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Lindbergh

Page 21

by Noel Behn


  The chase of ransom money moves into New York City, where the troopers had no authority to pursue the passers of bills, except at the sufferance of the NYPD. Hopes that the extortionist would not be found were dashed in September of 1934 with the first arrest made in the case since its onset. The suspect was in possession of almost fourteen thousand dollars in marked bills but had no direct links to the actual kidnapping, which meant he could only be charged with extortion. This was not good enough for many people, including H. Norman Schwarzkopf. New Jersey officials were intent on extraditing the suspect and trying him for the kidnapping and murder of the Eaglet. This might never have been possible save for Charles Lindbergh.

  Lindbergh had stated that he would never be able to identify the voice he heard call out, “Hey, Doc,” to Jafsie Condon in St. Raymond’s Cemetery. The night had been dark, and Lindy was some two hundred feet away. Whatever his motives, Lindbergh reversed himself—identified the suspect’s voice as being the same as the caller of “Hey, Doc.”

  The trial of the century got under way the first week of 1935. The small town in which it took place was overrun by tens of thousands of visitors each day. The press behaved abominably. “It was a sickness,” television journalist David Brinkley would later comment. Time proved that the greatest abomination was the trial itself. Almost every bit of prosecution testimony and evidence was either false, contrived, or tampered with. The defense was at best mediocre, at worst inept and inane. The accused man was found guilty and sentenced to death.

  Rigid, unbending, manipulative Charles Lindbergh came face-to-face with the reality that he had, by theory and with sworn testimony, helped condemn an innocent man to the electric chair.

  17

  Money Trails and Old Doubts

  Charles Lindbergh had opposed the two prime means investigators had for identifying and apprehending the unknown kidnapping gang. He insisted on keeping all law-enforcement personnel far away from the site selected to pay the ransom, thereby frustrating attempts to follow the felons. Nor would he allow the serial numbers of the ransom currency to be recorded.

  Two members of the Sorrel Hill inner circle, Jimmy Finn of the New York Police Department and Elmer Irey of the IRS, had energetically urged Lindbergh to allow the listing of serial numbers. Charles Lindbergh had never changed his mind regarding an investigation decision. It didn’t look as though he would in this instance, either. Elmer Irey was persistent in reminding Lindy that not recording serial numbers was a grave mistake—and one likely to evoke strong criticism. Public credibility was high on the Lindbergh-Breckinridge agenda.

  Lindbergh did not particularly like or trust two Internal Revenue men assisting Irey: Frank Wilson and Arthur Madden.1 Part of this may have had to do with the perception that, recorded or unrecorded, the IRS was obligated to track down the ransom loot after the money was paid—and would live up to this obligation. There was also pressure on Lindy from Jimmy Finn to list the serial numbers, but who was to say any of the bills would turn up in New York City, the only place Finn had jurisdiction. No, it was Irey who posed a potential credibility threat. But listing the bills could set off a nationwide treasure hunt that might heighten and prolong the case after the baby was found. Though perhaps not if only financial institutions and selected retail businesses were given lists of the numbers—lists that did not specify the bills came from the ransom, as Irey had been suggesting.

  Lindbergh, for the first time since his son was reported missing, reversed himself on a manhunt decision. Serial numbers of the loot could be recorded. The following night, April 2, 1932, fifty thousand dollars of the seventy thousand dollars in recorded currency disappeared into St. Raymond’s Cemetery.

  Three days later, on April 5, the first bill of the ransom loot, a twenty-dollar gold certificate, was detected in New York City at the Ninety-sixth Street and Amsterdam Avenue branch of the East River Savings Bank of Manhattan. The man into whose account it had been deposited had no idea where he had got it. Four days after that, as the result of a news leak, Lindbergh had Schwarzkopf acknowledge that a ransom had been paid. By now papers around the world were reprinting a breakdown of the ransom-money serial numbers sent to banks and certain businesses—a breakdown that showed the fifty-thousand-dollar payment contained 4,750 bills, of which 2,000 were in the denomination of five-dollar bills, 1,500 in tens, and 1,250 in twenties. The five-dollar bills were U.S. Treasury notes, which bore red seals and red serial numbers. America was still on the gold standard, and the majority of ten- and twenty-dollar bills were U.S. gold certificates.

  On April 14, a second ransom bill surfaced, this one a five-dollar note. Like the twenty-dollar certificate, it was discovered by a teller in a New York City bank. Not until after the body of the baby was found, nearly a month later, did more money appear: two five-dollar bills at different New York City banks on May 19, another five dollars, again at a Manhattan bank, on May 23. The May 19 money was traced to a Sinclair Oil Company in Brooklyn and a Bickford’s Restaurant next to the bank where it had been deposited. The May 23 bill was tracked to a dry goods store on Orchard Street in Manhattan. No one at any of the establishments remembered who had passed the notes.2

  The great American money hunt was on—and the New Jersey State Police’s jealously guarded control of the investigation had all but eroded. So had Lindbergh’s hope that the matter would quickly be forgotten. Adding to Lindbergh’s despair, and prolonging and often escalating interest in the case, was the internecine competition among law-enforcement personalities.

  New York City and its police department, not the New Jersey State Police, had the jurisdiction to track down whoever was spending the bills. The commissioner of the New York Police Department, no fan of H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s, was only too happy to inform the media, loud and clear, that his boys in blue were on the trail. Named to head the unit of NYPD investigators assigned to the money chase was a fifty-one-year-old detective who had been the department’s liaison with Lindbergh: Jimmy Finn.

  Finn had been a fixture at Sorrel Hill from early on in the case and had learned firsthand he was on a one-way street when dealing with Schwarzkopf and the Jersey troopers. They accepted much of the information he and the NYPD gathered but shut them off from their own investigatory activities. With ransom bills surfacing only in New York City, the shoe was now on the other foot—Detective Jimmy Finn’s. The state police could pitch in and help with the New York money hunt if they liked, but Jimmy intended it to be the NYPD’s ball game. The troopers dispatched a twelve-man unit to New York, but submitting to someone else’s guidelines wasn’t always easy.

  The Bureau of Investigation also had a presence in New York City. It had opened a Manhattan office at 370 Lexington Avenue, to which a detachment of fifteen special agents was assigned. The agent in charge was Thomas H. Sisk, who quickly established an amicable working relationship with Finn and the NYPD. Like the Jersey troopers, the bureau lads preferred doing things their own way when possible.

  It was Elmer Irey and his T-men who were under the greatest strain regarding the money chase, but not from Jimmy Finn, with whom the IRS man had a practical working relationship. Irey had developed an antagonist as awesome as one could find: J. Edgar Hoover. It was nothing personal, just plain old terroristic interdepartmental rivalry à la the BI director. Back on Friday, May 13, 1932, a day after the child’s body was found, President Herbert Hoover named J. Edgar to oversee and coordinate the activities of all federal agencies involved in the Lindbergh investigation. J. Edgar’s first move was to kick the Internal Revenue Service and the Secret Service off the case. Lindbergh, taken aback by the arbitrary dismissal of Irey, who had become a Sorrel Hill insider, telephoned the secretary of the treasury. Irey and his operatives were reinstated, but J. Edgar Hoover remained in charge.

  A March 18 meeting in Trenton between the New Jersey State Police, the county prosecutor, the IRS, and the BI saw J. Edgar again come up short. The troopers, it was announced, would continue to run the manhunt,
and the federal agencies would provide whatever assistance was asked for by the state police. The final blow to Hoover’s bid for jurisdiction came with the June 22 enactment of the Cochran bill, a federal statute against kidnapping, which was immediately known as the Lindbergh law. It was not retroactive. The kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., was still a state matter, with H. Norman Schwarzkopf and his troopers retaining control of the investigation.

  J. Edgar Hoover had won more than he lost. His department finally had a significant criminal law to enforce and was well on its way to becoming a national police agency with teeth, or as it was usually called by the press, “a federal Bureau of Investigation,” but the official name change would take time.

  Due in part to Jimmy Finn’s urging, Lindbergh had agreed to the Treasury Department’s issuing a fifty-seven-page, two-columns-to-a-page list of ransom-money serial numbers on April 6, 1932—four days after the loot disappeared into St. Raymond’s.3 Before the month was out, the New Jersey State Police abandoned the Treasury booklet and issued their own modified list on a single printed page, which measured seventeen by twenty-five inches and included the troopers’ phone number. One hundred thousand were distributed across the land—sixty thousand went to post offices—along with news of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward offered by the governor of New Jersey.

  As the money chase ended its second month, May, only 6 of the 4,750 ransom bills had surfaced in New York in sixty days—a twenty-dollar gold certificate and a five-dollar note in April, three five-dollar notes in May, one five-dollar note in early June. Jimmy Finn seems to have feared the fifty-seven page Treasury booklet of serial numbers was too cumbersome to be used effectively by the bank tellers, but it was almost a full year before he took action.4

  Finn, whose office was on the second floor of the NYPD’s Greenwich Street station house, off Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, had over a dozen officers assigned to assist him in the dollar chase.5 Even so, he personally followed up on every reported ransom bill. He also telephoned the Fed each day to see if any listed money had turned up. As an extra incentive for bank tellers to be on the alert, Finn helped persuade Lindbergh to offer a two-dollar bonus for each bill that was reported. Much later on he got the city of New York to do the same thing.

  H. Norman Schwarzkopf had always smelled a conspiracy, if not necessarily to steal the baby, then certainly to extort ransom money. Another likelihood was that a horrible hoax had been perpetrated. His three candidates for these possibilities were John Hughes Curtis, Morris Rosner, and John F. Condon. Part of his reaction may have been borne out of frustration: being excluded from Lindy’s dealings with the trio. Even if Lindy hadn’t voluntarily abdicated from the manhunt, public outcry would have forced H. Norman to take some type of action. As it was, he told Lindbergh that he had to deal with the three go-betweens as prime suspects.

  Late in the afternoon of May 12, the day the baby was found in the woods, the state police escorted John Hughes Curtis from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Schwarzkopf’s office at the Lindbergh estate. Waiting for him in addition to H. Norman were Captain Lamb and Lieutenant Keaten of the NJSP, Jersey City PD’s Harry Walsh, Detective Warren Moffat of the Newark Police Department, IRS agent Frank Wilson, and Anthony M. Hauck, the Hunterdon County prosecutor who would most likely be trying the murderers when they were apprehended. The contentious welcoming committee made it clear to Curtis that they had questions to ask and that truth was the commodity they sought. His suggestion that they wait for Lindbergh to arrive was brushed aside. The grilling was harsh and direct. The men in the room had never been privy to the Lindbergh-Curtis activities; now they were. Detailed descriptions of Nils, Eric, John, Dynamite, Hilda, and the others deepened suspicions that Curtis was what Schwarzkopf, Lamb, and Keaten would later claim they had always believed: a fraud or worse. When Lindbergh finally reached Sorrel Hill, he asked Curtis what he made of the death. The bankrupt shipyard operator had no answers but suggested that he and the Lone Eagle hurry and catch up with Hilda and Sam, who might know. The advice was ignored. Captain Lamb took over the questioning of Curtis, whom the state police planned to keep away from the media as long as possible. On May 17, after five days of intensive interrogation, John Hughes Curtis confessed to having perpetrated a hoax on Charles Lindbergh and was taken into custody by the troopers.

  John F. (“Jafsie”) Condon was questioned the next day, Friday, the thirteenth of May. As always, he was garrulous and his statement slightly discrepant. The NYPD and the BI wanted time with him as well. So did the Bronx County attorney and, of course, the press. Whatever investigators may have been told by him, the public was reading of yet another encounter Dr. Condon claimed to have had, this one with four of the actual kidnappers. It occurred on a boat off City Island, a popular Bronx recreational park. Condon claimed he had gone there to expedite the ransom-release of the baby. On seeing that the four men were armed, he proclaimed, “Gentlemen, I come to you as an umpire of a baseball game. I am not armed and have no occasion to fire.”6 Three of the men put away their guns. Condon described the fourth man in great detail. His name was Doc, and he seemed to be Scandinavian. What exactly happened to Doc’s gun was not mentioned, but there was no doubt that he was John.

  On May 21, four days after the arrest of John Hughes Curtis, a Bronx grand jury began an inquiry into the ransom payment at St. Raymond’s Cemetery. Among those slated to give secret testimony were Jafsie Condon, Henry Breckinridge, Max Rosenhain, Milton Gaglio, Al Reich, and Joseph Perrone, the cab driver who had been paid a dollar to deliver a ransom letter to Condon’s home.

  The New Jersey State Police left their initial questioning of Condon to Jersey City PD’s Harry Walsh. Lindbergh and Breckinridge had publicly vouched for Condon, but after reading in one of the papers Jafsie’s own account of meeting with Cemetery John, Inspector Walsh was convinced that the old man hadn’t told the truth and that he was directly implicated in the kidnapping and murder.7 The Jersey City cop was also confident he could get a confession from him. Jafsie was brought to the state-police barracks at Alpine, New Jersey, on June 2, 1932, where Walsh’s blunt, accusatory style resulted in a raucous four hours of confrontation but no admission of guilt from the imperious former school principal.8 Subsequent searches of Condon’s Bronx home and summer shack, phone taps, and mail surveillance resulted in the old man’s receiving a clean bill of health from the state police, but he remained the target of a great many skeptical lawmen, a number of whom suspected he was nothing more than another Gaston Means, John Hughes Curtis, or Morris Rosner.

  Schwarzkopf had not been privy to most of what had transpired between Lindbergh and the various go-betweens. Now, as interrogators began to elicit the facts, many a lawman was startled, if not alarmed, by what was learned. One of the most troubling disclosures came from Morris Rosner. Like John F. Condon, he was interrogated on Friday, April 13, at Sorrel Hill. The unnerving fact revealed by Mickey was that copies had been made of the original ransom note found in the nursery the night the child disappeared and that these copies were then circulated in the New York City underworld. The avowed motive for this was to try to identify the unknown author of the messages that Lindbergh and Breckinridge had so ardently denied existed. According to Rosner, many criminals had viewed the reproductions, including forgers and bunco artists. The possibility now existed that someone other than the actual kidnappers may have sent the last twelve ransom notes, that this someone had examined a copy of the nursery message and forged the writing style to extort fifty thousand dollars from Lindbergh.

  On May 27, after having analyzed the handwriting evidence the New Jersey State Police had sent him, seventy-one-year-old Albert Sherman Osborn submitted his findings. He was the second, and by far the best-known, expert on questioned documents with whom the troopers had checked. Eleven of the thirteen messages contained “signatures” of three interlacing colored circles dotted by three perforation marks, and according to Osborn’s findings, all thirty-three perfo
rations seemed to have been made by the same instrument, perhaps a nail. The inks used in drawing the circles were commonplace and provided no clues as to where they had been obtained. The same was true of the paper and envelopes. Osborn felt that a German-English dictionary had been referred to while the messages were being composed. He found characteristics of German sentence structure and phraseology throughout the text. The addressee on one of the envelopes, “Mr. Doctor John F. Condon” was distinctly German.9

  Like that of the previous expert from whom the state police had received an opinion, Osborn’s general conclusion was that only one person had written all thirteen messages. But this was not unequivocal. Osborn did concede that there was a difference between the writing in the first note, found in the nursery, and that in the subsequent twelve—as would be elaborated on at the trial. He felt this may have been due to the author’s intentional attempts to disguise his handwriting in the first note or perhaps because if was composed under difficult physical conditions, such as in an automobile.

  Despite the state police’s acceptance of Osborn’s single-writer theory, another body of thinking held that an extortionist had got hold of a copy of the first ransom note, imitated the writing style, and in an effort to obtain the money, had sent the next twelve messages received by Lindbergh, Breckinridge, and Condon. Put in simpler terms, two different criminal elements were involved with the tragic death: the kidnapper-murderers and the extortionists. There was nothing unique about this in 1932. Several newspapers pointed out that the burgeoning rash of kidnappings for money over the past several years had been accompanied by a dramatic rise in the interception of ransom payments by sharp-eyed forgers and con men. In years to come, newsmen as prestigious as Edwin Newman would cite the two-different-party theory regarding the Lindbergh ransom notes and payment.

 

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