by Brad Ricca
When men were whipped or held against their will, Grace’s work wasn’t difficult—she took photos and notes. But some of the camps were more secretive. So Grace was patient and did interviews and took photographs. Grace didn’t want to wade through court for the next ten years; she wanted to take down the whole system. So she got her affidavits, sent them along, and moved on to the next place the whispers in the swamps took her. In New York, Grace liked to spend her time between court cases shopping on a street filled with bobbing hats and ribbons. Now, she lurked behind branches and ate crawfish in tents. As always, Grace was relentless. One night, while she got off a train, a shot was fired from the dark and just missed her. She kept moving forward.
Grace finally returned north in October, arriving in Washington dripping with fever but carrying forty-six affidavits. She got in to see Attorney General William Henry Moody, giving him signed letters, confessions, and photographs of men working in swamps with water reaching up to their waists. Moody, a Roosevelt trustbuster, had been trying to find proof of peonage for some time, and now he had usable evidence of the crime in the interior of the United States, hand delivered from a slightly ragged Grace Quackenbos.
Moody said that he would send Assistant Attorney General Charles W. Russell down to Florida to begin prosecuting these cases. They would need Grace as a witness, of course. When reporters asked Grace about her meeting with Moody, she “declined to discuss her trip to the South, and said that the matter being in the hands of the government it would be discourteous for her to talk about it.” Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the attorney general’s office realized that there was only one thing they could do with Grace besides thank her for her service to her country. They had to hire her.
Grace offered to work for free, if only her expenses were paid. Looking at her results, Moody couldn’t see how they could refuse her. They appointed her through Henry L. Stimson, the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, the site of the original Schwartz case and Grace’s base of operations. Stimson was a Yale man and new to the job, having just been appointed by President Roosevelt. He was young enough to still have black hair and a mustache that was cut close to his upper lip. In November 1906, Stimson appointed Grace to the Office of Special Assistant United States District Attorney. She was the first woman to be appointed to this office. By following the trail of one man’s tears, leading from New York to Jacksonville and back again, Grace had found a new focus for her powers.
The following spring, Grace returned to the South. This time, she was allowed a small retinue of agents and lawyers. She had helped shut down several of the larger operations in Florida, drawing the ire of the local newspapers. F. J. O’Hara, a lumber magnate, alleged that one of Grace’s agents had abducted one of his own workers. Grace’s operative apparently charged this man with killing a witness and cutting his body to pieces. O’Hara brought a $50,000 lawsuit against Grace, but it was dismissed. Representative Frank Clark, of Florida, also attacked Grace in the papers. He demanded to know who she was and how much she was being paid by the Department of Justice. Her inquiries into turpentine and railroad camps had the potential to stall Florida’s steady march of industrial progress, charged Clark. He was angry.
“To deal with a ‘muck-raker’ is always unpleasant,” said Clark. “It is at no time agreeable to engage in disputation with that product of our present-day civilization known as ‘yellow journalism,’ which, for a few pennies and an opportunity to keep in the limelight, does not hesitate to calumniate an entire community.”
By April 1907, Henry Stimson was getting nervous. Public charges of murder in the newspapers, whether political rhetoric or not, were serious words. So Stimson, who had hired Grace (or at least had been asked to), wrote the attorney general to say that Grace lacked the character and skill to “deal with such an unscrupulous enemy.” She was doing good work, Stimson admitted, but he worried that she was angering a whole lot of people in the process. Stimson said that “the attitude of Mrs. Quackenbos is giving me considerable difficulty and concern.” Praising her investigative abilities, Stimson said that “her judgement as a lawyer in both the facts and the law was entirely untrustworthy.”
Attorney General Moody had been promoted to the Supreme Court at the close of the previous year. Succeeding him as attorney general was Charles Bonaparte, a short man with a wide forehead and smile. Bonaparte said, in his unmistakably musical voice, that the contents of Grace’s report were “revolting to every instinct of humanity” and are “repugnant to the enlightened opinion of modern times in all civilized countries.” Our goal, emphasized Bonaparte, was to “bring those guilty of them to adequate punishment.” Bonaparte reiterated that they didn’t intend to “stop their spending in this area.”
On the issue of Grace’s pay, Bonaparte said that “her compensation amounts only to what she is obliged to pay a competent person for taking her place in the office she has established as above described her own services being rendered gratuitously.” Grace returned to New York in March 1907, armed with more arrests and indictments in Florida.
Both Schwartz and other agents were eventually found guilty of peonage. But this was just the beginning: although Grace had already put a stop to a slew of turpentine farms and mines, there were still plenty of lumber camps that were guilty of peonage. While Schwartz was busy losing his company, Grace investigated the Jackson Lumber Company, whose employment agency was managed in the city by a group of Hungarians. But Grace couldn’t speak Hungarian, so she asked the Department of Justice for help. They assigned a special agent named Julius J. Kron to her service.
Kron met Grace and said he would see what he could do in terms of investigating the Hungarians. He had a scar and wore wool suits set in dark plaid. After a few weeks on the job, Kron’s successes had gotten him noticed. He was contacted by a man named Michael Tandlisch, who owned a restaurant on Fifth Street. Tandlisch gave Kron a long smile and told him that there was three hundred dollars for him if he could procure some court files. Kron looked puzzled. Tandlisch told Kron to meet his man, Stanley Bagg, at the Astor Hotel. Kron, five foot four and unassumingly quiet, nodded. They set the date for April 6.
When Kron walked into the Astor, he sat down and smoothed out the white tablecloth with his hands. His eyes searched the corners of the room with the barest possible movement. Bagg walked in, sat down, and proceeded to offer Kron five hundred dollars (he had raised the total) if he would give him the names of witnesses in a few cases currently before the federal grand jury. Kron knew he meant the Schwartz peonage case and that Bagg and his partner intended to bully the witnesses in order to keep their business operational. Five hundred dollars was an enormous amount of money for a private detective working for the government.
Across town, Tandlisch was at another restaurant when two federal agents moved in to arrest him. One waited outside while the other circled through the back. Tandlisch spotted him and made a mad dash through the front open window. He landed in the arms of the other agent on the street. Back at the Astor, Julius J. Kron motioned with his head and two officers stood up from nearby tables and placed Bagg under arrest.
When Kron was hired, there was some debate about his background and history. He was a bit of a rough character for government work. But when he got that first offer from Tandlisch, he went immediately to the Secret Service and set up the sting, refusing a bribe that would have made most people weak. Grace liked that, so she kept him on. She knew that there would be plenty of work for both of them. She had heard secret rumors of an even worse place down south somewhere. If only she could find it.
6
Army of the Vanished
March 1917
While Fourth Branch detectives looking for Ruth Cruger tracked down long-shot leads and busted down doors as far away as New Jersey, the detectives who first caught the case, Lagarenne and McGee, were still making time in the neighborhood of Cocchi’s store. While standing outside the motorcycle shop, Lagarenne looked up to see STUD
IO PORTRAITS lettered on the window on the second floor of the building on the opposite side of the street. After trudging to the top of the stairs and rapping on the door, they were greeted by Frank Lee, a dapper bohemian with long hair and a goatee. Lee told the detectives that he was a photographer and artist. He primarily took photos for magazines, he said. The detectives wondered if he took pictures of girls. They asked if he had seen Ruth Cruger.
“I saw a young man walking eastward on 127th Street,” Lee said, “keeping pace with a taxicab which was going slowly near the curb beside her. He beckoned to her and she walked toward him. He motioned toward the cab, and she hung back for a moment, but then entered.” The detectives looked at each other. This was the first corroboration of Henry Rubien’s cab story. Lee didn’t have any photos, which was their next, obvious question.
“I saw a girl who was under twenty years old,” Lee admitted, smiling. “A red-hot looking baby doll.” She was “smartly dressed in a long, dark coat, carrying a small package in her hands.” He paused. “Just as she reached the corner a taxi stopped and a young fellow—maybe twenty or so—got out and tipped his hat. She looked around quickly, like she was afraid someone would see her, and then got into the cab. The fellow got in again and then the cab went north on Manhattan.” Lee said that man looked rather pale.
“I don’t miss much,” Lee said. “Mostly I’m just looking and pretending to work.” He looked down at the floor. “Business isn’t so good.”
The detectives asked the photographer to describe the pale man. “The man was about thirty years old,” Lee told them. “Above middle height, and good-looking, with a round face. He was well dressed. His overcoat and hat were dark.” The detectives listened very carefully.
Meanwhile, John T. Dooling, the district attorney, was questioning people in the relative comfort of his office. He talked to Rosalind Ware, Ruth’s classmate at Wadleigh, who was escorted to his office by her mother. Rosalind and Ruth were best friends and used to walk home together after school.
“Ruth told me everything,” Rosalind said.
Dooling had also brought in Miss Shelley, who worked the telephone board at the Crugers’ apartment building. Miss Shelley testified that Ruth had called Rosalind only two hours before she disappeared. Rosalind said this was not true. Her mother agreed.
Looking at the handwritten phone records, Dooling saw two calls made in quick succession. The first call was indeed to Rosalind Ware’s home between 1:07 and 1:09 in the afternoon. The second call was from 1:10 to 1:11 to the Kappa Sigma fraternity house in the Bronx. According to her sister, Ruth had left the apartment at 1:30.
When Rosalind left, her mother tarried, and passed Dooling a list of four names: Many, Butler, Deroka, and Ward. They were all college boys, she said, hurrying out the door. Dooling knew that interviewing these boys might be hard on the Cruger family, since it could bring up private troubles. Some of these boys belonged to socially prominent families. But Dooling didn’t care. He felt that things were starting to tighten. When detectives got to the fraternity house, a student named Harold Buse said that he remembered the call. Ruth had wanted to talk to a boy named Seymour Many. He wasn’t in, so Ruth hung up.
“Ruth was a mighty fine girl,” said Harold. “I am sure she has not run off with any one. She came here to dances often, and was popular. She always appeared here with Seymour.” The detectives looked for Seymour Many, but he was busy all day at a sports contest at Madison Square Garden. He was captain of the track team.
The next morning, Dooling arrived at his office early to find that someone was already waiting for him. The young man—athletic but stocky—couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. He said that his name was Seymour Many and that he was a student at NYU. He was from Mount Vernon, Ruth Cruger’s old neighborhood, and had been a good friend of hers for a long time.
They sat down in the office. Seymour told Dooling that he had taken Ruth—“Miss Cruger,” as he called her—to the Wadleigh High School alumni dance on January 2. They also went ice-skating together quite frequently. Even though Ruth had moved to Harlem, they kept in touch by writing letters. “We were confidential friends,” Seymour said. When Dooling asked if he could see the letters, Seymour said that he had thrown them all out.
“I always destroyed them,” he said, “like I did with all letters from girls.” Seymour looked away for a moment. He said that he was probably the last person in the world to talk to Ruth on the phone before she disappeared.
Seymour Many spoke of a very different Ruth Cruger than the one her father had revealed to the press. Seymour said that Ruth had a fight with her papa a couple of days before she vanished. There was a boy, Seymour said. Someone her father wouldn’t let call on her. A Columbia man.
Apparently, Ruth had met this person one Sunday while skating at Van Cortlandt Park. Or was it a party at NYU? Seymour couldn’t remember. Anyway, they exchanged numbers and calls and smiles. They made plans to meet again. On Sunday, February 11, Seymour said that Ruth called her new Columbia friend. She broke the news that he couldn’t call on her at her home because her father had forbidden it. Ruth was furious, Seymour said. Her father said that the reason was because he didn’t know anything about the young man. Seymour said that Ruth’s father required that a common acquaintance introduce this boy to him. Ruth was very upset. All that studying and time at home caring for her sister had taken its toll on her. Ruth wrote Seymour and asked him to tell the Columbia man to ignore her father and to come anyway.
Seymour admitted that he had read the letter, but he claimed that he tore it up before relating its contents to its intended reader. Dooling asked why. Seymour said that he destroyed it, realizing that Ruth had been excited when she wrote it. Dooling asked Seymour to reconstruct the letter from memory, which he did.
“What day was it written?” asked Dooling.
“The Sunday before she disappeared,” Seymour said.
The district attorney asked the name of this Columbia man.
“Richard Butler,” said Seymour.
* * *
The next day, Richard Butler sat down across from the district attorney and a small group of detectives. Dooling eyed Butler, noting that he was athletic and handsome. Butler slid a paper across the table toward him.
The paper was titled “Alibi Schedule.”
The neatly handwritten note revealed Butler’s activities in precise detail—in fifteen-minute increments—on the day Ruth Cruger vanished. Dooling quickly looked the paper over and immediately saw two places where Butler’s schedule placed him close to Ruth’s route. According to the schedule, Butler was at a store near 127th and Manhattan Avenue, where a man took a girl matching Ruth’s description into a cab. Butler admitted being two blocks away.
As Dooling stared him down, Butler recited the relevant details of his short life. He lived at West 116th Street and was a sophomore at Columbia in the School of Mines. When asked if he knew Miss Cruger, Butler said that he indeed called on her the day she disappeared. Butler said that he set up the appointment with her by phone a few days before Ruth disappeared, on February 7. A few days later, Butler got a letter from Seymour Many telling him that Ruth’s father had forbidden her to see him but that he should go anyway. This contradicted what Many had said earlier. Dooling made a note of it.
Butler then slipped his hand into his coat and produced two neatly folded letters exchanged between him and Seymour Many. One was an original; the other was a reconstruction from memory. Dooling stared across at the young man in all of his perfect brightness. Dooling, who would not reveal the contents of these letters to the press, sent them over to be tested by ink and pen experts.
Butler otherwise corroborated Many’s version of events, saying that Ruth’s father had strongly objected to Butler’s visiting their home. Butler explained that Mr. Cruger was very cautious and that he was averse to having strangers around his daughter unless he received a formal introduction from a mutual acquaintance. Ruth was apparently m
ortified at her father’s impossible request.
Butler told Dooling that he actually only met Miss Cruger twice in his life. The first time was in November, at the Columbia versus NYU football game. Ruth was there with Many. The second time was weeks later on a subway platform at 116th Street and Broadway. Ruth was bundled tight against the cold and talking with her friends when Butler caught her eye and she smiled. This also differed from Many’s version; when pressed, he didn’t seem too sure of some of the details himself.
Butler also said that Many had told him that, according to Ruth, he had passed her once or twice on the street near her home without recognizing her.
She didn’t like that, said Butler.
The detectives then asked Butler about the cab and if he had a gray-belted overcoat. Butler said that he did have an overcoat like that, but he couldn’t remember if he was wearing it on that particular day. That coat is “getting rather shabby,” he said, laughing.
“Why did you call her up?” asked Detective Cuniffe, one of Dooling’s aides.
“She looked good to me,” admitted Butler. “Now don’t misunderstand me; I mean she was good to look at—a pretty girl.”
Butler said that they had a skating appointment on the day Ruth disappeared, but it had also been broken by letter days before. After Butler left, the district attorney told the newspapers that the handsome young man had “made a very favorable impression,” though he knew there were some discrepancies. The papers also verified with the Crugers that Ruth’s meeting with Butler had been canceled because of her father’s objections, but it was said that Ruth had not shown any bitterness at the time.
