The autumn and winter of 1915 were marked by the exposure of a number of German plots which revealed that groups of conspirators were in league in various parts of the country, bent on wrecking munition plants, sinking ships loaded with Allies' supplies, and fomenting strikes. Isolated successes had attended their efforts, but collectively their depredations presented a serious situation. The exposed plots produced clues to secret German sources from which a number of mysterious explosions at munition plants and on ships had apparently been directed. Projected labor disturbances at munition plants were traced to a similar origin. The result was that the docket of the Federal Department of Justice became laden with a motley collection of indictments which implicated fifty or more individuals concerned in some dozen conspiracies, in which four corporations were also involved. These cases only represented a portion of the criminal infractions of neutrality laws, which had arisen since the outbreak of the war. In January, 1916, an inquiry in Congress directed the Attorney General to name all persons "arrested in connection with criminal plots affecting the neutrality of our Government." Attorney General Gregory furnished a list of seventy-one indicted persons, and the four corporations mentioned. A list of merely arrested persons would not have been informative, as it would have conveyed an incomplete and misleading impression. Such a list, Mr. Gregory told Congress, would not include persons indicted but never arrested, having become fugitives from justice; nor persons indicted but never arrested, having surrendered; but would include persons arrested and not proceeded against. Thus there were many who had eluded the net of justice by flight and some through insufficient evidence. The seventy-one persons were concerned in violations of American neutrality in connection with the European war. The list covered several cases already recorded in this history, namely: A group of Englishmen, and another of Montenegrins, involved in so-called enlistment "plots" for obtaining recruits on American soil for the armies of their respective countries. The case of Werner Horn, indicted for attempting to destroy by an explosive the St. Croix railroad bridge between Maine and New Brunswick. A group of nine men, mainly Germans, concerned in procuring bogus passports to enable them to take passage to Europe to act as spies. Eight were convicted, the ninth man, named Von Wedell, a fugitive passport offender, was supposed to have been caught in England and shot. The Hamburg-American case, in which Dr. Karl Buenz, former German Consul General in New York, and other officials or employees of that steamship company, were convicted (subject to an appeal) of defrauding the Government in submitting false clearance papers as to the destinations of ships sent from New York to furnish supplies to German war vessels in the Atlantic.