Stevens’s father was also at Mellon, as president of the corporate banking department there, and it had made sense to everyone that Stevens would follow his father and grandfather into banking.
And he did. He graduated from the business school at the University of Pennsylvania and soon became a Mellon junior executive on the fast track. But it was not to last.
Stevens never was comfortable as a button-down type. And all the business of being a blue blood bored him; he’d just as soon push away from a gourmet meal at a gala at the Union League of Philadelphia, loosen his tie as he walked across Broad Street, and go eat a Philly cheesesteak in the 12th Street Market.
The undisputable fact was that genes had indeed jumped a generation—and the genes he had gotten were those of his grandmother.
Clearly, she had recognized that and, accordingly, willed to him the bar—her last defiant act in trying to loosen up the Stevens clan.
This time, she had been successful beyond her greatest hope.
It had been years since her funeral, and that had been the last time that Stevens had put on a suit and tie. He now was prone to well-worn khakis, a faded captain’s shirt with epaulets, and a crushed navy blue Greek sailor’s cap that was always askew on his unruly sandy hair.
As his grandmother had been, Stevens was also well liked. This was in part because of his engaging habit of greeting everyone with a pat on the back—a hug for certain regulars—but he knew it also was due to the fact that he had a habit of letting th
e bartenders at Pete’s pour penny draft beer when the happy mood struck him.
From most appearances, Stevens did not take the bar business too seriously. It seemed that the steady customers provided him an easy and reasonable cash flow most of the year and a very good income during the height of seasons, June through August and mid-November to early January. And he had that rent-free two-bedroom apartment above the bar, a bit ratty-looking from the outside but with what had to be an incredible view of the beach and Atlantic Ocean. Why work hard?
But the exact opposite was true.
The proprietor, with his master’s of business administration from Wharton, quietly tracked every nickel, knew what a keg cost him wholesale, knew what he lost in retail income when he just about gave away each keg during a “happy mood,” and knew by what percentage customer traffic—and revenue—then increased after word got around that Pete’s had been giving away beer again.
Most important, he knew that not all of the income found its way onto the cash receipts reported to the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Consequently, Stevens had a hefty fund tucked away for a rainy day—a very rainy day—or for whatever else he decided was the best use of his money.
In addition to the income from the bar, Stevens also dabbled in a number of other cash-generating ventures. He owned a couple of rental cottages—shacks, really, just bare bone and basic but with great beach access—and these he let in spring and summer (no one ever wanted to rent them in winter, when a cold wet wind blew in steadily off the ocean, and the only heat source in the cottages was the rarely used wood-burning stoves). And he traded cars, some by choice, some by necessity.
It was common—maybe too common—in a beach town environment for jobs to come and go almost as easy as the wind, leaving carpenters and painters and other such tradesmen to wait out the dry spells.
And it only made sense, at least to them, to spend time between jobs where they spent time after work when they had jobs: at Pete’s. But drinking when there’s no income, and no hope of income anytime soon, made for a bad formula.
Thus, quietly, because he did not want to become known as the Bank of Booze, Stevens allowed a select group to run bar tabs. While those who found themselves in that group thought it was a damned decent service for Stevens to offer to Pete’s regulars who were temporarily down on their luck, it was far from a magnanimous act on Stevens’s part.
He knew his customers, and which ones were loan worthy and which were ne’er-do-wells. And for the worthy, he charged a somewhat healthy interest rate, and secured it by holding the legal title to the car or truck of the borrower.
When the owner got work, he bought back his title by paying off—in cash—his tab and the interest incurred. If the owner did not get work and the tab reached a point short of the value of the vehicle, it was pay up or default time.
Consequently, Stevens had one, two—on occasion, as many as four—vehicles to his name.
When he could, he kept a couple of them parked outside the bar—it was always good for the place to look as though someone were there, to draw in patrons during business hours and, after hours, to deter others who might not have the best of intentions—and any extras he kept parked out at the rental cottages.
Richard Koch did not have the benefit of being educated at a school of finance—he had been strictly reared in a home of modest means, his father a hardworking diesel-engine mechanic who had brought the family to America but then decided to return home to Germany when Richard was nineteen and old enough to fend for himself—but Koch was frugal-minded, too.
He had managed his personal affairs well by keeping steady employment and spending within his means. He even socked away cash on a regular basis—a little some times, more others, till he had just over three thousand dollars.
Koch never needed to use Stevens’s loan system, but he was aware of it, and aware that Stevens seemed to be always doing something with cars, and so when, in November 1941, Koch made plans to visit his family in Germany, he spoke with Stevens about leaving his car with him. Stevens was of course agreeable—for a small fee.
That left only one thing to take care of: what to do with the brick of cash that Koch had saved. He did not want to leave it in a bank—not being a U.S. citizen made him concerned that the money could be confiscated for whatever reason—and he thought long and hard about what to do with it, from burying it to having someone hold it for him.
He finally realized that he already was having Stevens hold his car; why not just have him hold it, too—but not know that he was doing so? He could hide it in the car.
After first taking brown butcher paper and wrapping the cash in two small bundles, then covering the paper with heavy black tape, he went through the Ford looking for a spot that was both safe and not at all obvious. He looked and looked and finally decided on the backseat. He unbolted the seat from the floorboard, taped the bundles to the wire frame underneath, and then bolted the seat back in place.
Then he drove the car to Pete’s Bar, parked it out front, locked it, and went inside and handed the keys to Stevens—never for a moment realizing that in a month’s time Germany would be declaring war on the United States and in two months’ time he would be enlisted in the German army.
In December 1942, Richard Koch had a letter-sized envelope added to a pouch containing other correspondence from the Abwehr. This pouch was then hand-carried to Spain, where it found its way to a Spanish diplomatic courier en route to Spain’s consulate office in New York City. There the envelope was sent by messenger to Eva Carr, one of Fritz Kuhn’s faithful in the German-American Bund living on the Lower East Side.
When Eva Carr, a rugged-looking brunette of thirty-five, opened the plain envelope, she found another, note-card-sized envelope.