by Daniel Wakin
Donnell soon married Mary, fifteen years his junior. His fortunes improved even more when Missouri increased the number of bank charters. He grabbed one, founding a branch of the Bank of the State of Missouri with a partner and with Mary’s brother, John C. Calhoun Thornton, serving as the bank’s lawyer. Donnell went on to help finance the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, help build the city’s First Baptist Church, where he served as a deacon and oversaw the Sunday school, and become a trustee of William Jewell College, about sixty miles away in Liberty, Missouri.
Donnell was typical of a new type of businessman in mid-nineteenth-century Missouri, a class of men who “migrated from a seaboard slave state to the western frontier, founded successive and often simultaneous ventures requiring imagination and a high tolerance for risk, and went through several career changes,” wrote the historian Mark W. Geiger. “All were part of a self-selected kinship and social network, and had obvious ‘people skills.’ The most common career path was from farming to clerking, to opening a store, to the wholesale grocery or dry goods business, and finally into banking.”
At the start of the Civil War, when Missourians were deeply divided over the issue of slavery, many of these bankers threw their financial support behind the Southern states. In this too Donnell was typical. Rebel troops took control of St. Joseph early in the war, and Donnell favored a system that reimbursed merchants for goods seized by the rebels, effectively financing the Confederate war effort. For taking this position, he was jailed and put on trial for treason. General Benjamin Loan, the pro-Union commander of the Western district of the Missouri State Militia, said no one among St. Joseph’s rebels was “more potent for evil” than Donnell. In 1863, in consequence of these attacks, Donnell was banished from Missouri.
So it was on to the goldfields in the Montana Territory. “The area was a friendly haven for Missouri’s ex-Confederates,” Geiger wrote. Donnell’s brother-in-law, a former Confederate officer, joined him in Deer Lodge County. (It was coincidentally another refuge for Jesse James.) Donnell was forced to backtrack from his days as a prosperous banker. He opened a grocery store with a fellow Missourian, William Tutt. “The store charged frontier prices, three dollars for a dozen eggs when miners’ wages were four dollars a month,” Geiger wrote. Following the usual pattern, Donnell and his business associates established a bank, where they sold goods and gave loans in exchange for the collateral of shares in mines or for ore, which Donnell and his partners sent via railroad to Baltimore for smelting.
It was a leap, and it’s hard to know what impelled him to it, but Donnell decide to conquer the nation’s financial capital. So in 1870, at the age of fifty-four, he moved to New York, leaving a frontier town of two hundred for the country’s biggest metropolis. Donnell eventually joined up with another brother-in-law, Leonidas Lawson, who was married to Mary’s sister Theodosia, and George Simpson to create the banking firm of Donnell, Lawson & Simpson, which profited from the vast railway expansion of those years. The firm made good use of its Western connections, handling municipal bonds of western cities and investing in mining operations in Texas and New Mexico.
By 1880, the Donnells were living on Madison Avenue. Donnell retired in 1884 and died in 1892. What happened to his fortune is a puzzle because at her death, Mary’s estate was valued at only $75,000. Her nephew William was named the executor and Mary had instructed him to invest $50,000, assuming that it would double, and then provided that $100,000 go to William Jewell College in Missouri, to be used to establish and maintain a “historical library” called the Robert and Mary Donnell Library. Either the stock market didn’t cooperate, the nephew William didn’t fulfill his promise, or William Jewell College had other ideas, because there is no record of such a collection.
Another $10,000 was put toward the commissioning of portraits of her and her husband by “first class artists” to be given to her sister, Theodosia. Sums went to servants and her nephews.
Amid the attention given to New York’s Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants, it is sometimes overlooked that for decades, Germans constituted one of the largest groups of new arrivals to the United States, including nearly 1 million in the 1850s and nearly 1.5 million in the 1880s, the two peak decades. The city’s German-born population reached its height in 1900, at 324,000, nearly one-tenth of the citizenry. A visible symbol of that presence is a statue a Spaldeen’s throw away from the Riverside Drive townhouses. It depicts Brigadier General Franz Sigel, a mediocre Union general in the Civil War whose chief talent was helping attract large numbers of German immigrants to the Union cause. Sigel had military training at Karlsruhe, took the revolutionary side in 1848, and fled after the uprising was crushed, eventually arriving in the United States. Opposed to slavery, he was recruited by the Union in a campaign to attract abolitionist immigrants to the war effort. After the Civil War, Sigel edited widely read German newspapers and died on August 21, 1902, exactly thirty-two years to the day before the Rubel robbery. The statue, dedicated in 1907, depicts Sigel sitting ramrod straight on his horse and staring across Riverside Drive right at New Jersey. He would have been a proud neighbor for the several prominent German-American figures, including William Ahnelt, who took their place among the occupants of the Seven Beauties.
Another of those German neighbors traced his roots back to the middle of the eighteenth century.
In 1761, a thirty-year-old carpenter in the Bavarian town of Stein, near Nuremberg, set up a small pencil-making concern. The carpenter, Kaspar Faber, did well, figuring out ways to escape the strict commercial controls of the Nuremberg authorities. On his death in 1784, his son Anton Wilhelm Faber took over the business and expanded it. Anton followed the example of his father, passing on the factory to his son Georg Leonhard Faber in 1810.
Georg still made pencils his grandfather’s way—smelting lead and encasing it in sticks of wood—while manufacturers in France improved on the leads and British producers used a higher quality graphite. So Georg dispatched one of his sons, Lothar Faber, to London and Paris, where he learned the French method of blending pulverized graphite and clay, which made the lead more durable and produced a better line on paper.
When his father died in 1839, Lothar came home to run the company started by his great-grandfather and instituted the new process. He brought other modernization: new factory buildings, a high-quality graphite supply from a Siberian mine, and a savings bank, pension plan, and discount food store for workers, along with homes and health insurance for them. He did not depart from all tradition, especially in the assignment of gender roles. Male employees handled heavy manual work, while women polished, stamped, and packaged the pencils. That stamp was “A.W. Faber,” named for Lothar’s grandfather. (Georg also established a tradition of Fabers naming their sons Lothar and Eberhard, presenting a singular challenge to anyone attempting to write about the family. So be prepared.)
Georg had sent Lothar’s younger brother Eberhard to the United States to procure red cedar from Florida for the plant in Stein. Eberhard bought a tract of forest on Cedar Key, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, and set up a sawmill there. Eberhard then moved to New York and by 1850 was operating a pencil and stationery store at 133 William Street, near Wall Street. Eleven years later, the company was granted a United States trademark for its lead pencils and that year opened America’s first pencil factory, near the East River at 42nd Street.
By then, economics dictated a better system for making pencils: sending lead from Stein to be combined with the cedar at a New York factory. When fire destroyed the factory in May 1872, Eberhard Faber established a bigger plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, although the company’s headquarters remained in lower Manhattan. In 1858, the company began making rubber bands and rubber erasers at a plant in Newark, New Jersey.
Eberhard died on March 2, 1879, at which point his namesake son Eberhard and his younger son Lothar W. Faber took over the company’s United States operations. Eberhard the younger became president of the firm just a year after gra
duating from Columbia University, where he studied mining and civil engineering. Strife between the German parent company and its American corporate offspring grew, and in 1898, the US branch broke away and was incorporated as the E. Faber Pencil Company, when Lothar W. Faber succeeded his brother as president. The German parent company, A.W. Faber, sued over the name, so six years later, the US branch became the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company. The Greenpoint factory eventually encompassed two square blocks, remaining there until 1956, when it moved its offices and operations to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
By 1910, Lothar W. Faber—the nephew of the Lothar Faber who had built the pencil firm in Germany into a major company and who himself was founder Kaspar Faber’s great-great-grandson—lived in No. 335 with his wife, Anna Prieth, and two of their children: Lothar Eberhard (what else?), who later dropped the Lothar, thus making things even more confusing, and Margaret. The household also included three servants, a lodger, and most likely a healthy supply of pencils. Records show that before purchasing No. 335, Anna bought the more imposing No. 337 two doors down in 1906, just in time for the Sigel dedication; maybe it was too large for the family and modesty prevailed, leading to a move to the less showy building. It’s not hard to imagine the interior of No. 335 adorned with pencil motif decorations, as was the home of a cousin in the German branch living in Stein.
During Lothar W. Faber’s tenure, the pencil company more than doubled the floor space at its Brooklyn factory, introducing innovative products like fountain pens, mechanical pencils, and lead refills. His brother Eberhard, the company’s vice president, chose to live on a different side of town, at 820 Fifth Ave.
In 1913, the Fabers at No. 335 announced the engagement of their daughter Margaret to Brock Putnam, a scion of the G. P. Putnam’s Sons publishing company. That June, the couple held a small wedding in the house, attended by just the families and “a few intimate friends,” the Times reported. The young couple later moved to California, where Putnam worked in the sugar beet business near Sacramento. (Brock later boasted of holding the world golf endurance record: 252 holes in one day, at the Plainfield, New Jersey, Country Club. He stopped only once to change his clothes and eat a meal.)
The 1930 Census valued 335 Riverside Drive at $90,000. Margaret, Brock, and their young sons, age six and ten, lived there too, along with an Irish nurse, German housekeeper, Yugoslav butler, and German maid. Lothar W. Faber died in 1943 and his son (who, yes, dropped Lothar and called himself Eberhard) and brother assumed control of the company. But both died soon after. Eberhard, a 1915 Princeton graduate, his eight-year-old son James, and Brock Putnam were at the family summer home on the Jersey shore, in Mantoloking, one late August day in 1945. James become caught up in the surf, and the two brothers-in-law jumped in the water to save him. Both drowned, although another brother-in-law, Duncan Taylor, with the help of neighbors, rescued the boy. Faber’s widow, Julia Taylor, was named a vice president and member of the management committee in 1953 and helped run the company until her son Eberhard IV was old enough to take on responsibility a few years before the move to Pennsylvania.
The tug-of-war between the German and American branches of this kingdom of pencils was resolved in 1987, when the German company’s successor, A.W. Faber-Castell, bought the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company in the United States, creating a unified German concern for the first time in nearly a century.
CHAPTER 15.
The Gang Disintegrates: “I Lived High, Wide, and Handsome”
FOR ALL THE INTRICATE PLANNING OF the Rubel robbery, for all the inability of the police to make arrests, the luck of the gang ran out remarkably quickly. Within four years of the heist, all but two of the gang were dead or in jail. McMahon, he of the self-inflicted wound, was of course the first to go. Another confederate was a suicide. Another was mysteriously shot dead. Two were ensconced in the notorious prison on Alcatraz Island. And two more robbed a bank and were quickly caught.
Ever since the robbery, Manning had been keeping a low profile, befitting his quiet demeanor. On the evening of July 9, 1936, a sultry night when people were outside on roofs, stoops, and fire escapes to evade the heat, Manning was walking along 108th Street, near Second Avenue in East Harlem. Someone stepped out of a tenement doorway and fired five shots at him. The bullets left two holes in Manning’s back, a third in his chest and a fourth in his left arm. The wounds were fatal.
One voice that could tell police about what had happened that dramatic August day in Bath Beach was silenced, but a motive for Manning’s killing never emerged. Some speculated gang rivalry, others that his partners wanted to keep him from talking. Another theory held that he was riling the other gang members by talking about retribution for their failure to pay for his friend McMahon’s funeral. Either way, he never realized his agrarian ambitions of retiring to a quiet life on a farm.
It is also possible that an unrelated conflict led to Manning’s killing. Clues about another side of Manning’s criminal career emerged seventeen years later at a hearing on waterfront racketeering by the State Crime Commission. A waterfront gangster, Francis Smith, testified about how corrupt loading bosses controlled kickbacks and graft along the piers. Smith cited Manning as an example, identifying him as a member of the Rubel gang and a friend of Charlie Yanowsky of Jersey City, a New Jersey waterfront racketeer and longshoreman business agent who had tried to muscle into the operations along the New York docks. Smith testified that Manning wanted to grab the job of loading boss at Pier 90. (Whether this was before or after the Rubel robbery is unclear.) While Manning was rebuffed, he may have been killed in retaliation for trying, with Yanowsky, to take over territory in New York.
While some of the gang members went into hiding after the Rubel heist, Archie Stewart at first took the opposite tack. He immediately began making jaunts to Miami and Hot Springs, Arkansas, and reappearing at his old nightclub and burlesque haunts on Broadway on the theory that maintaining his usual routine would deflect police interest. He even caroused at a bar the same night that the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover had shown up there. One of Stewart’s friends suggested he meet Hoover, but prudence got the better of him and he declined.
At other times, Stewart seemed to tempt fate. Twice in 1936 he was arrested in connection with other matters—once for an out-of-state warrant, then on a vagrancy charge. Each time he was questioned by a far higher-ranking officer than might be expected, namely John Ryan, the chief of detectives in Brooklyn. Both times he kept his counsel.
But his natural arrogance, and maybe also a need for cash, eventually got the better of him. He later testified that by the end of 1935, he had spent all his share of the Rubel loot. “I lived high, wide, and handsome,” he said. With the money gone, he tried, and failed, at bookmaking.
So he and his fellow Rubel alumnus Stewart Wallace hooked up again, this time robbing a bank in Pine Bush, New York, in 1936. They took $14,000 and shot it out with the cops during a chase. Wallace took a round in the head, but he survived. Both men were convicted and sentenced to thirty to sixty years in prison, with Wallace sent to Auburn and Stewart to Clinton Prison in Dannemora, which was where Stewart crossed paths with Kress, the car thief, and tried to shake him down for money.
John Hughes, the boat owner, disappeared. Nearly a year after the heist, on June 23, 1935, a John Hughes, thirty-one, who listed his address at the Embassy Hotel, was reported to have been arrested with six other men hiding out at a bungalow in Mountain View, New Jersey. There, the police found an arsenal of grenades, rifles, revolvers and tear-gas guns. Hughes, who had an arrest record for homicide but no conviction, ended up serving a sentence in a state prison in Trenton, New Jersey, for explosives possession when Geary and Oley, imprisoned in Alcatraz, identified him as taking part in the Rubel robbery, according to news reports. He was immediately transferred from a prison farm to the main penitentiary. But was this the right John Hughes? For years afterward, including around the time of the trial, the Hughes implicated in the Rubel case was reported
“missing and presumed dead.” None of the chroniclers nor even some of the police had taken into account news of the arrest in 1935 of the Hughes implicated by Oley and Geary—unless the Hughes in Mountain View was a different man.
The authorities arrested Francis Oley in Denver for the Albany kidnapping in January 1937 after the reader of a detective magazine identified him from a story about the case. He was extradited to New York and became the next of the Rubel gang to die. While being held at the jail in Oneida, he knotted strips of bed sheet, tied one end to the top of his cell door, and made a noose out of the other end for his neck. He stepped off his bunk into oblivion.
John Oley and Geary were now wanted for two major crimes: the O’Connell kidnapping and the Rubel robbery. Francis’s arrest in the Albany case led to their downfall. One report at the time held that Francis’s five-year-old daughter inadvertently revealed to authorities that John Oley had been writing letters to his brother, which led to the capture. But Francis himself may have betrayed his own brother. “He was a pisspot, a squealer,” a source told William Kennedy in his Albany book. “They squeezed John’s whereabouts out of him.” Either way, on February 1, 1937, twelve days after Francis’s arrest, federal agents and New York City police made raids in Brooklyn in connection with the O’Connell case.
The authorities surrounded a building on Bedford Avenue, where Geary was living in a fourth-floor apartment, and arrested him as he walked out of the front door, carrying a large quantity of money. Not a shot was fired. He was processed at the Snyder Avenue police station and taken to the federal lockup in Manhattan. Over at a building on St. Paul’s Place, John Oley was asleep in blue pajamas in a back apartment on the fourth floor when he heard a knock on the door at about 2 a.m. Who was it, he demanded. “The superintendent,” came the reply. Oley did not buy the subterfuge and began clambering onto the fire escape but gave up when he saw it being guarded by the police. Police found $750 in fifties and hundreds in his overcoat. Francis Phillips, the detective who had been helping lead the investigation, was there to see Oley in handcuffs.