Bret Harte said that “the heathen Chinee” was peculiar. The British have learned long since that the Hindu, being an Oriental, cannot help being equally “peculiar,” and it is a great tribute to British persistence that it has labored so hard and so successfully in the good government of a people so temperamentally complex. They have studied the Hindu, and have understood him as well as may be. Understanding him they have watched him. When war broke out, this great Oriental empire presented to Britain a grave problem, for as a Hindu editor in the United States phrased it, “England is Germany’s enemy. England is our enemy. Our enemy’s enemy is our friend.”
It is not in my intention or power to discuss the methods which England employed to maintain strict loyalty in the Indian peninsula, but to outline here the part we played in uncovering a plot which threatened seriously to complicate her efforts around on the other side of the earth.
Scotland Yard told us in February, 1917, that Hindus were conspiring in bomb plots with certain Germans in the United States. If it was true, it was against the laws of our country. They supplied us with a few names, but tactfully suggested that inasmuch as it was our country and our laws which the plotters were attempting to disturb, we would prefer to develop the case ourselves. Various authorities in this country had already had strong suspicions of the British claims, but as yet those suspicions had not grown to proof of any specific act. So we went to work.
Among other names which were furnished us was that of one Chakravarty, whose address was 364 West 120th Street, New York. For more than a fortnight men of the Bomb Squad under Mr. (now Lieut.-Col.) Nicholas Biddle, as special aid to the commissioner, watched that house. They hired a room opposite, where through a slit in the window shade they could keep the doorway under observation. At the hours when working New York leaves its home to make money, and comes home at night having made it, the door was rarely used, but sometimes at mid-forenoon, sometimes in the small hours of the morning, the men on watch saw several dark-skinned individuals pass in and out of the house. The building itself gave no sign of suspicious activity. We were on the brink of war, and as was the case in most of the other houses in the block, an American flag hung draped in the front window. What went on behind the camouflage screen we did not know. Now and then our men, hiding in the shadow of the areaway, would go quietly up into the dark doorway and listen, but the house never gave out a sound. There was certainly no indication that these Hindus were conspiring with the Imperial German Government in dynamite plots.
We knew certain East Indians who could be depended upon, and told them to call upon Chakravarty. This ruse failed because Chakravarty never presented to the callers anything but a guileless reception. So far as they could learn his occupation was that of manufacturer of pills; he and a certain Ernest Sekunna constituted the Omin Company, which company packed in aluminum boxes and sold to a limited clientele pills which like most patent remedies were recommended for any ailment from indigestion up or down—if the pill sold, then it was a success. This news did not quiet our impatience, and we decided on a raid.
On the night of March 7, 1917, Detectives Barnitz, Coy, Randolph, Murphy, Jenkins, Walsh, Sterett and Fenelly called at the house, Sterett, pretending to be a messenger, and carrying a dummy package, presenting himself at the front door, and the rest of the party covering other avenues of escape. The portal was opened by a little Hindu who looked up innocently to Sterett and said that Dr. Chakravarty was not in—he had gone to Boston. The detectives announced their intention of searching the house. The little man protested, and was given certain short reasons why the search was in order. Surprise, injured innocence, and irritation crossed his olive-drab face, and he announced that he was a patriotic American and that he had never done anything to break the laws of the United States. If we wanted Dr. Chakravarty, he said, we should go and get him, and not disturb a peaceful household in this way, and he added that Chakravarty had left for New England months before, leaving no address. In this the little Hindu was borne out by the answers which the other occupant of the house gave to our questions—this was Sekunna, a German of thirty-five or so. We searched the house, and took the two prisoners and considerable material to headquarters.
A Handbill, printed in Hindu, used by the Hindu-Boche Conspirators
The search disclosed a supply of literature of the Omin Company describing the properties of its pills, a photograph of Sekunna and Chakravarty as the turbaned benefactors of an unhealthy world, and a number of express money-order receipts, deeds and a bank book which showed the missing Chakravarty to be one who had acquired a good deal of money during the past two years. The photograph on closer inspection revealed that the little prisoner was Dr. Chakravarty himself. Sekunna verified this, and Chakravarty, confronted by it, admitted it.
We asked the prisoner how he had suddenly come by the $60,000 which his books showed. He said that it was his inheritance from the estate of his grandfather in India, and that no less a personage than Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, had paid him, in December, 1916, $25,000 of the $45,000 due from the estate. About $35,000 had been given him, he added, by a lawyer named Chatterji, from Pegu, Burma, in March, 1916.