The Strange Death of President Harding: From the Diaries of Gaston B. Means, as Told to May Dixon Thacker (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Strange Death of President Harding: From...)
Excerpt from The Strange Death of President Harding: From the Diaries of Gaston B. Means, as Told to May Dixon Thacker
Col. Felder stopped in Savannah as was his plan. Bef the story had gotten into the newspapers I was info that he had died there suddenly.
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Gaston Bullock Means was an American private detective, salesman, bootlegger, forger, swindler, murder suspect, blackmailer, and con artist.
Background
Gaston Bullock Means was the fourth of seven children and first of four sons of William Gaston and Corrallie (Bullock) Means. He was born on July 11, 1879 on his paternal grandfather's estate at Blackwelder's Spring, North Carolina, and raised in nearby Concord, where his father practised law.
Education
After schooling and private tutoring, Means entered the University of North Carolina in 1898 but left after three years.
Career
Of Means's youth little that elucidates his career is known. He became a clerk for the Cannon Mills in Concord in 1904 and for the next ten years served the firm chiefly as a salesman of cotton goods in Chicago and New York. As a contributor of news of textile markets to the New York Journal of Commerce he came to the notice of Capt. Karl Boy-Ed, naval attaché of the German embassy in Washington, who upon the outbreak of war in 1914 sought information on Allied purchasing and shipping. Means agreed to furnish him data. His wife, Mrs. Means, formerly Julie Patterson, who stood by him to the end, testified that Captain Boy-Ed paid him from $700 to $1, 000 a week. During this venture in espionage, Means established himself in an elaborate Park Avenue apartment and left the textile business to join the William J. Burns International Detective Agency.
As a detective he was first assigned to protect Mrs. Maude King, widow of a wealthy Chicago lumber merchant. He induced her to trust him with the management of her affairs, transferred funds to his own account at will, gambled disastrously in cotton futures, and in three years decimated her fortune. In August 1917, while she was visiting him in Concord, N. C. , she was shot dead through the back of the head by a weapon he had purchased the day before. He was the sole witness: they had gone to the woods near his birthplace, "for target practice. " After New York authorities uncovered his financial dealings, he was indicted for murder and tried before a home-town jury. The militant support of his family, long prominent in Concord, the efforts of nine local attorneys, and his own confident testimony sufficed to win him acquittal, although ballistics experts testified that the fatal shot could not have been fired by Mrs. King. He later claimed that she had been shot by a German agent who intended to kill him for betraying the German cause. The conduct of his trial, which attracted national notice, was widely criticized as parochial. In 1918 Means rejoined the Burns agency, which he had left soon after meeting Mrs. King, and rapidly convinced William J. Burns of his talents. In October 1921 Burns appointed him a special agent of the federal Bureau of Investigation, which the elderly detective headed in the Harding administration.
(Excerpt from The Strange Death of President Harding: From...)
Personality
The balding pate, increasing girth, and jovial, bantering manner of the man suggested a small-town merchant. Beneath this guise he brought to his new calling a nimble brain, a compulsion for the theatrical, powers of suasion that were to prove sufficient to deceive sensible persons long after he achieved notoriety, and unbridled rapacity.