THROTTLED! THE DETECTION OF THE GERMAN AND ANARCHIST BOMB PLOTTERS BY INSPECTOR THOMAS J. TUNNEY Head of the Bomb Squad of the New York Police Department AS TOLD TO PAUL MERRICK HOLLISTER Author, with John Price Jones, of “The German Secret Service in America” ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY PUBLISHERS BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1919 By SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY (INCORPORATED) TO ARTHUR WOODS Formerly Police Commissio

Inspector Tunney’s Squad was formed early in August, 1914, to specialize in organized crimes of violence. It did some radically effective work against Black Handers, and handled several cases against domestic enemies of law and order, but as time wore on and war developed, the Squad’s energies became directed solely against the nefarious activities of Germans among us. Inspector Tunney is a most skilful detective, resourceful, persistent, understanding human nature, a good leader. He picked a sq

For the past twenty-three years I have been a member of the police department of the City of New York. It is a long time, in any single job. The department is comparable in size to a manufacturing establishment of the first magnitude—it employs more than ten thousand men—and its occupations are varied enough to suit the inclinations and ambitions of any man. And so I went through the mill, graduating from one duty to another until in 1914 I was an acting captain, and had been in charge of variou

The trend of events in early 1915 made it apparent that the Bomb Squad would be called upon to handle more and more cases of attempted violation of neutrality. Anyone who remembers our national mind at that time will recall that it was not yet made up and very liable to attacks of brainstorm. Every person was seeing events of unheard of violence and magnitude pass him pell-mell, giving no warning, and not waiting for comment, and he was too dazed to watch any single event with any high degree of

The business of crime prevention and detection depends largely on the confidence one man has in another. That is one reason why a “stool-pigeon” is an uncomfortable ally on a case. You can not be sure that a man who associates with criminals and is giving them away is not giving the case away at the same time. His gang hates him for squealing, his evidence is the evidence of a traitor, and he is a good person not to depend on. I make that point here because I have always tried to avoid using sto

Bret Harte said that “the heathen Chinee” was peculiar. The British have learned long since that the Hindu, being an Oriental, cannot help being equally “peculiar,” and it is a great tribute to British persistence that it has labored so hard and so successfully in the good government of a people so temperamentally complex. They have studied the Hindu, and have understood him as well as may be. Understanding him they have watched him. When war broke out, this great Oriental empire presented to Br

Of all the stories of the sea to which the war has given rise, here is one that is certainly not the least entertaining. It is not a story of hunting a criminal. The only part which the Bomb Squad played in it was bringing the prisoner back to justice. It called for no service on our part save that of examining the prisoner, and returning him, with his statements and the statements of others who had dealings with him, to New York. And I think those statements themselves had best tell the story.

Anyone familiar with the waterfront of a great port can appreciate its difficulties as an area to be policed. One of the busiest sections of the community during the daytime, it is little frequented at night. In districts where you find few people you will rarely find lights, and where there are no lights you may well expect crime. The contours of the shoreline are irregular, following usually the original margins of solid ground lining the natural harbor, and for every thoroughfare which can pa

The pursuit of Robert Fay unearthed what trial lawyers delight in calling “not one scintilla of evidence” that he had actually set fire to a ship. Fay was punished for what he intended to do and not for any real achievement for the German cause. Yet the thought persisted in our minds that he knew who was making and placing ship bombs. He professed ignorance. “I do know this much,” he said, after a long session of futile questioning, “I do know that a certain man paid another man $10,000 to make

The facts were apparently unrelated to each other. Only a flight of imagination would have connected them, and imagination, though it is often valuable in speculating on what probably happened, is not court evidence of what did happen. In the order of their occurrence, the facts were these: 1. On April 16, 1906, Leone Krembs Muenter, wife of Erich Muenter, an instructor in German in Harvard College, died, soon after the birth of her second baby. The circumstances of her death were suspicious, an

Richard Harding Davis could have done justice to this story. In December of 1917 we had been eight months at war. We would be an innocent and purposely ignorant nation if we did not acknowledge that even after we had been eight months at war there were German spies in the United States practising their quiet trade in order to make our waging of war as difficult as possible, just as for three years they had practised to keep us out of the war entirely. It would be as absurd to assume that there a

We caught a glimpse, in the chapter describing the attempt to wreck St. Patrick’s Cathedral, of the peace-time game of the anarchist group; we looked into their meeting places and their disorderly minds; and those of us who are familiar with the localities which were their haunts in New York City will have been enabled to visualize with some clearness the squalid surroundings in which they worked. War gave them new opportunities, and possibly a few high-lights which the Bomb Squad caught of the