VARIOUS ALIASES
In his meetings with various persons who had been picked for some daring enterprise, Koenig is accused of having employed various names. The Federal authorities give him at least thirteen, among which are Wegenkamp, Wegener, Kelly, Winter, Perkins, Stemler, Rectorberg, Boehm, Kennedy, James, Smith, Murphy and W. T. Munday.
After indictments had been returned against some of the Hamburg-American officials for conspiring to defraud the United States of legal clearance papers, Koenig, assisted by a private detective in the pay of Captain Boy-Ed, developed a scheme to get affidavits from tugboat captains to the effect that they had supplied English war vessels patrolling off Sandy Hook with provisions.
The plan was to turn sentiment against the British by proving that the British were doing the same thing that had been charged to the Germans. Accordingly, Koenig called a number of tugboat captains to a room in the Great Eastern Hotel, New York, and offered them a contract to haul provisions to the English cruisers. He told them that the captains were extremely suspicious of boats approaching the war vessels, and the affidavits were necessary to allay their fears that the tugboats might have a few Germans with bombs on board. So, in return for sworn statements from them to the effect that they already had been carrying supplies out to other English cruisers, he, Koenig, was to give them a monthly contract to do the work. Many of the tugboat captains signed the affidavits; but the scheme was exposed before the Germans really made any use of the documents. So carefully did Koenig work that he made the stenographers who took the statements transcribe the notes in his presence, give him the shorthand notes and he immediately destroyed them.