The subjects are usually women, who historically have been greatly ignored, but there are men who get the treatment of what might be called an obituary of reparations.
Last year the Times produced a collection of these obituaries in a book called...Overlooked No More. I got it for Christmas. The editors at the Times solicit ideas for subjects. So far I've submitted four, I think, all deceptive, felonious people who I love to read about. So far the Times hasn't picked up on one of my nominations. But I'm not discouraged. Here is another one.
Take a recent NYT obituary on Victor Brombert, a scholar who kept his Army past a secret who has just passed away at 101. In the largest photo accompanying the obit we see Mr. Brombert sitting at a desk in his office in Princeton University in 1985, in a setting that is what you'd expect to see a professor of comparative literature sitting in: paper strewn desk, shelves of books, a lamp and a window, while wearing an ascot. If his jacket were on we'd no doubt see elbow patches. No pipe in sight, however.
William Donovan started the O.S.S. recognizing that the U.S. didn't have a mature intelligence service like the European countries. Donovan recruited people who had language skills and academic rigor to work with Allied resistance cells to provide even the smallest piece of information about the enemy.
Victor, who at 19 came to the United States with his family via Berlin, Russia and France, was a perfect candidate for being a Ritchie Boy, so named after Camp Ritchie, the training came in Ritchie, Maryland. Victor could speak 5 languages, a definite asset for overseas work.
Donovan had people working out of embassies in neutral countries acquiring books, pamphlets, academic papers, anything that might be used as knowledge. There was a woman, Adele Kibre who was in Stockholm who scoured the libraries and rare book stores, microfilming the papers and sending it back to Washington for analysis.
The activities of this group of people is captured in Elyse Graham's recent book, Book and Dagger. No published piece of paper was too insignificant. Telephone directories, newspapers, and dry as dust books on railroads provided valuable information to the Allies that aided in planning military operations. Books titled, The Universal Directory of Railway Officials and The Railway Year Book 1936 were intelligence gold.
Victor landed on a Normandy beach on D-Day. He made his way into France and even got to see where he once lived. He was a Master Sergeant. He might have been reading and photographing serial numbers from disabled German tanks. This gave the Allies information on where the Germans were in making tanks. Just like the railroad books gave insight to the rail routes and the shortage of locomotives in Germany.
Colorful characters abound in Book and Dagger. There is Sherman Kent, who was already a history professor at Yale who was one of those who reported directly to Donovan and organized the departments that became part of the O.S.S.
Sherman was colorful because his language was colorful, full of swearing and off-color references that kept his colleagues at Yale entertained. In Book and Dagger he is quoted as disdainfully remarking that
a foreign regime's attempt at a cover-up was like "gathering piss with a rake."
Surely a guy like this got an interesting obit. Well, no. Not in 1986 when he passed away. The NYT obit is a small, unbylined piece that is only 9 paragraphs, single column, extending down maybe a third of the page, no photo. In 1986 obituaries didn't expose the everyday sides of a subject. They weren't the art form they today.
Mr. Kent's involvement with the founding of the C.I.A. is well noted. There is one quote that describes his passion about intelligence and keeping secrets that when he returned to Yale after the war he told President Truman that security was so lax in the Government that he intended to turn his Yale students loose and discover 95% of the nation's secrets through periodicals and daily newspapers. After all, that's what he and his colleagues did during the war in Europe.
I haven't yet finished reading Book and Dagger but I've already come across a person who in my opinion is worthy of an Overlooked No More obit, a safecracker G.B. "Sadie" Cohen who was a Lower East Side locksmith who had a store that was just a front for his consulting work on masterminding robberies. If Sherlock Holmes was a Consulting Detective, Sadie was a Consulting Thief.
Sadie was well-known to the NYC police of the time. And when he wasn't doing a stretch in Sing Sing, the state prison in Ossining, New York, he was called upon to do some covert work for the department opening safes when the real owner wasn't there. For this work, some indictments were overlooked.
The O.S.S. needed the contents of a safe in the Spanish Embassy in Washington examined. Spain was a neutral country during the war but like all neutral countries they leaned both ways. Countries like Spain were full of spies and full of German information.
Elyse Graham's book is full of attribution for her sources. The story surround Sadie comes from a memoir by Donald Downes, The Scarlet Thread.
Downes was a writer recruited for O.S.S. work after a meeting at the Yale Club in NYC. in 1941. Yale seems to run through the O.S.S. and C.I.A. veins. One of his assignments was to find a way into the safe at the Spanish Embassy in Washington D.C.
Being a writer, Downes knew a guy—who doesn't know a guy?—a major in Army counterintelligence who was once a NYPD detective in the Police Bomb Squad— who knew a guy—a safecracker who ran a locksmith shop on New York's Lower East Side that was actually a front for his more lucrative sideline of providing consulting work on robberies. After all, you can only make so much from making keys for people and opening their doors when they're locked out. G.B. "Sadie" Cohen had an idea, and came highly recommended.
The major told Downes there's, "not a safe Sadie can't open." We use him when he's not in Sing Sing, holding back some pending charges."
Sadie is straight out of the safecracker character Doc played by Sam Jaffe in the 1950 movie Asphalt Jungle. For all I know, Doc might have been based on Sadie.
Like many resident of New York's Lower East Side, Sadie was a Jewish immigrant who spoke heavily accented English. On entering the shop with Downes, described as a "junk heap" by Downes, Sadie asks the major, who he knows quite well from being arrested, "Val lootenant, how's bombs? Vat can I do for you?"
The situation is laid out, and Sadie is quick to absorb the details for the caper. You get someone on the inside, a woman, who hides a gilder's hammer in "her woman's national bank, her bosom." She goes to the safe and breaks the dial. When they call to get the safe fixed, Sadie tells them he goes in the repairman's place and makes the needed key to open the safe.
At this point in the story, Sadie should be immediately enshrined in the poetic hall of fame for referring to a woman's bosom as her "national bank." Needless to say, The O.S.S. gets what it wants.
And what does Sadie want? He's insulted at the offer of money. "Paid? You've come into my place and insult me. Don't I have two nephews in the Army? Ain't I an American a much as you? Aren't you ashamed? Pay me? You can't even tank me. Even a ticket to Vashington you can't buy me, or a Coca-Cola."
As Ms. Graham tells us, Sadie was a criminal, but he wasn't a Nazi. And that's how the war was won.
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