Darrow was ultimately acquitted, but Burns’s reputation was hardly sullied by the episode, as he had feared it would be. He remained a hero—“America’s Sherlock Holmes,” as the fictional detective’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, called him. Not only had he snared the McNamaras, who, though spared the noose, were sentenced to long prison terms, he eventually caught the anarchists Caplan and Schmidt. The supersleuth was a now a bona fide superstar. “My name is William J. Burns,” he wrote in his bestselling book The Masked War, “and my address is New York, London, Paris, Montreal, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and wherever else a law-abiding citizen may find need of men who know how to go quietly about throwing out of ambush a hidden assassin or drawing from cover career criminals who prey upon those who walk straight.” As it turned out, the great detective was needed in Georgia, where hate and ignorance would nearly consume him.
On April 27, 1913, the battered and sodomized body of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan was discovered in the basement of Atlanta’s National Pencil Factory where she worked as a machine operator for ten cents an hour. Georgians shocked by the ghastly deed were soon whipped into an anti-Semitic frenzy when factory superintendent Leo Frank, a Cornell-educated Jew, was charged with the murder of his young employee. Crowds gathered at his trial cheered for the prosecution that painted him as a predatory sexual deviant and chanted to the jury, “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you.” Frank was convicted and sentenced to death, largely on the testimony of a black man named Jim Conley who claimed he had helped the superintendent dispose of the body in the factory basement and then helped him cover up the crime. By the time William J. Burns entered the case, nearly a year after the murder, Frank’s appeal had been rejected by the Georgia Supreme Court and his defense attorneys were preparing an extraordinary motion for a new trial.
Burns had been retained by Chicago advertising magnate Albert D. Lasker, one of a number of powerful individuals, including New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs, who believed Frank had been unfairly tried and convicted in a racially charged circus of lies and intimidation. The celebrity sleuth took Atlanta by storm.
“Just the sight of Burns settling down to breakfast each morning in the fern-filled pink-and-white dining room of the grand Georgian Terrace Hotel suggested that a higher power was now at work,” writes author Steve Oney in his book about the celebrated case, And the Dead Shall Rise. “Surrounded by half a dozen reporters, attended by a traveling secretary and assorted subalterns, and invariably clad in a crisp hounds tooth suit that set off his famous red hair and mustache, the detective exuded energy and confidence. This was America’s greatest private investigator, and between bites of his soft-boiled eggs and toast, he would regale the table with war stories, pausing to dictate telegrams to clients and operatives in far-flung climes. Then, with the entire retinue in tow, he would stroll down Peachtree Street to his agency’s local office, declaiming not just on aspects of the Phagan murder but on his certainty that he would solve it.”
The detective’s jaunty confidence remained abundantly evident throughout the early stages of his investigation—almost as a setup for the tragic course of events that was to follow. Burns broadly hinted that he had all but solved the murder and vindicated Leo Frank, even as he tried to give the impression that he was impartial enough to declare his client’s guilt should the evidence so warrant. The crime had indeed been committed by a pervert, just as the prosecution had said, Burns told reporters. But, he added, Frank lacked all the qualities of a sexual deviant. Soon enough, he produced a series of obscene letters written by Jim Conley, indicating that the state’s star witness did have the perverse characteristics needed to be Mary Phagan’s murderer. Added to this, a group of physicians Burns had arranged to examine Frank “unanimously agreed that [he] was normal physically and mentally,” reported The New York Times. To bolster that finding, Burns offered a $1,000 reward for definite “reports concerning acts of perversion on the part of Leo M. Frank.”
Burns expected no responses to his offer and was therefore surprised when Newport Lanford, detective chief of the Atlanta Police Department, promised to share evidence of Frank’s deviant nature. Yet when Burns arrived at police headquarters, Lanford refused to open his files. He cited the upcoming hearing on the motion for a new trial as his reason. Furthermore, he publicly maintained that the police had never accused Frank of perversion in the first place. Armed with that blatant lie, Burns triumphantly wired Adolph Ochs at the Times:
Police department today withdrew charge of perversion against Leo M. Frank…. Bearing in mind the numerous filthy charges of perversion which saturated the community prior to the Frank trial and aroused their passions, the charges of perversion injected into the case by the State upon the trial…and in the Supreme Court of Georgia, the statement made today by Chief Lanford is a severe indictment of the police department of this city and of the outrageous methods used in the prosecution of Frank.
Burns seemed mighty pleased with the progress he was making, particularly as a number of prosecution witnesses retracted their testimony and new ones were found to implicate Jim Conley. But the detective failed to recognize the depth of resentment his presence in Georgia generated. To many he represented arrogant northern interests seeking to subvert local justice and free a depraved Jew. One of his most vociferous critics was the populist firebrand Thomas E. Watson, a former U.S. congressman and running mate of William Jennings Bryan in the presidential campaign of 1896. Watson used his publication, the Jeffersonian, to relentlessly attack Burns and “the conspiracy of Big Money against the law, against the courts, and against the poor little victim of hellish passion,” Mary Phagan.
“This man Burns richly deserves a coat of tar and feathers, plus a ride on a fence-rail,” roared Watson in the April 23, 1914, edition of the Jeffersonian. “He has been engineering a campaign of systematic lies tending to blacken this state and tending to provoke an outbreak of popular indignation. With all the bravado of a shallow bluffer, and with all the insolence of irresponsibility, he has gone to the extreme limit of toleration. There may not be a way by which the law can reach him, but there is a way to reach him.”
This none-too-subtle call to violence was answered just a week later when Burns and one of his agents, Dan Lehon, found themselves under siege in Mary Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia. They were on their way to interview a potential witness in Cedartown, the road to which ran through Marietta, when their car blew a tire. As they looked for a garage in town, a devotee of Watson’s named Robert E. Lee Howell recognized Burns by his distinctive red hair and stormed up to him. “I have promised to beat you if ever came to Marietta,” Howell announced, “and here goes.” With that, he slapped Burns on both cheeks and wildly cursed him.
A large crowd started to gather at the scene, many of them readers of the Jeffersonian, and before long a cry of “Lynch him!” was heard. Burns and Lehon quickly recognized the very real peril they faced as the mob of several hundred grew more menacing. Both made a run for it: Burns to an adjacent neighborhood and Lehon to the local sheriff’s office. “The great detective ran through several dark alleys as fast as his legs would carry him,” reported one resident, “and those that saw him in action do say that he certainly showed a wonderful burst of speed.” Burns eventually found refuge in a hotel on the outskirts of town, but the mob soon discovered where he was and reassembled outside. It was only when a circuit judge on the scene stepped in to calm the crowd that Burns, amidst a barrage of eggs, was whisked away in the car of a local furniture dealer. Lehon escaped separately.
Although disaster had been narrowly averted in Marietta, Burns still faced a number of troubling developments that boded ill for both him and Leo Frank. One of the worst came when a local pastor, Rev. C. B. Ragsdale, retracted his sworn statement that he had overheard Jim Conley confess to the murder of Mary Phagan. Ragsdale claimed that Burns operatives had bribed him. “They were just handing mone
y out,” he said. Burns dismissed the pastor’s allegation as “a cowardly lie by a cowardly liar,” but the damage was done. Tom Watson had a field day, of course, as did Leo Frank’s prosecutors, who suggested that Rev. Ragsdale was merely one of many false witnesses assembled by the Burns agency.
The situation grew even bleaker when Burns was called to testify at the hearing for Frank’s motion for a new trial. As prosecutors picked apart his investigative methods—challenging, for example, his declaration that Jim Conley was a deviant when he had never met the man, and mocking his failure to interview any witnesses favorable to the prosecution—the detective was frequently evasive or defensive. He distanced himself from some of the best defense evidence when the means of obtaining it was called into question, and was forced to acknowledge some other very suspect practices, such as his decision to send one sworn witness out of town beyond the reach of prosecutors. All in all, it was an unusually dismal performance by the celebrity sleuth.
The defense did their best to mitigate some of the damage, but they knew their case had been gravely compromised. “I regret to advise you that the situation here is desperate,” one of Frank’s attorneys wrote to Albert Lasker. “It is the belief of nearly all our friends that Burns’s connection with the case has done us irretrievable damage.” That sentiment was confirmed when the motion for a new trial was denied. “I have been disgusted at the farcical methods to which Burns has resorted,” wrote Louis Marshall of the American Jewish Committee to Louis Wiley of The New York Times. “Every one of his acts has been a burlesque upon modern detective ideas. It is deplorable that a case so meritorious as that of Frank should have been brought to this point of destruction by such ridiculous methods.”
What Marshall and others failed to realize was that Leo Frank’s cause was doomed by a system determined to hang him, not by anything William J. Burns did. Indeed, the detective himself was hammered by that very same system. He was indicted for subornation of perjury in the Ragsdale matter, then had his license revoked by the Atlanta City Council, which forced him to close his local office. America’s Sherlock Holmes had been effectively shut out—but not silenced. He continued to proclaim Frank’s innocence in the press, while at the same time condemning overeager police and prosecutors, a rabidly anti-Semitic public, and the man he declared to be Mary Phagan’s true murderer, Jim Conley.
Though the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately rejected the notion that Frank had not received a fair trial (with Oliver Wendell Holmes dissenting), public sentiment in much of America was with him, thanks largely to sympathetic press accounts. Leo Frank was no murderer, writer C. P. Connolly asserted in a Collier’s Weekly article that ran in December 1914, but a “shy, nervous, intellectual” who “looks through his prison bars with the eyes of a stoic.” Three things have condemned him, Connolly wrote: “politics, prejudice, and perjury.” That same month The New York Times devoted nearly a full page to Detective Burns’s take on the case and the miscarriage of justice that he believed had occurred.
By June of the following year, there was enough doubt in the mind of Georgia’s governor, John M. Slanton, that he commuted Frank’s death sentence to life in prison. He was hanged in effigy for his courageous decision, a preview of what was to happen to Leo Frank less than two months later. Shortly before midnight on August 16, 1915, a group of vigilantes calling themselves the “Knights of Mary Phagan” and comprised of some of Georgia’s leading citizens arrived at the Milledgeville prison farm where Frank was serving his sentence. With no resistance from either the warden or guards, they snatched the famous prisoner and drove him to a site two miles outside of Marietta known as Frey’s Gin. There they bound and blindfolded him, placed a noose around his neck, and hanged him from a tree. Justice had been served, Georgia-style, after which Marietta’s police chief sent Burns a jeering telegram: “Leo Frank lynched here. Come quick and help investigate.”
William J. Burns continued to solve crimes and to make headlines until 1921, when he was tapped by his friend Harry Daugherty, the new attorney general under President Harding, to head what was then called the Bureau of Investigation. It was not an illustrious tenure. Like many detectives of his day, Burns often used whatever questionable methods necessary to achieve results. To his detriment, he employed them at the bureau as well.
“He had no qualms about search and seizure or about employing criminals and men of dubious reputation,” wrote historian Francis Russell. “Any inquisitive congressman or senator, any critic of Daugherty or the Department of Justice, would soon find his own affairs investigated by Bureau agents who did not hesitate to break into offices, riffle files, tap wires, and copy private correspondence.”
Ultimately, though, Burns was brought down not so much by his own behavior as by the scandals of the Harding administration—one of the most corrupt in American history—and by an unsavory character named Gaston Means (see next chapter). He resigned from the bureau under pressure in 1924, and died less than a decade later. Since then his name has been all but obliterated from the history of the FBI, while his successor, J. Edgar Hoover, came to define that institution for the next half century. All in all, a rather sorry legacy for America’s Sherlock Holmes.
25
Gaston B. Means: American Scoundrel
If William J. Burns was America’s Sherlock Holmes, then Gaston B. Means was the nation’s very own Moriarty. An unrepentant rogue with devilish charm and a gift for mendacity, Means thrived in that decade of lawlessness known as the Roaring Twenties. In fact, he helped shape it. His finely spun lies metastasized into the highest levels of government, wreaking havoc and ruining reputations—including that of his pal William Burns. He bilked bootleggers and other criminals by selling influence he didn’t have, cruelly capitalized on the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s young son, and convinced many Americans that their president, Warren Harding, had been poisoned by his wife. He was so thoroughly rotten that he once bragged that he had been accused of every crime known in America—including murder—and convicted of none. Even when the law did finally catch up with him, Means was unbowed and continued to make sport of human lives until the day he died.
Francis Russell wrote of him: “In appearance a wastrel cherub with round face, dimpled smile, sharp chin, and beaming eyes that flickered from time to time with madness, [he] was a swindler for the joy of swindling, a liar proud of the credibility of his lies, a confidence man able to make his cheats and deceptions works of art.”
Gaston Bullock Means was born on July 11, 1879, at his family’s plantation outside Concord, North Carolina. By some accounts he was an affable, well-liked young man, if a bit of a rascal. It was only when he sustained a head injury after falling from the upper berth of a Pullman rail car that, intimates said, a darker, more sinister side of his personality began to emerge. Of course there were those who maintained that it was Means himself who had made the berth collapse by sawing through one of the chains that secured it. He certainly had the foresight to take out several accident insurance policies before boarding the train, and walked away with a tidy settlement.
After quitting his job as a salesman for the Cannon Cotton Mills (or being fired for lying, as the company maintained), Means used his family connections to approach the William J. Burns Detective Agency in 1915 for a job as an investigator. Burns was apparently impressed with Means’s ideas about how to bring in new business and hired him for $25 a week, plus commissions. It was the beginning of a fateful friendship. About the same time, Means began working as an agent for the German government. There was nothing illegal about this because the United States had not yet entered World War I and was still officially neutral. Still, it was almost impossible for Gaston Means to operate inside the bounds of truth. To bolster German propaganda efforts against its enemy Britain, he contrived various situations that made it appear that Britain was breaking U.S. neutrality laws by, among other things, receiving American supplies. A minor tempest in the press resulted, but dissipated just as quickly when
it was found that the allegations had no merit. By that time, Means had moved on to his next scam.
He managed to charm his way into the life of a wealthy, somewhat simple-minded widow named Maude King. Soon enough, he was managing her affairs and living off her money. Mrs. King had a tidy income from the estate of her late husband, but, as Means discovered, it was only a small portion of the estate. The bulk had been set aside in trust for the establishment of the James C. King Home for Old Men. Means thought himself far worthier of the money and settled on a way to get it. He fabricated a so-called second will that left the entire estate to his personal money vault, Mrs. King. The officers of the trust dismissed the forged will, however, after which Means tried to get former U.S. Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes to pursue the case. When that failed, he started to get desperate. He had already squandered most of Mrs. King’s money and he knew that if she ever found out, she might dismiss him as her manager, thus ruining his chance to profit from the bogus will. Plus, she had a met a young naval officer and wanted to marry him. That, too, would interfere with his plans. So, in an effort to isolate and distract her, he told Mrs. King that her life was in danger and sent her away to “safety” in North Carolina. When she grew restless there, Gaston Means settled on a more permanent solution.
A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans Page 18