Deppe collected his luggage and walked outside to hail a cab. He was driven to the Henry Hudson Hotel on 57th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, where Sabena Airlines personnel were quartered on their stopovers in New York.
When he reached his room, he tried to make a phone call, but no one answered. For the next few hours, he tried again and again to get an answer from the number. At last he took a shower, changed into light sports clothes and left the hotel to get a late dinner.
The telephone which Deppe heard ringing was in the apartment of Julius Falkenstein at 58 West 72nd St. The reason Falkenstein didn’t answer at the time was that he and his wife were being detained and searched by Customs agents at the Canadian border.
As far as Falkenstein’s friends knew, he was merely a hard-working employee of a New York furrier whose place of business was in the Manhattan garment district. He was a quiet chap who minded his own business. Customs agents had never heard his name until Friday, July 10—two days before Deppe’s plane landed at Idlewild—when Duncan received an urgent trans-Atlantic call from Beers in Antwerp.
“Tom,” Beers said, “I’ve got a good line on a smuggling ring. My informant here tells me that their New York contact is Julius Falkenstein. He has a brother in the business in Antwerp.”
“Maybe this is what we’ve been looking for,” Duncan said. “We’ll get right on it.”
Two agents called at the furrier’s shop where Falkenstein worked but were told that he had left for the weekend. This news was relayed to Agents Harold F. Smith and John Moseley, who had been sent by Duncan to watch the Falkenstein apartment building. The agents had obtained a description of their man from an apartment employee.
At 6 P.M. on that muggy afternoon, Falkenstein and his wife Ann came out of the building carrying suitcases. They walked around the corner and climbed into a car. Then they headed across town to the elevated West Side Highway and turned north. The agents followed them for several miles but finally lost them in the heavy weekend traffic. When the agents reported by radio to Duncan that they had lost contact, Duncan said, “Let ’em go. They are probably headed for the Catskills. We’ll pick them up again Monday.”
That night Duncan had another call from Antwerp. He was told that an informant had reported two shipments of diamonds were enroute to New York, one by way of Canada.
Duncan played a hunch. He called Agent Abe Eisenberg, the Customs’ representative in Montreal. Eisenberg was about sixty years old, a chunky man with graying hair who had been matching wits with smugglers for almost forty years. He was one of the best undercover men in the Service; he had an actor’s ability to look like a dignified banker or a bum. A man of meticulous honesty, he had one obsession: he hated crooked Jews. Being Jewish himself, he regarded every dishonest Jew as a disgrace to his race.