Courts, Criminals and the CamorraTrain, Arthur Cheney
History
Courts, Criminals and the Camorra
Train, Arthur Cheney
Camorra; Criminals -- United States; Justice, Administration of -- United States
The final episode in the drama was the unearthing by the police of
Hoboken of the secret cache of the dynamiters, containing a large
quantity of the explosive. Guthrie’s instructions as to how they should
find it read like a page from Poe’s “Gold Bug.” You had to go at night
to a place where a lonely road crossed the Erie Railroad tracks in the
Hackensack meadows, and mark the spot where the shadow of a telegraph
pole (cast by an arc light) fell on a stone wall. This you must climb
and walk so many paces north, turn and go so many feet west, and then
north again. You then came to a white stone, from which you laid your
course through more latitude and longitude until you were right over
the spot. The police of Hoboken did as directed, and after tacking
round and round the field, _found the dynamite_. Of course, the union
said the whole thing was a plant, and that Guthrie had put the dynamite
in the field himself at the instigation of his employers, but before
the case came to trial both dynamiters pleaded guilty and went to Sing
Sing. One of them turned out to be an ex-convict, a burglar. I often
wonder where Guthrie is now. He certainly cared little for his life.
Perhaps he is down in Venezuela or Mexico. He could never be aught than
a soldier of fortune. But for a long time the employers thought that
Guthrie was a detective sent by the unions to compromise _them_ in the
very dynamiting they were trying to stop!
I once had a particularly dangerous and unfortunate case where a
private client was being blackmailed by a half-crazy ruffian who had
never seen him, but had selected him arbitrarily, as a person likely to
give up money. The blackmailer was a German Socialist, who was out of
employment—a man of desperate character. He had made up his mind that
the world owed him a living, and he had decided that the easiest way
to get it was to make some more prosperous person give him a thousand
dollars under threat of being exposed as an enemy of society.
The charge was so absurd as to be almost ludicrous, but had my client
caused the blackmailer’s arrest the matter would have been the subject
of endless newspaper notoriety and comment. It was therefore thought
wise to make use of other means, and I procured the assistance
of a young German-American of my acquaintance, who, in the guise
of a vaudeville artist seeking a job, went to the blackmailer’s
boarding-house and pretended to be looking for an actor friend with a
name not unlike that of the criminal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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