Respa reported back. His next assignment was to go to Port Huron and determine whether enough dynamite might be attached to the rear of a passenger train bound through the international tunnel under the St. Clair River to destroy the tube. Respa came to the conclusion that it was not practicable, for the authorities were taking precautions against just such an operation. Respa and Stevens were then despatched to Duluth, where they met Schmidt and a fourth member of the group, each carrying a suitcase containing numerous sticks of dynamite, and the quartette returned with its explosives to Detroit.
Kaltschmidt then hired him for $18 a week. Respa had left Germany before his term of military service came due; Kaltschmidt used this information as a club over his head, for he knew the young man could not return to the Fatherland. On June 21 Kaltschmidt called Respa to his office in the Kresge Building, and showed him two elaborate time-clock devices which could be so set as to fire bombs at any specified hour, and Respa, at Kaltschmidt's command, carried the clocks across the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario, late that afternoon. His sister, Mrs. Schmidt, went with him, and together they wandered about until the hour when they knew that William Lefler, the night watchman of the Peabody Overall Company factory in Walkerville, would go on duty.
Under cover of darkness, the brother and sister met Lefler, who gave Respa two suitcases full of dynamite which Kaltschmidt had smuggled piecemeal into Canada under the front seat of his automobile. Respa attached the clocks to the charges, set one of the infernal machines near the factory, and planted the other in the rear of the Windsor armory, in which Canadian troops were asleep, and near which was a Catholic girls' school. Then he and Mrs. Schmidt scurried back to the ferry and took the last boat to Detroit. At three o'clock in the morning they heard a muffled roar from the Canadian side; the factory bomb had gone off. The other charge failed to explode: Respa said he deliberately set the percussion cap at the wrong angle, because he knew that soldiers were sleeping in the armory, and he had no stomach for murder.
One of the gang was presently arrested, and Respa was spirited away to the retirement of a mechanic's job in a West Hoboken garage. But he grew restless, and spent his money, and Kaltschmidt refused him more. He pawned his watch and his ring, bought a ticket to Detroit, and presented himself before Kaltschmidt with a demand for money, in default of which Respa proposed to "squeal." He was immediately returned to the payroll.
The Canadian provincial detectives had begun to search for the night watchman, Lefler. They found him, and from him they extracted a full confession. Respa's arrest was easy, and the United States willingly returned him, although Kaltschmidt did attempt to establish a false alibi for his underling. Respa was sentenced to life imprisonment, Lefler to ten years, for the destruction of the factory.
The dragnet closed in on Kaltschmidt. William M. Jarosch, a German-born, who later enlisted in the United States Army, had been introduced to Kaltschmidt in Chicago in 1915 by a former German consul there, Gustav Jacobsen. Jacobsen recruited two other men, and Kaltschmidt took the three to Detroit. Jarosch was directed to secure employment at the plant of the Detroit Screw Works, but he was rejected, so Kaltschmidt told him to watch the plant for a good opportunity to set a bomb there. In the course of his sojourn in Detroit he went to the Respa home in the placid little village of Romeo and returned with a generous quantity of dynamite. This he delivered to Neef, and in a conference at the magneto shop Kaltschmidt explained the operation of the time-clock, and ordered Jarosch to set the device at the Detroit Screw factory that night. He and his Chicago confederates set out for the scene, but there were guards about, and Jarosch had no desire for arrest, so he took the bomb to his hotel room, disengaged the trigger, and calmly went to sleep. Next morning Kaltschmidt reproached him, and Jarosch resigned, to return months later to show Federal officers where he had buried some 80 pounds of dynamite, nitroglycerine, and a bomb.
Kaltschmidt also conspired to destroy the Port Huron tunnel. For this enterprise he contrived a car which he proposed to load with dynamite set to explode with a time fuse. Fritz Neef, the Stuttgart graduate and expert mechanical engineer, was his able assistant and adviser in this project. The car was of standard railway gauge. It was to be set on the Grand Trunk tracks at the mouth of the Port Huron end of the tunnel and released, to roll down into the darkness under the river. At the low point in the tunnel's curve the charge would explode, bursting the walls of the tube, and completely interrupting the heavy international freight traffic at that point.
The "devil car" never was released. Kaltschmidt was arrested, and finally, in December, 1917, tried and convicted on three counts. He was given the maximum sentence, of four years' imprisonment and $20,000 fine. His sister, Mrs. Neef, who had been an active intermediary, was sentenced to three years' imprisonment and was fined $15,000; Carl Schmidt and his wife were each condemned to two years in prison, and assessed a fine of $10,000 each, and only old Franz Respa, the father of the dynamiter, was acquitted.
The activities of this group received tangible approval from the German Embassy. Even before von Papen drew the check on March 27 for Kaltschmidt, the attaché's secretary, von Igel, had transferred $2,000 to the Detroit German from the banking firm of Knauth, Nachod and Kuhne (January 23). On October 5, long after the Walkerville explosion, but while the Port Huron venture was still a possibility, the Chase National Bank of New York transferred to Knauth, Nachod and Kuhne $25,000 from the joint account maintained there by Count von Bernstorff and Dr. Albert, and next day the money was placed to Kaltschmidt's credit.
The Port Huron tunnel was the object of German attentions from the active San Francisco consulate. Crowley, who had been von Brincken's messenger in the Van Koolbergen affair, and one Louis J. Smith, were hired by Herr Bopp to go east on a destroying mission. They ran out of money in New York, and called at the New York consulate for assistance. They were told that the New York consulate had nothing to do with Pacific coast activities, so they wired von Schack for funds. He replied, chiding them for not having called on von Papen.