For all the recent complaints by New Jersey officials about the NYPD gathering intelligence in the Garden State, it’s worth noting that little has changed in a century.
At 2:08 a.m. on July 30, 1916, German saboteurs set off explosions on Black Tom Island, the promontory off Jersey City now known as Liberty State Park.
World War I was raging in Europe (with the United States still on the sidelines), and Black Tom was the largest ammunition dump in America. Trains brought munitions there to be loaded onto barges and transported to ships in New York Harbor that would deliver them to the Allied powers.
The explosions reached far. All over Manhattan, windows fell from buildings and people ran into the streets in panic. The Brooklyn Bridge swayed. The shock from the blast was felt as far south as Philadelphia.
An even larger explosion followed a half an hour later. Shells and shrapnel rained down on Ellis Island. At least six people were killed, including an infant in Jersey City.
The Black Tom bombing was the culmination of a series of German outrages. But New York City, unlike New Jersey, had taken steps against the threat.
When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, NYPD Commissioner Arthur Woods created a special “bomb squad” to secure the city. But when leads pointed to the Jersey side of New York Harbor, the squad was constrained. NYPD personnel had no authority there, and Frank Hague, boss of Jersey City and political czar of the Garden State, was against aid to the Allies.
In one instance, French intelligence notified bomb-squad commander Thomas Tunney that an informant had been asked to purchase TNT and deliver it to an address in Weehawken. A New York detective made contact with the German army lieutenant who’d wanted the explosives; they agreed to test the devices in nearby woods. Tunney then called in the US Secret Service to arrest the lieutenant and his accomplices.
The French also passed along word about mysterious bombs going off on Allied vessels, sinking or damaging 35 in total from 1915 onward. They were being planted out of the Hoboken terminals of the great German shipping lines.
Some 90 German ships had been caught in New York Harbor at the war’s outbreak, with British warships waiting outside the three-mile limit to sink them. The stranded officers and crews worked with Irish stevedores out of Hoboken to plant bombs that exploded after the Allied ships were at sea.
Handed the French tip, the NYPD flooded German-speaking detectives through the bars, beer gardens and restaurants on the Hoboken waterfront. In one instance, a New York police officer, pretending to be a German secret agent himself, persuaded a sea captain who worked in the bomb ring to accompany him back to New York City so he could be properly paid for his work. When the German arrived at NYPD headquarters, he realized he’d been tricked.
The bomb squad concluded that German attachés working out of Manhattan offices were running the ring. A Secret Service agent was tailing one of them when he fell asleep on the 6th Avenue elevated subway line — and his briefcase wound up in the agent’s hands.
The case held documents outlining millions in payments as part of the bomb ring. That evidence couldn’t be used in court, but it prompted the federal government to expel the attachés, decapitating the plot.
The bomb squad had smashed one German ring, but it couldn’t get them all. The Black Tom bombing had been planned out of Baltimore. Although the NYPD had long worried about Black Tom, an obvious target of sabotage, it had no authority to order improvements in its weak security system. Jersey City authorities did nothing about it.
If Boss Hague and his cohorts had been more interested in protecting the lives and property of their citizens and cooperated with the NYPD, the loss of life and the carnage of July 30, 1916, might never have occurred.
When the United States entered the war in April 1917, the government decided not to take any chances on Hague’s disrupting the war effort: President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Army to occupy the vital port of Hoboken for the duration. Tunney and his men, meanwhile, joined the Army and became the core of its counterspy efforts.
Today’s New Jersey officials need to recall the lessons of Black Tom. Of course, if they need a more recent example, they have the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which was carried out by Islamic militants operating out of Jersey City.
Thomas A. Reppetto is the author of “Battleground New York City: Countering Spies, Saboteurs and Terrorists Since 1861.”