SENATOR GOLDFOGLE: What do you mean by that statement, that these things happen all the time in New York City?
GRACE: I mean to say that it is absolutely a system, and it is a wheel within a wheel. To appreciate the situation, one needs only to see and hear the whole story.
Hearings Before Committee on Immigration and Naturalization (1910)
THE CRUGERS
In 1917, during the course of the investigation into his daughter’s disappearance, Henry Cruger withdrew an excess of $9,009.65 from his company with Alfred Brown beyond his regular salary. After Brown died on October 4, 1918, Henry sued Brown’s estate for $32,000 more.
The Cruger family eventually moved to 2 Cleveland Court in New Rochelle. Christina did not work, though Helen still did, as a clerk. In 1936, Christina was driving when she ran into a trolley. No one was hurt, but she delayed reporting the accident. Henry died on April 13, 1936, in New Rochelle, without any grandchildren. His wife died in 1938. Helen died in 1972. Henry and his wife’s second child, Catherine, lived only a year until she died in 1895.
JULIUS J. KRON
After Grace’s auto accident, Kron took a trip back home to Hungary in early 1923. Kron, the son of a Hungarian Jew, was born in Hungary, on July 7, 1885, in a house that spoke only Yiddish. His father, Mayer, was now living out on the ragged horizon of old Hungary, part of the newly christened Czechoslovakia.
After the First World War, Hungary was cut into awkward pieces. Count Mihály Károlyi was the liberal pacifist who toppled the house of Hapsburg and took control of Hungary’s first republic in November 1918. When Károlyi disbanded the army, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia all began aggressively expanding their territories into Hungary without fear or reprisal. Károlyi resigned, and the Communist Party of Hungary, led by Béla Kun, filled the void. Kun had a largely Jewish cabinet and enforced his own will through ruthless countrywide acts of violence, known as the Red Terror. Rebel royalists led by Admiral Miklós Horthy made up roving bands of volunteer soldiers who cut through the countryside. Their most feared leader was Pál Prónay, who sadistically hunted, tortured, and killed Hungarian Jews or any perceived Communists that he ran across. If they were women, he would cut off their breasts. In 1919, Horthy assumed control and eventually restored the monarchy as a figurehead. He looked the other way, for quite some time, as Prónay continued his executions across the state. The power in the state was controlled by force, doctored histories, and outright fear. The American papers called them “terrorists.”
Kron wrote on his passport that he planned to visit Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Serbia “to visit relatives.” But he crossed part of that out and instead wrote “Business for the Kron Detective Agency.” On the bottom of the passport, the type read that the bearer, in signing, does “solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Kron sailed on the S.S. Woodrow Wilson. He stayed abroad for three months.
By the time Kron returned to America, in the spring of 1925, the exiled pacifist Count Károlyi—still a hero to many—was making a tour of the United States. Though he clearly disapproved of Horthy’s brutal regime, now referred to as the White Terror, Károlyi could not voice his thoughts because his visa was contingent on a political gag order. Károlyi, with his dark mustache and eyes, was always thought of as the man who handed Hungary over to the Bolsheviks. So he toured America, smiling and waving, accompanied by his wife, who was widely regarded as one of the most beautiful women in the world.
Newspaper editorials begged the count to voice his opinions, but he would not. By April, the Károlyis were ready to visit Quebec before heading back to Europe. The count had remarked to a reporter that he would like to retire in Canada. He wanted a garden full of vegetables and a fireplace and to spend time with his wife in a narrow valley among the birches and pines. The countess, with her constant smile and high cheekbones, was Continental and adventurous. And as she boarded that boat to Quebec, Julius J. Kron was within fifty yards of her.
Kron and his men had been secretly shadowing the royal couple for nearly the entire spring. Kron even followed them across the border—but was kicked out of Canada after they realized he wasn’t a reporter. But he had seen enough. He returned to New York to finish off his report for his client.
On January 18, 1928, Kron’s name was again splashed across the front page of a newspaper. But it wasn’t the Evening Sun, the paper that had been so generous to him in the past. His name was stamped in black on the Daily Worker. In a glaring article, the Worker ran an exposé with the tantalizing lede NOTORIOUS SPY IN SERVICE OF HORTHY REGIME. The story contended that Kron’s detective agency was part of an elaborate spy mission in the United States on behalf of the Hungarian White Terror. The evidence for the argument was a nearly full-size reproduction of a letter from Kron, written on his bold new letterhead:
It is with the greatest regret that I must inform you that we are not able to satisfy your claim, for reasons that we ourselves failed to receive the money’s advanced by us on the case from the Hungarian Minister, and at a loss to understand his attitude toward us.
Yours respectfully,
Julius James Kron.
The addressee, Dr. Jacob Novitsky, was not a doctor. He was a notorious self-proclaimed spy. The Worker told a story whereby Kron and Novitsky made forgeries for the Hungarian ambassador to the United States, László Széchenyi, to pass on to Horthy in Hungary, who would use the forgeries as manufactured evidence of his enemies’ Communist ties in order to convict and imprison them. Széchenyi was a well-known man around New York City, having married the former Gladys Vanderbilt. They summered on Long Island.
The minister apparently promised Kron one hundred thousand dollars, but he didn’t care for the quality of the forgeries, so he refused to pay for them. The Worker reproduced one of the forgeries, which indeed looked poor. The Worker was by no means an objective newspaper, but the evidence was right there on the front page for all to see. Kron might have hoped it would blow over since nobody trusted the Daily Worker. Later that day, a call came into Kron’s office. It was the New York Times.