The Bergdoll Boys, page 34
9 It was probably Grover who changed the gold burial location to Maryland.
10 Ansell’s unreasonable suggestion was that releases could be granted for wild stories such as searching for buried gold when a limited number of other prisoner releases, under guard, had been allowed for cases of terminal illness among prisoners’ close family members.
11 Lt. Frank H. Smith, known among the prisoners as “Hard-Boiled” Smith, was the only other notorious prisoner at Governors Island during Bergdoll’s incarceration. Lt. Smith was court-martialed at Fort Jay and sentenced to 18 months in prison for ordering guards under his command at the U.S. Army prison farm number two near Paris, France to beat prisoners. Smith testified in his defense that other prisons were worse.
12 Congressman Ben Johnson suggested Hunt’s reliance on Army psychiatrists was no better than consulting a Ouija board.
13 In another incredible admission by Col. Hunt, he told the committee that he was unsure if he ever gave permission for the expedition to stop off at Grover’s mansion in Philadelphia instead of going directly from the North Philadelphia train station to Hagerstown.
14 Col. Hunt never got the Fort Leavenworth command. Instead, he was court martialed and promoted simultaneously, but then acquitted and retired from the Army at the rank of full colonel.
15 While Gibboney and Judge Romig claimed they had to represent Emma in her trial for trying to prevent Grover’s capture, it may have been a ruse. Gibboney was dropped far from the court, and Emma used a court-appointed attorney, was convicted, and paid a $200 cash fine. Investigators believed that by leaving the expedition, Gibboney and Romig were trying to remove themselves from the planned escape.
16 Agent O’Connor did not name the man who revealed Grover’s trip home for Christmas. It’s believed to be Thomas Furey, friend of both Grover and Erwin, who accidentally revealed the plan.
17 It was never determined why Strohm turned against his wife’s family and revealed Grover’s escape plan to federal agents. However, like many other saloon operators, he was selling illegal booze and he could have been cooperating with federal agents in return for lenience.
18 Details from the Select Committee to Investigate the Escape of General Prisoner Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, Sixty-Seventh Congress, May–July 1921.
19 O’Hare was approaching 20 years in the Army. On whose error it became 25 is unknown.
20 Master Sgt. John O’Hare later retired from the Army and lived in New York City.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Death of a Bergdoll Fixer
July–December 1920
On the morning of December 29, 1920, the bodies of four American men washed ashore from the southern Gulf of Mexico into a small white sand bay of Playa Punta Xen in the remote plantation region of Campeche, Mexico. Their pockets were empty except for a pair of glasses. No cash. No identification. Only cufflinks and a watch were found in the sand nearby. In time, the rapidly decomposing remains were identified as businessmen from Philadelphia.
One of them was David Clarence Gibboney, Sr., Grover’s attorney and the Bergdoll family fixer.1 Within days began wild speculation that Gibboney had gone to Mexico to see Grover and was murdered. A rumor among the public was that Grover was hiding in Mexico, and Gibboney had gone there to deliver cash and gold.2
***
The fact that Gibboney had become infamous in Philadelphia, New York, and Washington as the Bergdoll lawyer and mastermind of Grover’s release to fetch a pot of gold was not the only reason his story of Yucatan adventure, sailing, robbery or murder, drowning, or hoax was so captivating to the press. Even before he latched onto Emma Bergdoll’s purse snap, Gibboney was already making headlines with notorious campaigns against vice in Philadelphia and New Jersey.
Before 1920, Gibboney promoted an appealing alternative to the pending Prohibition that many people in the liquor and beer industry, including Emma, supported.
David Clarence Gibboney arrived in Pennsylvania from his youth in Iowa to attend the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. After several years as a drug store clerk, he became the powerful secretary of the Law and Order Society, a privately funded group forcing police and prosecutors to raid and close illegal liquor and beer saloons, gambling houses, and whorehouses in the 1890s. If the police wouldn’t act, they raided the illegal establishments themselves. The group was highly effective at shutting down saloons that sold beer on Sundays and allowed kids to fetch a pail or large kettle of lager for their parents at home. While the Law and Order Society focused on the unusual proclivities of these establishments, such as scantily clad dancing women and bloody prize fistfights, their activities later benefited Emma while managing the brewery’s hundreds of Bergdoll Beer-sponsored saloons. The Society got rid of her competition.
Gibboney was especially effective with raids on the Manayunk Pool Room, where nearly 100 people were convicted, except for a few released by police after a riot.3 He also focused on Camden, New Jersey, a ferry ride across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, where the Society rounded up 210 violators in one raid alone.
With these well-publicized raids, Gibboney received death threats almost daily. As a result, he didn’t keep a residential address in later years, often sleeping in his office. He preferred hotels, and once in a while, he would stay with the Bergdolls, bunking in an upstairs bedroom at the Wynnefield mansion by himself.
With Prohibition looming, Gibboney was popular among liquor and beer producers for his position that state and commonwealth governments should take over alcohol sales. The producers and retailers felt state control was better than a complete alcohol ban with Prohibition. But like Gibboney’s failed run for Philadelphia County district attorney, he could not influence the politicians on booze. Prohibition won.
***
In May 1920, soon after Grover’s escape and while the federal grand jury was considering conspiracy charges against Emma, Charles, and the others, Gibboney, still smarting over criticism for orchestrating Grover’s release, consulted an attorney in Philadelphia while considering if he should sue Philadelphia newspapers and the Bergdolls for laying blame for Grover’s escape at his feet. Gibboney felt he was being pilloried and assailed in the press. He claimed he was being treated in “an outrageous way.”4
The attorney, James Washington Logue, a former Philadelphia congressman who had dealt with Gibboney for many years over liquor licenses, swiftly declined. Laughing at the proposition made in his Philadelphia office, Logue suggested that Gibboney could not bring a suit against anyone.5
Logue knew Gibboney well enough from political campaigns to call him “Gib,” and he told him he had been “fooled and tricked” by Bergdoll.6 In a somewhat scolding manner, Logue told Gibboney he had an “implied duty, if not a direct duty,” to speak up if he had any helpful information to the grand jury.7 Logue said he was emphatic with Gibboney that he would not advise or represent him in any criminal or civil case. He later informed U.S. Attorney McAvoy of their conversation.
Logue said Gibboney revisited him that summer unannounced and at his Merion, Main Line, Pennsylvania home on a rainy and stormy Saturday night where Logue couldn’t avoid him or quickly get rid of him as he wished. This time Gibboney brought John Wescott with him. Logue said Gibboney questioned again if Logue would help him sue the Bergdolls and get action against the newspapers.
Logue said, “The proposition was such an insane one that I wouldn’t discuss it.” But he did. He said Gibboney “appeared to be grieved over the [Bergdoll’s] escape. He implied again that Gibboney had been a fool.
“How you could permit this man out of your sight for two minutes, I can’t understand. Your conduct is reprehensible,” the former congressman told his fellow attorney.
Logue said Wescott tried to engage him to support Gibboney and the brief he had written for Grover’s release, but Logue managed to shut down the efforts of both men. He surmised they visited him to plead for help because Logue, as an attorney with many federal cases, was often in touch with the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia, Department of Justice agents in Washington, the attorney general’s office, and cabinet secretaries he had known from his stint as a member of Congress, specifically the Secretary of War.
Gibboney left Logue’s home that night without the help he desired. Soon afterward, the grand jury declined to indict him but settled on a censure. The news was carried prominently in the local newspapers causing additional public embarrassment.
Gibboney was still peeved, but he had no choice or recourse but to move on and try to resurrect his soiled reputation and focus on new business ventures.
In 1920, while representing Grover in his court martial case and after years of making legal and financial arrangements for Emma, Gibboney also served as president and legal advisor of the Philadelphia-based Tropical Products Company with henequen hemp, fustic, dogwood, mahogany, cedar, and rubber plantations in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.8 Tropical Products was organized to absorb another firm, International Lumber and Development Company, when its principal, John Markley, was convicted of defrauding stockholders, fined $10,000, and sentenced to 15 months in the high stone-walled Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia in 1915.
Gibboney was Markley’s, International Lumber’s, and Tropical Products’ attorney. His counsel partner for the company was John W. Wescott, President Wilson’s close friend whose expertly crafted legal brief convinced the Army to let Grover out of jail to search for his pot of gold in the Maryland mountains.
Both men tried and failed to have a Pennsylvania congressman obtain a presidential pardon for the imprisoned Markley. The congressman later became the United States attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, the same attorney general in office during Grover’s capture, trial, and escape. Their mutual connection was Emma Bergdoll, a “significant” investor in Tropical Products.9
By October 1920, headlines about Grover’s escape and the trial of Erwin, Emma, and Charles were fading. Gibboney applied for a passport from the State Department to travel to Mexico via Cuba on Tropical Products Company business. Because of his connection to Grover, however, the application was denied. He appealed with the aid of U.S. Attorney McAvoy, who, despite his opposition to Gibboney’s role in the Bergdoll debacle, said he vouched to the State Department for Gibboney’s travel intentions. The appeal was processed on December 10, and on December 17, one day before Gibboney was to sail for Cuba, his passport was approved.
Gibboney, however, told associates he had a premonition about the trip and didn’t want to go.
The mission of the Mexico expedition was two-fold. As president of the new company with a stock valuation of $800,000 that replaced a company entangled in stock fraud, Gibboney, Markley, 72, and Shriver, 67, were to inspect several plantations producing henequen and report back to their new stockholders, including Emma.
Like Markley, Shriver was elderly. He was bald, mustachioed, and slightly built. They were to meet with Markley’s son, Lawrence, 36, a mining engineer from Elmhurst, Illinois, living in Mexico since 1919 managing the company’s henequen contracts at the plantations, who would lead the tour.
The elder Markley had been to Yucatan and Campeche a few times to handle labor difficulties. Because of the elder Markley’s fraud conviction, Gibboney and Shriver were required to go along as president and director of the new company for the second part of their mission, carrying cash and gold to pay the henequen producers who, under a Tropical Products land contract, managed the Mexican workers laboring under harsh conditions for a few centavos a day.10
Gibboney, Markley, and Shriver first sailed from New York to Havana on the steamer Mexico. Then they sailed to the Yucatan port at Progreso, checking in with immigration and the U.S. Consulate, and, by train, overland to Merida, where they visited and inspected some of their henequen plantations. Then came a journey on the Ferrocarriles Unidos de Yucatan with its Philadelphia-made wood-burning Baldwin locomotives, nicknamed toros de fuego (bulls of fire), to Campeche, where the line terminated. The rest of their trip would take them inland to the heavily wooded tropical forest, sparsely populated with dangerous animals such as the northern Mexico jaguar. The men were also aware of the violent war from the Mexican Revolution in the previous decade and Mexican bandits who knew that traveling Americans carried substantial amounts of cash in dollars.
Lawrence Markley chartered a small motor sailboat to make their trip safer, easier, and faster. They continued their voyage down the coast, landing at small seaside villages and then traipsing inland, visiting more henequen plantations. Without graded roads, their only other travel option would have been by mule train or horseback, a challenging journey on meandering paths for older men with limited time. Gibboney was only 52, but he was broad-shouldered, 6′1½″ tall, and fair-skinned with light brown hair and blue eyes. He was an office lawyer and businessman not accustomed to arduous wilderness adventures in the hot Mexican sun.
After spending 15 months in Philadelphia’s infamous Eastern State Prison and rebuilding his fractured business, an adventure trip to the wild lands of Mexico to see his son must have appealed to Markley. No fitter than Markley or Gibboney, Shriver had previously traveled to Jamaica with his family for a holiday and was aware of the challenges of the climate. Still, as far as can be determined, this was his first trip to Mexico.
Running along the vacant coastline in the chartered sailboat with six Mexican men as their sergios and marineros, on December 27 they were forced into the small fishing village of Champoton by a violent southwest storm. They waited through the night and, despite warnings by Champoton seafarers that “the storm was making danger for everyone who braved it,” they set off again on December 28 southward for Chenkan, the most remote region on their itinerary.
The bodies of eight drowned men, four Mexicans and four Americans, washed ashore in a small hook of a bay just north of Punta Xen on the central Campeche coast. They were removed by mule-drawn carts to the nearest community, Champoton, examined closely, and then buried in the fishing village’s small cemetery overlooking the gulf. It was determined that Gibboney and his Philadelphia and Chicago business associates, John R. Markley, Lawrence Markley, and Frank W. Shriver, had been in the motor sailboat that capsized in a violent storm the previous day. Based on the size of the craft, it was probably grossly overloaded. An investigation headed by the governor of Campeche relied on two other Mexican men who survived on board the boat. Not much is known about the two survivors, but they were able to report their tragedy, and the news was carried by a messenger on horseback about 40 miles north to Campeche.
The U.S. Consulate in Progreso forwarded the news by telegraph to Philadelphia and Elmhurst, Illinois, where families of the men were notified of the disaster by December 30. Gibboney’s wife, Ella, their daughter, and son, David Clarence, Jr., lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where daughter Louise May Gibboney was attending college. Mrs. Gibboney was reported to be “prostrate” with the news of her husband’s death.
Gibboney’s small chartered boat, left, capsized in the Bay of Campeche, causing his suspicious and untimely death. The press and public incorrectly speculated Gibboney was in Mexico carrying cash and gold to Grover. Grover would claim Gibboney was still alive and hiding in Mexico two years after his body had been returned to Philadelphia and buried. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania/Philadelphia Record/ Lawrence P. Sharples Photo)
Despite Mexican and American officials identifying the bodies and issuing death certificates, and witness accounts of the scene from the son of a Philadelphia-area multi-millionaire inventor who was on business in Campeche during the tragedy, speculation in the press and the public began to drift toward robbery and murder, or another Bergdoll hoax.11
Telegrams sent to the American consul in Progreso from Tropical Products’ Champoton employees speculated that the men had been robbed of the cash and gold they were carrying to pay the henequen farmers and then murdered. Because it was issued to the consul, the telegram report entered the newspapers on January 31, 1921.
Around the same time, Washington’s House Military Affairs committee received an anonymous letter with a Philadelphia postal cancelation stamp while members contemplated an investigation into Grover’s escape. The letter suggested Gibboney had fled to Mexico with Bergdoll’s cash and gold, was still alive, and was hiding there. House committee members became even more suspicious when several life insurance companies withheld about $37,000 due to the Gibboney heirs, claiming they needed more proof that the highly insured Gibboney was dead.
Playing in the newspapers, the controversy prompted Gibboney’s survivors to issue a statement. In it, because his mother was inconsolable, Gibboney, Jr. wrote:
I seriously question the sincerity of any government representative who says he is suspicious of the tragedy which overtook my father. Only a coward would want to bask in the political sunlight created by vague insinuations about a dead man who could not make a reply. The implication that my father is hiding in Mexico was known to be groundless when made, or else was the result of failure to investigate the facts surrounding his death in the slightest degree.
Still, in the spring of 1921, few believed the great Gibboney could be dead. His body was shipped home for final identification through his dental work. It enabled Ella and their children to collect substantial life insurance benefits. He was buried at Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania.12
Gibboney, for years, had been Emma’s lawyer, family fixer, and advisor. She paid him well, loaned him money, and invested in his business ventures. They were friends and sometimes social companions, but nothing more.
With his death, Emma lost one of the two men she could call at a moment’s notice, day or night, to tend to a family business or legal problem. Her decisions were often her own from that point onward, and they got her into much more trouble.
