He had only a single room for lodgings, and we called there one day while he was known to be elsewhere and made a careful examination of its contents. Our first signal that Boniface might be off-color was the discovery of a file of clippings from newspapers describing the arrest of von Kleist and his crew. Apparently he was interested in German bombs. There was no evidence of the reason for his interest, however, and the detectives were about to ‘leave the room as they had found it when they ran across two letters signed “Karl Schimmel,” one postmarked Buenos Aires and one from Holland. Both were colorless messages asking how fortune was treating Boniface.
Now a cat may look at a king, and a man may receive friendly notes from the Argentine and Holland without molestation, but I recalled something of this name Karl Schimmel. He had come under suspicion before, first, when the so-called “Do-Do Chemical Company” of 395 Broadway had applied to the fire department for permission to store dynamite on the premises of its executive, Karl Schimmel, at 127 Concord Avenue, the Bronx. The application had been denied, and the fire department had asked the Bomb Squad to look up the Do-Do Chemical Company and its officers. It had no factory, no visible business, and as we presently found out no Karl Schimmel, for he became alarmed at our investigations and fled to Mexico, and South America, and then, with the aid of Count Luxburg he made his way back to Germany. Again, Wolpert had spoken of having met Fay in Schimmel’s office with Rintelen—but Wolpert would not talk. There was a reasonable margin of doubt in our minds of Schimmel’s behavior—enough to warrant Barth’s going to Boniface and asking him to come to headquarters.
Schimmel, Boniface told us, had employed him for a time at $25 a week. And what had he done in return? Nothing more than provide Schimmel with a list of weekly sailings of all steamships leaving New York for Europe, together with a description of their cargoes. Why had Schimmel, a lawyer, been interested in sailings and cargoes? Boniface said he did not know. How had Boniface compiled the list? At first, he said, by scouting along the waterfront, picking up scraps of conversation here and there and keeping an observant eye on the trucks bound for the piers. Pier-guards began to notice him a trifle too attentively, the waterfront was too many miles long, twenty-five dollars a week was only twenty-five dollars a week, and Boniface, it must be remarked, was racially thrifty. So he adopted the much simpler expedient of buying each morning a copy of the New York Herald, a newspaper which pays some attention to shipping, net cost in those days one cent, copying sailing dates, hours and destinations from its columns, and conjuring the cargoes out of his imagination.
Where had he delivered his reports? To Schimmel in his office at 51 Chambers Street. Whom had he seen there? Why, Rintelen, once, but he didn’t know what his business there was. Another time a man named Herman Ebling. (Ebling, it developed later, had been directed by Wolpert, who had had his orders from á Captain Steinburg, to take a tube of glanders germs and a dipping stick, seek out the wharves where horses were being shipped abroad for artillery and transport, and insert the germ-soaked stick into the nostrils of every third horse he could reach, in order that a serious epidemic might presently break out. Ebling claims he threw the tube overboard without fulfilling his mission.) Where was Ebling? Boniface professed not to know. Whom else had he seen? Well, there was another German lawyer, Martin Illsen, counsel for the New Yorker Herold, a German daily.
We sent for Illsen and questioned him of his dealings with Schimmel. He had written an article which he sent to the newspapers protesting against the shipment of arms and ammunition to the Allies, for which Schimmel had paid him $100. That he said was the extent of his service.
Sergeant Thomas Jenkins, U. S. Army, who successfully located a part of one of the bombs in a locker in the German Turn Verein in Brooklyn
“Did you ever see this man Ebling there?” I inquired, feeling that in Ebling we might find the missing link between the bomb-makers and the fires. “Yes,” Illsen replied. “Where is he now?” Illsen did not know. “Do you remember meeting anyone else in the office?” “Yes, there was a lithographer. His name is Uhde. He comes, I think, from Brooklyn but I do not know where he is.”
It is our business to find out where people are, and as the reader may already have observed, to follow a case through from one man to another if we have to question a thousand individuals on the way to our goal. We took up the search for Uhde, and investigated everyone of that name in Greater New York. More months had passed before we finally found the man we were after—Walter Uhde. We pounced on him without the formality of an examination, and searched his room, to find some correspondence with Schimmel and more newspaper accounts of the arrest and trial of the Hoboken gang. It was this evidence and the pressure which it brought to bear upon his conscience that made Uhde give up evidence enough to picture the bomb plot in its entirety.
It began, as the outbreak of the ship fires already had indicated, in the early months of 1915. One winter night there was a secret meeting in the restaurant of the Brooklyn Labor Lyceum. In a private dining-room sat Dr. Scheele, the chemist, Captain Wolpert, the dock-superintendent, Karl Schimmel, the lawyer, Uhde, the lithographer, Eugene Reistert, the proprietor of the restaurant, and a certain Captain Steinburg. This man was particularly dangerous to the welfare of the United States. His real name was Erich von Steinmetz, and he was a captain in the German navy. At that time he had just come to America by way of Vladivostock, dodging the immigration examiners by travelling in woman’s dress, and evading the quarantine authorities by concealing in the fold of the dress the same tubes of glanders germs with which he sent Ebling to inoculate the horses for the Allies. Steinmetz was Rintelen’s first and ablest assistant, and Schimmel was his second. The two men outlined to the dinner party a plan to manufacture and plant the bombs. The sailors would make the containers, Scheele would see that they were filled and would act as paymaster for the group, Schimmel and Wolpert would keep in touch with the sailings and cargoes, and Wolpert, Uhde and Reistert would deliver them to the small fry who could be hired to place them in sugar-bags and other freight.