by Noel Behn
13
Payoff
At 7:45 P.M. Saturday, April 2, the bell at 2974 Decatur Avenue rang. John F. Condon’s daughter, Myra, opened the front door to a taxi driver. He was thin, dark, young, and definitely not the same cabby who had delivered the March 12 message, which had sent Condon and Al Reich to Woodlawn Cemetery, where Jafsie met with John. The driver handed an envelope to Myra, went to his cab, and drove off. Myra brought it inside, where Lindbergh, Breckinridge, Condon, and Reich were waiting. The handwriting Lindy read was familiar:
Dear Sir: Take a car and follow tremont Ave. to the east until you reach the number 3225 tremont ave.
It is a nursery
Bergen
Greenhauses florist
Ther is a table standing outside right on the door. You find letter undernead the table covert with a stone, read and follow instruction.
Then came the interlacing signature of three circles and three tiny perforations and more of the message:
Don’t speak to anyone on the way. If there is a radio alarm for policecar, we warn you we have same equipment have the money in one bundle
we give you 3/4 houer to reach the place.1
Special Agent Lackey, in a stakeout across the street, failed to observe Charles Lindbergh and John F. Condon as they exited 2974 Decatur Avenue, carrying a wooden box containing fifty thousand dollars’ ransom as well as a package in which another twenty thousand dollars was wrapped. Nor did he notice them get into Al Reich’s Ford coupe—a car John might have seen when he met with Condon at Woodlawn Cemetery—and leave.
Lindbergh drove; Condon was beside him. Heading in the direction of Long Island Sound, they arrived at 3225 East Tremont Avenue, a dark, closed floral shop and greenhouse bearing the name J. A. Bergen. Condon walked up to a table outside the establishment. On the table was a stone. Beneath the stone was an envelope, which he brought back to the car. Under the dash lights, he and Lindbergh read the instructions:
cross the street and walk to the next corner and
follow whittemore Ave to the soud
take the money with you. come alone
and walk
I will meet you.2
Lindbergh wanted to accompany Jafsie. The old man, who had so often ignored instructions contained in ransom communications, resisted on the grounds that the messages of this day stipulated that only he should meet with John. Lindbergh remained at the car.
Condon dealt more liberally with other dictates of the current ransom notes. Instead of bringing along the money as the unknown author stated, he left it with Lindbergh before crossing the street and starting along Tremont Avenue. The previous point of rendezvous had been a graveyard, Woodlawn Cemetery, and so, it turned out, was this. The section of Tremont Avenue he was walking along ran beside St. Raymond’s Cemetery, a swampland reclaimed in 1877 and long favored by the families of Bronx-Irish politicians but whose most notorious denizen was the recently interred twenty-three-year-old Vincent (“Mad Dog”) Coll.
Lindbergh watched from the Ford coupe as Condon, rather than obey the message’s final instruction and turn onto Whittemore Avenue, an ominous dirt road leading in among gravestones, behind which a whole kidnapping gang could hide, continued on along Tremont Avenue, gazing beyond the tombstones nearest him. He stopped at the main gate of the cemetery, looked about for a moment or so, then walked back to the Whittemore Avenue intersection, from which he yelled to Lindbergh in the car, “I guess there’s no one here. We’d better go back.”3
From inside the cemetery a voice called out what would prove to be the most fateful words of the entire event, “Hey Doctor, over here.”4 Jafsie heard it. So did Lindbergh, who was sitting a distance away in the car.
Condon disappeared into St. Raymond’s Cemetery. Lindbergh could not see or hear him. Some ten or twelve minutes later Jafsie returned to the car, bearing good news indeed. Two previous ransom messages had warned that information as to the child’s whereabouts wouldn’t be forthcoming until eight hours after the ransom had been paid. Now Condon told Lindbergh that not only had he just talked to John in the graveyard but that John had gone to fetch a “receipt,” a note saying just where the baby was. Jafsie also contended that John had agreed to accept fifty thousand dollars as ransom, rather than seventy thousand dollars.
Lindbergh handed Condon the wooden box containing the fifty thousand dollars, which the aged pedant carried into the graveyard. After a brief interlude he returned to the car without the box. Condon gave Lindbergh an envelope and relayed “what had happened and what had been said.”5
“John said you are not to open it for six hours. He said the baby is all right. They need six hours to escape.” The child, according to Condon, was on a boat called the Nelly.
In an action that a preponderance of investigators and newsmen would find incredible, Lindbergh put the unopened envelope into his pocket and drove off. Why not read it on the spot? Because, as it would later be explained, Lindy was honoring his end of the bargain with the kidnappers.
Less than a mile from the cemetery, Condon had them stop at a house he owned. Once on the porch, Jafsie provided Lindbergh with a rationale for reading the message without further delay: “You didn’t promise the kidnappers anything. I made the promise.”7
Lindbergh opened the envelope. The note was written in a hand similar to all the other ransom communications.
the boy is on Boad Nelly
it is a small Boad 28 feet
long, two person are on the
Boad, the are innosent.
you will find the Boad between
Horseneck Beach and gay Head
near Elizabeth Island8
Special Agent Lackey saw Charles Lindbergh and John F. Condon return to Condon’s home and would subsequently report that they were in possession of two black bags. He would also say that when they came out again, they were with Henry Breckinridge. By all other accounts, Al Reich was also with them.9
The four men left in Lindbergh’s car and drove to Mrs. Morrow’s townhouse, at 7 East Seventy-second Street, Manhattan, where other members of the inner circle were waiting. While Condon spoke with T-men Irey and Wilson about John, Lindbergh, Breckinridge, and other advisers began making preparations. The plan that evolved through the night and in the early hours of April 3 had the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard supporting an effort in which Lindbergh would use an amphibious navy plane to land at the Nelly and retrieve the child, then fly with him to the Aviation Country Club in Hicksville, Long Island.10
At dawn Condon was along as Lindbergh, Breckinridge, and Irey boarded a huge Sikorsky aircraft outside Bridgeport, Connecticut. Al Reich, left behind on the ground, drove Lindbergh’s car to the Hicksville country club to await their arrival with the Eaglet.11
Though the atmosphere in the cabin of the airborne Sikorsky was charged with optimism, the singular voice heard above the reverberating clamor of the engines was that of Jafsie Condon reciting Hamlet.12 With Lindbergh at the controls for much of the morning’s search above Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod, and the adjoining Elizabeth Islands, many of the sweeps were flown only a few feet above the surface of the ocean. After six hours in the air, no boat that fit John’s description of the Nelly had been spotted, nor was the craft seen by a navy warship and the half dozen Coast Guard boats that had joined the search armada.
Landing in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, and debarking for lunch at the Cuttyhunk Hotel on Cuttyhunk Island, Lindbergh and his party were confronted by a group of reporters who had been tipped off to his flight over the area. Breckinridge did what he could to cut off their questions and protect his party behind a wall of no comments. Never having seen or heard of Condon, the journalists presumed he was John Hughes Curtis, and ergo, for the wrong reason they correctly surmised that Lindbergh was looking for the ship on which his son was allegedly being kept.
The afternoon search from the Sikorsky and by navy and Coast Guard ships failed to locate the Nelly. At day’s end Lindbergh landed the large
seaplane at the prearranged spot on Long Island, where Al Reich was waiting with his car. Lindy drove Reich, Condon, Breckinridge, and Irey back to New York City in silence. When he finally did speak, it was to tell Condon that they’d been double-crossed by the kidnappers.13
Pulling up to a subway stop, Lindbergh asked, “Well, Doctor, what’s the bill for your services?”14 Jafsie would later write that he was insulted by the offer and that he marveled at Lindbergh’s naïveté in believing the kidnappers could be trusted, even though it was Condon himself who had strenuously implied that John was telling him the truth and could be dealt with.
In the wake of Special Agent Lackey’s reports for the night of April 2, the BI realized that a ransom had been paid not by John Hughes Curtis, as the papers were implying was about to occur, but by a man whose identity Charles Lindbergh and Henry Breckinridge had gone to untoward lengths trying to keep secret, John F. (“Jafsie”) Condon. For J. Edgar Hoover and his men it was a profound breakthrough and particularly sweet revenge for having been excluded from the case until now. With Treasury Department people already on the scene and with the ransom payment occurring on NYPD turf, those agencies would be active in tracking down the men who got the money, but BI operatives appeared confident that they also had a firm foot in the manhunt door.
BI operatives wasted no time in speaking to Condon and learning of his nocturnal meeting with John in St. Raymond’s. One of the things he revealed was that John, to come and meet him that night, had scaled a low fence at the cemetery. Jumping to the ground on the other side, John’s foot sunk into the soft earth. On Monday morning, April 4, with Lindbergh back in the air searching for the Nelly and the previous “Yes. Everything O.K. Jafsie” ad running again in the New York American, BI Special Agent Thomas H. Sisk accompanied Condon and his son-in-law, Ralph Hacker, in a probe for the footprint John may have left when leaping over the wall. They found it on top of a grave.15 Hacker and Sisk made a plaster of Paris cast of the impression.
The joint Lindbergh-Navy-Coast Guard air-and-sea hunt for the Nelly that same April 4 was being well covered by reporters. The Lone Eagle, who was flying alone, had switched to a Lockheed-Vega monoplane and brought along a small suitcase and his son’s favorite blanket. The combined search was no more productive than that of the previous day. Lindbergh landed at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport and drove back to Sorrel Hill, where it was later reported that he spoke by phone to Henry Breckinridge, who was at Condon’s home. Breckinridge, with Jafsie overhearing, told the Lone Eagle it was premature to assume they had been betrayed by John and the gang. He expressed confidence that the baby was well.16 Patience and a firm belief that the kidnappers would make contact became the strategy for the specious future. Condon thought it might help to rouse John through a series of ads in the Bronx Home News. Breckinridge agreed. The first one ran on Tuesday, April 5:
What is wrong? Have you crossed me? Please, better directions. Jafsie.
Jafsie received no word that day or the next. On April 7, headlines announced that John Hughes Curtis claimed to have met with the kidnapping gang. Gaston Means was continuing to tell the same thing to Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean.
It’s conceivable that Charles Lindbergh’s ostensible preoccupation with locating the Nelly after leaving St. Raymond’s Cemetery the night of April 2 provided an understandable explanation as to why more care wasn’t taken not to bend, fold, or excessively touch the final message from John, thereby preserving whatever latent fingerprints the kidnappers may have left. Dr. Erastus Mead Hudson’s silver nitrate technique of print detection offered both a possible method of identifying the kidnapping gang and a way of making sure the baby was still alive. Early on in the investigation, Hudson recovered latent prints from toys in the nursery believed to have been those of the missing child. During the protracted communications between Condon and the mythical kidnappers, Lindbergh could have asked that fingerprints of the Eaglet be provided to establish that the gang actually had his son. This was not done. Nor had there been any methodical attempt to preserve latent prints on the messages received by Lindbergh, Breckinridge, and later, Condon.
As the Lone Eagle took to the air and began his search for the Nelly, the primary means that investigators had of tracking down John and the gang was through the ransom money. If Lindbergh had had his way, this, too, would have been denied the police.
The risk involved in circulating the list of serial numbers for the currency was evident to any law-enforcement agency: Should news of what had been done get out, the kidnappers might feel betrayed and recover the child before Lindbergh could reach him on the ship. And news did get out. The U.S. Treasury Department prepared a fifty-seven-page list of serial numbers for the ransom loot, which it began to distribute on April 6. To ensure that the media, and ergo the kidnappers, not know, the booklets were distributed to banking institutions without saying the money was related to the Lindbergh case. Two days later, April 8, a Newark bank teller concluded that the serial numbers were from a ransom being paid for the baby. He relayed his hunch to an Evening News of Newark reporter, who put it into print. The story was picked up nationally, and the following day Lindbergh had Schwarzkopf publicly acknowledge that a fifty-thousand-dollar ransom payment had been made and that the kidnappers had failed to return the child.
Laura Vitray had spent almost six weeks covering the story for Hearst’s New York Journal. She had followed the Jafsie ads with avid fascination but, like other reporters, knew nothing of John F. Condon. She read about John Hughes Curtis and Sam and heard rumors of a ransom payment’s having been made in a cemetery. Like other elements of the investigation, none of it added up. Convinced that a conspiracy was in the making, she wrote a book that was rushed to print and entitled The Great Lindbergh Hullabaloo. In the introduction, datelined April 12, 1932, Vitray maintained that the missing child had not been kidnapped for ransom, nor was he being subjected to any danger. She believed that after the contents of her book were read, the child would be returned. She goes on to say that
no one who has carefully examined the facts from day to day, can believe that the removing of this child from its home was the work of cheap, money-mad thugs, nor of any ordinary kidnappers, whether professional or amateur.
Vitray’s conclusions come in the final two pages of the last chapter, which is called “I Accuse”:
I accuse the newspapers of this country of not reporting to the American people the true facts, as their reporters saw them, concerning the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.
I accuse the hundreds of reporters who have worked on the story close to the centers where the news was breaking, and who were themselves convinced that the story was not wholly on the “up and up,” of having kept that conviction hidden while writing the flood of sentimental slop that was heaved through the press since March first. A few days ago I was one of those guilty reporters myself, but I have stepped out of their ranks.
I accuse the “powers” of the Underworld, who have become the powers which guide and move the financiers and the administration of our government, of having deliberately arranged the Lindbergh “kidnapping,” not for ransom, but as a story, to divert public attention from the grave disaster that threatens this nation at their own hands today. It was the only story, bar none, capable of commanding the front page of every newspaper in the country throughout weeks, and perhaps until next fall.
I accuse the American public and the voters of allowing this one unique issue of a stolen baby to turn their eyes away from those matters which must be solved at once, unless this nation is to be crushed beneath the weight of foreign tyranny, and of inner corruption.17
Two days later, on April 14, a five-dollar note from the ransom payment was discovered by a teller in a New York City bank. It was the second bill to have turned up since the money disappeared into St. Raymond’s Cemetery. The first note, a twenty-dollar gold certificate, had also been recovered from a bank in New York City—a bill, it was later determined, that had been spent
three days after the ransom payment was made.
14
A Star Is Born
Charles Lindbergh was the greatest news getter of them all, Henry Breckinridge was as skilled a public relations man as existed. If their aim was to have the press, public, and police look in the wrong direction—as I fervently believe—no better helpmate could have existed than Dr. Condon. Condon was a runaway mouth who ordinarily would have been the last person in whom either Lindbergh or Breckinridge would have invested their trust. If, as I suspect, Lindbergh wanted done with the matter as quickly as possible, Condon would prove a bewildering impediment. The old doctor took on a life of his own, which was somewhat akin to riding a roller coaster.
On Monday, April 11, while papers across the land reproduced the list of serial numbers for the ransom loot, the New York Times and the Bronx Home News came up with the biggest scoop since the child disappeared. A seventy-two-year-old former school principal named John F. Condon, using his initials, J.F.C., or Jafsie, had acted as Lindbergh’s go-between and delivered the ransom to Cemetery John in the dead of night. The media descended on the Bronx. Condon was ready with a standing-room-only press conference in his parlor. It was a stirring performance, during which he cautioned that many facts must be withheld, opined that the large search effort may have scared off the kidnappers, and expressed hope that the abductors would honor their pledge and return the Eaglet. Reporters had finally come face-to-face with Jafsie Condon.
Whereas Lindbergh, Schwarzkopf, and official state-police spokesmen were guarded and usually terse in their comments to the fourth estate, John F. Condon inundated journalists with information. “Ask him a question and duck” was how one reporter described an early encounter with Condon. Jafsie’s style was expansive, grandiloquent, and often bufoonish, and the media wasted no time in criticizing Schwarzkopf and his troopers for having allowed Lindbergh to turn over money to the likes of the loquacious pedagogue. They also provided extensive profiles on Condon, as well as lapping up most everything he had to say. One of the things the venerable educator liked to do best at interviews was use an exaggerated Germanic accent when repeating what John had said to him. Garrulous and histrionic, Jafsie went beyond being hot copy; he was the first superstar to emerge from the crime, and he relished every moment in the spotlight.