The Secret Life of Houdini (13 page)

“We want a man who is not an old-fashioned detective, who is a gentleman, who has administrative ability, who is diplomatic, a good ‘mixer,’ and will be at home with Prince or pauper, whose honesty is unquestioned, who has, above all, sticktoitiveness,” Gage said. What he didn’t say was that the McKinley administration was contemplating a major realignment of the duties of the Secret Service. No longer would Secret Service merely be the agency that officially tracked down counterfeiters and, at that time, unofficially protected the president. They were about to charge the Secret Service with the responsibility for the vast majority of the intelligence and counterintelligence gathering for the United States. And John Wilkie was going to be their spymaster.

They couldn’t have chosen a better candidate. Born in Elgin, Illinois, Wilkie followed in the footsteps of his father, Franc Wilkie, a famous Civil War correspondent, and at eighteen was a night reporter at the same paper,
The Chicago Times
. Journeying with his father to London, he immediately made a name for himself by sending back a dispatch that ridiculed the published reports in London papers of great preparations for war against Russia. Wilkie traveled around England, visiting many major ports, and found no signs of preparedness evident. Returning to Chicago, he became a police reporter in 1881 for
The Chicago Tribune
, the
Times
’ great rival.

Wilkie was sworn in as chief of the U.S. Secret Service, at an annual salary of $3,500, on February 28, 1898, two weeks after an explosion rocked the battleship
Maine
, killing 260 sailors. By then, it was clear that the United States was about to go to war with Spain, which had been blamed for the carnage. With no CIA or FBI in existence, Wilkie was charged with coordinating both counterintelligence and foreign espionage. Going outside the ranks of his agency, Wilkie brought in fresh blood, and less than two months later had a special task force assembled and was trailing Spanish spies in the United States.

When the trail led to Montreal, where the Spanish attaché who headed the ring was quartered, Wilkie used two actors from the Bob Fitzsimmons Theatrical Company to accompany his Secret Service agent, who, under the guise of looking for housing, gained entry into the attaché’s rented quarters, where the agent stole a letter destined for Spain that outlined the ongoing espionage against the United States. Leaked to the papers, the letter provoked outrage, and Canada was forced to expel the Spaniards, effectively breaking the back of the spy ring.

John E. Wilkie, chief of the U.S. Secret Service.
Library of Congress

It was forward-thinking for the chief of America’s only intelligence operation to be using entertainers for covert activities in 1898. There was something else intriguing about using this particular troupe. Bob Fitzsimmons wasn’t just a theatrical impresario. He was the then-reigning heavyweight champion of the world. He was also a magician.

There was precedent for the Secret Service recruiting magicians.

Even before it was called the Secret Service, Horatio G. Cooke, an eighteen-year-old magician, dazzled President Abraham Lincoln with his skills at escaping rope ties, and was appointed by Lincoln as a scout, the then-current term for spies who infiltrated Confederate lines during the Civil War. He utilized his skills as an escape artist to free his scouting party and save them from execution after they had been ambushed and tied up by the Confederates.

Cooke became close with Lincoln. He was in the theater when the president was shot and was one of the few people to be at his bedside when he died. After the war, he became a professional magician and spent forty-one years exposing fraudulent spirit mediums. Near the end of his life, he became close friends with Houdini.

On May 15, 1886,
The New York Times
ran a small article about some counterfeiters who had been arrested near Detroit. Ezekiel Wellington Jones, a “colored” man, had been taken into custody after his home was raided. During the raid, the sheriff, accompanied by a Deputy United States Marshall also arrested “one ‘Professor’ Louis S. Leon, a reputed magician and sleight of hand performer.” Leon provided information leading to a seizure at a nearby underground cellar of large quantities of dies, and finished and unfinished coins. The article went on to note that while the “professor” was currently being held in jail at Cassopolis, “it is suspected there that Leon is really a detective.” In fact, it had always been Secret Service policy that undercover agents would take an arrest and maintain their cover until Washington could contact the local authorities and gain their release. It seems to have worked in this case, because two months later, Professor Leon was back in the newspapers, this time for ropewalking 1,440 feet over the chasm at Tallulah Falls, Georgia. In the early 1900s the Secret Service also reached out to an escape artist named R. G. Herrmann, who retired from the stage and went to work for the service, and probably utilized his skills as a safe expert.

There was one other compelling reason why Wilkie would have the mind-set to think to utilize a magician as a Secret Service operative—Chief Wilkie was an adept magician himself. Wilkie was circumspect about his skills at legerdemain, yet by 1902 a newspaper reporter had revealed that the head of the Secret Service was not only a magician but a “disciple of the illustrious Herrmann.” His utilization of associates in the course of doing mind reading to unsuspecting visitors to his office was documented in newspapers and magic magazines. While still a reporter in Chicago, he single-handedly created the most enduring myth in the field of magic—the Indian rope trick. In 1908 Wilkie revealed to a reporter that “sleight of hand is figuring more and more in the operations of the secret service.” Even though a respected magic magazine maintained that he was one of the best amateurs in the country, Wilkie told the reporter that he had “several men” at the bureau who were much better at magic than him.

The ability to perform sleight of hand would be indispensable to a Secret Service field operative charged with breaking up counterfeit currency rings. Wilkie himself in that 1908
Washington Post
article recounts one such incident. “One of our men who is pretty handy with his fingers was trying to land a gang of counterfeiters and succeeded in establishing friendly relations with the bunch. Every newcomer is naturally looked upon with suspicion until he commits some overt act, and in this instance the gang determined to have a showdown. In floating bad money each man is given so much of it and keeps half of the good money he gets hold of, turning the remainder in to the makers. The operator was given a lot of $1 imitations and told to get rid of them, another of the gang going along to see that he made good. Each time that he entered a store to make a small purchase, as the real crook thought, he came out with the proper change. But for some reason his companion was not satisfied and adopted the policy of entering the places with him, watching him closely as he bought. It was a pretty trying situation, but our man managed to do the sleight of hand trick so well that good American dollars found their way to the cash drawer while the ‘phony’ ones disappeared somewhere on his person, as evidence against the counterfeiters.”

With his early success in smashing Spain’s spy ring in the short-lived Spanish-American War, Wilkie knew that the purview of his agency had changed. Faced with more than six hundred suspected threats to national security, which had been winnowed down from more than a thousand tips, he also knew that he was seriously understaffed for the task at hand.

There were about 1,300 protestors at the workers’ rally in Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886, when the rains came. Apparently, for most of the people there, their indignation over the murder of four unarmed strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works factory by members of the Chicago Police Department the previous day was not as strong as their fear of getting wet, because 1,000 of the dissidents promptly left the square. So it seemed a little like overkill for 180 of Chicago’s finest to march in and demand that the 300 remaining diehards disperse immediately. It was shortly after that the bomb exploded in the center of the police ranks. One policeman died on the spot, seven died later, and many were injured. The police responded with wild gunfire. At the end of the night, at least seven protestors were dead and a hundred were wounded, half civilians and half policemen.

The reaction was swift. A wave of fear convulsed the nation. Politicians, civic leaders, prominent businessmen, even some renegade union leaders pointed fingers at the foreign-born anarchists who were fomenting a wave of terror, not only in the United States but across the planet. Four nights later there was a knock on the door of the rooming house on 229 West Lake Street. Andy Rohan, not yet a lieutenant on the detective squad, was directed to the room of a Thomas Brown, an Irish immigrant who was an active socialist and had been at a meeting of the American Group of the International Workingmen’s Association just minutes before the Haymarket rally commenced. Even though Brown claimed that he had only attended the rally for a few minutes that evening and had sought refuge at Zeph’s Saloon for a beer or two when the deluge began, Rohan arrested him for conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the deadly bombing at Haymarket Square.

The notion of an international anarchist conspiracy to create disorder and topple the established world order gained strength among all sectors of society as the 1880s progressed—with good reason. The years from 1892 until 1901 would be noted as the Decade of Regicide, a time when more kings, prime ministers, and even presidents met their fate at the hands of assassins than in any other period in recorded history. Even in cases like the assassination of Alexander II of Russia in 1881, or the attempted assassinations of Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1878 and King Humbert of Italy in 1878 and Alexander III in 1887, where the assailants were revolutionary socialists or just plain lone nuts, the violence was attributed to anarchists. The only man in America who had both the raw data and the ability to analyze it within the context of an international problem was Chief Wilkie. With the Secret Service serving as both the de facto national police force and the only federal counterintelligence agency, Wilkie knew that reports like the ones that had been generated during that conflict were essential to safeguard both the president (which was his unofficial responsibility) and the public order. Tracking anarchists in the United States wouldn’t really present such a problem, but to gain information in Europe, where that “tribe” originated, was another story. What little information we obtained overseas was generated by our naval attachés. Wilkie instinctively knew this was not enough. When the Spanish-American War broke out, our intelligence with respect to the capability and even location of the Spanish fleet was woefully inadequate. Rather than waiting for meager intelligence to filter in, Wilkie dispatched a Secret Service operative to Madrid a few weeks after hostilities commenced. With the dispatch of that agent, Wilkie had broadened the powers of the Secret Service from counterintelligence to active intelligence-gathering overseas.

Back stateside, Wilkie was hamstrung by the small number of agents that the Secret Service employed. Because of our unique system of federalism, America never had a national police force, but he could look to one other place, a private club, for cooperation in coordinating responses against criminal activity. The International Association of Chiefs of Police was founded in 1893 (and originally named the National Chiefs of Police Union) when police chiefs from all over America assembled in Chicago to form a cooperative network to apprehend and return wanted criminals who had fled their local jurisdictions. Within a few years, the IACP (which now included members from Canada and Latin America) founded the National Bureau of Identification—a repository of both photographs and measurements (done according to the Bertillon system of classification, which measured parts of the body and skull to positively identify criminals since fingerprinting had not yet been perfected) of known criminals in the United States. Located in Chicago, the bureau amassed a large database and lobbied to get the Bertillon system adopted by federal agencies. Detective Andy Rohan became one of the acknowledged U.S. experts in the Bertillon system of criminal identification. Wilkie would later funnel police requests from other countries to the IACP, unofficially sanctioning it as a national police organization.

In early May of 1898, just a few weeks into the Spanish-American War, the IACP convened their sixth annual convention in Milwaukee. Joining the chiefs of police from almost every major city in the country were two old friends from Chicago, John Wilkie and Andy Rohan.

“Let’s see your hands,” Detective McCarthy ordered Houdini, after the magician had escaped from another pair of handcuffs that night at the central station.

McCarthy was astounded to note that Houdini’s hands weren’t in the least bit cut or chafed.