The Fish That Ate the Whale (11 page)

The Knox plan satisfied the British bankers, who agreed to sell their railroad bonds, which had a face value of $500, for $75 apiece. It satisfied President Dávila, who believed it would protect him. If Morgan bank officers were working in Honduras, the American navy would be obliged to defend them, protecting the Honduran government from revolutionaries. The Knox plan was good for everyone, in fact, except the people of Honduras and Samuel Zemurray, whose business could not function without the concessions and sweetheart deals that would be forbidden by Morgan. The Knox plan, in fact, depended on men like Zemurray paying in every way possible. If enacted, it would add as much as a penny per bunch to cost, driving Cuyamel out of business.

Zemurray went to work as soon as he learned the terms of the Knox plan. His goal was simple: undermine, overturn, undo. Kill it dead. In the beginning, he went after this the traditional way, hiring lobbyists who buttonholed congressmen, urging them to pressure the White House. This business of meddling in the affairs of foreign nations had to stop. As the campaign gained momentum—newspaper articles, editorials—Knox became alarmed and inquired after the source of the opposition.
Where's this coming from? Who's behind it?
He soon discovered that the lobbyists were paying for neither their own meals nor hotel rooms. All bills had been charged to a Mr. S. Zemurray of New Orleans, Louisiana.

*   *   *

In the summer of 1910, on what must have been one of the strangest days of his life, Zemurray received a message from Washington, D.C. He was to report to the office of the United States secretary of state. He had been in America less than a generation, and here he was embroiled at the highest levels of national affairs. A Jew from the shtetl off for an audience with the czar. He arrived in the capital early in the morning, left the train station in the dark, rode through the streets at first light. He stopped at the hotel, then went to the Old Executive Office Building, a beautiful chaos of columns, dormered windows, and chimneys. He met first with Alvey Adee, special assistant to the secretary. Adee, a patrician with a gray goatee and steel blue eyes, was an old government hand, having served as the acting secretary of state during the Spanish-American War. He questioned Zemurray, then brought him into Secretary Knox's office, which was wood and brass, globes, books, oil paintings. In photos, Knox looks big, soft, and round, with the commanding nose characteristic of his old Philadelphia family; his eyes were sleepy and sad. His girlish chin staged rearguard action against the bulk of his neck. Zemurray was taller than Knox, long and lean, with a shrewd face that changed when he smiled.

The details of this meeting were reported by Zemurray to friends and a few journalists, who wrote them up and retold them. Over time, it grew into a legend. In my mind, Zemurray sits patiently as Knox explains the history of the isthmus as you might explain it to a child, the instability of the Latin nations and the Latin character, the fiasco of the Honduran railroad and the resulting debt, the danger of foreign encroachment, the issue of prestige. He speaks of Mr. Morgan's role, the good it will do Honduras.

Yes, yes, fine, says Zemurray, but what about the interests of a businessman who invested with certain expectations? Are previous commitments to be simply discarded?

Knox is vague. Zemurray presses for answers. The resulting exchange, which I've pieced together from various sources, went something like this:

—You've not been brought here to haggle, sir.

—Then why have I been brought here? To be told I'm finished?

—That's not my concern.

—Look, Mr. Secretary, if a few simple accommodations could be worked out …

—I'm not discussing it, Mr. Zemurray. I'm not bargaining. I'm telling you the policy of the United States. Now that you know that policy, I am advising you, as nicely as I can, to go home and stay out of it. Don't meddle in Honduras. It's not your concern.

—But it is my concern, Mr. Secretary. The treaty will mean the end of my business.

—That's unfortunate, Mr. Zemurray, but my purview is larger than your banana business.

—But what would be the harm if concessions were honored?

—If you have a particular concern, I suggest you bring it up with Mr. Morgan.

—“Mr. Secretary, I'm no favorite grandson of Mr. Morgan's. Mr. Morgan never heard of me.”

—That's not my concern, sir.

“I was doing a small business buying fruit from independent planters, but I wanted to expand,” Zemurray told
The American Magazine
. “I wanted to build railroads and raise my own fruit. The duty on railroad equipment was prohibitive—a cent a pound—and so I had to have concessions that would enable me to import that stuff duty free. If the banks were running Honduras and collecting their loans from customs duties, how far would I have gotten?”

When Zemurray stood to leave, Knox warned him a second time: Don't meddle! Keep your head down! Stay out of it! I better not hear you've got yourself mixed up in the politics of Honduras!

Zemurray nodded and seemed to agree, but Secretary Knox was not so sure.

Though he tried to put people at ease, Zemurray often struck those in power as a man who could not be controlled. If you want to know what he's going to do, forget what he seems to agree to and figure out what's in his interest. (Sure, sure, you won't
hear
I've gotten mixed up in Honduras.) As soon as Zemurray was gone, Knox made some calls, gave some orders. He told officials from the Department of the Treasury to put together a Secret Service team in New Orleans. He wanted the Banana Man monitored. He was not to leave the country, nor were any of his cohorts.

Pretend you're Samuel Zemurray. You're thirty-two. You've been in America less than twenty years. You lived in Russia before that, in a poor farming town filled with rabbis. Now you're here, an entrepreneur of considerable means, but still, somewhere in your mind, the little Jew who snuck in the back door. You're a husband and father, with a young daughter and another child on the way. You've been summoned to Washington, called to account by the secretary of state, warned. What do you do? Put your head down, shut up? Sit in a corner and thank God for your good fortune? Well, maybe that's what you would do, but not Sam Zemurray. He muttered all the way back to New Orleans: these momzers! Don't get involved? How about I overthrow the fucking government? Is that too involved? You made a deal with the president of Honduras, Miguel Dávila? Well, what if Señor Dávila wasn't president no more?

Consider the audacity!

In defying Philander Knox and J. Pierpont Morgan, Sam Zemurray was challenging two of the most powerful men in America.

*   *   *

Zemurray's scheme can be described as a coup disguised as a revolution. (It would not be hard to stir popular anger in the country, since most Hondurans hated the Knox plan.) Dávila would be driven out and a new president put in his place. General Manuel Bonilla, who had been president of Honduras until he was deposed in 1907, was cast in the role of insurgent leader for several reasons: because he was living in New Orleans; because he was known in Honduras; because he was trusted by Honduran businessmen; because Sam knew and liked Bonilla, whom he called
Mi General
; because Bonilla knew and liked Sam, having described him on one occasion as “an angel sent from heaven”; because he had allies in the region who would fight by his side; because he was dark skinned and broad nosed, features described by diplomats as Indian in a way that would give the operation the aura of popular revolt.

Zemurray worked out the arrangements with Bonilla and Lee Christmas, who was the president's right hand. In social situations it was Christmas who did the talking. He was better with English and also something of a public personality. Zemurray would have found the men in the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter, a haunt of exiled Latin American leaders and North American filibusters, mercenaries forever in search of a job, a government to overthrow.

Bonilla was picturesque, a tiny man who now and then turned up in the uniform of a cavalry officer: riding boots and whip. Surrounded by followers, he made big promises to return to Tegucigalpa in triumph but was in fact down to his last dollar when Zemurray contacted him, living rent check to rent check in a cold-water flat on Royal Street. (William Merry, of the U.S. State Department, described Bonilla as a “half Indian and half Negro, uneducated and without much ability.”) At the moment, his interests were perfectly aligned with those of Zemurray. Sam had money, ships, guns. Bonilla had legitimacy, motivation, and that fine Indian face.

In the summer of 1910, Lee Christmas began recruiting Bonilla's army of liberation, tapping men in the bordellos and dives of the French Quarter, importing others from the port cities on the Gulf. He did this as discreetly as possible but was being watched—through a window, across the street—by Treasury agents reporting to Knox. It seemed as though everyone in town knew what Christmas was up to. According to an article in
The
New York Times
(it described New Orleans as “the hotbed of revolution and the Mecca of filibusters”), “Never before perhaps have there been so many people of known revolutionary designs in New Orleans as there are now, and they are leading a score of secret service agents of this and other countries on a merry chase.”

The idea of Christmas doing anything in secret was a joke. He was an incorrigible attention getter, gruff and boisterous, a figure from a Saturday-afternoon serial come to life. Like most storied mercenaries, he was less soldier than showman, a pop star playing a role for mild-mannered America. He had a fair complexion, a walrus mustache, and the pretty blue eyes of a Romeo. If circumstances allowed, he wore a military uniform, double-breasted, brass buttoned, with piping and braid, which was tailor-made in a costume shop in Paris. On occasion, he carried a sword. He was a modern hybrid: real and fake, deadly serious and having a laugh. He'd fought in several wars, had been shot more than a few times, but was a clown, too, playing to the crowd. Born on a cotton plantation in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, in 1863, he had refused to play a bit part in life and went adventuring instead. Between 1890 and 1925, he was a featured player in the comic opera of Central American politics.

Christmas had first arrived in Puerto Cortés in 1893. Within a decade, he was a star, having seen action in various battles, having conquered and killed. He was said to be the model for Richard Harding Davis's protagonist in the bestselling novel
Soldiers of Fortune.
He fashioned a pact with General Bonilla soon after they met in the early 1900s. First they were allies, then friends, then brothers. Christmas risked his life for Bonilla's cause in 1907, when the general, his soldiers defeated in battle, was driven into exile.

Christmas was trapped with a few hundred men in the hills outside Tegucigalpa. Realizing their position was hopeless, he ordered his men to surrender, while he made a run for it. According to
The Incredible Yanqui
by Hermann Deutsch, Christmas told his men, “I'm going out. There'll be seven cartridges in my gun and each of the first six will get me one of those rawhides. The last will be for me, in case they nip me on the road. But I guarantee they'll never drag me out in front of a mob and make a show of killing me.”

A handful of men volunteered to ride with Christmas. They went at dawn, each with pistol and machete. They burst across the defensive line in a group, riding hard. Three of these men—Ted Reyes, Francis Barahona, Fred Mills—were shot and killed. Christmas rode toward the trees across the clearing. He was almost there, almost there, almost there …
wham!
His horse was shot out from under him. The falling went on forever. He was pinned beneath the animal, one leg badly broken. Enemy soldiers ran toward him. He aimed his gun, a German Luger. He believed he had three bullets left—he shot twice, then put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Click.
Pulled it again.
Click.
He never was good at math. He was surrounded, supine in his dirty uniform, the faces staring down, the sky, the peaks—a legendary scene in the life of Lee Christmas.

“Goddamned you all to Hell!” he shouted. “Shoot me now if you've got the guts. Shoot me you miserable heathens. Shoot me and be done with me but don't bury me. Leave me on the ground to rot.”

“Don't bury you? But why Señor General?”

Then came the words that Christmas either wrote in advance, made up afterward, or actually spoke—words that attached themselves to his story like a tagline, in the nature of “Do you feel lucky, punk?”

“Because I want the buzzards to eat me, and fly over you afterward, and scatter white shit all over your God-damned black faces.”

Christmas said he expected this to infuriate the soldiers: he was trying to provoke them into killing him, but it only made them laugh. “You're a brave man, Jefe,” the enemy commander told Christmas. “For this, you will not be executed at all.”

A stretcher was made out of branches and saplings. Christmas was carried over the mountains to Tegucigalpa, where his leg was rebroken and set. Once recovered, he was expelled from Honduras, eventually making his way, via mail ship, to New Orleans, where the newspapers, relying on secondhand accounts, had reported his death. In
The New York Times
, the story ran under the headline “Daredevil American Cut to Pieces by Nicaraguan Soldiers.” When he turned up in the Carousel Bar as if at his own funeral, his legend was assured.

*   *   *

Here are some of the men Lee Christmas recruited for the army of Manuel Bonilla:

Tracy Custer Richardson of Broken Bow, Nebraska. Like the hero of a folk song, he'd been a rambler and a gambler, a steamship roustabout and oil field fitter before seeing combat in the Nicaraguan civil war. He served in the Mexican border wars, on the Western Front during the First World War, as a member of Wild Bill Donovan's OSS during the Second World War. With Richardson, as with most New Orleans mercenaries, it was impossible to untangle fact from legend. No matter how deep you dig, you never hit bedrock—it's just story on story, tale on tale. In the end, he was the greatest singer of his own song, which he told and retold in novels and penny-a-word true crime pulps. When Christmas found Richardson, he was just another kid getting wasted on Bourbon Street.