We will move forward to 1914, with Trump reportedly still operating his barber shop, working as a hotel manager & running a budding real estate empire. Germany has gone to war with Britain, France & other nations, while America is trying to remain neutral. But our policy wasn’t exactly neutral, we said we would sell supplies to either side in the war but Britania rules the waves. So ships full of arms for Britain stream out of NYC & other American ports, while German ships are tied up at the docks unable to leave harbor without being captured or sunk by the British.
In an effort to deter American from arming the Brits, Germany implements an effort to sabotage American industry & attack shipping to deny arms shipments to England. They also target American banking & finance to deny loans to the Brits to keep them in the war. These attacks cost hundreds of American lives as bombs & fired destroyed facilities. America was woefully unprepared, the military was responsible to stopping enemy saboteurs & spies in wartime, but the US was technically at peace & the federal government did not have the legal authority or resources to stop them. Once war was declared, the military inducted some of the NYPD team into the US Army counter intelligence units to continue the hunt for German spies.
There is a brief summary of the German efforts in an old Life Magazine article at https://time.com/3881226/the-first-terrorist-cell-in-america/ The campaign included placing bombs in ships, possibly using Irish American workers who were very anti-British. An attack on an explosives laden train depot in New Jersey that was heard as far away as Maryland, registered as a 5.5 on the Richter Scale & damaged the Statue of Liberty & blew out windows in Manhattan. The railroad had to hire private investigators to infiltrate the cell and only agency with resources to hunt them at the time was the newly formed NYPD Bomb Squad had no jurisdiction across state lines. https://www.historynet.com/world-war-i-intrigue-german-spies-in-new-york.htm
Soon individual agents were apprehended convincing the US Government that a larger plot run by German diplomats & military attaches was coordinating the activity. The primary leader of the group was Franz von Papen, former military aide to the Kaiser sent to Washington in 1914. He had diplomatic immunity but was expelled at the end of 1915 as the evidence against him grew.
With Von Papen’s expulsion, his assistants took over running the spy ring, while rubbing elbows in NYC. They operated in 3 main buildings (and lots of hotels) in Manhattan, running their terror campaign against America. Three buildings that were positioned to bracket the JP Morgan Bank headquarters as he was one of the prime architects of loans to Germany’s enemies. One German saboteur shot & wounded JP Morgan Jr. while he had breakfast in his home with the British Ambassador.
The Germans also established front companies & bought a finance company to arrange money laundering to hide the payments to their agents. They became more sophisticated even opening an advertising company on Wall Street to disguise their operations.
Also at this time a new group of feds joined the hunt for the Germans, with additional legal authorities, investigators from the DOJ’s Bureau of Investigation joined the hunt. Agents reporting to an up and coming DOJ lawyer who was running counterintelligence for the DOJ in 1916, a young man by the name of J. Edgar Hoover. How would they find loyal informants & assets capable of hunting German spies among a German community? Who would hate the Kaiser enough to risk spying upon their saboteurs & agents? Who could blend in near the operations at the German front company located at 60 Wall Street & conduct surveillance upon the Germans coming & going?
Would agents reporting to J. Edgar Hoover’s (he was not yet with the Bureau) attempt to find an asset already positioned to help them? If you are expecting a huge coincidence you are right. Friedrich Trump’s barber shop, was located on the first floor of 60 Wall Street, the very building the Bureau of Investigation needed to place under surveillance. The Friedrich Trump deported from Germany, the Friedrich Trump who would not let his kids learn German, the Friedrich Trump whose children & grandchildren would pretend to be Swedish, that Friedrich Trump. https://nycwalks.com/2019/03/07/generation-i-grandfather-frederick-trump-the-founder-of-the-family-fortune/
If that was the only coincidence, I might dismiss it, but it lead me to something else.
The Bureau’s agents not only caught Igel but managed to time their arrest perfectly. The agents managed to burst into his office while he had 70 pounds of documents for the plots organized on his desk in an effort to ship them to Germany’s embassy as diplomatic pouches. Agents were able to tackle him to prevent him securing his safe, an intelligence coup that likely made J. Edgar Hoover’s career. We will never know how the Bureau got so ‘lucky’ in their timing. https://www.historynet.com/world-war-i-intrigue-german-spies-in-new-york.htm
There is also one other big issue that opens an even larger question and may explain the alliance between the Trump family & the Bureau, a relationship that may go back to 60 Wall Street in 1916. One-hundred years before Friedrich’s grandson would become President of the United States of America after decades of serving as an asset for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Part 3 is available here: https://butnothingshappening.com/trump-friedrich-trump-part-3/