The Bergdoll Boys, page 35
Even from his hiding place in Eberbach, Germany, Grover knew that Gibboney had consulted an attorney to file suit against the Philadelphia newspapers and the Bergdolls, and it roiled him. Then, adding fuel to the fire, Grover made things worse for the still-simmering Gibboney rumors when, two years after the attorney’s death, he made the wildly unfounded accusation in his interview with magazine journalist Leighton Blood that Gibboney was still alive and well in Mexico.
Grover desecrated the memory of the man who had gotten him out of jail and turned a blind eye, providing the opportunity for escape.
“You know, Gibboney was supposed to have drowned while fishing in the Gulf of Mexico,” Grover said. “I know for a fact that he’s hiding in Mexico, and give me a week there, and I’ll turn him up.”
“I know where he is,” Grover bragged with complete ignorance from five thousand miles away in Germany. “And I’ll be only too glad to see him brought to justice.”
***
Emma’s longtime advisor and fixer’s death closed a disastrous year for the Bergdoll family. Grover had been captured, tried, convicted, released to search for gold, and had escaped. Prohibition shut down the Bergdoll Brewery, the family’s cash-flowing spigot. Income from their hundreds of saloons dried up, despite serving “near-beer” and home brewing kits. Emma was convicted of threatening police and federal agents with a gun during Grover’s capture. In Grover’s escape, she and Charles, Grover, Erwin, Stecher, and Judge Romig were indicted by a federal grand jury. Those who were tried were convicted. The same grand jury censured Gibboney for “gross carelessness,” leading to bickering among the Bergdolls and callous blame by the press and public. And finally, after two years on the run, Erwin decided to surrender and face charges of desertion.
Unlike Grover, he walked unannounced into the Disciplinary Barracks at Governors Island and gave himself up on July 21, 1920. Erwin’s arrival was so surprising that Army officials had to halt their court martial of Col. John Hunt in Grover’s escape to conduct Erwin’s arraignment immediately. They made sure the Army guards put him in handcuffs.
Tired of being on the run, he called his father-in-law, William Parker, who was occasionally staying at Erwin’s Broomall farm despite the death of his daughter, Sarah Parker Bergdoll, in 1919. Erwin suggested that Mr. Parker notify Charles and Judge Romig to arrange his surrender. Together, all three men boarded a train at Philadelphia, rode to New York, obtained government passes for the ferry, and without being recognized by anyone in public, made the 10-minute crossing to Governors Island. Alerted from the Manhattan Battery ferry dock of the notorious visitor, Judge Advocate Prosecutor Col. Cresson and three guards met Erwin, Charles, and Judge Romig on the Fort Jay parade ground.
“Do you want a civilian lawyer?” Cresson asked his new prisoner.
“No,” Erwin replied. “I want to get it over as soon as possible. I’m tired of running around the country. I always knew they wanted me.”
Erwin was led into Castle Williams and the same upper floor of steel-walled jail cells from which Grover was released before he escaped. Charles and Judge Romig returned to Philadelphia. They had been trying to convince Erwin to surrender since April 1919, just days after the death of Sarah.
Erwin’s court-martial trial in August 1920 followed a similar path to Grover’s. Local draft board officials from Broomall were brought to New York to describe how they sent Erwin’s draft notice to the farm and how Erwin and Sarah insisted he was placed in the wrong callup category because he was married and a farmer. Erwin’s draft board secretary testified that Erwin told him he didn’t want to go to war because “I might have to shoot relatives on the other side.”
When challenged about Erwin’s status as a farmer, the draft board responded that Erwin showed only “slight knowledge of agriculture.” Farming was “a sideline.”
While Grover was on trial for draft evasion in 1920, Emma Bergdoll appeared regularly in court, facing conspiracy charges and threatening officers with a gun. She always traveled to court in Philadelphia with a hired companion carrying a small black valise containing $10,000 cash for bail. (Temple University Urban Archives)
Federal agents involved in the hunt for Erwin felt sympathy for him; for Grover, they did not. Federal prosecutor McAvoy said Erwin seemed more sincere about his opposition to the war (he was pro-German). Unlike Grover, he stayed away quietly, without sending taunting letters and postcards to newspapers and the men charged with hunting him down.
Erwin was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison at Leavenworth. He was returned to Philadelphia a few weeks later as a witness in the federal conspiracy trial for Emma, Charles, Judge Romig, and the others charged with helping him and Grover run from the draft.
This time, Army guards were ordered to take no chances with an infamous Bergdoll being released for a cross-country trip. Along with two noncommissioned officers as armed guards, Erwin traveled back to Philadelphia in shackles and handcuffs, supervised by Adjutant Julius A. Penn. He was locked in a cell at the Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia, and his two guards stayed in the cell with him each night.
At the conspiracy trial in the federal building and post office at Ninth and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia, Erwin was allowed to testify from the courtroom witness box without handcuffs but with two armed guards surrounding him. He absolved his mother, brother, and even the automobile broker charged with providing him a new car.
He did make the federal agents appear foolish, however, when he testified that he hid in the old barn at the Bergdolls’ Broomall farm and, peeking through cracks in the barn boards, watched the agents searching his farmhouse and machine shop, Charles’ mansion and carriage house, and the outbuildings on the property, but never coming inside the derelict barn with Louis’ pigeon-pooped Blériot airplane hanging in the rafters.
Erwin said he often slept in the hay mow of the dirty old barn, fearing the agents would return at night. They didn’t.
During the trial, Erwin told his mother he would gladly return to Leavenworth. He told Emma that the Frankford Arsenal jail was uncomfortable and had lousy food. At Leavenworth, Erwin worked in the machine shop, which he liked, slept on a soft bed, and received quality food with a chance to return for second and third helpings. He was eager to serve his sentence and move on with his life.
Emma and the others were convicted of conspiracy, and their suspended sentences were eventually reduced to hefty fines. Emma and Charles later made the payments for everyone and were free to go. Emma charged through the federal building hallways trailing a line of scribbling reporters around her like a Washington politician. She reserved her criticism for Col. Cresson, calling him a liar for convicting her second son of desertion weeks earlier.
“He’s a hog, eh,” Emma called out. “And now I’m going shopping.”
_________________
1 The details of Gibboney’s trip to Mexico and accidental drowning are from Congressional testimony and investigative reports. The information was supported by travel documents, consulate, and court records on Gibboney’s business partner, John Markley. Mortuary and burial records support the investigation report that the men suffered from accidental drowning during a violent storm in the Gulf of Mexico.
2 Speculation about the Gibboney–Grover Mexico rendezvous was mainly among the uninformed public. Military Intelligence had already confirmed on October 26, 1920, that Grover was hiding in Eberbach, Germany.
3 Manayunk was a working-class garment mill section of Philadelphia along the Schuylkill and not far from the Bergdoll Brewery and Biergartens. Its mill workers and residents were frequent contributors to and victims of vice.
4 The revelation that Gibboney was trying to turn on his long, lucrative relationship with Emma Bergdoll is supported by testimony from former Philadelphia Congressman and Attorney James Washington Logue.
5 Logue was a devout Catholic and president of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union which dealt with Gibboney’s Law and Order Society over liquor licenses. He also lost a son to influenza while shipping out to France in the war.
6 Gibboney once ran for district attorney of Philadelphia but was soundly beaten in the polls.
7 Gibboney appeared before the grand jury and was later censured by the panel but not charged.
8 Henequen from the Yucatan made hay-baling twine and mooring lines for ocean-going ships.
9 It’s unknown how much money Emma invested in Tropical Products. Gibboney described it as “significant.”
10 Gibboney’s passport application appeal details his need to go to Yucatan and Campeche, where “payments were required.” Additional details are compiled from All in the Family: Railroads and Henequen Monoculture in Porfirian Yucatan. Allen Wells, Hispanic American Historical Review, 1992, Duke University Press.
11 Lawrence P. Sharples, son of Philip M. Sharples of West Chester, Pennsylvania, the incredibly rich inventor of the centrifugal milk cream separator, was on holiday in Mexico then and gathered information about the tragedy among his fellow Philadelphia-area businessmen. A highly reputable man, he vouched for the accuracy of the Mexican authorities’ information that the men were dead and identified correctly.
12 Incredibly, the two Philadelphia mortuary men sent to Campeche in March 1921 to disinter and return the bodies of Gibboney and Shriver were also caught in an eight-hour violent storm with the men’s bodies on board their boat. Gibboney’s eyeglasses were still in his pocket, but a substantial amount of cash was missing from his money belt. Philadelphia Inquirer, April 12, 1921.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Kidnap on the Hochzeitsfeier
Eberbach, Germany, 1921
The first kidnapping attempt on Grover Bergdoll occurred in January 1921, a full year after he was captured at gunpoint from the window box at his Wynnefield mansion. It was a disastrous shooting involving two U.S. Army officer detectives who claimed their superiors at Army headquarters in Coblenz authorized them to undertake a daring raid into unoccupied German territory and grab Bergdoll.1 The secret plot ended horribly, and the officers had to be rescued from German captivity through sensitive diplomacy ordered by Washington.
What no one knew at the time was that a third U.S. Army detective was also surveilling Grover in Eberbach and watching the near-deadly shootout. His orders prevented him from jumping in to help.
He kept it a secret for almost two decades.
***
Grover and Stecher had their first scrape with the German police in October 1920. An American Army officer in Coblenz convinced German officials in Berlin to issue a murder warrant for Grover and Stecher and send it to Baden state prosecutors in Eberbach. Whom they murdered was never revealed. Tipped off to the pending warrant, Grover and Stecher fled to Switzerland in their car for two weeks. Grover’s Eberbach lawyer, Karl Zeiss, convinced German authorities to quash the bogus warrant and discipline the federal official in Berlin who signed off on it. It was the first of several legal cases Attorney Zeiss would perform for Grover. He became Bergdoll’s full-time attorney in Germany as the Army advanced its effort to capture Grover in his relative haven of unoccupied Baden.
Just as West Philadelphia draft board secretary John Dwyer had ramped up his machine to get Bergdoll in 1917 and 1918, the American Legion and other veterans’ support groups focused nearly all of their considerable political influence on capturing Bergdoll from 1920 onward. These efforts also attracted criticism. As stated in The Boston Sunday Globe in May 1921, under a headline, BERGDOLL WILL SMILE AS HE SITS IN GERMANY PERUSING ACCOUNTS OF OUR CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION, “The War Department undertakes to publish a list of several thousand ‘slackers’—and the country is lukewarm on the subject, for fear injustice will be done. The War Department allows one slacker to escape—and the country is so indignant that Congress is now investigating. Who was to blame for Bergdoll’s escape?”
More importantly, at this time, who was going to capture Bergdoll? Just as Philadelphia police and federal agents repeatedly failed to capture Grover over three years in the United States, detectives and bounty hunters could not catch him for years in Germany.
While hiding in Eberbach, Grover and Stecher agreed to use their bright red touring car (also nicknamed Big Red) to drive a young Eberbach couple to and from their wedding in Neckarwimmersbach, across the Neckar River.2
On the evening of January 22, 1921, with Grover behind the wheel of the long, sleek crimson Benz with its rounded fenders, chrome headlamps, and dual horns in front of its plow-shaped radiator grill, he and Stecher drove from the Neckarwimmersbach wedding site to the Krone-Post Hotel to celebrate with the wedding party and wait for a friend arriving on the evening train. With the car’s canvas top up against the cool January air, Grover drove the wedding party to the train station. Suddenly, they were accosted by two men who ran up to Big Red, pointing an Army-issued automatic pistol at Grover and hollering, “Throw up your hands; you’re under arrest.” Acting quickly and fearlessly, Grover swung his right hand, trying to smack the gun down, and sped off in his car with Stecher aiming toward but not shooting the assailants. The bride and groom, and other members of the party, were in the rear seats. At least two shots were fired, and bridesmaid Lina Rupp, 22, of Heidelberg, was hit in the hand.3 Another bullet punctured a tire on Big Red.
What happened next was all very fast. The story went that people rushed in to grab the shooter and his weapon immediately after the gun went off. The second man was caught when he jumped on the departing train and was pulled off before it gained too much speed. Their four German accomplices were surrounded, trying to get away in an old war surplus taxi ambulance, and all were held until Eberbach police arrived. Within a few months, however, this story would change.
Until their trial on March 21, when the truth came out, all six kidnapping suspects, including the two Army officers, were held in German jails with little access to the outside world. Grover and Stecher remained free and fled into the German countryside in Big Red.
One of the men with guns was identified as U.S. Army Sergeant Charles Otto Naef, 27, born in Milan, Italy, in 1893 to a German-speaking Swiss father and an Italian mother.4 As 18-year-old Carlo Naef, he left Milan for France and emigrated alone to the United States in January 1912 with $50 in his purse. He joined the merchant marine before enlisting in the Army in August 1914 in the 2nd Cavalry at Fort Slocum, David’s Island, New York. Interestingly, Private Naef deserted his post at Fort Ethan Allen, Vermont, on May 19, 1915, and fled to Canada for five months. He was captured by an American immigration agent in Montreal and returned to military control at Rouse’s Point, New York, and then the nearby Plattsburgh Army barracks on October 25. He was jailed in the Army brig and sentenced to several months of hard labor before returning to duty at Ethan Allen’s mess hall.
Then, as mess sergeant, Naef was deployed to France in the 76th Field Artillery in April 1918. He was a fortunate survivor of battle and gas in the summer of 1918, and, upon discharge from the Army at the end of the war, Naef returned to New York City in 1918–1919, where he lived in an old, run-down federal-style rooming house at 51 St. Mark’s Place on New York’s Lower East Side.
Life in that neighborhood may have strongly ignited his patriotic feelings toward his new homeland.
By then, the former Little Germany community around St. Mark’s Place between First and Second Avenues in New York had become a melting pot of European immigrants. It had been the scene of protesting the war draft in 1917. It was well-known for its anti-establishment school organized by the Russian socialists and anarchists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, both of whom were represented in their anti-draft protesting by the man who would later become Bergdoll’s long-time attorney, Harry Weinberger.
In 1919, Naef’s beliefs contradicted many of his ultra-liberal New York neighbors. He re-enlisted in the Army. He may have begun petitioning through the Army court for citizenship because “naturalization—Army Court” is noted on his re-enlistment records. Despite his lack of experience in law enforcement, Naef was assigned as a sergeant to the Provisional Military Police for the American Forces in Germany (A.F.I.G.) at Coblenz. His status was that of a civilian police detective working with the U.S. Department of Justice. Before reporting to Coblenz, perhaps beginning a mission to track Bergdoll, Naef, with the ability to dress in civilian clothing to perform surveillance, was moved from New York to an American city where he’d never lived or visited his entire life: Philadelphia. He spent several months working from a rooming house in the 1800 block of Arch Street in Philadelphia before moving to Coblenz and American Army headquarters in Germany by March 1920.5
Naef’s subordinate for the Bergdoll job was Army Technical Sergeant Frank Zimmer, 361st Infantry, of Wheatridge, Colorado, near Denver. Zimmer, also 27, joined the Army through the Colorado National Guard during the conflict with Mexico in 1916. He fought in three battles during the war and then joined the Provisional Military Police at Coblenz as a detective in 1920. Naef said he brought Zimmer on the Bergdoll kidnapping caper so that if something happened to him, Zimmer could alert the military police at Coblenz. Their four German accomplices were brought along for muscle power. One was responsible for tipping Naef that Bergdoll was hiding in Eberbach, Baden, but in the unoccupied territory where the American Army and detectives for military intelligence could not conduct official business without authorization from the Germans.
However, Naef and Zimmer were mistakenly authorized by Army headquarters at Coblenz, specifically the commanding general’s chief of staff, to enter the unoccupied zone to make arrests. The mistaken authorization was “contrary to the instructions of the commanding general,” reported an Army investigation. Furthermore, Naef and Zimmer failed to gain permission from the Germans in Baden for cooperation in their sovereign zone.
They went renegade, thinking they could capture Bergdoll at will. The kidnapping attempt embarrassed the highly respected A.F.I.G. commander, General Henry T. Allen, who prided himself on being fair and honest with his German counterparts, because it occurred in Baden where, under the terms of the armistice ending the war, Americans had no jurisdiction. It created an international incident and led to the American Legion’s direct and long-lasting intervention in the Bergdoll affair.
