At the same time that Maude was reclaiming the Alexander Agassiz in San Diego, on the other side of the world, the final attack of the great German spring offensive was being driven back by the Allied forces. The German campaign captured substantial French territory and inflicted heavy casualties, but in the end, was stopped forty miles from Paris. German manpower was exhausted in the futile effort, while the Allies were bolstered by the arrival of 300,000 fresh American troops each month. The German army began a broad retreat, and by August 1918, even the Kaiser recognized that the war was lost.
In Mazatlán, reports of the initial success of the spring offensive had brought great rejoicing in the German community, and a banquet had been held to celebrate the Fatherland’s impending victory. Now the atmosphere had grown sullen, as it became clear that the initiative had passed to the enemy. With the change in fortune, there could be no German Mexican invasion of the United States, and the submarines that were expected on the Pacific coast failed to materialize. In the final months of the war, German secret service operations in Mexico quickly drew to a close.
To the managing directors of Melchers Sucesores and their countrymen, the news of the German surrender was almost overwhelming. But along with despair came the hope that the end of hostilities would bring the return of normal business conditions, and allow the firm to regain its former prominence.
The first signs were positive. On April 29, 1919, the U.S. War Trade Board announced that the Enemy Trading List (the “blacklist”) was formally rescinded. Two years later, Melchers Sucs celebrated its seventy-fifth year in operation, giving renewed confidence in the future. The partners expressed their belief, “strong and optimistic, that the future is bright and promising . . . We are hopeful that the future will be prosperous and fruitful for future generations. A healthy optimism makes us expect that we will reach the century mark driven by the same trends of advancement and continuous improvement as in the past.”
But the decade of the 1920s proved difficult for Melchers Sucesores. In 1922, a general economic depression spread across Mexico and the trading company’s business declined significantly. At the same time, the Weimar Republic, struggling to pay war reparations to the Allied governments, was forced to use unsupported paper marks to buy foreign currency on the open exchanges, creating a severe hyperinflation that lasted three years and destabilized the nation’s economy. The mark became virtually worthless, which disrupted Casa Melchers’ ability to conduct financial transactions in Germany, its leading source of supply. Mexican customers saw the price of German goods increase, while deliveries could not always be depended upon.
The wartime isolation of the German trading houses by the Allied blockade and enemy trading lists resulted in American companies making strong inroads into the Mexican market. The expansion of the Southern Pacific Railroad down the west coast of Mexico further increased competition from merchants in California, and trade reverted to the United States in ever-growing proportions.
The final straw came with the Wall Street crash in 1929, which triggered a worldwide depression. Melchers Sucesores was forced to declare bankruptcy. With Casa Melchers gone, Consul Friedrich Unger took a position with the Cervecería del Pacífico brewery. He died of a heart attack in Mazatlán in 1940 at the age of sixty-five.
Maude’s immediate concern after the war was how to keep the Alexander Agassiz from being seized again—by the U.S. Marshal for nonpayment of outstanding claims against the vessel. The mortgage owed on the schooner to the University of California alone had ballooned to almost $8,000, and the problem remained that the Agassiz could not pass inspection to carry cargo for hire in the United States.
The financial outlook brightened somewhat when an offer to charter the schooner arrived from an unlikely source. The Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (later renamed Paramount Pictures) was planning to film a comedy-romance titled Such a Little Pirate about an innocent young girl who sails off in search of her great-grandfather’s pirate treasure, and along the way, nearly falls prey to the machinations of her cutthroat crew. The picture would feature one of the studio’s rising stars, a talented young actress named Lila Lee, who went on to star in blockbuster hits like Blood and Sand with Rudolph Valentino, and became one of the few stars of the silent era to successfully transition to “talkies” a decade later. Executives at the studio had read about Maude Lochrane and the Alexander Agassiz in Los Angeles newspapers, and recognizing the publicity potential, chartered the former German raider for use in the film. Four months after Maude and the raider crew were captured off Mazatlán, the Agassiz returned to the sea again, sailing between San Pedro and Catalina Island with Lila Lee and a company of “pirate” actors to film scenes for the movie. But when the production ended, so did the charter income, and the Pacific Coast Trading and Shipping Company once more teetered toward bankruptcy.
In desperation, Maude hatched a “go-for-broke” scheme to take the Agassiz on a sealing expedition to the Santa Cruz Islands. She hired a captain, W. J. Saunders, to pilot the boat, an engineer named Harry Tripp to handle the engines, and two seamen, Charley Grass and Hans Nelson to catch the seals. She borrowed money for supplies from Miss Vive Lorie, an acquaintance in Los Angeles, and set sail for Santa Cruz.
The voyage was a financial disaster; few seals were caught and Maude returned to port owing $854 that she didn’t have to Saunders, Miss Lorie, and the crew. Her newest creditors filed a legal action, which resulted in the Alexander Agassiz being seized by the U.S. Marshal in San Diego. For the next six months the schooner was moored under the watch of a keeper, until June 24, 1919, when Maude was able to reach an agreement to settle their claims and obtain the schooner’s release.
Undeterred by the sealing fiasco, “the ‘skippertress’ of the good ship Alexander Agassiz,” as Maude was now known in the press, continued a vain search for freight contracts that would help pay off the mounting debt, but it was a losing battle. Within a year the Agassiz was seized once again, this time by the U.S. marshal in Los Angeles, and put up for auction to pay off Maude’s creditors.
Joseph Mesmer had supported Maude in her efforts to run a shipping company from the beginning, both out of friendship and his personal desire to assist the disadvantaged. But the industrialist recognized that the Pacific Coast Trading and Shipping Company was destined for failure; a freight carrier with a vessel that could not legally carry cargo for hire was not a viable business proposition. When the Alexander Agassiz came up for sale at the U.S. Marshal’s auction, Mesmer purchased the schooner for $4,200 to help settle some of the outstanding claims against the vessel. He then recovered part of his outlay by selling the Agassiz to the Halfhill Tuna Packing Company of San Francisco, the largest tuna processor on the Pacific Coast. The Alexander Agassiz was gone, but until her death in the mid-1940s, it would be remembered by Maude Lochrane as the greatest adventure of her life.
Cornelius Adolph Heintz finished the war safe at home in Los Angeles. After giving his deposition at the Prize Court hearing, he was released on his own recognizance. On April 5, 1918, Heintz registered for the draft, claiming an exemption for having a dependent wife. Following Judge Bledsoe’s ruling that no overt act of privateering or other belligerent operations had been indulged in by the Agassiz’s crew, Heintz was released from custody, a free man.
Unlike the others captured on board the schooner, for Cornelius Heintz, the Alexander Agassiz saga had a happy ending. He was no longer a slacker, no longer subject to the penalty of one year in jail for draft evasion, and with a dependent wife, would not be called to serve in the U.S. armed forces.
In the years after the fateful voyage, Heintz would continue to find employment as an engineer. He developed a smokeless incinerator, and in the 1930s capitalized on the growing demand for air conditioning by forming his own air conditioner manufacturing company. Heintz later remarried and had four sons. His first son, Cornelius A. Heintz Jr., was a hero during World War II. An Army Air Corps navigator, young Heintz’s bomber was shot down over France in 1943, and he spent the following two years in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
Cornelius Adolph Heintz Sr. died in Los Angeles in 1958 at the age of sixty-eight.
Lieutenant Charles Edwin Reordan’s actions during the capture of the Alexander Agassiz would add to his reputation as a capable naval commander. In the decades that followed, his career in the navy would steadily progress, as he rose from lieutenant, to lieutenant-commander, commander, and finally to captain. He was the commanding officer of a number of U.S. Navy vessels, from the USS Henderson, a 12,000-ton troop transport, to the USS Farragut, one of the newest destroyers in the fleet. In 1935, Reordan was selected to attend the U.S. Naval War College and graduated in the senior class. Six years later, he was the captain of the USS Tennessee, a powerful 33,000-ton battleship with a ship’s company of over 1,000 men.
One peaceful Sunday morning in December 1941, Captain Reordan was enjoying shore leave on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, when the sound of distant explosions and gunfire signaled the opening of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Wave after wave of Japanese dive bombers, torpedo planes, and fighters descended upon the unsuspecting American warships, and within minutes, the Tennessee, moored on Battleship Row along Ford Island with seven other battleships, was struck by two armor-piercing bombs that disabled a gun and killed several sailors. As the Tennessee responded with a barrage of defensive fire, a terrific explosion occurred aft of the warship, as the battleship Arizona was torn apart by a bomb that dropped down her funnel, showering the Tennessee with burning debris and leaving the surface of the water “a mass of flaming oil from millions of gallons of (released) fuel oil.” As the battle continued to rage, the Tennessee was singled out for attack, and became the target of additional bombs, while her deck was raked with machine-gun bullets from low-flying Japanese planes.
Without stopping to change out of his civilian clothes or remove the straw hat that he was wearing, Reordan rushed back to his ship to take command. The burning oil from the Arizona threatened to engulf the Tennessee, and he gave orders to advance at slow speed into a better defensive position. But no movement could occur—the Tennessee was now pinned against a dock by the stricken battleship West Virginia and frozen in place. At that moment, Reordan noticed that the wash from the Tennessee’s propellers was holding back the burning oil released by the Arizona. He directed that the engines be run at full speed, which kept the flaming mass away from the Tennessee and saved the ship. The whirring propellers continued to protect the Tennessee for the next twenty-four hours until the flames subsided. The battleship was finally freed when the dock was dynamited, and the Tennessee returned to sea within a few days of the Japanese attack.
For his performance at Pearl Harbor, Captain Reordan received a commendation from Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the commander of the Pacific Fleet, and he would later receive the Legion of Merit from President Truman for his work as commandant of the Key West Naval Operating Base. Charles E. Reordan died in Miami, Florida, at the age of fifty-eight, on March 23, 1947.
After his harrowing escape from Mexico, Dr. Paul Altendorf reported to the Military Intelligence office in Nogales, Arizona, where he spent the next several weeks monitoring the movement of suspected enemy agents across the border. In August 1918, he was called to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, to testify at the trial of Lothar Witzke, the German saboteur-assassin he had delivered into American hands. Altendorf provided damning firsthand testimony, telling the court of Witzke’s confessing to multiple acts of sabotage on American soil. At the conclusion of the trial, the German agent was sentenced to death, and only escaped the hangman’s noose when President Wilson commuted his sentence to “confinement at hard labor for the rest of his natural life.” Witzke was sent to Leavenworth penitentiary. Three years later, under intense pressure from the Weimar Republic, the U.S. government released Witzke and he was deported to Germany.
Witzke would remain one of a score of men who wanted to see Dr. Paul Bernardo Altendorf dead. In 1928, lawyers representing the Lehigh Valley Railroad, owners of Black Tom Island, the munitions storage terminal destroyed in 1916 by a group of saboteurs that included Jahnke and Witzke, located the former saboteur in Venezuela. Although Witzke refused to divulge any information about the missions that he had undertaken for Germany during the war, the lawyers found him to be amiable and courteous—until Dr. Altendorf was introduced into the conversation. At the mention of Altendorf’s name, Witzke’s demeanor changed in an instant. “With eyes flashing fire, he referred to Altendorf, stating that he had once had him at the point of a pistol and regretted that he had not put him out of the way then.”
While Altendorf was at San Antonio, Major Barnes, the head of military intelligence for the Southern Department, told him to “look around and see what you can do.” Forty-eight hours later, Altendorf had become a member of the Tannhauser Halle, the leading German club in San Antonio. He subsequently investigated several cases for the department, including that of Dr. Ludwig Reuter, a suspect German chemist, and Count Pierre Fremonte E. Rodyke, a Russian-born German agent, obtaining evidence that sent both men to prison.
As the war drew to a close, the army’s military intelligence branch was drastically reduced in size. The unit in which Altendorf served, the Corps of Intelligence Police, which had fielded over a thousand investigators during the war, was soon left with just a handful of men. Altendorf’s superiors attempted to retain their star agent as an interpreter, or obtain permission to hire him for another secret mission, but without success. The doctor-spy was demobilized from the service in April 1919.
Altendorf left the military intelligence branch on the best of terms. A letter of recommendation from Brigadier General J. A. Ryan stated:
Dr. Altendorf is a fine linguist and a man of exceptional talent for secret service work. His splendid work in Mexico resulted in important developments and important captures by the Government. He is devoted to the American Forces and I deem him competent to perform the duties of a Captain of the Intelligence Department, to which Department he would be a valuable acquisition. Dr. Altendorf is possessed of experience way beyond his years and should not be placed under men who have less experience and less ability. He should by all means be secured for the U.S. Secret Service.
Dr. Altendorf displayed much energy in the discharge of his duties. He is an excellent linguist and is otherwise well qualified for this class of work. The results which he secured while connected with the service were very gratifying.
The division superintendent of the Bureau of Investigation in San Antonio, Charles E. Breniman, provided a further endorsement:
Dr. P. B. Altendorf has been known to me personally for the past several months through his connection with the Intelligence Office of the Southern Department. He is a man who possesses exceptional ability as an investigator, speaks a number of foreign languages, is painstaking and careful in his work, and his reports are always received with the most implicit confidence. His wide experience, splendid education and natural qualifications would make him a most valuable man to any investigating branch of the Government.
Breniman recommended Altendorf for a job with the Bureau of Investigation, which he accepted and held for a period of six months. Altendorf then moved to New York in pursuit of something more lucrative—an offer that he had received from the McClure Newspaper Syndicate for publication rights to the story of his wartime adventures as a secret agent. In the months that followed, the former spy penned a complete account of his exploits, from being chased out of Yucatán by Salvador Alvarado to his escape from Mexico and eventual departure from military intelligence. Altendorf pulled no punches in identifying his enemies in the narrative—Schwiertz, Calles, Jahnke, Witzke, and Unger—but concealed the names of American agents and their operating methods. Altendorf’s memoir On Secret Service in Mexico was syndicated as a thirty-installment series in newspapers from coast to coast. It detailed the extraordinary degree to which he had infiltrated the German secret service, while also revealing the duplicity that existed during the war between German representatives in Mexico and members of the Carranza government.
In his syndicated series, Altendorf claimed that he had received official approval from Brigadier-General Marlborough Churchill, the director of Military Intelligence, to publish the articles. But when pressed for approval, Churchill had merely stated that Military Intelligence had no legal means to prevent their publication because Altendorf was no longer in their employ, but that he regretted the articles being published and would not vouch for their accuracy. When Altendorf’s syndicated memoirs appeared in the press less than a year after the Armistice, the man who had been seen as “an invaluable asset to the American government . . . [who] provided more information of real value than any other dozen informants” fell rapidly from grace. The legendary agent had dishonored the service by revealing secret operations for money and burned many of his bridges to U.S. military intelligence in the process.
Among the public at large, Altendorf became recognized as an authority on current conditions in Mexico. The former spy was invited to make an address on the Mexican situation before the Society of American Wars in New York City, whose members included President Wilson, ex-President Taft, and General Pershing. He gave a series of interviews to the National Association for the Protection of American Rights in Mexico, a powerful business group consisting of banks, oil companies, and miners with interests in Mexico that were printed and widely distributed to news organizations. Altendorf stated:
Since 1914 I have been in 22 of the 27 states constituting the former Mexican Republic, and in most of them in the last two years, traveling almost continuously on foot, on mule back, in boats and on the few trains that are still running. I traveled as a German; for no one but a German is safe in Mexico. Speaking from the fullness of first hand knowledge thus acquired, it seems to me a joke to call Carranza’s administration a “government.” No real government exists south of the Rio Grande, except such authority as a thug with a gun exercises over an unarmed victim. Mexico is nothing more than an agglomeration of anarchist gangs who kill and plunder with no restraint but their own caprices . . . The men at the top get the largest share of the swag; make no mistake about that. Carranza is reputed to have $15 million on deposit in Chilean banks . . . General Calles, former governor of Sonora, now in command of the troops there and consequently the real ruler, saved more than a million dollars in two years out of a government salary . . . In Mexico, as in Russia, the sinister hand of Germany is to be found pulling the strings.
In January 1920, Dr. Altendorf was called to give testimony before Senator Fall, the chairman of a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigating affairs in Mexico. After being sworn in, he made a strong impression on the committee, describing the interwoven relationship that existed between the Mexican and German governments during the war, and provided as an example, Mario Méndez, the minister of telegraph, who Alterndorf alleged was in the pay of Germany and provided von Eckhardt with copies of cables sent by the U.S. government to the American ambassador.
Altendorf had made a great many enemies in Mexico after being exposed as an American spy, and continued to stoke the flames of their enmity through his writings and public statements. Two years after he escaped across the border, he took a step that was wholly unexpected and would prove extremely unwise: Dr. Altendorf returned to Mexico.
By the summer of 1920, the former secret agent was once again short of cash. The money that he had been paid for On Secret Service in Mexico by the McClure Syndicate was running low, and he now had a wife to support. Altendorf had married Mrs. Wallace M. Woody, the widow of an army lieutenant killed in France. To add to his frustration, his life savings of $14,800 remained buried on the Pacific coast of Mexico—the last place on earth that he could go to recover it. If Altendorf returned to Mexico, he would be walking to almost certain death.
The only alternative would be to send someone to retrieve the money for him; someone that he could trust implicitly. Altendorf contacted his former superior, Captain Dickey at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, and explained the situation, offering to pay him $4,000 to travel to Guaymas and bring back the buried cash. The adventurous captain readily agreed. Altendorf gave Dickey $125 to cover expenses and provided him with a detailed map showing exactly where the money was hidden. The intelligence officer departed for Mexico, and a week later returned to inform Altendorf that he had encountered a major problem when he arrived at the destination—a landslide had covered the burial spot with a small mountain of earth. He would not be able to do anything without another four or five men to help excavate.
Altendorf came to the conclusion that he would have to go to Guaymas himself to retrieve his savings, but then encountered another obstacle, when he learned that he could not obtain a U.S. passport for travel to Mexico. In desperation, he formulated a risky plan for obtaining safe passage through Mexico. Altendorf visited Teodulo Beltrán, the Mexican Consul in San Antonio and advised him that he had obtained information about a counterrevolution brewing in Mexico. He told Beltrán that he wanted to personally convey details of the plot that he had uncovered to the Mexican authorities, and requested a letter of recommendation and a guarantee of safety for him to travel to Mexico City. The consul agreed to the request, and gave Altendorf a letter addressed to President de la Huerta, and a second addressed to the president’s chief of staff, Colonel Gaxiola.
Altendorf crossed into Mexico through the port of Nuevo Laredo, arriving in the Mexican capital on August 6, and proceeded directly to the Hotel Regis, where he registered under the name Pablo Heitke. The next day he went to the National Palace and requested an audience with the president. An aide brought the documents that he had received from Beltrán to de la Huerta, and word was relayed back to the captain of the guard for Altendorf to call again later in the afternoon. He waited at the palace for his appointment with the president and met a number of old acquaintances, telling them that he had come to see de la Huerta on personal business. At the appointed hour, he excused himself and went to see Colonel Gaxiola about his meeting with the president. He was announced to President de la Huerta, but word was returned that the Mexican leader was not feeling well and would be unable to see him. Could the doctor come back tomorrow?
He returned the next day and received the same message.
On Monday, August 9, Altendorf once again called at the National Palace and asked to see the president. At half past one, instead of being taken to de la Huerta, he was ushered into the office of General Plutarco Elías Calles, now the powerful minister of war and marine—the same man whom Altendorf had tricked into dismissing Major Schwiertz, a loyal officer on his staff; the same man who had been Altendorf’s superior in the Mexican Army before he deserted to America as a wanted spy; and the same man that he had subsequently denounced as a corrupt scoundrel in his syndicated memoirs and public statements.
Altendorf reached out to shake Calles’s hand, but the general turned away sharply, and barked an order to a major and two soldiers armed with rifles to take the doctor to the military prison of Santiago Tlatelolco. If the prisoner made a move to escape, they were to use their rifles. Stunned, Altendorf tried to provide an explanation, but Calles cut him off, telling him to “keep quiet and not say one more word.” Then he was briskly escorted from the room.
At Santiago prison, Altendorf’s personal effects were confiscated and he was clapped into a small cell with an iron bed called a “gridiron.” He had no visitors until eight o’clock in the evening, when two captains came to check on him in his cell. Altendorf asked if he could have a mattress for the bed. One of the officers responded, “No. Prisoners are allowed to buy their own mattress and blankets, but I have orders from General Calles not to allow you to buy anything; you are to remain as you are in the cell.”
The other officer flashed Altendorf a sign that he did not understand. Fifteen minutes later he returned and said that he could give him a pencil and paper if he wanted to send out any messages. Altendorf scribbled a quick note to the Hotel Regis and a second to the American consul informing him of his arrest and handed them to the officer.
The next day, Calles sent some reporters from the Universal newspaper to interview the “American spy.” They asked Altendorf if it was true that he had deserted from the Mexican Army in 1917.
“I was in the Mexican Army only 2–1/2 months and resigned in Hermosillo, Sonora in October 1917,” Altendorf told them. “The general knows this perfectly well.”
They informed him that Calles intended to have him court-martialed and shot. One of the reporters said, “Doctor, I have orders to take some pictures of you.” Altendorf refused, and the captain of the guard, a man named Rodolfo Vela, was called and the pictures were taken by force.
A second group of reporters, this time from the Excelsior newspaper, arrived to interview Altendorf, but he refused to speak with them. They directed his attention to a wall outside his cell. “You see that wall, Doctor? If you refuse to talk they are going to put you there at half past four in the morning, and shoot you like they do the rest.” Altendorf maintained his silence and they left without a story.
Calles next sent an undercover informant to visit his cell in an attempt to trap him into revealing something incriminating. “He presented himself in a very suspicious way and I had very little confidence in him,” Altendorf recalled later. “He began to talk to me in English, very broken English. He said, ‘Doctor, I come here to help you. You need not be afraid of me.’ ”
But the former spy would not be fooled.
Every time the man spoke to him in English he answered in Spanish. After several minutes spent going back and forth this way, Altendorf grew tired of the game and told the stranger, “You are young and have little experience. You will have to know a lot more than you know now, before you can get into any conversation with me.”
He left him at the door and walked back into his cell.
On his second Sunday in prison, Altendorf was allowed into the yard, at Santiago prison called “the patio”:
It was ten o’clock in the morning and the captain opened my cell and told me to walk out and have some exercise. When I walked out into the yard, I noticed that I was being watched by some of the guards to see if I would attempt to speak to somebody . . . After making two rounds in the patio, Colonel Feta with several of the soldiers who were prisoners walked up to me and grabbed me and threw me into a water tank that used to be a fountain in the yard, and shouted “throw him into the water, that gringo.” Every time that I tried to come up and get some air, they hit me in the head with sticks and dived me down into the water for about ten minutes. I got up again at last without any assistance and went back to my cell.
At six o’clock that evening, Colonel Farel, who was in charge of the prison, walked by on inspection. Altendorf called him to his cell and complained about his near-drowning in the fountain.
“You’re all right,” Farel replied, sarcastically. “You can stand this. Think that you have been out in the rain.” For registering a complaint, Altendorf was denied the black coffee that they called “supper” that night and had to go without food until morning.
The days at Santiago Tlaltelolco prison were filled with tension as Altendorf waited to be taken away for a quick trial and an even quicker execution. After being held incommunicado for over a week, his face was now covered with a heavy growth of black beard.
Early one morning, without any advance notice, two army officers came to his cell—Colonel Santos Mendoza and Major Jiménez. The captain of the guard unlocked the door, and Altendorf was informed that President de la Huerta had ordered him deported under Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution as a “pernicious foreigner” for maligning Mexico in his writings and Senate testimony. He was told that they would depart in one hour on a train for Juárez.
Altendorf breathed a sigh of relief. The message that he had sent to the U.S. consul had apparently done the trick. Not wanting trouble with the Americans for executing their spy, Calles had decided to have him deported instead.
Following a train ride that lasted two days with little food and water, they reached Juárez, and Altendorf was taken to see Mr. Harper, the American consul. The Mexican officers informed Harper that Altendorf was being deported back to the United States.
The American Consul asked me if I was an American citizen and if I had a passport. I told him I had taken out my first naturalization papers in 1918 and that I have my papers in San Antonio. He consulted with the Immigration Officer and after a while he told me that he was very sorry but he could not allow me to cross the border without having this paper. I wired to my wife in San Antonio; she brought up the paper and there I found more trouble. I am a Pole, born in Austrian Poland before the war, and because I was born in Austrian Poland, I was again an alien enemy.
The U.S. officials refused to allow Altendorf to pass onto American soil. Colonel Mendoza sent a wire to his superiors that Altendorf had been denied entry into the United States, requesting further instructions. On August 31 the colonel received an ominous reply—“Bring Altendorf back to Mexico City at once.” It was now clear to the Mexican officials that the Americans were not concerned about the fate of their spy after all.
The meaning of the message was not lost on Altendorf, who began to plan his escape.
That afternoon, the three men returned to the hotel suite that they were sharing, and Mendoza and Jiménez started drinking heavily. At eight o’clock Altendorf went into his room, undressed, and went to bed. After an appropriate amount of time had passed, he peered into the outer room and saw the officers sitting in their chairs, drunk and nodding off to sleep. He dressed quickly, then slipped past his slumbering escort and walked outside into the darkened street. There was no one in sight. During the previous two days, Altendorf had been allowed to go about the streets of Juárez while accompanied by Major Jiménez and was now familiar with the area. He found a horse that he was able to bridle, mounted it bareback, and cantered off into the night. He knew the direction of the border from a map that he had studied in the American consul’s office, and rode through brush and mud until he reached the Rio Grande. He abandoned the horse on the Mexican side of the river and swam across the cool water into the United States.
For the second time in as many years, Altendorf had escaped from his enemies in Mexico.
He walked along a country road for two and a half miles, and then caught a ride into El Paso. It was raining, and he used his handkerchief to shine his shoes, trying to make himself appear somewhat more presentable. He was able to check into a room at the Hotel Fisher, where he was joined by his wife the following day.
Altendorf went to the office of the Bureau of Investigation and confessed to having “entered the United States at a place other than a regular point of entry and without the knowledge or consent of duly authorized officers of the United States.” The U.S. Attorney was consulted, and a complaint was filed against him for violation of the Passport Control Act. He was released on a $300 bond to ensure his appearance at a Grand Jury hearing.
Months later, after learning the details of Altendorf’s work as a Military Intelligence agent during the war and of his life being in danger at the time of his escape from Mexico, the San Antonio Grand Jury decided not to indict Altendorf for illegally entering the United States.
For a year, Dr. Altendorf disappeared from public view and his whereabouts remained a mystery. Then he returned to the spotlight once again during the investigation of one of the most infamous crimes of the 1920s.
Shortly before noon on September 16, 1920, a red horse-drawn wagon slowly made its way through the financial district of New York and came to a stop in front of the headquarters of the J. P. Morgan Bank at 23 Wall Street, the busiest location in the district. As lunchtime crowds surged along the sidewalks, the wagon driver exited his vehicle and hurried away, apparently to arrange a delivery. Minutes later, a fifty-pound charge of blasting gelatin exploded, blowing the horse and wagon to bits and sending hundreds of cast-iron window sash weights tearing through the area. The concussion of the blast was terrific, and was quickly followed by a searing wall of flame. After the smoke cleared, the financial district had been transformed into a battleground: a demolished car lay on its side burning fiercely, the pavement was coated with glass shards from hundreds of shattered office windows, and mangled bodies were scattered in every direction. Thirty-eight people died as a result of the blast and over a hundred were injured, while property damage ran into the millions of dollars.
Responsibility for the deadly “bomb outrage” was quickly directed at foreign-inspired anarchists and radicals. In a mailbox located a few blocks from the scene, a postal letter carrier discovered five circulars printed on cheap 7 x 11 paper that read:
Remember
We will not tolerate any longer
Free the political prisoners or it will be death to all of you
American Anarchist Fighters
A year earlier, on June 2, 1919, smaller package bombs had been detonated in eight U.S. cities—one was planted outside the Washington townhouse of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer—that were wrapped in circulars signed “Anarchist Fighters.” The June explosions had been the catalyst that led to the Palmer “red raids” in which thousands of foreign-born communists and anarchists with no connection to the incidents had been arrested.
Investigations into the Wall Street bombing were launched by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the New York City Police, the Fire Department, and several insurance companies, but they quickly stalled due to lack of evidence. The night after the explosion, cleaning crews swept through the area to allow business to resume the next day, removing physical evidence that could have helped investigators locate those responsible for the crime. The remains of the dead horse were carted off to a rendering plant. Many eyewitnesses dispersed after the explosion, and the recollections of those who could be located were vague and uncertain. Promising leads went nowhere. Yet public officials still announced that those responsible would be brought to justice and that “arrests were imminent,” which only served to heighten public pressure for a speedy resolution to the crime.
One of the investigators at work trying to apprehend the culprits was William J. Burns, the president of the Burns International Detective Agency and the most famous detective in America. Burns had spent a lifetime solving “unsolvable” crimes of every sort: arson, counterfeiting, murder, robbery, land theft—even the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building. He had been hired by the American Bankers Association to investigate the Wall Street blast. On the afternoon of the explosion, the detective went to the scene to personally pick through the debris in search of clues. While the authorities debated whether the destruction was the result of an accident or an “infernal machine,” Burns knew at once that it was a premeditated crime.
“We have evidence to prove that it was the work of time-lock bombs,” Burns told the Associated Press, “placed by anarchists or ‘reds’ as a gesture to startle the world.”
Two months later, the Burns International Detective Agency announced that it would pay a $50,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the individuals responsible for the deadly attack. By this time, Burns was convinced that the Wall Street bombing had been inspired by the leaders of the Communist International in Moscow.
One of his chief sources of information on radical activities was a Polish immigrant named Wolfe Lindenfeld, also known by the alias William Linde. Lindenfeld had a long history of involvement in fringe political and labor groups, and was variously described as a half-brother of German socialist Rosa Luxemburg, the managing editor of the radical Slavic Press Bureau, and a representative in America of Lenin and the Third International. He had been recommended to the Burns Detective Agency as “the man who knew most about the Wall Street explosion,” and Burns later declared, “careful checking had borne this out.” Lindenfeld had been an informant on “red” activities for the New York police department, and later applied for a position with the Burns Detective Agency, where he was hired “to keep the agency in touch with the activity of anarchistic circles.”
Three weeks before the Wall Street explosion, confidential sources had informed the Burns Agency that a bombing would occur shortly. When asked to verify the information, Lindenfeld told Burns that the rumor was true, but denied that he knew where the bombing would take place. After the bomb wagon exploded in the financial district, Burns was convinced that Lindenfeld knew the full story behind the deadly act.
In March 1921, Burns entrusted Lindenfeld with the mission of searching out the Wall Street bombers. He provided the informant with $3,000 in expense money and sent him to Europe, where the ex-radical claimed the perpetrators had fled after the explosion. For months Lindenfeld traveled across the continent attending communist party gatherings in Moscow, Zurich, Berlin, and Warsaw. As time passed without Burns receiving any word from Lindenfeld, newly discovered evidence in the United States suggested that rather than being a turncoat, Lindenfeld was in fact an active communist and perhaps a conspirator in the Wall Street bombing himself.
Burns needed to locate Lindenfeld fast. Fortunately, he had just the man to track him down: Dr. Paul Bernardo Altendorf.
A month after Altendorf swam across the Rio Grande to escape from Mexico, he moved to New York and obtained employment as an operative with the Burns Detective Agency at a salary of $8 per day. Burns now gave the former intelligence agent an important assignment—travel to Europe and find Wolfe Lindenfeld.
Altendorf had already been dispatched to Europe in search of information earlier that year. Just as the doctor-spy had worked his way into the confidence of the German secret service in Mexico City, he had traveled to Russia and Poland posing as a dedicated Marxist to gain the confidence of the Communist International. On his return to New York City, Altendorf made the acquaintance of Dr. Isaac Hourwich, a legal adviser to L. C. Martens, the representative of the Soviet government in the United States. Hourwich arranged for him to join the American Benevolent Committee for Child Relief in Poland, a communist front organization, at a salary of $20 per week. He was given credentials that would enable him to visit Poland as a member of the committee and (the communists believed), to obtain information for the Soviet bureau directed by Hourwich.
With his cover as a Bolshevik secret agent firmly established, Altendorf booked passage on a steamship for Poland, arriving in his homeland in late August 1921. He traveled extensively and met with communist intermediaries throughout the country, attempting to learn more about the Wall Street bomb plot and the whereabouts of Wolfe Lindenfeld. His suspicious activities quickly brought him to the attention of the Polish authorities. When he was detained by the Poles for questioning, Altendorf resorted to a strategy that had yielded great success in his secret operations in Mexico. He exaggerated his level of authority, informing the officials that he was a representative of the U.S. Department of Justice on an official mission for the government. To support his claim, Altendorf showed them documents that described his service in American military intelligence.
But postwar Warsaw was a European metropolis, not the hinterlands of Mexico, and the Poles immediately contacted the U.S. Legation to learn whether Altendorf was, in fact, on an official mission. The Polish inquiry resulted in a flurry of awkward exchanges between the U.S. State Department, the Justice Department, and William Burns, which resulted in Altendorf’s becoming persona non grata at the legation. To the U.S. diplomats in Warsaw, Altendorf was an unprincipled troublemaker whose false claims and misrepresentations threatened to create a diplomatic incident. Henceforth, the “Burns agency man” would receive no assistance in his investigation from the American Mission in Warsaw.
Despite the lack of cooperation from the State Department officials, Altendorf sent word to Burns that he was making considerable progress on the case. Then Altendorf, like Lindenfeld, mysteriously disappeared . . .
Growing increasingly frustrated with the status of the investigation, William Burns, who had recently been appointed the director of the Bureau of Investigation, dispatched a special agent named Silvester Cosgrove to Poland to “get in touch with Altendorf, find out what Altendorf has and knows, and transmit it to the Justice Department.”
Cosgrove was able to track down Altendorf, and then Lindenfeld, who was arrested by the Polish police. Lindenfeld turned state’s evidence and provided a ten-thousand-word written statement in which he claimed that although he was not a participant in the crime, he knew the complete story. According to Lindenfeld, the Soviets in Moscow had promised a $30,000 payment for the job, which was carried out by five principals. Their intended target in the attack had been banker J. P. Morgan, but the plotters were foiled when the bomb had exploded prematurely due to “a mechanical mistake.” Lindenfeld’s sworn statement provided a mass of details, including the New York addresses of various individuals involved in the plot, and even the location where the cash was to be paid.
When news of Lindenfeld’s arrest reached the United States, it appeared that the mystery surrounding who was behind the Wall Street bombing had at last been solved. All of the pertinent facts in the case were disclosed in Lindenfeld’s written confession, and the authorities announced that further arrests were expected.
In recognition of the part that he had played in the capture of Wolfe Lindenfeld, Altendorf was hailed as a hero. His picture appeared in the nation’s newspapers once again, beneath headlines like “Dr. Paul B. Altendorf, Former Soldier of Fortune, Balked Berlin’s War Lords at Every Step, Adds to Laurels.” Journalists wrote glowingly that Lindenfeld stood little chance against Altendorf, the “Nemesis of German Plotters” whose “services as a super-spy in the war days were immeasurable.”
The news seemed too good to be true—and it was. Within days of the stories’ release, accolades turned to indignation, when Wolfe Lindenfeld was exposed as a fraud. Far from being a valued informant for the New York City Police Department, it turned out that the police considered Lindenfeld to be a “hot air artist,” and had given him the nickname “Windy Linde.” Although he had worked with radicals “of every shade and degree” while acting as a stool pigeon for the New York police, neither side really trusted him. A cursory investigation of Lindenfeld’s claims revealed them to be pure fiction, and “Windy Linde” later recanted his testimony to the Polish police.
The Lindenfeld episode was a personal disaster for William J. Burns. Renowned as “America’s Sherlock Holmes,” overnight the new director of the Bureau of Investigation became a subject of scorn and ridicule.
It also brought an end to the amazing career of Dr. Paul Bernardo Altendorf. In 1918, he had been a legend in military intelligence, but in the years since, his star had taken a precipitous decline. He had drawn the ire of his wartime superiors by publishing his memoirs in the newspapers. He caused further embarrassment by foolishly returning to Mexico and getting himself tossed into prison, then was charged with illegally entering the United States on his return. Now the man who had outfoxed the German secret service while serving as an American spy in Mexico had been taken in by the shameless deception of a con man. Altendorf, the “man of mystery,” quietly disappeared from the public stage, this time, never to return.
By the late 1920s, Altendorf’s descent seemed nearly complete as rumors surfaced that the former spy was in Havana, mixed up with a gang of prohibition rum-runners “something worse than a lot of rum-runners.” When he heard the news, Vaughn Cooper, a lieutenant-colonel in the Military Intelligence Division said of Altendorf, “His service with G2 during the war was very valuable; but after the war he seems to have followed the usual course of adventurers and gotten into trouble.” Marlborough Churchill gave a more succinct appraisal: “Altendorf is an adventurer out of luck.”
In the fall of 1920, Captain Roy Stevens hoped his luck would hold as he cautiously edged his fishing schooner, the Alexander Agassiz, closer to the coast. He was heading for San Francisco from San Pedro in late November, and it was a tough time to be out on the water. In the early morning darkness, there was a heavy fog blowing in over Drake’s Bay that made taking bearings impossible. He was now almost feeling his way toward the San Francisco channel.
Stevens had bought the Agassiz from the Halfhill Tuna Packing Company, which in turn had acquired it from Joseph Mesmer. Halfhill Tuna, named after Albert Halfhill, the pioneer of the California tuna industry, was the largest tuna cannery in the state. The company bought boats like the Agassiz and then sold them on time payments to fishermen, taking a share of the albacore that they caught in payment.
The 1920 albacore season had been a disappointment, forcing boats to go out in weather that would otherwise have kept them in port. The rocky waters of the lower coast, combined with unpredictable weather, made tuna fishing a precarious way to make a living. Three Halfhill boats had been lost around the California channel islands in the past five years. The Agassiz herself had been driven onto the rocks of the Long Beach harbor jetties by heavy groundswells the previous August, and three boats owned by other packers had either been damaged or gone onto the jetties themselves trying to help free the stranded schooner. Fortunately, the Agassiz had been pulled to safety without much damage.
As the Alexander Agassiz cruised closer to the coast in the heavy fog, Captain Stevens suddenly felt the boat lurch and heard a sickening crash, as the schooner ran aground on the rocks near Point Reyes at the tip of the bay. He ordered the engines reversed in an attempt to pull away, but soon realized that it was a hopeless task—the schooner was stuck fast on the rocks.
At daybreak, Mate Herman Derham and another member of the crew swam ashore in search of help, but there was none to be found. Later that morning, Steven’s wife, the engineer’s wife, and five of the crew went ashore in a small boat, while Captain Stevens and three other men remained on board trying to free the stricken vessel. No matter what was attempted the boat would not budge and they were forced to abandon the effort.
The schooner Alexander Agassiz, which had collected marine specimens for University of California biologists, hauled cargo between Mexican ports while captained by Maude Lochrane, had been commissioned as a commerce raider by Germans in Mazatlán, starred in a pirate movie filmed off Catalina Island, and finally, used to fish for tuna in southern California waters, had been lost. Within days, the schooner was pounded to pieces by the action of the surf and disappeared beneath the waves.
Like the other participants of the secret war in Mexico, the Alexander Agassiz quickly faded from memory and was forgotten, as if it had never existed at all.