by Noel Behn
The American article detailed additional activities and frustrations of the governor’s investigators in recent days that could have been obtained only by someone privy to inside information, such as Stanton. It would be half a day before most competing papers would have any statement as to why Harold Hoffman had decided on granting the reprieve. Stanton bared it on January 17: The governor wanted the whole truth, and after studying every available record, including the new information, he was not convinced that Bruno had acted alone.
The following day Stanton still had the exclusive on Nosovitsky, as his page-one three-column report in the New York American announced, HOFFMAN TRACES NEW SUSPECT IN WEST AS HE DEFIES CRITICS; OFFICIALS GET DEATH THREATS: “Suspect Search Involves Woman; Police Chiefs Told Name of Lindy Case Accomplice.” The text revealed that the governor’s investigators, working independently of the New Jersey State Police, had sent information regarding the new prime suspect to police departments in several midwestern cities. Their mystery man’s description was, of course, a description of the still unnamed Jacob Nosovitsky:
Age 47–49
Hgt 5’ 10½”
Wght 160
Eye Gray
Hair Sandy streaked with gray
Prominent cheek bones
Speaks with strong Teutonic accent.
The American let it be known that the governor’s operatives, who had been on the case for two months, believed they were weaving together a strong chain of circumstantial evidence that implicated both the Russian Pole and the woman accomplice. The suspect’s trail had already led investigators near where Hauptmann lived in the Bronx as well as to Yorkville, where Bruno had spent much of his time. It was discovered that an associate of the wanted man lived on the sixth floor of a walk-up apartment building in the Bronx. The investigator assigned to follow up, in this case a woman detective, had rented a room in the building and waited for the suspect to show up, which he failed to do.
According to the American, the governor had initially requested a review of every step of the case from the night of the kidnapping on, including channels of investigation followed by the New Jersey State Police, the New York PD, and the G-men. Crack sleuth Gus Lockwood was quoted as saying, “My orders were simply to clean up the case. Particularly, I was told to dig up Hauptmann’s accomplices, if he had any.”
By Sunday, January 19, the New York Daily News and the New York American both proclaimed that the trail of J. J. Faulkner—they both acknowledged him as being the Russian Pole—had been picked up by the New Jersey State Police and federal agents and that his capture appeared imminent. The American’s exclusivity regarding Nosovitsky had ended.
The two-party theory, so circumspectly embraced by the governor and a select group of aides, exploded into print the following day, when several newspapers made a startling revelation: The Russian Pole might only have intercepted the ransom payment and had nothing to with the taking of the baby. It was reported that the suspect may have seen the ransom note that Rosner, Spitale, and Bitz had shown around the New York City underworld in the wake of the child’s disappearance back in March of 1932 and then copied the style to send his own counterfeit notes, which ultimately brought Jafsie Condon—and fifty thousand dollars—to a meeting with him in St. Raymond’s graveyard.
Not one newsman, or paper, speculated that if this were true, if in fact the note had been copied, who was it, then, who had written the original message, and who had left it in the nursery, where Lindbergh claimed he had found it on a windowsill?
On January 16, the day the reprieve was granted, the Trenton Evening Times printed a special edition, in which a front-page editorial box called for the governor’s impeachment. Nearly every other paper in the state condemned his action, though few of them echoed the impeachment demand. Even publications usually partial to Hoffman found little merit in granting a reprieve. The national and international media were no more consoling.
Harold Hoffman struck back at his critics and, in particular, at the Trenton Evening Times, by saying:
I expected it. It is typical of the editorial abuse I have received since November 1934 when I committed the unpardonable sin of being elected when the Trenton Times and several other New Jersey newspapers said that I couldn’t.
If impeachment is the price that must be paid for daring to follow the dictates of my own conscience, I am ready to pay it. A good investigation of the Lindbergh case might be a healthy thing. If an investigation is started I will not run away.
I have never expressed an opinion upon the guilt or innocence of Hauptmann. I do share, with hundreds of thousands of other people the doubt as to the value of the evidence that placed him in the Lindbergh nursery the night of the crime. I do wonder what part passion and prejudice played in the conviction of a man who was previously tried and convicted in the columns of many of our newspapers.2
Word that Harold Hoffman would command him to reopen the Lindbergh investigation sent Schwarzkopf running to Wilentz, from whom he sought a definition of his legal rights and obligations regarding such an order. The attorney general was not duty bound to the governor in this matter. But the superintendent of the state police, who was flat out against the reprieve, had to obey the chief executive’s dictates. After conferring with Wilentz, Schwarzkopf announced that he would do as the governor bade. Hoffman had reason to believe that H. Norman’s compliance was not wholehearted when on January 19 he learned that Lieutenant Keaten of the state police and three more top trooper officers were discreetly monitoring the progress of his investigation.3 The governor had already added to the state police’s and Wilentz’s discomfort with a report that he was inviting J. Edgar Hoover’s Division of Investigation to join the reopened inquiry. Wilentz was able to pay Hoffman back in kind regarding Jafsie Condon, who was still in Panama and whom the governor urgently wanted to interview. Jafsie wired Wilentz on January 17, saying he was willing to come back. The attorney general answered that he saw no reason, under the prevailing conditions, for the old man to cut short his vacation.
The open break between Harold Hoffman and H. Norman Schwarzkopf as well as David Wilentz, which many newsmen were predicting, never quite occurred. But animosity ran high, and brinkmanship was the rule of the day. H. Norman managed to get a lick in by asserting that even though he would do as ordered by the governor, Hauptmann was guilty.4 The governor saw to it that an open letter he had received was circulated around the state office building; it urged that Mark O. Kimberling be named the new superintendent of the New Jersey State Police when H. Norman’s five-year term ended in June. Schwarzie’s defenders accused Hoffman loyalists at the Department of Motor Vehicles of writing the letter. The governor demanded that Wilentz turn over to him material in his possession concerning an alleged illegitimate son of the late Dwight W. Morrow. The attorney general did so on January 22, with a stern warning for the chief executive not to follow this course of investigation.5
On Thursday, January 30, Schwarzkopf received a sharply worded letter from the governor, instructing him to renew the investigation of the Lindbergh case and saying in part that the state-police boss was to “continue a thorough and impartial search” and that “you will acknowledge receipt of this letter and will report to me, in writing, at least once weekly, the steps you have taken.”6 The text also contained nineteen questions the governor demanded be answered, many of which were accusatory in regard to the state-police investigation and the prosecution’s handling of the trial.7 In a telephone discussion regarding the order, Schwarzkopf asked Wilentz, “How do you respond to something like this?”
The state’s attorney general replied, “You don’t. Hauptmann has been tried and convicted and he’s exhausted his appeals. As far as I’m concerned the governor’s investigation is irrelevant.”
The trooper boss explained, “But he wants a weekly report—on our progress.”
Wilentz countered, “All right. So you look around and what do you find?”
The answer Schwarzie ca
me up with was “Nothing.”
“So that’s your report,” the state’s ranking law-enforcement officer explained.
The following day Schwarzkopf responded to the governor in writing, pledged his full support of the renewed inquiry, and added, “Please turn over to me any and all information you may possess which may support the doubts you have expressed.”8 David Wilentz, the same day, publicly criticized the governor for reopening the case, reiterated his firm belief that Hauptmann alone was guilty of the crime, gave assurances that Colonel Schwarzkopf would cooperate with the governor, and left for a three-week vacation in Florida.
Harold Hoffman and David Wilentz did share one new and common experience: In the wake of the reprieve’s being issued, they had each received death threats for their respective stands on the issue. So had prosecutor Anthony Hauck, whose children were threatened as well. All three officials and their families were assigned bodyguards.
J. Edgar Hoover’s public posture subscribed to the guilt of Bruno Hauptmann, but just prior to the reprieve he had met with Harold Hoffman in the New Yorker Hotel, a meeting that might have given the governor an impression that the director of the bureau was sympathetic to his views. J. Edgar liked Harold Hoffman. But he certainly didn’t care much for Jacob Nosovitsky, who had conned him into writing personal endorsements for an ongoing scam back in the 1920s. His principal bête noire, however, was H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who had not only excluded the bureau from the original Lindbergh investigation but had made no secret that he intended to take J. Edgar’s job. Hoover and his organization had systematically done what they could, within the confines of questionable taste, to discredit the state-police handling of the Lindbergh case. The difficulty here was that they had so effectively been cut off from the inquiry that much of the information the G-men obtained was second- and thirdhand and inaccurate. Even so, there was little the troopers had done that one bureau expert or another couldn’t take to task.
Subsequent to the reprieve, Hoover provided the governor with solicited as well as unsolicited information regarding the case,9 such as a copy of a letter he received on January 5 and passed on to David Wilentz on January 23 that declared the Lindbergh kidnapper to be one Mike Sololiski, a Russian Pole who had killed five women.10 The same shipment of documents included a letter from the lawyer representing an ex-convict who claimed that Gaston Means handed him twenty-five thousand dollars.
J. Edgar Hoover was no political novice. The Lindbergh case was poison PR medicine. He didn’t mind helping his pal the governor twit Schwarzkopf’s nose, or even Wilentz’s, for that matter, but ultimately he wasn’t going to open up a full investigation into the affair. When on February 4, Harold Hoffman, a Republican, finally got H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the appointee of a Democratic governor, to request formally the DI’s participation in the renewed investigation, Hoover let his boss, U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings, another Democratic appointee, extend a polite refusal.
Harold Hoffman didn’t fare any better with the coalition administration of New York City’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, a fusion candidate. Schwarzkopf’s February 4 letter to the commissioner of the New York Police Department, now James Valentine, requested that the NYPD reinstate its original team of Lindbergh investigators and revive the case. In his reply Valentine lauded the renewed inquiry and flatly refused to participate.
The governor was forced to go it alone, using a group of predominantly volunteer investigators, whom the New York Herald Tribune consistently referred to as amateurs. Since Justice Trenchard had agreed to Wilentz’s request to set a new execution date only after the thirty-day reprieve ran out, it was expected that Hauptmann would be given an additional four or five weeks to live. The task before Harold Hoffman’s probers was profound. Locating the elusive Nosovitsky was already more difficult than had been expected. Reviewing the state-police case files—there would be an estimated forty thousand pages accumulated by the governor before the matter was concluded—was in itself a monumental undertaking. Coordinating the activities was often impossible, and many of the operations, like runaway trains, sped off in their own direction.
On January 16, the day the reprieve was signed, the New York American announced that Governor Hoffman had moved his investigatory headquarters to a midtown New York City hotel. This was partially true. He continued to visit Manhattan’s New Yorker Hotel for political as much as investigatory reasons and also to be near his favored Circus, Saints and Sinners organization. There is nothing to indicate that he didn’t confer on the progress of two New York City-related channels of investigation. Wally Stroh was still being interviewed at the Tombs by Gus Lockwood’s team, which included Mary McGill and William Pelletreau. Stroh, who had approximately sixty days left to serve in jail, agreed to stay at McGill’s home on his release so he could be available as he was needed by the governor’s people. His information had already sent at least one investigator to Nosovitsky’s brother in Cleveland. The brother acknowledged that his notorious sibling had been there a week before the kidnapping but claimed not to know his present whereabouts. Lockwood’s unit continued to contact out-of-state agencies and try to locate and interview people who might know where Nosovitsky had gone, such as Mollie Schneiderman, his bigamized third wife.
Ellis Parker also had a New York City operation under way: zeroing in on the man he stubbornly considered to be the sole culprit, Paul Wendel. Murray Bleefeld and several associates had managed to trace Wendel to the Stamford Hotel on Manhattan’s Thirty-second Street and were keeping him under surveillance.
The bulk of the investigation remained in New Jersey, with command posts in either the governor’s suite at Trenton’s Hildebrecht Hotel or in his offices at the statehouse. It was at the statehouse that on January 18, two days after signing the reprieve, Hoffman conferred with another group of his operatives, a meeting at which Dr. Erastus Hudson gave additional weight to the possibility of Lindbergh’s manipulations by claiming that shortly after the kidnapping someone in the Sorrel Hill household had carefully wiped the nursery clean and that “it was ludicrous to imagine that the kidnapper had gone down the ramshackle ladder with a pail of water and rag in one hand, and the baby in the other.”11
The governor at this juncture had been contacted by a young woman from Boston named Zoe Hobbs, who was petitioning to become a volunteer investigator. They had exchanged several letters before she wrote to him on January 17, saying in part that he was a great man for his stand on the Lindbergh-Hauptmann case. Zoe enclosed a personal biography that claimed she had been a court reporter for the Boston Evening Record. On the second page it stated, “If an investigation is to take place, why not let it include members of the Lindbergh and Morrow family.”12 The governor accepted her application.
The slapdash manner in which the governor had recruited investigators, and the quality of this personnel, began to take its toll. Many of these operatives bore code names. K-4, for example, was Harold C. Keyes, the private detective who had come to the governor via Bruno Hauptmann’s attorney, Lloyd Fisher. Keyes, among other self-assigned tasks, was currently investigating a reputed sweetheart of Isador Fisch’s as well as the possession by a New York man of eight thousand dollars that might have come from the ransom payment.
R-9 was Robert Hicks, the vaunted criminologist whom Mrs. McLean had contributed to the cause and whose salary she was still partially paying. R-9 was also receiving funds from another booster of the governor’s investigation, Paul G. Clancy, editor to the American Astrology magazine.
Hicks had a remarkable ability to get his name in the papers, where it had already been reported that he went to St. Raymond’s Cemetery and reenacted the ransom payment and had Hauptmann’s attic examined in conjunction with his own wood expert, Arch W. Loney of the Public Works Administration. Another well-reported assignment being investigated by Hicks was a claim that Betty Gow had been seen at the Elarno Hotel in Coney Island, Brooklyn, just prior to the kidnapping. His most imaginative bit of press agentry occur
red just before the issuing of the reprieve. He was aboard a train when two trunks crashed through the window of his compartment and knocked him unconscious. Railroad personnel told reporters it was an accident; Hicks swore it was a plot.13
Zoe Hobbs had also begun to display a knack for getting her name in the papers, so far and luckily in out-of-town papers. When it came to major media mischief, not to mention tampering with the investigation’s top source of information, Hobbs and Hicks could take a lesson or two from the private eye and handwriting maven Bill Pelletreau.
The New York American had helped steer the governor’s investigators to Wally Stroh and as a result received an exclusive on the story. It was only time before other papers would learn who the American’s, and Gus Lockwood’s, source was. Warned of this by the governor’s men, Stroh agreed to make no statements to other media people. He was good to his word, telling inquiring journalists that if any information was wanted, they should contact Mary McGill’s boss, Dr. E. M. Hudson, at 30 East Seventy-sixth Street.
Like McGill, Pelletreau was one of the investigating team’s members who continued to visit Stroh. Stroh was broke. Pelletreau arranged a deal for Wally with the New York Daily News—and a deal for himself as the News’s representative. Stroh was working on a story that would present all the facts—and name Nosovitsky. His asking price was five thousand dollars, which the News agreed to place in escrow. If Nosovitsky turned out to be the malefactor, Wally could have the money and the News could have his story. Until then, to maintain the investigation’s confidentiality, the paper could not publish the suspect’s name. Though it was not part of the arrangement, on Sunday, January 19, the News broke the New York American’s stranglehold on the story by announcing, along with the American, that the trail of J. J. Faulkner had been picked up by the New Jersey State Police and federal investigators and that his capture appeared imminent.