Given the political and budgetary importance of the US Veterans Bureau to the Harding administration, Colonel Forbes had little stature in Washington outside of his job. He was not a cabinet member attending regular multidepartmental meetings with the president. He did not enjoy participating in political and social gossip networks. He was focused on his work at the bureau. He had tricked General Sawyer by holding the key meeting to select the location of new veterans hospitals while Sawyer was away but was evidently impelled to do so by the urgency of his cause, not by a self-congratulatory Machiavellianism. Far from it. He had an overly optimistic, engineer’s perspective on the world. He was an idealist rather than a cynic. Yet in America cynicism raged. There was an air of “looseness” everywhere in 1922: not only in the sense of moral order but also of a people let loose in an unforgiving marketplace; loose practices, loose money, loose lips.
Prohibition encouraged new forms of crime. Federal agents arrested 42,000 individuals for prohibition violations in 1922, but state controls were generally weak, laws flouted, federal enforcers could not keep up, and one of every twelve federal prohibition agents was reportedly dismissed for corruption. This was a nation of capitalists, corrupters, patsies, and marks, or so it seemed. Modern psychology suggested that human behavior was morally fluid. Literature followed up. Manners were more important than moral codes. Character could be learned from self-help experts. A postwar American could go a long way by projecting a trustworthy and endearing surface, whatever motives lurked beneath. The scenario was tailor-made for con men. Forbes was vulnerable and did not know it.1
Gaston Bullock Means and Elias Harvey Mortimer were products of the time. Means came to symbolize Harry Daugherty’s laisser-faire attitude to dirty tricks at the Department of Justice. Mortimer destroyed Charles Forbes’s reputation and sent him to the penitentiary. Means was a large, merry-looking, fleshy, flamboyant man in his forties: a former salesman and teacher who had left North Carolina for bigger opportunities. The so-called Great Detective William J. Burns had hired him for his private detective agency in 1915, and through that source, Means became a spy for the Germans and a useful source for Burns, someone to be remembered when Burns took over the Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at the Department of Justice in 1921. (By that time, Means had gained control of the fortune of a Mrs. Maude King of Chicago, and had been prosecuted and acquitted of a charge of murdering her. She had died of a shot in the back of her head.) His biographer described Means as a man who needed constant excitement. Bribery, blackmail, and other forms of corruption fit the bill, as did searching offices without a warrant, stalking witnesses, and other illegal practices.
In the spring of 1922, Means worked in Washington for Daugherty’s associate Jesse “Jess” Smith, investigating congressmen and senators who were attacking Daugherty, in order to dig out information that could be used against them for political reasons. Means, like Mortimer, worked with bootleggers, spreading the word that he could “fix” prosecutions for a hefty fee by tampering with official files. Later, Means was a prominent, damaging witness against Harry Daugherty in Senate hearings on the Department of Justice but then recanted. He was a colossal liar. It was “difficult for the lay mind to distinguish between trained dissimulation and lying …” was how he put it. Eventually, he was to overreach, beyond anyone’s powers of credulity, but in 1922, he was in his element.2
Elias H. Mortimer was one of a crowd of lobbyists, publicists, and fixers who descended on Washington during the wartime boom in industrial production and stayed on during postwar readjustment. Means was more flamboyant, Mortimer more subtle. He projected appealing eagerness and an air of can-do sincerity and had helpful information at his fingertips, relevant contacts, the ability to convince, and (where necessary) a penitence so moving that he was usually forgiven. Before World War I provided opportunities to exercise his talents as a middleman hustling for war contracts, he lived at his parents’ home and worked as a contracting agent and salesman for iron and steel companies in Minneapolis. He liked to party on a lavish scale, was “prominently identified with Minneapolis night life,” and spent money freely. Shortly before he departed for the East Coast in 1917, he declared bankruptcy in US District Court. Among his creditors, besides various saloons, hotels, and clubs, his parents sued him for $215 for the cost of his room and board. His father made additional claims on two loan notes issued in 1914, which were still on file as unpaid in US District Court in 1924. Mortimer’s lawyer and old schoolmate Augustus Dowdall sued Mortimer for an unpaid fee of $508. Yet on the surface he was as sweet and lovable as anyone could be. The president of a roofing company in St. Paul took his word that he was an engineer and hired him as a consultant: “I fired him.” A general contractor: “He tried to swindle me out of $800 in a business deal, in 1916.” The contracting manager for the American Bridge Company in St. Louis offered himself as a mentor in the belief that he was only “rather wild,” not “anything vicious.” All attempts failed. Mortimer had a slippery quality, constantly given new chances and almost invariably escaping punishment. Chicago investigative reporter Philip Kinsley summed up Mortimer’s pre-Washington experiences, together with some similar ones later: “Mortimer held many jobs as salesman and estimator, traveled a good deal, and seems to have left a trail of disappointment and disillusion.”3
A good government-industry contract fixer could make money as military-industrial production scaled up for war. Mortimer fit right in. He conveniently forgot to register for the draft. By 1919, he had perfected a slick one-two punch method: (1) corrupt officials and others by friendship and guile; (2) destroy the chief target’s reputation if he refused to play. Where Means sought red-hot excitement, Mortimer was a puppet master. Affection and friendship were tools in a transactional relationship. He was a dangerous man to know.
Two recorded instances of his method show him as an established master of the con game well before he met Charles R. Forbes. The first centered on Captain Leo V. Lannen of the US Army Flying Corps and predated Forbes’s encounter with Mortimer by about three years. The second revolved around Congressman John W. Langley, sponsor of the Langley Acts for veterans hospital construction, who met Mortimer a year or so before Forbes did. In both cases, Mortimer became a cherished friend. Lannen and Langley had their reputations destroyed and their lives upended, as did Forbes.
In March 1919, Captain Lannen became chief of the Building and Grounds Section of the air service (the fledgling US Air Force), responsible for government purchasing. Almost immediately, “not more than a day,” according to Lannen, Mortimer appeared at his office and invited him to lunch. They became so friendly so quickly that the captain was best man for Mortimer at his wedding at the end of April. Mortimer subtly invited Lannen to join with him to rig bids for supplies by reporting a “rumor” that Lannen’s fellow officers were “crooked” and that his predecessor had made off with a fortune—between $100,000 and $200,000 (a million or two in twenty-first-century terms). Lannen did not rise to the bait, but the friendship continued. Then, one day in 1920, Lannen learned that Mortimer had flat-out lied to him and ended their association. This triggered phase 2. Mortimer let it be known that Lannen was a crook who had a “very bad reputation” in his hometown of Buffalo and lodged an official charge that the two of them had worked together to rig bids on the government’s purchase of 1.5 million nuts and bolts. Mortimer reported that he had persuaded a company that was not interested in the contract to put in a high bid so that the American Dump Company, which wanted the contract, could raise its own bid and still be the lowest bidder. Lannen protested his innocence. After military intelligence investigated, the War Department charged both men with conspiracy to defraud the US government. Mortimer made sure he could slip out of danger by using his contacts to get his file from the Department of Justice and make sure “they were unable to pin anything on me.” Lannen was eventually exonerated, but his military career was destroyed. He spent years trying to bring Mortimer down, calling him a “fiend” and an “insane criminal.” Mortimer continued as before.4
Congressman Langley had a twofold value for Mortimer. He came from Kentucky, a major whiskey-producing state (which was still producing whiskey under permit for medical purposes), and he chaired the House Committee on Public Buildings and Lands, where construction appropriations were negotiated. Langley had represented the Tenth Congressional District in the southeastern mountains of Kentucky since 1907. His wife, Katherine Gudger Langley, daughter of a former congressman, worked with him, staffed the committee, and ran his office. At the very least, Mortimer might use Langley to get introductions to prohibition officials in the hope of procuring illegal withdrawal permits for liquor from bonded warehouses. He could also get early news about where federal construction money would flow and which agency would control it. Langley was affable and, like Lannen, easy to reach. A story made the rounds that on one very hot August day in Washington Langley bet a fellow Republican congressman that it was hot enough to fry eggs on the Capitol steps. Langley got two eggs from the House restaurant, cracked them on the steps, waited, flipped them over—they were cooked. He looked after his people back home in Pike County. Sometimes he was called Pork Barrel John. He played the banjo and enjoyed a drink but was officially “dry” (like many of his fellows in Congress); he had voted for the Volstead Act.
John Langley was sitting in his committee conference room with his wife one day in 1920, when in walked this charming man in his late thirties. They invited him to sit down and chat. Langley remembered Mortimer boasting of his acquaintance with the president and some members of the cabinet, “which was the main subject of our conversation.” They observed when he departed that he drove a magnificent, costly automobile (a Packard Twin Six special car, nickel-plated), driven by a uniformed chauffeur. A few days later he returned with a friend, discussed politics in Langley’s state of Kentucky, told Langley he was connected with Kuhn, Loeb and Co., a prominent investment bank in New York, and mentioned that he was in the coal business—a matter of interest to the congressman because Kentucky was a major coal-producing state. Although Mortimer did not know Harding or have access to the White House, and was extremely unlikely to have been connected with Kuhn, Loeb, it never occurred to Langley to check him out. Why would it? It became Mortimer’s habit to drop by the office, supplemented by chance meetings in the House building. Langley wrote in his memoir that he was impressed with his “evident gallantry and refinement” and soon came to regard him as a good friend.
In 1921, when Langley told him he was in financial difficulties Mortimer made him a generous loan of $6,000 (more than $80,000 in twenty-first-century terms), giving the impression he had money idling in the bank. What Langley actually did or did not do for Mortimer in return for the loan is unclear, apart from introducing him to Kentucky’s “dry” prohibition commissioner and others whom he knew. In May 1924, Mortimer was the unindicted coconspirator and star witness against Langley when he was tried and convicted of conspiracy to violate the National Prohibition Act. Langley eventually went to prison. (His wife succeeded him in Congress.) The story involved the use (and abuse) of official whiskey permits and the withdrawal of 1,400 cases of medicinal whiskey from the Belle of Anderson distillery in Kentucky. Langley’s view of Mortimer had shifted from warm comradeship to icy loathing. The formerly “nice-looking, well groomed, smooth talking fellow” Langley had first met had become a man who was a “paragon of mendacity,” comparable to a rat. Mortimer went free.5
The Langley case showed Mortimer’s use of loans to reel someone in. Among Mortimer’s known victims was Republican Congressman Frederick N. Zihlman of Maryland. Zihlman’s encounter apparently began with a mere $8 from Mortimer to Mrs. Zihlman, which Mortimer recorded as “to pay maid never has been repaid.” One day Zihlman telephoned him, Mortimer recalled: “He came over the same night telling me Margaret his wife had lost quite a sum of money and had pawned her diamond Rings [sic], etc and the money had been lost by her on card games.” Zihlman’s good friend Mortimer made out a $900 check to Margaret Zihlman (about $12,600 in twenty-first-century terms) and received a promissory note from her husband in exchange. Mortimer’s stated reason for writing such a large check was that Zihlman “could help me in many ways”; notably because he was a “very personal friend and supporter” of a certain Mr. Budwitz, the newly appointed prohibition director for Maryland, who could grant “many favors.” Among them were issuing blank whiskey withdrawal permits for legal withdrawal of alcohol from bonded warehouses. When Department of Justice investigators examined Mortimer’s remaining bank accounts (some were mysteriously stolen or lost), they found the cancelled check paid to Margaret Zihlman for $900 dated August 9, 1921, plus another one for $500 dated August 30 (a total of almost $20,000 in twenty-first-century terms). Fred Zihlman finally broke with Mortimer after the latter’s attempt to involve him in a scam. A Mr. Edward Robinson, who had a drugstore in Baltimore, found himself in trouble with prohibition officials and talked with Mortimer about it. Mortimer told him he would get Congressman Zihlman to “fix” his problem, but this would require a fee of $5,000 or more. After Zihlman dealt with the problem without money changing hands he leaned on Mortimer to return the money he had received. Mortimer’s version was that Zihlman had taken money and that he, Mortimer, was trying to get Zihlman to return it. A congressional committee believed Zihlman and exonerated him in 1924, but the experience must have been unpleasant.6
Mortimer’s surviving cashed checks included one for $25 to the president’s sister, Carolyn Harding Votaw, who was a friend of Mortimer’s wife. According to Mortimer, he offered Mrs. Votaw $5,000 (about $70,000 in twenty-first-century terms) if she could fix a pardon for a Charles Vincenti of Baltimore, who had been convicted for violating the prohibition law and sentenced to eighteen months in the Atlanta federal penitentiary. Vincenti and his associates D. L. Delancey of New York and Herman Geltzriler of New Jersey were (said Mortimer) offering him a princely sum for his release from the judgment. Mrs. Votaw took the problem to her brother at the White House—a good idea. Harding told her that “the papers would have to come through in the regular way,” and that they must include the consent of government officials and the sentencing judge, Federal Judge John Carter Rose of Baltimore. Mortimer’s friend Sidney Bieber duly approached the judge. Nothing doing. Judge Rose opined, “If he had to do it over again he would give Vincenti 18 years in place of 18 months.” Every deal could not be won.7
Elias H. Mortimer had enhanced his social credibility by marrying Katherine Bulkeley Tullidge in April 1919 (with Captain Leo Lannen as best man). Her father, Dr. George Bowler Tullidge of Philadelphia, was a highly educated, well-connected, philanthropic physician with a well-regarded private medical practice in Philadelphia. He served on the staff of six of the city’s hospitals. Her devout Roman Catholic mother was a prominent Philadelphia clubwoman. Attachment to the family offered Mortimer the protective clothing of upper-crust respectability. His contribution to the family was strictly negative. Before long, Katherine and other family members became enmeshed in the deviousness and lies of their new family member—a process that eventually led to Dr. Tullidge and his wife testifying against their son-in-law and in favor of Charles R. Forbes in federal court. Mortimer became particularly close to Katherine’s aunt, Margaret (Mrs. James) Williams. He lent her money—a total of $760 via three checks in 1921 alone (more than $10,000 in twenty-first-century terms) and provided her with liquor. James and Margaret Williams became strong supporters of Mortimer, pitting them against other members of the family. Katherine Mortimer’s sister Margaret, who lived with the Williamses, was apparently the only family member not to get caught in Mortimer’s schemes.8
World War I had disrupted expectations across the United States. For George and Katherine O’Donnell Tullidge and their five children the war had brought catastrophe. Mortimer was the final straw. Forbes was to get to know all of them. The eldest Tullidge son, dashing, blue-eyed, dark-haired, enterprising, arrogant Dr. Edward Tullidge, homosexual in a homophobic society, gravitated toward the military. He traveled to Austria-Hungary and Italy late in 1914 to visit war zones and observe front-line military medicine for six months and report on it in the US medical literature. He suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized and went to England, where he was briefly held as an enemy spy. Back home, in 1916 he served as a lieutenant in the National Guard on the Mexican border. Then, with American entry into World War I, he volunteered for the US Navy Medical Corps. As an assistant surgeon crossing the Atlantic aboard the troopship USS Birmingham his career imploded.
Edward Kilbourne Tullidge, MD, was arrested at sea on September 2, 1917, and convicted by a navy court-martial on board the USS Sacramento for inappropriate behavior during medical examinations, officially interpreted as disciplinary infractions. Summarily dismissed from the navy for what the records show to have been sexual transgressions, he was sentenced to five years imprisonment with hard labor, with his term to be served in the New Hampshire state prison. The verdict went up the line to President Wilson, who confirmed it. Between the court-martial and confirmation of sentence, Tullidge’s article on motor-operating field theaters was published in the US Navy Medical Bulletin. Back on firm ground in the United States, Tullidge escaped his guards and fled to Mexico, where he lived for the next five years. He had pleaded not guilty on all counts. When Elias Mortimer joined the family, Edward Tullidge was an escaped convict in unknown mental and physical health, forced to live in exile to avoid hard labor.9
Katherine Bulkeley Tullidge, Mortimer’s bride, began work as a laboratory technician in the US Army on September 1, 1918, when she was twenty-two years old. Fort Oglethorpe, a military post near Macon, Georgia, had suffered in the first recognized wave of the influenza pandemic that swept through congested military camps in March 1918. At Fort Oglethorpe, she worked in the biological laboratories of US Army General Hospital 14. Lab tests were crucial in identifying and controlling infectious diseases. Suddenly, tragedy struck back home. Mary Louisa, the oldest of the three Tullidge daughters, working as a Red Cross nurse, died of pneumonia brought on by influenza in the second virulent wave of the influenza epidemic, which hit Philadelphia in September and October 1918. Mary Louisa died at the Tullidge home, 843 North Sixty-Third Street, on September 25, twenty-four hours after reporting her first symptoms. The mother’s faith in God had not been enough to keep Edward out of trouble; the father’s medical skills did not save Mary Louisa. Katherine rushed home but arrived too late to say goodbye. Philadelphia newspapers, having pledged (with others) to keep public morale high during the war, emphasized upbeat news: the heroic role of American troops in St. Mihiel, France, the famous Bryn Mawr Horse Show, and the return of (well-heeled) Philadelphia families to the city after summering away. In this surreal context, Mary Louisa Tullidge was laid to rest. Her brother Edward, in Mexico, was reportedly “overseas on a Government ship.”10
Katherine’s decision to leave the army and marry Elias Mortimer seven months after her sister’s death offered an upbeat change for the family. Bride and groom misread each other from the start. Mortimer had clearly wanted a young, pliable bride who would do his bidding and look like a wealthy society woman. She claimed to be twenty-one but was actually twenty-three, a determined young woman with a mind of her own. He had her dress conservatively in close-fitting hats and a long, expensive fur-trimmed coat. She was tall, dark-haired and elegant, with a square determined jaw, a Philadelphia lady through and through. When she was not smiling she could look remote, even intimidating, but when she laughed she sparkled. She was bound to be critical of her new husband when she heard him lie to others, let alone discovered his misdeeds. He was bound to be vindictive. The marriage took place at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia on April 30, 1919, when all seemed well. With her sister Margaret, a dietitian, as a bridesmaid dressed in pink chiffon, Katherine appeared in white satin and tulle trimmed with pearls, with a long train, her tulle veil held in place with orange blossoms. Teenaged George, the fifth and youngest sibling, serving as an usher, was about to graduate from the Staunton Military Institute in Virginia and embark on a course in engineering. (He, too, like the others, will reappear in Forbes’s story.) The newspaper description of the wedding made no mention of Mortimer’s parents.11
Mortimer’s new wife and in-laws apparently accepted without question his claim to work in the coal business as vice president of the Campbell Corporation in Philadelphia, with an office in the Real Estate Trust Building, and also to represent various contractors. He also claimed a connection with the reputable Mulford pharmaceutical firm of Philadelphia. According to one report, Katherine Mortimer called on Colonel Campbell to ask about her husband’s interest in the Campbell firm and was told he had none except for a commission on any sales he might make. (Wife passed this information on to husband, who was in New York at the time, and he, in turn, fired off a letter to Campbell “accusing him of trying to date up his wife and threatening to get him for it.”) Katherine Mortimer was valuable as a legitimating prop for her husband, not unlike his luxurious automobile. He had no compunction in introducing her to B. G. Dahlberg, president of the Celotex Company, as President Warren Harding’s niece, which she was not. By remaining silent, she became complicit in the “con.” Dahlberg testified later that Mortimer “wanted to arrange to have us presented to ‘Warren’” and have Warren “arrange a dinner for us at the White House.” Later, having been taken in, Dahlberg commented on the fact that the apparently upright Katherine Mortimer did not contradict these statements. She was in an impossible situation. Objecting was no good. Mortimer’s reaction was to hit her. She had been raised in the Roman Catholic faith in which marriage was an unbreakable bond. Elias and Katherine Mortimer separated after three months of marriage, then reconciled, and then separated again.12
Early in 1922, as prohibition enforcement became more effective, Mortimer saw new sources of potential income in the money expected to flow to the Veterans Bureau for hospital construction. Katherine and Elias Mortimer were only recently reunited when Mortimer met Charles R. Forbes. Mortimer was a predator, and Forbes his latest prey.
Colonel Forbes, looking warily over his shoulder at General Sawyer as his hospital plans took shape, was unprepared for a threat arising in his nonwork domain. For Forbes, the two spheres were unconnected: work was work, and play was play. He recalled his first meeting with Elias Mortimer in April 1922; Mortimer put the date back to February, when the hearings on the second Langley bill were being held. Both may be correct: a casual meeting in the House of Representatives in February and other possible conversations in March but Mortimer’s serious campaign in April, when Forbes was poised to seize control of veterans hospital construction. All it would take, in the Mortimer scenario, was to find Forbes’s weak spot so that he would willingly participate with him and others to scam the federal government through loans, bribes, and kickbacks. Carolyn Votaw had introduced Forbes to her friend Mrs. Mortimer. The scene was nicely set. There was Mortimer waiting for his wife with his magnificent car outside the Veterans Bureau at the end of the day and Forbes coming out in the company of Mrs. Mortimer and Mrs. Votaw, ready to be introduced. Kate Forbes was away or incapacitated in the weeks before she left for Europe in June 1922. Forbes recalled only one occasion when the two couples, Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer and Colonel and Mrs. Forbes, were together, sometime in April or May 1922, and another when Kate went driving with Mortimer and Forbes.13
Elias Mortimer figured in Forbes’s social life from springtime to the fall of 1922. He offered Forbes, at a trouble-ridden time, the balm of an apparently uncomplicated friendship, as he had to Captain Lannen and US Representatives Langley and Zihlman. He radiated confidence and wealth, was intelligent and well informed—sometimes surprisingly so—and appeared fascinated with Forbes’s ideas. He was a great listener, sympathetic and eager to help in whatever way he could—the perfect friend. Colonel Forbes, relying on his own assessment of others and typically brushing off divergent views, did not stop to ask whether Mortimer was too friendly, too helpful, too available or whether he himself was too uncritical or trusting. Mortimer maintained an illusion of respect in his form of address. He called Forbes “Colonel,” rather than “Bob,” “Charles,” or “Charlie,” while Forbes usually called him “Mort.” For Forbes, the friendship was one of congenial off-duty companionship, friends to relax with over meals and on trips. He described Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer as “very sociable” and liked to “ride out with them” in their car in the evenings when he was free, play cards, and have dinner with them. Mortimer later characterized their relationship as business oriented from the start. Forbes consistently said it was “purely social.” He liked both of his new companions and gave them a photo of himself, inscribed in his handwriting: “To Eli and Katherine Mortimer—Friendship should be lasting memories. Value them and remember me among those you love. Sincerely, Charles R. Forbes.” Elias H. Mortimer, Katherine T. Mortimer, and Charles R. Forbes became a trio.14
By mid-April 1922, Mortimer had identified clients for whom he planned to act as middleman in his campaign to set up construction contracts for veterans hospitals. His chief targets were John W. Thompson and James W. Black. Thompson, a self-made millionaire about sixty years of age, was a contractor in the railroad and related construction business who was familiar with federal contracting. He had received a $3 million wartime contract to construct a camp for Canadian aviators near Fort Worth, Texas ($42 million in twenty-first-century terms). He lived in St. Louis and had an office in Chicago. Mortimer claimed that Thompson “was rated at an estimated wealth of $15,000,000 and could put up any bond that was necessary and give any references through any New York or Chicago bank that was necessary.” Jim Black had major business interests in St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Portland, and other cities. Sometime in April, Thompson and Black made a formal agreement to work together for mutually rewarding business. Documents produced later showed that both of them stayed at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC, on April 4–14 and April 19–20, 1922, and involved Mortimer in at least part of their discussions. On April 19, the day before the second Langley bill became law, Thompson contacted Owen Hughes in Dallas, president of one of his associated companies (Hughes-O’Rourke Construction Company), telling him to write Forbes with a copy to Mortimer that he had read press reports about a hospital to be constructed and that Hughes could handle the work.15
Thompson entertained Elias and Katherine Mortimer at the Ambassador Hotel in New York on April 22, when Black was also in New York, at the Belmont Hotel. It is reasonable to conclude that Thompson, Black, and Mortimer were developing plans for hospital contracts. Mortimer was to testify at Forbes’s trial that the three men agreed in mid-April 1922 (sometime between April 12 and 14, Mortimer said with characteristic precision) to seek a commission of 34 percent of the profits on all contracts they might receive from the Veterans Bureau. He described this as a “fair and perfectly legitimate transaction.” Neither Black nor Thompson corroborated this. (They were not asked, at least for the record.) But even if the discussions were as Mortimer reported, Forbes did not participate in them. Mortimer reported that he formally introduced Forbes to Thompson and Black sometime in April 1922. Forbes reported that he had met both of them before. Carolyn Votaw had introduced him to Thompson, and Forbes had known and liked Black for a number of years. “He was a very unusual man, and anybody would be interested in him,” Forbes said. “He was a man, I should say, of around 60 years of age, unmarried, and he had an old mother that his whole life was wrapped up in, and he had a couple of little nieces that he was very fond of.” Black’s devotion to his mom would have appealed to Forbes. He had met Black and his nieces in Seattle.16
The master spider wove his web. With the addition of Thompson and Black, Mortimer had a full deck of potential coconspirators for Forbes to work with, with Mortimer as the pivot. Thompson, Black, Mortimer, Forbes, and, for never fully explained reasons, Charles F. Cramer, the Veterans Bureau lawyer, were the five conspirators named at indictments in 1924, though Mortimer might have had a different array in mind in the spring of 1922. As he did in other cases in which he served as a government informer/snitch, Mortimer deflected blame away from himself. On one occasion he declared, “The idea of bribing and corrupting Forbes originated with Black and Thompson—and I followed along in fine shape.” Elsewhere Mortimer said that Forbes had corrupted him.17
Why James Black and John Thompson needed a middleman to get contracts is a mystery, as the proposals for hospital building contracts were advertised in the usual way. Either of them could have approached Forbes directly and asked him what he hoped to get out of any deal for himself, if anything, citing Mortimer as their informer. There is no evidence that they did. Thompson and Black, two successful midwesterners, apparently accepted Mortimer’s word that kickbacks and corruption were normal practice at the Veterans Bureau. But here’s the rub: why should they not believe Mortimer when Forbes was from all appearances Mortimer’s friend? Forbes was entangling himself in the web. A government official who forms a close relationship with an individual who seeks or is likely to seek business advantages from that relationship is on a slippery ethical slope, even if no favoritism or corruption is intended by that official.
While Forbes in work mode was preparing plans for the US national veterans hospital system, reviewing the medley of hospitals inherited from the US Public Health Service, and casting a baleful eye on ongoing construction by the White Committee, Mortimer found Forbes’s Achilles’ heel: his love of civil engineering. Fortuitously, Mortimer had come across just the opportunity to entice Colonel Forbes. Black and Thompson were interested in railroad construction and other development prospects in Colombia, South America. (Mortimer had no role in the project.) Forbes was happy to bring his development experience in Hawaii to bear on this case. With the US debt to Colombia with respect to the Panama Canal finally paid and relations eased between the two nations, Colombia sought American capital to develop its coffee, oil, gold, and mining industries. Black and Thompson were members of an American business syndicate formed to pursue these goals and to develop necessary infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, and railways. The president-elect of Colombia, American-educated General Pedro Nel Ospina, visited the United States in April and May 1922. Forbes went with Thompson, Black, and businessman B. G. Dahlberg, the disbursing member of the syndicate, to call on Ospina in New York on April 28. They reportedly discussed matters of interest to the syndicate for about an hour. Members of the syndicate were impressed by Forbes. James Black raised the Colombia project with him on four or five occasions. No one disputed that there were subsequent discussions to offer him an appointment as consultant engineer. Forbes prevaricated: “I couldn’t consider it. I couldn’t stand the Tropics,” but he would consider consulting if there were an opportunity to do this in the United States.18
Though there was no evidence that an offer of employment was contingent on awarding hospital contracts, a large sum of money was mentioned as the salary Forbes would get as a consultant. Mortimer’s inflated figure was $100,000, corrected at the trial to the more realistic but still enticing sum of $25,000 a year (more than twice Forbes’s government salary). Mortimer gave his version for involving Forbes in the Colombia project: To “keep him coming along in good shape for the hospital contract. We hung out some bait to Forbes and he bit it and took it, hook, line and sinker.”19
Throughout all of the discussions, Forbes seemed unaware of the concept of conflict of interest and deaf to the need for a public figure to build and maintain a pristine reputation. He visited Ospina as a private person and development engineer, but he was also a senior US government official. His visit could be construed as lobbying for the interests of one syndicate on a matter of private commerce with a soon-to-be leader of a foreign government. He also discussed career opportunities with Thompson and Black, which might bias his decisions in their favor with respect to government hospital contracts. Dr. Joel Boone, Sawyer’s White House medical colleague, commented on the effect of professional gaffes made by Forbes in 1922, including taking Mortimer with him on relatively short trips to see potential hospital sites: “He conducted himself in such a way as to make him a suspect of wrongdoing.” Quite apart from anyone else’s machinations, Forbes was digging a hole for himself.20
Part of Mortimer’s version of their friendship, as told later, was that Forbes spent most of his free time with him and his wife and that the amount of time was substantial. How substantial is unknown. When Forbes was in town, he enjoyed Harding’s poker parties at the White House, to which Mortimer had no chance of being invited. Cabinet member and classicist Herbert Hoover described these low-stake poker evenings, extending well into the night, as the president’s “greatest relaxation,” though Hoover disliked the game and refused to attend—“it irked me to see it in the White House.” There were poker parties outside the White House as well plus other White House events and Washington gatherings of various kinds, and Forbes enjoyed going to the theater. Mortimer, too, must have had other business to pursue. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Mortimer garnered as much of Forbes’s attention as he could, and that Forbes made the process easy. At some point, presumably after Kate and Marcia Forbes left the country early in June 1922, he moved from their family apartment on Connecticut Avenue to quasi-bachelor status in room 111 at the 2,000-room Wardman Park Hotel, where the Mortimers lived. It was a good place for legislators, staff, and lobbyists to mix with one another when in town. Mortimer aptly described the Wardman Park as a “very nice hotel, with considerable ground around it” and, with a little puffery, as “the most fashionable and aristocratic of residential hotels in Washington.” Interior Secretary Albert Fall lived there too, as did Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty and his associate Jess Smith, and the controversial head of the Bureau of Information, the “Great Detective” William J. Burns.21
Mortimer was to testify that he told Forbes as early as March 1922 that he was “very much interested” in hospital contracts: “We used to talk hospitals up there so much I thought I was in a hospital.” Forbes said that he did discuss some Veterans Bureau matters with Mortimer as part of other discussion, but “I never discussed or gave him information that would lead him to believe that at any time he had any entrée to my bureau or any advance information of any of our work, and he knew that I would not entertain any such proposition.” Mortimer let potential building contractors know that he was Forbes’s close friend. His view of friendship was chilling. “I knew how I stood with Forbes at that time,” he testified. “I knew how friendly he was, and everyone else in Washington knew how friendly I was with him and how friendly he was with me, and that is what half the game in Washington was during that time, was friendship.” Was Mortimer selling friendship, he was asked, or “your ability to corrupt?” Mortimer: “Well, if it was necessary I would have sold both.”22
Colonel Edward C. Stockdale, who had known Mortimer in the war years, tried to warn Forbes about him in mid-April after seeing them together one Sunday evening at a party. Charles and Kate Forbes had been invited, but she was not present, and Forbes brought Elias and Katherine Mortimer instead. Stockdale remembered greeting Mrs. Mortimer mistakenly as Mrs. Forbes. Stockdale, who was also interested in federal contracts, was suspicious of Mortimer’s presence with the head of the Veterans Bureau and warned Forbes that the association might lead to trouble. Forbes gave an astonishingly naive response. He told Stockdale that he had no business relationship with Mortimer, and knew he was an unfit person to do business with. Obviously, these views had not been transmitted and received by his friend Mort. A more cautious Washington official would have dropped Mortimer like a red-hot poker at this point. Forbes acted like a babe in the woods. In his view, there was no danger, no crossover between the spheres of work and play. He waved away Stockdale’s concerns. Sometime after the party, Stockdale became disgusted with Forbes after Mortimer told him that he was handling construction proposals for Forbes (which was untrue), and Stockdale learned that Forbes and the Mortimers were still partying together. Forbes had clocked up one more hostile critic.23
By the end of April 1922, the state of play among the key figures interested in veterans hospital construction was that each was bent on fooling at least one of the others. Mortimer was playing Colonel Forbes as a potential victim/cash cow, while ingratiating himself and his wife as his intimate friends. Forbes was playing Mortimer by welcoming him as a friend but not taking him seriously as a colleague or partner in business. What Mortimer had not observed was that Forbes, too, had a shell; he was a past master of withholding part of himself from others. General Sawyer was open about his policy differences with Forbes but expected to outwit him on hospital planning and control of supplies through exerting authority in his role as chief coordinator of the Federal Board of Hospitalization. Forbes, determined to get his program approved and implemented, played Sawyer by excluding him from the Veterans Bureau hospital planning process, neglecting to inform him when the list of proposed hospitals would be ready for the Federal Board and speaking independently to President Harding. Harding played an equivocal role by listening to both Sawyer and Forbes without directing their relationship. He was a practical politician who kept his options open.
In the last week of May 1922, Forbes conferred with President Harding, Republican Congressmen Martin B. Madden of Illinois, and Daniel R. Anthony of Kansas (fiscal conservatives) on whether it would be better policy to enlarge existing hospitals rather than to build new ones (no, in Forbes’s view); kept the president on track on the hospital construction program; reminded the Federal Board of Hospitalization that they had already allocated $12 million to $13 million of the second Langley funds, including new buildings at Northampton and Livermore; and hosted a national conference on rehabilitation. Before going to New York and saying goodbye to his wife and child, who left for Europe in early June, Forbes wanted to get away for a restful weekend. He asked Mortimer to suggest a good place to go. Mortimer named the Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, fashionably located at Illinois Avenue and the Boardwalk and overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and invited himself and his wife to come too. Forbes and the two Mortimers traveled to the coast together by train. Abandoning hope of a complete rest, Forbes sent a telegram to headquarters summoning his secretary Merle L. Sweet, who took business papers to Forbes at the hotel on June 1 and stayed on to work with his boss.24
Mortimer also arranged for the actors Francine Larrimore and her sister Stella, members of a prominent New York theater family, to be there at the same time. Enter the “actresses,” as they were called in later attempts to suggest Forbes was sexually involved with Francine. (Whether he was or not is undetermined.) Forbes said she had asked him to help her get a US passport (she was born in France), but he declined. Francine Larrimore, with her ingénue blue eyes and cloudy mop of reddish hair, played the lead as racy flapper Theodora “Teddy” Gloucester in the comedy Nice People at the National Theater in Washington in the first week of May after a successful run in New York. The Mortimers and Forbes had been at various gatherings with the sisters, including a party hosted by Francine Larrimore and attended by President and Mrs. Harding, followed by a reception Miss Larrimore gave for Forbes, the Mortimers, Stockdale, and others at her suite at the Shoreham Hotel. Charles Forbes, Elias and Katherine Mortimer, and the Larrimore sisters had dinner together one night at the Traymore Hotel. Again, Forbes walked into a situation that was later construed as dubious on several fronts. There was of course the implied sexual frisson of intimacy with actresses, particularly with one who played a sexy role onstage, but beyond that, Forbes was both on vacation and working, mixing up his work/play roles, and he let his apparently rich friend Mortimer pay his hotel bill at the Traymore, raising questions of accepting favors or a bribe. The hotel record for the rooms showed that the two rooms used by the Mortimers and Forbes, numbers 614 and 615 (for check-in May 31, departure June 4), were paid for as one amount. Forbes argued that, if Mortimer did pay his bill at the Traymore, he could not remember; it was in exchange for something else, such as paying for dinners, but as an explanation that is weak. It was definitely not true, as some accounts later alleged, that Forbes took over a whole floor of an Atlantic City hotel for partying.25
As on other occasions, Katherine Tullidge Mortimer was on the Atlantic City trip as a silent supportive wife, merely the “and Mrs. Mortimer,” an addendum to her husband’s name. She was not actually silent, of course; rather, her actions and words were not recorded. Sometime in the spring or summer of 1922 her father, Dr. George B. Tullidge, went to Mexico and stayed there for about a year, ostensibly for his health (he had a heart condition) but also to check on his exiled son Edward, leaving his wife in an empty house in Philadelphia and his daughter Katherine, in her mid-twenties, without male protection from her abusive husband. Not surprisingly, she would turn to her friend Charles R. Forbes, a comfortable man in his mid-forties, for help when she needed it. The Mortimers stuck to Forbes so intensely that it was only a matter of time before he would see some evidence of Mortimer’s physical abuse of his wife.
It happened soon. One day early in June, Katherine Mortimer telephoned Forbes on the house phone at his first-floor apartment at the Wardman Park Hotel and asked him to come up to hers on the fifth. “I found her crying and pretty well hammered up,” he said. “Her dress was torn, and up here, this part of her eye [indicating] was swollen pretty badly.” Mort had gone down to get some cigars or sundries, and returned shortly. Forbes duly “took him to task.” Mortimer said he felt bad about it, was sorry, and it wouldn’t happen again. Forbes accepted this statement and invited Mort and Katherine down to dinner in the Wardman Park dining room. He had done his duty and spoken “just as a man would call one down for beating a woman up,” he said, and then they had a meal together.26
Colonel Forbes had planned an overdue four-week working trip to Veterans Bureau districts in Chicago and on the West Coast from mid-June to mid-July 1922. Travel would allow him to get away from the craziness of Washington’s intrigues, critiques, and rumor mills. Gossip was becoming unpleasantly pointed, including general attacks on the Harding administration. In January, New England textile workers had gone on a six-month strike. In April, a major coal strike had begun. In June, twenty strikebreakers were killed by armed miners at Herrin, Illinois. In July, railroad shop workers struck. Harding’s speech before Congress in August against the miners’ and shopmens’ strike was called the “most scathing indictment ever laid upon any body of workers in America.” At the same time the president was criticized for doing nothing, for seeking to impose government control on business, and for wasting time on unnecessary investigations.27
A cynical response to congress and the presidency was by no means unreasonable. This was a fruitful time to “debunk” (expose the underbelly of) government and its minions and to engage in character assassination. H. L. Mencken described politics in the United States as “incomparably the greatest show on earth,” with its “ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operation of master rogues, the pursuit of witches and heretics [and] the desperate struggles of inferior men to claw their way into Heaven.”28