Empire of Deception

by Dean Jobb

  BY THE TIME THE workmen declared victory and retreated from Pinehurst, the lodge had been transformed into a cross between a backwoods resort and a gentleman’s country retreat. Pinehurst “was known as one of the best equipped hunting lodges in the eastern section of Canada,” noted one visitor, but Leo “made it the best.” Local people out for an evening drive sometimes ventured up the long driveway just to take a look.

  The veranda that ran the length of the lodge—more than one hundred feet—had been widened from six to ten feet and enclosed in glass to keep out mosquitoes and blackflies. It was now an indoor space with a polished oak floor and a spectacular view of the lake. A main door off the veranda opened into a massive living room filled with both antiques and modern furniture. The music room, as Leo called it, housed a piano and a gramophone. The dining room easily accommodated a billiard table as well as a mahogany table and chairs; a silver tea service sat on a wagon in one corner, and a moose head glowered above the stone fireplace.

  Upstairs were three guest bedrooms, each with its own bath. A fourth bedroom, Leo’s, was on the second floor of an octagonal, three-level turret that rose like a silo from the north end of the lodge. It had two large windows to frame the view of the lake. He mounted a set of carpeted steps to climb into his four-poster bed and slept under a silk canopy. The comforter at the foot of the bed was silk as well and embroidered with Chinese dragons and serpents. The top floor of the turret had windows on all sides like a watchtower, ensuring he could spot any unwanted visitors who pulled up in the driveway. There were fifteen rooms in all, with seventeen fireplaces, enough decorative guns and swords to stock a small armory, and a herd of disembodied moose and other big game. Everything was “set in its place” and reeked “of newness,” said one person who got a look inside, making the lodge feel more like “a salesroom in a department store” than a home.

  Leo and his guests ate at a table set with fine china, walked on rich Axminster wool rugs imported from England, and sank into a plush chesterfield suite upholstered in Spanish leather. He upgraded the plumbing, ran a new telephone line, and erected a coal-fired plant to supply steam heat. The boiler also generated electricity, making Pinehurst the first dwelling in the immediate area to have electric lights. There was a garage for his cars, a tennis court, and a croquet lawn. Benches and observation platforms dotted the grounds. Several canoes bobbed at the lakeshore, and tons of sand had been trucked in to create a beach for bathing. Leo stabled a horse for saddle and buggy rides and had a French bulldog and an Airedale to greet visitors. Radios were still a novelty in the area—Alton House, Caledonia’s largest hotel, had just installed one—but Leo insisted on the latest in receiving technology, a five-tube neutrodyne set that spared his guests the high-pitched squeals of older models.

  It took a sizable staff to run it all. Laurie Mitchell was in charge; his wife, Elizabeth, ran the household; and a local man, Charles Kennedy, was hired as caretaker. Walter Scott of Caledonia, who had noted Leo’s free-spending ways, was in his late twenties when he was put in charge of Leo’s vehicles. “He was a real fussy man with his car,” he recalled. “He wanted it perfect, everything from the inside to the tires.” Leo disliked driving—he blamed his poor eyesight—and usually conscripted an employee such as Scott or a friend to act as his chauffeur.

  Scott’s younger brother, Maurice, who ran a barbershop and pool hall in Caledonia, was summoned to Pinehurst many times to cut Leo’s thinning hair and trim his thick beard. “Getting me there to cut his hair was just a trick,” he soon realized. He was really looking for someone to keep him company and put the billiard table to use. Maurice recalled, “We usually ended up playing pool,” sometimes for the rest of the day. Leo would slip him four or five dollars and sometimes even a ten-dollar bill, a windfall to a man who charged twenty-five cents for a haircut.

  Leo was as fussy about his dinner-table etiquette as he was about his cars. The evening meal was a formal affair, served by a young man dressed in a white jacket, black pants, and a black bow tie. As Leo and his guests ate, the server stood behind him like a footman in an English manor, ready to respond to his master’s command.

  As a final extravagance, Leo shelled out about $1,000 for a thirty-eight-foot motorboat, Tuna II, which was large enough to cruise the Nova Scotia coast and offered the comfort of a cabin with four sleeping berths. Leo kept it tied up in Liverpool and hired a local ship’s captain as its skipper.

  There was one thing the caretaker, Charles Kennedy, found odd about working at Pinehurst. Not a single photograph of Lou Keyte could be found anywhere in the lodge, and his boss refused to allow one to be taken.

  22

  THE PRINCE OF ENTERTAINERS

  THE PARTIES BEGAN, as Leo had promised, as soon as the renovations to Pinehurst were complete. They became legendary affairs, growing grander and more decadent as stories spread of Lou Keyte’s generosity and extravagance. He earned a reputation as a “prince of entertainers” who lived the “merry life” of a country squire. Some of his Pinehurst soirees, it was rumored, lasted up to four days or an entire week. He hired musicians to play and, according to one story, imported three members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a dinner-dance. Booze flowed in defiance of Canada’s Prohibition laws.

  He let his guests do most of the drinking. Eighteen people attended one of the parties, one guest claimed, “and seventeen were drunk.” The sober one was Leo. While it was probably diabetes and not an aversion to alcohol that kept him from indulging, one observer later wondered whether he stayed sober “for fear he’d talk too much if he got drunk.” Pinehurst became a northern version of the Long Island estate that F. Scott Fitzgerald imagined for Jay Gatsby, the title character of his classic novel written that year—a blaze of lights to all hours, guests filling the rooms and wandering the grounds in the moonlight, an endless supply of liquor, an orchestra providing the sound track. Leo was as gracious a host as the enigmatic Gatsby, flitting from guest to guest, drinking little or nothing, keeping his head as his new friends swapped theories about how he had made his fortune.

  A cartoonist’s view of Leo’s busy social life in Nova Scotia in 1924 while posing as bearded literary critic Lou Keyte: sailing with the yacht-club set; conveying guests to hotel dinners in hired cars; showering gifts on young women.

  Fitzgerald’s Gatsby had eyes for only one woman—his old flame Daisy Buchanan. Not Keyte, who seemed to have an eye for every young, attractive woman he met in Nova Scotia. “Everyone liked him, especially the women,” noted Walter Scott, the man in charge of the Pinehurst motor pool, and he “liked the women in turn.” It was obvious to everyone who met him more than once that he dyed his beard to make himself look younger; one day it was black, another it could be reddish or auburn. Scott chalked up his popularity with women to his prowess on the dance floor. To others, including Scott’s brother, Maurice, the attraction was obvious. “He was a rich bachelor,” Maurice recalled. “Most of the girls in Caledonia and vicinity were struck on him.”

  That summer “a succession of dear friends,” as Thomas Raddall termed them, visited Leo at Pinehurst. All were “goodlooking and most of them were American show-girl types,” and he suspected one or more might be a prostitute “well paid for her ‘holiday.’” One attractive young woman was a waitress he had met in Halifax; she took up residence at Pinehurst until a woman named Frances White showed up and sent her packing. Leo introduced White as the daughter of one of his publishers in New York—or was it Boston? No one was quite sure who the women were or where they were from, and usually they stayed for only a week or so.

  White was said to have stayed the longest, but even her reign at Pinehurst was temporary. In Raddall’s opinion, the women quickly grew tired of the isolation and solitude at Pinehurst, and Leo soon grew tired of them. “Keyte had a fickle and insatiable appetite for women,” he noted, looking back on that summer many years later. “Sometimes a new ‘friend’ arrived while the ‘old’ one was still there—but the old one inva
riably departed promptly.”

  Leo, who was extremely good at pretending, pretended he did nothing to encourage his female admirers. “They send me urgent telegrams asking me to invite them up to my place,” he once announced to his dinner guests. “I never answer them and that usually cures them.”

  “I am always indifferent to them,” he continued, apparently with a straight face, “and sometimes I am downright rude, but it just seems to make them want me more than ever. I don’t know what I do to make them behave so foolishly.” It was the same reverse psychology he had used so effectively to sell millions of dollars’ worth of bogus stocks.

  THE GRANDEST PINEHURST EVENT of the summer was Keyte’s housewarming bash at the end of August. It was, Laurie Mitchell said, “a brilliant party that astonished every one.” About 125 people showed up, including some of the area’s most prominent businessmen and politicians. Thomas Raddall’s date was an American girl staying at a summer home nearby, and they thundered up the driveway in style, in her family’s sleek and expensive Winston Six.

  The weather was perfect. A hurricane that had swept across the province the previous night—guests picked their way to Pinehurst along roads littered with broken branches and downed wires—left a hot, sunny afternoon in its wake. Leo brought in an orchestra from a resort near the seaside town of Digby. “Dancing,” the Halifax Herald noted in a brief account of the festivities, “was the chief entertainment.” Some people commandeered canoes and ventured onto the lake. Inside the lodge, guests gathered around a large punch bowl—most likely the Willow-patterned, washbasin-size one Leo had picked up at an antique store for such occasions. A bigger draw was the bar set up in his bedroom in the turret, stocked with liquor and wine.

  Raddall spotted an attractive woman seated at the far end of the large living room, “dressed in white,” he recalled, “from head to foot.” Leo introduced her as “a dear friend of mine,” then seemed at a loss for words. He finally blurted out “Miss White,” as if her attire had been the cue he needed to remember the name of the latest woman in his life—Frances White. “She made a little conversation and seemed a quiet and intelligent person,” Raddall noted, “but she kept in the background during the party.”

  The party wound down around one in the morning. A group of drunken Liverpool businessmen emerged from the turret room. Guests stumbled off to their cars after saluting their host with a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Raddall and his date were about to join the exodus when Leo pulled them aside. He was alone. The standoffish Miss White, Raddall thought, must have turned in for the night.

  “Don’t go,” he pleaded. “It’s a lovely night. Stay and talk with me for a while.”

  They sat on the veranda steps overlooking the lake and chatted for another hour. It was small talk, mostly, and they compared notes on who had done what during the party. The lodge windows sent shafts of light into the gloom, glistening on the water and casting deep shadows into the surrounding trees. The acid-sweet scent of pine drifted in the night air. Loons often called to each other from somewhere out on the lake, and perhaps one broke the stillness with its haunting, warbled cry. Leo, as usual, had had little to drink, but something loosened his tongue. Raddall, who knew him as well as anyone in Nova Scotia, suspected it was loneliness: “he felt himself far up in the wilds of Canada an enormous distance away from home.”

  Whatever the reason, he began to talk about the one subject he studiously avoided: himself. “I come from Chicago, and I made most of my money in land deals,” he said. “My first big profit came from a large area of swamp land on the Mississippi. An engineer looked it over for me, and said it could be drained. The soil was deep and black, the very finest kind of soil for rice-growing. So I raised the money to drain it, and two or three years later I was able to sell it at a whale of a profit for myself and for the people who lent me the money.”

  A note of bitterness crept into his voice. “Then everybody wanted me to find another piece of land like that and make another haul,” he continued. “They pushed their money at me. Well, I couldn’t find another place like that, anywhere in the States. However I did find one, down on the Bayano River in Panama. After that I retired. I had enough, and I didn’t want people pestering me any more.”

  Leo had often claimed to have made his fortune in real estate, but this was the first time Raddall had heard the details. A savvy businessman from Chicago who speculated in rice farms. A promoter who struck it rich with property on the Bayano River in Panama and made huge profits for investors. None of it meant anything to Raddall. Leo might as well have said he made a fortune mining green cheese on the moon. He did not know, would never have suspected, the significance of what he was hearing.

  It was the closest Leo had come, in the many months since his arrival in Nova Scotia, to telling the truth.

  23

  THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY

  THE BOY’S NAKED body was found stuffed into a culvert on the outskirts of Chicago, and only by chance. A factory worker walking along a rail line happened to look down at the right moment and spotted the boy’s feet floating in the water. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses had been discarded nearby.

  The victim, Bobby Franks, was just fourteen and the son of wealthy parents. He had been badly beaten and had died of asphyxiation, not drowning—he was dead before he wound up facedown in the culvert. It was a brutal murder, even by Chicago’s brutal standards, and the boy’s age and his family’s stature made it an instant sensation. Robert Crowe ranked it as “the most cruel, cowardly, dastardly murder” in American history. The judge who had sent the killer of little Janet Wilkinson to the gallows was now the prosecutor determined to avenge the death of young Bobby Franks. Those responsible, he assured shocked and outraged Chicagoans, would be found and punished.

  By the time Franks’s parents received a note demanding a $10,000 ransom, they knew their boy was dead. The kidnappers had not counted on the body’s being found so quickly, within a day of his death. Police rounded up an array of suspects, from the boy’s male teachers to the owners of cars like one seen near his school, but the eyeglasses were the clue that cracked the case. The frames were unusual; only one optician in Chicago sold them, and only one customer who bought them could not find his pair when police showed up at his door. He was Nathan Leopold, a nineteen-year-old university student and the son of a prosperous factory owner. Leopold’s best friend, Richard Loeb, eighteen, was a neighbor of the Frankses and well off, too—his father was a top executive with Sears, Roebuck. Both were brought in for questioning.

  Crowe took charge of the marathon interrogations. The alibis the pair had concocted for the day of the kidnapping crumbled. Loeb, caught in too many lies, finally confessed to John Sbarbaro that they had hatched a scheme to kidnap and kill a kid from a rich family, hide the body, and demand a ransom. Loeb claimed Leopold had inflicted the fatal blows with a chisel. Confronted with his friend’s admission, Leopold said Loeb was the murderer. The motive? Not the ransom, Leopold insisted. They already had plenty of money. They had pulled off a string of petty crimes—vandalism, a break-in, car theft—and the kidnapping and murder were supposed to be their criminal masterpiece, the perfect crime. They did it, Leopold said, for the “love of thrills.” They killed for kicks.

  Nineteen twenty-four was the year Vladimir Lenin died. Adolf Hitler, jailed for his role in the failed Beer Hall Putsch, had time on his hands and started to write Mein Kampf. Four intrepid US Army pilots in two planes recorded the first round-the-world flight, a marathon that took 175 days to complete. But for millions of newspaper readers that year, in Chicago and across North America, only one story mattered—the Franks murder soon claimed the title of “crime of the century.”

  Near daybreak on the last day of May, with the confessions recorded and witnessed, Crowe emerged from his offices to declare victory. Little more than a week after the boy’s body was found, the state’s attorney had cracked the case. Jubilation overcame his exhaustion. “The Franks mu
rder mystery has been solved,” he announced. “Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb have completely and voluntarily confessed.” He was confident he had the evidence needed to punish the pair to the full extent of the law. “I have a hanging case.”

  THE DEATH PENALTY BECAME the only issue. The Leopold and Loeb families hired Clarence Darrow, the most vocal opponent of capital punishment in America, to lead the defense. Crowe’s belief that fear of the noose was enough to prevent people from killing each other was, to Darrow’s mind, nonsense. Most murderers acted on impulse, lashing out at their victims in a sudden rage fueled by fear or jealousy; murder tended to be a crime of emotion, not calculation. He condemned the death penalty as a “barbarous practice” that did nothing to prevent crime or to protect society. The state “continues to kill its victims,” he argued, “not so much to defend society against them—it could do that equally well by imprisonment—but to appease the mob’s emotions of hatred and revenge.”

  Leopold and Loeb had not acted on impulse, though; they were cold, calculating killers. And since they had confessed, Darrow’s options for saving them from the gallows were limited. The crime was so horrible that it suggested some form of mental illness, and their youth offered another compelling argument for a prison term instead of a death sentence. Darrow entered guilty pleas and threw his clients on the mercy of the court.

  That summer, Crowe and Darrow squared off in a month-long sentencing hearing before Chief Justice John Caverly of the criminal court. The courtroom was packed every day, and the heat was stifling. The state’s attorney, with all Chicago watching, produced more than eighty witnesses to describe every detail of the crime. Darrow’s defense relied on the testimony of eminent psychiatrists who explored deep-rooted mental problems that might help to explain an inexplicable crime. Crowe accused the defense of trying to have things both ways—admitting guilt while pleading insanity—and produced experts of his own, who found no evidence of mental illness.