Germans -- United States; World War, 1914-1918 -- Secret service -- Germany
To conceal the true nature of their operations they hired a small
building on Main Street and put a sign over the door announcing
themselves in business as “The Riverside Garage.” They added
verisimilitude to this scheme by buying a second-hand car in bad
condition and dismantling it, scattering the parts around the room
so that it would look as if they were engaged in making repairs.
Every once in a while they would shift these parts about so as to
alter the appearance of the place. However, they did not accept
any business--whenever a man took the sign at its face value and
came in asking to have work done, Fay or Scholz would take him to
a near-by saloon and buy him a few drinks and pass him along,
referring him to some other garage.
The most of their time they spent about the real business in hand.
They took care to have the windows of their room in the boarding
house heavily curtained to keep out prying eyes, and here, under
a student lamp, they spent hours over mechanical drawings which
were afterward produced in evidence at the trial of their case.
The mechanism that Fay had conceived was carefully perfected on
paper, and then they confronted the task of getting the machinery
assembled. Some of the parts were standard--that is, they could be
bought at any big hardware store. Others, however, were peculiar to
this device and had to be made to order from the drawings. They had
the tanks made by a sheet-metal worker named Ignatz Schiering, at
344 West 42nd Street, New York. Scholz went to him with a drawing,
telling him that it was for a gasolene tank for a motor boat.
Scholz made several trips to the shop to supervise some of the
details of the construction and once to order more tanks of a new
size and shape.
At the same time Scholz went to Bernard McMillan, doing business
under the name of McMillan & Werner, 81 Centre Street, New York, to
have him make special kinds of wheels and gears for the internal
mechanism of the bomb, from sketches which Scholz supplied. At odd
times between June 10th and October 20th McMillan was working on
these things and delivered the last of them to Scholz just a few
days before he was arrested.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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