by Noel Behn
A complaint had been registered with Donovan regarding Julius J. Kron, Edward Chaims, and Dr. Jack Anderson, also known as Nosovitsky, who were trying to negotiate a deal with Count Széchenyi, the Hungarian minister to Washington, for information that allegedly would verify a Communist-inspired uprising in Hungary. Hoover wrote to Donovan, counseling against any further negotiations with Nosovitsky and associates.
In August of 1926, during an interview at the Mexican consulate general in New York City, Edward Chaims whispered to an assistant of Arturo M. Elías, the consul general, that he possessed proof that some very well known Americans were involved in a gun-running plot on behalf of the revolutionaries in Mexico: pro-Catholic plotters. The cautious Elìas wanted proof. Negotiations went on for three months, during which time false documents were readily produced by Nosovitsky to validate the Red-scare shakedown tactic. In the end Elìas and his adviser on public relations, Charles W. Ervin, claimed they had laughed Nosovitsky right out of the consulate—but made no mention of the incident to the press or authorities for another two years.
Nosovitsky, in the early months of 1927, began a long and intricate scam—involving a mass of forged documents—that would eventually lead to Hearst’s unwittingly printing the notorious Mexican papers that accused four innocent senators of being on President Calles’s payroll. On August 24, Dr. Cuthberto Hidalgo (most likely Chaims) went to the Mexican consul general in Los Angeles and offered to sell the same documents Hearst had purchased for twenty-five hundred dollars. When later told of this, Hearst asked how they could be offered to the Mexicans when he had them.14
The fall and winter of 1927 were particularly bad periods for Nosovitsky, who despite all the activity, was in dire need of funds. He and his wife, Esther, resided at 1206 Forty-eighth Street, Brooklyn, under the name of E. Nossow—Estelle Nossow—and, presumably, J. J. Nossow. But on September 15, he arranged to rent a room at Mrs. Schneiderman’s apartment, at 4608 Tenth Avenue, Brooklyn, within easy walking distance of 1206 Forty-eighth Street. For Mrs. Schneiderman’s consumption he was Dr. Jacob Anderson, a physician who owned a chemical plant in Canada—and he produced fake medical certification from Michigan to prove his claim. Dr. Anderson also professed to being single. Mrs. Schneiderman, as it turned out, had a twenty-year-old daughter who was also single: Mollie.
On September 19, four days after taking a room at Mrs. Schneiderman’s, Mollie and Dr. Anderson eloped to Poughkeepsie, New York. Before the week was out, the good doctor borrowed eighteen hundred dollars from Mollie, saying he was going to Montreal to get a house and furniture and send for her. Mollie waited at her mother’s apartment. When her husband hadn’t returned by December 8, she went through his papers and spotted one that read, “In case of accident; notify E. Nosso, 1206 48th. Street, Brooklyn.” Mollie Schneidermann traveled the short distance to the Forty-eighth Street address and found E. Nosso all right, Estelle Nosso. She found something else, hiding in the back room: her husband, Dr. Anderson. Mollie didn’t realize Jacob was also married to Estelle. He was fooling around; that was bad enough. And he had her eighteen hundred dollars to boot. She had the good doctor arrested the next day on a charge of grand larceny. He was sent to the Raymond Street jail, still under the name of Dr. Jacob Anderson.
Arturo M. Elìas, Mexico’s consul general in New York City, also had problems in preparing just what to say at the U.S. Senate’s hearing on the validity and purchase of the Mexican papers by the Hearst news empire, at which he and other officials had been requested to testify. Among the expert witnesses slated to be heard by the Senate subcommittee was the renowned international spy, Dr. Jacob Nosovitsky. The invitation was rendered, in no small part, because Nosovitsky had let it be known that he knew something about the hoax.
Nosovitsky had been unexpectedly indisposed. On December 14, 1927, the day before the hearings were to begin in Washington, D.C., he was arraigned at the Fifth Avenue court, Brooklyn, and held without bail pending an appearance before the grand jury on Mollie Schneidermann’s complaint of grand larceny. At the same time Senate clerks were wondering what had become of Nosovitsky, New York newspaper reporters were taking notes on the marital troubles of Dr. Jacob Nosovitsky, the so-called international spy. Mollie swore under oath that she was Dr. Jacob’s wife—Dr. Jacob Anderson, the only name she knew him by.
On Monday, January 9, 1928, the World added insult to Nosovitsky’s injury by giving front-page coverage to Arturo Elías’s detailed disclosure of the international spy’s attempt to sell him forged documents on an alleged Catholic gun-running conspiracy.
Less than a month later, on February 1, 1928, Nosovitsky’s grand larceny trial got under way at the Brooklyn Supreme Court. The doctor refuted his having run out on Mollie and, to prove she was in touch with him while he was away, claimed that he had love letters she wrote him while he was staying at the Breslin Hotel in New York as well as in Montreal. Dr. Nosovitsky claimed he didn’t steal because he had a receipt to prove that he paid the Schneiderman family thirty-six hundred dollars. On February 24, he was acquitted of grand larceny. Four months later, on June 6, he was confined to the New York County Penitentiary on Hart’s Island, to serve an indeterminate term of between three months and three years for bigamy.
Inmate J. J. Nosovitsky was made assistant to the resident physician at Hart’s Island, where he was known as the Doc. Subsequent to producing medical papers from Michigan that showed he was a medical doctor, he was put in charge of the TB ward. Nosovitsky got on well with his fellow inmates, to whom he spoke of a close association with Gaston B. Means. The Doc also told them almost everything that had appeared in “Confessions of an International Spy.”
Following his release from Hart’s Island, Nosovitsky continued to run scams in both New York and New Jersey, often with a woman partner. He spent time in Chicago, Detroit, and Montreal, but his home remained New York, and at least one address shows he resided in the Bronx during a period when Jafsie Condon’s letters were being published in the Bronx Home News. Nosovitsky maintained his connection with the Eagle Detective Agency and affiliated himself with at least one strong-arm gang in New York that was known to perpetrate murders. He gained a reputation among New York police officials of being a bad hombre, which was another, but tacit, way of saying he was considered capable of murder. In the fervid period of rampant kidnapping-extortions during 1930 and 1931, it was likely that his skills at forgery came into play. Two of the cities he most favored, Chicago and Detroit, were hotbeds of this sort of extortion.
Jacob Nosovitsky’s most-publicized skills were forgery and scams. William Randolph Hearst had learned about this the hard way. So had J. Edgar Hoover, William J. Donovan, and a good portion of the New York City underworld, where getting your name in the paper made you something of a legend. It would seem plausible that the Doctor would have been among the first criminals Morris Rosner sought out to view the first ransom note the night of March 2, 1932, ostensibly to identify the author.
Clandestinely Nosovitsky was, his entire life, a purveyor of information who showed little remorse at selling out an associate. This had made him valuable to American and British intelligence. Whether this was the original basis of his association with J. Edgar Hoover is moot. Nosovitsky said it was. Hoover insisted the relationship was social, not business.
When in June of 1932 Anne B. Sloane had written the New Jersey State Police, complaining that Nosovitsky had kidnapped and killed the Lindbergh baby, trooper investigators had to rely on the New York Police Department, which assured them Nosovitsky wasn’t involved.15 At approximately the same time at the New York American, a Breckinridge representative met with two ex-convicts who had served time with Nosovitsky at Hart’s Island: Wally Stroh and Arthur Graham. Both believed the Doc had stolen the baby, and Stroh offered a motive, confessed to him by Nosovitsky: The Morgan bank interests (Woods was Morgan’s nephew by marriage, and Dwight Morrow had been a company partner) not only refused to pay him the fifty thousand dollars owed for a Mexi
can assignment, but they tried to frame him with a Mann Act charge, which prompted him to commit bigamy by marrying Mollie Schneiderman. While at Hart’s Island, according to Stroh, the Doc had often talked about getting revenge. He had also been obsessed with perpetrating a foolproof kidnapping—snatching a child, because children couldn’t identify you—and claimed to have contacts to do so in New Jersey.16
There was reason to discount the credibility of Stroh and Graham: They hadn’t come forward until a reward was posted well after the perpetration. As for Mrs. Sloane’s complaint, the New Jersey investigators were told by the New York City police that the woman was a chronic pest who sought revenge for the murder of her criminal son by a gang including Nosovitsky. The NYPD admitted Nosovitsky was a rough criminal but assured the NJSP he was not involved with the kidnapping. That pretty much ended official interest in J. J. Nosovitsky—until Governor Hoffman’s investigation reached its final days in 1936.
What is there to say Nosovitsky was involved or wasn’t involved with the crime? Handwriting experts commissioned by the New Jersey State Police continue to insist that all the ransom messages had been written by one person: Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Experts brought in by the endless army of authors, scholars, and lawyers who are fascinated with the case firmly believe that two different people were responsible for the messages: that one person wrote the original letter found in the nursery and a second person wrote the remaining twelve in a style closely resembling the initial communication.
Jesse William Pelletreau was certain Nosovitsky had written all thirteen notes. Examining an extensive collection of Nosovitsky’s writing, the Jersey City private detective looked for a match for what he considered to be the unique k in the ransom messages. Nosovitsky’s k seemed almost identical to the prototype ransom-letter k; so did other key letters gleaned from the samples. Nowhere, in Pelletreau’s estimation, was Nosovisky’s k more like the prototype k than in the bank-slip signature of J. J. Faulkner and in the subsequent letter Faulkner wrote Governor Hoffman to proclaim Hauptmann’s innocence.
Pelletreau’s belief that Nosovitsky had also kidnapped and murdered the child was negated by the findings of his fellow investigators and what information the state police and the NYPD had on hand. The preponderance of data established that Nosovitsky was far away from New Jersey the night the alleged kidnapping-murder occurred. The role he could have played in the crime was as an extortionist: writing ransom messages in the style of the first note and receiving the payment carried by Condon.
Assuming that Nosovitsky was Cemetery John, the man who was given fifty thousand dollars at St. Raymond’s back in April of 1932, was it in Breckinridge’s interest to confirm this when his aides purportedly showed a picture of the Doc to Jafsie Condon two months later? Condon allegedly said Nosovitsky was not John. If, indeed, Lindbergh had concocted the kidnapping scenario, had gone to extremes to protect the nonexistent abductors from being caught after receiving the ransom, the capture of the actual extortionist would be a most unwelcome and untimely event. The kidnapping hoax could not afford to have a suspect. This author could find nothing to confirm or disprove that Condon had been shown a photograph of J. J. Nosovitsky.
The New York Police Department appeared to be the root source for both the New Jersey State Police and the BI information regarding Nosovitsky’s lack of complicity—and the NYPD may have had a reason to protect him. The international spy was a professional, if not compulsive, informer. Due to the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of pages of material regarding him have confirmed this fact. So have Justice Department and Bureau of Investigation documents found in Harold Hoffman’s collection. His relationship with the Eagle Detective Agency and other private-eye organizations reveals that he had good connections with the New York police. Documents found in the governor’s file tend to confirm this.
The only thing Jacob Nosovitsky had to offer the NYPD was information. What he may have received in return was immunity from prosecution for many of the scams he pulled. But would this provide him protection in a case as notorious as the Lindbergh kidnapping? That would have depended on how important he was to his source at the police department. There were indications that at one time he made himself very important by providing the police with the most valuable of all information—the name of a fellow gang member who perpetrated a murder.
Was J. J. Nosovitsky the kind of man who could not only have perpetrated the extortion but might also have displayed the sort of remorse that would move him to write the J. J. Faulkner letter to Hoffman that exonerated Hauptmann? Unfortunately for the governor and Hauptmann, Nosovitsky was not located, the question never answered.
In a series of 1935 and 1936 letters, J. Edgar Hoover admitted that Jacob Nosovitsky was J. J. Faulkner. At the same time he categorically rejected the idea that the international spy had anything to do with the Lindbergh case.
The New York Police Department has never turned its files regarding the Lindbergh kidnapping over to the New Jersey State Police archives or to the FBI. After a protracted series of communications, this author was taken to the NYPD’s legal-section library at 1 Police Plaza in New York City, where he was given access to the three cardboard banker’s boxes that contain what remains of the department’s files on the Lindbergh-Hauptmann case. Nothing was found in them to indicate that Nosovitsky had been the man who received the ransom money in St. Raymond’s Cemetery back in 1932. However, there was something else that did. The author was shown a copy of his criminal record, which included his aliases. Jacob Nosovitsky was J. J. Faulkner.
28
Family Affairs
“The killer was right in the Lindbergh household,” Harry Green told this author during their California talks in 1986. “It was Elisabeth, Anne’s older sister, who died before the trial began. She did it out of jealousy. The governor was told this after Hauptmann was convicted. It was explosive. We had statements, but we needed more to make it stick. That’s what the governor was trying to do at the end: prove it. That’s why he gave the stay of execution—and ruined his life.”1
For an incipient racial supremacist such as Charles Lindbergh, the daughters of Dwight and Elizabeth Morrow were prime Presbyterian breeding stock. Constance, the youngest of the three sisters, was still in prep school. That left twenty-three-year-old Elisabeth and Anne, twenty-one, a Smith College senior whom at first the Flying Colonel hardly noticed. It was Christmas vacation of 1927, and Lindy had flown to Mexico on a goodwill junket initiated by the U.S. ambassador to that country—Dwight Morrow.
Morrow, who was fifty-four, had met the twenty-five-year-old Lindbergh earlier that year, when both men were staying at the temporary White House on Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C.2 Lindy, there for only the night, was being welcomed home to America after his historic flight across the Atlantic. Morrow had come at the behest of a schoolmate from Amherst College, President Calvin Coolidge, who wanted Dwight to accept the Mexican ambassadorship. In the world of law and finance, the rags-to-riches saga of Morrow, a partner of J. P. Morgan’s, was the American dream incarnate. Though his celebrity was modest compared with that of Lindbergh, many who knew him considered Dwight a saint—an honor the ages would deny the handsome aviator. No one knew at the time that the two men were fated to become integral parts of each other’s lives. Not only would the financier be responsible for the Lone Eagle’s finding a wife, but Morrow, who was a trustee of the Guggenheim Foundation for the Promotion of Aeronautics and had urged that the organization give Lindbergh a fifty-thousand-dollar grant, would help make him a wealthy man.3
Small, slight, mussed, and “diffidently aggressive,” Dwight Whitney Morrow, as a young man, had a habit of standing with the fingers of his hands held tightly together until he gathered his confidence or became amused.4 Self-made and with a phobia about poverty, he performed at Morgan and Company in a manner that was nothing less than spectacular. “Morrow,” in the words of one biographer,
mastered every subject, through sheer diligenc
e. He mutualized the Equitable Life Assurance Society and oversaw Morgan lending to Cuba. He also masterminded Kennecott Copper, a public company formed around the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate in Alaska and other properties. Daniel Guggenheim was awed by Morrow’s retentive brain and said that “six months after Morrow had started upon his investigation, he knew more about copper than I or any of my six brothers.” In his absentminded way, however, Dwight neglected one detail of the Kennecott operation: “You have forgotten to provide for our commission,” Davison gently chided him.5
Morrow’s absentmindedness, rooted in his nearly trance-like powers of concentration, was legend among the Morgan partners. On one occasion he spent a dinner at Thomas Lamont’s gesturing with a well-gnawed olive pit before the butler offered a plate. Another tale recounted Morrow riding a train and frantically searching for his ticket to give to the waiting conductor, only to discover that he had it between his teeth.6
Dwight Morrow and Thomas Lamont were the principal Morgan and Company statesmen and theoreticians. Along with Russell Leffingwell, they “gave the House of Morgan its patina of culture, its reputation as a home to bankers who wrote essays, gave speeches, joined foreign policy councils, and served on foundation boards.” Dwight seems to have had a very specific and private vision. “As a student of ancient civilization, Morrow wanted to clothe the mundane, often sordid world of the twenties in some larger classical dimension.”7 Politics was one way of achieving this. Political life, which had always held a fascination for him, loomed even larger as his interest in banking diminished, but when an opportunity arose to assume public office, Morrow was as indecisive as he was about assuming the presidency of Yale. However, part of the classical dimension he so dearly coveted had already been achieved—by his wife, Betty.