After getting permission, they immediately found a pile of new 1x4 lumber that had come from the Dorn mill just four or five months earlier. That wasn’t what they were looking for, but at the bottom of the pile were some old pieces.
Tracking down lumber shipments from South Carolina, Koehler visited the National Lumber and Millwork Company in the Bronx, where the foreman pulled a piece of lumber for him from a storage shed. “One look was enough!” he wrote his wife. He’d found the place where the wood for Rails 12 and 13 had been sold. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)
As he told Ethelyn, he didn’t see any other way to check it out but to have them take down the whole pile of wood.
I wanted to see it awfully bad. I couldn’t get around the back to see if any protruded so I crawled over and sure enough long ends of the old stack was sticking out. I asked Bornmann to get me a hand saw and I cut some off and also picked up some broken pieces off the ground which had been there for some time as I could see.
I took them out to the light and while I could not be sure that they did or did not come from McCormick on account of being badly discolored, I decided to take them along for further scrutiny but one thing was sure, they did not show its defect on one edge that I was looking for. By this time stock in Detective Co Ltd was pretty low.
It was lunchtime in the yard. As the foreman and one of his helpers sat down to eat, Koehler strode up to him for a conversation.
“Are you sure that the lumber in the bottom of this pile was from the shipment from McCormick in December 1931?” Koehler asked him.
“No, I’m not sure,” replied the foreman. But then he said, “I built a coal bin from scraps in that pine shipment.”
He put down his lunch, and the men proceeded to the coal bin. They cut off a protruding piece only to find out it was Douglas fir, not North Carolina pine after all.
Koehler’s shoulders sagged.
“I got one other idea,” the foreman said. “In the summer of 1932 I built some bins in the shed for moldings and miscellaneous lumber and I am quite sure that was from the car.” He had his colleague take a saw, crawl through to the back of one of the bins where there was overhanging lumber, and cut a sample for Koehler and Bornmann.
“Make sure you get a good piece—about 18 inches long with square edges,” Koehler shouted to the man wedged inside the storage shed.
Koehler would later prepare this slide to show the similarities in the rails and the lumber sample from the Bronx yard. The investigation would hit a dead end when he discovered the company only did cash sales during the Depression. (Courtesy: Dr. Regis Miller/Forest Products Laboratory)
“He soon had it off and crawled back with it,” Koehler wrote to Ethelyn. “One look was enough! Here was the defect and the lumber was dressed at the same speed as the ladder rail. We thanked the men for their trouble, they did not know what it was about, and went back to the hotel. There we compared it with a piece of the ladder rail which we carried with us and the planer marks and defect were identical. If it hadn’t been for a slight difference in grain you would think the two were cut from the same piece.”
As he further examined the Bronx lumber, he discovered a defect in the planing of the face that was apparent on both the ladder rail and the sample. He hadn’t noticed it right away because it was stained by the silver nitrate that had been used to take fingerprints off the ladder. But the sample had a second defect that did not show at all on the ladder uprights.
That second defect reinforced Koehler’s belief that this Bronx yard had to have sold the lumber in question because it was not found in the sample shipped ten days later to the Queens County Lumber Company. The ladder lumber had to have come from the earlier part of the shipment, while the National Lumber and Millwork sample came from the latter part of the carload.
“This conclusion is made because defects in knives do not disappear as more lumber is dressed, and if the face knives had been sharpened the other defect in one of the face knives would also have been ground out,” he wrote in his official report of the visit.
He took it back one step further just to make sure and found the shipment before National Lumber and Millwork had gone to Pennsylvania and had also been dressed ⅛ inch narrower than the ladder rails.
“No doubt now remained,” he later told a reporter, “that the retail source of the lower uprights of the ladder had been found and its location was in the Bronx, New York City.”
Bornmann’s colleagues at the New Jersey State Police immediately went to work investigating the National Lumber and Millwork Company. They now knew the wood had been bought after December 1, 1931, but that’s about it.
“I have not yet decided what the next move will be,” Koehler told Ethelyn.
That’s because the most logical move had been ruled out during his earlier visit. When he and Bornmann had asked to see sales slips, they were informed National Lumber and Millwork had stopped selling on credit in the spring of 1930. Arthur Koehler had found the yard that sold the lumber that made up Rails 12 and 13 only to come up short in finding a suspect. He was shaken.
“It was a hard blow,” he told Ethelyn.
It was harder still for the Lindberghs and for the investigators working the case. One of their most promising leads had hit a brick wall.
7
Acting Lieutenant James J. Finn, known as Jimmy to his friends, stared at the three-foot-long New York City map on his office wall day in and day out, looking at the pattern for another clue, something he might have missed, anything that could help him solve the crime that had harmed a man he knew personally.
Green, red, and black pins dotted the boroughs, primarily in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, with a few more placed in Queens. The pins marked locations where $4,200 of the $50,000 Lindbergh ransom money had turned up. Green represented the twenties, red the tens, and black the fives.
The fifty-two-year-old Finn had been with the New York Police Department since 1905. As “one of the smallest men in the department,” he didn’t really look the part of a cop, but he reportedly made up for that by being “handy with his fists.” The newspapers of the day described him as “a slight, nervous and sharp-visaged man.”
He would later be described by historian Barry Levy as “not unhandsome, but perhaps unremarkable describes him better. Straight, dark, close-cropped hair parted in the middle accentuated a well-proportioned though square, honest face atop a sturdy but lithe frame. Maybe he is best described as inconspicuous—hardly a disadvantage in his line of work. His pale blue eyes constantly flitted about absorbing details, betraying the sharp intelligence behind them.”
It was that intelligence that had defined his tenure with the NYPD. Within only ten years on the force, he was a detective sergeant in charge of some officers in the gangster unit, getting written up in the newspapers for “suppressing violence, dispersing gangs and capturing persons in possession of revolvers.”
The New York Times reported that he battled Prohibition violators like the “Hudson Dusters,” the “Dopey Benny [Fein] Gang,” “Terry Riley’s cohorts, the legions of Johnnie Spanish and Humpty Jackson, [and] the car barn outfits in the early ’20s” before losing a battle of his own. The politics of the department, insiders speculated, led to a demotion and a walking beat, first in the Bronx and then on Staten Island.
A new police commissioner led to a promotion back to the rank of detective sergeant and eventually to an assignment that was the envy of millions of Americans and others worldwide. By 1927, Finn was on Charles Lindbergh’s security detail, serving as one of the aviator’s bodyguards when he returned to New York for a ticker tape parade after his successful flight over the Atlantic Ocean.
After the event, Lindbergh sent the police commissioner a note commending Finn and the others on the detail for their “remarkable” work in light of the “tremendous problem” they adeptly handle
d. He shook each of their hands and thanked them personally before leaving for St. Louis.
During the assignment, Finn became close with Harry Bruno, Lindbergh’s press secretary. They stayed friendly through the years, and rumor had it that Finn had been socializing at Bruno’s home the night Lindbergh’s little boy was kidnapped.
Bruno recommended to Lindbergh that the NYPD put Finn on the kidnapping case, and the aviator asked the commissioner if he could “borrow the detective.” His request was granted, and Finn became the NYPD’s point person on the crime. More tellingly, he had access whenever he wanted to the victim’s family. The Lindberghs trusted him even if the New Jersey State Police believed the NYPD wanted all the publicity surrounding the investigation.
For example, in a letter to his wife in December 1933, Arthur Koehler recalled a meeting with Colonel Schwarzkopf, Captain Lamb, and the other officers in New Jersey where half of the meeting was “devoted to discussing the importance of keeping the investigation quiet. We are no longer to mention the true purpose of the investigation even to reputable businessmen for they all have axes to grind with the papers or politicians.” He explained,
Not only would publicity hinder our work a great deal, but they don’t want the New York Police in on it because they would take all the glory and the local papers would stand by them. They say there is nothing the New York Police would not to do to have a story to spill about this case. . . .
They said if either the police or the papers knew what I was doing I would have a “tail,” that is, one following behind to see what I was doing and a photographer handy to take my picture if I picked up a piece of lumber to examine it.
Finn and his unit at the NYPD didn’t have time to worry about the ladder. They were tracking the ransom money.
An Internal Revenue Service accountant named Elmer Irey had the idea to make a majority of the $50,000 ransom twenty-dollar and ten-dollar gold certificates, along with some Federal Reserve notes. Great Britain had dropped the gold standard in 1931 in an effort to prop up its currency and its banks to deal with the Great Depression, and FDR had taken notice. The economic theory was to inflate the value of money in an effort to prevent an economic downturn. By requiring banks and citizens to turn in gold in exchange for standard currency, Roosevelt believed the Federal Reserve could inflate the country’s money supply.
Irey knew Roosevelt didn’t like the gold standard, and indeed, the president would severely restrict gold’s use in the United States in the spring of 1933. Congress enacted a joint resolution a month later nullifying the right of creditors to demand payment in gold if dollars were not available.
The new economic policy doubled as a crime-fighting one. In the context of the Lindbergh investigation, this dramatically limited the yellow-seal notes still in circulation nationwide and drew attention to whoever possessed the currency.
The rest of the ransom money was in five-dollar United States notes with red seals and red serial numbers. FBI records show the ransom included 2,000 five-dollar bills, 1,500 tens, and 1,250 twenties. All were printed in 1928.
The authorities had taken down the serial numbers of the 4,750 bills in the ransom bundle and sent a list, fifty-seven pages long, to banks around the country. Despite efforts to keep that information private, it was leaked by a bank employee and published in numerous newspapers just a month after the crime, in April 1932.
Finn’s job became more difficult the longer the case went on without an arrest. Two years after the crime had been committed, he continued to visit bank officials and tellers around New York, reminding them of the type of currency to look for. He had searched a list of those who had rented safety deposit boxes in the early months after the kidnapping, holding the signatures of those individuals to compare against any future suspects.
Finn was working on the money angle in concert with the federal government’s Bureau of Investigation, in particular Special Agent Thomas Sisk, a serious young man with a black mop of hair on top, cut short on the sides per regulation. Clean cut and clean shaven, all the government agents dressed formally, in suit and tie.
The first money, a twenty-dollar bill, serial number B04173050, was identified by a teller at the East River Savings Bank on April 4, just two days after the $50,000 ransom was turned over. Finn received a list of the bank’s depositors and he and others interviewed them, but turned up nothing worthwhile.
The next clue, a five-dollar bill, serial number B26909389, was deposited at the Bank of the Manhattan Co. on April 14, 1932, by the owner of Schraffts Stores, a lunchroom and candy and ice cream maker. The deposit contained money from all of the store’s five branches in Lower Manhattan, at 31 Broadway, 48 Broadway, 181 Broadway, 281 Broadway, and 61 Maiden Lane.
It was more than a month before another bill turned up, on May 19. A five-dollar bill, serial number A85819751, was deposited at the Chase National Bank on 7th Avenue and 41st Street, as part of a deposit from Bickford’s Restaurant at 225 West 42nd Street. Bickford’s was regularly described as a “lunchroom,” even if its extended hours provided customers modestly priced and quickly served meals at all hours of the day.
Finn talked to Peter Reilly, the night cashier at Bickford’s, who didn’t recall receiving any five-dollar bills until around 3:00 am on the date in question. Between then and the end of his shift at 6:00 am, he estimated he had seen about five bills of the five-dollar denomination.
“The bill in question was possibly presented by an unknown man apparently of Irish, Italian or possibly American extraction,” the Bureau of Investigation report on the matter stated, “about 30 years of age; five-foot-eight inches tall, weighing about 150 pounds; with dark brown hair and eyes, tall flabby face; dark complexion; mild manner; had appearance of taxi driver or chauffeur, dressed in shabby clothes, old grey cap and grey suit.”
The man Reilly described came to his attention because he had paid for a fifteen-cent meal with the five-dollar bill. The witness looked through the NYPD’s and Bureau of Investigation’s photo books but didn’t find anyone who resembled the customer.
Another five-dollar bill, serial number B52611313, came to a different branch of the Chase National Bank on June 6. It was traced back to Brilliant Restaurant, located at the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge on Canal Street. It was a large restaurant catering to a transient clientele, authorities learned.
The cashier on duty that day didn’t notice any of the six customers who had paid with a five-dollar bill during her morning shift, from 7:00 to 11:00 am. However, after getting a description from detectives of “Cemetery John,” the man who had picked up the ransom, she told them about a man who matched that sketch who visited the restaurant every other day.
So on June 7, Finn and his NYPD detectives and Sisk and his Bureau of Investigation agents went back to the Brilliant and waited. They watched William Heilewertz enter the restaurant and promptly took him back to NYPD headquarters for questioning.
The Brooklyn resident had seven cents in his pocket when he was picked up. The Polish immigrant had no criminal record, and after being sufficiently scared and investigated, police let him go, concluding he was not “Cemetery John.”
This continued for the rest of 1932 like a slow leaking faucet. A five-dollar bill from the ransom money was tracked back to a gas station, another one to a woman “of good reputation and character” who received the money as part of her salary, and another to the Palace Café in Midtown Manhattan, which was “patronized for the most part by theatrical people,” the Bureau of Investigation would later report.
A ten-dollar ransom bill showed up in the deposit from a cigar store in Queens. A five-dollar ransom bill came from a Manhattan sports shop. The electric company Brooklyn Edison turned in a ten-dollar bill in October as part of its collections. One of the Sheridan Cafeteria’s 1,100 customers on November 19, 1932, passed a five-dollar bill associated with the case.
Each time, Finn inte
rviewed the person who received the bill. Each time, he told them he was investigating a counterfeiting ring. He never mentioned Lindbergh or the kidnapping. And after each time, he placed another pin on his office map of New York City.
Sisk was also using this method to look for patterns, except he had large borough-specific maps of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn at his office on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.
For more than a year, Finn tracked ransom money, and after a break from late December 1932 to March 1933, during which none turned up, things began to get busy. In April 1933, bills turned up regularly, with five bills discovered between the twelfth and the twenty-second of the month. On April 27, Finn thought he’d caught a break with a five-dollar bill, serial number B-56667794. The detectives traced it to a man named Paul Yakutis, who ran a rooming house at 234 East 18th Street in New York.
According to phone records, Yakutis had made numerous long distance calls to a person named J. Fries in Youngsville, New York. Finn and his men discovered that a man named J. Fries had worked on the Lindbergh home as a steamfitter and had roomed with a Hopewell farmer whose son had served as a caretaker of the Lindbergh estate for a week while the butler was gone.
The NYPD put an undercover man inside Yakutis’s rooming house and tracked Fries to Connecticut through his labor union, where he was tailed for a week before being brought to NYPD headquarters for questioning. It turned out to be another dead end, though, as Fries and Yakutis were cleared of wrongdoing.
The Sixteenth Rail Page 14