Freedom's Detective Page 11
He gave the detective the name of the man behind the spurious bills, and it was a shocking one: Joshua D. Miner.
As far as New York’s public knew, “Jot” Miner was a paragon of the Manhattan business community, who had made a fortune building streets and water projects, as a contractor to the city government dominated by the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall political machine and its famous chieftain, William M. “Boss” Tweed. Miner had adhered to Tammany after an initial flirtation with the Republicans in the late 1860s.31 He owned and operated one of the first steam drills capable of boring through rock, and employed more than one hundred fifty workers. As of 1871, the city owed Miner’s company $100,000 for work it had performed on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which included paving Ninth Avenue and constructing a sewer system under it.
Bill Gurney’s revelations cast Miner in a different light, however: as the mastermind of a vast counterfeiting organization. Miner’s legitimate, politically connected business fronted for his network of engravers, printers, and distributors, which fabricated and sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bogus banknotes.
To all outward appearances, Joshua D. Miner was a wealthy and respectable businessman, but Whitley knew he ran a counterfeiting ring and set out to destroy it. (Memoirs of the United States Secret Service)
As Whitley learned, Miner came from a long line of counterfeiters, going back to the era of the state banknotes. He was born in 1830 in rural Steuben County, New York, where both his father and his brother had run afoul of the law by distributing coney. His wife’s brothers were shovers, too. For a time, Miner ran a sawmill in his home county, where he notoriously paid his workers in counterfeit. He tried to establish a branch of the family’s illicit business in Cleveland, Ohio, during the 1850s, but the Cuyahoga County sheriff arrested him in February 1855 for possession of $7,000 in phony money. Miner spent three months in an Ohio penitentiary before escaping. In 1858, he secured a pardon from Ohio’s governor, possibly in return for a promise to leave the state, which he did.
By 1859, Miner had made his way to New York City, where he went into ostensibly lawful business. Miner might have contented himself with this, but he seems to have regarded the United States government’s development of a supposedly counterfeit-proof new currency during the Civil War as a challenge. In 1862, Miner made contact with Thomas Ballard, an expert engraver and chemist who worked for one of the companies that printed authentic banknotes. Funded by the wealthy contractor, Ballard developed engraving plates for the two-dollar, ten-dollar, twenty-dollar, and fifty-dollar notes issued by various federally chartered banks, as well as a process for making the special paper on which they were printed.
Miner and Ballard set up a clandestine money factory in Manhattan, and by the late 1860s they were turning out fake notes by the thousands, which circulated throughout New York and Pennsylvania. Miner’s take was 10 percent to 15 percent of the spurious bills’ face value.
* * *
Whitley realized that he had a chance to decapitate the biggest counterfeiting ring on the East Coast, which would be a greater coup for federal law enforcement than William P. Wood or any other detective had ever delivered. It could make him a hero.
Whitley’s first move was to escort Bill Gurney up to Miner’s mansion on 67th Street for a surprise visit to the counterfeiting magnate.
“Hello, old stick-in-the-mud!” Miner called out, spotting Gurney.32
To Miner’s chagrin, Gurney introduced his companion as a Secret Service detective. “I am in trouble, and I need your help,” he pleaded, playing his part just as Whitley had scripted it for him.
Miner spluttered a refusal. Whitley took the counterfeiter aside and explained that Gurney had told him all about Miner and his engraving plate for the twenty-dollar National Shoe and Leather Bank note. “I want it,” Whitley demanded.
Miner pondered Whitley’s proposition. He was not in business to do favors, not even for an erstwhile collaborator, and definitely not for the Secret Service. At this point, however, Gurney had exposed him; if Miner played his cards right, helping Gurney out of his jam might be the best way to save his own neck. He had never dealt with Whitley before. William P. Wood, however, had frequently agreed not to pursue counterfeiters who surrendered the tools of their trade. Perhaps Whitley might make a similar deal; a few months earlier, in fact, he had done so with the Midwestern counterfeiter Pete McCartney. McCartney showed the Secret Service chief spots in several states where he had buried engraving plates and large quantities of fake bills, in the hopes of receiving leniency—though he absconded after Whitley arranged for him to be released on bond pending trial, thus avoiding any conviction or sentence at all.33
Miner coolly lied, telling Whitley that he did not have the plates, but would try to find out where they might be. He agreed to see Whitley a few days later at the Astor House hotel, and asked the Secret Service chief to show good faith in the meantime by keeping Miner’s name out of the papers. Whitley complied. When they met at the Astor House, Miner promised he would, indeed, hand over the plates, if Whitley could wait for another meeting, and continue to protect Miner from publicity. Whitley again agreed.
Two more weeks went by until Whitley met Miner again, at the latter’s home, where they whiled away several hours talking about counterfeiting. Miner guaranteed that he was finally ready to get Whitley the plates, after which he would quit the coney business forever.
A few days later, when the mail arrived at Whitley’s Bleecker Street headquarters, there was an envelope with two items inside: a claim check for a trunk stored at a New Jersey warehouse and an unsigned letter explaining how to get there. Sure enough, when Whitley’s assistant fetched the trunk for him, Whitley found the National Shoe and Leather Bank note plates inside.34
In early November 1870 Whitley triumphantly took the plates to Washington, where he presented them to Secretary Boutwell, along with all the other equipment, fake revenue stamps, and phony bonds that he and his men had confiscated in other cases. The whole mass was to be incinerated in a blast furnace at the Navy Yard, in the southeast quadrant of the city, not far from the Capitol.35
By no means did the Secret Service chief intend this fiery spectacle to signal the end of his dealings with Joshua D. Miner. The notion of a master criminal conducting illegal business from an exalted position in Manhattan society, with implicit protection from his political connections, intrigued—and annoyed—the Secret Service chief. Going back at least to the Ashburn case, in which Columbus, Georgia’s local elite had gotten lower-class men to do the Ku Klux Klan’s dirty work, Whitley reserved his purest contempt not for the rank-and-file offender but for the high-class criminals who often manipulated them from behind a facade of wealth and respectability.
Those fortunate enough to have education and wealth had a special responsibility to society, and yet, as the Secret Service chief would later write, “Cultivated criminals stalk about in church and mart, seemingly exemplary in thought and act but in reality a lie and a cheat.” These “hypocritical thieves in the garden of life” were more reprehensible, he observed, than the poor man whose “cravings...for a loaf of bread and the theft of it make him a common thief.”36
Now that Whitley knew firsthand that Miner was nothing but a well-groomed predator, he was doubly determined to assemble proof of his guilt that would stand up in court. The engraving plates alone would not suffice; Miner could disavow any knowledge of the trunk in which Whitley’s man had found them, or the anonymous letter that led to it. The situation called for a large-scale undercover operation, which could only work if Whitley were given complete latitude to offer lower-level counterfeiters immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperation—and that would have to culminate by capturing Joshua D. Miner himself, red-handed.
The Washington trip provided Whitley cover for a meeting with Secretary Boutwell and Solicitor Banfield, at which he briefed them on Miner’s
organization, and laid out his plans to penetrate it. This proposition must have struck Banfield as distasteful, and even the more worldly Boutwell as risky. As his pitch to General Meade and Captain Mills in the Ashburn case had shown, however, Whitley had a way of portraying aggressive and unorthodox methods as the only ones with any chance of success. The Secret Service chief was “determined in willpower, peculiarly communicative of the subtle sentiment he entertains, and mentally resolved to carry his point in any personal or individual controversy,” as a journalist of his acquaintance put it.37
Nor could the significance of “Jot” Miner’s links to the New York Democratic Party machine, Tammany Hall, fail to impress the Republican partisans who ran the Treasury Department. If Whitley succeeded, it would help fight counterfeiting and embarrass their political enemies at the same time.
Boutwell and Banfield agreed to support him.38 Whitley placed Miner under full-time surveillance and meanwhile instructed his men in New York to squeeze every low-level dealer they arrested for any detail that might lead to Miner.
* * *
In September 1871 an informant’s tip led Whitley’s detectives to David Kirkbride, a shover, whom they arrested at the Hudson River Depot, a railroad station at the corner of Liberty Street and West Broadway in Lower Manhattan. Kirkbride was about to depart for Chicago with $5,000 in counterfeit money, neatly wrapped in tinfoil, ready for sale. The Secret Service men took Kirkbride to Whitley’s second-floor office at Bleecker Street, where the chief explained to Kirkbride that he was not interested in sending him to prison—or wouldn’t be, as long as Kirkbride told him where he had gotten the coney.39
Kirkbride gave Whitley the name and address of his supplier, David Keene, and agreed to set up another buy at Keene’s house a few nights later, on October 6—under Secret Service surveillance. As Keene went to his backyard to unearth a large metal box containing more tinfoil packages filled with phony bills, Whitley’s men sprang from the tall grass where they were hiding and handcuffed him. To save himself from prosecution, Keene told Whitley that he bought the counterfeit from someone who enjoyed direct access to Miner: a veteran of the coney trade known as Harry Cole.
When Secret Service detectives picked up Cole at his house on 84th Street on October 10, he was carrying $2,400 in twenty-dollar National Shoe and Leather Bank notes. For the next three days and nights, Whitley held Cole incommunicado in his office at Bleecker Street, until the old shover finally broke down and admitted that he had trafficked hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of counterfeit notes from Miner since 1863. He knew Miner well and could identify his engraver, too, though he knew that member of Miner’s ring only by sight, not by name.
Cole’s sunken eyes and emaciation told of chronic illness, and exhaustion from his life of crime.40 He had previously done time at the state penitentiary in Albany, New York, and was in no shape to repeat the experience. He was ready to deal, and Whitley was, too. He told Cole that the government would waive his $10,000 bail, allow him back out on the street, and guarantee him immunity from prosecution. The federal government would even help arrange a state pardon for him from New York, which would restore his civil rights, including, under the law of the time, his right to testify in court.
All Whitley asked in return was that Cole help the Secret Service set up a sting operation against Miner, be a witness against him at trial—and surrender the deed to his house in Manhattan, as a guarantee that he wouldn’t double-cross the detectives. Whitley sent word to the federal prosecutor and magistrate for New York, who came down to Bleecker Street and assured Cole that they, too, endorsed the deal. Cole agreed.
* * *
Shortly after seven in the evening on October 25, 1871, a steady rain poured on the Boulevard, as the wide extension of Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan was then called. Flickering gaslights glowed dimly, forming illuminated spheres in the mist. Most sensible people stayed indoors, except for three or four laborers straggling home with their picks and shovels—and two more elegantly attired men, protected by umbrellas, who exited a brownstone mansion on 67th Street, proceeded south along the Boulevard for five blocks, and then paused.
One of the pair, dressed in a fine broadcloth suit, and sporting dark muttonchop whiskers, crossed the Boulevard toward the grassy median strip, where yet a third individual stood. As the man with muttonchop whiskers huddled with him under an umbrella, the figure handed over a bundle wrapped in brown paper—and immediately fled.
The man with muttonchop whiskers returned to his original companion, who accepted the brown-paper package, offering in return a similar-sized bundle he had been carrying in his coat pocket.
Suddenly, one of the construction laborers dashed straight at the two men, throwing himself on the one with muttonchop whiskers, knocking him off his feet and attempting to pin him to the ground. The target of the apparent assault shouted, “Thieves! Robbery! Help!” Despite his modest size, no more than five and a half feet tall, he fought back ferociously, punching, kicking, and biting—his assailant howled as the teeth sank into his hand.
Another laborer in blue overalls joined the fray, rushing to assist the first upon hearing his screams. This one got a grip on the muttonchopped man’s neck, forcing him facedown into the muddy street and binding his arms behind his back with iron handcuffs. Panting and sweating from the struggle, the attackers dragged their captive, covered in wet grime, to a waiting horse-drawn carriage, and rode off with him downtown.
A half dozen miles later, the carriage pulled up in front of a nondescript brick building at 52 Bleecker Street. The two laborers hustled their prisoner up the stairs to a second-floor office—where Hiram C. Whitley stood waiting with a look of satisfaction on his face.
The assailants who had subdued the gentleman on the New York streets that night were not construction laborers, and they were not robbers or kidnappers. They were Secret Service detectives. Their prisoner, now bleeding profusely from a punch in the mouth administered by one of the disguised Secret Service men during the struggle, was Joshua D. Miner.
Everything had gone just as Whitley planned. Harry Cole had arranged to rendezvous with an unsuspecting Miner, and to pay the counterfeiting magnate $1,500 in marked bills—supplied to him discreetly by Whitley in a saloon near the Bleecker Street headquarters—for two-and ten-dollar bill engraving plates, as undercover Secret Service agents watched, and then, at a prearranged signal from Cole, pounced. The Secret Service had caught Miner in the act of selling the counterfeit engraving plates: the force had him, as detectives liked to say, “dead to rights.”
When Miner arrived at Bleecker Street, his expensive clothes soaked and caked in mud, his wrists pinched by handcuffs, and his four front false teeth missing, he presented a pathetic picture indeed.
“Sorry you got into this scrape,” Whitley mocked.
“I got into it through trying to help a friend,” Miner muttered.41
Miner’s arrest electrified New York. Whitley reveled in the conquest, summoning members of the press to Bleecker Street, where he held court surrounded by piles of captured bills, along with confiscated plates and printing presses. He explained to the reporters that the mysterious figure across the Boulevard who had handed Miner the package of engraving plates, and then fled, was none other than Thomas Ballard, the counterfeiting boss’s master engraver. Whitley’s men had followed Ballard and taken him into custody, too. He led them the next morning to a safe house at 256 Rivington Street, where they discovered an astonishing factory for making the same “fiber paper” used in genuine currency.42 Ballard refused to cooperate—and promptly escaped from jail, probably because Miner’s minions bribed his guards. Still, to Whitley, what mattered most was that Ballard’s equipment had been confiscated and that his boss, Miner, remained in government custody.
“We have reached the bottom of this business,” Whitley crowed. “We have got the plates now of every issue of counterfeit known t
o the Treasury Department.”43
The papers splashed Whitley’s dramatic assertions across their front pages, extolling the methodical way his Secret Service had dismantled Miner’s previously impermeable organization. By this time, Whitley had begun calling himself “Colonel,” based on his brief provisional appointment to that rank, not “Major,” his previous title. Military résumé inflation was not uncommon; American men of the era were judged by what they had done, or claimed to have done, during the Civil War. “Colonel Whitley and his detectives may well feel proud of their captures,” the New York Dispatch opined. “These are by all odds the most important arrests ever made in the history of the Secret Service Division.”44
Crime boss Joshua D. Miner fought furiously when Secret Service detectives caught him in the act of selling counterfeit engraving plates on the streets of New York. (From Thirty Years a Detective by Allan Pinkerton)
What remained, however, was to convict Miner, in a trial that the government intended to hold quickly so that Miner would have as little time as possible to bribe or intimidate potential witnesses or jurors. Whitley himself reported offers of up to $20,000 if he would somehow give up the case; he refused.45 A mere five weeks passed between November 2, 1871, the day when Miner posted $30,000 bond and left the Ludlow Street Jail, and December 11, 1871, when his trial opened at the high-ceilinged United States court on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan.
New Yorkers flocked to watch proceedings that would determine the fate of a man previously known as one of their town’s wealthiest and most influential citizens. “The case excited a good deal of interest on account of the respectable position previously occupied by Miner,” the New York Herald reported.46 Among those who packed the dimly lit court were Secret Service detectives who had worked the case. They expected Miner’s conviction and wanted to savor every minute leading up to that result.