Origins: The Reich (5 page)

  “I think you’ll find this batch very useful,” Don Maranzano commented while Hastelloy began thumbing through the four-inch thick stack of papers, receipts and photographs.  Featured among them were some of the most powerful and influential individuals in American business and politics.  “Vice President Curtis, and Henry Ford have taken numerous deliveries of alcohol from our organization.  President Hoover, Speaker Longworth, and Alfred Sloan like the ladies, as you can see.”

With an air of great satisfaction, Hastelloy closed the briefcase, took one last gulp of wine, and rose to his feet.  “Don, it has been a pleasure as always.  Al, from Chicago, good luck and be sure to stay on the good side of the agent heading my Chicago office.  Eliot Ness can be a real bulldog.”

Without another word, Hastelloy headed for the door, but came to a stop upon hearing Maranzano’s parting words.

“The contents of that briefcase along with all the other stacks of files me and my boys have gathered for you over the years contain some pretty damning stuff.  Things powerful men would do almost anything to keep from becoming public.  I’d say that, along with running the Bureau of Investigation, makes you the most powerful man in the country.”

“Be sure and remember that,” Hastelloy said and proceeded out the same door from which he entered.

“how did your
meeting with the distinguished Charles Dawes go this evening?” Hastelloy asked one of his field agents seated across the desk in his office.

“At first he was quite insistent about seeking the Republican presidential nomination next year.  He was supremely confident he still carried sufficient clout within the party to win.”

“Well the man did earn a Nobel Peace Prize a few years back, and was Vice President under Coolidge only three years ago.  I suppose he’s entitled to a somewhat inflated ego,” Hastelloy mused.

“I’ll say,” the agent added.  “He darn near laughed himself silly when I broached the topic of him not seeking the nomination in favor of letting President Hoover try for a second term.  After he wiped the tears from his eyes Mr. Dawes said to me in no uncertain terms that ‘I cannot in good conscience give that man another four years in office to push this great nation of ours even further into an economic depression’.”

“How did he react when you presented him with the evidence we have of his insider trading activities involving the City National Bank and Trust Company of Chicago on which he sits as a board member?” Hastelloy asked.

The agent let loose a laugh as he answered the question.  “When I told him charges would be filed if he did not step away from politics, he darn near lunged across the table to try and choke the life out of me.”

“Not very becoming of a Nobel Peace Prize winner,” Hastelloy chuckled.  “Did it work though?  Is he still intent on running for president, or will he step away?”

“I have no idea who the next president will be, but I do know that it will not be Mr. Dawes.  After much consideration, he’s chosen to retire from politics,” the agent answered with pride.

“Excellent.  Good work,” Hastelloy commended as he rose to his feet while gesturing toward the door.

The field agent got the message and rose from his chair to leave Hastelloy’s office, but paused at the doorway.  “Do you mind if I ask, sir, why does the Bureau care who’s the next president of the United States?  We are revealing a lot of dirt we have on people and making enemies of several powerful men in the process.  Why?”

“For the sake of national security,” Hastelloy answered in a manner that invited no further questions.  Without paying the agent any further notice, Hastelloy directed his attention to his secretary seated at her desk outside his office door.  “Alvina, is my seven o’clock here yet?”

“Yes, Mr. Frank Lowden is waiting out in the reception area for you,” the aging secretary answered.

“Tom,” Hastelloy called out to his departing field agent.  “Before you leave, can you please escort Mr. Lowden into my office?”

“Another meeting with a prominent Republican Party member for the sake of national security?” the agent asked over his shoulder with a hint of sarcasm.

“Precisely; please show him in,” Hastelloy answered on the way back to his desk.  A few minutes later, he rose from his chair and offered a greeting handshake to the last possible internal Republican challenger to President Hoover’s reelection bid.  “Mr. Lowden, thank you for taking the time to meet with me this evening.”

“It was no trouble, though I am curious why the Director of the FBI would want a private meeting with me,” Mr. Lowden replied while grasping Hastelloy’s extended hand.

“Presidential politics,” Hastelloy answered.  “You presented President Hoover quite a challenge in the Republican primaries the last go around.  Tell me, do you plan on challenging him again this election cycle?”

“You’d better believe it,” the man answered while visibly noticing that Hastelloy had not yet released his hand from his grasp.  “With manufacturing output reduced to one third of our capacity since 1929 and the people suffering twenty-five percent unemployment, you’d better believe I plan to run against that incompetent fool.  Now, would you mind if I used my hand to pull up a chair so that we may talk more comfortably?”

“No need, you won’t be staying long enough to warrant getting comfortable,” Hastelloy answered and then turned Mr. Lowden’s hand to face palm up.  “You see the circles and creases at the tips of your fingers here.  It turns out those patterns of circles are unique to every individual.”

“Fascinating,” Mr. Lowden answered with a perplexed look at the abrupt change of topic with a hint of indignation lingering behind his eyes at Hastelloy denying his guest the right to sit down.  “You law enforcement types come up with the darndest ways to tell one person from another.”

“Yes, we do,” Hastelloy replied with a bright smile.  “It means that everything you touch with these fingertips can be traced back to you.  For example, if you grasp a glass at a party to take an illegal drink of scotch, we can trace it back to you.  If you hold a gun to commit a crime we can now prove you did it.”

“That’s a truly whimsical ability you now have,” Mr. Lowden sneered, now working hard to retrieve his hand from Hastelloy’s grasp.

“Indeed.  In your case, I can now prove your fingertips were around the windpipe of a prostitute last Christmas when she was strangled to death,” Hastelloy elaborated while strengthening his handshake to a crushing vise grip that brought Mr. Lowden to his knees.  “Why choose some nasty street whore instead of a young, beautiful call girl to pay for sex?  Perhaps you thought no one would miss an ugly fatty for you to carry out your sick snuff fetish upon.”

“Stop, please,” Mr. Lowden begged from his knees as his other hand attempted to aid his trapped appendage.

“No, you are the one who will stop,” Hastelloy insisted.  “You will stop your bid to challenge President Hoover for the nomination, and you will most definitely stop murdering prostitutes.  Stop these two activities, and I will keep my evidence against you private.  Continue, and you will be placed behind bars and publically humiliated.  Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, sir.” Mr. Lowden shrieked along with a chorus of bones snapping in his hand under Hastelloy’s grasp.

“Then you’re free to go,” Hastelloy declared and released his grip.  He hauled Mr. Lowden to his feet as the man cradled his right hand and shoved him out the door of his office.  He pushed him again down the hallway toward the building’s main reception area.  “I trust you’re capable of seeing yourself out?”

If Mr. Lowden had a response, it was lost on Hastelloy whose attention now lay upon his secretary.  “Are they ready in the conference room?”

“Yes, Director,” Alvina answered with a broad grin of satisfaction on her face as her eyes followed the wounded man out the door leading to a bank of elevators.  In her position, she was privy to nearly as much intelligence information as Hastelloy.  “Mister Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Morgan and DuPont are all waiting for you.  By the way, each of them is wearing my salary; I need a raise.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Hastelloy teased on his way to the conference room to greet his distinguished guests.  Inside the dimly lit conference room, and seated around a circular table, Hastelloy found the four wealthiest and most powerful industrialists in the world.  Each of them was either influential enough to keep incriminating evidence out of his hands, or actually abided by the laws.  Either way, Hastelloy would have to use other motivating factors to secure their cooperation.

“Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time this evening,” Hastelloy offered in greeting.

“I was led to believe I didn’t have much choice in the matter,” Mr. Rockefeller said with an encouraging amount of good cheer in his voice.  “How about the rest of you fine gentlemen?”

“There were no handcuffs involved,” Mr. Guggenheim chuckled, “though I did feel a certain necessity to cancel my dinner reservation.  What is this all about, Director?”

Hastelloy allowed the question to hang over the room as he pulled out a chair for himself at the table of distinguished men. “It’s about the future.  Each of you placed your considerable financial and organizational backing behind President Hoover’s election on the basis that he was a business friendly capitalist whose policies would bring you much prosperity.  Three years and an unprecedented economic collapse later, I am now forced to ask the four of you how that has worked out for you?”

“Considering a third of my factories sit idle and I’ve lost nearly half my net worth, I have to answer that it hasn’t worked out the way I’d hoped,” Mr. DuPont answered.

“What was our alternative?” Mr. Morgan insisted.  “Lose half our wealth with a Republican in office or all of it with some Communist sympathizing Democrat as president?  Those liberals are all backed by labor unions supporting minimum wages, fixed forty-hour work weeks, and requiring employers to contribute toward an unemployment benefits pool to be paid out to laid off workers.  They want to destroy everything that our meritocracy was based upon in favor of handouts.”

“Oh spare me, Morgan.  You were handed most of what you control from your father, the same as me,” Rockefeller objected with a nonchalant wave of his hand across the air in front of him.

“Be that as it may,” Morgan conceded, “the only way to recover from this economic depression is for us to grow our way out of it.  That is accomplished by way of President Hoover’s policies to issue tax breaks and lend capital to manufacturers in order to encourage their expansion.  Our businesses would then hire more workers and pay them a decent wage for a day’s work rather than having them sitting around waiting to collect a handout.”

“Morgan, I find it rather ironic that you sit here and in one breath denounce the worker’s cries for financial help.  Then in your very next breath, you insist the only way to fix things is for the government to give tax breaks and cheap lending, also known as handouts, to us and our businesses,” Rockefeller objected.

“We industrialists will put that money to good use making products the people will want to buy.  What are millions of workers going to do with the few dollars they receive from some unemployment fund handout that I paid into on their behalf?” Morgan asked.  “It gets diluted across the economy and does nothing for it in the end.”

“Collectively those millions of laid off workers and their families will buy food to keep farmers farming, and they’ll buy clothing to keep textile mills running.  Let’s be honest with each other,” Rockefeller instructed.  “A lack of money is not holding any one of us in this room back from expanding our enterprises.  It is a complete lack of profit in doing so.  No one is buying anything; therefore, we don’t make anything.  Demand must be created from the bottom and ripple up through the economy.”

“This has certainly been a fun debate,” Hastelloy interrupted while opening his hands out wide and looking to his left palm.  “On the one hand, we have the idea of giving money to the top as the titans of industry attempt to predict what the people will want to buy and build out their industrial capacity in kind.  That of course assumes the funds handed out get spent at all and don’t just disappear into ever fattening bank accounts.  Assuming that, more workers will get hired and the economy will grow happily ever after.”

Hastelloy shifted his gaze to his right hand.  “On the other hand we have the bottom up approach of supporting the little guys so that they may buy things that they need to survive and thereby instruct the titans of industry what they want manufactured.  The industrialists then build out to meet that demand, hire workers and again the economy grows on its merry way.”

“I personally see a dangerous parallel between the top down approach and communism’s central economic planning.  In both cases a small, elite group tries to decide where money and economic capacity should be spent without much input from the fundamental laws of supply and demand.”

“Then again, what do I know?  I’m just the nation’s top cop,” Hastelloy sighed.  “My life revolves around facts, not theories.  That being the case, the fact of the matter is we already tried Hoover’s top down solution and it failed in spectacular and disastrous fashion.  It’s time for something new, a New Deal for America.  A deal which grants
relief
to the unemployed and the poor,
recovery
to economic normalcy, and
reform
of the financial system to prevent this from ever happening again.”

“Who is proposing this New Deal?” Morgan asked.

“That is why the four of you are here now.  Gentlemen, I would like you to meet Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Hastelloy announced and had his words rewarded with a distinguished individual in his early fifties enter the room.  “President Hoover and his history of failed economics will represent the Republican ticket in the next election cycle.  None of you can afford another four years like the last four.  Mr. Roosevelt, with the backing of you four gentlemen, will represent the Democratic ticket and usher in his New Deal with America.  All I ask as your host this evening is that you listen to him and his ideas.  At that point you are free to make your own decision.”

Just over a year removed from the initial introductory meeting he facilitated between Mr. Roosevelt and his financial backers, Hastelloy stood in the crowd to watch the newly elected President Roosevelt take the oath of office.

As predicted, President Hoover was soundly trounced in the election.  The deeply unpopular sitting president received only thirty-nine percent of the popular vote, and managed to carry only six states in the all-important Electoral College count.