A few researchers also have cited conflicting evidence about what the three key witnesses, Krister Littorin, Karin Bökman, and Jeannette Barrault, found in Ivar’s apartment. They claim the French police ignored a basic fact that echoes a Sherlock Holmes story: Ivar was right-handed.
Recall Krister Littorin’s testimony that when they found the body the left hand still clutched the pistol in a “cramped grip.” According to the other two witnesses, Bökman and Barrault, their best recollection was that gun was on the bed at the left of the body, level with the leg, and that the arms lay stretched out limply along the sides of the corpse.6
If the pistol was in Ivar’s left hand in a cramped grip, was the evidence at the scene doctored? Did someone move the gun? It would have been virtually impossible for any right-handed person to shoot himself in the center of the heart with a powerful Browning 9 mm pistol, and then end up holding the gun in a cramped grip in his left hand. This would have been particularly true of a man, like Ivar, whose left index finger was stunted from a childhood accident.
Perhaps Littorin misremembered the facts or someone moved the gun. Perhaps Ivar actually shot himself with his left hand, instead of his right. Perhaps the gun was not in Ivar’s hand at all when he was found, but instead had slipped across his body after he fired, to his left side. That placement would tend to suggest that Ivar had held the gun in his right hand and fired it; then, the gun kicked back and landed on the bed to his left.
The murder theorists also point to the disappearance of three suitcases the French police found in Ivar’s apartment. Apparently, the police turned the suitcases over to the Swedish Embassy, which sealed all three and left them with Karin Bökman to transport to Stockholm. The suitcases were never seen again.
Apparently, an attorney representing Oscar Rydbeck and other bankers broke the seals and took papers from the suitcases, including Ivar’s diaries. According to one view, when these men later discovered that the diaries contained evidence of murder, they burned them. This view remains popular throughout Scandinavia, where The Burned Diaries of Ivar Kreuger is a long-standing art and film project.7
Although the crime scene and any physical evidence are long gone, and therefore one cannot definitively rule out murder, it seems unlikely that anyone would have had the motive or opportunity to kill Ivar. Throughout midday on March 12, 1932, most of the people who were about to be financially decimated by Ivar’s collapse, including Donald Durant, Oscar Rydbeck, and several other bankers, were at the Hotel du Rhin. A.D. Berning was in New York. Ivar’s Swedish accountants were in Stockholm.
Who might have killed Ivar? The only people with access to Ivar during the narrow window of time available for a murder were Krister Littorin, Karin Bökman, Jeannette Barrault, and the telegram delivery boy. (The Finnish girl left in the early morning, and Morgan’s man, John Brown, was only there earlier, if at all.) Littorin and Bökman wouldn’t likely have killed their dear friend, and Barrault had always been a loyal housekeeper. The police questioned all three of them, and no one suspected foul play. If the telegram boy had been a hired assassin, he would not likely have returned voluntarily to tell investigators the details of his few minutes with Ivar.
The concierge remained at her post during the hour or so from the time the delivery boy left until the time Jeannette Barrault returned, and she said there were no other visitors during this time. It is possible that someone slipped past the concierge and entered Ivar’s apartment after Barrault left to go shopping. Who might it have been?
Some have suggested the killer was hired by Jack Morgan, who had come to despise Ivar for usurping his role as the leading international financier, for excluding his bank from important deals, and for winning business from European governments, particularly France and Germany, that previously had hired only J. P. Morgan & Co. Numerous witnesses had heard Jack Morgan disparage Ivar. Of course, Jack wouldn’t have done the deed himself, and he wasn’t in Paris then in any event.8 Moreover, if Jack had decided to have someone kill Ivar, Jack likely would have wanted to wait until after the crucial meeting on March 12, when the bankers planned to ask Ivar to explain the forged Italian treasury bills and the German bond switch. There would have been plenty of time for murder after that.
Although some of the French police officers acted like Keystone Cops at the scene, particularly given the high-profile nature of the case, they likely would have pursued any viable murder leads, particularly one involving a Morgan, simply out of self-interest. Perhaps the leads went dark because Ivar was murdered so stealthily. Perhaps someone managed to persuade Ivar, at gunpoint, to write faked goodbye notes to his sister, Sune Schéle, and Littorin. But a more sensible conclusion is that Ivar was not murdered. Although a few writers have punched holes in the story that Ivar committed suicide, there are more and bigger holes in the murder theory. Murder seems plausible only through the cloud of hindsight.
One final, highly speculative version of the facts about Ivar is the “escape theory,” the notion that Ivar didn’t die on March 12, 1932, but instead planned an elaborate escape and disappeared, leaving behind a trail of fabricated evidence of nervous breakdown and suicide. Investigators actually pursued this theory for a year. It was widely publicized in the media, and much discussed among people who had followed Ivar’s life. The French police carefully considered the escape theory, in an attempt to overcome criticism of how they had handled the initial inquiry. However, as with the murder theory, every lead came to a dead end. As The New York Times reported on March 19, 1933, just over a year after the reports of Ivar’s death, French investigators rejected the escape theory and concluded that the body found at Victor Emmanuel III was indeed Ivar’s.9
Still, the theory deserves a mention, if only because Ivar’s spectacular story merits at least the remote possibility of an even more spectacular ending. Certainly Ivar, having constructed Potemkin companies, could imagine a clever getaway. He knew there was no other way out, as he was unable to raise new funds. He had the time and resources to find a lookalike, and then enlist help from someone utterly trustworthy.
The escape story goes something like this. First, suppose that, beginning with the 1929 crash, Ivar knew his companies were destined for collapse. He hadn’t intentionally concocted a pyramid scheme, as Price Waterhouse and the bankruptcy trustees later concluded. Instead, he had been too casual in his accounting and had become overextended by borrowing too much money, and paying out too much in dividends. When the market for new funds dried up in late 1929, Ivar must have known he would not be able to sustain those high dividend payments for long.
When he faced the precipice in October 1929, he decided to take the path of gambling on the German loan. But then the markets crashed, and he knew he was ruined. Eventually, falling securities prices would prevent him from raising enough money to pay his increasing obligations. There was no way out.
After the 1929 crash, Ivar had more than two years to ponder every conceivable alternative. He was well read in outlandish schemes; he already had mimicked one, the South Sea Bubble, in his European deal making. He knew how panics destroyed businesses, especially those that had exaggerated their profits. Ivar feared death and was obsessed with preserving his health. He had millions of dollars hidden in various offshore accounts. And he would not have been the first financier, or the last, to consider escape.
Much of the evidence that Ivar’s supporters say points to murder could instead be proof of Kreuger-as-Houdini. Suppose, supporters of the escape theory say, Ivar bought a corpse in a Paris morgue, where he could have found a credible body double for a small sum.10 He might even have arranged for the body to have a stunted left index finger. Suppose he then bought the Browning 9 mm and staged a suicide scene, but inadvertently placed the gun in his poor victim’s left hand, as a right-handed person looking down on a body might do. Several observers at Ivar’s funeral insisted that the body on display did not resemble him.
Or suppose the body Littorin and Bökman “found” at
Ivar’s apartment was a dummy. Witnesses said the face in the glass section of the casket appeared to be that of a wax doll. A pallbearer reported that he had never carried a coffin as light as Ivar’s, nor had he ever smelled so much wax at a cremation.11
The French police relied heavily on testimony from Krister Littorin and Karin Bökman. But what if the two of them were involved in, or at least knew about, Ivar’s escape plan? That might explain Bökman’s odd behavior during the afternoon of March 12, and shortly thereafter. The police and journalists investigating Ivar’s death initially received their information primarily from her. Bökman insisted on being the first one to tell investigators that Ivar had committed suicide. She and Krister Littorin were eager to be the first people to find the body. Why was it so important to be there first, except to set the story? Why did they wait so long before telling the police?
During Bökman’s first visit with investigators, when the body was still warm, she did not tell anyone that her bag contained a bulky envelope filled with Swedish kronor that Ivar had given her just two hours earlier. Investigators discovered that later. Nor did Bökman initially tell the French police about the three sealed suitcases. Or that Ivar’s last words to her had been that he would see her soon in Stockholm. The police did not even know whether she and Ivar had been having an affair.
For anyone attracted to the escape theory, the key evidence came from lands far away. Various reports found Ivar abroad later during 1932, in Moscow helping Stalin build the Soviet match industry, or in Sumatra simply relaxing. Some journalists reported on a large order from Sumatra for the unique type of custom-made Havana cigars Ivar had favored. Many people, particularly in Sweden, thought Ivar was using this order to confirm, in code, that his escape plan had worked.12
If Ivar really had planned to commit suicide, wouldn’t he have chosen a more private time than just before a crucial meeting when his whereabouts were known and he was at risk of being interrupted or discovered? Would he have used a new weapon purchased at the last minute, given that he had many guns in Stockholm?
Would he have set up such a seemingly posed bedroom scene, complete with an obscure suicide note? Ivar typically was precise in his choice of language, and the note to Littorin, his closest friend, seems deliberately vague: “I have made such a mess of things that I believe this to be the most satisfactory solution for everybody concerned.” What is “this”? Perhaps the word “this” was meant to lay a trail, so that a clever person - perhaps Littorin - would eventually figure it all out. And then there was the form of his signature on the suicide note, which Littorin had never seen: “I.K.” What did he mean by that? Why the fat dots?
If Ivar got away, it appears that he never contacted any of his friends. If he promised Karin Bökman he would meet her in Stockholm, he broke the promise. He never told his brother Torsten, who continued to claim Ivar had been murdered. If Ivar contacted Krister Littorin or Anders Jordahl, both men remained silent. Nor did Ivar see Greta Garbo, whose fame surged after the reports of his death, unless they met later in Sumatra, or at the island she had purchased from Ivar’s estate.
Perhaps Ivar’s closest devotees believed they would help him execute an elaborate escape plan, and then see him again, only to have Ivar betray them, too. Perhaps Ivar understood that the only way for him to ensure he truly could disappear was to mislead his friends, as well as his enemies. Perhaps Ivar had become paranoid, and believed he couldn’t rely on even his inner circle. Or perhaps he just wanted to spend his last time on Earth as he had spent his first: alone.
What if Ivar’s bipolar displays for Donald Durant, George Murnane, Isaac Marcosson, and others were merely a ruse, a show of manufactured emotions designed to throw everyone off the scent as Ivar flew from his crumpling empire? If Sherlock Holmes really had been on the case, he would have focused on the gaps in the other theories, and asked: If neither suicide nor murder, what else remains? Could that possibility, no matter how improbable, be true?
Doesn’t a Hollywood life deserve a Hollywood ending?
Probably not, if facts matter. Yet the fanciful escape theory is not the only one belied by the evidence. None of the most commonly held views of Ivar - as crook, murder victim, or escape artist - reflects the textured and complex reality about his life and death. Ivar was a student of history, a wayward genius with an extraordinary mind who sought, not merely wealth, but greatness. History should regard him as studiously as he regarded history.
As a boy, Ivar had imagined building a life as formidable as the twelfth-century turrets of Kalmar Slott. At first, Ivar’s businesses were strong and sturdy: construction projects, real estate, and matches. But the foundation of his empire cracked in October 1929. Just as the shifting of the Swedish- Danish border decimated Kalmar Slott’s utility, the market crash wrecked Ivar’s companies. He might have responded by downsizing or admitting defeat. But Ivar stubbornly refused to recognize losses or reduce dividends. Instead, he hid his mounting liabilities, and doubled down by lending to Germany. His gamble appeared to work temporarily, but it made his destruction inevitable.
A close analysis of the available evidence suggests that the truth about Ivar Kreuger is somewhere between his stellar reputation before March 12, 1932 and his abysmal reputation after that date. Yes, he committed forgeries and issued false financial statements. Yes, he abused innovative financial techniques to secure control of large publicly traded companies, and then manipulated accounting results so that he would not be beholden to investors he regarded as fickle. But he also legitimately created substantial wealth, revived much of Europe after the war, and generated real profits for investors. He paid out much of those profits as large cash dividends. The bulk of those payments went to Ivar’s investors, not to Ivar.
If this revised view is correct, Ivar’s role in history is more complicated than previously thought. He was not merely the greatest financial fraudster of the century. He was a builder, as well as a destroyer. He was a victim, as well as a perpetrator. He was a hero, as well as a villain.
His life is like the story of Kalmar Slott, a once-grand fortress that survives even with its core reduced to rubble, a monument to the frailty of any human enterprise in the long run, and a memory of what might have been.
On May 4, 1932, less than two months after Ivar’s reported suicide, The New York Times featured side-by-side front-page stories on the world’s two most infamous criminals.13 First, the paper reported that, late the previous evening, a police squad car had whisked Alphonse “Scarface” Capone from the Cook County jail to the Dearborn Street station, where he and several government agents had boarded the Dixie Flyer, headed for Atlanta and the federal penitentiary there.
The adjacent story described the first day of hearings before the federal referee overseeing the bankruptcy of International Match - the first witnesses called were Donald Durant and Frederic Allen, from Lee Higginson. “Glad to Start, He Says” was the tagline for the Capone column; the one about Ivar said “Trusted Him Implicitly.”
The implication was that Al Capone and Ivar Kreuger belonged together. When Al Capone’s heavy-set, nattily dressed form disappeared into a train in Chicago, people everywhere imagined that Ivar should follow him. That image stuck with Ivar for many years. In these pages I have tried to show that this image is the wrong one. Ivar might have been a crook, at least at the end, but he was a much more attractive one than Capone.
In 1984, Ivar Kreuger made the Financial Times list of the top five financial scandals of all time, just behind the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Scheme of John Law.14 In that way, finally, he achieved greatness.
A NOTE ON SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When economist John Kenneth Galbraith reviewed one of the many books on Ivar Kreuger, from 1957, he lamented the absence of source references in that book, and in most of the books that had been written about this remarkable man. He wrote that the “time has come when we must incite readers to violence against all authors - certainly all histori
ans - who do not provide a decent minimum of footnotes. (A place should also be made in the quicklime for the carcasses of publishers who think that footnotes hurt sales.)”1
With the hope of avoiding violence, I have included endnotes on pp. 236-62. I have not noted every fact related to Ivar’s story, many of which are uncontroversial and were widely reported at the time. In particular, journalists’ accounts from 1932 generated much of the material used in later books about Ivar. I have endeavored to set forth sufficient references so that a reader can check the basis for particular facts, or at least see that a reference is there.
With respect to new material not previously cited in other articles and books, I have provided more detailed notes, with the hope that future writers will find it easier to locate sources than I did. In my research, I found that, because of the absence of footnotes in the various articles and books on Ivar, it was difficult to trace numerous secondary references. These difficulties were particularly acute for materials published after 1933, including some of the secondary sources that were the basis of Professor Galbraith’s complaints. Therefore, I have tried to refer to primary sources whenever possible in referencing new material.
Most of the primary sources on Ivar are collected in various archives in Sweden and the United States. The largest archives, several miles of documents in aggregate, are in Vadstena, Sweden. Much of the financial information about Ivar’s companies, including many of the documents from Anton Wendler, his Swedish accountant, are collected at Riksarkivet, the Swedish National Archive in Arninge, north of Stockholm. Princeton’s Mudd Library has a trove of documents from the bankruptcy proceedings of International Match. The Morgan Library & Museum Reading Room includes letters and cables from Jack Morgan about Ivar and some of his dealings, particularly in Germany. The University of Florida Smathers Libraries have an eight-box collection established by Klein, Hinds & Finke, the accounting firm that acted as trustee in bankruptcy for the International Match Corporation. The Match Museum in Jönköping, Sweden, has a fine collection of documents and artifacts, including match machines and a slide show featuring Ivar. I am grateful to the archivists at these places, men and women who carefully watch over the remaining evidence of Ivar’s life and death, and particularly to Olle Nordquist and Claes Westling at Vadstena, Nancy Shader at Princeton, and Christine Nelson and Maggie Portis at the Morgan Library.
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