In late 1914 Schleindl registered with the German consul in New York, setting down his name and address as liable to call for special service. In May, 1915, he was directed by the consul to meet a certain person at the Hotel Manhattan; the unknown proved to be Koenig, who had been informed of Schleindl's occupation by the alert German consul. Playing on the youth's patriotism and greed, Koenig agreed to pay him $25 a week for confidential information from the bank. From that time forward Schleindl reported regularly to Koenig. Nearly every evening a meeting occurred in the office in the Hamburg-American building, and Koenig and Metzler would spend many hours a night in copying the letters, cables and shipping documents. In the morning they would return the originals to Schleindl on his way to work--he made it his custom to arrive early at the bank--and the papers would be restored to their proper files when the business day began. On December 17, 1915, Schleindl was arrested. In his pocket were two documents, enough to convict him of having stolen information: one a duplicate of a cablegram from the Banque Belge pour Etrangers to the National City Bank relating to a shipment of 2,000,000 rifles which was then being handled by the Hudson Trust Company; the other a cablegram from the Russian Government authorizing the City Bank to place some millions of dollars to the credit of Colonel Golejewski, the Russian naval attaché and purchasing agent. From a German standpoint, of course, both were highly significant. Schleindl's arrest caused considerable uneasiness in Wall Street, and other banking houses who had been dealing in munitions "looked unto themselves" lest there be similar cracks through which information might sift to Berlin. There had been many such. Koenig was tried on the charge of having bought stolen information, and convicted, but sentence was suspended, although the United States already looked back on two years of waterfront conspiracies to destroy Allied shipping. The City Bank episode gave a clue to the source of those conspiracies, by the white light which it cast upon an explosion in hold number 2 of the steamship _Minnehaha_ on July 4, 1915. Thousands of magnetos were stored there destined for automobiles at the front. The only person besides the officers of the bank and of the magneto factory who could have known of the ship in which they were transported was the man who wrote the letter to the bank enclosing the bill of lading for the shipment. Naturally the officers were not suspected of circulating the news; the leak therefore must have occurred in handling the letter. That theory was a strong scent, made no less pungent by the activities in America of one Franz von Rintelen.