by Charles Lane
Soon thereafter, Reed had talked Ivins into traveling with him to New York, supposedly to pursue a counterfeit securities selling scheme. On Broadway, near the Astor Hotel, they happened upon a wealthy Indianan, whom Reed recognized as his old friend “Captain Blake.” Reed, Ivins, and the Hoosier spent the afternoon drinking, culminating in a cognac-swilling session at the Merchants’ Hotel.
With a confidential wink to Ivins, Reed poured what appeared to be a powdered drug into “Captain Blake’s” drink, behind the latter’s back. Once “Captain Blake” had drained his glass, and passed out, Reed and Ivins stripped him of his watch, diamond lapel pin, rings, shirt studs, cuff links, and wallet. Then they absconded to a new hideout in Jersey City, New Jersey.
As soon as he heard the hotel-room door shut behind Reed and Ivins, “Blake” rose from his feigned stupor, waited until the two men were well on their way, then headed to Whitley’s office on Bleecker Street. “Blake” was William H. Butts, a Secret Service detective, playing his part in Whitley’s plot to help the attorney general get rid of his troublesome stepson. Next, Butts went to the New York Tribune, where a staffer who owed Whitley a favor printed a convincing-looking article about the robbery and murder of “Captain Blake.” Before the poison in his cognac took final effect, the “article” said, the victim had described the killers, two men from Washington, for whom there was now a large reward.
Butts smuggled the bogus clipping to Reed. Reed showed it to Ivins, who panicked. Reed said they should run to Brownsville, Texas, where he had stashed counterfeit bonds; they could live off the proceeds of selling them until it was safe to go back to New York. On their way to Texas, the two men passed through New Orleans, where Whitley had arranged for posters to be hung in the railroad station advertising a $2,000 reward for “Blake’s” murderers. If the Secret Service was on their trail, Reed told Ivins, they would have to flee all the way to Mexico.
Reed slipped away from Ivins long enough to telegraph Whitley, informing him that they were en route to Mexico City. Whitley passed the news to the attorney general, who asked him to convey it in person to his wife. Kate Williams laughed and congratulated Whitley on his ruse, and expressed the hope that her son would never show his face in Washington again.
James Ivins followed William H. Reed of the Secret Service all the way to the Mexican city of Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico. There, more than two thousand miles away from Washington, Whitley’s man abandoned the attorney general’s stepson. By the time Ivins figured out that he had been duped, Reed was well on his way to New York.
The troublesome child of Kate Williams’s first marriage never bothered his mother or her famous husband again. James Ivins did, however, find his way from Veracruz to California, and gave up his previous illegal ways in favor of real estate speculation and agriculture. By the late 1870s, he owned a thousand-acre dairy farm at Petaluma. When anyone asked what prompted him to move West, he said that he had gone there to seek his fortune after finishing college.27
* * *
In the latter half of February 1874, Hiram C. Whitley treated himself and his family to a vacation in sunny Jacksonville, Florida. It was a rare and well-earned rest for a man who had driven himself to near-exhaustion on behalf of the federal government for half a decade.
In early March, a telegram to Whitley from Everett C. Banfield, the solicitor of the Treasury, interrupted the Secret Service chief’s respite. A chill of fear, and a spasm of anger, ran through him as he read it: Banfield was warning him that a rival detective from Chicago had come to Washington, and was lobbying to replace Whitley as chief of the Secret Service.28
It barely seemed possible: Whitley’s position had been secure when he left; he would not have ventured so far from home, even for a short interval, otherwise. He felt he had more than earned the Grant administration’s full backing, through the discreet and effective performance of both official and unofficial missions.
Even for the most seasoned undercover operator, paranoia can be an occupational hazard; to some extent, it’s a job requirement. One of the Secret Service’s top detectives described Whitley to a friendly reporter as “circumspect and unfamiliar,” with his detectives, a man who kept “his own counsel and impresses the necessity of this on others.”29 And as he pondered Solicitor Banfield’s message, Whitley’s paranoia mounted. He wired Solicitor Banfield back, asking him to alert his occasional ally Orville E. Babcock at the White House to what was afoot. Then he boarded a northbound train.30
As he sped back to Washington in early March 1874, Whitley had every reason to assume Babcock would reciprocate his past services to the administration by protecting him from this rumored new threat to his tenure. Banfield arranged a meeting for Whitley with Babcock; and, sure enough, the latter told the former that he had nothing to fear. Babcock said he had asked President Grant about the matter and had been personally assured there would be no change at the Secret Service.
Relieved, Whitley asked Babcock if there was anything he could do for him in return. A few days later, Babcock informed him that there was.31
At that moment, the president’s aide found himself embroiled in an annoying little political fight, related not to his White House duties, but to the additional position he held as Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds for the city of Washington. In this capacity, Babcock had authority over the Republican-led local government’s vast drainage, paving, and park program. The construction beautified and sanitized the capital. It also raised property values, enriching certain Republican-connected landlords and contractors.
Washington’s traditional business elite, mainly conservative Democrats, felt excluded and denounced the program as a waste of their taxes, doubly odious to these erstwhile slaveholders because newly enfranchised African American voters backed the District government. This group lobbied Congress to investigate alleged corruption and cost overruns—targeting Babcock’s purported complicity. Congress duly empaneled a select committee, which held its first hearing on March 5, 1874. Democratic newspapers began fanning the flames of scandal.
Babcock wanted Whitley to infiltrate detectives into this nest of critics. To avoid any risk of exposing the White House’s involvement, they would not report to Babcock, but to his protégé, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Richard Harrington, who wore two hats as both the chief prosecutor for the city, and its legal representative before the congressional investigative committee.
The request was legally and ethically questionable, as Whitley must have known. It might also have occurred to him that Babcock deliberately started the rumor about a threat to Whitley’s job, to maneuver the Secret Service chief into this dubious task.
Whitley also knew, though, that he had executed other murky assignments for Babcock and for Attorney General Williams, without unduly negative consequences. To the contrary, doing the dirty work for powerful figures gave Whitley some leverage over them, and, with it, an added measure of the job security he craved.
Babcock’s new proposal seemed especially safe to Whitley since both the president of the United States’ right-hand man and the top prosecutor in the city, Richard Harrington, would be in on it. In general, Whitley believed that the ends justified the means, and this mission could be construed to illustrate the maxim: the intended targets were Southern-sympathizing Democratic foes of the Grant administration and Reconstruction who, though less violent than the Ku Klux Klan, basically represented the same social, political, and racial ideology.
The Secret Service chief told Babcock he would get right on it.
By the middle of March, he had delegated Babcock’s mission to Ichabod C. Nettleship, who, in turn, assigned two part-time informants to infiltrate Babcock’s opponents in the Washington press corps. After a few days, Harrington had heard nothing from them, and Whitley became impatient. Returning to Washington with Nettleship to check on the spies, the Secret Service chief discovered that
one had disappeared, while the other had been arrested for selling bootleg cigars.
Whitley told Nettleship to forget about them, as well as the relatively unambitious goal of gathering intelligence on Babcock’s journalistic critics. He had a new, more aggressive plan, he explained, which, “if it worked out, would settle the whole thing.”32
The source for much of the negative press about the public works program was Columbus Alexander, a printer and landowner descended from the English earl whose lands formed the southern half of the national capital’s original territory (which had since been restored to Virginia under the name of Alexandria). A pro-Southern slaveholder before the Civil War, Alexander was now obsessed with the idea that one of the city’s leading contractors had covered up his corruption by giving the congressional investigating committee false business records. Alexander had let it be known he would not rest until he discovered the real records.33
Whitley had no idea whether Alexander’s obsession had a basis in fact. But he thought it could be used against him. Suppose, he mused to Nettleship, that the Secret Service arranged to get Alexander the records he so eagerly sought—but under circumstances calculated to destroy his reputation. Specifically, undercover agents posing as government insiders could offer to procure the documents for Alexander, no questions asked, and, if he agreed, frame him for ordering their theft.
A staged burglary of documents planted in United States Attorney Richard Harrington’s office safe would be perfect, since anyone would believe that the city’s lawyer might have held the “real” records. The Secret Service would recruit safecrackers, and Harrington would be in on the plot, too. When Harrington “discovered” the document theft, Whitley explained, he would drop the charges against the “burglars,” in return for their testimony pinning the whole thing on Columbus Alexander. They would then swear to Alexander’s guilt in court. It would discredit not only Alexander, but all of Babcock’s political foes.
Even for the intellectual author of James Ivins’s abduction, this plan was creative, bold, and convoluted. Nettleship thought it might be a bit too convoluted.
“It is a funny job,” he told Whitley. “Suppose it don’t work. What will become of us?”34 Nettleship said he wanted no part of a plot that would physically hurt Alexander or anyone else.
Whitley assured Nettleship that the purpose was purely to “throw muck” on Alexander and his political allies. As for the risk the scheme might go awry, it was hardly worth worrying: friends in high places would protect them. Reluctantly, Nettleship agreed to the plan. The chief had never led him astray before.
* * *
Whitley had employed both permanent and part-time detectives to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in the South. Once the violence ebbed, and the Secret Service’s operations wound down, he laid off some of the part-timers. For months thereafter, they found themselves at loose ends. Whitley decided to recruit the key man in his plot to frame Columbus Alexander from this pool of tested but underemployed talent.
Michael Hayes was a New Yorker with a checkered past, who had spent much of his time before and during the Civil War wandering Latin America, from Cuba to Uruguay. This was the sort of thing that small-time criminals sometimes did to escape the law, but there was no proof of wrongdoing by Hayes as of 1871, when Whitley hired him and sent him to Alabama. Hayes, who had learned Southern ways and idioms during his previous travels, used the name “Major Hudson,” and worked undercover tending bar in a Tuscaloosa, Alabama, tavern frequented by Klansmen.35 Since the end of that mission, however, Hayes and his wife had struggled to make ends meet in Manhattan. Hayes earned extra dollars selling Whitley occasional tips on smuggling activity in the port of New York.
On April 5, 1874, a messenger arrived at Hayes’s house on Roosevelt Street in New York, bearing the surprising news that the Secret Service chief wanted to see him. At Bleecker Street, Hayes was ushered into Whitley’s office, where Whitley rose from behind his desk and crossed the room to shake Hayes’s hand. This unusually friendly gesture aroused Hayes’s suspicion, but Whitley, in his inimitable manner, persuaded him to go to Washington, where, the Secret Service chief said, Ichabod C. Nettleship would explain a big job to him.
In the nation’s capital, Nettleship sounded sympathetic about Hayes’s personal problems. Whitley always liked Hayes, Nettleship told him. “It’s not our fault you have not got any appointment or steady work,” he said. Now Hayes’s luck was about to change, precisely because the chief esteemed him so highly. “I have got something for you that will keep you employed while Colonel Whitley has the division,” Nettleship confided.
Nettleship laid out the safe burglary plot and Hayes’s part in it. Hayes, posing as someone with access to the documents Columbus Alexander wanted, would contact Alexander through an intermediary, to whom Nettleship would soon introduce Hayes. If Alexander took the bait, Hayes would recruit some safecrackers, and introduce one of them to Alexander—as a courier—so that the businessman would recognize him when he came to his house to deliver the documents.
Harrington’s part would be crucial. He would be sent a fake anonymous letter “warning” of an impending theft of documents from his office safe. Citing this letter, he would ask the Washington superintendent of police to join him on a stakeout outside his office on the night of the “burglary.” Harrington and the police chief would follow the “burglar” as he left the building, to find out where he took the “stolen” papers. When the “burglar” reached Alexander’s house, and Alexander emerged to take the documents, the lawman, unaware of what was really afoot, would make the arrest.
In addition to the Secret Service chief’s gratitude, and a permanent place in the division, Hayes would earn $2,000.
The moon was bright, and all was quiet on the streets of Washington as midnight, April 23, 1874, the start time for Whitley’s elaborate caper, approached. Harrington, along with Washington’s superintendent of police, and his chief detective, crouched behind a billboard at the corner of Fifth Street and Louisiana Avenue, in the heart of the city. They were watching Harrington’s office across the street.
Ten minutes went by, then thirty. Things were running behind schedule. It was not until after 1:00 a.m. that a loud explosion shattered the silence: the safe had at last been blown. Neighbors threw open their windows to see what all the commotion was about. Someone emerged from the office carrying a large bag. At Harrington’s urging, he and the two police officials followed; yet the man with the bag seemed confused as to where he was going. At one point he paused to ask the men behind him for directions to Columbus Alexander’s house.
Whitley’s plan was falling apart. By the time the suspected “burglar” reached Alexander’s stately mansion at the corner of Tenth and F Streets, the superintendent of police was beginning to suspect some sort of hoax. Then the “burglar” stood in front of the mansion for almost half an hour, furiously ringing the doorbell, while the house remained dark and no one answered. Due to the delays in blowing open the safe, the man had arrived long after Alexander and everyone else in his mansion was sound asleep.
Finally, the police superintendent decided he could wait no longer; he walked across the street to arrest the burglar. There would be no incriminating documents handed to Alexander, no devastating frame-up of Orville E. Babcock’s political opponents.
Off the group went to the city jail, a mere five blocks away. Upon their arrival, Whitley’s coconspirator Richard Harrington was suddenly overcome by a sensation much different from the feeling of triumph he had expected when the evening began. He turned from his companions and threw up on the sidewalk.
* * *
Orville E. Babcock simply shook his head when Hiram C. Whitley came to see him at the White House three days after the botched safe burglary.36 Babcock was aghast at how far beyond his orders Whitley had gone; the president’s secretary never would have approved this outlandish scheme. “I thought you were smarter than tha
t,” he scolded the Secret Service chief.
Though initially contained within governmental circles, news of the affair became public in early May. The police superintendent who had arrested the burglar at Columbus Alexander’s house filed a report with the city’s legislature, in which he suggested the burglary was a setup, somehow intended to smear Alexander, and called for an investigation. This document leaked to the press, prompting Congress to order the committee that was already looking into alleged corruption in the District to probe the safe burglary, as well.
Whitley and his confederates mounted a frenzied cover-up. By the time the congressional committee started closed-door hearings on the case in mid-May, Harrington had arranged for the jailed burglar to swear out an affidavit saying he was indeed working for Alexander. Whitley and Nettleship, meanwhile, had paid Michael Hayes $200 for an affidavit corroborating the burglar’s. Then they sent him to Toronto, with the promise of an eight dollars per day stipend until it was safe for him to return to the United States.
Both affidavits reached the committee before Whitley, Nettleship, and Harrington testified. Believing they could not be contradicted by either of the participants in the burglary who were known to the committee, the three falsely, but confidently, swore they were not involved.
Whitley had conceived the entire plot, which meant his lies to the committee would have to be especially brazen. He claimed that he knew “nothing in any way whatever, in the slightest,” about the caper before reading about it in the newspapers. He denied having seen Hayes since his work infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan ended almost two years previously. Whitley swore he had no idea where Hayes was now, but vowed that “if you will apply to the Treasury Department for my services, I will do my level best to find him.”37
Whitley assumed the cover-up would work as long as Michael Hayes followed the rule set forth in the new Secret Service Circular of Instructions: “Employees must observe the utmost secrecy in all transactions relating to the business of the service.” What Whitley did not know was that Hayes had already broken it.