The trial of these men was one of the most picturesque scenes ever enacted in an American court. In the prisoner’s dock aggressive blond German officers sat beside anaemic, swarthy, turbaned Hindus and plain American business men. To make the evidence intelligible to the jury, a map of half the world was painted on one wall of the court-room, showing America and Asia and the Pacific Ocean, splotched with red dots and routes of travel. Beside the map were printed the names of the defendants, so that their strangeness might be somewhat simplified. Among the polyglot evidence were Hindu publications in six Oriental languages, including Persian; cipher messages which, when deciphered, proved to be an Indian revolutionist’s letters which had to be translated by reference to page and line of an American’s book about “Germany and the Germans”; enciphered code, written in Berlin by the German Foreign Minister, transmitted to Stockholm and thence by the Swedish Government to Buenos Aires and thence by Count Luxburg to Bernstorff in Washington, telling him to pay an East Indian in New York money for use in San Francisco to send arms to revolutionists near Calcutta—besides other oddities of men and places and documents too numerous to mention.
The episode of the Maverick and the Annie Larsen occupied a large place in the trial. One of the humours of that fiasco was the proof that “Juan Bernardo Bowen,” of Topolobampo, Mexico, was a romantic imagining to conceal plain Bernard Manning of San Diego. There was no Juan Bernardo. The man who got Tauscher’s shipment of arms for the Annie Larsen was Manning.
The prosecution proved that the funds for the purchase of the Maverick and for the charter of the Annie Larsen were got from the German Consulate’s bank accounts in San Francisco, and were concealed by an elaborate jugglery through a chain of American lawyers and shipping agents in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego.
The end of the story is briefly told in the following despatch to the New York Sun, dated San Francisco, April 24, 1918:
Twenty-nine men, charged with conspiring on American soil to start a revolution against British rule in India, were found guilty by a jury in Federal Court early to-day.
Just as court adjourned for the noon recess yesterday, the last day of the trial, Ram Singh, a defendant, shot and killed Ram Chandra, another defendant. United States Marshal James Holohan shot Ram Singh dead in his tracks.
[CHAPTER XI]
Dr. Scheele, Chemical Spy
One day the Department of Justice in Washington received a brief code message, dated from Havana, saying that “Dr. Scheele” was coming home. The War Department also had received a code message; these started a little hum of activity. The messages gave a key to the possession of certain papers. Hurriedly a special agent of the Department of Justice was provided with a letter written in the cipher designated. The agent spoke German, looked German, and hastened to the home of an unsuspecting custodian of some of the Fatherland’s most damaging records, and there arranged with the guardian for a safer place for such papers. But the duly-accredited messenger wasn’t German at all, and the papers handed over widened out the trail of one big German plot.