One’s laundry, too, may be a dangerous thing. Lamar denied that he had stopped at hotels in Chicago and Indianapolis and elsewhere at the same time that Martin and others were there. But handwriting experts proved that the names “David Lenaur,” “David Lewis,” and the like, on hotel registers on those days were in Lamar’s handwriting. And the conclusive proof of their evidence was that the laundry lists of the hotels on those days showed that the laundry mark on the linen of “Lenaur” and of “Lewis” was the laundry mark of Lamar.
Charge accounts at stores may also prove troublesome. It became necessary to find out where Lamar banked his money. That was discovered through Lamar’s stomach trouble. He was a patron of a druggist in New York who had his pet prescription for his pet ailment. Lamar sometimes wrote, and sometimes telegraphed, for another bottle of this medicine. A telegram of this kind sent the Government agent to the druggist. Did Lamar ever pay by check? On what banks? The answers led to those banks and thence to others and thence to Lamar’s brokers, from one of whom alone evidence was obtained that the whilom bankrupt had lost, in one series of speculations that summer, $38,000 in cash. Whose cash? The Government was able to prove that Lamar had got thousands of dollars from Rintelen, because they produced the men who saw Rintelen pay it, and Lamar was not able to prove that he had got any such sums from anybody else, so the jury took the Government’s theory as fact that Lamar was Rintelen’s man.
The story of this proof is worth telling. On the witness stand at the trial, George Plockman, the treasurer of the Transatlantic Trust Company (the Austrian bank in New York with which Rintelen kept his funds) described the arrangement Rintelen had made to conceal the passage of money for illegal acts. He had instructed the Transatlantic Trust Company, when it received checks drawn by him in a certain form, to cash them without questioning the identity of the bearer and without requiring him to endorse them.
One check of this kind was presented at the bank one day, and the paying teller brought it to Plockman to ask if he should pay it.
“Who presented it?” asked Plockman.
“That dark man over there,” replied the paying teller.
“I thought,” said Plockman on the witness stand, “that this man was a Mexican, but while I was looking at him our vice-president came up and when he understood the situation and saw the man he said: ‘Mein Gott! Dot is de Volf of Vall Street! I hope Rintelen has not got into his clutches!’”
One other incident of the trial should be told. Testimony was brought in that showed how the money for the Peace Council was spent. One item was for funds to pay the expenses of a German preacher from St. Louis to attend the convention at Washington and open the proceedings with prayer. Lamar had never heard of this until he heard it in the courtroom. It was too much for him. When this evidence came out, of the lengths to which his own pupils had out-distanced even their teacher in the art of political camouflage, he burst into roars of uncontrollable laughter which literally stopped all proceedings in court, the tears rolling down his cheeks as he struggled to subdue his mirth.
Out of all the investigations of the Government arose a card index of every man that Rintelen and Lamar had seen during the four months from April 3 to August 3, 1915, of every hotel they had visited, of practically every telephone call they had made and every telegram sent or received, of nearly every dollar they had had and spent. Thousands upon thousands of these cards were made and filed. They convicted both men.
The Government indicted Rintelen, Lamar, Buchanan, Fowler, Martin, Schulteis, and a man named Monnett, for conspiracy to violate the Sherman Act in the operations of Labour’s National Peace Council to restrain our foreign trade. Rintelen, Lamar, and Martin were convicted. The rest got the benefit of a very slim doubt, except Frank B. Monnett, the farmer attorney-general of Ohio, whose reputation in the early suit of Ohio to oust the Standard Oil Company from the state had been used as “stage setting” by Martin. He was freed by the Court before the jury was sent out to deliberate. The convicted men got the limit of the law—one year in jail. Rintelen was likewise indicted for perjury in his application for a passport as Edward V. Gates, and again for another crime against our laws. He was convicted on both charges, and sentenced to several months’ imprisonment on each.