by Henry Landau
But there were other developments. The local police were busily searching for leads. A Mrs Chapman, a resident of Bayonne, New Jersey, who since her childhood had known Captain John J. Rigney, of the Bayonne police department reported to him her suspicions that a cousin, Michael Kristoff, was responsible for the destruction of Black Tom. She related that Kristoff, who had formerly lodged with her and at the time lodged with her mother, Mrs Anna Rushnak, at 76 East 25th Street, Bayonne, did not return home until four o’clock in the morning of the night of the explosion. Hearing him pace the floor, her mother went to his room. She found him in a state of great excitement and near nervous prostration. To her anxious query as to what had happened, the only reply she could get out of him was ‘What I do! What I do!’ This he kept repeating over and over again as he ran his hands through his hair.
According to Captain Rigney, Mrs Chapman also told him that ‘Kristoff had been in the habit of going away from time to time and that everywhere he went there was an explosion.’ She referred to some place in Columbus, Ohio, where he had gone and said that whenever he came back from any of these trips he always had plenty of money. She also said that she had seen maps and charts in Kristoff’s possession while he had been staying with her at her house at 114 Neptune Avenue, Jersey City, New Jersey.
The result was that after shadowing Kristoff for some time, Captain Rigney arrested him near Mrs Rushnak’s home on 31 August 1916 and turned him over to Lieutenant Peter Green of the Jersey City police department.
All that was known about Kristoff was that he was born in 1893, in Presov, then in the Slovak region of Hungary, now a part of Czechoslovakia, and had been given the surname of Michael. When he was six years old his parents immigrated to the United States, where his mother had several members of her family living. By 1916 he had grown into a tall, slimly built young man, with light reddish hair, pale blue eyes, fair complexion, and a weak receding chin. For some months prior to July he had been working for the Tidewater Oil Company at Bayonne, New Jersey, close to Black Tom.
When examined by the Bayonne Police authorities, his story ran substantially as follows: on 3 January 1916 he was sitting in the waiting-room of the Pennsylvania railroad station, 33rd Street, New York City, when he was accosted by a man who asked him the time and then inquired where he was going. Kristoff informed him that he was waiting for a train to go to Cambridge, Ohio, where he intended to visit his sister. This man, who then gave his name as Graentnor, offered him a job at $20 per week, which he accepted. He went with Graentnor to the Hotel York, and on the next day they started off on a series of travels which took them in turn to Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Cleveland, Akron, Columbus, Chicago, Kansas City, St Louis, and finally back to New York. After arranging to meet him in the lobby of the Hotel McAlpin Graentnor disappeared, and he never saw him again. Kristoff stated that during these journeys his job was to carry Graentnor’s two suitcases, which contained blueprints of bridges and factories, also money and books. He had no idea whom Graentnor saw in these towns, but ventured an opinion that the plans were ‘to show people how to build bridges and houses and factories’.
His whole story sounded so unintelligible to the police authorities that they got the impression Kristoff was half demented; and, therefore, they called in a specialist to examine him. It was finally decided that he was not altogether sane, but not dangerously insane. Whereupon, in spite of the fact he had furnished several false alibis as to where he had been on the night of the explosion and had admitted working for the Eagle Oil Works, adjacent to Black Tom, and not returning for his pay after the explosion, he was released on 25 September 1916 after promising to look for Graentnor.
But the Lehigh Valley Railroad officials were not convinced. To them the strange story of Kristoff was not that of a crazy man but that of a man attempting to cover up his tracks. They felt that in his clumsy evasions he had admitted some truths. Factories were being blown up all over the country, and Graentnor and his two suitcases filled with blueprints sounded real.
From the payroll records of the Tidewater Oil Company in Bayonne, where Kristoff had been employed prior to his work at the Eagle Oil Works, they discovered that he had been absent for five work-days in January 1916. Subsequently he had left the employ of the company on 29 February 1916, and had not returned to work until 19 June. After working there for a month he had transferred his services to the Eagle Oil Works. In addition, Mrs Chapman later made an affidavit to the effect that while cleaning Kristoff’s room one day shortly before the Black Tom explosion she had found an un-mailed letter to a man named ‘Grandson’ or ‘Graentnor’ in which he had demanded a large sum of money. The Lehigh Valley Railroad therefore hired Alexander Kassman, an employee of the W. J. Burns Detective Agency, to shadow him.
For almost a year Kassman lived in close contact with Kristoff; they worked at the same chocolate factory and met nightly. Kassman posed as an Austrian anarchist, took Kristoff to anarchists’ meetings, and thus won his confidence. At regular intervals Kassman reported to the Burns Agency. A perusal of these reports shows that Kristoff on numerous occasions admitted to Kassman that he had assisted in blowing up Black Tom.
In May 1917 Kassman lost track of Kristoff. Records discovered long afterwards revealed, however, that he employed a well-known ruse to divert attention from himself: on 22 May 1917 he enlisted in the United States Army. A later entry in his army record shows that he was discharged on 12 September 1917 because of tuberculosis and for having enlisted under false enlistment papers.
Kristoff now vanished completely until the spring of 1921, when he was located in prison at Albany, New York, where he had been committed for larceny under the name of ‘John Christie’,
Once again the Lehigh Valley attempted to get from him further information about Black Tom. Through the co-operation of the county officials of Albany County, a detective of the Washington detective bureau was placed in a cell next to Kristoff, and together with him was assigned to work in the prison bakery. The detective remained there nineteen days, but Kristoff was on the defensive when approached about Black Tom. He was well aware that a murder charge was involved. He repeated the same story about Graentnor and the blueprints which he had told to the Bayonne police five years previously; and, although he refused to make any admission that he had blown up Black Tom, he did admit that he had been working with a German group for several weeks and that they had promised him a large sum of money.
Shortly after this he was released from prison and for the time being disappeared.
Of the various investigations which were conducted at the time by the Department of Justice, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the local authorities, and the owners, none was successful. It was not until after 1922, when the Mixed Claims Commission was established, that the American lawyers employed by the owners gradually began by exhaustive investigations to lift the curtain of mystery which surrounded the destruction of Black Tom, and by piecing the intricate clues together began to build up their case against Germany. The story of their dogged fight against the German secret service and their immense difficulties in collecting the evidence is told elsewhere. The evidence they collected led the American investigators to the conviction that Graentnor was Hinsch or at least that Hinsch knew a Graentnor whose name he borrowed as an alias; that Jahnke and Witzke rowed across to Black Tom from the New York side to assist Kristoff in blowing up the terminal; and that two of the Dougherty guards were paid agents of Koenig’s.
CHAPTER 29
THE KINGSLAND FIRE
ON THE AFTERNOON of 11 January 1917 New York City once again heard the thunderous roar of exploding munitions. For four hours northern New Jersey, New York City, Westchester, and the western end of Long Island listened to a bombardment in which probably half a million 3-inch, high explosive shells were discharged. This explosion took place in the shell-assembling plant of the agency of the Canadian Car & Foundry company, near Kingsland, New Jersey, about 10 miles from the docks in New York harbour. A
fire originated suddenly and inexplicably in one of the assembling sheds, Building 30, to be exact; and within a few minutes the whole plant was ablaze. As the flames reached each case of shells and exploded the projection charges, the missiles shot high up in the air and then rained down in the vicinity of the factory.
Luckily the shells were not equipped with detonating fuses; therefore they fell as so much metal without exploding. Kingsland and Rutherford were soon filled with hundreds of refugees who had fled from their homes. Fortunately there were no casualties. The 14,000 workers in the plant and all others nearby, mindful of the danger, fled in a mad rush at the first peal of the fire alarm, escaping only just in the nick of time. The entire plant was destroyed. Here the material damage amounted to $17,000,000.
To understand events it is necessary to know something about the plant at Kingsland and the history of the company.
The war had been in progress but a few months when enormous munitions orders started pouring in to the Canadian Car & Foundry company in Montreal. Large contracts were signed both with England and Russia for the delivery of shells. The Canadian factory was working to capacity when, in the spring of 1915, the company secured an $83,000,000 contract from the Russian government for 5 million shells. In order to fulfil this contract the parent company in Canada formed a separate agency and incorporated it under the laws of New York. In March 1916 the huge plant of the agency was erected close to Kingsland, in Bergen County, New Jersey. Shells, shell-cases, shrapnel, and powder were shipped to Kingsland from over 100 different factories and there assembled for shipment to Russia. At the time of the fire the plant was turning out three million shells per month – it was a worthy objective for the German saboteur. The company was well aware of this, and as a safeguard had erected around the plant a 6 ft fence which was patrolled night and day by guards. None of the 1,400 workers were allowed to enter without a preparatory search, and it was strictly forbidden for any of them to carry matches on his person.
Building 30, where the fire originated, was entirely devoted to cleaning out shells. The building was furnished with forty-eight workbenches, along which stood the workers. On the bench in front of each worker was a pan of petrol and a small rotating machine operated by a belt. The cleaning process consisted, first, in dusting out the shell with a brush; then, in order to clean out the thin coating of grease with which the shell had been covered on shipment from the factory, a cloth, moistened in the pan of petrol, was wrapped around a piece of wood about a foot long and, after the shell had been fitted on to the rotating machine, inserted into the shell as it slowly turned; finally, a dry cloth was wrapped around the stick, and the shell was dried in a similar manner. It was in the vicinity of one of these machines that the fire was first noticed.
So rapidly did it spread from building to building that within a few minutes the whole mammoth plant was ablaze. Four hours later all that was left of it was a smouldering mass of ruins. 275,000 loaded shells, 300,000 cartridge cases, 100,086 detonators, 439,920 time fuses, large stores of TNT, and more than one million unloaded shells that were either in the shops, or waiting shipment to Russia, were completely destroyed.
Immediately after the fire, the officers of the company commenced an investigation to determine the cause of the blaze. Various workmen were called in and examined by Mr Cahan, one of the directors of the company. It was quickly established that the fire had broken out at the bench of Fiodore Wozniak, one of the workers. A gang foreman, Morris Chester Musson, who was at the end of the building when the fire originated, described what he saw as follows in an affidavit:
One of the men at the place where the fire originated was Fiodore Wozniak, whose photograph I recognise and which appears below as follows:
[A photograph of Wozniak appeared here in the original affidavit.]
I noticed that this man Wozniak had quite a large collection of rags and that the blaze started in these rags. I also noticed that he had spilled his pan of alcohol all over the table just preceding that time. The fire immediately spread very rapidly in the alcohol saturated table. I also noticed that someone threw a pail of liquid on the rags or the table almost immediately in the confusion. I am not able to state whether this was water or one of the pails of refuse alcohol under the tables. My recollection, however, is that there were no pails of water in the building, the fire buckets being filled with sand. Whatever the liquid was it caused the fire to spread very rapidly and the flames dropped down on the floor and in a few minutes the entire place was in a blaze.
It was my firm conviction from what I saw, and I so stated at the time, that the place was set on fire purposely, and that has always been and is my firm belief.
Thomas Steele, another workman, described his observations as follows:
I was working in No. 30, No. 2265. The fire broke out in the liquid pan in front of an Austrian workman just after three o’clock. This Austrian had been there working for at least three weeks.
I saw the fire burning up in his pan about four or five inches high. The Austrian said nothing, but ran for his coat and taking it, ran through the freight car opening out into the backyard. I was the third man from the Austrian.
Mr Cahan also gave his impressions of an interview he had with Wozniak:
I told him [Wozniak] that most of his fellow workmen agreed that the flames had first been seen at or near his table. He admitted to me that the flames had originated there and he said that they had started in some cloths which he was using to clean one of the shells.
Wozniak told me that several days before the fire occurred he had found matches deposited in one of the shells, among the cloths, ‘rags’, he called them, which he used for cleaning shells. He seemed to lay singular stress on this fact which at the time, created suspicion in my mind that he was developing a story to throw suspicion on one of his fellow workers … He said that he was taking the third step in the process of cleaning a shell, that is, drying the inside with a clean cloth, when a flame burst from the opening of the shell…
I questioned Wozniak about the man who had worked at the bench next to him and he said that the man working next to him, on the day of the fire, was a new man who came on that bench that day for the first time … He said that he did not know his name…
I found the man who usually worked at the second table next to that of Wozniak. He was No. 1208, named Rodriguez, who claimed to have been originally from Porto Rico. He gave his residence No. 105 West 64th Street, New York City; and when I had him brought to the office of the company he declared that he had been absent from the Works on the day of the fire and that he had been home all day with his family…
Other workmen in Building 30 alleged that the fire started in the pan of gasoline mixture, which was fixed in front of Wozniak’s wooden roller … others who were farther away only saw the flames shooting from the pan of gasoline mixture high towards the ceiling.
…I had the impression from his [Wozniak’s] nervous behaviour, from his demeanour when led into apparent contradictions, and from other incidents in our interviews which were significant to me but difficult to describe, that he knew that the fire was no accident and that he personally was implicated in its origin.
G. W. A. Woodhouse, who acted as interpreter for Mr Cahan at some of his interviews with Wozniak and who also interviewed Wozniak, separately stated:
I obtained the same impression from the interviews which are recorded by Mr Cahan … I also know that the company made great efforts later to try to shadow Wozniak and to locate the other workman who was said to have been employed that day for the first time at the adjoining bench, but Wozniak disappeared entirely shortly after the detectives were put on his trail, and we never were able to locate either him or the workman who had been at the adjoining table.
Wozniak said that, though he had entered the company’s employ as a Russian, he was actually an ‘Austrian Galician’; he admitted that he had served his time in the Austrian Army and that he had at one time been an Austrian genda
rme.
Wozniak was told by Mr Cahan that he would be needed in New York in connection with further investigations regarding the fire and that he would be kept on the company’s payroll during that period. Detectives were then employed to watch Wozniak. He went to live at the Russian Immigrant Home on Third Street, New York; but shortly thereafter he eluded the detectives and disappeared.
Other investigations by the owners and the police proved abortive; the disaster was left unexplained as yet another mystery of the war. The insurance companies paid out several million dollars in claims, and the owners had to bear the rest of the loss.
The years rolled by, and it was not until after 1922, when the Mixed Claims Commission was formed and the owners of Kingsland filed a claim against Germany for recovery, that the mystery of the fire was largely dispelled. The American investigators finally produced the evidence which they believe proves conclusively that Hinsch procured the services of Wozniak, and that Wozniak, acting under instructions of Herrmann, fired Kingsland, either by the use of incendiary pencils or rags saturated with phosphorus dissolved in some solvent. On the other hand, the Germans claim it was an industrial accident.
