by Dean Jobb
“Sure,” he said, “that’s Bronson.”
Bronson had rented apartment number 200 for six years and had lived there with his wife, Alice Bronson, “a pretty brunette,” until September 1923. The couple had been kind—Bronson tipped Davidson a dollar to fetch ice or milk—and he saw them arrive or leave by taxi two or three times a week. Bronson said he was a traveling salesman, which seemed to explain why he was often away from home. The couple also guarded their privacy, paying extra to install a private phone line instead of routing calls through the switchboard.
“I always thought it funny that they came only in the daytime, but that was none of my business,” Davidson told a reporter after prosecutors took his statement. “It’s strange,” he added, “that a couple apparently as deeply in love with each other as these two should never stay at their home all night.”
ANNA AUERBACH MET THE reporter for the Hearst papers at her home in the high-rise Webster Hotel, on the edge of Lincoln Park. Auerbach’s husband of fifteen years, Salo, owned the seven-hundred-seat New Strand Theater, and selling dreams to moviegoers paid the rent on their sumptuous suite. There was money left over to invest, and that’s why the newspaper had sent someone to wrangle an interview. The Auerbachs were Bayano stockholders and close friends of the missing swindler.
Yes, Anna Auerbach confirmed, the couple held $35,000 in shares. And of course, the news that Leo had swindled them and so many others was “a tremendous shock.”
Auerbach was a “strikingly beautiful” brunette, tall and “vivacious and charming in her manners”—details the reporter carefully recorded as they spoke.
And yes, she continued, he was “a genius with the ladies.” She spoke of how kind and thoughtful he was, how he pampered the wives of his business associates—taking them to lunch and buying them jewelry as birthday gifts. She suspected there was a “woman in the case.”
“I know he would never become a fugitive, especially with half a million dollars maybe, without taking along somebody, some woman of whom he was fond.”
The reporter took it all down and filed the story in time for the first run of the Evening American. It ran under the headline KORETZ LIKED THE LADIES, BUT LIKED ’EM SAFELY MARRIED.
Fake oil fields and timber holdings, bewildered investors, millions of missing dollars, an honest family spurning its ill-gotten gains—all took a backseat to the racier story behind the collapse of the Bayano swindle. Something stronger than greed had driven Leo to steal from his family and friends. “He was a Don Juan,” declared assistant state’s attorney Klarkowski, “as well as a Wallingford.”
Detectives on Leo’s trail and reporters pounding the pavement for beats had a new focus: find the woman. Breathless exposés of the swindler’s double life soon filled the newspapers. Chicago editors, John McPhaul observed, subscribed to a time-honored axiom of journalism: “You can do well with a good crime story, but you can do better if you garnish it with sex.”
George Hargrave told the police about the beautiful brunette who had hired his detective agency to find out if women visited Leo at the Drake. If one mistress had been trying to find out if she had rivals, just how many women were there in his life? Hargrave revealed an important clue to the woman’s identity; he had traced the license plate of the car she had used to visit his office. The car was registered to Sylvia Schwartz, the young wife of Joseph Schwartz, a partner in a wholesale woolens business. The couple lived in the Webster Hotel, and Sylvia Schwartz’s best friend was her neighbor Anna Auerbach.
Klarkowski issued subpoenas for both women to appear before a grand jury to reveal what they knew about Leo’s private life and where he had fled.
Charles Davidson, the janitor at the Shirley Apartments, was shown another photograph, of a woman bundled in a sealskin coat. Was this Alice Bronson? Davidson said he could not be sure. “I never saw her,” he pointed out, “except in a house dress.”
Detectives took the photo to the maid and some of the Shirley’s tenants. They were convinced it was Alice Bronson. Klarkowski was coy when reporters asked him to name the woman in the photo, but he left no doubt who she was.
“She lives in a fashionable north side hotel and her husband is a well-known and wealthy business man,” he said, adding, “I don’t want to cast odium on a woman … if she will tell the whole truth, her name still may be kept secret. But if she tries to hedge—well, we are trying to run down a man who swindled those closest to him, and none can stand in the way of justice.”
The newspapers, handed a juicy new angle on the story, ran with it. BARE KORETZ’S DOUBLE LIFE, shouted a thick headline atop the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune.
Al Bronson, readers learned, had done double duty—as a member of the phantom Bayano Syndicate and as a cover for Leo’s philandering. Newsmen christened the apartment at the Shirley a love nest. The Daily News huffed with moral indignation: “Here … he passed his afternoons while his wife, in the luxurious home at 2715 Sheridan road, Evanston, was superintending the preparation of dinner against his return from ‘business.’”
Klarkowski may have been reluctant to “cast odium” on the woman suspected of sharing the love nest; the newspapers were not.
Anna Auerbach, they speculated or outright reported, was Alice Bronson and the woman who had hired detectives to spy on Leo. Her name leaped out from bold headlines; she flashed a broad smile in a photo the papers ran alongside the latest news about Leo’s disappearance and double life.
She hired a lawyer, who denied the allegations and said his client was too distraught to talk to anyone, even to the detectives camped in the hallway outside her suite, waiting to serve the grand jury subpoena. “She was not the woman of the Shirley apartments, not the woman who employed the Hargrave Secret Service agency to watch Koretz’s suite in the Drake hotel,” her lawyer insisted. “Implications that she was have caused her to become ill.”
No one believed him.
Auerbach was hysterical. The policemen cooling their heels at the door heard her cry out: “I wasn’t the only woman in Leo’s life. Why do they pick on me?”
Hours later, when the detectives were allowed in to serve the summons, Salo Auerbach ran interference with the reporters who accompanied them. “I have absolute faith in my wife. I trust her and nothing can separate us,” he said. “She had nothing but business relations with him.”
No one believed him, either.
Anna Auerbach, the wife of a theater owner, was identified in the press as the woman who shared Leo’s “love nest” on Chicago’s South Side. “I wasn’t the only woman in Leo’s life,” she complained. “Why do they pick on me?”
A HANDWRITTEN LETTER FOUND in Leo’s Majestic Building offices offered fresh insights into his double life. It had been torn to bits, but a reporter for the Daily News scooped up the fragments and pieced them together. It was from a woman named Fraser and referred to another woman, “Alt,” who was “heart-broken” by his disappearance. Fraser begged him to get in touch with them. “I would willingly come to Chicago if you want me to,” she wrote. “I care a whole lot: you are the only friend I had. Please don’t let anything come between us.” There was a postscript in different handwriting, apparently from Fraser’s friend Alt. “Please answer at once; I am so anxious.”
The letter had been mailed on December 8—five days after Leo took the train from Chicago to New York—from Absecon, New Jersey. The Daily News imagined him meeting and charming the women as he strolled on the boardwalk in nearby Atlantic City during one of his trips to New York. “And now one woman writes for the other’s broken heart,” it noted, “while the second is too crushed to add more than a brief postscript.” The paper published a photograph of the reconstructed letter under the headline TORN LETTER CLEW TO “OTHER” KORETZ LOVES.
Reporters soon tracked down both women. Fraser was Millie Fraser, the recent widow Leo had befriended and Mary Schoener’s sister. A “motherly” and “not unattractive little woman,” in the estimation of the Hea
rst reporter who turned up at her door, she insisted Leo had been a big brother to her, nothing more. She produced a letter he had written after her husband’s death, offering her a job at the Bayano Syndicate’s soon-to-be-opened New York office. She had begged Leo to invest $10,000 from her husband’s life insurance settlement, but he had refused to take her money. “I shudder now to think what I might have done,” she told another newsman. “I was so sure of his honesty.”
The heartbroken “Alt” was Mary Schoener, one of the last people to see Leo in New York before he disappeared. At Robert Crowe’s request, district attorneys in New York questioned her. Leo’s startling announcement that he was ill with diabetes and had only months to live, Schoener claimed, had been the reason for her hysterics when he went missing. As far as she knew, he was not “mixed up” with any women in New York.
Back in Chicago, Klarkowski was confident Sylvia Schwartz could sort out what he termed “Koretz’ complicated affairs with women.” He became more confident after police tracked down Schwartz’s former chauffeur, who described Leo’s getaways to Hot Springs and other resorts, accompanied by other men’s wives. “I drove a great part of the time for Mr. Koretz,” he said, a job that included fetching women at Leo’s request and delivering them to hotels and restaurants. Klarkowski was pleased to share these revelations with the press, as well as his suspicion that the frequent visits to New York on business or to Arkansas to inspect his rice lands were a cover for his affairs. Leo, he suggested, had maintained a series of “love nests” like the one at the Shirley Apartments—“a string of apartments and hotel suites from the Atlantic to the Pacific for the benefit of his many women friends.”
“For four days we have followed the old French axiom of ‘find the woman,’” Klarkowski added. “Now we have found not only a woman but perhaps half a dozen women.”
Reporters jumped on the bandwagon with speculation of their own. The Daily Tribune concluded that much of the money Leo had swindled over the years had been frittered away on “the ancient triumvirate of wine, women and song.” The “real cause of the swindler’s flight,” the paper concluded, was not the collapse of the Bayano bubble—it was “too many women.” A story accusing him of kissing a woman named Eve “several times against her will” and making “improper advances” hit the front page of the Daily Journal. Hearst’s Herald and Examiner and Evening American came up with a more intriguing explanation for what had happened to the money sunk into Bayano. A front-page story in both papers said police were looking into a tip that Leo had paid as much as a million dollars to blackmailers to conceal his love affairs.
Then Auerbach and Schwartz disappeared. They slipped out of the Webster Hotel late at night and were whisked away in Schwartz’s Pierce-Arrow. Auerbach had suffered a nervous breakdown, Klarkowski was told, and had taken refuge in a sanatorium to avoid appearing before the grand jury.
“I want action,” bellowed his boss, Robert Crowe. “Regardless of who it hits, get to the bottom of this.”
Crowe put his best prosecutor on the case. John Sbarbaro, just thirty-three but touted as the ace of the state’s attorney’s staff, would work with Klarkowski to get the investigation back on track. Sbarbaro had joined Crowe’s office in 1921, fresh out of law school, bringing with him a sly smile and loads of confidence. He may have known Leo—they were both members of the Illinois Athletic Club. Sbarbaro’s first act was to secure a warrant for Auerbach’s arrest on a charge of contempt of court. Chicago police searched her home at the Webster. Patrolmen who assembled for roll call at stations across the city were issued a copy of her photograph.
At ten o’clock that night, after reporters working the crime beat had gone home for the day or retired to a speakeasy, Auerbach and her lawyer turned up at the office of the state’s attorney. She was questioned for three hours but could no longer offer the insights she had shared in her press interviews. “My only acquaintance with him was at functions which both my husband and I attended,” she insisted. “I don’t know where he is. I haven’t heard from him since he disappeared.”
Auerbach was free to go. She gave a brief, final interview to the ever receptive Evening American. “I knew and know nothing of any of Mr. Koretz’ personal affairs,” she said. “What’s the good now in raking up all this personal stuff about him? It only breaks up families.”
“We have no desire to subject this woman to humiliation,” Sbarbaro told the press. “If she wishes to deny that she was the woman of the love nest she may do so. We are interested only in finding Koretz.”
After days of chasing down witnesses who could link Leo and Auerbach to the Bronson apartment, Sbarbaro signaled a new approach. The investigation into the swindler’s dalliances with women had produced lurid headlines and racy newspaper copy, but not a single clue to his whereabouts. Anna Auerbach, Millie Fraser, Mary Schoener—all were in the dark. Sylvia Schwartz was never questioned, but there was nothing to suggest she knew where he was, either. Klarkowski’s “find the woman” strategy had failed. The Evening Post pointed out to the “thinking people” it courted as readers that the investigation had “concerned itself as much with inquiring about love nests” as with finding the fugitive swindler and his loot.
The office of the state’s attorney switched into damage-control mode. Crowe issued a public apology to one of the women caught in Leo’s web of lies. “We find that a grave injustice has been done Mrs. Schwartz,” he announced. She had been an acquaintance of Leo’s, nothing more. “She is absolutely innocent, I am convinced.” There was no mention of Anna Auerbach and no apology for the relentless, humiliating effort to question her. If Leo had maintained a string of “love nests” across the country, nothing more was said about them. “The object of this investigation,” Crowe reminded reporters—and, perhaps, his staff and himself—“is to turn up Leo Koretz.”
Mae Koretz, “dressed as a widow,” waiting to testify at the hearing into her husband’s bankruptcy.
17
THE VICTIMS
PHOTOGRAPHERS FOUND HER slumped on a wooden chair in the hallway, her arms limply folded as she stared blankly at the floor. A sitting duck. Mae made no attempt to hide her face or her sadness as shutters clicked and flashbulbs popped from all sides.
The newspapers were overflowing with allegations of her husband’s infidelities, the South Side “love nest,” the resort weekends with other men’s wives. What was left to hide? Her husband of seventeen years, the father of her two children, the man she had trusted completely—lies, all lies. Leo’s personal life had been as phony as his Bayano oil fields. His affairs and the parade of lurid, humiliating stories in the press left Mae numb. Discovering that her husband had orchestrated one of the biggest stock swindles in history had been devastating; this was worse.
She said nothing to the clutch of newsmen waiting to hear her testify at Leo’s bankruptcy hearing. Her brother-in-law Leon Klein took a couple of the reporters aside. “Yes, it was a terrible surprise to Mrs. Koretz to find her husband had been going with other women,” he told them. Even as the news was breaking in the papers, “she couldn’t believe a word of it.” “Now she knows the truth,” he said, “and you can see how it has affected her.”
She wore black from head to toe—“dressed as a widow,” as one bystander put it. Her black, feather-trimmed felt hat was clamped on so tightly it almost touched the wire rims of her glasses. Bundled in a bulky, full-length winter coat even though it was warm outside for Chicago in mid-December, she looked like a helmeted soldier peering out at the enemy from a bunker.
Creditors—most of them Bayano investors—had petitioned Leo into bankruptcy. Mae was the first witness at a hearing convened to identify assets he had left behind. The referee assigned to the case, Harry Parkin, was a former US district attorney who, by coincidence, had once prosecuted Rockefeller’s Standard Oil for violating antitrust laws. The Chicago Title and Trust Company, the receiver, hired the lawyer Maurice Berkson—Leo’s childhood friend and one of the few peopl
e who had suspected his wealth was too good to be true—to spearhead the inquiry.
Her voice barely audible at times, Mae repeated what she had told a police sergeant who had visited her home a few days earlier: She had not spoken to her husband since December 6, when he phoned from New York and claimed to be headed to Boston. She could shed little light on the Bayano Syndicate or the Arkansas landholdings. She remembered the name Gustav Fischer, but she was not sure “whether he is real or just a figment of the imagination.” Leo had given her six shares in Bayano in September, she acknowledged, which had earned her $550 a month until the swindle collapsed.
Mae was asked to account for every stick of furniture in her home, every gift he had given her, the $1,000 she had recently withdrawn from their joint account to cover household bills. She was asked about the assets she had already turned over to the receiver, including the two Rolls-Royce limousines. Her voice broke as she described handing over an emerald ring and diamond-studded hairpins—recent gifts from Leo. “I didn’t think I had a right to them,” she said. She had dismissed her maid, her cook, and Mari’s governess and planned to move in the New Year, when the next rent payment on the Sheridan Road house came due. She had asked the superintendent of schools to renew her teaching certificate, so she could go to work as soon as possible.
Her ordeal lasted most of the day. When she was finally free to go, she paused for a brief word with Berkson. “My one regret,” she told him, “is that I didn’t save up money during the days when I was the wife of a wealthy man, so that I could help pay back some of these debts.”
THE CUSTOMER WAS BEING picky. She wanted the perfect Christmas gift for her husband. “Yes madam,” Mentor Koretz said as he produced another pile of shirts, “perhaps you would like this pattern better.”
The day his mother’s shattered world was dissected at the bankruptcy hearing was the sixteen-year-old’s first as a clerk at the Rosenberg’s department store in Evanston. Mentor withdrew from Lake Forest Academy within days of his father’s disappearance. Mae could not afford his private school tuition, and the family needed his wages—eighteen dollars a week—to weather the tough times ahead.
