The Saboteurs

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Thank you, Chief,” Donovan said as he stood up. “Murray, please come join us,” he added, waving him in.

  Canidy stood and followed Donovan as Ellis left the room and closed the door.

  Donovan shook hands with Gurfein, then motioned toward Canidy. “Murray Gurfein, Dick Canidy. Dick, Murray.”

  They shook hands.

  Donovan put a hand on Gurfein’s shoulder, squeezed it, and said, “Something to drink, Murray? Dick pours a deadly single malt.”

  Gurfein smiled. “That would be a lifesaver.”

  Canidy brought the drink to where Donovan and Gurfein were seated.

  The director of the Office of Strategic Services raised his glass in a toast and Canidy and Gurfein followed.

  “Our swords,” Donovan said.

  “Our swords,” Canidy and Gurfein repeated in unison.

  After they sipped, Donovan looked at Gurfein. “Nice booze, no?”

  “Very.”

  Donovan turned to Canidy. “For your edification, Dick, the most recent time that Murray and I had the opportunity to share a single malt was last summer at the bar of a very nice hotel in midtown Manhattan, a den of ill repute frequented by the usual bigwigs, including Mayor Fiorello La Guardia himself. Our host was a lawyer by the name of Moses Polakoff.”

  Canidy drew a blank on the name, and shook his head slightly to indicate that.

  “Charles Luciano?” Donovan said.

  Canidy shook his head again.

  Gurfein offered, “Charlie ‘Lucky’?”

  Canidy’s eyebrows rose. “The head of the mob? Isn’t he doing time?”

  Gurfein nodded. “Thirty to fifty, courtesy of my former employer.”

  “Before Murray joined the OSS,” Donovan explained, “he was head of the Rackets Bureau of the New York County District Attorney’s Office. Tom Dewey, as D.A. for New York County and as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, did an incredible job of cleaning out the underworld—Dutch Schultz, Waxey Gordon, Legs Diamond.”

  “Luciano went down in ’36,” Gurfein added, “for compulsory prostitution of women. Moses Polakoff is his lawyer. Luciano was in Dannemora Prison till last May, when we had him transferred to Great Meadow.”

  “Why the move?” Canidy said.

  “That’s why Murray is here,” Donovan said. “When he was running the Rackets Bureau, an unusual situation arose with ONI. One that might help you.”

  Canidy looked incredulous. “I’m going to ask a Guinea gangster for help?”

  Donovan looked at him a long moment. “Time to dance with a new devil, Dick.” He glanced at his watch, then at Gurfein. “Why don’t you start from the beginning, Murray? But first, shall we eat?”

  [ TWO ]

  Manhattan Beach, Florida

  0330 28 February 1943

  Richard Koch and Rudolf Cremer helped Kurt Bayer and Rolf Grossman dig two shallow holes beyond a line of sand dunes fifty yards inland from the beach in order to bury the black stainless steel containers—now each just top and bottom shells that were nested together after being emptied of the soft bags that contained explosives, detonators, pistols and ammunition, United States currency, and clothing.

  Koch thought, but couldn’t be sure, that he heard the angry shouting of Kapitänleutnant Hans-Günther Brosin from just offshore. He told himself that he had to be imagining it because of at least two things: Enough time had passed since they had sent the young coastguardsman, bound and gagged, out to the U-boat in the train of rafts being retrieved, which should have put the vessel—and its captain—far out of earshot. And the U-boat commander would not be so careless as to draw undue attention to himself while in the process of trying to get his ship to deeper water before being discovered.

  Still, Koch smiled in the darkness at what he imagined as the U-boat captain’s furious reaction to his little surprise.

  The men filled in the greater part of the holes using their short-handled shovels, then tossed the shovels in on top, too, and filled in the last foot or so of sand by hand. They smoothed out the top of the disturbed sand as best they could, then left it, relying on the rain and wind to blend it all back together.

  They stood, and each slung one of the heavy soft bags over their shoulder, adjusted its strap, then started moving southward along the sand-dune line, the team of Richard Koch and Kurt Bayer in the lead and, some ten paces or so back, Rudolf Cremer and Rolf Grossman bringing up the rear.

  The plan now called for the two teams to separate as soon as possible. That meant after they had secured transportation—a 1935 Ford sedan, big enough to fit them all for the short time necessary—which Koch told them he had arranged for through an old contact.

  On the surface, the car seemed only a convenience, not a necessity—each team member had been thoroughly briefed on the terrain and alternate transportation options by Koch and could find their way alone if necessary—but beyond that, it held other value to Koch.

  Richard Koch had lived for three years—between stints as a part-time engineering student at the University of Florida at Gainesville—in Jacksonville, where he worked for the local company that distributed Budweiser beer. He had driven a truck and delivered cases and kegs of Auggie Busch’s best brewed hops and barley to Duval County bars in the seaside towns that lined its shore—Manhattan Beach, Jacksonville Beach, and on down U.S. Highway 1 to the St. Johns County line.

  Over the course of his regular three-times-a-week route, he had become friendly with many of the bartenders and restaurant managers with whom he had come in contact, but none so well as J. Whit Stevens. “Jay,” as he was called, was a stocky, middle-aged blue blood from Philadelphia who had inherited from his eccentric grandmother a popular hole-in-the-wall at Neptune Beach called Pete’s Bar.

  It was because of his grandmother that generations of the Stevens family had spent their winter breaks at Jacksonville Beach. She was a free spirit in the world of the upper crust, and believed that the Palm Beach–type crowds wintering to the south of Jax were snooty and terribly overrated. She had spent nearly a lifetime trying to take some of the stiffness out of her own husband—Stevens’s grandfather—and her son—Stevens’s father—but with little success.

  And so it surprised no one when, after old man Stevens died of a heart attack at his senior vice president desk in the trust department of Mellon Bank, Grandma Stevens up and moved permanently to Jacksonville Beach, where, in another free-spirited act, she opened Pete’s to help her pass the time.

  Stevens’s father was also at Mellon, as president of the corporate banking department there, and it had made sense to everyone that Stevens would follow his father and grandfather into banking.

  And he did. He graduated from the business school at the University of Pennsylvania and soon became a Mellon junior executive on the fast track. But it was not to last.

  Stevens never was comfortable as a button-down type. And all the business of being a blue blood bored him; he’d just as soon push away from a gourmet meal at a gala at the Union League of Philadelphia, loosen his tie as he walked across Broad Street, and go eat a Philly cheesesteak in the 12th Street Market.

  The undisputable fact was that genes had indeed jumped a generation—and the genes he had gotten were those of his grandmother.

  Clearly, she had recognized that and, accordingly, willed to him the bar—her last defiant act in trying to loosen up the Stevens clan.

  This time, she had been successful beyond her greatest hope.

  It had been years since her funeral, and that had been the last time that Stevens had put on a suit and tie. He now was prone to well-worn khakis, a faded captain’s shirt with epaulets, and a crushed navy blue Greek sailor’s cap that was always askew on his unruly sandy hair.

  As his grandmother had been, Stevens was also well liked. This was in part because of his engaging habit of greeting everyone with a pat on the back—a hug for certain regulars—but he knew it also was due to the fact that he had a habit of letting th
e bartenders at Pete’s pour penny draft beer when the happy mood struck him.

  From most appearances, Stevens did not take the bar business too seriously. It seemed that the steady customers provided him an easy and reasonable cash flow most of the year and a very good income during the height of seasons, June through August and mid-November to early January. And he had that rent-free two-bedroom apartment above the bar, a bit ratty-looking from the outside but with what had to be an incredible view of the beach and Atlantic Ocean. Why work hard?

  But the exact opposite was true.

  The proprietor, with his master’s of business administration from Wharton, quietly tracked every nickel, knew what a keg cost him wholesale, knew what he lost in retail income when he just about gave away each keg during a “happy mood,” and knew by what percentage customer traffic—and revenue—then increased after word got around that Pete’s had been giving away beer again.

  Most important, he knew that not all of the income found its way onto the cash receipts reported to the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Consequently, Stevens had a hefty fund tucked away for a rainy day—a very rainy day—or for whatever else he decided was the best use of his money.

  In addition to the income from the bar, Stevens also dabbled in a number of other cash-generating ventures. He owned a couple of rental cottages—shacks, really, just bare bone and basic but with great beach access—and these he let in spring and summer (no one ever wanted to rent them in winter, when a cold wet wind blew in steadily off the ocean, and the only heat source in the cottages was the rarely used wood-burning stoves). And he traded cars, some by choice, some by necessity.

  It was common—maybe too common—in a beach town environment for jobs to come and go almost as easy as the wind, leaving carpenters and painters and other such tradesmen to wait out the dry spells.

  And it only made sense, at least to them, to spend time between jobs where they spent time after work when they had jobs: at Pete’s. But drinking when there’s no income, and no hope of income anytime soon, made for a bad formula.

  Thus, quietly, because he did not want to become known as the Bank of Booze, Stevens allowed a select group to run bar tabs. While those who found themselves in that group thought it was a damned decent service for Stevens to offer to Pete’s regulars who were temporarily down on their luck, it was far from a magnanimous act on Stevens’s part.

  He knew his customers, and which ones were loan worthy and which were ne’er-do-wells. And for the worthy, he charged a somewhat healthy interest rate, and secured it by holding the legal title to the car or truck of the borrower.

  When the owner got work, he bought back his title by paying off—in cash—his tab and the interest incurred. If the owner did not get work and the tab reached a point short of the value of the vehicle, it was pay up or default time.

  Consequently, Stevens had one, two—on occasion, as many as four—vehicles to his name.

  When he could, he kept a couple of them parked outside the bar—it was always good for the place to look as though someone were there, to draw in patrons during business hours and, after hours, to deter others who might not have the best of intentions—and any extras he kept parked out at the rental cottages.

  Richard Koch did not have the benefit of being educated at a school of finance—he had been strictly reared in a home of modest means, his father a hardworking diesel-engine mechanic who had brought the family to America but then decided to return home to Germany when Richard was nineteen and old enough to fend for himself—but Koch was frugal-minded, too.

  He had managed his personal affairs well by keeping steady employment and spending within his means. He even socked away cash on a regular basis—a little some times, more others, till he had just over three thousand dollars.

  Koch never needed to use Stevens’s loan system, but he was aware of it, and aware that Stevens seemed to be always doing something with cars, and so when, in November 1941, Koch made plans to visit his family in Germany, he spoke with Stevens about leaving his car with him. Stevens was of course agreeable—for a small fee.

  That left only one thing to take care of: what to do with the brick of cash that Koch had saved. He did not want to leave it in a bank—not being a U.S. citizen made him concerned that the money could be confiscated for whatever reason—and he thought long and hard about what to do with it, from burying it to having someone hold it for him.

  He finally realized that he already was having Stevens hold his car; why not just have him hold it, too—but not know that he was doing so? He could hide it in the car.

  After first taking brown butcher paper and wrapping the cash in two small bundles, then covering the paper with heavy black tape, he went through the Ford looking for a spot that was both safe and not at all obvious. He looked and looked and finally decided on the backseat. He unbolted the seat from the floorboard, taped the bundles to the wire frame underneath, and then bolted the seat back in place.

  Then he drove the car to Pete’s Bar, parked it out front, locked it, and went inside and handed the keys to Stevens—never for a moment realizing that in a month’s time Germany would be declaring war on the United States and in two months’ time he would be enlisted in the German army.

  In December 1942, Richard Koch had a letter-sized envelope added to a pouch containing other correspondence from the Abwehr. This pouch was then hand-carried to Spain, where it found its way to a Spanish diplomatic courier en route to Spain’s consulate office in New York City. There the envelope was sent by messenger to Eva Carr, one of Fritz Kuhn’s faithful in the German-American Bund living on the Lower East Side.

  When Eva Carr, a rugged-looking brunette of thirty-five, opened the plain envelope, she found another, note-card-sized envelope.

  It carried the return address:

  Richard Koch

  Gen Delivery

  NYC NY

  And it was addressed to:

  Mr. J. W. Stevens

  c/o Pete’s Bar

  117 1st St

  Neptune Beach Florida

  Attached to the inner envelope was a handwritten note that instructed the recipient to affix the proper three-cent postage to the inner envelope and mail it from a box in New York.

  Had Eva Carr opened the smaller envelope, she would have seen the letter therein, written by hand by Koch, that began “My Dear Jay,” then opened with a line inquiring as to Stevens’s health and well-being, and abruptly segued to announce that Koch would be coming back to collect his car, within the next thirty to forty-five days, and if Koch could so impose on Stevens he enclosed a twenty-dollar bill (in U.S. currency, of course, which had come from German counterintelligence) in order to have someone check out the car to ensure that it was in sound operating order, that it didn’t need a new battery or tire or other, that it had a full tank of fresh gasoline, et cetera, et cetera.

  The letter closed by wishing Stevens—and Pete’s—a successful new year.

  [ THREE ]

  Wordlessly, the teams made their way southward in the rain at a half trot, following along the dune line. They came to an occasional footpath—beach access points that connected parking lots to the shore—and stopped, carefully looking for the lone, love-struck couple out for a middle-of-the-night stroll or the drunk who may not have quite made it home, before crossing the path and continuing south.

  At one point, they came to a halt at a four-foot-high fence that blocked their way—Kurt Bayer actually ran right into the wall of vertical wooden slats wired together and was grateful that it had flexed at impact—and, breathing heavily, the four had to take time to debate whether it was faster to scale the fence or to run toward the ocean in order to circumvent it.

  They chose, after a brief and animated discussion, to scale it and soon were running at a measured pace back toward the south, the path clear of everything but sand and more sand for the next forty-five minutes.

  Then they came to another beach access path, and there in the dark the faded signag
e announced, unnecessarily:

  NO LIFEGUARD

  ON DUTY!

  SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK!

  TOWN OF ATLANTIC BEACH

  It was the last part that Richard Koch had found the most interesting, for it confirmed for him what he thought he both remembered and recognized in the dark and rain of the landmarks through this area.

  Kurt Bayer stood there beside him, catching his breath, and they waited for Rudolf Cremer and Rolf Grossman to catch up to them. After a moment, they could hear them—feet squeaking in the sand as they ran—and shortly thereafter their vague shapes came into view through the mist.

  Koch could hear their labored breaths. Then he heard Cremer manage to say, “Is—is this—this it?”

  Koch whispered, “This should be the path leading to Sixteenth Street, and, if so, just over there about five hundred meters”—he pointed south and slightly inland, past some scrub pine trees and palmettos—“are the cottages.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Grossman said, already moving and trying not to sound as if he were breathing as hard as he was. They passed the pines and palmettos and came to a pair of darkened cottages, two hexagonal designs built side by side on pilings six feet above the sand and overlooking the ocean. Koch knew that these belonged to J. Whit Stevens because he had twice rented one of them himself.

  They were identical, with weather-beaten wooden siding, wooden decks and railings—some sections warped—and rusty tin roofs. The windows were shuttered for the season. Even in the dark it was clear that these were summer rentals, absently looked after with the kind of neglect where one fixes things only when they break—and maybe then not even right away—as opposed to performing some semblance of preventative maintenance.

  Koch, after pulling his Walther P38 9mm semiautomatic pistol from the leather holster on his hip, then hearing the others doing the same, led the men toward the nearest cottage.