Throttled! The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb Plotters

by Thomas J. Tunney

The Kirkoswald carried sugar. By examining the cargo-records of the other ships which had suffered near or actual mishaps, we found that they had also carried sugar, and that in the instances when fire broke out, the highly inflammable sugar gave a lot of trouble to the fire crew. The vigilance of the waterfront and harbor police had of course been keyed up to detect anything suspicious, but a bomb-planter does not often carry his bomb under a policeman’s nose, and it seemed not unreasonable to suspect that the bombs had gone aboard with the sugar. So I went to a sugar refinery to see how sugar was made.

I followed the process from the entry of the raw sugar to the bagging and shipping of the finished product. All of the sugar shipped abroad went in bags, which were sewn tight either by hand or by machinery. After considerable testing I found that it was fairly easy to open a hand-sewn bag and sew it up again without leaving evidence of what I had done; the machine stitches, however, resisted any intrusion, and were hard to duplicate once they had been taken out. I put that fact away for future reference and looked in on the shipping department, to learn there that the only two persons who could know of the destination of a consignment of sugar before it was actually loaded into a vessel’s hold were the shipping clerk of the refinery and the captain of the lighter who took the sugar from the refinery to the ship.

So we first paid court to the lighter captains and their aids. We followed shipments of sugar from the refinery doors to the lighters, saw the shipping clerk hand over his bill to the captain, saw the lighter pull out for a pier somewhere about the harbor, followed him to the pier, and watched the transfer of the cargo into the vessel’s hold. If a lighterman knew that hand-sewn bags could be ripped open, and wished to insert a bomb and close the bag again, he would have to do it on the way from the refinery to the pier—of that we were confident, for as soon as the lighter pulled up to the vessel’s side the stevedores rushed the cargo into the hold, the hatches were sealed, and the cargo-checker, employed by the vessel, turned over to the lighter captain his receipt for the consignment. There was apparently no other time for tampering with the bags.

How to watch the bags themselves from the refinery into the vessel was a troublesome problem. The river, during the daytime, is in constant traffic, and navigation for a cumbersome lighter in the river-paths is about as comfortable as crossing Fifth Avenue on foot at rush hour. The river at night was comparatively free, and it was then that most of the lightering was done. A waterman can identify the uncouth shapes of queer craft on dark waters, a landsman cannot, but we had to make the best of a bad bargain and chase the lighters in a motorboat, often diligently following a blinking light through the mist for hours to discover finally that it was on the wrong ship. Ships on a dark river are like timid spinsters in a dark street—they exhibit, perhaps through fear of collision, perhaps because ships are feminine, a strong suspicion of anything that approaches. Our barking motorboat advertised itself half a mile away. If we drifted we lost our quarry. We tried to smuggle men aboard the lighters, but there were so many, and they were bound in so many different directions, that we were not manned for this.

So passed June and July. It was a thankless task, and one which had its risks. Detective Senff fell into the river one night when he was chasing a suspicious character around under a pier at the foot of West 44th Street and nearly drowned before he could be pulled out. The case seemed to be getting no further than abstractions. Ashore, however, we learned that most of the lighter captains in the harbor were Germans, and in an effort to reduce the field we learned the names of the captains of the lighters which had most frequently visited the vessels on which fires had occurred. This took time and an exhaustive study of lighterage receipts, but it brought out the fact that in every case of a delivery of sugar to an outward bound vessel, the captain of the lighter had returned a full receipt—which exploded the possibility that a lighterman might take a bag from one shipment, put a bomb in it, and add it to the next.

I am happy now to say that we did not give up. We couldn’t, for the ship fires were going right on, increasing in frequency, and somebody was making bombs, for they continued to be found. On the assumption that a lighter captain who would place a bomb in a sugar-bag must first get the bomb, we began to shadow the captains, not only afloat but ashore, and then suddenly the case took a queer twist and our theory of German intrigue got badly balled up.

We followed certain lightermen to their homes, their drinking haunts, and their other places of business, and among their other places of business found the residence—on the lower West Side of Manhattan—of a man known to be a river pirate. That was enough for an arrest, and on August 27 we brought Mike Matzet, Ferdinand Hahn, Richard Meyerhoffer and Jene Storms, Germans, and John Peterson, Swede, to headquarters for examination. Matzet confessed that he, and “all the rest” of the lighter captains, as he expressed it, had been regularly stealing sugar from the consignments, and selling it to river pirates for ⅙ the market price, which allowed the pirates to re-sell it at ⅚ the market for 400 per cent. clear profit. The pirates in a motorboat would steal into the shadow of a lighter as she lay at her anchorage, take off a few bags, and slip away. We had seen such boats, but had never been able to close in and see what they were doing. The checkers who were supposed to render a true and just account of the number of bags which later passed into the hatches of the ocean vessels were merely accomplices who shared in the profits when the stolen sugar was sold.

There were no bombs on the captains (who presently went to jail) but they were all fully aware of the conditions along the waterfront, for one said to a pirate who was “buying” sugar: “Take all you want—the damn ship will never get over anyway!” No bombs—and what if there had been? We were reasonably certain that the ships were being fired, but we did not know now whether it was for German reasons, or merely to efface the sugar thefts before the cargoes reached the other side of the ocean and were discovered by the consignees. The conviction of the thieves was not much consolation for the slow development of the case, and it fixed no guilt for bombs.

But when you are bound on a long trip, and you have mislaid your ticket, it is second nature to go through your pockets one by one, knowing full well that it is not in any of them, for you “just looked there.” Then you find it in one of the pockets where you knew it could not be. Acting on a not dissimilar instinct we began to retrace our steps from June to September, and to follow again the progress of sugar from the refinery to the hold of the outward bound steamer. Our theory that the bombs had some connection with the sugar was either to be proven or destroyed this time. It was in this more or less dull review that we made the acquaintance of the Chenangoes.

They were nothing more romantic than fly-by-night stevedores whom the lighter companies engaged at the sugar wharves to load cargoes. They worked by the day, or by the job, there were always plenty loitering around to be hired, and they drew their pay and went their way. No one ever had to wonder who they were or where they came from, for a stout body was all the recommendation a Chenango required. They were a nondescript type of common labor, the same, I suspect, that carried materials for the Tower of Babel, and speaking almost as many tongues. The same face rarely appeared a second time to be hired—not that there was anything particularly unpleasant about the work, but rather that all work is repulsive to a Chenango. He is the hobo of labor and if the same man had been re-hired, no one would have noticed or cared. We paid such attention to them as their variety permitted—followed them to all the points of the compass, and watched them closely while they worked, to see whether any of them seemed to linger aboard in the cargo, or carried any suspicious package. The wickedest thing we found was an occasional pint flask on the hip, which was no proof of any special criminal affairs.