manned a pair of headphones in a nearby apartment that tied into the funeral home of one Vito DeMaria.
Previously, in Kansas City, also with Cochrane under his bearish arm, Wheeler demonstrated how two federal agencies could work closely for the greater good of the public: he removed twenty-five dollars a week from Bureau petty cash and passed it along to the mailman who had railroad yards. In this way, Dick Wheeler read his victims' mail every morning before they received it.
'How can you do that?' Cochrane asked, the new boy on the block.
'I can't,' said Wheeler. 'So I do it anyway.' When Cochrane grimaced, Wheeler expanded. 'Very common practice, Bill,' Wheeler said. 'Look. Those bad guys out there do whatever they want. So I do, too.'
'Apparently,' Cochrane answered.
'One thing you'll learn if you stay on this job long enough,' said Wheeler instructively. 'No one argues with results.'
'Apparently,' Cochrane repeated.
Then Bureau headquarters in Washington sent Cochrane swimming into some deeper water. He went to New York posing as a County Antrim gunrunner for the Irish Republican Army. In lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, Cochrane put together a good infiltration effort among the Jewish mobsters along Delancey, Hester, and Canal streets-Meyer Lansky, Waxey Gordon, and Whitey Krackauer-and from the nether side of the Brooklyn Bridge, Lepke Buchalter, Gurrah Shapiro, and Mendy Weiss. These were the presiding experts at running weapons in and out of New York. And there were few shortages of customers. Everyone, back in those days, had someone he wanted to shoot. Sometimes, even an entire group of people.
While he was at it, Cochrane uncovered and blew the whistle on several middle-range operations associated with the same gangs, mostly shlom jobs in the garment centers that had to do with sash weights and lead pipes massaging the skulls of labor organizers.
'There's only one problem with Cochrane,' observed the other agents who worked out of the New York F.B.I. office on Cardinal Hayes Place. 'He can't keep his nose out of someone else's case.'
By mid-1937, the other agents in New York and the jagged-fingernail set along Hester Street received the fulfillment of their most earnest wishes. The need for American agents abroad had reached a crisis point. President Roosevelt himself was concerned about access to information in Europe should the United States be drawn into another world war. The U.S., after all, had never engaged in espionage abroad. There was something inherently unseemly about it. Nonetheless, the President took two steps.
He asked a Wall Street lawyer and world war hero named William Donovan to travel to Europe and study how an intelligence service might be established. And second, he launched a personal directive to J. Edgar Hoover to establish a foreign branch posthaste.
At the invocation of the word 'foreign,' J. Edgar Hoover remembered Bill Cochrane's letter of 1934. He abruptly recalled Cochrane to Washington to prepare for European service. 'What's been our success rate so far in Europe?' Cochrane asked Frank Lerrick toward the end of a second week of reorientation.
'Success rate? What do you mean?'
'Other agents?' Cochrane asked. 'How are we doing?'
'There, uh, are no other agents. You're the first.'
There was a long, long silence. 'Oh,' Cochrane finally said. 'Thanks for the honor.'
Cochrane traveled by the Polish liner Pilsudski from Washington to Bremen, working under the cover of an American businessman sympathetic to Hitler's National Socialist Party. His only orders from the F.B.I. were, 'Find out what you can, and don't get caught. More than likely, we won't be able to get you out.'
'Any particular set of rules to play by?' Cochrane had asked the day before leaving.
'Spies don't play by rules, young Agent Cochrane,' Hoover had snorted. 'And that's what you are now. A spy.'
'And remember this,' Frank Lerrick added, by way of benediction. 'In this line of work, there is no such thing as coincidence. Keep your eyes open. Always.'
Hoover was concluding. 'Use the brains you were born with and the skills this Bureau taught you. If you're exceedingly lucky, that might be enough and you won’t get killed.'
SEVEN
Bill Cochrane's arrival in Berlin from Bremen coincided with a state visit by Mussolini. Cochrane was grateful for the public activity. Easier for him to move around the city and become oriented. Better for him to observe.
The old Germany, the one he had read about, was still there. The polite, orderly people, the handsome blond children. There were the quaint, aging gingerbread buildings both from the medieval period and the previous century. And there were the stark iron monuments erected to those who had sacrificed 'for the Fatherland' in the Great War.
But then there was the New Germany. Everywhere, particularly upon Il Duce's arrival, there was the new red and black facades. Everywhere Bill Cochrane looked there was a march. Everywhere there were Swastikas, Hitler Youth, evening parades by torchlight, and grandiose, overstated new buildings.
Once, on a hot afternoon, Cochrane fell into step with the front phalanx of marchers. Wearing a fedora, a suit and tie, he was mistaken for a plainclothes party official and seated on a podium behind the Fuhrer himself as the mad little corporal gave a rousing speech. Had Cochrane felt like sacrificing his own life, he could have shot the little lunatic in the back. In later years, he wondered if he should have.
Daily in Berlin, along the tree-lined main boulevards were a sea of long vertical banners, proudly alternating with the trees and fluttering. On long poles topped by golden eagles waved the red banners of the Third Reich-with a black swastika in a round white field at the center- and these in turn were interspersed with the red, white, and green banners of Fascist Italy. The displays were powerful and impressive, none more so than from the center of Berlin along the Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse leading to Hitler's new Chancellery in pink marble.
The pink glint of the seat of power suggested an incongruous touch to Cochrane's American sensibilities. In the cafes he struck up conversations with Germans and discussed the bold new Nazi architecture. Twice Cochrane was told what everyone else in Germany seemed to know.
'Hitler likes pink,' they told him.
Cochrane pondered this as he found himself an apartment. When he ceased to think about Hitler's predilection for pink, he was struck by the fact that both the United States and Nazi Germany now had an eagle as their symbol. And there, he concluded, the similarities ended.
About a week after his arrival, Cochrane faced certain disaster. There lived on a side street only a few blocks from the Reichstag a large, smiling, bookish bespectacled tailor named Kuri Kurkevics. The tailor, a Latvian, had been on the F.B.I. payroll for the previous six months. But when Cochrane ambled by Kurkevics' home and then his shop, the tailor was nowhere to be found. The home was locked and dark, the shop boarded up. Cochrane's contact in Berlin had been uncovered and, most likely, executed.
Cochrane then improvised.
Two weeks later he opened a brokerage house and spent his free hours lounging around the bar at the Kaiser Wilhelm Hotel. He took into his confidence anyone with whom he fell into conversation, and mentioned that he had inside information on the American stock market. When investors grinned and offered money to him, he at first demurred, then accepted it a few weeks later purely out of friendship. Within two months he had cabled a million and a half dollars worth of investments to the United States. Fortunately, most of them turned out well. More business walked in. Cochrane considered his good fortune to be a gift from a providential God. Until he had arrived in Germany, he had never followed the U.S. stock market. He knew virtually nothing about it, other than having overheard a friend from Chestnut Hill, just before leaving Washington, comment that everything would be going up within a year.
The businessmen, industrialists, and speculators whom Cochrane met in Germany kept their hearts close to their bank drafts. But as their American friend was making money for them, they drew him into their circle. Soon Cochrane was being invited to the very offices, factories, and gatherings of which the F.B.I. would eventually want a working knowledge. Cochrane's gentle nature and social graces dispelled any suspicion. The very qualities that the F.B.I. had once nearly used to disqualify him were now paying generous dividends.
