The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  The idea of Christmas doing anything in secret was a joke. He was an incorrigible attention getter, gruff and boisterous, a figure from a Saturday-afternoon serial come to life. Like most storied mercenaries, he was less soldier than showman, a pop star playing a role for mild-mannered America. He had a fair complexion, a walrus mustache, and the pretty blue eyes of a Romeo. If circumstances allowed, he wore a military uniform, double-breasted, brass buttoned, with piping and braid, which was tailor-made in a costume shop in Paris. On occasion, he carried a sword. He was a modern hybrid: real and fake, deadly serious and having a laugh. He’d fought in several wars, had been shot more than a few times, but was a clown, too, playing to the crowd. Born on a cotton plantation in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, in 1863, he had refused to play a bit part in life and went adventuring instead. Between 1890 and 1925, he was a featured player in the comic opera of Central American politics.

  Christmas had first arrived in Puerto Cortés in 1893. Within a decade, he was a star, having seen action in various battles, having conquered and killed. He was said to be the model for Richard Harding Davis’s protagonist in the bestselling novel Soldiers of Fortune. He fashioned a pact with General Bonilla soon after they met in the early 1900s. First they were allies, then friends, then brothers. Christmas risked his life for Bonilla’s cause in 1907, when the general, his soldiers defeated in battle, was driven into exile.

  Christmas was trapped with a few hundred men in the hills outside Tegucigalpa. Realizing their position was hopeless, he ordered his men to surrender, while he made a run for it. According to The Incredible Yanqui by Hermann Deutsch, Christmas told his men, “I’m going out. There’ll be seven cartridges in my gun and each of the first six will get me one of those rawhides. The last will be for me, in case they nip me on the road. But I guarantee they’ll never drag me out in front of a mob and make a show of killing me.”

  A handful of men volunteered to ride with Christmas. They went at dawn, each with pistol and machete. They burst across the defensive line in a group, riding hard. Three of these men—Ted Reyes, Francis Barahona, Fred Mills—were shot and killed. Christmas rode toward the trees across the clearing. He was almost there, almost there, almost there … wham! His horse was shot out from under him. The falling went on forever. He was pinned beneath the animal, one leg badly broken. Enemy soldiers ran toward him. He aimed his gun, a German Luger. He believed he had three bullets left—he shot twice, then put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Click. Pulled it again. Click. He never was good at math. He was surrounded, supine in his dirty uniform, the faces staring down, the sky, the peaks—a legendary scene in the life of Lee Christmas.

  “Goddamned you all to Hell!” he shouted. “Shoot me now if you’ve got the guts. Shoot me you miserable heathens. Shoot me and be done with me but don’t bury me. Leave me on the ground to rot.”

  “Don’t bury you? But why Señor General?”

  Then came the words that Christmas either wrote in advance, made up afterward, or actually spoke—words that attached themselves to his story like a tagline, in the nature of “Do you feel lucky, punk?”

  “Because I want the buzzards to eat me, and fly over you afterward, and scatter white shit all over your God-damned black faces.”

  Christmas said he expected this to infuriate the soldiers: he was trying to provoke them into killing him, but it only made them laugh. “You’re a brave man, Jefe,” the enemy commander told Christmas. “For this, you will not be executed at all.”

  A stretcher was made out of branches and saplings. Christmas was carried over the mountains to Tegucigalpa, where his leg was rebroken and set. Once recovered, he was expelled from Honduras, eventually making his way, via mail ship, to New Orleans, where the newspapers, relying on secondhand accounts, had reported his death. In The New York Times, the story ran under the headline “Daredevil American Cut to Pieces by Nicaraguan Soldiers.” When he turned up in the Carousel Bar as if at his own funeral, his legend was assured.

  * * *

  Here are some of the men Lee Christmas recruited for the army of Manuel Bonilla:

  Tracy Custer Richardson of Broken Bow, Nebraska. Like the hero of a folk song, he’d been a rambler and a gambler, a steamship roustabout and oil field fitter before seeing combat in the Nicaraguan civil war. He served in the Mexican border wars, on the Western Front during the First World War, as a member of Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS during the Second World War. With Richardson, as with most New Orleans mercenaries, it was impossible to untangle fact from legend. No matter how deep you dig, you never hit bedrock—it’s just story on story, tale on tale. In the end, he was the greatest singer of his own song, which he told and retold in novels and penny-a-word true crime pulps. When Christmas found Richardson, he was just another kid getting wasted on Bourbon Street.

  Sam “the Fighting Jew” Dreben, who enlisted in the U.S. Army soon after he arrived from Russia. In the Philippines, Dreben participated in America’s first war of counterinsurgency, a precursor to Vietnam and Afghanistan. He learned to ambush, booby-trap, track, and kill at close quarters, skills well suited to the isthmus. His manic ferocity came to the attention of General Black Jack Pershing, who decorated Dreben “an outstanding hero of the American Expeditionary Forces.” Back in New York, on the Lower East Side, he was a magnet for newspaper hacks. To them, he seemed an oddity—a Jew who loved fighting as other Jews supposedly loved stitching and accumulating. Whenever he appeared in print, it was in the guise of the hapless Yid, the vaudeville act. According to an appreciation that ran in The New Yorker in 1925 after Dreben’s death, “He looked like an emotional button-hole worker, but he fought like a calm fiend. The unexpected quality of his conduct under fire immediately won him high unofficial rank with his outfit, and for the first time in his life Sam Dreben, the harried, cringing Russian Jew immigrant, tasted the flavor of respect.”

  Guy Molony, who ran away from New Orleans at sixteen to fight in the Boer War. It was the era of romantic soldiering, when boys heeded the call of Rudyard Kipling (“Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, / Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst,” he wrote in “Mandalay”). By twenty, Molony was a man of the world, having fought in South Africa and the Philippines, where he mastered the machine gun. He was the epitome of the modern soldier, less concerned with style than with his glorious weapon. He returned to New Orleans, where he worked as a cop, but longed for his footloose days. He joined Christmas at the suggestion of Sam Dreben, who had moved to New Orleans and become a habitué of the Carousel Bar. “They’re getting set to knock off Dávila,” Dreben told Guy Molony. “How about it? Want to sit in?”

  Dreben gave Molony a note of introduction, which he carried to a house uptown, where he was given another note, which he carried to another house, where he was handed a ticket. He met Christmas on a ship off the coast of Belize. Christmas dumped the pieces of a machine gun at Molony’s feet and said, “Put it together.” Molony finished in no time. “That’s fine,” said Christmas. “You’re in.”

  Zemurray’s mercenary army would have perhaps one hundred soldiers, a ragtag band of guns for hire, a pirate gang in cast-off clothes, every shape and color, every weapon and motivation. This group was supplemented by recruits from the isthmus. According to The New York Times, “Manuel Bonilla is now in New Orleans, preparing for the departure of himself and a few companions for the Atlantic coast of Honduras. There he expects to place himself at the head of a force, already organized and equipped, and raise again the flag of revolution.”

  The first attempt on Honduras failed “farcically,” as it was then described. Bonilla feared his patron’s reaction, but Zemurray could not afford to withdraw his support. Having staked everything on the general, he decided instead to figure out what went wrong and fix it. (This is how Zemurray regarded most things in his life: as problems to be solved.) Though not a military man, Sam was a fine tactician who understood the flow of men and machine
s. He quickly recognized reasons for the fiasco: first, the political moment had not been ripe, the people of Honduras not sufficiently alarmed by the Knox plan. (Friendly newspapermen would soon change that.) Second, the insurgents had been outclassed at sea, where they had just one ship, an old tub that was no match for the Honduran navy. Zemurray corrected the imbalance, procuring, through a third party, a 160-foot warship that could reach fifteen knots an hour, faster than anything in Miguel Dávila’s fleet. Called the Hornet, the ship had been part of the American naval fleet, seeing action in Manzanillo harbor in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. The government had sold it for $5,100 to a merchant, who then sold it to an agent secretly representing Zemurray. Secretary Knox must have received news of this sale with a string of expletives.

  There was not much that could be legally done. Zemurray had covered his tracks so thoroughly that his ownership of the Hornet was hard to prove. As far as Port of New Orleans officials were concerned, the ship was the property of a legitimate trader who intended to use it on trips across the Caribbean. If deployed in battle, the owner of the ship would be in breach of the Neutrality Act, but property could not be seized for what might happen in the future. Dávila was certain the purchase meant that war was coming. As soon he got the news, he ordered his army to dig trenches around the port cities on the Atlantic, then sent spies to New Orleans, but these men were easily identified in the lobby of the St. Charles Hotel by their phony gringo wear: blue jeans, cowboy boots, tall hats.

  The Hornet was anchored at Algiers Point, across from Jackson Square, where it was routinely boarded and searched by Treasury agents—early in the morning when the city was gray in the distance, late at night when the streetlights were yellow, in midafternoon when the river was drowsy and the decks smelled like varnish. Nothing was found: not a map, not a knife, not a document, not a bullet.

  * * *

  On December 15, 1910, Charley Johnson, the captain of the Hornet, asked permission to sail from New Orleans. There was no reason to hold him. He was a merchant seaman leaving on what appeared a legitimate run to Nicaragua, where he’d arranged a purchase of iron ore. This fictitious trip was to take seventeen days: six days down, three days in harbor, eight days back. It seemed straightforward. What’s more, the men Secretary Knox told the agents to watch—Zemurray, Bonilla, Christmas—had never been near the Hornet.

  When the Hornet sailed on December 22, three Treasury agents rode on its deck for seventy miles below New Orleans—just to make sure no filibusters snuck aboard at a country landing. These men disembarked at a river station near the mouth of the Mississippi. Captain Johnson steered the Hornet past the customshouse and into the Gulf. He killed the engines beyond the horizon, then drifted like a cork. He headed east when the signal came, sailing through the islands of the Mississippi Sound. He dropped anchor and waited. It was a cold, gloomy time of year. Captain Johnson finally spotted Zemurray’s sleek little boat, where the mercenaries were playing poker in the cabin below. It was speeding toward the Hornet, getting more distinct as it came. It tied up alongside, then a man, tall and lean in a long overcoat, climbed aboard.

  Any trouble getting out? he asked.

  No, sir.

  Good, said Zemurray. I’m going to bring the others over now.

  A few minutes later, Bonilla, Christmas, and Molony were on the Hornet, helping stack weapons—rifles, bullets, grenades, a machine gun. The newspapers took notice of the sudden disappearance of Zemurray’s men. On December 24, The New York Times reported that “coincident with the departure late yesterday of the steamer Hornet, Gen. Manuel Bonilla, ex-President of Honduras; Gen. Lee Christmas, soldier of fortune, and one of the leaders of the alleged revolutionary expedition against President Davila of Honduras, and several Americans who have seen service in Central American wars disappeared from this city.”

  As Zemurray stood on deck, he noticed Bonilla shivering. “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you, Manny?”

  “Just a chill, amigo.”

  Zemurray took off his coat and draped it across the general’s narrow shoulders. “I shot the roll on you,” he said, “and I might as well shoot the coat, too.”

  Zemurray climbed down to his boat when the Hornet was ready to sail.

  * * *

  It was a five-day journey to Honduras, hours of tedium and small talk, poker and rum, the world filling with color as the ship went south. For Christmas, it was a kind of homecoming. He had been driven out of Honduras. He would fight his way back in, returning to the towns and taverns where he’d spent his best days. As he sat on the deck of the Hornet, watching the Gulf coast of Mexico unwind, perhaps he recalled the scenes of his own life.

  As a boy, Christmas dreamed of working as an engineer on the railroad. It might sound modest, but in the 1890s the train was the fastest thing going. (A daredevil segment will always be attracted by speed.) At eighteen, he was hired as a fireman on the Great Jackson Railroad, which traveled from New Orleans to Chicago. By twenty-two, he was an engineer on the Illinois Central based in New Orleans. Late one night in 1897, he turned up in a barroom after a fifty-four-hour shift and commenced drinking. An official from the Illinois Central came looking for him at four a.m., by which time Christmas could barely stand. It did not matter to the official; Christmas was needed to run bananas to Baton Rogue. If the cargo went punk, it would become the property of Sam the Banana Man.

  Christmas later said he had been too drunk to object, that the railroad official dragged him to the freight yard and put him in the engine room. The sun was rising. A great train of boxcars stretched behind. Christmas’s father-in-law showed up with coffee. “Drink it,” he said. The switchman signaled, Christmas hit the throttle, and off he went through the city and its outskirts. From the point of view of the drunken engineer, the journey was a montage: a building blurred by speed, iron rails whizzing by, the slum seen at crooked extremes, a dog scurrying from the track, the devil laughing in the window. The train blew through a signal near Metairie, Louisiana, going full steam, sixty miles per hour or more. The brakeman later said he had seen the engineer slumped over the stick, sound asleep.

  When Christmas regained consciousness in the hospital, he claimed he remembered nothing: not getting on the train, not drinking the coffee, not pressing the throttle. It was all oblivion. The first thing he recalled was the pain of the steam scalding him in the wreckage. His survival was a miracle. He’d driven off the rails into another train at a bend in the track. The boxcars crumbled into a ball. Smoke hung over the scene. The worst accident in the history of the train company was later written up in the Illinois Central magazine.

  [Christmas] had been 54 hours on duty and then had been ordered back to his run without a rest; as a result, he went by a station asleep, and had a disastrous collision with another train. In the wreck, Engineer Christmas was seriously scalded and his right eye was knocked out—but that eye is still in use, although he says it has been knocked out three times, the first time when he was in a fight as a boy.

  Lee Christmas was fired by the Illinois Central, then blackballed by every other railroad. He was one of that breed of men who had everything and lost it. He spent three years in a drunken haze, stumbling here to there, telling his story to anyone who would listen. His occasional employment included stints at a lumberyard in Natchez and at a railroad hotel in Memphis. He cleaned sewers in New Orleans, lived like a tramp, slept in fields, begged drinks. His fancy clothes turned to rags. Now and then, he was arrested. Now and then, he stole. When his daughter was born, he fell to his knees and promised to change. He met with the night yardmaster of the Illinois Central, the only company in a position to know the true details of the accident. He demanded an investigation and was exonerated. He was offered a job as an engineer on a modest run. He only needed to pass a physical exam.

  The doctor listened to his heart, checked his pulse, ears, reflexes, etc., then sat him at a table covered with blocks: red, green, yellow, orange, black, blue. It was a new test fo
r color blindness. In the wake of Christmas’s accident, the company had installed electric signals—red, green—at the entrance and exit of every station. The doctor told Christmas to pick up a red block. He picked up a blue block. The doctor told him to pick up a yellow block. He picked up an orange block. When the doctor told him to pick up a green block, he picked up a blue block. He thought he’d scored perfectly but reconsidered when he looked at the doctor, who was shaking his head.

  He said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Christmas, but you’re color-blind.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’ll never work as an engineer on this railroad again.”

  Christmas wandered into the hallway, where his friend Boyd Cetti was waiting. “He came up to me dragging his steps, and not the way he used to walk,” Cetti told Hermann Deutsch years later. “I asked him what was wrong, wasn’t he going to work for us? And he says ‘No, because the so-and-so doctor from Chicago tells him he’s got the color blind.’ He picked up a piece of floss as green as the greenest grass and put it with one that was red as blood and said the color was the same.

  “‘Lee Christmas,’ I said, ‘I want you to tell me and tell me straight: do those colors look the same to you?’

  “And he looked up like he was kind of puzzled. ‘Ain’t they the same?’ says he.

  “‘The same!’ I yelled. ‘Can’t you see one of em’s greener than the greenest grass and the other is redder than the reddest blood?’”