Encounters Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire Emrah ■ahin
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M c Gill- Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto.
series one: g.a. rawlyk, editor
1 Small Differences
Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922
An International Perspective
Donald Harman Akenson
2 Two Worlds
The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario
William Westfall
3 An Evangelical Mind
Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918
Marguerite Van Die
4 The Dévotes
Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France
Elizabeth Rapley
5 The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression
Michael Gauvreau
6 The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods
James M. Stayer
7 A World Mission
Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918–1939
Robert Wright
8 Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada
Phyllis D. Airhart
9 A Sensitive Independence
Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925
Rosemary R. Gagan
10 God’s Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster
Donald Harman Akenson
11 Creed and Culture
The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930
Edited by Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz
12 Piety and Nationalism
Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895
Brian P. Clarke
13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States
Edited by George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll
14 Children of Peace
W. John McIntyre
15 A Solitary Pillar
Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution
Joan Marshall
16 Padres in No Man’s Land Canadian Chaplains and the Great War
Duff Crerar
17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis
P. Travis Kroeker
18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land
Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981
Robert K. Burkinshaw
19 Through Sunshine and Shadow
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930
Sharon Cook
20 Church, College, and Clergy
A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994
Brian J. Fraser
21 The Lord’s Dominion
The History of Canadian Methodism
Neil Semple
22 A Full-Orbed Christianity
The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940
Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau
23 Evangelism and Apostasy
The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico
Kurt Bowen
24 The Chignecto Covenanters A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827–1905
Eldon Hay
25 Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1925
Johanne Selles
26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy
William Lamont
series two: in memory of george rawlyk
donald harman akenson, editor
1 Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640–1665
Patricia Simpson
2 Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience
Edited by G.A. Rawlyk
3 Infinity, Faith, and Time
Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature
John Spencer Hill
4 The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada
Edited by Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk
5 Labour, Love, and Prayer
Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914
Andrea Ebel Brozyna
6 The Waning of the Green Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922
Mark G. McGowan
7 Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine
The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900
John-Paul Himka
8 Good Citizens
British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1918
James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston
9 The Theology of the Oral Torah Revealing the Justice of God
Jacob Neusner
10 Gentle Eminence A Life of Cardinal Flahiff
P. Wallace Platt
11 Culture, Religion, and Demographic Behaviour Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace, 1750–1870
Kevin McQuillan
12 Between Damnation and Starvation Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland Politics, 1745–1855
John P. Greene
13 Martin Luther, German Saviour German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933
James M. Stayer
14 Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950
William H. Katerberg
The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896–1914
George Emery
16 Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel
Paul Charles Merkley
17 A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime
Elizabeth Rapley
18 Households of Faith Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969
Edited by Nancy Christie
19 Blood Ground
Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853
Elizabeth Elbourne
20 A History of Canadian Catholics Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism
Terence J. Fay
21 The View from Rome
Archbishop Stagni’s 1915 Reports on the Ontario Bilingual Schools Question
Edited and translated by
John Zucchi
22 The Founding Moment Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College
William Westfall
23 The Holocaust, Israel, and Canadian Protestant Churches
Haim Genizi
24 Governing Charities Church and State in Toronto’s Catholic Archdiocese, 1850–1950
Paula Maurutto
25 Anglicans and the Atlantic World High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the Quebec Connection
Richard W. Vaudry
26 Evangelicals and the Continental Divide
The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United States
Sam Reimer
27 Christians in a Secular World
The Canadian Experience
Kurt Bowen
28 Anatomy of a Seance
A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada
Stan McMullin
29 With Skilful Hand
The Story of King David
David T. Barnard
30 Faithful Intellect
Samuel S. Nelles and Victoria University
Neil Semple
31 W. Stanford Reid
An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy
Donald MacLeod
32 A Long Eclipse
The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970
Catherine Gidney
33 Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics, 1787–1858
Kyla Madden
34 For Canada’s Sake Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s
Gary R. Miedema
35 Revival in the City
The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884–1914
Eric R. Crouse
36 The Lord for the Body Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880–1930
James Opp
37 Six Hundred Years of Reform
Bishops and the French Church, 1190–1789
J. Michael Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields
38 The Missionary Oblate Sisters
Vision and Mission
Rosa Bruno-Jofré
39 Religion, Family, and Community in Victorian Canada
The Colbys of Carrollcroft
Marguerite Van Die
40 Michael Power
The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier
Mark G. McGowan
41 The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970
Michael Gauvreau
42 Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 1665–1700
Patricia Simpson
43 To Heal a Fractured World
The Ethics of Responsibility
Jonathan Sacks
44 Revivalists
Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957
Kevin Kee
45 The Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Canada
Edited by Michael Gauvreau and Ollivier Hubert
46 Political Ecumenism
Catholics, Jews, and Protestants in De Gaulle’s Free France, 1940–1945
Geoffrey Adams
47 From Quaker to Upper Canadian Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends, 1801–1850
Robynne Rogers Healey
48 The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693–1796
Colleen Gray
49 Canadian Pentecostalism
Transition and Transformation
Edited by Michael Wilkinson
50 A War with a Silver Lining Canadian Protestant Churches and the South African War, 1899–1902
Gordon L. Heath
51 In the Aftermath of Catastrophe Founding Judaism, 70 to 640
Jacob Neusner
52 Imagining Holiness
Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times
Justin Jaron Lewis
53 Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774–1874
Calvin Hollett
54 Into Deep Waters Evangelical Spirituality and Maritime Calvinist Baptist Ministers, 1790–1855
Daniel C. Goodwin
55 Vanguard of the New Age The Toronto Theosophical Society, 1891–1945
Gillian McCann
56 A Commerce of Taste Church Architecture in Canada, 1867–1914
Barry Magrill
57 The Big Picture The Antigonish Movement of Eastern Nova Scotia
Santo Dodaro and Leonard Pluta
58 My Heart’s Best Wishes for You A Biography of Archbishop
John Walsh
John P. Comiskey
59 The Covenanters in Canada Reformed Presbyterianism from 1820 to 2012
Eldon Hay
60 The Guardianship of Best Interests
Institutional Care for the Children of the Poor in Halifax, 1850–1960
Renée N. Lafferty
61 In Defence of the Faith Joaquim Marques de Araújo, a Brazilian Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline
James E. Wadsworth
62 Contesting the Moral High Ground Popular Moralists in MidTwentieth-Century Britain
Paul T. Phillips
63 The Catholicisms of Coutances Varieties of Religion in Early Modern France, 1350–1789
J. Michael Hayden
64 After Evangelicalism
The Sixties and the United Church of Canada
Kevin N. Flatt
65 The Return of Ancestral Gods
Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative Vision for a Nation
Mariya Lesiv
66 Transatlantic Methodists
British Wesleyanism and the Formation of an Evangelical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec
Todd Webb
67 A Church with the Soul of a Nation Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada
Phyllis D. Airhart
68 Fighting over God A Legal and Political History of Religious Freedom in Canada
Janet Epp Buckingham
69 From India to Israel Identity, Immigration, and the Struggle for Religious Equality
Joseph Hodes
70 Becoming Holy in Early Canada
Timothy G. Pearson
71 The Cistercian Arts From the 12th to the 21st Century Edited by Terryl N. Kinder and Roberto Cassanelli
72 The Canny Scot Archbishop James Morrison of Antigonish
Peter Ludlow
73 Religion and Greater Ireland Christianity and Irish Global Networks, 1750–1950 Edited by Colin Barr and Hilary M. Carey
74 The Invisible Irish Finding Protestants in the NineteenthCentury Migrations to America
Rankin Sherling
75 Beating against the Wind Popular Opposition to Bishop Feild and Tractarianism in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1844–1876
Calvin Hollett
76 The Body or the Soul? Religion and Culture in a Quebec Parish, 1736–1901
Frank A. Abbott
77 Saving Germany North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945–1974
James C. Enns
78 The Imperial Irish Canada’s Irish Catholics Fight the Great War, 1914–1918
Mark G. McGowan
79 Into Silence and Servitude How American Girls Became Nuns, 1945–1965
Brian Titley
80 Boundless Dominion Providence, Politics, and the Early Canadian Presbyterian Worldview
Denis McKim
81 Faithful Encounters Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire Emrah Şahin
Prologue
faith and the faithful
This book may well change the way you think about the Ottomans. The context is the late Ottoman world stretching from eastern Europe to the Middle East. The characters are the sultans and bureaucrats who managed this vast region from the capital city of Istanbul, the local agents who executed the capital’s orders, and the Protestant missionaries who engaged with them in dialogue and deed. The matter is how Muslim authorities treated Christian missionaries. Christian missionaries belonged to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. New England evangelicals founded this organization in 1810 with an ambitious mandate to civilize the world. They invested the largest amounts of assets in their missions to Ottoman communities. Figures for 1909 indicate the breadth and wealth of these missions, recording 169 American missionaries, 65,240 native workers and adherents, 57 schools, 20 hospitals, and 125 churches – along with $99,111.07 in locally collected donations. This enterprise, seconded by missions to Imperial China, merits study in its own right. This book explores especially how the Ottoman authorities noticed, assessed, and handled the evangelical news. Evangelical missionaries raised the stakes precisely because their ideals and outreach collided with imperial faith and order.1
Faith mattered in the Ottoman Empire. It forged the imperial selfconcept and public order. A confluence of classic, Islamic, and pragmatic models transformed the state edifice over the long term. But faith, in and of itself, netted greater than the sum of applied models. Its presence transcended time and space. Imperial authorities saw the
wider world figuratively on a map of green, red, and white – three shades of faith depicting the abodes of Islam, war, and peace. Foreign nations thus had to decide whether to become Turks by joining the eternal state, to fight the Turks to the end, or to ally with them in trade and times of war. Salient examples that illustrate these scenarios are, respectively, the conquest of Bosnia in 1463, protracted wars with the Habsburgs, and the well-honoured Franco-Turkish alliance.2
Called millets, local communities coexisted as discrete faith units. These people made similar choices about submission, resistance, or exchanging favours. In the vision of the avant-garde modernizer Sultan Mahmud II, the central state “shall only differentiate” the “Muslim subjects at the mosque,” “Christian subjects at the church,” and “Jewish subjects at the synagogue.” A step outside God’s house, Mahmud called them all “my sons and daughters.” In fact, however, faith meant more than ritual visibility. The matters of faith subsumed and disrupted realities even in the speech of a fatherly sultan. The imperial state strayed further away from the Mahmudian ethics as its bureaucrats began to ascribe to a new type of unconditional political trust, aiming to restore the faith of local subjects in the imperial order.3
The bureaucrats called the sultan’s house to order in postMahmudian decades. This period marked some serious trouble exacerbated by internal traumas such as bankruptcy, disorder, and massacres – along with external pressures regarding European political and religious claims, as in France’s occupation of Egypt and later interference in the Catholic millet’s affairs. Then American missionaries came aboard, showing a real potential to breach the empire’s faith defences, which were virtually crumbling from the inside out. Dramatically, Mahmud’s vision was transformed into an illusion of faithful order and then collapsed as an obsolete resolution.4
Historians have not overlooked American missionaries in the Middle East. Yet practically every scholar examines missionary accounts to discuss modernity and the American involvement in the region. They reference the missionaries while debating the issues of ethnicity, education, gender, religion, and society. The extant studies tend to repeat a binary pattern, portraying evangelical missionaries as “liberal thinkers” or “warm and smiley faces” who concealed the “cold face” of American imperialism. These versions likewise describe Ottoman authorities as “autocratic” or “double-faced,” largely due to the actions of Abdulhamid II, the despotic sultan from 1876 to
1909. In his classic book Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East, for instance, Joseph Grabill claims that Ottoman imperial authorities did not appreciate the “considerable benevolence and aid” shown by American missionaries. Such narratives teach us about the missionaries’ accomplishments, but they impart little about imperial perspectives and nearly nothing about the chemistry of state policies and local realities. In my version, I illustrate how imperial authorities made sense of missionary exchanges and formulated certain responses to them.5
The assertive turn in later policies reflected prevalent views in the state centre. Strikingly, state bureaucrats imagined local subjects as “ignorant masses.” In their elite minds, the rural people were reminiscent of the people in Plato’s cave, who were chained in a dark place and thus unqualified to know the truth from its mere reflection on the cave wall. They seemed naturally vulnerable and notoriously prone to manipulation in troubled times. This mentality invented a moral pretext for powerful statesmen to mould their superior body into a purported common good. European and homegrown literature often streamlined this govern-mental transition. The ideas of prolific intellectuals, especially Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Durkheim, Ş emsettin Sami, and Ahmet Mithat, placed the establishment bureaucrats virtually at a crossroads between the world of passion and intrigue and the world of tradition and reality. The vogue also initiated some unpredictable reactions in downtown Istanbul in April 1873 when performances of Namık Kemal’s play Fatherland or Silistria electrified huge crowds. Its patriotic and irredentist message goaded the crowds into protesting about the regime. Sultan Abdülaziz eventually pushed Kemal and his colleagues into exile. By agitating the public purposely or not, homegrown authors walked a fine line between law and chaos. In this case, Kemal suffered punishment for his alleged trespass into the latter.6
The life of Mehmet Faik Memduh encapsulates the careers and minds of establishment bureaucrats. He was born in 1839 into a prominent family. His grandfather Ömer Lütfi led the Izmir Tax and Customs Office, and his father, Mustafa Fehmi, administered the sultan’s private treasury. Memduh studied sciences and French before interning in the Communications Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He then became the chief correspondent in the Ministries of Education and Finance, served on the Financial Affairs and State Councils, and governed the provinces of Konya, Sivas, and
Ankara. Meanwhile, he standardized the state recruitment protocol and regulated the main tasks assigned to public security officers. While at his later post as the interior minister (1895–1908), Memduh worked with the purpose of centralizing the imperial state. His political and social platform issued from his field experience. He had governed in Konya during the great famine of 1887–88 and in Sivas during the ethnic clash of 1889–92.7
Memduh envisioned the Ottoman world as a garden and its subjects as delicate flowers desiring affection and upkeep. In his book The Mirror of Affairs, he described his species as the educated, loyal, and Muslim “cream of the crop.” He suggested that only they could grasp “realities” and correct “ignorant masses.” Memduh accordingly ordered the Ministry of the Interior to teach loyalties and preach to locals. He calculated they would halt colonial and local chaos this way. Under the watch of foreign and public powers, such strategic views turned into a litmus test when put into effect.8
Above all, bureaucrats and missionaries claimed the fate of locals in this world and thereafter. To evaluate the intensity and quality of their outlook, it is necessary to turn to their contacts and conflicts. In doing so, I proceed from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, revealing how ideas, conditions, agents, and groups interacted; in other words, I aim your attention at the discursive, imaginative, institutional, and social realms. This book may well change the way you think about the Ottoman Empire as it weaves Ottoman property into the evangelical narrative. Religious interactions are fascinating as well. Given that past Muslim-Christian interactions have stunning relevance to the present, it is even more significant to read the clamouring Turkish and Muslim voices that have echoed across time. When listened to closely, these voices allow us to retrieve from the past some familiar rhythms of how politics and religions generate difficult situations – and all the while the instrumental characters counteract and interact with each other through a vocabulary commonly shared by faith and the faithful.
encounters in context
Recent hate crimes have revived an old debate in Turkey. Several attackers have hit local minorities on recent occasions, including the firebombing of the International Protestant Church in the capital city of Ankara and the torture of an American missionary in the Syrian
border town of Antep. Although these assaults yielded no casualties, they heralded the fiercest of their kind. It happened on 18 April 2007 at the Zirve Publishing House, a Protestant publisher of Bibles located in the eastern city of Malatya. Five young Muslim nationalists patiently waited for the converted pastor Necati Aydın to start his sermon. Once the sermon began, they unleashed carnage on the unsuspecting congregation. They tied the pastor and his parishioners, Tilman Geske and Uğur Yüksel, to chairs and then tortured and massacred them.9
Police officers hotly pursued and apprehended the subjects. As interrogations proceeded, the focus of the case shifted from the coldblooded act itself to a discussion about the Ergenekon – an alleged ultra-nationalist, secularist, and secret organization aiming to oust Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s party from government. The perpetrators had visited the crime scene several times and had reportedly met the victims before the day of the incident. During the trial, the chief perpetrator, Yunus Günaydın, mentioned that Varol Aral, an Ergenekon member who was a journalist, had urged somebody to “step up and do something about the missionary activity.” He sought “state support” and asked whether Günaydın would volunteer. Aral also prodded him to hit the Zirve Publishing House by persuading him that its staff operated as an enemy of the state – namely as a tentacle of the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane (Kurdish Workers Party), whose terrorists have been fighting for three decades to liberate eastern Turkey in order to benefit the Kurdish people. When the judge called for a merger of the Zirve case with the Ergenekon trial, nobody predicted that the case would drag on for nine years and more than a hundred sessions.10
The Zirve massacre sparked immediate reaction in Turkey and abroad. Hamza Özant, the director of the Zirve Publishing House, regretted not summoning police for protection after receiving threatening calls. Local supporters of the Malatya Soccer Club denounced the massacre in a game against the Gençlerbirliği Soccer Club, shouting, “We Condemn Terror!” Meanwhile, thousands paraded through Taksim, Istanbul’s central square, to demand human rights modelled after the European Convention on Human Rights. The Christian Concern and other organizations expressed condolences about the “satanic” act, demanding in the same breath that the killers be prosecuted. Turkish authorities also denounced the “savagery,” vowing to punish the “slayers.” Their raging and mourning aside, the authorities
were put in the spotlight by international media already suspicious about their sincerity.11
Turkey’s report card showed repeated failure to protect civil liberties and legal practices. From an outside perspective, the resurgence of religious violence seemed to unmask the ethos of the Turkish administration. Critics became deeply skeptical of the government’s action plan on the Zirve incident – even though the prime minister declared that “we, the people of responsibility,” would be “willing and able to catch the perpetrators.” Given the glaring failure of the Turkish state to deliver criminal justice, official statements sounded rather hypocritical when state authorities announced that the judicial process was already “well underway” and that they would remain “supportive of it.”12
Prominent linguist and activist Noam Chomsky reflected on the chronic violence in the region and endorsed the January 2016 Academics for Peace petition. He dubbed the petition an intellectual call for “the state to punish those who are responsible for human rights violations” and “compensate those citizens who have experienced material and psychological damage.” The collective effort registered 2,218 scholarly signatures against forced migrations, civilian deaths, state-sanctioned curfews, and entrenchment campaigns ongoing in southeastern towns. Somewhat indignant, Chomsky also rejected Erdoğan’s invitation to visit Turkey and “see with his own eyes what is really going on.” He certainly would “not visit the site” when government authorities were perpetrating “a deliberate massacre of Kurdish and other peoples in the region,” as well as not pushing through any reforms at all. Then, once again, violence flared up when Turkish officials undercut their legitimacy by not practising what they were preaching. Inconsistent political discourse undermined the nation’s prestige at home and abroad as well.13
Where hate crimes evoked the pathos of past tragedies, news outlets chimed in and opined that ethno-religious terror had struck root in the Islamic world. Figuratively, the Zirve assailants seemed to be some kind of shamans who had resurrected the barbaric and bestial spirits of the Muslim Turk, once destroyed with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire. While Der Spiegel portrayed them as part of the larger organized “attack on Christians,” other papers blamed the Turkish state for “fanning the growing hostility against non-Muslims.” In the partisan view of the bulletin the Florida Baptist Witness, state officials were traditionally malevolent. “The prosecutors and police
authorities” remained generally “reluctant to pursue reported incidents of vandalism or threats against church buildings or personnel.”14
Protestant missionaries imbued the media coverage with historical drama. Thomas Schirrmacher, the director of the International Institute for Religious Freedom, construed the situation of Christians in Muslim lands against the backdrop of the latest massacre. He portrayed the members of “the tiny Protestant or Evangelical minority” as the victims of “uninterrupted and unrestrained slander,” as they were still suffering from unfair treatment by “the highest levels in the government.” For nationalists and Islamists, “their dislike of Turkish Christians” is the “one thing on which they strongly agree.” They talk “about overly aggressive missions” even when they see a Muslim purchasing the Bible from a local store. This sort of incident might happen “only in Turkey.” Given the anti-Christian consensus, the Zirve massacre “almost had to happen.”15
The Middle East may strike some evangelical eyes as a region that has succumbed to the Islamic-Turkish yoke over the centuries. In Schirrmacher’s view, for instance, the Ottoman Turks granted local churches little to no “freedom of religion.” The First World War halted their reign and at long last ended “the time of the Sultans.” The region’s upward march regressed to anguish, however, as ethno-religious fanaticism returned with poignant force. Historical memory and personal calamity likewise harboured much pessimism about local minorities. As social chaos resumed, Schirrmacher martyred his own student, Necati Aydın, in the Zirve massacre.16
It is true that the time of the sultans is over and that the local people are permitted to practise the ways of their races and creeds in complete freedom. But ethnic hostility and religious terror continue and thus compel our attention to their historical context. If we can retrieve from social memory the relevant cases of savagery, violence, and massacres, it is also timely and critical for us to evaluate the ways that Muslim authorities treated Christian missionaries and local minorities. Consequently, this examination will revolve around Istanbul for understanding the heart of the Ottoman administration, all the while explaining the inner dynamics of the Ottoman world by conveying the variety of local narratives.17
The tragic progress of the Zirve case presents more lessons harking back to Ottoman history. After numerous sessions, the Penal Court decided to free the suspects while monitoring their movements through the use of trackable bracelets in March 2014. Although the court’s
decision satisfied the statute regarding case-time limitations, it ignored substantial evidence against the suspects. It also exposed the nation’s precarious legal standards and shook the public’s fragile trust in state authority. The court’s verdict certainly embittered the plaintiff’s grieving family. Even Tilman Geske’s kind and mild-mannered widow made a statement of reproach, saying, “Of course, this is injustice.”18
Two years after the Zirve gang was freed, the court conducted a retrospective study. The judge found the pre-existing risk of an attack to be a cause of the incident and declared the official ranks guilty of “defective service” for not preventing it. He ordered that the Ministry of the Interior and the City Governor’s Office pay the plaintiff Geske family damages of $138,616. His ruling referenced the European Convention’s legal standards as stipulated in article 9, which states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” including “freedom to change his religion or belief” and “freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.” Although this landmark order signified progress toward religious freedoms and healed sentimental wounds, the plaintiff’s family would rather not have seen “the murderers walk free” than be awarded the money.19
The trial’s concluding verdict came on 28 September 2016 – after 115 sessions, eight years, eleven months, and fourteen days. In the last session, the Ergenekon journalist Varol Aral claimed the Zirve massacre to be “a crime of national consensus.” The perpetrators also did “not wish to be sentenced” for a state-planned crime and sought “refuge in the justice and conscience” of the state court. The verdict sentenced the murderers to “aggravated life in prison” and released the journalist. The court closed the case with specific evidence still unexamined. As much as the Geske family wished the massacre had not occurred, their victimhood supported the legal maxim that justice belated is justice denied.20
What follows is the Ottoman context in which religious encounters took place.
the ottoman world
The Ottoman Empire symbolized exchanges between Europe and the Orient. It had become a world power by the sixteenth century,
stretching from southeast Europe to southwest Asia. A range of cultural and political dynamics created the Ottoman world. These dynamics offer the key to understanding missionary activities and modern nations in the region.21
The Ottomans began in a favourable location. Unlike the peoples of other Turkic principalities huddled within Anatolia, they were nestled on the Byzantine Empire’s wavering eastern frontier and courted Turcoman-Muslim tribes migrating westward. Although the incoming tribes fought to conquer the Christian lands, imperial state leadership and local Christians were both entwined in the social fabric. The conflux of positive developments expanded the frontier, and all the while the expanding frontier bolstered the accommodating authority, military ascension, and economic vitality. With the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman state emerged as a European Muslim great power. As Constantinople became Istanbul, imperial authorities set the essentials of their ruling standards. Professional bureaucrats steered administration under the sultan’s authority in compliance with state laws that combined Turkish mores, Islamic laws, and local circumstances. They likewise categorized local subjects into confessional communities and made them the foundation of social order.22
A concerted force of opponents contested the aggressive expansion of the Ottoman Empire. As the Ottoman realm had reached its limits bordering the Habsburg Empire and Persia by the sixteenth century, the imperial army started waging protracted battles on both sides and the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, the Ottoman monopoly on global trade networks faded with competition and the invention of alternative trade routes. State bureaucrats in Istanbul launched a series of massive reforms in November 1839 to restore the health of the empire – an empire then called the “sick man of Europe” by foreign diplomats and intellectuals. Their agenda focused on revising laws, finances, and liberties, but their success eventually depended on a fine compromise between state sensibilities and novel ideologies, such as nationalism and positivism. The bureaucratic soul-searching crossed three ideological currents – Ottomanism, Islamism, and Turkism – and converged over negative developments. In fact, the imperial state was lacking consensus, its army was losing battles, and Europe-based colonial aggression was undermining the state’s integrity. After all, local subjects rejected the ideologies ascribed from the centre. Christian minorities were demanding independence, or at least autonomy.23
State Formation
Ottoman sultans originated among the Oghuz Turks, a group of central Asian nomads who migrated to western Eurasia in the ninth century. From the founder, Osman, to Mehmet II (1299–1481), the first seven generations of them pursued a hyperactive protocol of engagement and settlement, transforming an insignificant chiefdom into a veritable empire. Places, people, and faith cooperated along the way.24
Osman’s principality had stepped into an unguarded space in western Anatolia. His army – positioned between vulnerable yet rich Byzantine townships on the western flank and quarrelling Turkish principalities on the eastern flank – attacked the Christian west while waiting out the Muslim east. The Turcoman-Muslim converts, then fleeing from the marauding Mongol Empire, supplied the Ottoman forces with soldiers and labourers. The sultans granted pasturelands for the converts’ herds and parlayed their fighting talents into further expansion. Indeed, all ambitions led to the west. The holy-war ideal precipitated spatial advance toward Europe and political ambivalence toward the Turkic-sibling rivalries on the eastern flank.25
Diverse communities and a nuanced brand of nonegalitarian tolerance emerged in the post-expansion era. Strikingly, imperial authorities sanctioned Muslim dervishes to settle and proselytize in new lands but prohibited any possibilities of conversion from Islam. American missionaries contacted non-Muslim minorities partly because the Ottoman state set punitive barriers to Muslim missions and partly because the Muslims disdained them.26
Historical Condition
The conquest of Istanbul fashioned economic dynamism and political consolidation in the late fifteenth century. As the empire’s eastern and western domains merged, Ottoman merchants prevailed in the Mediterranean trade. In the south, the locals annexed in Mecca, Medina, and Cairo lauded the Ottoman sultans as leaders of the Muslims. Indeed, for five centuries following the conquest of Egypt in August 1516, the Ottoman state had wielded political and spiritual leadership in the Islamic world. During this time, decisive victories delivered vast territories from Algeria to Belgrade and secure access to the Persian Gulf. The diplomatic overtures bore alliances with the
Dutch Republic, England, and France, together aspiring to envelop their common enemies, Austria, Spain, and Italy.27
New shipping technologies, trade routes, and industrialized competition challenged the Ottoman monopoly on the Mediterranean trade. When coupled with catastrophic defeats after the failed siege of Vienna in September 1683, such developments induced the Ottoman authorities to find ways to restore the central state and its revenues. However, the mounting crisis did not correlate with European progress because internal problems were exacerbated in parallel with external failures. Although authorities, merchants, and intellectuals knew what was going on in Europe, they worried more about what was going wrong within the Ottoman Empire. Their inward-looking approach emphasized collective alienation from traditional and Islamic roots, widespread official corruption, inadequate military performance, and several individual insurgents who were provoking local subjects to nonconformity. The imperial authorities adopted a mix of progressive reforms and coercive measures in response.28
The Ottoman Empire tottered from crisis to crisis and then dissolved. Following a humiliating defeat against Russia in 1774, the imperial delegation signed the Küçük Kaynarca Treaty, admitting that their non-Muslim subjects could be a topic of diplomatic discussion. They also declared bankruptcy upon the failure to repay emergency loans taken out later during the Crimean War (1853–56). Two decades later, the Public Debt Administration overtook imperial revenue streams under the pretext of collecting the payments owed to European banks and companies.29
The ambitious reform agenda coped with local nationalist movements and with arrangements of the United States. As a political and social force, nationalism penetrated the Ottoman world from western provinces and galvanized the Balkan peoples. The first revolution, staged by the Serbian subjects and suppressed by Janissary rulers, opened the pathway to disintegration. The second revolution created modern Serbia a decade later in 1814, thus offering an aspiring path for the Greek, Moldavian, and Bulgarian communities. The Arab, Armenian, and Kurdish peoples also followed suit, albeit with little or no success. Besides the rampant public disorder, successive military defeats and weakening diplomatic clout persuaded imperial authorities to launch a process of reformation. Called Tanzimat (1839–76), the reform project made three key adjustments by centralizing the state, modernizing the military, and bestowing civil
liberties. Further regulations emulated European practices, developed a modern financial and educational system, and granted liberties to the minorities.30
As progressive reforms failed to stem the civil crisis, Ottoman authorities sought to bond their diverse subjects by ascribing them an adjoined Ottoman, Islamic, and Turkish collective identity. Some limited impact aside, these invented ideologies did not inspire fondness for the state. Identity politics did not strike a chord with the public even after the pro-reformer, extroverted, elite bureaucrats integrated French institutions and liberties into the imperial system. From 1876 onward, the new Constitutional Parliament continued to discuss the limits of amendments, freedoms, and rights.31
In Istanbul intellectuals and officers drew up separate agendas for reconstruction, but they all found a common enemy in the person of Sultan Abdulhamid II. In fact, the proactive members of the Young Turk movement organized secret committees and defamation campaigns as part of a widespread effort to outmanoeuvre him. Although the powerhouse Union and Progress Committee splintered on the course of action, the movement’s inner caucuses agreed on radical modernization. In particular, Turkish nationalist members agreed to topple the regime. Union and Progress members coalesced with a secret association of Turkish officials and officers in Thessaloniki. They staged the July 1908 revolution and proclaimed the Constitutional Era. Strikingly, the Young Turks founded an air force, sanctioned the first women’s organization, and screened the first Turkish movie with an anti-Russian storyline. They also launched soccer teams in Istanbul and funded two Ottoman athletes to compete in the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm. Put together, such ambitious projects attempted to advertise the Young Turk regime by modernizing the military, empowering women, and importing competitive sports.32
The post-revolution government nevertheless staggered under weighty matters. The committee-controlled armed forces fought in North Africa, the Balkans, and then the First World War as a German ally, but wartime measures and mobilization would prove disastrous for local communities. Internecine strife surged, forced deportations became commonplace, and ethnic massacres took place. Eventually, in August 1920, the Sèvres Treaty recognized Armenia and the Kingdom of Hejaz as new countries, while authorizing the victorious powers to create regional spheres of influence. It also subdued the Ottoman imperial state. Specific treaty articles required downsizing
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peace was restored at no increase in wages. If union leaders were having trouble with rank-and-file members, Lepke’s strong-arm squad would bring the rebels back into line with beatings and threats against the men’s families.
Other mobs sold such services on a flat-fee basis. But not Lepke. When his men were hired to put down a union revolt, they remained as members and then slowly muscled their way into the management of the union. The members’ dues were increased to pay for the services rendered.
Businessmen who hired Lepke’s strike-breaking services were ordered to buy the protection on a continuing basis. If they refused, a bomb would be hurled through a window to wreck a plant or a shop. Acid would be thrown onto merchandise, or someone’s face would be splashed with acid as he walked from his place of business to his home.
Those who capitulated—and most of them did—soon found Lepke’s men demanding a voice in management, even to the dictation of contracts (from which they received a kickback) and the placement of a man in the business office to keep a check on the money.
Little Augie was pleased with Lepke’s organizing brilliance and the profits that were rolling in. But the word got around that he didn’t like Lepke’s growing strength in the organization, where he was known as “The Judge” and “Judge Louis.”
Little Augie’s irritation was short-lived. On October 16, 1927, as he stood in a doorway at 103 Norfolk Street talking with his young bodyguard, a sedan suddenly swerved to the curb. A voice called, “Hey, Little Augie!” As the gang chief turned, a burst of machinegun fire cut him down. His wounded bodyguard was identified by police as John Diamond—later to become better known as Jack “Legs” Diamond.
The underworld hummed with the story that Little Augie had fallen victim to Lepke’s ambition. On the basis of an informer’s tip, police picked up Lepke, “Gurrah Jake” Shapiro and “Little Hymie” Holtz and charged them with murder. But no one could prove anything and the case soon was dropped.
With Little Augie out of the way, Lepke set to work to consolidate his empire. He moved more solidly into the leather, baking, garment, fur and transportation industries. At the peak of his power, Lepke personally directed some 250 criminal operations. He rode about New York in a limousine with a liveried chauffeur. He had a staff of 300 men looking after his affairs, plus an assortment of accountants, bookkeepers, gunmen, strong-arm men, and experts in such matters as acid-throwing.
He also put murder on a cash-and-carry basis. If a member of the mob became careless or talked too much, he was executed summarily. Dangerous witnesses were ordered to leave the state under the threat of death—and if they refused to obey, they were killed.
Oddly enough, even at the height of his power, Lepke was virtually an unknown in New York and throughout the country. While other hoodlums gained the headlines, Lepke remained in the shadows with few people realizing the extent of his empire, whose earnings have been estimated at more than $50 million a year. Nor was it known for twelve years—1927 until 1939—that Lepke alone had ordered the deaths of from sixty to eighty men whom he considered a threat to his own safety and prosperity.
By 1933, however, the operations of Lepke and other racketeers had aroused such popular indignation that the U.S. government moved against them. In November of that year a Federal grand jury indicted Lepke on two counts of violating the antitrust laws through his domination of the rabbit-fur-dressing industry. He was arrested and released on bail. He returned home to his wife and adopted son to continue operations as usual while the wheels of justice turned slowly.
It was during this period that another opportunity came to Lepke quite unexpectedly. Three hoodlums—Jack Katzenberg, Jake Lvovsky, and Sam Gross—were allied with other gangsters in the operation of an illicit chemical plant in Newark, New Jersey. The gang was smuggling opium into the country, taking it to the plant and extracting morphine from the opium, to be sold at wholesale across the country. This business was wiped out on February 25, 1935, when an explosion destroyed the chemical plant.
Katzenberg, Lvovsky, and Gross had found the narcotics business too profitable to give up. They began looking around for other ways to get back into the business, and they decided to talk the problem over with Lepke. A mutual friend brought them together in his apartment, where they discussed setting up an international organization which would obtain narcotics in Shanghai and smuggle them into the United States. The sale of narcotics was to be put on the same efficient basis as the sale of murder.
The major stumbling block to the plan was the U.S. Customs. It would be relatively simple to obtain heroin in Shanghai and to bring it as far as the port of New York. The problem was how to smuggle it past the Customs inspectors on a continuing basis that would guarantee a steady supply with a minimum risk.
Lepke was a firm believer in the adage that every man has his price—and he was certain he would have no difficulty in finding someone whose price was reasonable and who would cooperate with the syndicate. This direct approach had always worked in the past and Lepke had no reason to change tactics now.
One of Lepke’s first moves was to investigate the Customs procedures at the New York pier. He found that when vessels arrived at the Port of New York, the passengers’ baggage and trunks were brought to the pier for examination. And when they had been examined, a Customs inspector affixed a colored stamp on each piece of luggage. Once the stamps were affixed, the luggage could be removed from the pier and placed in a taxi or in a truck to be carted away.
Lepke saw that the stamps were the key to his problem. If he could find a Customs employee who would furnish him with the colored stickers, then a sticker could be affixed to a trunk or a suitcase containing narcotics and it would pass through Customs without an actual inspection.
Carefully, Lepke’s lieutenants made inquiries along the waterfront. At last they found their men, two guards who were willing—for a price of $1,000 a trip—to furnish Lepke and his men with the necessary stickers on the day that the narcotics carriers arrived. The price was cheaper than Lepke had expected.
With easy entry for the narcotics assured, Lepke arranged to obtain heroin from two Greek dealers in Shanghai.
This was the state of affairs when Jack Katzenberg made a trip to Brooklyn for a visit with his brother-in-law, Ben Schisoff, a balding, sadeyed man with the face of a ferret. Ben and his wife Bella operated a Coney Island hot dog concession. They cleared about $1,500 to $2,000 in profit each season, enough to live on through the winter and to take care of the concession rental for the next season.
Katzenberg generously offered to send Ben on an all-expensespaid trip around the world by luxury liner. All he asked in return was that Schisoff bring back two trunks from Shanghai. “You won’t even have to bother about looking after the trunks,” Katzenberg said, “because there’ll be somebody to do that for you. And when you get back I’ll have some money for you.”
Schisoff was confused. (At least that was the story he would tell Customs agents later.) Why would his brother-in-law suddenly wish to send him around the world with all expenses paid—and then give him money at the end of the trip? He knew his brother-in-law was in the rackets. He knew his reputation as a hoodlum. He also had heard all the rumors that Katzenberg was connected with the narcotics traffic even though he had managed to elude Federal officers. Schisoff told Katzenberg to give him a few days to think it over.
Schisoff finally sat down with his wife and said, “Listen, Bella, I want to go on a trip by myself. You go to Miami. You’ve worked hard and now you are entitled to share the money we have. I want to go alone. You know I am a nervous type of man and I want to go for a couple of months to recuperate. You can stay home or you can go to Miami or do whatever you please. How about it?”
But Bella was having none of this business of her husband taking a vacation alone. She loudly insisted that if he were going on a trip, then she was going with him. She wasn’t going to let him go gallivanting off by himself to get into God knows what sort of trouble. Her answer was “no!”
Schisoff reluctantly told Katzenberg that his sister insisted on going along. He expected his brother-in-law to call off the deal. But instead Katzenberg amiably agreed that both of them could go and that he
would pay their expenses. And so on November 15, 1935, the couple boarded the SS President Lincoln in San Francisco and set sail that day on their voyage around the world by way of Shanghai.
When the President Lincoln arrived in Shanghai, Sam Gross was waiting at the pier to meet them. He introduced them to his two Greek companions and then took them to the Metropole Hotel, where he had made reservations for them. Sam said, “Now you two get a good rest. Everything is going all right.”
As Schisoff told the story later: “A few days later, Sam Gross tells me that he is going away for a week. He said to us, ‘Don’t walk too often in the street because it is not so good.’ I said, ‘All right. But what will I do if anything happens? Maybe I’ll get sick. I don’t know anybody around here.’ So he gave me an address. In case anything went wrong I should call that telephone number. I don’t remember the address and the number. It was a Greek fellow, named Jay, and his wife. Finally Sammy Gross puts a scare into me and tells me not to go into the streets.
“And so we stayed in the hotel until we got blue in the face And so my wife finally says, ‘We have money. Why sit in the hotel? I want to do some shopping. Everything is so cheap here.’
“So we were sitting there about three days and then I called that number that Sam gives me and the wife answered. I told her about us. She answered, ‘All right, I’m going to send my chauffeur to bring you over....’ She treated us to a meal and we spent the afternoon there and then went home.
“Gross finally returned and said, ‘Listen, the ship is going to be here in a day or two. I’ll have two trunks for you to take with you. You don’t have to do anything. We will put the trunks on board for you and I will show you what to do when you are on the boat. You forget about the trunks. When you are about three days out of Marseilles, go to the purser and say that you want to have the trunks shipped across France to Cherbourg in transit. Then when you get to Marseilles, there’ll be somebody waiting for you to take care of everything. That way they don’t have to open the trunks when they go through France.’”
The Schisoffs had a gay Christmas party at the home of the Greeks, and four days later they boarded their ship and sailed from
Shanghai. They were met in Marseilles by one of Lepke’s henchmen, who handled the trans-shipment of the trunks. Then the Schisoffs left the ship at Marseilles and went by train to Cherbourg to catch the SS Majestic for New York.
Lepke’s man told them, “Don’t put those two trunks on your baggage declaration.”
Schisoff said, “How am I going to do it then?”
The hoodlum said, “You’ve got eight pieces of luggage of your own. You put down everything on the declaration that you bought but leave these two trunks out. They will be taken care of. Don’t you worry about that.”
Schisoff replied, “All right. Whatever you say is all right with me.”
On the night of February 4, 1936, the night before the Majestic was to dock in New York, Jake Lvovsky and Jack Katzenberg registered at the Luxor Hotel in New York. A short time after they went to their rooms they were joined by two Customs guards, John McAdams and Al Hoffman. It was agreed that Lvovsky would meet McAdams and Hoffman at the pier the next morning before the Majestic docked and they would turn over to him the stickers to be placed on the trunks brought in by the Schisoffs. The stickers were issued to the guards each morning and a new color was used each day For that reason the delivery of the stickers had to be made at the pier.
Lvovsky arrived at the pier as the Majestic was docking. He stopped and chatted casually with McAdams, who slipped him the stickers. When the baggage was unloaded, the Schisoffs’ trunks were sent to the section marked with the initial “S.” Schisoff pointed out the two trunks to Lvovsky, who walked over casually and sat down on a trunk to smoke a cigarette, as though waiting for an inspector to check the luggage. Unobtrusively he took one of the stickers and pasted it to the trunk. He moved to the other trunk, sat down, and pasted a sticker on that trunk. And then he strolled away.
A Customs inspector examined the Schisoffs’ suitcases, but he noted the trunks already had the inspection stickers on them so he permitted them to be carted off. They were loaded into taxis by Lvovsky and Katzenberg and hustled off to an unknown destination.
The system worked like a charm. Each time that Lvovsky notified the two Customs guards of an arrival of a “world traveller” the guards would arrange to be on duty at those hours so that they could obtain stickers and pass them on to Lvovsky Six times the confederates of the gang made the trip safely from Shanghai without any inspection of the heroin-loaded trunks.
But Treasury agents were closing in on the gang. Narcotics agents, with aid from Customs agents, had opened an investigation of Lepke’s narcotics smuggling ring after an informant had squealed to Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger. The informant—whose name has never been disclosed—was a woman with revenge in her heart. Her boy friend—one of the Lepke mob—had been playing around with another woman and she wanted to get even with him for his infidelity. She gave Anslinger enough information, with facts that could be verified, to start the ball rolling. Bit by bit, the agents closed in on the gangsters. And they discovered by a close check of the stickers issued to all pier personnel that there was an irregularity in the stickers which had been issued to the guards McAdams and Hoffman.
As the agents began to put on the heat, underworld characters started to talk. Those “world travellers” who had helped bring narcotics into the country began to confess. Evidence mounted against the gang, and when the crackdown finally came, a total of thirty-one persons were involved. Lepke was indicted on ten counts of a conspiracy to smuggle narcotics into the United States.
At this time—December, 1937—Lepke was a fugitive. A little more than a year earlier he and Gurrah Jake Shapiro had been convicted on the antitrust charges brought against them four years earlier. They had been sentenced to two years in prison and fined $10,000. But Lepke appealed. He was released under $3,000 bail and immediately went into hiding.
For almost two years Lepke’s pals hid him from the law. He lived for a time in the old Oriental Dance Hall on Coney Island. Then, twenty pounds heavier and wearing a mustache, he moved to a flat in Brooklyn. Later he occupied a house in Flatbush, posing as the paralyzed husband of a Mrs. Walker. All this time he continued directing the affairs of his criminal organization.
But now, in 1939, the search for Lepke had become the most intense manhunt the country had seen in years. The Federal government wanted him on the narcotics charges growing out of his syndicate operations. And he was the No. 1 man on the most-wanted list of New York’s District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey, who then was opening his first bid for the Republican Presidential nomination. Among other things, Dewey was certain he could pin a murder charge on Lepke—who now had “dead or alive” rewards on his head totalling $50,000.
As the pressures mounted, the hunted man became desperate. And desperately he tried to wreck the cases against him by sending witnesses out of the state, by intimidation, and by murder. The heat was on the underworld as it had never been before. The rumor spread that if Lepke did not surrender to the authorities, he would be killed by one of his own kind. Lepke had at last become too much of a liability even to his old pals.
Hunted and frightened, with every day holding the threat of sudden death, Lepke began negotiations to surrender to New York Columnist Walter Winchell—on the condition that he would be turned over to the FBI rather than New York State authorities.
During the evening of August 5, Winchell received a telephone call from a man who refused to identify himself. “Lepke wants to come in,” he said. “But he’s heard so many different stories about what will happen to him. He can’t trust anybody, he says. If he can find someone he can trust, he will give himself up to that person. The talk around town is that Lepke would be shot while supposedly escaping.”
Winchell called FBI Director John Edgar Hoover in Washington and told him of the mysterious call and Lepke’s willingness to surrender if he could be assured of protection.
Hoover told Winchell: “You are authorized to state that the FBI will guarantee it.”
For almost three weeks the dickering continued between Winchell and his mysterious callers until Hoover finally said, “This is a lot of bunk, Walter. You are being made a fool of, and so are we. If you contact those people again, tell them the time limit is up! I will instruct my agents to shoot Lepke on sight.”
Winchell relayed this information to the intermediary. Then it was that arrangements were made for Hoover to be waiting in his automobile on 28th Street near Fifth Avenue at 10:15 on the evening of August 24.
Winchell was parked in his car at Madison Square when Lepke came out of the shadows and stepped into the car beside him. “Hello,” Lepke said. “Thanks very much.”
Quickly, the columnist drove to 28th Street, where he pulled up behind Hoover’s car. Lepke quickly moved into the automobile beside Hoover.
Winchell said, “Mr. Hoover, this is Lepke.”
“How do you do,” Lepke replied. “Let’s go.”
And so ended one of the greatest manhunts in American criminal history.
Four months later, Lepke went on trial in the Federal district court in New York City. He sat in silence, his brown eyes expressionless, as his former henchmen paraded to the stand to tell the details of their narcotics smuggling.
Among the government witnesses, many of them pale from sunless days in prison, were Jack Katzenberg, Ben Schisoff and John McAdams, the Customs employee. No longer were they afraid of the little man who sat there staring at them.
The trial dragged through fifteen days, but in the end Lepke was convicted. He was sentenced to serve fourteen years in prison and was fined $2,500 on ten narcotics charges. Two weeks later in General Sessions Court, Lepke was convicted on thirty-six counts of extortion and sentenced to an additional thirty years in prison.
Among the others involved in the smuggling ring, Lvovsky received seven years in prison and was fined $15,000. Sam Gross was sentenced to six years and fined $15,000, while Katzenberg was given ten years and a $10,000 fine. Both the Customs employees, McAdams and Hoffman, also received prison sentences.
But the final ordeal for Lepke was yet to come. In October, 1941, Lepke was taken from prison and returned to New York to stand trial
for his role as mastermind in the operations of Murder, Inc. Specifically, he was charged with ordering the murder of a former garment industry truck driver, Joseph Rosen, who had ignored his warnings to get out of town and out of reach of questioning by District Attorney Dewey at the time Dewey was investigating the rackets in New York.
Manuel “Mendy” Weiss was named by the state as the actual triggerman in the slaying, and a small-time hood named Louis Capone (no kin to Al Capone) was accused of being the man who assisted Weiss in his getaway. Rosen had been found shot to death on the morning of September 13, 1936, lying on the floor of his small candy shop in Brooklyn.
One of the witnesses against Lepke was Max Ruben, whose death Lepke had ordered when Ruben refused to stay out of New York. One of Lepke’s henchmen had shot Ruben through the neck and left him lying near death. But he had recovered to tell his story to Prosecutor Burton Turkus.
Ruben testified that Lepke—two days before Rosen was killed— told him: “That bastard Rosen is going around Brownsville shooting his mouth off that he’s going downtown. He and nobody else are going down anyplace or do any more talking ... or any talking at all.”
Allie Tannenbaum, another of Lepke’s triggermen, supported Ruben’s testimony. He said he had heard Lepke say of Rosen: “There’s one son-of-a-bitch who’ll never go downtown.” By downtown, Lepke meant the office of the district attorney.
Tannenbaum also told of hearing Mendy Weiss describe how he had shot Rosen—after which his pal, “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, had pumped bullets into the body just for kicks.
When Lepke was advised that Rosen was dead, Tannenbaum said his boss replied, “What’s the difference as long as everyone is clean and got away all right.”
A battery of nine attorneys defended Lepke. But this time the king of the underworld couldn’t squeeze out of the trap. Too many of his old gang had decided to talk. They had lived too long in fear that Lepke would order their own deaths in his effort to remove anyone who might be dangerous to him. Now they wanted Lepke out of the way.
Lepke, Weiss and Capone were convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair. They went to their deaths on December 2, 1941.
Control of the narcotics traffic in the United States is primarily the responsibility of the Narcotics Bureau. But Customs agents also have a direct responsibility in the government’s efforts to throttle the illicit trade. For this reason Customs agents frequently are teamed with Narcotics agents in investigations which often are international in scope.
It is not unusual for Customs agents to work for as much as two years in tracking down a single narcotics smuggler and removing him from circulation. These cases require endless hours of surveillance and hunting for the one bit of information which will trap the quarry.
Such a case was dropped in the laps of Customs agents in San Francisco and Seattle on August 2, 1954, when an informant tipped Customs agents at Seattle that $30,000 worth of heroin was to be smuggled into the United States aboard the SS M. N. Patrick by a Negro seaman named Robert King. He described King as tall, jugeared and middle-aged, with a taste for conservative clothes and gaudy night spots. The tipster said King planned to take the heroin ashore in San Francisco when the Patrick completed her run from Hong Kong.
Seattle forwarded a teletype message to San Francisco saying: “Information considered to be very reliable received today that ship M. N. Patrick arriving San Francisco between August 4 and August 8 from India via Hong Kong has heroin valued at about $30,000 on board. Vessel supposed to be in Seattle today but not verified. The suspect, Robert King, in steward’s department, is owner and will try to bring ashore at San Francisco.”
Alerted by this message, San Francisco agents began checking on the probable arrival time of the Patrick only to discover that the ship had changed its sailing schedule and would not touch San Francisco on that trip. A message was forwarded to Seattle saying: “We have just checked here and find that Patrick is not coming to San Francisco this
trip. She is due in Seattle today (August 6) and will make two trips from Seattle to Alaska and then back to Far East. Under circumstances consider probable that King will try to unload at Seattle....”
The Patrick had already docked in Seattle when this message was received. Agents rushed to the waterfront. But as the agents were walking aboard the ship, King was walking off undetected, apparently carrying the heroin with him.
A few hours later it was learned that King had contacted a known narcotics peddler in Los Angeles and had arranged for a $30,000 “loan.” It was suspected by agents that King had made his contact successfully and disposed of the narcotics before agents could get on his trail.
Agents began checking on King’s background and on his movements as far as possible in previous years. They discovered that while he had no known source of income, he owned an apartment building in San Francisco valued at $135,000. He maintained a bank account which showed heavy deposits and withdrawals. It was discovered also that in past years he had made frequent trips to Hong Kong and Japan. On occasions he had shipped as a seaman, and at other times he had gone abroad as a tourist.
Treasury agents in Japan found that King often frequented the Port Hole Bar in Yokohama, which was a known meeting place of narcotics peddlers when they were trying to contact seamen to use as carriers.
For more than a year and a half agents kept a periodic check on King’s movements in an effort to trap him in an act of smuggling or trafficking in narcotics. They had no success until a seemingly unrelated incident occurred in Japan.
On February 9, 1956, Japanese postal inspectors at Yokohama seized a shipment of narcotics which proved to be of special interest to Customs agents in San Francisco and Seattle. While making a routine examination of a package mailed by international air mail, they found 167 grams of heroin and 217 capsules of cocaine hidden in the folds of a pair of woman’s pajamas and slippers. The package was addressed to a Mrs. Hazel Scott in Seattle, Washington. The Customs declaration tag gave the name of the sender as W. M. Scott and listed an address in Yokohama. The addresses were written by typewriter. The narcotics
were in a manila envelope bearing the words “For Walker.” The Japanese turned this information over to the U.S. Embassy.
During the years of the Allied Occupation of Japan after World War II, American and Japanese authorities had achieved close cooperation in combatting the traffic in narcotics and other contraband. This cooperation was continued after the signing of the Peace Treaty in 1952 formally ending the occupation.
The United Nations made the control of narcotics traffic one of its important objectives soon after its formation, resulting in a combined effort by many nations to strangle the illicit trade by joint efforts which were unknown in the years prior to the war.
Treasury agents were stationed in Tokyo as liaison officers to work with Japanese authorities on any cases involving American interests. And it was a routine matter for the Japanese police to give Treasury agents the information on the seizure of the package addressed to Mrs. Scott. This information was relayed from the U.S. Embassy to Customs agents in San Francisco.
The agents found there had been a seaman named Walter Scott aboard an American naval vessel in Yokohama at the time the package was sent—but Scott had not mailed a package while his ship was in Yokohama. Obviously whoever had sent the package containing narcotics had used Scott’s name without his knowledge. As for the envelope marked “For Walker,” agents suspected that it was probably intended for a known narcotics dealer named Roosevelt Walker, who first came to the attention of Customs in 1940 when he was arrested in Nogales, Arizona, and was charged with smuggling a quantity of marihuana into the country.
And agents found another interesting fact: Walker was a companion of Robert L. King. King had been in Tokyo at the time the package was mailed, but there apparently was no way to link him with this smuggling effort.
And so the surveillance of King was continued. On July 16, 1956, agents trailed King to the International Airport at San Francisco. He had booked passage on Pan American Flight 831 for Tokyo by way of Honolulu and Manila. King was nattily dressed in a brown business suit and he wore a rakish straw hat as he boarded the plane. The agents
watched his plane leave San Francisco at 10 . ., making no effort to stop him. Honolulu and Tokyo were alerted to the fact that King was aboard the plane and that his movements should be watched.
King was permitted to enter Japan unmolested. He also was allowed to leave Japan for a trip to Hong Kong, where he spent several days shopping before returning to Tokyo.
The return to Tokyo was a mistake for King. For months Japanese police had been trying to trace the typewriter which had written the addresses on the package containing the narcotics. They found that King, at the time the package was mailed, had been living in Yokohama at the Tomo Yei Hotel. They also found that King had rented a typewriter—two days before the parcel was mailed—from a Mr. Ono who ran a shop near the hotel. And then they matched a sample of typing from this machine with the typed address on the package containing narcotics. The comparison left no doubt that this was the machine which had been used by the would-be smuggler.
When King returned from Hong Kong on September 20, he was arrested by Japanese police at the Tokyo International Airport and lodged in jail at Yokohama, charged with narcotics smuggling. Unable to raise money for a bail bond, King remained in jail for six months while authorities in Japan and the United States investigated his case. But at last he obtained money from friends in the United States and made bond. He was released, pending a trial. The Japanese held on to his passport as insurance that he would not leave the country
Passport or no passport, King was determined to get out of Japan before his trial. He went to the Yokohama waterfront and found an old friend who agreed to smuggle him aboard the military transport General C. G. Morton The ship docked at Pier 5 at Oakland on April 14, 1957, and King slipped ashore.
Within a matter of hours, Customs agents were on his trail. FBI agents were called in on the case because King had returned to the country without a passport, which was in the hands of Japanese police. The agents found a seaman who testified he had seen King aboard the C. G. Morton. The seaman told agents: “About two days before we got to San Francisco, a friend came to me and said, ‘How would you like to make some money?’ I asked him how and he said,
‘Take a package off the ship for me in San Francisco.’ He showed me the package and it contained ten rubbers filled with heroin. About two days after we got to San Francisco I took the narcotics off at Pier 5, Oakland Army Terminal. My friend walked off just ahead of me. I had the package of heroin under my coat. We got in my car and went to a motel somewhere in the Richmond district and registered. We stashed the package of heroin in our room. I don’t know who picked up the heroin. The next night my friend gave me King’s address and told me to go and see him. I went to the hotel and King gave me $500.”
King denied that he had re-entered the United States illegally and claimed that he had returned on a Pan American flight from Tokyo. But agents were able to prove that King had not been booked aboard the plane which he claimed he had been on. They broke down his alibis and at last King entered a plea of guilty to a charge of conspiracy to smuggle narcotics into the United States and to entering the United States without a passport. He was convicted, fined $13,000 and sent to prison for five years.
But it seems that whenever the Kings and the Lepkes are taken out of circulation, there is someone new to take their place. That is why there is a U.S. Customs force.
THE CASE OF THE CROOKED DIPLOMAT
The Case of the Crooked Diplomat had its beginning when an Arab informer whispered a warning to a U.S. Bureau of Narcotics agent in faraway Beirut, Lebanon. And before it was closed, agents of the Customs Bureau, the Bureau of Narcotics and the French Sûreté had teamed up in a cooperative drive to smash a ring of criminals attempting to smuggle $20 million worth of heroin into the United States.
They were an oddly assorted lot, the members of this ring. There were only four known members, but in early 1960 their operations had begun to stir alarm across the country among law enforcement agencies seeking the mysterious source of heroin which at intervals had begun to appear in large lots on the underworld market.
The quartet was composed of:
Mauricio Rosal, forty-seven, Guatemala’s ambassador to Belgium and the Netherlands, and the son of a respected Central American diplomat; a small, portly, balding man known favorably in many countries as a witty conversationalist and shrewd politician of seeming integrity; something of a dandy, he usually wore dark homburg hats, expensively tailored dark blue suits and maroon ties; he affected an air of aristocratic elegance both in dress and manners.
Etienne Tarditi, fifty-five, a short, heavy-jowled, paunchy, gross figure of the Parisian underworld with a cloudy background; addicted to trench coats, pork-pie hats and the notion that he resembled Alfred Hitchcock (which he did); a gambler who played for big stakes
in narcotics, with connections in many countries; a manipulator who usually remained in the background.
Charles Bourbonnais, thirty-nine, a slender, dapper steward for Trans World Airways, who had an eye for a pretty girl when his wife was not looking; often seen in the company of Tarditi when in Paris, and a liberal spender for a salaried man; the messenger and fixer for the ring.
Nicholas Calamaris, forty-seven, a powerful man with a huge nose, jug ears, skull-like face and long arms which reached almost to his knees; employed as a New York longshoreman, but this job was merely the front for his nighttime operations as a big-time dealer in narcotics; a cautious, secretive man with few close friends.
In the winter and spring of 1960, Federal, state and city police agencies were at a loss to explain the source of heroin which was at times available in almost any quantity desired. Agents canvassed their underworld tipsters with little luck. The informers knew only that at intervals the word would spread that another large load of heroin had arrived in New York and was available. Where it came from and how it entered the country none could—or would—say.
It was not until June that Narcotics Agent Paul Knight picked up the first clue of substance in Beirut, which had become an important listening post for the Narcotics Bureau.
A tipster whispered to Knight that heroin processed in Beirut from a morphine base had been sent to a smuggling ring in Paris. The reputed leader of the ring was a man named Etienne Tarditi. He had, the tipster said, smuggled as much as 40 to 60 kilograms of heroin from Beirut to France, and, according to rumors, it had gone from France to the United States. The carrier was said to be a Spanish-speaking diplomat.
This was the first break. The information from Beirut was passed on to the French Sûreté Nationale with a request that the Narcotics Bureau be informed of Tarditi’s movements and his associates.
In August, the Sûreté informed the Bureau that Tarditi had returned to Paris from a trip to New York. His plane companion on
the trip, and on several previous trips, had been the Spanishspeaking Guatemalan ambassador, Mauricio Rosal. The Sûreté added that Tarditi also had been seen in Paris in the company of a TWA steward named Charles Bourbonnais.
From this time forward, Tarditi, Rosal and Bourbonnais were under almost constant police surveillance on the Continent. When Bourbonnais returned to the United States on August 24 he was placed under surveillance by Narcotics and Customs agents.
Bourbonnais, the agents found, was married to a TWA hostess. He lived on Long Island and in recent months had sold a residence for $40,000. He always seemed to have plenty of money, and he was something of a playboy when his wife was away from home or when he was in Paris.
Agents trailed Bourbonnais when he drove from the airport. He drove a devious route to an apartment house in Queens. He stood at the entrance of the building looking furtively about before entering.
“That guy is really jumpy,” an agent remarked to another. “Do you think he knows we are on his tail?”
“I don’t know,” was the answer, “but we’d better drop the surveillance. He’s suspicious of something. He could have spotted us.”
The surveillance was called off temporarily. It wasn’t until later that the agents learned that Bourbonnais’ wariness had nothing to do with narcotics peddling. On this particular occasion he was on his way to a rendezvous with a girl friend—and he merely wanted to be certain that he wasn’t being followed by private detectives hired by his wife.
At the same time, Customs agents began checking into the background of Mauricio Rosal, who they found had been a frequent visitor to the United States. Leafing through old files one day, Agent Mario Cozzi found a report showing that almost twenty years earlier Rosal had been under investigation for alleged smuggling, although nothing had ever been proved against him.
He had arrived in New York City aboard the SS Nyassa on August 9, 1941, carrying papers which identified him as a Guatemalan chargé d’affaires. He had claimed—and been granted— diplomatic courtesies when passing through Customs with his wife. His declaration showed that he was enroute from Lisbon to Mexico City on his way to Honduras.
The Rosals had remained in New York only a few days and then had departed with their seventeen pieces of luggage, none of which was subjected to Customs examination.
A few days after their departure, Customs agents were informed by a tipster that Rosal had carried essential oils worth $40,000 and diamonds worth $37,000 into the city. A diamond dealer was found who admitted that Rosal had brought the diamonds to him and offered to sell them.
“I refused to buy unless Rosal could produce receipts showing he had paid the customs duty,” the dealer said. “When he could not show me a proper clearance from Customs, I turned down his offer.”
Customs, however, had reason to believe that Rosal had disposed of the essential oils and the diamonds before he left the city. Months later, Customs Agent Salvador Pena had interviewed Rosal in Mexico City, inquiring about his reported failure to list the dutiable imports on his declaration.
Rosal blandly admitted he had carried the oils with him in a wooden box. “I brought them over from Vichy for a friend,” he said, “and delivered them to his brother at the Waldorf-Astoria. I was assured the duty had been paid and I never dreamed, of course, there was anything irregular.”
As for the diamonds, Rosal admitted he had approached a dealer and offered to sell him several diamonds. But he insisted that when no agreement was reached, he had taken the gems on to Venezuela, where he had disposed of them. Had he made the sale in New York, he added with a shrug, he would naturally have paid the required customs duty.
There was nothing further that Customs could do about the matter and the case was closed. The report was filed away to gather dust until Rosal’s name was linked with that of Tarditi.
On September 30, six weeks after Cozzi had found the old report, the Sûreté advised the Narcotics Bureau that Rosal and Tarditi had purchased tickets for a flight to New York and it was suspected they would be carrying narcotics. Tarditi was booked to arrive at Idlewild International Airport on October 1, and Rosal was due to arrive a day later. Bourbonnais was scheduled to leave Paris a short time after Tarditi as the steward aboard TWA’s Flight 801.
As the original tip on the case had come to the Narcotics Bureau, the investigation was in the hands of District Director George H. Gaffney, a veteran agent, with Customs playing a supporting role.
Thus began one of the most remarkable cases of Federal agency cooperation in the war against smuggling. Gaffney laid his plans well, and when TWA’s Flight 801 touched down at Idlewild at 5 . . on October 1, a squad of Narcotics and Customs agents was waiting to place Tarditi under surveillance. Customs inspectors had been alerted to signal an identification when Tarditi handed over his baggage declaration, and to make only a cursory examination of a single piece of his luggage.
Tarditi stepped from the plane wearing a trench coat and a porkpie hat set jauntily at an angle. He seemed unconcerned when the inspector asked him to open the single bag he carried to the inspection station. The inspector noted on his declaration that his destination was the Sherry Netherlands Hotel.
And so it was that Tarditi passed through Customs with no hint given that several pairs of eyes were watching every move he made. A porter carried Tarditi’s luggage to a waiting taxi while a radio message was flashed from Idlewild to a squad of agents in midtown Manhattan that the suspect was enroute to the Sherry Netherlands. Agents were instructed to keep him under surveillance when he reached the hotel.
