Lindbergh Read online

  Coll managed to stay alive almost another six weeks before he was tommy-gunned to death on February 7, 1931, while telephoning from a West Twenty-third Street, New York City, outdoor booth. Legs didn’t even last twelve hours. Following his trial in Troy, he returned to Albany and an aquittal party in his honor at Freddy Young’s speakeasy on Broadway, across from the railroad station. He drank heavily, then ducked out of Young’s, dropped in on Marian (“Kiki”) Roberts, his girlfriend, and later took a taxi to his ten-dollar-a-week Dove Street boardinghouse.2 Legs was so drunk the cab driver had to help him to his room and pour him into bed. Around 4:50 A.M. three or four men entered the room and killed him with three bullets in the head. It was widely suspected that Brooklyn beer lord Salvatore Spitale had arranged for the rub out and may have been one of the hit men.

  Coll’s execution was generally attributed to his blood feud with Dutch Schultz, but the author William Kennedy believes it was most likely ordered by New York City’s most powerful mobster, Owen (“Owney”) Madden, in retaliation for the Mad Dog’s kidnapping earlier that year of Madden’s partner, Big Frenchy Demange, a snatch in which Legs Diamond acted as the go-between.3 Madden had paid the ransom negotiated by Diamond, and Big Frenchy was released. It was widely held that Legs not only masterminded the entire caper but that he used a chunk of the ransom money to pay the lawyers in his Rensselaer County trial for kidnapping.

  Whatever the true facts, Madden and Spitale would soon find their way to Sorrell Hill and meet with Charles Lindbergh.

  Racketeers kidnapping other racketeers had been commonplace in Chicago and several other large cities as the bootlegging-spawned mobs fought for territory and supremacy in the halcyon days of Prohibition. By 1930, gangs had formed in the Midwest that specialized in kidnapping wealthy members of communities for ransom. Extortionists got into the act even earlier, as had been the case in April of 1929, when fifteen-year-old Milton Academy student Constance Morrow, Anne’s younger sister, received a letter that threatened her with mutilation and death if fifty thousand dollars was not left at a location to be designated later.

  By the beginning of 1932, the kidnapping for ransom of rich and well-to-do people had accelerated to the point where two groups of prominent citizens, one from St. Louis and the other from Chicago, had joined forces and were testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee in support of their proposed Cochran bill, which called for making the crime a federal offense punishable by death. They presented statistics showing that 279 persons had been kidnapped in twenty-eight states during the previous year. The Associated Press had already set the 1931 figure of reported kidnappings at 208 but estimated that unreported incidents were probably ten times that number. Others appearing before the committee tended to agree that the majority of perpetrations were not reported and that most likely several thousand kidnappings had been committed during the year.4

  By March of 1932, an escalating fear within the nation’s business community seems to have come true: that with the possible demise of Prohibition no further away than the November elections, more mobsters than ever would turn to kidnapping for ransom as their alternate source of revenue. And why not? The crime was easy to perpetrate and get away with because the families of most victims preferred paying the money without contacting authorities and also because there were few standardized laws concerning it. There were no federal statutes regarding kidnapping and little likelihood the Cochran bill or some other legislation would be passed. With no national law or agency to combat the crime—the FBI was still the BI, the Bureau of Investigation, which was without the authority and wherewithal to investigate anything much besides white slavery—the pursuit and prosecution of kidnappers fell to the individual states. Punishment in seven states included the death penalty. Life imprisonment was the maximum sentence in sixteen other states. In the remaining twenty-five states prison terms varied from one to seven years (in Colorado) to ten to ninety years (in New Mexico). While all forty-eight states had kidnapping legislation, laws specifically recognizing kidnapping for ransom existed in only twenty-five of them.

  A region highly conducive to the perpetration of a successful kidnapping for ransom was the four-state area of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. No greater concentration of wealth existed anywhere else in the country, including fortunes such as that of the late Dwight W. Morrow, whose estate had been publicized to be worth twenty million dollars, and that of his son-in-law, Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, an estimated two million dollars. Cooperation between interstate law-enforcement agencies was minimal. New York City alone was one of the nation’s largest repositories of criminals and criminal-support systems, including expert forgers who could concoct untraceable ransom messages; money changers who would swap hot ransom bills for unmarked, usable currency; and in the case of apprehension, the finest criminal lawyers in the land. Hostility existed between the NYPD and most every other police agency.

  Pennsylvania’s penalty for kidnapping was a thousand-dollar fine and a fifteen-year maximum prison term; Connecticut’s imprisonment for not more than thirty years; New York’s, imprisonment for not less than ten years nor more than fifty years. New Jersey’s punishment had included the death penalty; then in 1928 it was amended to thirty years to life imprisonment. New Jersey did have a felony murder statute, however, which mandated that if during the commission of a felony a victim was accidentally killed, the perpetrator could be tried and executed for murder.

  “If you ever have friends who are involved in a kidnapping case,” Morris (“Mickey”) Rosner had once told attorney Robert Thayer of William Donovan’s New York City law office, “get in touch with me because I know how to handle this type of case.”5 On March 2, Thayer reminded Rosner of this and asked if there was anything he could do regarding the Lindbergh snatch. A convicted felon, Rosner was currently out on bail for grand larceny in connection with the sale of fraudulent stocks. A previous conviction and jail sentence for an obstruction-of-justice violation had been reversed. Rosner, who boasted friendships with such well-known gangsters as Waxy Gordon, Legs Diamond, and Owney Madden, had supposedly done undercover work for the Department of Justice and was vouched for by two U.S. senators. Mickey very much wanted to be involved in the Lindbergh kidnapping, and it was characteristic of him to upgrade his own importance rather than credit Thayer with seeking him out. He would claim it was Congresswoman Ruth Pratt who had contacted her good friend, and Thayer’s boss, Bill Donovan in his behalf and said, “You must put Morris Rosner on that case.”6

  Thirty-one-year-old Harvard-educated Bob Thayer was Ruth Pratt’s son-in-law. His wife, like her congresswoman mother, was an heiress to the Standard Oil fortune. The Thayers, who counted Charles and Anne Lindbergh among their friends, were a popular part of New York City’s café-society set, which had helped turn the illegal speakeasies and gambling joints around town into a booming business.

  Thayer had represented Mickey Rosner in the past, and the two men had stayed in touch. Rosner, a nervous bantam-cock braggart and self-promoting contact man, had the reputation of being “a rather clever individual” who “had never double-crossed either the underworld or overworld.”7 What better way to discover which crook or gang had the missing baby than through Morris Rosner’s criminal contacts? Bill Donovan, a man known to appreciate a good drink and understand big-time racketeering, voiced no objection to Rosner’s being brought in. When mob kingpin Owney Madden, with whom Donovan had once shared a liquor locker, heard about the idea, he was dumbstruck, but by then it would be too late.8

  Bob Thayer caught up with Rosner on March 2 at the East Thirty-fifth Street court, where Mickey was suing his sister to collect on a five-hundred-dollar note she had given him. Thayer got the judge to expedite the proceedings, then asked Rosner to do what he could about the Lindbergh kidnapping. An hour later Mickey called the lawyer and said he had received very important information, the nature of which he could not discuss but insisted Thayer relay the
message to Lindbergh himself. Donovan told Thayer to do nothing unless Rosner was more explicit.9

  At approximately 4:00 P.M., after having phoned every half hour, Rosner came to see Thayer and related that a very well known man in the underworld with a record of kidnapping had disappeared just before the Eaglet was taken. He said that the underworld was convinced this man had something to do with the crime. According to Rosner, the underworld, if authorized by the Lindbergh family, would do everything it could to recover the child. He also claimed he was a great personal friend of the chief of Unione Sicilione, who could have his entire organization out looking for the kidnappers and gathering information. Donovan relayed what had transpired to Henry Breckinridge, who was willing to hear out Rosner.

  Breckinridge and one of his private investigators, Captain William E. Galvin, met with Rosner at Thayer’s New York City home later that same day. The man the underworld suspected of knowing about the crime was Abie Wagner, a snatch artist and machine gun specialist. To locate Wagner or others with information, Rosner said he would have to send emissaries to various gang leaders throughout the country, including Owney Madden, Waxy Gordon, and Salvatore Spitale in New York, the Purple gang in Detroit, Bobo Hoff in Philadelphia, and the successor to Al Capone in Chicago. He would require ten emissaries in all, and each would have to be paid $250.

  While Rosner waited upstairs for a decision on his proposal, Thayer told Breckinridge and Galvin that neither he nor Bill Donovan could recommend paying the money because they didn’t fully trust Rosner. Breckinridge replied that since he and Lindbergh were absolutely in the dark as to who took the baby, the current strategy was to get all the help possible from any quarter, to go to any length to obtain information.

  Rosner was given twenty-five hundred dollars in cash and told to initiate his plan. He stipulated two provisos, which were agreed to by Breckinridge: that he not be followed or interfered with by the police and that the Lindbergh family should insist the U.S. Secret Service be kept away because the underworld feared them. Rosner went to the phone and called several numbers. It wasn’t long before two men arrived and were shown to another room in the Thayer house. Rosner peeled off approximately five hundred dollars from the bankroll and put part of the cash in one trouser pocket and the balance in the other; then he joined the two visitors, whom he hadn’t bothered to introduce or identify. The men departed with Rosner telling Thayer that the pair was going directly to Chicago. Thayer would later learn that one of the two men worked for Salvatore Spitale, the Brooklyn beer-lord questioned in regard to the Legs Diamond murder, and that Rosner had only given him twenty dollars to go see his boss.10

  That same evening at Sorrel Hill, Morris Rosner was introduced to Charles Lindbergh. His visit, like Thayer’s contacting him, was kept secret from Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf and his New Jersey State Police. After talking with Lindbergh and members of the household staff, Rosner asked to see, and was shown, the ransom note. Three versions exist as to what occurred next. One report holds that Rosner was given a photostatic copy of the note; another, that a tracing, not a Photostat, was made; the third, that he took the actual note with him back to New York City, where he had copies made. In any event, early on March 3, copies of the ransom note, or possibly the original, began being shown around New York City’s underworld in hopes that the style would be recognized and the writer revealed. There, at the bottom of the message, for all to see, was the “secret signature” of interlacing circles and perforations. The criminals to whom Rosner displayed the message included expert forgers and extortionists—who were not above copying a kidnapper’s ransom note and extorting the money for themselves.

  On the premise that the Lindbergh scenario had allowed for two possibilities regarding the nonexistent kidnappers, the first, and most likely, was that no one would respond to the ransom letter that had been left in the nursery, that after an extended manhunt the state police would give up the search for the missing child and the matter would be forgotten without anyone’s being affected by the conspiracy to cover up what had really happened to the child.

  The second possibility in the scenario, a long shot and the most desired for pivotal action, was now actually happening: The underworld had been viewing the note and the secret symbol. The question was, What extortionist, if any, would take the bait—copy the message’s style and try to claim the ransom as his own? If this did occur, then the manhunt could turn into a long and arduous struggle to catch up with the extortionist, thereby further isolating and obscuring the actual killer.

  9

  Go-Betweens

  With a national epidemic of kidnappings plaguing the land, Lindbergh and his Sorrel Hill advisers appeared aware of two specific rules by which the snatch gangs played: Ransom messages from the kidnappers were usually answered in newspaper ads, and go-betweens were often selected to deal with the release of the victim. The ransom note found in the nursery March 1 mentioned nothing about the use of go-betweens. Even so, on March 2, Lindbergh, who was still denying that a ransom note was left, named Douglas G. Thompson and Arthur Springer to be his negotiators with the kidnappers, an act that implied a ransom communication had indeed been received. By midafternoon of the following day, Mickey Rosner’s attempt to usurp Thompson and Springer ran into a major stumbling block: Owney Madden, one of the most powerful mobsters in New York. Suspecting that Rosner was in league with federal agents, Madden was reluctant to cooperate in Mickey’s proposed plan. A panicky Rosner wasn’t to be denied.

  At 11:00 P.M. that night, March 3, Rosner had attorney Robert Thayer drive him to Broadway and Forty-seventh Street. Getting out of the car, he told Thayer to wait, warning that if he didn’t return within an hour, it meant he was in serious trouble and that help should be sought. He had not mentioned Madden by name but left little doubt that was who he was about to see. Rosner entered a building, came out within the hour highly agitated, and asked to talk to Colonel Donovan. Donovan was in Albany, so Thayer arranged for them to confer with Henry Breckinridge. The three men rendezvoused at a Princeton, New Jersey, luncheonette at 4:00 A.M., March 4. Rosner, who still had not identified Madden, told Breckinridge that he had just met with someone who had definite information concerning the kidnapping and that this person had imposed two conditions for cooperating with them: The Lindberghs must exonerate the kidnappers upon the safe return of the child, and Rosner must be given a clear, untapped phone wire from the Lindbergh home so that this person could be reached without fear of federal or local police interference.

  They proceeded on to Sorrel Hill and entered into a long conference with Lindbergh and Schwarzkopf, who for the first time learned of the Rosner connection. Schwarzkopf and Lindy went along with the terms being imposed by Rosner.1 William Galvin drafted a soon-to-be-issued statement by the Lindberghs that exonerated the kidnappers—and when it appeared in print, it prompted New Jersey’s attorney general to serve notice that neither Lindbergh nor the state police had the power to grant immunity.

  The Lindbergh house was now both a command post and dormitory. The Breckinridges had moved into one of the bedrooms, and Henry’s private investigators, Fogarty and Galvin, occupied another. At night many of the large rooms downstairs were fitted out with cots and bedrolls for the detectives and policemen who worked there on kidnapping business during the day. Rosner was given his own room and provided with a clear telephone line—a line the Bureau of Investigation would later claim had been tapped by the state police. During the day and through the night of March 4, Rosner stationed himself at the phone. Every now and then he would dial a number and say, “This is X. Have you any news for me?” No one seemed to.2

  Over a thousand letters and cards were contained in the Saturday morning, March 5, mail that was delivered to the estate. Sorting through it with the trooper assigned to the task, Lindbergh himself picked out an envelope that had been sent at 9:00 P.M. the evening before from a post office station near Borough Hall, Brooklyn, New York. He opened it. The pencil-written m
essage seemed to be in the same hand as the one left in the nursery by the kidnappers. Unlike the previous note, which had been a single-sheet communication, the text of this message required two full pages. Lindbergh, as he had done with the ransom note found in the nursery March 1, had someone else read the text aloud, in this case the officer in charge of the mail.

  Dear Sir,

  We have warned you note to make

  anything public also notify the police

  now you have take consequences—

  means we will have to hold the baby until everything

  is quiet. We can note make any appointments

  just now. We know very well what it

  means to us. It is realy necessary to

  make a world affair out of this, or to

  get your back as soon as possible

  to settle those affair in a quick way

  will be better for both such. Dont be

  afraid about the baby—

  keeping care of us day and night.

  We also feed him

  according to diet

  The right-hand lower corner of the page had the same “signature” as the previous message: three perforated holes across a solid circle of red inside two larger, interlacing circles. The second page contained this message:

  We are interested to send him back in

  gut heal. And ransom was made aus for 50000 $