Chapter Five

Nazis in Manhattan

When the Nazis came to Manhattan, Meyer Lansky was waiting for them. ‘My friends and I saw some good action against the Brown Shirts around New York’, said the mobster. ‘I got my buddies like Bugsy Siegel – before he went to California – and some other young guys. We taught them how to use their fists and handle themselves in fights, and we didn’t behave like gents.’

Lansky was a bad enemy to have. Physically unimpressive, just 5 feet 4 inches tall, with a slight build, brown hair and eyes, he had a mean temper and was completely fearless. As a kid on the Lower East Side, he had been picked on by a gang of older Irish boys as he carried a plate of food home for his family. The Irish boys told him to drop his pants to show if he was circumcised. Lansky rammed the plate at the bigger boy and nearly killed him with the jagged edge of broken china. By the time the fight was broken up, the Jewish boy was covered in blood but unbeaten.

Lucky Luciano lived in the same part of town as Lansky and remembered trying to shake down the little Jew for protection money:

I was about a head taller than this midget, but he looked up at me without blinkin’ an eye, with nothin’ but guts showin’ in his face, and he said, ‘Fuck you.’ Well, I started to laugh. I patted him on the shoulder and said, ‘Okay, you got protection for free.’ He just pulled away and yelled, ‘Shove your protection up your ass, I don’t need it!’ Believe me, I found out he didn’t need it. Next to Benny Siegel, Meyer Lansky was the toughest guy, pound for pound, I ever knew in my whole life . . .

It was the beginning of a profitable relationship. By the time he was thirty, Lansky had established a stolen car ring supplying trucks to criminals, graduated to leading his own gang of enforcers, been charged with murder several times, set up a major bootleg organisation smuggling in liquor from Canada, and brought together the first national gangster gathering at Atlantic City. Respected for his intelligence as much as his guts, Lansky was a key member of Luciano’s underworld empire.

Since coming out on top at the end of the Castellammarese War in 1931, Lucky Luciano and his associates had entered a boom time of crime. They dominated prostitution, narcotics, loan-sharking, gambling and labour rackets throughout New York. Even when Prohibition came to an end in 1933, they moved from bootlegging into controlling the legitimate import of whiskey.

Luciano’s preference was to drop the whole Mafia infrastructure as designed by Maranzano. He preferred a much looser, less pretentious association of independent outfits, but Lansky persuaded him to keep it going as it provided an ethnic power base to fight off other ethnically-based gangs. The reality was that Jewish gangsters probably outnumbered the Italian Mafia at the time.

Lansky brought together many Jewish gangs at a meeting at the Franconia Hotel in Manhattan in November 1931. Aside from his crime partner, Bugsy Siegel, they included Louis Lepke, Joseph ‘Doc’ Stacher, Harry ‘Big Greenie’ Greenberg, Hyman ‘Curly’ Holtz, Harry Teitelbaum, and Lewis ‘Shadows’ Kravitz, all them major players in the underworld. All these gangsters agreed to respect each other’s territories and form a national crime syndicate along with the Italians. Or, as Bugsy Siegel reputedly put it: ‘The yids and the dagos would no longer fight each other.’

Lansky managed to keep a low profile throughout the 1930s, but Luciano was more flamboyant and became the face of organised crime in New York. This attracted the attention of an ambitious young lawyer called Thomas E. Dewey. Aged just twenty-eight in 1931, Dewey took up the post of Chief Assistant United States Attorney. He was the youngest man to hold the post. His baby-face did not help and he grew a moustache to give himself some maturity. He now headed a Federal Government office of sixty lawyers. With such an effective machine to call on, he switched from prosecuting Wall Street criminals to gangsters.

Dewey’s first target was Dutch Schultz, a hot-headed hoodlum who ran the numbers game in Harlem. Dutch Schultz had Mad Dog Coll gunned down – the man who was going to kill Luciano for Maranzano. When Dewey went after Schultz, closing down his operations, Schultz swore to put a hit on the prosecutor. Luciano and Lansky considered this the last thing they needed – the heat would be too much for their criminal enterprises. Instead, they decided to hit Schultz and he was shot down in the toilet of the New Jersey Palace Chop House. Dewey would know nothing about his narrow escape from assassination – all thanks to Luciano’s intervention. Instead, Dewey made his intentions clear:

Today crime is syndicated and organized. A new type of criminal exists who leaves to his hirelings and front-men the actual offences and rarely commits an overt act himself. The only way in which the major criminal can be punished is by connecting to him those various layers of subordinates and the related but separate crimes on their behalf.

This was his justification for the introduction of the so-called Dewey Law, which allowed the connecting of similar offences in one single indictment with a significantly heavier sentence. When Dewey went after Luciano in 1936, he nailed him for prostitution along with eight other gang members. Straight after the trial, the Special Prosecutor revealed his true agenda to the New York Times:

This, of course, was not a vice trial. It was a racket prosecution. The control of all organized prostitution in New York by the convicted defendants was one of their lesser rackets. The four bookers of women who pleaded guilty were underlings. The prostitution racket was merely the vehicle by which these men were convicted.

It is my understanding that certain of the top-ranking defendants in this case, together with the other criminals under [Luciano], have gradually absorbed control of the narcotic, policy, loan shark and Italian lottery syndicates, the receipt of stolen goods and certain industrial rackets.

Luciano was sentenced to an unprecedented 30 – 50 years behind bars. It was a tremendous blow to organised crime in New York and turned Dewey into a crime-busting celebrity. With this major triumph under his belt, he soon graduated to a political career. Dewey became Governor of New York in 1943 and stood as Republican candidate for President in 1944 and 1948.

Amazingly, Lansky had managed to avoid Dewey’s assault and it was left to him and Frank Costello, originally from Calabria in south-west Italy, to run Luciano’s underworld business on the outside during the late 1930s and early 1940s. They would visit him in jail on a regular basis and take back his orders to the rest of their organisation.

For the first few weeks, life was grim in Clinton State Prison at Dannemora in upstate New York, near the Canadian border – ‘Little Siberia’. Luciano initial work placement was in the laundry room, but then he started to use his influence. ‘After a few weeks I found where to spread the dough around’, he recalled. ‘Pretty soon I was up in the library, where it was clean, quiet and I could so some real thinkin’ and plannin’.’

It was Lansky who later claimed to have set up the secret alliance between Luciano and US Naval Intelligence. He knew that Italian-American Fascist sympathies in the docks could prove a weak point for America when war came to Europe. He was speaking for Luciano as well when he said:

We both knew that when Mussolini went into the war some of the Italians in America were proud. They were second-class citizens in America – to be poor you’re automatically second class. It was very important for them that Mussolini was winning. It gave them pride. Even if he was a friend of Hitler they did not care. This was a small minority of the Italian-Americans, you understand, but they did exist – and a few others were terrorized by Fascist agents.

For Lansky it was all part of the same war:

The reason why I cooperated [with the US government] was because of strong personal convictions. I wanted the Nazis beaten. I made this my number one priority even before the United States got into the war. I was a Jew and I felt for those Jews in Europe who were suffering. They were my brothers.

Lansky’s family knew all about Old World anti-Semitism. They had fled from it in 1911 when they left Grodno (now in Belarus but then part of the Russian Empire), to escape pogroms inflicted on their people. There, he had been born Maier Suchowljansky. His name was later Americanised at school in Manhattan.

When the Nazis came to New York in the 1930s, Lansky was not going to run before them.

Whereas Italian-American Fascist organisations had been most active in the 1920s, it was not until 1933, when Adolf Hitler finally became Chancellor of Germany, that a major Nazi presence was established in America. In July 1933, the German-American Bund was created out of the remnants of previous German-American societies. It had three main branches or ‘Gau’: one in Milwaukee, one in Los Angeles, and a third in New York City under the command of Fritz Kuhn, a former employee of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit.

Henry Ford himself was a prominent anti-Semite and Adolf Hitler took inspiration from him in the 1920s, even referring to him in Mein Kampf: ‘Every year makes them [American Jews] more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence.’ The support of establishment people like Ford really worried Lansky. ‘Important WASPs’, he said, ‘as we would call them now, openly made anti-Semitic statements and some magazines and papers backed them.’ In July 1938, Henry Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle by the German Vice-Consul in Detroit. It was the highest honour Hitler could bestow on a foreigner.

The dictator regretted the departure of so many Germans to America and was happy to fund Nazi organisations on American soil. Over dinner on 6 August 1942, Hitler proclaimed: ‘Our country today is overpopulated, and yet the numbers who emigrated to America are incredible. How I wish we had the German-Americans with us still! In so far as there are any decent people in America, they are all of German origin.’

The Gaue of the German-American Bund were divided into ninety-three local organisations called ‘Ortsgruppen’. The US Department of Justice estimated that there were 8,000 German-American members of the Bund, but this may have risen to 100,000, while another source claims the Nazis had a mailing list of 250,000 German-Americans with relatives in the Third Reich. The Bund published four weekly German-language newspapers, ran German language schools, and even raised several divisions of Hitler Youth who paraded at their twenty-two camps. At Camp Hindenburg, near Buffalo, a Bund parade was reviewed by the German Ambassador Hans Dieckhoff in August 1937.

A typical recruiting ground for the Bund was recalled by Arlene Stein, who was a child in the 1930s:

Ridgewood was primarily a German neighborhood and some customs from the Old Country were still practiced. A ritual of cleaning took place every Saturday morning. Homeowners or janitors would clean the halls and stairs, scrub the front stoop and sweep the sidewalk to the curb . . . These were hard-working, law-abiding people with virtues of cleanliness, discipline, thriftiness and honesty.

But then the mood changed, as Stein remembered:

There was a house on St Nicholas Avenue that people spoke of in whispers. The shades were almost always pulled down. On a few occasions the shades were up and on the far wall was a well-lit picture of Adolf Hitler. This was the late 1930s. Our country was not at war yet, but it was evident that the problems of Europe would eventually effect the USA.

It was to the dismay of most German-Americans that Nazi Bund meetings were taking place right in our neighborhood. Bund members were mostly young men and women in their teens and twenties who dressed in uniform, white blouses and shirts/black skirts and trousers, with a black hat with a red symbol.

By March 1936, Fritz Kuhn had taken over leadership of the Bund. His movement had grown in ambition and he campaigned on behalf of Alfred Landon, the Republican candidate for President. He spoke on the radio alongside Dr Ignatz Griebl, leader of the Friends of New Germany and a Nazi spy. The Bund also campaigned for a senator and a member of Congress. In October 1937, a massive rally was held at Madison Square Garden when 1,150 uniformed Bund stormtroopers marched to the sound of the Nazi beat.

Such activities greatly worried the Jewish community in New York and Meyer Lansky was contacted by two of its prominent members. Rabbi Stephen Wise asked him to do something about the dangerous trend. Even an upholder of the law, New York state judge Nathan Perlman, turned to Lansky for help in 1935. He said to Lansky:

Nazism is flourishing in the United States. The Bund members are not ashamed to have their meetings in the most public places. We Jews should be more militant. Meyer, we want to take action against these Nazi sympathizers. We’ll put money and legal assistance at your disposal, whatever you need. Can you organise the militant part for us?

So even here, at this early stage, there was the offer of a secret alliance between a part of the US establishment and the underworld. ‘I’ll fight these Nazis with my own resources’, replied Lansky. ‘I don’t need your cash. But I will ask you one thing, that after we go into action you’ll try to make sure the Jewish press don’t criticize me.’

In return for breaking up Bund rallies, but not actually killing Bund members – a disappointing constraint for the gangster – Lansky received from Perlman the names of leading Bund activists and the locations of their meetings. Even Walter Winchell, the legendary reporter and broadcaster (and early critic of Hitler), got in on the act, telephoning an address of a Bund meeting to Lansky.

On one night, Lansky went to Yorkville, the heart of the German community in Manhattan, with Siegel and other Jewish gangsters at his side:

We got there that evening and found several hundred people dressed in their brown shirts. The stage was decorated with a swastika and pictures of Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only about fifteen of us, but we went into action.

We attacked them in the hall and threw some of them out the windows. There were fist fights all over the place. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up, and some of them were out of action for months. Yes, it was violence. We wanted to teach them a lesson. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.

Judge Perlman, Rabbi Wise, and Winchell were all delighted with the results. But it was just the start of Lansky’s personal campaign against East Coast Nazis. He led raids on them throughout New York and New Jersey. Even his Italian mobster friends wanted to get in on the action, said Lansky:

The Italians I knew offered to help, but as a matter of pride I wouldn’t accept. I neglected my business many times to travel around and organize our counterattacks. I must say I enjoyed beating up those Nazis. There were times when we treated a Bund leader or other big anti-Semite in a very special way, but the main point was just to teach them that Jews couldn’t be kicked around.

New York newspapers reported one such battle in Yorkville Casino in April 1938. The Bund was celebrating Hitler’s forty-ninth birthday at 210 East 86th Street when trouble broke out inside the casino. Several Bund speakers were lined up for the evening, including the wife of Fritz Kuhn, but it was an Otto Wegener who ignited the action. He congratulated Hitler on his seizure of Austria and demanded that President Roosevelt accept the Anschluss. At that point a man rose in the audience and shouted: ‘Is this an American or a German meeting?’ The man was 39-year-old war veteran Jean Mathias.

‘At that moment,’ reported the New York Herald Tribune, ‘someone slugged him from behind. He turned on his assailant and began to grapple as American war veterans swarmed to his assistance.’ Uniformed ‘Storm Troopers’ surged forward and whipped Mathias with Sam Browne belts pulled from their uniforms. In retaliation, a hundred Jewish war veterans stood up and donned the blue overseas caps of American Legionnaires before joining the fight. Bund chairman Gustave Elmer tried to calm the audience by ordering the band to play, but this only provided a weird soundtrack to the events. Witnesses spoke of ‘gray-shirted arms rising and falling, wielding blackjacks . . . The Storm Troopers [then] took off their belts, equipped with heavy buckles, and swung these as weapons . . .’ As Mathias fought his way to the exit, he was hit with a chair and had multiple contusions on the face.

The Jewish protesters were eventually thrown out of the casino by Storm Troopers. Outside, they faced a large group of pickets made up of members of the German-American Workers Club and Young Patriots of the USA. Opposite them, on the north sidewalk, was a crowd of anti-Nazi protestors getting angrier by the minute. When they saw the bloodied faces of the Jewish war veterans, they pushed forward, wanting to get into the hall. A detail of twenty-four policemen had to hold them back, but fighting broke out on the street. When Bund members later tried to leave the hall, the angry crowd charged at them too. The police captain had to call up an extra fifty policemen to clear the street.

Among the four people arrested was Otto Geisler, of 302 East 91st Street, a seventeen-year-old German-American wearing a Nazi uniform, charged with carrying a dagger on his belt, and Jack Caback, 42, a Jewish war veteran, of 334 East 86th Street, charged with disorderly conduct in connection with fighting outside the casino.

Max Hinkes was an associate of New Jersey mobster ‘Longy’ Zwillman and he joined a Newark Jewish resistance group called the ‘Minutemen’. They attacked a Bund meeting at Schwabben Hall on Springfield Avenue in a German neighbourhood of Newark. Hinkes recalled:

The Nazi scumbags were meeting one night on the second floor. Nat Arno and I went upstairs and threw stink bombs into the room where the creeps were. As they came out of the room, running from the horrible odor of the stink bombs and running down the steps in to the street to escape, our boys were waiting with bats and iron bars. It was like running a gauntlet.

Our boys were lined up on both sides and we started hitting, aiming for their heads or any other part of their bodies, with our bats and irons. The Nazis were screaming blue murder. This was one of the most happy moments of my life.

Even the Jewish-Italian-American Mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, waded into the action. At a lunch for the American Jewish Congress, Mayor La Guardia told the audience he would like to see a ‘chamber of horrors’ at the forthcoming New York World’s Fair with a ‘figure of that brown-shirted fanatic who is now menacing the peace of the world’. The German Embassy protested most strongly at this insult to their Führer and a German newspaper Angriff inflamed the situation by calling La Guardia a ‘Jewish ruffian’ and ‘New York gangster-in-chief’ who is ‘a protector of New York gangsters and everything vile and detestable . . .’

Although secretly pleased to see the Bund being given a tough time by Lansky and his gangsters, the Jewish establishment did not deliver on their promise to let up on their criticism of him in the press. Even the biggest Yiddish newspaper, the Morgen Journal, condemned him as a Jewish gangster, while other Jewish papers referred to the mob of Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. This was a shock for Lansky as he had never been publicly labelled a gangster. When this was picked up by the wider press and radio, Lansky argued with the journalists, but they said if it was good enough for Jewish reporters to use that term then it was good enough for them.

Lansky was getting uncomfortable with all the publicity and so was the Jewish establishment. ‘One day we got a message from Rabbi Wise to stop our activity – people were saying it was morally wrong to use the same violence the Nazis were using.’ So Lansky stopped, but the damage to him had already been done. ‘I really think our action against the Bund created an atmosphere in which my name was easily connected with gangsterism and the Mafia.’

Lansky still believed in the righteousness of his cause, but he would pursue his campaign against Nazis and Fascists in a more discreet way. When war broke out, he was ready to broker a deal between Luciano and US Naval Intelligence.

Lansky’s reluctant ceasefire with the Nazis of New York coincided with the decline of the Bund. The German government had already withdrawn its funding from the Bund following its Madison Square rally in October 1937. The event was embarrassing and they wished to pursue more subtle ways of manipulating American support for Hitler.

Undeterred, Fritz Kuhn pressed on with another impressive mass rally at Madison Square Garden on February 1939 to celebrate Washington’s Birthday. It was attended by some 22,000 supporters. By the end of the year, however, he had been jailed for larceny, having siphoned off large amounts of money from the Bund to his own personal accounts. The following year pro-Fascist leader Edward James Smythe was trying to fix up an alliance between the Bund and the Ku Klux Klan, but this came to nothing, and Smythe was eventually charged with sedition before fleeing to Canada.

While Meyer Lansky had been told to cool it on the streets of Manhattan, Dr Hans Thomsen, German Chargé d’Affaires in Washington DC, had been trying to calm Nazi activities in America. Mass Nazi-style rallies only embarrassed Germany and when these were accompanied by street riots it alienated American supporters. Financial support had already been withdrawn from the Bund and Thomsen sought far more sophisticated methods of influence.

By the summer of 1940, with Europe at war, Thomsen could see that the pro-isolationist camp in America was losing ground. The German diplomat recommended that a ‘well-camouflaged lightning propaganda campaign might well prove useful, for which there are the following possibilities where German influence would in no case be visible to the outside.’

These included a well-known Republican congressman gathering the support of fifty isolationist fellow Republican congressmen. They formed a committee to take out a full-page advert in all leading US newspapers saying ‘Keep America out of War’. For this, Thomsen recommended Nazi Germany provide $43,000 of funding to the isolationist Republicans involved.

On a similar tack, Thomsen made contact with top American literary agency William C. Lengel to commission five books drawing public attention in America to the ‘dangers of intervention’. The five authors included left-wing writer Theodore Dreiser and best-selling novelist and pacifist Kathleen Norris. ‘None of the authors knows’, said Thomsen, ‘who is behind the publisher’s offer’. For this project, he needed $20,000 of Nazi funding.

Above all, Thomsen did not want to see any crude attempts at sabotage on US territory:

Please inform the Brigadeführer [he told the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin] that in the interest of keeping the USA out of the war it is absolutely necessary that no activity should develop here. Otherwise, owing to the incalculable mentality of the American people, irreparable damage can be caused to the German conduct of war. It is proposed that confidential agents in so far as they are not engaged purely in collecting information, be withdrawn. The Wehrmacht has been similarly informed.

In a later telegram, Thomsen was annoyed to note that the Wehrmacht had ignored his warning and had an agent active in the United States:

The agent von Hausberger who has been trained in Germany in the use of all kinds of explosives is again receiving orders via Portugal from Major Osten instructing him to establish contact with American citizens of German descent, whose names have been given to him, and to train them successfully as saboteurs.

Thomsen feared that the circle of people this agent was contacting was becoming wider and:

Thus the danger of being unmasked is constantly increasing . . . I cannot warn too urgently against this method. The example of 1917 shows that American public opinion was incited to war far less by German submarine warfare than by alleged and actual cases of sabotage.

The example referred to by Thomsen was the assault on American economic targets sanctioned by Franz von Papen, German military attaché in Washington during World War I. Because American industry was producing arms and munitions for the British and French during World War I, it was regarded as a legitimate target by German embassy officials long before the US actually entered the war. In April 1915, Berlin sent a naval reserve officer, Franz von Rintelen, with specific instructions to disrupt the Allied war effort. He identified the New York docks as the weak link in the supply chain, and soon recruited longshoremen to plant explosives on Allied ships. These caused mysterious fires and sinkings once the ships were at sea.

The plot was revealed when von Rintelen returned to Germany disguised as a Swiss businessman. His ship anchored at Falmouth, England, and von Rintelen was detained by British counter-intelligence. Von Papen and other German embassy officials were expelled from the US in December 1915, but acts of sabotage continued. The most spectacular came in July 1916, when ammunition freight cars and barges exploded at the Black Tom Island terminal in New York harbour, causing $14 million worth of damage – a staggering amount at the time. It was a devastating demonstration of what German spies could achieve on the American mainland. It was a threat not to be forgotten by US defence authorities.

Hans Thomsen was not the only person to fear a repeat of German sabotage on American soil. While the German Chargé d’Affaires sent his cautionary telegrams to the German Foreign Ministry, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was already on the look out for Nazi agents of destruction on the East Coast. With J. Edgar Hoover at its head, the FBI had been secretly authorised by President Roosevelt to gather information on German supporters within the United States. Its agents had infiltrated the activities of the German-American Bund and other pro-Nazi associations.

In the summer of 1940, the FBI got its first major break. It involved William G. Sebold. Born in Germany, he had fought in World War I in the German Army, but he left the country in 1921 to work in aircraft manufacturing plants in the USA and South America. On 10 February 1936, Sebold became a naturalised citizen of the United States. He then returned to Germany in February 1939 to visit his mother. While in Hamburg, he was approached by a Gestapo agent, who knew about a previous police record he had in Germany. This was followed up by a meeting with a Dr Gassner, a member of the German armed forces secret service – the Abwehr – in Mülheim in September 1939. He wanted to know everything that Sebold knew about US military planes and equipment. Gassner then asked the German-American to spy for the Third Reich in the United States.

Because Sebold feared that his family might be punished if he did not co-operate, he told the Abwehr that he would become an agent for them. But first he had to replace his US passport. When he went to the American Consulate in Cologne, he secretly told them about his predicament and said he wished to cooperate with the FBI on his return to America. They advised him to carry on with his training as a Nazi agent.

When Sebold’s German secret service handlers thought he was ready, they gave him five sheets of microfilm containing instructions on how to send coded messages from the US back to Germany. He was meant to pass on three of the microfilms to other agents active in the United States. Finally, given the false name of ‘Harry Sawyer’, he sailed for New York in February 1940.

Informed of Sebold’s arrival, the Federal Bureau of Investigation wasted no time in setting up ‘Sawyer’ with a business cover as a consultant diesel engineer. They gave him an office on Broadway and 42nd Street which was monitored by concealed cameras so they could see exactly who was coming and going as he established contact with several German agents. A key figure was Frederick J. Duquesne, a Boer from South Africa who hated the British and whose espionage career stretched back to World War I.

Duquesne operated a business known as the Air Terminals Company and he established contact with Sebold in New York City. In their first meeting, Duquesne was wary of FBI surveillance and they ended talking in an automat. Feeling more confident, Duquesne then provided Sebold with information about US national defence and technology, including photographs and specifications of a new type of bomb. Duquesne claimed some of this information came from secretly entering the DuPont plant in Wilmington, Delaware, but other data was gained by innocently pretending to be a student wanting to know more about a particular industrial process. Duquesne was also interested in industrial sabotage and discussed starting fires in factories. He even suggested turning candy-coated gum into miniature bombs. Much of this seditious talk was captured on film by the FBI.

The switch from information-gathering to sabotage alarmed the FBI and in June 1941 they swooped on Duquesne and thirty-two other Nazi spies. In the subsequent high-profile trial in the Federal District Court, Brooklyn, New York, September – December 1941, the hours of FBI film shot in Sebold’s fake office proved decisive evidence. J. Edgar Hoover himself provided the soundtrack:

That’s Heinrich Clausing, a cook on the liner Argentina. Clausing’s work was to act as courier, carrying military information. The important-looking man is Hartwig Kleiss, who worked for the United States line as a cook. The money Kleiss is giving to Sawyer [Sebold] is for the purchase of a Leica camera to be used in his activities as a spy. In these pictures Kleiss has brought to Sawyer the blueprints of the steam ship America, showing the plans of her secret gun emplacements. There’s Duquesne again, the leader of the ring and the most cautious of them all.

The thirty-three defendants were sentenced to a total of more than 300 years in prison. Duquesne was sentenced to eighteen years for espionage, plus a two-year concurrent sentence and $2,000 fine for violation of the Registration Act.

The convictions ended the activity of the largest single spy ring in US history, but it also sent a chill through the heart of the US defence establishment: twenty-five of the thirty-three convicted spies were naturalised American citizens. If German-Americans could be involved in this, what about Italian-Americans still loyal to Mussolini?

That many New Yorkers still supported the Fascist dictator had been underlined by a Columbus Day meeting on 13 October 1938. There, 35,000 New Yorkers booed Mayor La Guardia and cheered Mussolini.

The gathering was definitely sympathetic toward the Fascist regime in Italy [said a newspaper report], shouting ‘Viva Mussolini!’ when a speaker praised the Italian dictator for his recent intervention for world peace.

The sensational trial of the Duquesne spy ring was what Hans Thomsen feared most. The American public now clearly knew their enemy was Nazi Germany, but it was too late anyway for Thomsen and his strategy of support for American isolationism.

Before the Duquesne trial had even come to an end, America was at war with the Third Reich. Four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Hitler declared war on America. It was up to Thomsen to deliver the news.

At 8.00 a.m. on 11 December, the German diplomat walked out of his red-bricked embassy in Washington DC carrying Germany’s declaration to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. When Thomsen arrived, he was told that Hull was ‘engaged’ and he had glumly to hand the note to the Chief of the European Division. All Thomsen’s efforts to keep America out of the war had come to nothing.

Later that day, Benito Mussolini joined his Axis comrade and also declared war on the USA.

With America officially at war with Germany, Italy and Japan, there was now a desperate race to prevent any further pre-emptive attacks. This time, on the Eastern seaboard.

Intriguingly, one of the foreign agents associated with the Duquesne spy ring and caught on film was Lieutenant-Commander Takeo Ezima of the Japanese Navy. A New York Times report later claimed that a ‘Japanese agent was linked with the Nazi spy ring broken up in June, 1941, but that he escaped.’ Acting under the cover of an engineer inspector called Satoz, he had agreed to ship samples of American war material to Germany on a more secure route via Japan. ‘Ezima’s program’, said the report, ‘outlined to the spies, was for a four-day run to the West Coast, where the materiel would be picked up every two weeks by boats sailing for Japan.’ But as the FBI was arresting the spies, Ezima quietly left New York for the West Coast, boarded the Japanese freighter Kamakura-Maru and went home.

Such stories heightened a sense of imminent crisis faced by the US government as it looked to defending its homeland from a combined foreign assault. It did not help matters when several mysterious fires broke out along the waterfront in New York. The worst occurred on the morning of 9 January 1942, destroying Municipal Pier 83 and two buildings at 43rd Street and the Hudson River. The cause of the fire was later said to be an accident, but it was a worrying development and US defence agencies were keen to deal with anyone of influence who could help.

Lieutenant Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden was put in charge of the Third Naval District’s investigations section, based at 50 Church Street in downtown Manhattan. Haffenden told a naval aide:

I’ll talk to anybody, a priest, a bank manager, a gangster, the devil himself, if I can get the information I need. This is a war. American lives are at stake. It’s not a college game where we have to look up the rule book every minute, and we’re not running a headquarters office where regulations must be followed to the letter. I have a job to do.

The initial attempts of Naval Intelligence to get a grip on the security situation on the New York docks were unimpressive, however. ‘Everybody in New York’, recalled mobster Meyer Lansky, ‘was laughing at the way those naïve Navy agents were going around the docks. They went up to men working in the area and talked out of the corner of their mouths like they had seen in the movies, asking about spies.’ Lucky Luciano was even less impressed. ‘As far as Haffenden was concerned’, he said, ‘he didn’t know nothin’ that was goin’ on except that he was sittin’ there with his mouth open, prayin’ I would say yes and help his whole department . . .’

It would take a spectacular disaster to get both sides talking seriously about protecting America’s East Coast. That happened on the afternoon of 9 February 1942 when the Normandie, a luxury ocean liner turned troopship, burst into flames. Some 1,500 sailors and civilian workers fled the burning vessel. By the next day it was a smoking hulk. It was a bitter blow to the American war effort – but it pushed Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and the defense agencies together. A secret alliance between the New York underworld and the US government was about to be forged.