Lindbergh

by Noel Behn

  In a letter dated September 18, 1933, Hoover reminded Schwarzkopf that the DI had the legislated license to assist in any other law-enforcement effort to find the abductors of the Lindbergh child, and he also invited the state police to provide his organization with a summary of their investigation to date.3 For H. Norman, J. Edgar’s reemergence in the case created a public relations dilemma. Hoover was as skillful at manipulating the media as Schwarzkopf was inept. When J. Edgar withdrew most of his special agents from the New York City investigation, reporters seemed not to notice. Listening to him speak and reading many of his organization’s press statements now that he had decided to get back into the money chase, one might get the impression that he and his Division of Investigation had taken over the Lindbergh case. As J. Edgar, amidst ample media coverage, tried to forge an alliance between the Jersey State Police, the DI, and the NYPD to apprehend the passer or passers of the ransom bills, Schwarzkopf was hard-pressed. To say no would eliminate his troopers from the New York City manhunt, as well as provoking even more ire from antagonistic journalists who were hailing Hoover’s assistance and plan.

  In October of 1933, Schwarzkopf publicly joined and praised the joint state-police-DI-NYPD effort orchestrated by J. Edgar. Privately he told Special Agent Sisk that he had no intention of opening his files to the DI, and he never did.4 Two of Schwarzkopf’s top aides and staunchest loyalists on the state-police force, Captain John J. Lamb and Lieutenant Arthur T. (“Buster”) Keaten, were openly hostile to the arrangement. Lamp and Keaten had supervised the troopers’ handling of the Lindbergh case since the onset, but in the opinion of the author and BBC investigative reporter Ludovic Kennedy, they were “third raters” when it came to standard police work.5 Keaten was in direct command of the twelve troopers dispatched to New York City. His claim to fame as a crime buster was that he had worked on the troopers’ end of the sorry investigation of the Hall-Mills murders.6 Keaten told Special Agent Sisk that “‘Roosevelt and his gang’ were dangerous Communists and that when the Republicans were elected, ‘Schwarzkopf goes in.’”7

  Captain John Lamb also listed the state police’s minimal participation in the Hall-Mills case as his top credit. An excitable, not too clever, red-faced man, Lamb joined Keaten in criticizing Scotland Yard and launching tirades against almost everyone else who had tried to help in the case, including the Northwest Mounted Police, the New York Police Department, and investigators and inspectors for the Department of Labor and the Treasury Department. Lamb as well as Keaten bragged that their men had been ordered not to give any information to the NYPD or special agents of the DI. Lamb referred to Detective Jimmy Finn as a “nitwit” and to New York City’s new police commissioner John F. O’Ryan as an “old broken-down general.”8 Lamb resented the DI as much as the NYPD. Luckily for the trooper interest, Detective William F. Horn had established an affable working relationship with Finn, Sisk, and Special Agent William F. Seery.

  The police, DI men, and troopers of the joint task force were provided with a sketch of Cemetery John made by the cartoonist James T. Barryman from descriptions given to him not only by Jafsie Condon but by Joseph Perrone, the taxi driver who had carried a message from the kidnapper to Condon. There were qualms about this. Perrone had gotten only a fleeting glimpse in the dark at the man wearing a brown topcoat and brown felt hat who had paid him one dollar to deliver a ransom message to Condon, and he originally stated that he would not be able to identify him.9 Under the glare of continued press coverage and notoriety, he began to recall in great detail the face he hadn’t seen clearly enough to describe at the time, and it didn’t differ all that much from what, thanks to Jafsie, had already been printed in the papers. Perrone, once his memory returned, identified quite a few suspects as being John.

  Even though the DI, like most other agencies, was suspicious of Condon, its special agents met with him regularly and displayed mug shots of people who might be Cemetery John. None ever was. Once the New York City money chase got under way, DI as well as NYPD investigators paid specific attention to neighborhoods in New York City where German and Scandinavian languages were spoken, whose accents Condon attributed John as having.

  Locations where ransom currency was recovered were marked with pins on large maps in the offices of both Finn and Sisk, and a pattern emerged:10 More money was being spent in a triangular section of the Bronx than anyplace else, an area that contained no German-speaking communities. Then ransom bills appeared in Albany and Coopers-town, New York. Several showed up in the state of Maine.

  On the clear and cold evening of Sunday, November 26, 1933, at Loew’s Sheridan Square Theatre on Seventh Avenue and Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village—over two hundred blocks south of the Bronx triangle—a man handed a tightly folded bill to cashier Cecile M. Barr. The feature for the evening was Broadway thru a Keyhole, which starred Paul Kelly and Constance Cummings. The script had been written in part by the most powerful gossip columnist in the world, the acerbic Walter Winchell, who was an avid chronicler of the Lindbergh crime and investigation. On opening the compact bill—it was folded once lengthwise and twice across—the young movie-house cashier saw that it was a five-dollar Federal Reserve note. The customer seemed puzzled when she explained that there were three different admission prices. He bought a forty-cent ticket and went inside.

  The next morning the theater’s assistant manager deposited the creased five-dollar note with the other receipts at a Seventh Avenue branch of the Corn Exchange Bank. A teller by the name of William Cody spotted it as coming from the ransom loot. When cashier Barr came on duty at 5:00 that night, she was confronted by Special Agent Manning, Detective Horn, and Jimmy Finn. They wanted to know if she could describe the person who gave her the bill. Indeed she could. He was in his mid-thirties, and even though it was cold out, he hadn’t worn a top-coat over his dark suit. He was of medium height and weight and had a wiry build. A dark slouch hat was pulled down over his forehead, and his blue eyes unwaveringly returned her look from a triangular face formed by high cheekbones, flat cheeks, and a pointed chin.11 Barr claimed that the customer was American and made no mention of his having an accent. She did, however, identify Barryman’s drawing of Cemetery John as being the man who gave her the folded five dollars.

  The excitement prompted by the Sheridan Square Theatre find was short-lived. The second anniversary of the money search came and went with bills continuing to pass but no identifying descriptions of the passer being made. The same was true through the spring and summer of 1934, during which time investigators tracked listed bills to as far away as Kobe, Japan, without developing a relevant lead. For Jimmy Finn, at least, answering a call from a bank was no longer the thrill it had been in the past. Nor was it any fun talking to reporters anymore. Finn and the NYPD, as had the Jersey troopers for a long while, were feeling the bite of impatient and critical journalists. The lack of progress was even putting the DI under fire.

  New territorial spending patterns of ransom money began to appear on the pin-dotted maps in the offices of the DI and the NY police. The elusive passer seemed to have run out of five-dollar bills and was drawing more regularly from his backlog of twenty-dollar gold certificates, which were easier to spot. A flurry of listed twenties had been retrieved in the Yorkville section of upper Manhattan, between East Seventy-ninth and East Eighty-ninth streets. There were fewer but consistent discoveries of ransom bills being paid for merchandise between Fifty-ninth Street in Manhattan and 161st Street in the Bronx along the Lexington Avenue subway line and along the Second Avenue and Third Avenue elevated lines. As far as Finn could project, the passer had taken to traveling between midtown Manhattan and the Bronx in an effort to change ransom loot, but he was concentrating this effort in the business and restaurant district of Little Germany, as Yorkville was known, where German was spoken as frequently as English.

  A second eyewitness was developed when on September 6, 1934, Finn, Horn, and Special Agent Seery traced a ten-dollar gold certificate from th
e Lindbergh ransom loot to a food and vegetable store on Eighty-ninth Street and Third Avenue in Yorkville. A young Italian American clerk by the name of Levatino remembered that the bill had been given to him as payment for a six-cent head of lettuce by a man who was not a regular customer. When the proprietor of the shop chewed Levatino out for making $9.94 worth of change for a ten-dollar bill, the surly stranger had got into an argument with the owner and shaken a menacing finger at him. Levatino’s description of the passer closely fit that of Cecile Barr, the movie-theater cashier. But whereas Barr thought he was American and hadn’t seen the color of his hair, the young clerk said he seemed to be German and that his hair was light brown.

  To Finn’s way of thinking, the same man had given ransom money to Barr and Levatino, a person who in the course of the nine-month lapse of time between the two incidents had evolved from a retiring, unsure, suspicious criminal into an aggressive, self-confident, and somewhat arrogant one.12 Finn and Special Agent Sisk, confident they were breathing down the passer’s neck, agreed that the time had come for extreme action. Five DI special agents, five trooper detectives, and five NYPD plainclothesmen, including Finn, infiltrated the area between East Seventy-ninth Street and East Eighty-ninth Street, where bills were most frequently passed. Each man was assigned a post and given a report-in time. When more ransom surfaced in the area, Sisk pushed for an escalation of manpower and volunteered to send in more special agents. This was the final straw for Captain Lamb of the state police, who feared that Sisk, a man he had never cared for, was conniving to exclude the troopers from the final capture of the passer. “‘Sisk, you and your outfit want to run the whole thing,’ Lamb fumed. ‘You make me sick …’ Sisk replied, ‘What did you contribute to this case except to knock everybody and everything? You do nothing but sit around and make everybody think you’re smart.’ Lamb yelled, ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’” only to be shouted down by other officers of the state police.13 Admitting that he might be jittery, Lamb apologized.

  The number of investigators operating on the streets was upped from fifteen to fifty and bumped again to sixty-four. Twenty-five were from the NYPD, twenty from the DI, and nineteen from the New Jersey State Police. Besides infiltrating the Yorkville terrain, mobile patrols kept a tight watch on vegetable stores and stands along the Lexington Avenue subway and the Second Avenue and Third Avenue elevated railroad stations between Fifty-ninth Street in Manhattan and 161st Street in the Bronx. Other lawmen were stationed at each of the subway and elevated stations along the route; still others walked the blocks between stations, looking for someone who fit the passer’s description. Fat men were eliminated; so were those over five feet ten inches tall. Middle-aged prospects were passed by, along with anyone who didn’t speak German or a Scandinavian language.

  Earlier in the investigation, when Finn and Sisk had noticed that no bills were passed for days or often a week after the local papers reported the recovery of ransom loot, they prevailed on the city’s editors not to mention the finding of future currency. By August of 1934, with the news blackout still in force, a steady stream of ransom bills was turning up. Then Jafsie Condon called both Finn and Sisk—and breathlessly reported that he had been riding on a bus and had seen John walk past on the street, and by the time he got off and gave chase, John was gone.

  As DI, NYPD, and trooper investigators flooded the specified area, Condon went public with the information, thereby shattering the news blackout. Even so, ransom money continued to surface. The Finn-Sisk attempt at censorship received another setback on Sunday evening, September 16, when a listening audience of millions heard Walter Winchell berate New York City bank tellers on his popular evening radio show by saying, “Boys, if you weren’t such a bunch of saps and yaps, you’d have already captured the Lindbergh kidnappers.”

  On the afternoon of September 18, 1934, two days after Walter Winchell’s public scolding of New York City bank personnel, the chief teller of the Corn Exchange Bank at 125th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan reported the finding of two ten-dollar gold certificates from the ransom loot. The DI was notified, and Jimmy Finn, Special Agent William F. Seery, and John J. Lamb of the New Jersey State Police responded. Printed in pencil on the back of one of the two bills they were shown was this notation: “4U-13-41, N.Y.”14 The ten-dollar gold certificate was quickly traced to the Warner-Quinlan filling station at 127th Street and Lexington Avenue, only four blocks away from the bank. Walter Lyle, the station manager, recognized the bill and identified the printing on the back as his. He remembered very well who had given it to him.

  Lyle related that the previous Saturday night, September 15, just before 10:00 P.M., a dark-blue 1930 Dodge sedan pulled into his gas station. An attendant, John Lyons, unscrewed the radiator cap to see if water was needed while Lyle, pump hose in hand, asked the driver if he should fill her up. The driver, a man with a German accent, said no, he only wanted five dollars’ worth of “ethyl.” While Lyle pumped the gas and Lyons cleaned the windshield, the man got out of the car. He wore mechanic’s garb and had a V-shaped face with high cheekbones, flat cheeks, and a pointed chin. “That’s ninety cents,” Lyle said after hanging up the hose and replacing the Dodge’s gas cap. The man took an envelope from his inside jacket pocket and withdrew a ten-dollar gold certificate, which he gave to Lyle. The owners of the station had cautioned against accepting gold certificates, which were no longer legal tender. Lyle had also received a New York Police Department circular asking that they be on the alert for Lindbergh ransom money. Until recently he had kept the accompanying list of serial numbers beside the cash register in the office. Seeing Lyle study the bill, the man had said, “They’re all right. Any bank will take them.” Lyle told him that you didn’t see many gold certificates anymore, to which the man replied, “No. I only have about a hundred left.” After giving the man his change and watching him drive off, Lyle jotted down the license plate number on the back margin of the ten-dollar gold certificate before putting it into the register.15

  Subsequent to interviewing Lyle and leaving the filling station, Jimmy Finn telephoned a friend at the New York State Motor Vehicle Department, read him the license number, and waited on the line while a search was made. Finn was told that the name and address for license plate number 4U-13-41 was Richard Hauptmann of 1279 East 222nd Street, the Bronx.

  Lawmen cautiously infiltrated the area. Two- and three-story wood-and-stucco houses backed by a thick stand of woods and fronted by well-tended lawns and flower beds lined the north side of the twelve-hundred block along East 222nd Street, a distinctly blue-collar neighborhood. Number 1279, the address given for Richard Hauptmann, was something of an exception. The house was ordinary enough, a two-story frame structure coated in tan stucco, with the second floor set back slightly. But the front lawn and ample side yard were tainted with weeds. The side yard ended at a narrow, unpaved, rutted road named Needham Avenue, directly across from which was a ramshackle wooden garage whose double doors were painted red and padlocked. Running along Needham Avenue and on into the woods behind the property were venerable oak and poplar trees. Six and a half blocks to the west, and within hiking distance of the house, 222nd Street ends at Woodlawn Cemetery—the place where Jafsie Condon claimed the first of his two meetings with John had occurred.

  Excited investigators worked through the night amassing whatever information they could on Hauptmann and trying to devise a strategy for apprehending him. He was thirty-five years old and rented the five-room apartment on the second floor of number 1279, where he lived with his wife and young son. Two other families occupied the pair of apartments on the first floor. A search of police files produced no arrests. License-bureau records showed that he had registered the same 1930 Dodge for the past four years and that in 1931 it had been described as dark green, rather than its present dark blue. Jimmy Finn and Special Agent Sisk were more than optimistic that they had finally found their man. Hauptmann had been born in Germany, which meant he probably had an accent. />
  The frenzy increased as the lawmen tried to formulate a plan of attack. Should they invade the house and take him there? What if Hauptmann were armed and prepared for this? Should they let him lead them to his accomplices, assuming he had accomplices? Should they let him lead them to the rest of the ransom money? Should they risk him spotting their surveillance and escaping? One thing was certain, he must be taken alive. A strategy was finally worked out. It was agreed that the operation be kept secret from the press.

  That the atmosphere among the sixty members of the joint task force now involved with the case was electric is understandable.16 The first bill from the ransom payment had been detected in a New York City bank back on April 5, 1932. During the ensuing thirty months, money-chase investigators had traveled seventy-six hundred miles to 716 locations, where bills had been passed and five thousand people had been questioned.17 Now for the first time since the baby disappeared, a suspect was about to be apprehended.

  At 8:15 A.M., Wednesday, September 19, 1934, a wiry five-foot-ten, blue-eyed man emerged through the front door of the house at 1279 East 222nd Street. He weighed approximately 180 pounds and wore a double-breasted blue suit and brown shoes. A soft hat rode on his blond hair. His flat cheeked, V-shaped face resembled somewhat the sketch that cartoonist Barryman had drawn of Cemetery John. The man crossed the front lawn and the rutted road known as Needham Avenue, went to the wooden garage, unlocked the red doors, and entered. A dark-blue 1930 four-door Dodge sedan with license plates that read 4U-13-41 backed out and stopped. The man left the car, closed and padlocked the garage, returned to the Dodge, and drove off. Members of the joint NYPD-DI-trooper arrest team, who had been watching from a distance, scrambled for three black, unmarked Ford sedans.