Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  Fries began sketching the chart of the new service and drafting the order that would create it. For three days, he motored back and forth between the army’s offices in a chauffeured Ford that careened through the streets, making Fries fear for the lives of pedestrians. For a month, there had been silence from Manning and Burrell in Washington. No help or information had been sent, and the reams of reports that the chemists were generating back in Washington were not making it to Europe. “Nothing is known of activities of Bureau of Mines in these matters except information received in personal letters to individuals written about the middle of July,” Pershing complained in a cable to Washington on August 24. With scant help coming from Washington, Fries relied instead on his allies in Europe. In nearly every way, his new service mirrored the British organization, from the acquisition of Stokes mortars to organization of special units trained to handle and deploy gas.

  When he brought a draft of his plan to Pershing, the general wanted to know why the British had special units to handle gas rather than letting artillery regiments fire gas mortars. Fries admitted he had no idea. “Well, don’t you think you better beat it up to the British gas service in the field and find out about these Stokes mortars?” Pershing asked.

  “General, that is exactly what I want to do,” Fries told him.

  “All right,” Pershing said, “get going and take anybody you want with you.”

  Fries wrote to Bessie that he was going away on a trip for three or four days, and reassured her that he would be nowhere near the fighting and didn’t expect to be away for a long time. His comforting words were far from true—in fact, he was going to the front.

  On the fresh, bright morning of August 25, Fries, two other officers, and their driver left Paris in a Cadillac for Saint-Omer, the field headquarters of the British gas service about 160 miles away, on the northwest coast near Dunkirk. The few days of sun and warmth were unusual that August—for most of the month, drenching rains had been falling over France. It was a scenic drive across the countryside, and they arrived at the headquarters in late afternoon. They spent the evening in conference with their British counterparts before Fries retired to his hotel. Then, in the morning, the British took Fries and his officers up to the line.

  For the first time, Fries was within artillery range of the Germans. About a mile away from the lines, they stopped and watched as high-explosive shells fell at the end of the Messines Ridge. The detonations threw huge columns of black smoke high into the air, a sight he grew accustomed to over the coming months. It also made him realize the peril facing the newly arrived American soldiers at Gondrecourt, the U.S. training grounds. There were already about twelve thousand American soldiers within thirty miles of the front, and not a single one had a mask or any training with gas.

  The British volunteered everything that they knew about mustard gas and were candid about what they didn’t know—it was still so new that they didn’t even yet know whether blinded soldiers would regain their sight. Cordial and helpful to Fries, they seemed determined to help prevent him from repeating their mistakes of the past. They told him about their early findings that oil-impregnated fabric could block mustard gas and that uniforms soaked in linseed oil might afford protection. They showed him hand-colored photographs and drawings of mustard burns. He learned about the twenty thousand masks that Burrell’s Research Division had sent over and why they were inadequate. He learned about the first airplane bombs, incendiary devices that were small but nonetheless quite deadly; aerial gas bombs were not being used. He learned about antiaircraft shells, the three-inch shells called archies that were flung by the thousands to bring down aircraft. He guessed that such defenses would only drive airplanes higher but “could not stop airplanes from bombarding cities.”

  The British officers made an indelible impression on Fries. They provided everything Fries asked for and attempted to answer all of his questions. “They were able, fearless, energetic and active,” Fries wrote. In particular, Charles Howard Foulkes, the chief of the British gas troops promoted to brigadier general in June, made an indelible impression. Both men were engineers, and both had been thrust into their roles in charge of gas without any previous knowledge or experience. Fries’s service was new and untested, an evolving improvisational organization, just as Foulkes’s had been in its earliest days. “The men who came into it were not afraid of new ideas, not afraid of treading unknown paths, nor afraid of the terror of night or those of the day, of the unseen gas or the hovering airplane,” he later wrote.

  By the time Fries returned to Paris two days later, the sunny weather had evaporated. As his Cadillac barreled across the countryside, a powerful gale buffeted the car with whipping winds and cascades of rain.

  As the front receded behind Fries, the soldiers there were not so lucky. Amid the endless rains, the British had launched yet another new offensive in Ypres in late August. The British Royal Artillery struggled to pull their guns through a soup of mud that turned shell craters into water-soaked graves. Gas was everywhere. The plop of yellow-cross fuses and spraying mustard gas forced the British and French to keep their masks in place day and night. They slithered and waded through the mire that spread in every direction, interrupted by inverted roots of toppled trees. Hundreds of miles of wooden duckboards snaked across the front, a maze of walkways that barely kept the men above the mud. At times, impenetrable volleys of artillery and shells arched overhead. With each detonation, the mud and the water quivered like jelly, and explosions threw curtains of mud over the soldiers as they splashed in their sodden trenches. The stench of rotting bodies hung over the battlefield. After sunset each night, the flash and concussion of bursting shells lit up the night, with colored flares raking the sky with streaks of yellow, green, and red phosphorus. The rain forced the British to call off the offensive. The stalemate resumed.

  The dismal conditions of the front were a world away from the bright lights of Manhattan. As the evening performance ended at the Eltinge Theater on August 22, the crowd spilled from the lobby onto the sidewalk, where the blazing marquee overhead advertised Business Before Pleasure, the latest smash success from director Montague Glass. It was a warm, clear Wednesday evening. As the crowd milled on the sidewalk, a sleek Rolls-Royce purred at the curb. It was a gorgeous car, all elegant lines and gleaming chrome, its lustrous body painted blue.

  A group of theater-goers burst from the theater doors—two men accompanied by three young women. Richmond M. Levering was one of the five. He was tall, just under six feet, husky and solid as a boxer, with hound-dog jowls and drooping bags under his eyes. But the member of the group that drew stares was one of the three women by his side. Draped in jewels, alluring and sultry, the showgirl Billie Allen was instantly recognizable as much for her stage roles as her antics reported in the society pages of the New York tabloids. The Texas beauty was a Ziegfeld Follies dancer who had caused a minor scandal for her outlandish costumes. She was also married—very publicly so. Offstage, Billie Allen was Mrs. John A. Hoagland, the wife of a millionaire heir to a baking-powder empire.

  Levering, Mrs. Hoagland, and their companions pranced through the crowd and piled inside the blue Rolls-Royce, the chauffeur slamming the doors behind them. Other theatergoers stared as the car pulled away from the curb and shot down Forty-Second Street with the glamorous Broadway star inside. But there was something else noteworthy about the flashy car: a metal sign attached to the radiator grille. Eighteen inches across, the sign read in impossible-to-ignore letters: DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE.

  Two days later, a report from the Office of Naval Intelligence landed in front of A. Bruce Bielaski, chief of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation in Washington. The terse letter from Commander Edward McCauley Jr. needed little embellishment. The Office of Naval Intelligence had received a letter from New York describing the car and the flamboyant passengers. In a dry and disapproving tone, the letter made clear that the dancer and her companions had made quite a splash. “Miss Bil
lie Allen is probably as well known as any young woman in New York,” Bielaski read. “The two men and the three women entered the Rolls-Royce car bearing the inscription ‘Department of Justice,’ attracting a great deal of attention as they did so.”

  The letter went on to say that the car was registered with the secretary of state as belonging to one Mr. Richmond Levering.

  Levering had been with the bureau for less than four months, and in that short time, he had already proved to be an exasperating distraction and a headache. Technically, he didn’t even work for the bureau; he headed the New York branch of the American Protective League, a civilian police auxiliary of the Department of Justice. After an uneventful start for Levering, word trickled back to the department that New York businessmen were astonished that Levering had been put in charge of the organization. He wasn’t exactly an exemplar of upright living, it turned out.

  Bielaski already had plenty to worry about. The Bureau of Investigation was only a small agency, its meager resources stretched thin pursuing spies and labor radicals. Bielaski had just ordered his agents to begin chasing down slackers, draft dodgers who failed or refused to register. Only a few days before, saboteurs had tried to dynamite the water main in San Diego. As if that weren’t enough, now he had a rogue special agent cavorting around Manhattan with a showgirl, bringing embarrassing attention to the bureau in the midst of wartime.

  The escapade with the car was foolish but hardly surprising. Levering lived in a gilded world greased with the easy money of oil. A young man of thirty-six, he lived at the sumptuous St. Regis, one of New York’s most luxurious hotels, and had a country estate on Long Island. He vacationed regularly in Europe and, for recreation, invited friends to sail up the coast in his yacht to fish in Newfoundland. His motorboat, the Heather, had won a New York– to–Bermuda race, and he owned a fleet of Rolls-Royces. Boisterous and temperamental, he drank little or perhaps not at all, cavorted with Broadway stars—particularly actresses—and invested in theatrical productions. He had always been a ladies’ man. His first wife had very publicly divorced him in 1915, reverted to her maiden name, and forced him to surrender nearly all of his rights to their three children, a lopsided agreement reported breathlessly in the New York newspapers.

  Levering was not a handsome man, with his large hooked nose and a pale, almost cadaverous appearance, but he had a magnetic personality that suggested supreme self-confidence in everything he did. He was a consummate dealmaker, a fast talker with a silken and reassuring nature that swept away questions about the extravagant transactions he proposed to deep-pocketed investors.

  Levering had grown up in Lafayette, Indiana, the only child of Julia and Mortimer Levering, a successful banker. His parents bundled him off to a prestigious East Coast boarding school, and then he proceeded to Yale, where he rowed crew and graduated from the college’s Sheffield Scientific School. His first business venture out of college was the Indian Asphalt Company. The company obtained oil leases in his home state, primarily to commercialize asphalt, but also to sell refined oil as a by-product to the Standard Oil Company. The company had a promising start, but then the finances of the company all but collapsed, revealing stock manipulation and other unsavory practices. An investigation by one of the company financiers, a New York banker, found Levering to be at fault. The banker forced him out and shuttered the troubled company, creating the first of Levering’s many enemies.

  One of Levering’s indisputable strengths was his ability to turn failure into advantage, capitalizing off the detritus of one disastrous venture to build the next. He convinced one of his Yale classmates, William Barnum, to go into business with him in a new undertaking, the Indian Refining Company. Like its predecessor, it would lease oil properties in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana and sell the refined oil to Standard.

  Deploying his substantial charms, Levering also courted Barnum’s sister Laura. The couple married in 1905 and moved to Lexington, Kentucky. Levering asked his father-in-law to help finance the new company and then made the rounds among the wealthiest financiers in Cincinnati seeking investors. One was William Cooper Procter of Procter & Gamble, who became one of the largest shareholders; another was William Rowe, president of the First National Bank of Cincinnati; a third was Julius Fleischmann, president of the Fleischmann Yeast Company.

  The company built a refinery near Indianapolis and began making money, but there was something peculiar about the finances. Levering had taken control of the company’s day-to-day affairs and was shifting large amounts of money between accounts in New York and Cincinnati. He explained to shareholders that the money was for investigations of oil concessions in Russia, but an investigation showed that he was actually using the money for personal expenses to subsidize his lavish lifestyle. In 1912, the stockholders ousted him and ordered him to return some four hundred thousand dollars to the company. He never paid.

  His third venture was in real estate. Before the Indian Refining Company went bad, he formed a new corporation, the Gardiner’s Bay Company, to buy hundreds of acres of prime real estate on the southern tip of Long Island, a few miles west of Montauk Point, and created a community called Devon. He subdivided the land and sold the lots for large summerhouses to the same Cincinnati businessmen who invested in the Indian Refining Company. The community had its own yacht club, and Levering put himself in charge of building the houses. However, when the buyers inquired about their houses, they learned not only that none of the builders had been paid but that the houses would cost more than double the estimated twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars. Levering claimed ignorance and assigned one of his most loyal and dedicated employees to investigate, who turned over a damning report to the investors without letting Levering see it first. Levering summoned him to New York, where he was seized and involuntarily committed to a lunatic asylum. Levering, meanwhile, told the other shareholders that the records for the Gardiner’s Bay Company had gone missing and that the employee was a crook who had stolen their money.

  With his former investors furious, Levering all but disappeared for two years, practically abandoning his wife and three children in Kentucky. The swelling ranks of his enemies and former business partners were more than happy to be rid of him. In reality, he was still at work on other more ambitious ventures. These enterprises were overseas. Rather than enlisting the support of wealthy industrials and bankers, he would get the backing of the world’s deepest pockets—the U.S. government.

  During his years after the collapse of the Indian Refining Company, Levering formed a bevy of intertwined companies with stakes in overseas drilling. One of them purported to have secured rights to oil fields near Tampico, Mexico, a brawling, hardscrabble Gulf Coast boomtown about three hundred miles south of the U.S. border. Mexico was the world’s second-largest producer of oil after the United States, and millions of gallons of oil flowed through Tampico and Veracruz farther south. Levering claimed that his drilling rights would yield thousands of barrels of oil every day and more than a million each year. He also claimed to have ventures in Cuba, Colombia, and Venezuela.

  Tampico was hardly a safe investment with its mixture of labor unrest, revolutionary insurrection, and volatile politics. Levering and dozens of other oilmen formed an association to secure assurances of military protection and diplomatic backing from President Wilson and the State Department, but their efforts were rebuffed. His overtures to the British ambassador for help were warmly received but also yielded no promises.

  As war loomed toward the end of 1916, he made a proposal to the U.S. government to form a partnership with the Navy Fuel Board that would give the navy rights to the oil from Levering’s wells, and he would set up new companies created for the sole purpose of supplying oil to the navy. All he asked was a 5 percent royalty. In March of 1917, he asked the board to ink the deal. “By the operation of the above contracts, you can see that the Navy can count on a reserve not hitherto available, and of course not obtainable by the United States itself, as none of these
countries permit foreign governments to operate within their boundaries.”

  As part of the deal, Levering asked the navy to accept his claims regarding his foreign holdings in March of 1917, on the eve of war:

  I would be glad if you would record with the proper officials that Richmond Levering and Company has oil rights on about 60 square miles of territory in Cuba; on about 1,000,000 acres in the Republic of Columbia [sic], and are obtaining concession rights on a very large oil territory in the United States of Venezuela. We are, as you know, largely interested in about 500,000 acres of the best selected oil territory in Mexico.

  The navy wasn’t the only arm of the U.S. government that Levering wanted closer ties with. On March 16, 1917, an intriguing letter landed on Bruce Bielaski’s desk at the Bureau of Investigation. William Offley, the Bureau of Investigation’s division superintendent in New York, had had a long conversation with Levering that morning and had come away deeply impressed by the oilman and his overseas ventures. His concessions in Mexico gave him the right to build radio towers, which he would allow Bureau of Investigation radio operators to use. He was also more than willing to use the imprimatur of his company to send agents to any of the countries where he had business interests and said that he had close ties with the Cuban secret service, which would be only too happy to assist with intelligence matters. Levering was “a gentleman of standing and reputation,” Offley wrote, and the bureau might have a place for Levering in an unofficial capacity: in a new organization called the American Protective League.