The King is Dead (25 page)
Authors: Ellery Queen
Clarence T. Wright in '78
Dr. PIERCE MINIKIN
There was a lot of pressure put on Bob Hunter to name the boy, I remember. He wanted to, too â it would have been good politics, because Bob was always weak in Wright County. But in the end he had to say no. The boy's marks just wouldn't stand up. And, as Bob told me himself, he couldn't let Bendigo take the entrance examinations because if he failed that would be a nice big Senatorial black eye. So he gave it that year to a boy from up Latham way â¦
Kane was furious, deathly mad. I was in the Bendigo house on a professional call to his stepmother when the news came. His face got black, I tell you. The only way he showed his disappointment in
action
was pretty mild, I thought, considering that look on his face. He kicked the cat through one of the stained-glass side windows of the vestibule. That cat never was the same again, haha! â¦
WRIGHTSVILLE
Record
, July 29, 1915
KANE BENDIGO TO ATTEND
MERRIMAC U. THIS FALL
CHET
(â
IRON MAN
')
FOGG
(By long-distance phone to his home in Leesburg, Va. Fogg was football coach at Merrimac University from 1913 to 1942, when he retired.)
I never made any bones about it, and I don't today. Kane Bendigo put Merrimac U. on the college athletic map. He was real big-time, the kind of athlete a coach dreams about. He was as good as Jim Thorpe any day. There wasn't anything Kane couldn't do, and do better than anybody else. He ran wild in the backfield the two seasons he played Varsity. He played baseball like Frank Merriwell â or was it Dick? â anyway, whichever one was Superman, that's the one he played like. He made track records that still stand. He was a natural-born boxer, and he slugged his way to the state college heavyweight championship â and if he'd ever gone into his senior year, my money would have been on him to take the national. No college wrestler ever took a fall over him, though that's one he used to say he owed to his old man â the only thing, he'd say, he did owe âthe old bastard'. And if you'll look it up, you'll find that in 1918 he was named by
Collier's
magazine the most promising all-round college athlete in the U.S., even though by that time he was in the Army â¦
That's right. He left to enlist in the middle of his junior year â around Christmas of 1917, I think it was â¦
WRIGHTSVILLE
Record
, October 10, 1918
KANE BENDIGO WINS NATION'S
HIGHEST MILITARY AWARD
Wrightsville Hero of Saint-Mihiel Gets
Congressional Medal of Honour
WRIGHTSVILLE
Record
, September 4, 1919
WAR HERO FETED;
ANNOUNCES PLANS
Kane Bendigo, Wrightsville's Congressional Medal of Honour hero of the late conflict, was given a roaring welcome today when he returned to the city of his birth after being mustered out of the U.S. Army â¦
After the reception, Mr. Bendigo granted an exclusive interview to the
Record
. Queried as to his postwar plans, Mr. Bendigo said: âI have had all sorts of offers to go back to college, and a dozen pro offers in various fields of athletics, but I am through with that stuff. I am going into business, where I can make some real money. I saw too many young fellows die in France to waste any part of my life on rah-rah stuff or working for somebody else. When my father was killed last year in that construction accident, he left a sizeable estate. Most of it is in my stepmother's name, but she and my brothers have agreed to let me handle the money and I know just what to do with it. I am going into business for myself. I have something all lined up â¦'
Excerpts from E. Q.'s Digest
Between January 1920 and November 1923 K.B. had four business failures. He went into the manufacture of sports equipment in Wrightsville and at the same time tried to run his father's contracting business. Result: Both went into bankruptcy. His next venture was to take over a factory that manufactured metal containers. He ran this into the ground in a little over a year filing a petition in bankruptcy in January of 1922. He then negotiated a deal whereby he took over the Wrightsville Machine Shop in Low Village for the manufacture of light machinery. By November of 1923 this had flopped, too. His main trouble, as I was able to piece it together, seems to have been that he always bit off more than he could chew. He constantly made grandiose plans, over-extended himself, and fell flat on his face. What he did have, as evidenced by the record, was the ability to charm hard-boiled New England monied people into loosening up â¦
Note historic parallel:
About the time Kane Bendigo was broke and discredited, apparently a total failure, a man in Germany named Hitler was lying wounded in prison as the result of the collapse of his ambitious Beer Putsch march on Munich. Both were at the nadir of their careers â¦
Abel had had a brilliant scholastic record, and at 17 (Sept. 1921) entered Harvard on a scholarship. He quit college at the end of his junior year (June 1924). Note that between November of 1923 and June of 1924, Kane was licking his commercial wounds. But he wasn't entirely idle, he was back at his old charm routine. He must have been, because coincidentally with Abel's leaving Harvard to join him in Wrightsville, we find Kane starting a new enterprise with the financial backing of such a goulash as John F. Wright, Richard Giannis, Sr, the then-young Diedrich Van Horn, and old Mrs. Granjon. Kane took over an abandoned factory on the outskirts of town and went into the manufacture of shell-casings for the U.S. Navy. Abel went in with him â¦
At this time Judah was in Paris studying music at the Conservatoire â¦
Mrs. Bendigo, mother of Abel and Judah and stepmother of Kane, died in 1925 â¦
⦠prospered from the start. The small plant mushroomed into a large plant, the large plant became two large plants. The expansion was incredibly quick. Apparently Abel's native business brilliance exactly complemented Kane's charm, drive, and unbounded ambition. They went more and more deeply into the field of munitions. The further they expanded, the smaller dwindled the group which had financed them. One after another Kane bought out his original backers. At this time the company was known as The Bendigo Arms Company (it was in the early thirties that the company name was quietly changed to Bodigen), and Kane was apparently determined to give himself exclusivity in fact as well as in title. There is reason to believe that Kane did not gain total control without a struggle, as the profits and dividends were beginning to be considerable. Talked with old Judge Martin, Samuel R. Livingston, one of the Granjon sons, and with Wolfert Van Horn. The Judge recalls John F. Wright's battle only vaguely, and Livingston was mysterious. Van Horn cagey but transparent. Convinced me that Kane brought lots of pressure to bear and used methods the victims never talked about as a matter of pride. Considering Wolfert Van Horn's own business reputation, this shows genius of the lowest order â¦
By 1928 all the inside outsiders were outside looking in, and the Bendigos owned all the shares in the parent company, which now had six immense plants in operation â¦
October 29, 1929, was the turning point. On the ruins of the stock market Kane Bendigo built his fabulous fortune. He had sold out all his holdings early in October, at the peak highs, after buying everything in sight on dangerous margin at the lows. The crash made him a multimillionaire. Just how much he made cannot be determined; there is reason to believe his profits ran to hundreds of millions of dollars. This was the effective beginning of the Bendigo empire. Kane was 32. Abel was 25!!!!! â¦
They began expanding immediately. Bought out a very large munitions company. In rapid succession several smaller ones. These plus what they already had became the nucleus of the gigantic overall organization, of which The Bodigen Arms Company today is only a part â¦
In the summer of 1930 the Bendigos left Wrightsville. It had become like a whale trying to manoeuvre in a pond. They had to get to where they could move around. They built a whole city in southern Illinois, an industrial city of 100,000 population. Their main offices were in New York. They began to open branches in foreign countries â¦
Some of the original Bendigo plants are still operating in Wrightsville, although the ownership is so tangled up it would take an army of experts to work its way through â¦
There is no evidence that either Kane or Abel Bendigo has set foot in Wrightsville since that day. Dr. Minikin, who recalls the old days with far greater clarity than the recent past, âthinks' Judah was back during the mid-thirties for a few days, alone, but I have found no one who remembers having seen him, and a search of the register records of the Hollis, Upham House, and the Kelton for that period has not turned up his name ⦠William M. Bendigo's grave in the little Fidelity cemetery is untended, overgrown, and almost obliterated. Ellen Wentworth Bendigo is buried in the Wentworth family plot in the Wrightsville cemetery â¦
June 22, 1930; Government of Bolivia overthrown
.
Aug. 22â27, 1930; Peruvian government ditto
.
Sept. 6, 1930; Argentine government ditto
.
Oct. 24, 1930; Brazilian government ditto
.
ITEM
: Between January and June of 1930 all plants of The Bodigen Arms Co. (year name-change effected) worked on double shift. Sales almost exclusively South American.
NOTE
: It is clear, in the light of this and certain other evidence, that Bendigo provided the explosive force which blew up four South American governments within five months â¦
NOTE
: Bendigo did not
cause
the revolutions. He merely made them possible â¦
NOTE
: Obviously, these were King Bendigo's practice sessions, trying out his muscles. Small stuff â in one of the insurrections there were a mere 3000 casualties â¦
Jan. 2, 1931; Panama Republic overthrown
.
Mar. 1, 1931; A second overthrow of the Peru government
.
July 24, 1931; Bye-bye existing régime of Chile
.
Oct. 26, 1931; Ditto Paraguay
.
Dec. 3, 1931; Ditto Salvador
.
NOTE
: Five more tests of power. What might be called the build-up of the body beautiful, with biceps and chest expanding rapidly. But this is mere gym work, with set-ups; he's about ready to step out into the big time â¦
In 1932 we find peaceful consolidation, improvement, and further expansion. The organization is unwieldy. There is weeding out of personnel all along the line. Companies are merged, finances consolidated and redistributed, soft spots strengthened, production streamlined, new industries absorbed. The speed of K.B.'s empire building is stupendous; there is only one precedent in modern times, and it stumbles by comparison. This is the kind of industrial story that could never be invented in fiction. No one would believe it â¦
June 4, 1932; Another revolution in Chile
.
This was apparently the result of an error in calculation, or overzealousness on the part of some Company super salesman. It was immediately remedied by â¦
Jan. 30, 1933; Adolf Hitler named Chancellor of Germany
.
The global phase, to which the other was the merest preliminary, begins here.
Finding Capt. Mike Bellodgia has been a stroke of greatest good luck. The famous round-the-world flyer was put under contract by K.B. toward the end of 1932. He had one job â to fly King Bendigo. He was King's personal chief pilot for almost thirteen years â until, in fact, a bit after the end of World War II, when Bendigo was persuaded that Bellodgia was getting too old to be trusted with his precious passenger.
Bellodgia is still bitter about it, probably the real reason why he allowed me to take a look at his diaries, although we both pretended he believed my story that I was there in the interests of posterity. I flew up to Maine, where he now lives, and spent several days with him. He lives very handsomely, I must say â Bendigo was generous with him to the point of prodigality, and Bellodgia is financially secure for the remainder of his days. Bellodgia remarks dryly that he earned it; he says that never once in thirteen years of flying Bendigo all over the world did he have to make a forced landing or develop serious engine trouble.
Capt. Bellodgia's diaries are really not diaries at all but personal logs. He doesn't seem to realize what he has, and I have not enlightened him.
By juxtaposing Bellodgia's record of King Bendigo's flights, destinations, dates, and lengths of stay with historical events, it has been possible to place Bendigo pretty accurately in his true perspective between Hitler's ascension to power in Germany and the end of World War II â¦
In 1933 the Reichstag voted absolute power to Hitler. The following day a German newspaper which had been the most powerful pro-Nazi propaganda organ was sold to a German. It had been owned by Kane Bendigo for two years. The conclusion is evident: With Hitler's position secure, Bendigo no longer needed the newspaper â¦
On Oct. 14, 1933, Germany quit the League of Nations and withdrew from the Disarmament Conference. On Oct. 12, 13, and 14 of that year Bendigo was in Berlin, spending most of his time at the Chancellery. He flew back to his New York headquarters on the night of Oct. 14 â¦
On Apr. 27, 1934, an anti-war pact â previously agreed on at the Pan-American Conference in Montevideo â was signed in Buenos Aires by the U.S. and certain Central and South American countries; Mexico and others had signed on Oct. 10, 1933. The record of Bendigo's air trips at this time is illuminating; they tripled in number. The Bendigo munitions works now spread to South America and Europe, were working around the clock. The Bodigen Arms Company, then, in the midst of peace talks and pacts was playing the world short â¦