“What am I to do with nine of you when I was only warned to expect one?”
It was rhetorical, but Antoine answered anyway, “Help us get to Bariloche; so, we can make you rich. We are presently in need, and will always be in your debt, Hauptsturmführer. However, we do not come as beggars to the feast. We have excellent resources. In fact, once we are settled, I will ask that you bring major investors of our same persuasion; and we will all begin to build a financial empire. You will benefit without making a financial contribution; your expertise will suffice. Others will profit beyond their wildest dreams. We have already done what we need to do in Bariloche to get started and have full confidence that our financial infusion will sweep away any lingering doubts on anyone’s part.”
“But, of course, Herr General. I hope to help you all to a rapid and successful assimilation into Argentinian life. I have found the country to be most accommodating and cordial.”
§§§§§§
Headquarters, Metropolitan Police Service/New Scotland Yard, Criminal Investigation Department [CID], Victoria Embankment, London, the same day
DIs Angela Snowden and Anthony Bourden-Clift reported to DCI Lincoln Crandall-White and Superintendent Guy Mutz, chief of the INTERPOL, in the western suburb of St. Cloud in Paris on their day’s investigation into the little known affairs of two men presumed to be the mass murderers of World War II senior Allied officers.
Angela was—as usual—terse: “We learned two things. The first is that the most important of the killers—presumably the ring leaders—were the man in the Texas hospital, Randolph Bellwether, and Antoine Duvalier aka Laird Eagen. Duvalier was traced to Moscow on information from his office and with the good work of our tech department. However, he has disappeared off the face of the earth it would appear. The second thing we learned is that there are several potential confederates. We found a list of names, all presumably aliases, but still perhaps in use.”
She passed out a printed Xerox copy of the list they found. It included the names of eleven men: Laird Eagen, Randolph Bellwether, Pedro T. Rodriguez, Gonzalez Martin Sanchez, Dominico Lobos, Antonio de Castro, Guglielmo Pardini, Humberto Garrido, Ismael García-Iglesias, Augustín Ruiz-Rubalcaba, and José María Zapatero.
“Of these, we only know the original identity of the first two. Laird Eagen is the putative leader of the group—correctly, Antoine Duvalier—and Randolph Bellwether is the former Michaele Dupont who is now lying in a Texas hospital under the remarkably improbable alias of Dennis Cunningham Lord Downfort. He has given a full confession and has been granted immunity. The officers at the hospital are under the impression that he is suffering from an advanced case of tuberculosis and is not long for this world. Our office is attempting to get more old French and German army records about the Nazi SS unit they all served in during the war—the 33rd Waffen-Grenadier
Division, better known as the Charlemagne Division—and the Russian and Allied POW records. It is slow going. INTERPOL, under Superintendent Mutz and DCS Dentremont, we have a liason with Soviet law enforcement, and are working directly with a Moscow police detective, Lieutenant of Militsiya Trushin Vasilyovich Stepanovich. He has connections to the KGB which—miracle of miracles—is willing to open its files on the Siberian POW camps to help trace the activities of the German SS officer corps internees after their release in 1956. It is a significant understatement to observe that the KGB has a very efficient record system and ability to find people it wants to find.
“The second part of the answer to your question is something Chief Superintendent Dentremont suggested. Maybe the perpetrators are all old Nazi SS officers who now recognize that they can no longer live in Europe. Like most good Nazis, they may have been secreted out of Europe by the ODESSA and are now living comfortably in Argentina, the US, or even Asia. SS fugitives have the help of the Vatican, the Swiss, and the CIA. INTERPOL sources are investigating all of those helpers. Because the move must have been quite recent, we are concentrating on Argentina first. The Mossad has a very thorough and intense interest in the South American Nazi havens, and they have agreed to help. We have begun to work with Argentine police who are willing to help to a degree because an influential citizen of theirs was one of the murder victims.
Our liason agent in Argentina is Teniente Policía de la Provincia de Policía de Córdoba, PPC José Emanuel de Corsos. INTERPOL has an agent in Córdoba as we speak. We have spread a wide net and are beginning to close it down bit by bit as we obtain more information. We have a set of Spanish names; so, Argentina is where the net will tighten the quickest and the tightest.”
“Angela, tell us about the ongoing efforts with organized crime. We are getting hints that Eagan and Bellwether have a role in that world,” said Superintendent Mutz.
“We have only known about that connection for a little while; so, everything is preliminary. I don’t have to tell you that the mafia or its counterparts is a very close-mouthed bunch. They tend to respond only to serious threats to their ongoing enterprises or to promises of illicit profiteering. We are employing both tactics at the same time. Our INTERPOL and regular law enforcement agencies all over the free world are putting the screws on organized criminals, starting with the mid-level gangsters who usually know the most and do the most. As with the other efforts, we are concentrating on Argentina to begin with. One of the murders occurred in France, and there is a Corsican connection to that murder and to Argentine organized crime. Benedettu Paganucci and his two underlings, Dominic Rizzuto and Tony Lagomarsino, have a lucrative confidential informant relationship with Enquêteur] Grégoire Laurent De Vincent and Research Unit Officer-Assistant to Inspector De Vincent Gendarmerie Lieutenant Sylvain Piétri.
“Our preliminary information from those sources indicates that the organized crime families are beginning to doubt the effectiveness of the so-called Gebirgsjägers and are losing their fear of them. The profit motive is beginning to take over. Paganucci has given some good intel into the underbelly of Argentine society—who can be bought, who does the buying, and where the skeletons are buried. Most importantly, he seems to know where the criminal money is being spent to branch into legitimate businesses. All of that information comes at a cost; and INTERPOL is working with the French, the Americans, and the Israelis to pay the cost. We are in hopes that the information coming in is good, because Paganucci, Rizzuto, and Lagomarsino are going to be rich men from the payments for the dribs and drabs of information they are supplying. We’ll see whether or not the cost is worth it.
“We know that there are Catholic, organized crime, and ODESSA, tentacles intertwined into certain Swiss financial organizations. There is a ‘fixer’ by the name of François Caussidière, an enthusiastic Swiss Nazi collaborator before and after the war. He has connections with Paganucci, the Vatican, and the UBS [Union Bank of Switzerland] in Geneva. He is a pure mercenary and can be bought for the right price; but we have to tread lightly since his sympathies lie with the Nazis. Our tack is to convince him that the Gebirgsjägers’ day is done. We are trying to squeeze him to find out any financial information about, or the whereabouts of, the still-surviving Gebirgsjägers. Not much in the way of results yet, but the wily fox seems to be negotiating rather than outright refusing. It is an early work in progress, I’m afraid.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Boehme New Alemana Delicatessen 420 Avenida Pepito Moreno, San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina, October 8, 1962
For more than two centuries, the northern portion of the Andean Patagonia country rested at the feet of the majestic Andes largely unspoiled by development or intrusion by Europeans. However, those foreigners who did see the place agreed with the Patagonian pioneer, Francisco P. Moreno, that it was “a beautiful piece of Argentine Switzerland.” No one agreed more fervently and longingly than the former German SS officer Hauptsturmführer Erich Walther Boehme, now a minor businessman in the hub city of the area—San Carlos de Bariloche. Bariloche was founded only as recently as 1902 and—with the advent of th
e railroad in the 1930s—had grown to a population of 22,000 year-round residents and hosted several hundred thousand tourist visitors to Iguazú Falls and Nahuel Huapi National Park which surrounded the city. In the mind of Erich Boehme—and a fairly large number of other similarly entrepreneurially-minded men—Bariloche was ripe for development and to make millionaires of the developers.
The arrival of the “Gebirgsjägers” would have been the answer to his prayers had Erich been a praying man. They brought with them a financial portfolio that rivaled that of the duly elected politicians of the Argentine government and sufficient worldwide influence to be able to gather a meeting of men who could—with the swipe of a pen—make a hotel, a resort, or even a new city happen. Seated in the backroom office of his delicatessen were twenty-three well-dressed affluent men who were unknown to him a month previously but were now about to make him rich and powerful.
The close quarters of the office afforded the opportunity for all of the men to speak quietly and still be heard.
As they waited for everyone to gather and take a seat, Antoine turned to Benedettu Paganucci and said, “My friend, there are some things you and I should decide upon before we talk business with the others.”
“I agree, Laird. First, a question: what name do you use here in Argentina?”
“I am Don Pedro Altenhofen. It says so on my well-worn Argentine passport. If you care to check, you will find that I have lived in Argentina for over twenty years, having moved here from Essen. My parents were in the import-export business, and I grew up there. However, back twenty years ago, I developed a strong desire to live in the land of my ancestors—Argentina. You could check all of that out if you wished to do so. It is good to be at home.”
The thuggish Mafioso looked at Antoine’s eyes and then began to laugh.
“I was getting used to you being a three-generation Englander named Laird Eagen.”
Laughing or even smiling did not come quite naturally to the taciturn Sicilian. He was a block of a man—all muscle. He was five feet three inches tall and weighed 212 pounds. He had a knife-cut scar on his left cheek, and pockmarked skin from a bad case of untreated adolescent acne. To deflect attention from himself, he chose a conservative soft white cotton bosom fronted fitted shirt. Benedettu’s heavily muscled arms strained the shirt’s fabric.
Benedettu had tight curled black hair, an olive complexion, a strong chin and nose, large white teeth, and he rarely smiled, let alone let himself have a laugh. Even in his modified gaucho pants, he came across as the Italian thug he was.
Antoine laughed with him, then abruptly said, “Benedettu, I want you to know that all of us in the Gebirgsjägers intend to get out of our mutual business and to live ordinary, but rich, lives here in Argentina. We have no further interest in the business where you do so well, and we wish you well. However, should anyone feel that we have become weak or afraid or that we hide from them who truly know us, you can tell them that they are quite mistaken in that belief. If anyone of us should encounter violence, remember that we still have a network of very loyal people who would happily cut a few throats. I say to you, my friend, it is in your best interest and that of the Mafia or Unione Corse [Corsican crime syndicate] to let us go our separate ways in peace. Our meeting today is to offer you an opportunity to make a great deal of money in a legitimate investment—one the authorities will not question.”
Benedettu grunted his understanding as the others entered the room and were introduced to each other. Antoine’s nine Gebirgsjägers were familiar with Benedettu Paganucci, Dominic Rizzuto, and Tony Lagomarsino from the Unione Corse; and it was almost laughably awkward to be rentroduced with their new Argentine names. The nine men had not had adequate time to become used to being Pedro T. Rodriguez, Gonzalez Martin Sanchez, Dominico Lobos, Antonio de Castro, Guglielmo Pardini, Humberto Garrido, Ismael García-Iglesias, Augustín Ruiz-Rubalcaba, and José María Zapatero. Most of the names were hard for the Gebirgsjägers to pronounce, but the Corsicans knew better than to allow anything but a slight smile of acknowledgement to crease their faces. They were also familiar with the two Swiss men—the fixer, François Gaspard Caussidière, and the banker from UBS, Liert Beili Amstutz. Liert was the only man in the room wearing a suit, and the only one whose naturally stiff demeanor did not match the faux bonhomie written on the faces of all of the other men.
The Argentines and other attendees were—until that day—strangers to the others. Besides Erich Boehme, there was a Buenos Aires banker named Gunther Horn—an unapologetic Prussian. He was as Catholic as the pope for all of his Germanic background. He had six daughters: Maria Innocenta, Maria Guadalupe, Maria Veronica, Maria Immaculata, Maria Angela, and Maria Crosifissa. Gunther was huge, massively obese—so much so that he wore what looked like an oversized priest’s cassock made of the finest silk and cotton blend. He was intolerably bigoted towards Mestizos, Negroes, Protestants, and assorted non-Germans.
The most unusual of the men in the room was an American investment banker with the Negro Industrial Bank of Washington—the oldest and largest Negro-owned commercial bank in the metropolitan Washington, DC, region. Evert Williams had been intentionally selected because of the relative obscurity of the Industrial Bank in banking circles around the world, and because he and his bank were hungry for a good new investment outside the United States to start the board’s program of diversification. He was a tall, thin, sophisticated Southern gentleman with no pretensions of fighting for equality of races. He was about money and about accumulating a good deal of it for his bank, with the source not being contested by the White establishment in the eastern United States.
He was what Negroes called a “Cordon”—a derivative of the name of a popular champagne, Cordon Negro—and a “Bear,” because he was very light-skinned and because he was (b)lack, (e)ducated, (a)nd (r)ich. He had been called worse. When he lived in Jones Beach, New York City, he had been dubbed an “African Rock Fish,” a term for Negroes indicating that all of them were very poor swimmers; and throughout his rising career, he had been called behind his back by his fellow Negroes, a “chocolate-covered marshmallow”—a black man who acts white. He ignored them all.
Evert made himself an expert on the legislative efforts to repeal the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking act of 1933. In the first two years of the 1960s, he had been influential in persuading the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to issue aggressive interpretations of Glass-Steagall to permit national banks to engage in certain securities activities. His main credential so far as the developers were concerned was that he brought very large amounts of investment capital to the table.
The final three men in the room were there to bring the dream to physical reality. Heinrich Stracher was the artist/architect/civil engineer who conceived the actual plan. He was a pale, small, intense, nervous, man who wore pince-nez spectacles, a French beret, and a flouncy blouse and gaucho pants. He had a wispy mustache and beard that set off his face to match his intended appearance of a French impressionist painter. Despite his sui generis—almost cartoon character—appearance, he received full attention from the rest of the men due to his obvious genius, his intense passion for the project, and the captivating plans and drawings he produced.
Daniel Urquiza was the experienced developer having built similar grand projects in Buenos Aires, San Clemente del Tuyú on the Atlantic coast, and Ushuaia—El Fin del Mundo—in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. He was famous for his accomplishments in Santiago de Chile, Viña del Mar, and Concepción Chile. Daniel was a bluff man with sandy hair, a stubble beard, and the coarse features, topographical bronzed skin, and hard hands of a construction worker. He had intense silvery blue eyes, high cheek bones, and muscular arms revealed by a clean white tee shirt. He was the only man in the room wearing American three-button Levi 501 denims as a proud Germanic signature—in his mind—because the inventor of the first blue jeans was Levi Strauss, who was born in Buttenheim, Bavaria. He wore scuffed knee-high
gaucho boots with spurs. As soon as he could, Daniel dominated the conversation with his intentions for bringing Heinrich’s artistry into reality.
Of course, every major project requires a necessary evil—an attorney. In the case of the newly named Pueblo Parque National Nahuel Huapi, a team of attorneys was required. The firm of Xavier Manriquez-Huelsmann and Mitarbeiter Abogados la Ley [Attorneys-atLaw], Buenos Aires, had handled almost every major building project in Argentina for the past thirty years. The firm held distinct advantages for its clients which made it indispensable. In order of importance, those advantages were: 1. Connections with the Casa Rosada. Xavier was related personally to Interim President José María Guido through his mother and to Argentine Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers, Guillermo Fernández, by marriage which gave him ready access to the Argentine seat of government at will. His large extended family had done mutually lucrative business with the government of Argentina for three decades. 2. The Huelsmann family had deep roots—five generations in Argentina—with the behind-the-scenes ruling elite and kingmakers of the German community. 3. Xavier’s perfect record of contributing an honest kickback of fifteen percent of every project profit for which his firm served as the abogados. Therefore, having the firm involved as attorneys guaranteed unexcelled three way profits—for the clients, for the firm, and for the government. 4. And, Xavier knew everyone and everything in Argentina that mattered. He was extraordinarily—almost miraculously so—effective and efficient. His presence in the back room of Erich Boehme’s delicatessen that day guaranteed the project’s success.
Xavier Manriquez-Huelsmann looked every bit the role as the major player in any room. He was fifty years old, tall, patrician, and slender. His full head of dark blond hair was beginning to gray at the temples, which gave him the appearance of mature wisdom. His slender handsome face and imperial sneer gave him the air of invincible power. He had a perfect Germanic dueling scar on his left cheek, and an athletic physique which removed any doubt about his virility and energy. He dressed the part—a freshly pressed beige linen suit, silk shirt tie made from Thailand, highly polished $2,400 Gucci horsebit loafers imported from Italy, and a diamond-encircled Rolex.
The Charlemagne Murders Page 51