Vic Socotra

14 September 2009

Follow the Money

(Map of Blue Plains, Extreme SE Washington DC)

The revelation came to me on the road up from Brandy Station. It had been building as I poured over the disconnected bits of information in the files about the Nazis, and why now, suddenly, the appearance of the wannebe-National Socialists a couple decades ago, and their embarrassing marble monument to the executed German Abwehr agents had become a big deal.

There had to be cash at the bottom of it, and not the suitcase full of it that George Dash brought ashore from the U-202. Following the money was the key, and I think I found where it is. I’ll get to it presently, and it is a nice chunk of change, several hundred million bucks, all shovel ready. That made everything about the Nazi graves more than a little dangerous.

I understood now why this had to be handled as a matter of discretion.

Recession or not, Washington is coming alive again after a tough thirty years. Smoking on the roof of the Grayhound Bus Terminal a couple years ago I could count fourteen of those big construction cranes towering over the city. For the first time, under the tender ministrations of the Williams Administration, business and government were joining to develop the crap out of the vast swath of distressed District.

Some of the credit has to go to the Navy, who was tired of hunching down behind the walls of the Navy Yard, and who lobbed a redevelopment plan over the transom. Add the fight to bring major league baseball back to town, and voila! Suddenly there was a brand new stadium on the river, and gentrification marched south to the water, and north and east along Pennsylvania Avenue.

The resurgence of the city is quite as remarkable as its collapse was back in the 1960s. After the riots that followed the assassination of Dr. King, there were three separate Washingtons: the white marble belt of the Federal City that cuts from Arlington House across the Potomac and down the national mall, the rich residential district northwest of there, and the abandoned great swatch of hopelessness that marched from the tip of the diamond shape clockwise to the wasteland where the District ends.

That is too broad a brush, I know, but for the purposes of this conversation it is true enough to suffice. When I went to the Industrial College at Fort McNair, you could have bought one of the condos outside the wall on your credit card. No more. Waterfront property on the Anacostia is now going for a premium.

I was eager to bring the team together to determine if my guess about the money was right. But I have a day-job, and that was what caused us to be on the wrong side of the Potomac last week.

We delivered the proposal to the Government on the second floor of the new addition to the big aluminum Bread Box at Bolling Air Force Base. That was the reason we happened to be in Anacostia on this late summer day. There were a couple of the usual thrills and chills along the way- but those do not concern the main thread of the story, and I will dispense with them in the interest of clarity.

I am thinking about reconnecting the siren on the Bluesmobile, though. It could be useful.

The party broke up once the papers were counte-signed by the affable bureaucrat in the contracting shop and we slogged back across the wide green field that used to be the main runway for the air base.

Some of us live in Maryland, others down in Stafford, and it made no sense for us all to go back to the office in Arlington this late in the day with the traffic already starting to build. We had parked the convoy in the Army-Air Force Exchange, and I waved goodbye as the others blasted off to try to get ahead of the crush.

I popped the trunk on the police car to retrieve the folder and my extensive notes. I was here, so what the hell. Satellite imagery can only do so much to orient you to the situation on the ground. I thought I would head down to Blue Plains and see what things looked like tactically before we deployed the team on the Great Nazi Hunt.

I flipped through my notes and pictures. The monument had been found on the National Park Service property near the old District Almshouse in 1982. That might have been the last hurrah of George Lincoln Rockwell’s make-believe bully-boys.

Rockwell had been assassinated on August 25, 1967, in front of the Dominion Hills Econowash laundromat. He was shot by John Patler, a party member who was attempting to introduce Marxist doctrine into the party platform. With the death of their charismatic founder, the American Nazi Party lurched from lunacy into fevered delirium.

In 1970, a splinter group headed by Frank Collin broke away from the group and founded the National Socialist Party of America (NSWPP). They were the models for the pocket Nazis in the film The Blues Brothers, who are remembered mostly for their attempt to march through Skokie, Illinois. Collin was sent up to Joliet on charges of child molestation in 1979, the same year as the Greensboro massacre, where five communist marchers in an anti-Klan protest in North Carolina, were shot and killed.

The legal problems that came out of the violence were legion. There were government informants in the Klan and the WSWPP factions, and though none of the shooters were ever convicted, the survivors of the Communist Workers Party won a judgment civil lawsuit in 1985 worth $350,000. The legal fees broke the movement, and they took down their big swastika sign off Wilson Boulevard and left town with their tails between their legs.

Not before they left their monument to their martyred imaginary brethren at Blue Plains, though.

I drove the police car out the back gate at Bolling and down the access road to the Navy Research Lab, where the first military reconnaissance satellites were built.

I turned left under the overpass where traffic was hurtling down I-295 toward the Beltway and the new Wilson Bridge.

Glancing at the map on my lap, I noted the right turn at the fire-fighting school, where carcasses of burned out cars were torched for training.

According to the maps, all the key points for locating the graves were along the fence that demarcates the District from Maryland. The key was getting to the other side. I cruised slowly past the National Botanical Gardens support facility, and the Potomac Jobs training center. The old abandoned hospital was on the right, and parking lots, and then a curve to some anonymous buildings butted up to the stark iron fence of the impound lot.

No way to get through there.

I swung the Bluesmobile around and poked into the abandoned power plant. The lot next to it was one of the possibilities for where Potter’s Field was located, but it did not feel right.

I cruised out of there and back onto DC Village Lane. There was a gap in the fence, and a narrow strip of blacktop that looked promising.

There were no signs telling me I couldn’t, so I did.

I plunged the cruiser down the bike-path, parting the tall grass with the fenders on both sides. Eventually I came to a broad meadow, and got to the gap in the fence that demarcates the District and Maryland. There were three deer on the other side, looking at me through the windshield without curiousity.

There, behind them, was a sign the read "Official Vehicles Only."

Although the Bluesmobile was once thoroughly official, on this day it was not. Of course, I was wearing business dress with badges on the leash around my neck, so who could tell? I was fairly sure there were no Nazis lurking out there, at least not animate ones, but they were not the ones with the money.

I got out and walked to the boundary fence to get a better look at what I was about to deal with. SE 8 District Stone was a quarter mile to my right, and that is where I could pace the distance to Potters Field.

I was going to need a team for that, though, and that meant coming back to the hole in the wall I had found. I climbed back in the cop car and beat traffic getting back to the right side of the River.

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