor, Solicitor Everett C. Banfield—in letters twice as large. Whitley had “prepared” the manual, the text announced, whereas Banfield merely “approved” it.

  Whitley’s other boss, Attorney General George H. Williams, did not even know of the new rulebook until it had already been printed, at which point Whitley sent a copy to the Department of Justice with a breezy cover letter: “I thought it might be a matter of interest...to have some general idea of our methods of operating.”18

  Despite the professionalism he espoused in the Circular—and demonstrated in fighting counterfeiters and the Klan—Whitley often thought and acted as if he were a law unto himself. He did so with the connivance of high Grant administration officials, who increasingly found it politically and personally useful to have an ethically flexible Secret Service chief and his team available for extracurricular chores.

  One such mission was Attorney General Williams’s use of Secret Service detectives to gather political intelligence in the South during the 1872 campaign, which yielded a series of reports Whitley passed on to the partisan attorney general. Orville E. Babcock, President Grant’s top White House aide, had already used the Secret Service for a political purpose prior to that. The president’s top foreign policy priority of his first term was to annex Santo Domingo, as the Dominican Republic was then known. In 1871, when a former American official in Santo Domingo denounced corrupt interests, linked to Babcock, behind the annexation drive, Babcock asked Whitley to stalk the whistle-blower at his Rhode Island home, and seize him for extradition to Texas on trumped-up murder charges. Whitley sent Ichabod C. Nettleship to do the job. They only called it off upon learning that Rhode Island courts would not honor the Texas extradition.19 Later, when Babcock discovered a con man was embarrassing him—and getting rich—by mailing Republican postmasters a phony party fund-raising appeal over Babcock’s forged signature, he asked Whitley to handle that case, too. Secret Service detectives covertly staged warrantless searches on the suspected con man’s apartment and intercepted his mail, using the information they gathered to track him down and make an arrest.20

>   * * *

  At about the same time his Circular of Instructions was making its way to operatives around the country, Whitley got a telegram from Attorney General Williams, asking the Secret Service chief to report to Washington immediately.

  Whitley boarded the next train from New York to the nation’s capital, and he soon found himself being ushered into the attorney general’s study at the newly built mansion on Rhode Island Avenue where Williams and his wife, Kate, hosted lavish receptions for the capital’s political and diplomatic elite.

  There was nothing necessarily unusual about any of this. Whitley had recently carried out a confidential task for the attorney general that arguably fell within his lawful job description: an undercover investigation of corruption by United States Marshals and their deputies. Whitley’s detectives had identified one deputy marshal in South Carolina who was riding suspiciously “fine horses,” for a man whose official pay did not exceed a few dollars a day.21 Williams repaid the favor by backing more funding for Whitley’s detective force in the March 3, 1873, appropriation bill.

  This time, however, the attorney general told Whitley he had a different kind of covert assignment—a personal one. “I need your assistance in a little matter of much concern to my wife and myself,” he said.22

  Everyone in Washington knew Kate Williams as the most beautiful and status-conscious of the cabinet wives, but Whitley knew her better than most. He had first encountered his boss’s spouse decades earlier, on the frontier in Kirtland, Ohio, when he was a restless student, and she was the eighteen-year-old bride of a wealthy local miller eight years her senior. In January 1849, less than nine months after her wedding, Kate bore a son.23 Then she left both husband and child and returned to her family in Keokuk, Iowa. A judge in Keokuk—George H. Williams, the future senator and attorney general—granted her a divorce, on the grounds of infidelity.

  Many years later, after his first wife died, George Williams and Kate had renewed acquaintances in Portland, Oregon. In 1867, they married, and she accompanied him to Washington. Unfortunately for the couple, the son Kate Williams left behind in Ohio had grown into a gambler and a thief. To make matters worse, the young man had recently moved to the nation’s capital and was living off the proceeds of his crimes—which included blackmailing his mother and stepfather.

  Kate Williams’s old acquaintance Hiram C. Whitley had repeatedly helped her, and the attorney general, to cover up the crimes of her wayward son, as well as the very fact of his relationship to the couple. When a well-known Baltimore madame came to Washington, demanding the return of the jewelry Kate’s son stole from her bordello, Whitley recovered and returned the baubles. Undaunted, the son robbed $27,000 from the attorney general’s personal safe and ran off to New York. Again, Whitley tracked him down and forced him to return the cash, except for $1,200 he had spent. And yet the young man kept embarrassing his mother and stepfather by showing up at receptions in their mansion, accompanied by prostitutes.

  With his wife at his side, the attorney general explained to Whitley that she was deeply anxious over the situation, and “often wakes at midnight to cry and toss upon her bed.” He feared the stress would kill her. Kate Williams then spoke bitterly of her son and said she wished there was a way to send him into exile; she would be equally relieved if he were dead.

  The attorney general quashed that suggestion. “Now don’t hurt him,” Williams said, “or do anything that will disgrace my family, but for God’s sake get him out of Washington.”

  * * *

  As the attorney general knew, Whitley and the Secret Service had already carried out at least one abduction for the Department of Justice on Williams’s watch.

  Late in the afternoon of June 4, 1872, a lanky, middle-aged, man with a wispy gray beard strolled along Waterloo Street in London, Ontario. Up ahead, three men loitered around a parked horse-drawn cab. One of the strangers began walking toward the bearded pedestrian—then suddenly accelerated and tackled him. After a furious struggle, the assailant fastened a pair of handcuffs around the bearded man’s wrists. He claimed to have an arrest warrant, but when the captive demanded to see it, he was told, curtly, “You’ll find out soon enough.” The bearded man continued to fight, until his captor forced a chloroform-soaked rag over his mouth, stuffed him into the parked cab, and ordered the driver to take the backstreets to the railroad station.24

  The next morning, the prisoner awoke to find himself inside a Pullman car at the Detroit, Michigan, railroad station, looking into the light blue eyes of Secret Service man Joseph G. Hester. “You come with me now,” Hester barked.

  Hester’s prisoner called himself “James Simpson.” The detective knew him as a fugitive Ku Klux Klan chieftain from South Carolina under federal indictment for murdering an African American state militia officer in 1871. On April 21, 1872, the attorney general obtained a Canadian magistrate’s authorization for the local authorities in that country to arrest him and hand him over to a United States officer, as provided for in extradition treaties covering the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.

  Based on Hester’s success against the Klan in North Carolina, Whitley had tapped him to orchestrate the sensitive international operation. Hester mounted a clandestine hunt for the Klan fugitive, eventually tracking him to the home of another South Carolinian in London, Ontario. Hester recruited one of the Canadian town’s law enforcement officials to make the actual capture.

  Upon meeting his prisoner in Detroit, Hester showed him a federal warrant for his arrest, then set off with him on the long train ride back to South Carolina. There was only one problem: both the Canadian extradition order and the American arrest warrant identified the Klansman to be taken into custody as James William Avery, but “James Simpson” was, in reality, a different Klan boss, James Rufus Bratton.

  Since Bratton had refused to cooperate, insisting that he was “under Canadian law,” and using a pseudonym, Hester did not grasp the fact that his Canadian agent had grabbed the wrong fugitive until after he brought Bratton to South Carolina. A federal court there set the prisoner’s bail at $12,000, and released him when Klan sympathizers promised to come up with the money.

  Bratton promptly violated the bail agreement by returning to Ontario. In theory, this gave the United States a fresh legal reason to arrest and extradite him, but the British and Canadians were angry and embarrassed at the bungled extradition. At Her Majesty’s Government’s request—and to quiet press critics in the United States—Attorney General Williams dropped the matter, saying he would not enforce a bail bond against Bratton that would not have existed if not for the faulty arrest.25

  The Canadian official who seized Bratton on Waterloo Street served as a scapegoat for both governments; an Ontario court convicted him of kidnapping. In the United States, Hester paid a milder penalty, in the form of his forced resignation as a deputy United States Marshal. Whitley kept him on as a Secret Service detective through the November 1872 elections, however. Ever fearful of the Klan, North Carolina’s Republicans insisted that Whitley retain him.26

  * * *

  Hester’s manhunt in Canada was a rare failure in his otherwise brilliant federal career. However, it was fundamentally a case of mistaken identity, which meant that better information about his quarry might have prevented it.

  Applying this lesson to his new assignment for Whitley, Attorney General Williams gave the Secret Service chief a photograph of his wife’s son, whose pale eyes uncannily resembled hers. His name was James Ivins, and his ways were secretive. “It would be somewhat difficult,” the attorney general advised Whitley, “for a stranger to make his acquaintance and obtain his confidence.”

  Whitley did not try to dissuade his boss, either by reminding him of the admonitions on “sincere motives and undoubted integrity” the Secret Service chief had just issued to his force, or by warning him of the political repercussions should this unlawful operation somehow become publ
ic. Nor did Whitley note the contradiction between his boss’s previous insistence on budgetary discipline and his willingness, now, to use government resources for this eminently personal purpose.

  Instead, Whitley studied James Ivins’s handsome face, pondering the intriguing task that the attorney general had just set before him, and thinking, no doubt, that this powerful cabinet member would be indebted to Whitley, and the Secret Service, if they accomplished it.

  “I think I have just the man in my employ who can handle the rooster,” Whitley said.

  Whitley assigned the case to William H. Reed, who had worked with him on the Ashburn murder in 1868, and whom he had recently added to the Secret Service’s expanding roster. Whitley had come to admire Reed’s imperturbable deadpan and silver tongue. “If ever there was a born confidence man,” he later wrote, “he was the one.” Reed would be perfect for a job that required overcoming a young gambler’s suspicious nature. The Secret Service chief told Reed to take a good look at the photograph of James Ivins, then began laying out his plan for the young “rooster’s” bloodless but permanent removal from the nation’s capital.

  Posing as a counterfeiter from the South, Reed staged a “chance” encounter with Ivins in a billiard parlor on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. Within a week, Whitley reported to Attorney General Williams that his detective and James Ivins were living together at the expensive hotel room Williams’s blackmail money subsidized.