CHAPTER VI PAUL KOENIG
Justice and Metzler—Koenig's personality—von Papen's checks—The "little black book"—Telephone codes—Shadowing—Koenig's agents—His betrayal.
In a narrative which attempts so far as possible to proceed chronologically, it becomes necessary at this point to introduce Paul Koenig. For, on September 15, 1914, he sent an Irishman, named Edmund Justice, who had been a dock watchman, and one Frederick Metzler to Quebec for information of the number of Canadian troops in training. On September 18 Koenig left New York and met Metzler in Portland, Maine. He received his report, and on September 25 was in Burlington, Vt., where he conferred with Justice, and learned that the two spies had inspected the fortifications in Quebec, and had visited the training camps long enough to estimate the number and condition of the men. (Their information Koenig reported at once to von Papen, and it is possible that it dictated Papen's recall of Goltz from Buffalo the next day.)
Who was Paul Koenig? His underlings knew him as "P. K.," and called him the "bull-headed Westphalian" behind his back. He had a dozen aliases, among them Wegenkamp, Wagener, Kelly, Winter, Perkins, Stemler, Rectorberg, Boehm, Kennedy, James, Smith, Murphy, and W. T. Munday.
He was a product of the "Kaiser's Own"—the Hamburg-American Line. He had been a detective in the service of the Atlas Line, a subsidiary of the Hamburg-American, and for some years before the war was superintendent of the latter company's police. In that capacity he bossed a dozen men, watching the company's laborers and investigating any complaints made to the line. His work threw him into constant contact with sailors, tug-skippers, wharf-rats, longshoremen, and dive-keepers of the lowest type, and there was little of the criminal life of the waterfront that he had not seen.
He had arms like an ape, and the bodily strength of one. His expression suggested craft, ferocity, and brutality. Altogether his powerful frame and lurid vocabulary made him a figure to avoid or respect. Waterfront society did both—and hated him as well.
Paul Koenig, the Hamburg-American employe, who supplied
and directed agents of German violence in America
Von Papen saw in Koenig's little police force the nucleus of just such an organization as he needed. The Line put Koenig at the attaché's disposal in August, 1914, and straightway von Papen connected certain channels of information with Koenig's own system. He supplied reservists for special investigations and crimes, and presently Koenig became in effect the foreman of a large part of Germany's secret service in the East. As his activities broadened, he was called upon to execute commissions for Bernstorff, Albert, Dr. Dumba, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador, and Dr. Alexander von Nuber, the Austrian consul in New York, as well as for the attachés themselves. He acted as their guard on occasion, served as their confidential messenger, and made himself generally useful in investigation work.
The guilt-stained check-book of the military attaché contained these entries:
March 29, 1915. Paul Koenig (Secret Service Bill) $509.11
April 18, Paul Koenig (Secret Service Bill) $90.94
May 11, Paul Koenig (Secret Service) $66.71
July 16, Paul Koenig (Compensation for F. J. Busse) $150.00
August 4, Paul Koenig (5 bills secret service) $118.92
Those entries represent only the payments made Koenig by check for special work done for von Papen. Koenig received his wages from the Line. When he performed work for any one else he rendered a special bill. This necessitated his itemizing his expenditures, and this Germanly thorough and thoroughly German system of petty accounting enabled our secret service later to trace his activities with considerable success. Koenig and von Papen used to haggle over his bills—on one occasion the attaché felt he was being overcharged, and accordingly deducted a half-dollar from the total.
"P. K." also had an incriminating book—a carefully prepared notebook of his spies and of persons in New York, Boston and other cities who were useful in furnishing him information. In another book he kept a complete record of the purpose and cost of assignments on which he sent his men. He listed in its pages the names of several hundred persons—army reservists, German-Americans and Americans, clerks, scientists and city and Federal employees—showing that his district was large and that his range for getting information and for supervising other pro-German propaganda was broad. For his own direct staff he worked out a system of numbers and initials to be used in communication. The numbers he changed at regular intervals and a system of progression was devised by which each agent would know when his number changed. He provided them with suitable aliases. These men had alternative codes for writing letters and for telephone communication to be changed automatically by certain fixed dates.
Always alert for spies upon himself, Koenig suspected that his telephone wire was tapped and that his orders were being overheard. So he instructed his men in various code words. If he told an agent to meet him "at 5 o'clock at South Ferry" he meant: "Meet me at 7 o'clock at Forty-second Street and Broadway." His suspicions were well-grounded, for his wire was tapped, and Koenig led the men who were spying on him an unhappy dance.
For example: he would receive a call on the telephone and would direct his agent, at the other end of the wire, to meet him in fifteen minutes at Pabst's, Harlem. It is practically impossible to make the journey from Koenig's office in the Hamburg-American Building to 125th Street in a quarter of an hour. After a time his watchers learned that "Pabst's, Harlem" meant Borough Hall, Brooklyn.
He never went out in the daytime without one or two of his agents trailing him to see whether he was being shadowed. He used to turn a corner suddenly and stand still so that an American detective following came unexpectedly face to face with him and betrayed his identity. Koenig would laugh heartily and pass on. Thus he came to know many agents of the Department of Justice and many New York detectives. When he started out at night he usually had three of his own men follow him and by a prearranged system of signals inform him if any strangers were following him.
The task of keeping watch of Koenig's movements required astute guessing and tireless work on the part of the New York police. So elusive did he become that it was necessary for Captain Tunney to evolve a new system of shadowing him in order to keep him in sight without betraying that he was under surveillance. One detective, accordingly, would be stationed several blocks away and would start out ahead of Koenig. The "front shadow" was signaled by his confederates in the rear whenever Koenig turned a corner, so that the man in front might dart down a cross-street and manœuvre to keep ahead of him. If Koenig boarded a street car the man ahead would hail the car several blocks beyond, thus avoiding suspicion. In more than one instance detectives in the rear, guessing that he was about to take a car, would board it several blocks before it got abreast of Koenig. His alertness kept Detectives Barnitz, Coy, Terra, and Corell on edge for months.
It was impossible to overhear direct conversation between Koenig and any man to whom he was giving instructions. Some of his workers he never permitted to meet him at all, but when he kept a rendezvous it was in the open, in the parks in broad daylight, or in a moving-picture theatre, or in the Pennsylvania Station, or the Grand Central Terminal. There he could make sure that nobody was eavesdropping. If he met an agent in the open for the first time he gave him some such command at this:
"Be at Third Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street at 2:30 to-morrow afternoon beside a public telephone booth there. When the telephone rings answer it."
The man would obey. On the minute the telephone would ring and the man would lift the receiver. A strange voice told him to do certain things—either a definite assignment, or instructions to be at a similar place on the following day to receive a message. Or he might be told to meet another man, who would give him money and further orders. The voice at the other end of the wire spoke from a public telephone booth and was thus reasonably sure that the wire was not tapped.
And Koenig trusted no man. He never sent an agent out on a job without detailing another man to shadow that man and report back to him in full the operations of the agent and of any persons whom he might deal with. He was brutally severe in his insistence that his men do exactly what he told them without using their own initiative.
Koenig had spies on every big steamship pier. He had eavesdroppers in hotels, and on busy telephone switchboards. He employed porters, window-cleaners, bank clerks, corporation employees and even a member of the Police Department.
This last, listed in his book as "Special Agent A. S.," was Otto F. Mottola, a detective in the warrant squad. The notebook revealed Mottola as "Antonio Marino," an alias later changed to Antonio Salvatore. Evidence was produced at Mottola's trial at Police Headquarters that Koenig paid him for investigating a passenger who sailed on the Bergensfjord; that he often called up Mottola, asked questions, and received answers which Koenig's stenographer took down in shorthand. Through him Koenig sought to keep closely informed of developments at Police Headquarters in the inquiry being made by the police into the activities of the Germans. Mottola was dismissed from the force because of false statements made to his superiors when they questioned him about Koenig.
Koenig's very caution was the cause of his undoing. The detectives who shadowed him learned that he "never employed the same man more than once," which meant simply that he was careful to place no subordinate in a position where blackmail and exposure might be too easy. To this fact they added another trifling observation; they noticed that as time went on he was seen less in the company of one George Fuchs, a relative with whom he had been intimate early in the war. They cultivated the young man's acquaintance to the extent that he finally burst out with a recitation of his grievances against Koenig, and betrayed him to the authorities.
"P. K." was defiant always. "They did get Dr. Albert's portfolio," he said one day, "but they won't get mine. I won't carry one."