The Best American Crime Writing (45 page)

Natalia could not track down her sister, but at the Alo Bar she started talking to a beautiful and morose Moldovan woman named Niki. Niki was the girlfriend of the owner, an Albanian named Tus,
and she said that she had been trafficked to Bosnia and then to the Apaci bar in Ferizaj, where she wound up in some kind of trouble.

“She told me that someone tried to help her and she thought that the owner noticed and so he sold her,” Natalia says.

We are squeezed into the backseat of a Russian Lada on the way to Kagul. It has been raining hard all morning, and the creeks are up over the roads; the locals are using horses to drag cars through the washouts. “She told me there was something special on their faces,” Natalia goes on. “She was afraid they were journalists and she didn’t want to screw up her reputation back home. One of them questioned her, but he wasn’t in love with her—she said he was either a journalist … or maybe the police.”

Natalia spent hours talking to Niki, almost certainly the same woman we had tried to help. Either Natalia somehow heard about our experience and just repeated it to us, or the Kosovo underworld is so small and sordid—and the girls get shuffled around so much—that they just wind up meeting one another. Niki kept a diary, and during the time they were together she had let Natalia read it. I had told Niki my name when she came to our table, and in her journal she had referred to me as Sebastian Bach. She wrote that she must somehow have deserved the terrible things that happened to her, and so it didn’t make sense that we were trying to help her. The owner had been tipped off that there was going to be a raid, and she had actually hidden herself when the police came looking for her after we left. She was scared of them because she knew that most of them were also customers at the bar. She knew that only the OSCE could help her, but she didn’t want to escape before she had a little money to return home with. Also, she feared going to jail if she turned herself in to the police. In the meantime, she had taken some photos at the Alo Bar that she would try to send home to her mother. That way—however unrealistic the hope—her mother might be able to help her.

We arrive in Kagul in early afternoon, and Natalia takes us to the
Flamingo Bar, which is near the bus station. It’s a cheap-looking place with Formica tabletops and louver blinds on the windows. This is where the traffickers try to pick up girls who are waiting for buses to Chişinâu or Bucharest. Well-dressed men come and go from tables, and Natalia hides her face from them because she’s afraid of being recognized. She got a crew cut a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to disguise herself, but she still lives in fear that they’ll somehow find out she escaped. I ask her if she would testify against her traffickers if she had the chance.

“What would I do about my family?” she asks. “The police would lock up one guy, and there are ten more … We’d have to leave the country. It’s better that I forget. I just pretend I don’t see anything, and I go on with my life.”

It was not until July 2001 that Moldova passed an anti-trafficking law. Recruiting for and organizing the trafficking of a human being abroad for the purpose of sexual exploitation, slavery, criminal or military activity, pornography, or “other loathsome purposes” is now punishable by up to fifteen years in jail. Traffickers can get up to twenty-five years if their crimes involve minors, groups of people, the use of violence, or the taking of internal organs.

The Moldovan law is modeled after U.N. regulations, but enforcing it is even more daunting here than in Kosovo. In a country where doctors make around $30 a month, buying off the entire justice system—from the police right on up to the judges on the bench—presents no particular difficulty for the Moldovan Mafia. There are honest cops and judges, but they face a trafficking system that is so fluid and hard to pin down that it is almost impossible to crack. The process often starts with a completely legal classified ad in the newspaper: “Hiring girls without complexes for the work abroad” is a common one. The ad includes a phone number, and the initial contact is usually a woman, often one who was trafficked
and has been blackmailed or otherwise coerced into doing the job. From there, the recruits are handed over to the traffickers themselves, whose job it is to get them across the border into Romania. In many ways that is the smallest obstacle in the entire process. Passports can be bought or forged for just a few hundred dollars, border guards can be bribed for even less, and the border itself is so porous that until recently the authorities didn’t even bother to keep records of who went back and forth. (The Moldovan government is still hoping for an international loan that will allow it to buy a computer system to handle that task.) Once the girls are in Romania, they’re almost always beyond help.

Vastly adding to the problem is the psychology of both the new recruits and the ones who have made it back. Not only are they poor, uneducated, and desperate, but they have grown up in a society that tolerates such astronomical levels of domestic violence that almost any kind of abuse could be considered normal, even deserved. “During the Soviet times there weren’t as many social problems,” says Lilia Gorceag, an American-trained psychologist who treats women at the IOM safe house in Chişinâu. “There was some kind of stability. Now that everything is gone, all our frustrations and fears have been converted to a fear about tomorrow, and it really increased the levels of violence.”

According to Gorceag, one of the more common reactions to a violent childhood or marriage—not to mention a violent trafficking experience—is massive feelings of guilt. Niki’s conviction that she somehow deserved her fate is a classic example of this sort of psychological defense. “Most trafficked women have very negative sexual experiences during childhood,” says Gorceag. “Many were raped when they were young—I have many patients who had been raped by the age of twelve, sometimes by their own father. They adopt a perspective that they have been created to satisfy someone else’s sexual
needs. They consider themselves depraved, unacceptable to family and friends. And very few men here would tolerate it if they found out a woman had been trafficked. I know one nineteen-year-old woman who says her brother would kill her if he found out.”

Such a woman is perfect prey for a trafficker, and a good candidate for relapsing into prostitution even if she makes it back to Moldova. Gorceag says that women who are trafficked to Turkey, Greece, and Italy generally survive their experiences psychologically intact, but the ones who wind up in the Balkans are utterly destroyed as people. They exhibit classic symptoms of severe posttraumatic stress disorder: They can’t focus; they can’t follow schedules; they’re apathetic to the point of appearing somnambulistic; they fly into violent rages or plunge into hopeless depression; some even live in terror that someone will come and take them away. Their condition keeps them from functioning normally in a family or a job, and that puts them at even greater risk of being trafficked again.

“One of my patients ate napkins,” says Gorceag. “When I took away the napkins, she started eating newspaper. She wasn’t even aware of what she was doing. There is another patient who counts. She counts everything. When she can’t find anything to count, she turns her sleeve and counts the stitching. These are people with completely destroyed psyches. It’s a form of genocide. I know that’s a very strong word, but I live with twenty-two of these women, and I see their suffering every day.”

On our last day in Moldova, Teun and I meet Natalia to look at some photos she wants to show us. I have just received word from members of the U.N. anti-trafficking unit in Kosovo that they think they have found the bar where Niki is working, and they want me to fly back there to participate in a police raid. That way I can identify her so she can be sent home to Moldova, whether she wants to be or not. It’s a beautiful fall day, and Natalia and Teun and I sit down
at an outdoor cafe next to two puff-pastry blonds who are wearing maybe an ounce of fabric between them. Natalia—tough, smart, and battered by her experience in Kosovo—tosses them a dismissive look.

“What do those women want?” I ask her. “What are they looking for?”

“Men with money,” Natalia says. “Moldovan women have become very cold, very callous. They don’t want to fall in love. They just want to meet a rich guy, and most of the guys with money are thugs. It’s their mothers who push them into this—that’s the worst part.”

The photos Natalia shows us were taken at a bar when she was working as a prostitute. One was taken a few days after she arrived; she’s very drunk and her eyes are red from crying. She has long, glamorous hair and very red lipstick and a forced smile that says more about her situation than any expression of hate or fear. There is none of the wry sarcasm in her eyes that I have become so fond of. I tell her that Niki has been located, and that if I go back to identify her she in all likelihood will be repatriated to Moldova.

“What should we do?” I ask. “Would we just be making things worse for her?”

“Yes, I think so,” Natalia says without hesitation.

“So we shouldn’t go to the police?”

Natalia takes a drag on the cigarette we gave her and crushes it in the ashtray. For her this is clearly not a question of principle; it’s a question of guessing what Niki herself would want. If Niki were tied up in a basement getting raped, the answer would be easy: Break down the door and save her. But she’s not. She’s imprisoned by a web of manipulation and poverty and threat and, much as I hate to admit it, personal choice. The answers aren’t so obvious.

“She would just deny that she’s a prostitute,” says Natalia. “Look, there’s nothing here for her. If you brought her home you’d have some sort of …” She casts around for the right words.

“Moral responsibility?”

“Yes,” Natalia says, never taking her eyes off me. “Exactly.”

T
he four men arrived by U-boat and landed on a deserted beach near Amagansett, Long Island, in the midnight darkness on Saturday, June 13, 1942, a mere six months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. They had close to $80,000 (equivalent to nearly a million dollars today) in cash, four boxes of explosives, and a mission that had been planned at the highest levels of the Third Reich—namely, to halt production at key American manufacturing plants, create railroad bottlenecks, disrupt communication lines, and cripple New York City’s water supply system. The mission, audacious in means and scope, had the potential to seriously impede America’s military buildup, and perhaps even to affect the outcome of the war.

It was a spectacular failure. Within the month the operatives were arrested, along with the members of another team of four, who had landed in Florida four days later, under similar circumstances. Neither team had managed even to attempt an act of sabotage.

President Franklin Roosevelt, newly engaged in the war against Germany and eager to demonstrate successes, demanded that justice be swift and severe. To that end he ordered the creation of a military tribunal, using as precedents obscure cases from the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. Within a month all eight men had been sentenced to death and six had been executed. The other two, who had turned in their colleagues and cooperated with the U.S. government, had their sentences reduced—one to life in prison, the other to thirty years. Transcripts of the tribunal’s proceedings, on which
this article is based, ran to some 3,000 pages and were kept secret for eighteen years after the trial; a copy sits in the “Map Room files” at the Roosevelt Presidential Library, in Hyde Park, New York. Prior to the tribunal the FBI interviewed all eight of the would-be saboteurs, who provided details about their training in Germany, their arrival in the United States, and their capture. Transcripts of those interviews, on which this article also relies, can be found in Justice Department files at the National Archives.

This episode, though minor in the overall context of the war, is nevertheless of renewed interest today. The military tribunals proposed by the Bush administration in the wake of the September 11 attacks rely on the case of the captured Germans for precedent.

The idea of sending saboteurs to the United States was the brainchild of Walter Kappe, a high-ranking Nazi official who had immigrated to America from Germany in 1925. Kappe took a job at a farm implement factory in Kankakee, Illinois; he later moved to Chicago, to write for a German-language newspaper, and by 1933 he had moved to New York and become a leader in the Friends of Hitler movement there. In 1937 he returned to Germany to serve in the Third Reich’s propaganda office, where he spent the next four years giving pep talks to repatriated Germans like himself. By late 1941 Kappe had been transferred to German military intelligence, known as the Abwehr, where he was assigned to identify and train men for a sabotage campaign in America.

The Abwehr had studied U.S. military production and key transportation lines in great detail, and Kappe made use of this intelligence in his planning. To cripple the light-metals industry, critical in airplane manufacturing, he and the Abwehr targeted plants operated by the Aluminum Company of America in Alcoa, Tennessee; Massena, New York; and East St. Louis, Illinois. To disrupt
the supply of important raw materials for aluminum production, they targeted the Philadelphia Salt Company’s cryolite plant. They developed plans to sabotage certain U.S. waterways—focusing particularly on the Ohio River locks between Cincinnati and St. Louis and the hydroelectric power plants at Niagara Falls and in the Tennessee Valley. They also wanted to mangle the Horseshoe Curve, an important railroad site in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and the Hell Gate Bridge, which connected the rail lines of New England with New York City. They had designs on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, one of America’s major coal carriers. They planned to bomb Jewish-owned department stores for general terror-inducing effect.

Kappe code-named his mission Operation Pastorius, after Franz Daniel Pastorius, the leader of the first group of Germans to settle in colonial America, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683. Kappe imagined that he would ultimately return to Chicago as the mastermind of the operation. He had plans that a U-boat with German saboteurs would arrive in the United States every six weeks until the war was won.

There was no shortage of candidates for Kappe’s initial crew of operatives. The Nazis had recently repatriated thousands of Germans living in the United States by offering them one-way tickets home. But his requirements were exacting: He wanted men who spoke English, were familiar with the United States, and were skilled in a trade that could provide them with cover while they lived in America. That proved difficult.

George John Dasch was Kappe’s first recruit. He had gone to America in October of 1922, as a stowaway on the S.S.
Schoharie
, and had been a dishwasher and a waiter in Manhattan and on Long Island. In August of 1926 he was arrested twice, for operating a brothel and for violating Prohibition laws. While working in a hotel he met and married an American. Later he spent time in Chicago selling sanctuary supplies for the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy
before returning to waiting tables. Although he completed the requirements for U.S. citizenship in 1939, he never showed up in court to be sworn in.

In 1941 Dasch returned to Berlin, where the Nazi bureaucracy required that he fill out forms explaining the reason for his return to Germany. Dasch wrote that he intended “to partake in political life.” This led to his being questioned further by a Gestapo agent, to whom he said, “Even if I have to work as a street cleaner and do my job cleaning streets right, I want to participate politically.” His motives may have been more complicated, however: He was not, one of his fellows later observed, “the absolute Nazi he pretended to be.” After his capture by the FBI, Dasch claimed that he had joined the sabotage mission in order to learn secrets that he could later use in the United States to fight against the Nazis.

On June 3, 1941, Dasch met Kappe, who cross-examined him about his life in the United States. When Dasch said he wanted to join the German army, Kappe said he believed that Dasch might serve the Third Reich to far better advantage in another, unspecified capacity. Kappe subsequently hired Dasch to monitor U.S. radio broadcasts in a listening station where fifty-three languages were spoken and where the news that was gathered was teletyped to all the members of the German cabinet.

In November, Kappe called on Dasch again and asked him if he would like to return to America, to help realize “the plan on which my office has been working for a long time.” Dasch demurred, saying, “But that’s a peaceful country, isn’t it?” Kappe admitted that the United States was indeed neutral, but he characterized it as an indirect enemy, because it was a supplier and a supporter of Germany’s enemies. “Therefore,” he said, “it is time to attack them. We wish to attack the American industries by industrial sabotage.” By mid-January of 1941 Dasch had been assigned permanently to the planning of the U.S. mission.

On March 1 Dasch reported to a secret officer of the Abwehr to
review the personal histories of several other men whom Kappe had tentatively selected to make up two teams of saboteurs, one of which Dasch would lead. In a series of interviews Dasch identified and eliminated a number of what he called “nitwits,” along with others who seemed interested simply in escaping Germany at any cost. In the end he selected the following men, who, if not “nitwits,” were also not exactly the Nazi elite.

• Ernest Peter Burger, born in 1906, joined the Nazi Party at the age of 17. He immigrated to America in 1927 to work as a machinist in Milwaukee and Detroit. He became a U.S. citizen in February of 1933, but when he couldn’t find work during the Depression, he returned to Germany. There he rejoined the Nazi Party and became an aide-de-camp to Ernest Roehm, the chief of the Nazi storm troopers. He went on to study at the University of Berlin, and he later wrote a paper critical of the Gestapo—a move that earned him seventeen months in a concentration camp. Upon his release from the camp, in July of 1941, Burger served as a private in the German army, guarding Yugoslav and British prisoners of war. The following February he appeared on a list of Germans who had lived in America, and soon after he was interviewed and—somewhat oddly, given his history—selected to attend sabotage school.
  

• Herbert Haupt, born in 1919, was the youngest of the recruits. He had also spent the most time in America, having moved to Chicago with his family when he was 6 years old. Haupt attended Chicago’s Lane Technical High School and served in the German-American Bund’s Junior League, but he fled to Mexico in June of 1941. The German consul in Mexico City gave him money and arranged for his passage to Japan; Haupt took a Japanese freighter to Yokohama, where he later boarded a German steamer that broke through the British
  naval blockade of Germany and landed him in Bordeaux 107 days later. He received the Iron Cross, second class, for sighting an enemy steamer while on lookout.
  

• Heinrich Heinck, born in 1907, entered the United States illegally in 1926. After working in New York City as a busboy, a handyman, an elevator operator, and a machinist, he leaped at the German government’s return offer in 1939. He had a limited command of English and spoke with a thick German accent. The other recruits considered Heinck phlegmatic and unsure of himself.
  

• Edward Kerling, born in 1909, was among the first 80,000 men to join the Nazi Party. He joined at the age of 19 and maintained his membership after moving to America, in 1928. After a stint smoking hams for a Brooklyn meat-packing company, Kerling found work as a chauffeur and handyman in Mount Kisco, New York, and Greenwich, Connecticut. In 1940 he returned to Germany, where he ran the propaganda shows in movie theaters. With his puffy cheeks, heavy jaw, and dimpled chin, Kerling was, Burger thought, a “decidedly Irish type.” He was chosen to lead the second team.
  

• Herman Neubauer, born in 1910, went to America in 1931; he worked as a cook in restaurants, on ships, and at the Chicago World’s Fair, in 1933. In 1939 he moved to Miami, but in 1940, while visiting his family in Germany, he was drafted into the German army and sent to the Russian front, where he was wounded in the face and the leg by shrapnel. While recovering in an army medical center in Vienna, he received a note from Kappe inquiring whether he would “like to go on a special assignment to a country where you have been before.”
  

• Richard Quirin, born in 1908, moved to the United States in 1927. He worked in maintenance at a General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, but was laid off during the Depression.
  He then moved to New York City, where he joined the Friends of the New Germany and found work as a house-painter. He, too, returned to Germany in the repatriation program.
  

• Werner Thiel, born in 1907, traveled to America in 1927 to work as a machinist at a Ford plant in Detroit. He later moved to New York, where he took a job as a porter in a senior citizens’ home. He subsequently moved to Hammond, Indiana, before taking various jobs in Illinois, California, and Florida. In 1939 Thiel returned to Germany in the repatriation program.
  

In April, Kappe and his recruits were dispatched to a farm in Brandenburg, forty miles west of Berlin. From the road all that was visible of the farm, formerly the home of a wealthy Jewish shoe manufacturer, was a large stone farmhouse and a few pigs and cows roaming the grounds. But back behind a stone wall armed guards and German shepherds were on patrol twenty-four hours a day. In the fields behind the farmhouse members of the Abwehr constructed sections of railroad track and bridges of various kinds and lengths. They also set up pistol and rifle ranges, a field for hand grenade practice, and a gymnasium for boxing and judo training. Classrooms and laboratories were situated above the garage, and a nearby greenhouse supplied fresh fruit, vegetables, and—incongruously, given the circumstances—flowers.

On their first day at the farm Kappe told the men that they were about to begin training for an important battle against U.S. production and manufacturing. Their training, he said, would include courses in the construction and use of explosives, primers, fuses, and timers, and in the workings and vulnerabilities of industrial plants, railroads, bridges, and canal locks. The men would also be given plausible new identities for use in the United States.

The recruits settled into a routine of classroom time, private study, practical training, and exercise. They began each day with calisthenics, attended lectures in the morning and the afternoon, and had regular breaks from the classroom for sports. They took walks in the countryside, during which they sang “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Oh, Susanna!” At meals and after hours they were required to read recently published American newspapers and magazines. In pairs they practiced blowing up the railroad tracks laid around the estate, determining by trial and error the exact amount of explosives required in a given situation. Occasionally their instructors tested their vigilance and their reactions by launching surprise attacks on them.

In the classroom the men were forbidden to take notes and were required instead to commit everything to memory. Using detailed photographs, plans, and drawings, their instructors discussed the major terminals of the U.S. railroad system, the various engines used, and average freight-train speeds. The men were briefed on railroad bottlenecks where sabotage would inflict the greatest disruption.

The primary objective of the missions, Kappe told his men, was simply to do enough harm to impede production. He warned them not to try to blow up large dams or iron bridges or bridges with girders—such jobs were too difficult for a small team to carry out. They should also avoid targeting passenger trains. The Abwehr wanted to minimize civilian casualties.