Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America

by Blum, Howard

  Muenter’s ministrations succeeded. On April 6, as the doting professor at last agreed to leave the bedroom and allow the nurses to take charge, Leona gave birth to a healthy baby girl. The child was named Mary after Leona’s favorite aunt.

  The next three days, the nurses would fondly recall, were joyous. Not only was the infant flourishing, but Mrs. Muenter seemed on the mend. Her appetite had returned. One night she even ate the plate of boiled chicken Miss Case had prepared, and then surprised them further by asking for a second helping.

  Yet by the week’s end Leona was once again eating nothing but her husband’s spoon-fed broth, and, more of a concern, the pains had returned. This time they were worse than ever. She suffered, and the nurses watched with sympathy as her husband suffered along with her. His pain and anguish as his wife’s condition deteriorated tugged at their hearts.

  When Leona died on the morning of April 16, Muenter was devastated. Neighbors heard him howling like a wounded animal. “I don’t know what to do,” he sobbed helplessly to Nurse Dietrich.

  By late afternoon, though, the professor had pulled himself together and come up with a plan. A Cambridge undertaker had already removed his wife’s body, but now Muenter decided that his wife would have wanted to be buried in Chicago with her parents in attendance at the funeral. Would the two nurses accompany him and the children on the train trip to Chicago? he asked. He’d like to leave tomorrow. Better to get this over and done with for the children’s sake, he explained through his tears. Of course the nurses agreed, sobbing along with him, their tears as much for the brokenhearted professor as for his poor wife.

  That evening when Muenter tried to make arrangements for the body to accompany him on the next day’s train, there was a complication. Mr. A. E. Long, the undertaker, said that the body could not be removed from the funeral home until a certificate identifying the cause of death had been signed by a doctor. That meant, Long explained, that there would need to be an autopsy. After the procedure was completed and the certificate duly signed, the body could be shipped wherever the professor desired for burial.

  Muenter flew into a rage. He insisted that he be allowed to take his wife home to Chicago so she could be buried in the presence of her grieving family. He shouted that the undertaker had no right to interfere.

  Long apologized, but he remained adamant: a rule is a rule.

  Muenter considered; and then he broke down in tears. He pleaded that he just wanted to bury his wife. He wanted her to find some peace at last. He cried and cried, his body shaking with grief. He was inconsolable.

  Long could not help feeling the unfortunate man’s pain. He finally told the professor that he’d have Mrs. Muenter’s coffin on the morning train.

  But after Muenter left, as Long prepared to embalm the body, he had second thoughts. Perhaps there was a way, the mortician reasoned with a more characteristic prudence, to satisfy both the bereft professor and the authorities. He decided to remove Mrs. Muenter’s internal organs. First thing in the morning, he’d send them on to Dr. Whitney Swan, the Cambridge medical examiner. Of course by the time Dr. Swan got around to looking at them, the body would be on the train to Chicago. But it wouldn’t matter, Long reassured himself. The autopsy of a Harvard professor’s wife was, after all, just a formality.

  THE FUNERAL SERVICE WAS HELD in the small living room of Leona’s parents’ home on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago. Burial followed at Rose Hill Cemetery. Throughout the service and the internment Muenter was wooden, as if in shock. He seemed incapable of speaking. His gaze was vacant. After he returned from the cemetery, however, Muenter managed to pull himself together sufficiently to talk with Arthur Kremb, Leona’s father.

  He explained that he needed to get away. He wanted to think about everything that had happened. He asked if the Krembs would mind watching the children for a few days.

  Of course, agreed Kremb. He told his grieving son-in-law to take some time for himself, to sort things out.

  Muenter promised that he’d be back in two days.

  Five days later, when two Chicago detectives came to Kremb’s home with a warrant issued by the Cambridge police charging Erich Muenter with the murder of his wife, the professor had still not returned. The detectives explained that the Cambridge medical examiner had become suspicious after examining Leona’s internal organs and had delivered them for further analysis to W. F. Whitney, a chemistry professor at the Harvard Medical School. Whitney quickly confirmed the medical examiner’s suspicions: the remains were laced with arsenic. Leona Muenter had been slowly and painfully poisoned, he concluded.

  Arthur Kremb refused to believe that his daughter’s husband had murdered her. “I am sure that when a thorough investigation is made it will be found that everything is all right,” he insisted stubbornly.

  But as weeks, then months, and then years passed without any word from the professor, as Kremb and his wife were forced to raise their two grandchildren, Kremb began to realize that he had been wrong. Not only was his son-in-law a murderer, but he had gotten away with it. Erich Muenter had vanished.

  Part I:

  “A Troubled Hour”

  Chapter 1

  Early-morning light beamed through the tall stained-glass windows, scattering a misty, diffuse glow over the nave and the rows of pews in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. But on this cold March morning in 1915, New York Police captain Tom Tunney deliberately stuck to the shadows, moving up a narrow side aisle as dark and gloomy as a sepulchre. When he drew closer to the altar, he ducked behind a massive stone pillar. He waited a moment to allow his eyes to get accustomed to the half-light shrouding his hiding place, and then he did a quick reconnaissance.

  In the vestibule, three scrubwomen puttered about with pails and mops. The one with long red hair kept her head down as, on hands and knees, she washed the marble floor. She wore a faded blue skirt that reached to her ankles, a white blouse, and, rather oddly, a dark shawl that stretched like a tent across her broad shoulders. She scrubbed with diligence, and as she labored the shawl rose up her back. Tom saw a flash of the revolver in the holster strapped across her chest. But there was no way now to alert detective Patrick Walsh to fix his disguise. Things were moving too quickly.

  The New York Police Department detectives, disguised as scrubwomen, who foiled an attempt to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral. From left: Patrick Walsh, Jerome Murphy, and James Sterett.

  (Thomas J. Tunney, Throttled!)

  Tom turned and looked up the aisle toward the front pews. An elderly usher, stooped and white-bearded, directed the stream of worshippers arriving for the seven a.m. Mass to their seats. The usher wore shiny gold spectacles and an absurd double-breasted frock coat that, Tom silently moaned, seemed more suitable for a minor European prince.

  Giving him further cause for concern, detective sergeant George Barnitz—Tom’s usually dependable right-hand man—was playing his role to a contrived hilt. The usher wheezed up the aisle with a theatrical slowness, his back bent in a pretense of age and humility that was comical. Tom wouldn’t have been surprised if Barnitz’s snow-white wig fell off his head, with all his bowing and scraping.

  But these small worries receded as Bishop Hayes began chanting Mass. As the parishioners prayed, Tom prayed too. He prayed, he would later say, with more fervor than he had ever before evoked in all the years of his long churchgoing life. He prayed that he could prevent this great cathedral, and all who were in it, from being blown to bits. But for now all he could do was wait, and hope a merciful God would answer his prayers.

  New York Police Department captain Thomas “Tom” J. Tunney.

  (Thomas J. Tunney, Throttled!)

  TOM WAS THE HEAD OF the New York Police Bomb Squad. He had joined the department seventeen years earlier in 1898, a strapping, broad-shouldered twenty-two-year-old. The reasons for his signing on, he’d concede with a philosophical candor when years later he looked back at his long career, were a mixed and rather murky stew.

&nbs
p; There was, for one thing, the example of his uncle John, sainted in family lore, who had proudly served in the Royal Irish Constabulary for more than two decades. Tom, who had been born in county Cork but since his eight birthday had made his home on Manhattan’s West Side, nevertheless had the wistful notion that a way of life that had worked for one Tunney might work for another.

  A further nudge was the public commitment of police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt to fill the department’s ranks with the best and brightest rather than simply the recruits whose journey had begun in the politicized corridors of Tammany Hall. Always competitive, Tom wanted to prove that he could meet the commissioner’s high standards.

  But most of all, while Tom had only a vague knowledge of the policeman’s job, it was the prospect of helping others and acting with honor that sent the young man to the downtown headquarters to file his application.

  Honor was crucial. “It’s the one thing they can never take from you,” his Da, an Irish immigrant who had shuffled from one backbreaking day laborer’s job to another until he keeled over dead at forty-eight, had lectured. And what could be more honorable, Tom instinctively felt, than being on the side of law and order? It was a direct, uncomplicated, and unyielding way of moving through the world, and it would serve him well throughout a lifetime of service.

  From the start, Tom was gung ho. His first assignment was walking a beat in Brooklyn, and Officer Tunney was quickly known throughout the neighborhood as a dependable presence. There was the time, for example, when without bothering to call for reinforcements he single-handedly charged into a raging Friday-night bar fight and, with only a couple of swings of his nightstick and an intimidating stare, managed to restore order. Or, when he took off in surprisingly rapid pursuit of a purse snatcher and twelve blocks later ran him to ground (a feat that proved not to be a fluke when he won the hundred-yard dash at the Police Field Day that year in an impressive 10.5 seconds). People always felt safer when Officer Tunney in his high-collared gold-buttoned tunic was walking his beat.

  At headquarters, Tom’s superiors were also quick to notice the young man. From the first, it was recognized that Tunney had a commanding way about him, they would recall in testimonials written toward the end of his career. Although he was a big man, it wasn’t so much his hulking size that made him such a dominating presence. Rather, it was his ability, deputy commissioner Guy Scull would remark, “to listen to those around him in thoughtful silence.” It was a polite demeanor that earned respect. Tom never said much, Scull noted, but when he did speak, “people would listen.”

  Over the next decade, Tom’s career flourished. “I went through the mill,” was how Tom modestly recalled it, “graduating from one duty to another.” He moved from patrol to the “shoo-fly squad,” the plainclothes cops who toured high-crime precincts throughout the city to see if officers were at their posts, and then on to the elite Detective Bureau, where he rapidly made a name for himself.

  In one celebrated case he went undercover as a garage mechanic to solve the mystery of who had run down an unfortunate Brooklyn doctor as he stepped off a streetcar after a night spent delivering a baby. “Clever Detective Work,” lauded the Times. Then there was the time he doggedly tracked down the villain who had poisoned an archbishop and thirty other prominent members of the University Club. “His exploits read like detective novels,” a fawning press was soon gushing about its new tabloid hero.

  As for Tom, while he was embarrassed by the attention he was getting, he had to concede that he had found his calling. He loved what he called “the stern chase” of detective work. “The thrill of starting without a clue, or maybe having just a single thread,” he’d write in an account of his life and work, “and then working your way to the end was always an exciting journey.”

  Then in early 1913, after being promoted to acting captain by police commissioner Arthur Woods, the Harvard graduate and former Groton School English teacher who had been brought in to reorganize the department, Tom was put in command of the newly formed bomb squad.

  From left: New York City police commissioner Arthur Hale Woods, New York City mayor John Purroy Mitchel, and General Leonard Wood review the Thirtieth U.S. Infantry as they pass Manhattan’s City Hall on January 20, 1915.

  (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

  New York had become a city of targets. Over the past unruly decade, both anarchists and Black Handers, as the cutthroat gang of Sicilian immigrants who signed their ransom notes with a black ink handprint had become notoriously known, had wantonly hurled bombs and planted explosives. Buildings had been destroyed, and lives lost. And the carnage, Commissioner Woods anticipated with a despairing logic, would only escalate.

  The grudge match between the forces of labor and capital was heating up around the country; in Los Angeles twenty-one people had been killed by a bomb planted by union men at the Los Angeles Times building. There was no reason to expect this vendetta wouldn’t soon zero in on the towering structures that lined the concrete-and-steel canyons of Wall Street.

  Also cause for concern, the police department no longer had a formal unit to monitor the Black Handers. The Italian Squad, as it had been known, had been disbanded four years earlier after the police lieutenant who headed it was shot as he walked through the streets of Palermo, Italy, to meet “an informant.”

  It was Tom’s assignment to stop the bombings. He was to arrest the men who mixed the chemicals and procured the sticks of TNT before they planted the devices. If that failed, if he was too late, he was to sift through the wreckage for clues. Then he was to hunt the bombers down. “To the ends of the earth, if need be,” the commissioner solemnly ordered.

  From the start, Tom was given a free hand. He could recruit any men he wanted for his mob, as special squads were called in the department. The commissioner also offered Tom the abandoned office of the Italian Squad.

  It was a narrow, dingy loft above a Centre Street saloon, and it hadn’t been cleaned in the years since the Italian Squad had been dissolved. But Tom accepted at once. The opportunity to work in secret, away from the tumult and politics of headquarters, would be, he realized, more important than comfort.

  Another blessing: the commissioner made it clear that Tom would report to him, and only to him. No one else in the department, regardless of rank, had the power to question Tom’s activities or countermand his orders.

  Tom set to work. His first step, as he sardonically put it, was to make “the acquaintance of the bomb itself.” He went to prisons and cajoled convicted Black Handers to explain how they had made their devices. He spent long days at the New York offices of the DuPont company, where officials and technicians gave him an extended course in explosives. He pored over Bureau of Mines publications, searching for information about the latest advances in demolition. He even, he said with some surprise, found himself “forced to become something of a student of chemistry.”

  It was a thorough tutelage, and it paid off. Over the next year Tom had, he’d say, “a good deal of experience in tracing bomb outrages to certain of the anarchistic and Black Hand elements in the population of the city.”

  Then, the previous summer, he had launched the investigation that eight months later would lead him and his team in the icy predawn darkness to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  Chapter 2

  The first operational steps in Tom’s long journey to the imposing cathedral had been taken in the basement of a decrepit tenement far uptown on 106th Street near the New York Central tracks. This was where the Brescia Circle, named in honor of the anarchist who had murdered an Italian king, met on Sundays.

  These were uncertain times in the country: people were out of work; families were going to sleep each night hungry. The Circle’s public meetings were fired with raw, desperate talk. The speakers raged about the swaggering forces of capital taking advantage of the working class. They railed with a fiery intensity about how the Catholic Church, with its well-fed priests and ornate temples, wa
s ignoring its duties to the tithed and deluded masses. There were demonstrations, too, demanding jobs and fair pay. Last spring, a brash mob led by the Circle had stormed into St. Alphonsus Church in Brooklyn and refused to leave unless they received food.

  Tom, who had grown up in a home where on some nights there was only thin soup for supper, could understand the anger and desperation building in the city. He was neither a husband nor a father; his job was his life. Yet he’d experienced enough hard times to feel for those who were out of work, for families who were struggling. And although he had little tolerance for people who charged into churches or wanted to undermine the government, members of his squad had heard him complain, “Some things in this country just aren’t right.” “Can’t blame people for wanting a fair shake,” he sympathized when other officers condemned the radicals.

  But the Circle didn’t merely talk or demonstrate. They also, as Tom put it with a professional’s bitter cynicism, “had a fondness for bombs.”

  On July 4 the year before, a man had been arrested as he climbed over the wall surrounding the John D. Rockefeller estate outside the city in Tarrytown. On that same day, three members of the Circle were blown up in their rooms on Lexington Avenue when the device they were assembling exploded. Searching through the bomb factory debris, the police found evidence that tied together the day’s events: the man in Tarrytown had been sent to reconnoiter the estate, and the next day he’d have returned to plant the Circle’s bomb beneath a window of the Rockefeller mansion.