Lindbergh

by Noel Behn

  After going over the confession, Attorney General Wilentz had Schwarzkopf order Parker to turn Wendel over to the state police, which the trooper superintendent did in a Saturday, March 28, telegram addressed to the Old Chief at his country courthouse office. On receipt of the wire, Parker made arrangements for his Mercer County counterpart, James Kirkham, to take possession of Wendel. The transfer occurred that night near the county line. Assuming Wendel had been picked up for old embezzlement charges, the Mercer County detective was nonplussed when Paul presented him with a copy of the confession. Wendel was taken before a justice of the peace, where he was arraigned for murder and remanded to the Mercer County jail in Trenton.

  By the time Wilentz and Schwarzkopf reached the county jail, word of the arrest had got out, and a small crowd of spectators and media people had gathered. Wendel renounced his confession, displayed bruises and welts to confirm that he had been tortured, and recounted his abduction and how he was coerced into saying he had taken the Eaglet. It was 3:00 A.M. when he signed a statement disavowing guilt in the Lindbergh crime and accusing the Parkers, Murray Bleefeld and his father, Harry Weiss, and Martin Schlossman of kidnapping him. The New York PD and the Brooklyn DA prepared to open investigations. So did J. Edgar Hoover, since transporting a kidnapping victim across state lines was now a federal offense.

  Governor Hoffman was still denying to reporters any connection with the kidnapping when on Monday morning, March 30, he entered the court of pardons and, in his official capacity as head of that body, joined the other seven members to hear Hauptmann’s final plea for clemency and evaluate the Wendel confession and disavowal. The session began at 11:00 A.M. and ended at 4:00 P.M. After deliberating another hour, all the judges, including Harold Hoffman, voted to deny the prisoner’s petition. The governor also announced that he was not granting Hauptmann another reprieve. The execution would proceed as scheduled at 8:00 P.M. the following evening.

  Two last hopes for postponement remained. One was the Mercer County grand jury, to whom Lloyd Fisher had also presented Wendel’s confession and who were meeting on the matter and hearing the testimony of witnesses. The second was Justice Trenchard.

  The next morning Hauptmann was issued his death garb, which had been slit along the trouser legs to allow for the attachment of the electrodes. The back of his head was shaved as well. After reading Wendel’s confession, Justice Trenchard refused Lloyd Fisher’s request for a delay. Death preparations continued on through the day. Six P.M. arrived, and then 7:00 P.M. At 7:50 P.M. the Mercer County grand jury foreman telephoned Colonel Mark O. Kimberling, principal keeper of the state prisons, asking for a stay of execution. It was Justice Trenchard who had established the week of March 30 for the death. Mark Kimberling had set the day and hour. Granting the doomed prisoner one last gift of time, Kimberling, already cited to be the next superintendent of the state police, exercised his prerogative of changing the day and hour and put off the lethal event until 8:00 P.M., Friday, April 3, pending the grand jury’s decision.

  The day of April 2, in a zero hour effort to garner new information, Harold Hoffman sent four investigators to the Lindbergh estate: Leo Mead of the Mead Detective Agency, former state trooper William Lewis, private detective William Saunders, and Frank Holmes, a friend of the governor’s. The quartet was stopped on the grounds by the caretaker, Joe Lyons, and turned back. They subsequently insisted they had gone to survey the Lindbergh house and take certain measurements.

  At 11:50 P.M., April 2, after a fifteen-hour session, the Mercer County grand jury simply quit its examination of the Wendel confession and went home without having voted on whether to indict or not indict the disbarred attorney. It was a highly unusual action, particularly in light of the fact that the jury wasn’t to meet again until the coming Monday, April 6, three days after Hauptmann’s scheduled execution.

  The Trenton State Prison death house measured eleven feet by twenty-three feet. It was the evening of April 3, and fifty-seven people were present to witness the killing. Bruno Richard Hauptmann appeared at the door at 8:41 P.M. and was hurried to the electric chair by two guards. Straps were adjusted and electrodes fastened in place, leaving only Hauptmann’s nose and mouth visible. One of the guards held a clock up so the prisoner could watch the time. The clock was half a minute fast. Mark O. Kimberling lifted his hand. Robert G. Elliot, the sixty-seven-year-old executioner, grasped the rheostat. Kimberling’s hand came down. The switch was pulled, unleashing two thousand volts of electricity. After three minutes the current was shut off. Richard Hauptmann’s body sat slumped in the chair. At 8:47.5 P.M. he was pronounced dead.31

  Book Five

  AUTHOR’S VIEW

  Prelude

  Four years less one month and two days of anguish, turmoil, and controversy was legally ended at 8:47.5 P.M. Friday, April 3, 1936—but the matter was not to rest. The Lindbergh-Hauptmann affair has developed a life of its own, due in part to the disturbing, unanswered questions that continue to fascinate laymen and legal scholars alike. Books and untold articles have been written on the subject. Moot courts continue to try the merits of the case.

  If Lindbergh had played a hoax by masking the death of his son under the veil of a kidnapping, he had done so masterly and with apparent impenitence had let the wrong person die for the crime. The extent to which Lindbergh wanted the death behind him and forgotten becomes vividly evident with the admission by one of his later children that not until he was twelve did he learn, from outsiders, he once had an older brother, Charles Jr., who had been kidnapped and killed.

  The New Jersey State Police, working under the severe limitations Lindbergh had imposed and contending with a relentless and often ruthless press, solved nothing deductively, lasted out the money chase, and managed to be in on the arrest of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. For Hauptmann’s trial the state police provided prosecuting attorney David Wilentz with some highly dubious evidence and witnesses. As for Wilentz, he had prosecuted the accused with effective and dramatic intensity. Edward J. Reilly’s defense was tangled, his communication with his client a disgrace.

  Harold Hoffman’s involvement in behalf of Hauptmann tends to befuddle and confound those who find time to examine his actions. Why would a governor with as bright a political future as his have maneuvered himself into such a hopeless position, putting his career at risk?

  After nearly eight years with the material, this author has come to believe, like Harold Hoffman, that Richard Hauptmann did not kidnap and murder Charles Lindbergh, Jr. If Hauptmann had been involved, it was with the extorting of the ransom money. It is just as likely that he and Fisch had occasionally bought hot, or stolen, money as a speculation—the going rate had been as little as ten cents on the dollar in parts of New York, during the depression—and that one of their purchases had included at least fourteen thousand dollars of the Lindbergh loot. Equally possible was that Fisch had bought the ransom money on his own and left it with Hauptmann, not saying what it was. Who, then, was the seller?

  Based on thousands of pages of recently uncovered information and prolonged probing, this author strongly suspects that J. J. Nosovitsky forged the last twelve ransom messages and extorted the fifty thousand dollars. Nosovitsky’s previous involvement in the case may well have been dismissed or negated under the protective wings of certain police officials or due to the personal motives of J. Edgar Hoover. Fingers had been pointed at Nosovitsky, whose more nefarious dealings made headlines, but nothing ever came of it. He had even volunteered to appear and discuss his part in the case, and then he vanished. Had Harold Hoffman been able to produce Nosovitsky at the court of pardons hearings, Hauptmann’s execution might never have taken place.

  If Nosovitsky was the forger-extortionist who had obtained the fifty thousand dollars after writing twelve ransom messages, what of the original letter he copied, the one found in the Lindbergh nursery March 1, 1932? Who wrote that communication? The letter, or a facsimile, had been taken to New York City and displayed to underwo
rld types, which is where Nosovitsky might have seen it and copied the style—but who was the author?

  In 1986, I flew to Los Angeles to meet with ninety-three-year-old Harry Green, who had been Harold Hoffman’s friend and lawyer. According to Green, he and the governor had always adhered to the two-person theory: one killer, someone different receiving the money.

  “What was more,” Green said, “the governor knew who killed the child. People never understood why the governor risked his career for Bruno Hauptmann. It was because he always knew there wasn’t a kidnapping.”

  27

  An International Spy

  On December 15, 1927, a day after Charles Lindbergh, on a goodwill mission to Mexico, landed his Spirit of St. Louis before a cheering crowd of 150,000 at Mexico City’s Valbuena Airport, William Randolph Hearst, the brazen press baron of San Simeon, was called before a U.S. Senate subcommittee to account for what may have been efforts by his empire of twenty-four daily newspapers to undermine the purpose of Lindy’s flight.

  Dwight Morrow, newly installed as ambassador to Mexico, had arranged for Lindbergh’s visit in the hope of gaining favor with the Mexican president Plutarco Elìas Calles. Morrow’s long-term objective was to normalize relations between Mexico City and Washington, a near-Herculean task since the pro-Communist policies of Calles and his predecessor, Álvaro Obregón, had resulted in their country’s defaulting on its foreign debt, confiscating American-owned property without compensation, and threatening the wholesale cancellation of oil leases held by U.S. companies.

  Catholicism had also suffered in Mexico, and William Randolph Hearst was Catholic. Obregón and Calles had nationalized Mexico’s churches, closed Catholic schools, and forced nuns and priests to wear mufti. Like the newspaper czar, other influential U.S. Catholics had viewed Morrow’s ambassadorial appointment as a warning that President Calvin Coolidge not only might be placing the needs of America’s oil industry, in which the J. P. Morgan group had a vested interest, ahead of their church’s plight in Mexico but that he might be planning to abandon efforts to help.

  In the weeks prior to Lindbergh’s December 14 landing at Valbuena Airport, the Hearst papers had launched an exposé campaign in which four U.S. senators, whom William Randolph did not particularly admire, were accused of having secretly received money from the Calles government for backing legislation favorable to Mexico: William E. Borah of Idaho, George W. Norris of Nebraska, Thomas J. Heflin of Alabama, and Robert M. La Follette, Jr., of Wisconsin. The allegations, according to Hearst officials, were based on documents that had come from the personal files of President Calles in the National Palace, the secret archives of the Mexican consul general in New York City, and the comptroller general’s office in Mexico City. The material had been purchased by the Hearst organization for $20,150 and showed that Mexico paid Borah $500,000 for his support, Norris and Heflin $350,000 each, and La Follette $15,000.1 Denials were immediate and vehement.

  President Calvin Coolidge ignored the Mexican document controversy, but not the U.S. Senate, which convened a subcommittee inquiry for the first of its seven sessions on the day after Lindbergh was scheduled to arrive in Mexico.2 William Randolph Hearst, the first witness called, retreated a step or so from his chain’s hawkish stance by testifying that though he was sure the Mexican documents were genuine, he doubted that the accused senators had received any money. As more was heard from his staff and others, including the four imputed senators, it became evident that Hearst had mistakenly placed confidence in the authenticity of the material he had permitted to be purchased and published. He and his associates had been hoodwinked by the elaborate and ingenious scam of a master con artist-forger. Adding to William Randolph’s embarrassment was that this man, who went into the Congressional Record as the only suspect in the perpetration of the fraud, had previously been promoted and genially apotheosized in Hearst newspapers as an “international spy and super-forger.” His name was Jacob J. Nosovitsky.3

  In the early days of the Lindbergh kidnapping, complaints were received by both the New York Police Department and the New Jersey State Police naming Nosovitsky as the perpetrator. Nosovitsky did fit Jafsie Condon’s physical description of Cemetery John, right down to the accent and cough. Nosovitsky was also well-known in New York City’s underworld, the type of criminal to whom Morris Rosner might well have shown the original Lindbergh ransom message. Soon after a New York Police Department official assured inquiring New Jersey trooper investigators that the NYPD had checked out Nosovitsky and he was not implicated in the Lindbergh case, the matter was dropped.

  Three years later, on the eve of Hauptmann’s execution, interest in J. J. Nosovitsky’s participation in the crime, perhaps only as an extortionist, was revived with a fury by the New Jersey governor’s investigators. The state police also swung into action, trying to find out what Hoffman’s detectives were learning. It was too late for everyone, including Hauptmann. Nosovitsky had dropped from sight. The electrocution took place.

  Half a dozen years of collecting bits and pieces on Nosovitsky’s background add up to an enormous, often comical mosaic of daring escapes and espionage high jinks, pure bunk and later bunco, forged documents by the ream, blatant extortion, and paltry bigamy. He was, in fact, a fallen Reilly, Ace of Spies, mixed with an amateur production of Peer Gynt. His main commodity was information, and he learned its value early and well, working for both the U.S. and British secret services, then taking his dark crafts into the private sector.

  Fiction may well have bested fact regarding the origins of Jacob Nosovitsky. Born during May of either 1889 or 1890 in Chenassy, province of Kiev, Russia, Nosovitsky claimed that at the age of fifteen he joined the Socialist Revolutionary party, an extremist group that killed the czar’s father and made several attempts on the life of the czar himself.4 Wounded in a 1907 gunfight in which four policemen died, he was packed off to Archangel, where he remained in a prison camp until 1911. The year 1912 found him attending the University of Kiev. Two years later he was back in Archangel for his most specious revolutionary activities. He escaped the camp, survived a swampland chase, and eventually reached a safe haven in Norway.

  February 10, 1916, marked Jacob Nosovitsky’s arrival in the United States, where he remained a Communist.5 News that his parents had died of starvation in Russia and that his two brothers had been killed, most likely by the Bolsheviks, converted him to a die-hard anti-Red. At least that’s the motive he gave when he appeared at the U.S. State Department’s New York City office and volunteered to fight bolshevism. The State Department sent him to the Justice Department, where he was taken on as a nonsalaried undercover operative who would receive minimal expenses. Still active with the Communist party, he reported its activities to the Justice Department throughout 1917 and 1918.6

  Nosovitsky’s connection to powerful men started with Sir Robert Nathan, head of the British secret service in the United States, who offered the Russian undercover agent seventeen hundred dollars a month to do the same thing for Scotland Yard as he was doing for the Americans. The State Department approved. Nosovitsky devised a plan whereby he could travel regularly from New York without arousing suspicion: become a surgeon on a passenger ship between the two places. Sir Robert Nathan introduced him to a wealthy American capitalist residing in a rented castle in England: Henry W. Marsh. Marsh, who was to become Nosovitsky’s biggest fan, got him a position as surgeon with the Cunard Line’s Mauritania as well as obtaining needed medical credentials. From then on the Russian forged his own documents.

  Nosovitsky by now had acquired many of the skills valuable to the dark art of espionage, such as the use of aliases and cover stories. He was fluent in many languages, including French and German. He had also mastered both the reading and writing of English, but he spoke with a decided guttural accent. His greatest knack seemed to have been in counterfeiting important documents and forging signatures. A pair of suspicious State Department officials, L. Lanier Wilson and W. L. Hurley, had put him under
surveillance and conducted a background check without immediately discovering that he was working as an undercover agent for both the British and the U.S. Justice Department—as is reflected in the December 6 and 8, 1920, correspondence between Hurley and a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general, J. Edgar Hoover.

  A major Nosovitsky coup was tracking down the secret paymaster for the English Communist party. He would later write that on returning to New York City, he was met in the outer harbor by Hoover, who had come to retrieve the information. According to Nosovitsky, J. Edgar was pleased with the intelligence regarding the paymaster. Cunard and the Mauritania’s doctor, however, were unhappy over his portraying a surgeon. Henry Marsh arranged for Nosovitsky to become the ship’s doctor on the steamer Melita out of Canada, which also sailed between the United States and England. On both the Mauritania and the Melita he went under the name of Dr. Jacob Nosovitsky, to whom his fraudulent credentials were made out—including a certificate of medical registration from the state of Michigan. His favorite alias for the period was Dr. Jacob Anderson. His favorite middle initial was to become J.