Fanne Foxe, Who Plunged Into the Tidal Basin and Emerged Famous, Dies at 84

A stripper known as “the Argentine Firecracker,” she was at the center of a political sex scandal that rocked Washington in the 1970s.

Fanne Foxe with Representative Wilbur Mills outside her dressing room at a theater in Boston in 1974. In October that year they became the subjects of a sensational sex scandal.Credit…Bettmann/Getty Images

By Robert D. McFadden

Feb. 24, 2021

Fanne Foxe, the stripper known as “the Argentine Firecracker,” who leapt from the limousine of Representative Wilbur D. Mills and plunged into Washington’s Tidal Basin after a night of drinking, exposing one of the biggest political sex scandals of the 1970s, died on Feb. 10. She was 84.

Her death was announced in a paid notice in The Tampa Bay Times. It did not say where she died or give a cause.

Until the Tidal Basin episode, Mr. Mills had been one of the most powerful members of Congress, an 18-term Arkansas Democrat who chaired the Ways and Means Committee and wrote major tax legislation. He had flirted with a bid for the presidency and a Supreme Court seat and, at 65, seemed a model of stability, a married father and grandfather in the twilight of a distinguished career.

But for more than a year he had been drinking heavily and was involved in a secret affair with Ms. Foxe, 38, a mother of three whose real name was Annabel Battistella (later Annabel Montgomery). She was a $500-a-week performer at the Silver Slipper, a club in Washington. Until her recent divorce, she and her husband had lived in an Arlington, Va., apartment building where Mr. Mills and his wife resided.

The first whiff of trouble broke about 2 a.m. on Oct. 7, 1974, when two United States Park Service police officers spotted Mr. Mills’s car speeding with lights off near the Jefferson Memorial and pulled it over. Apparently panicking, Ms. Foxe bolted from the car and, yelling in English and Spanish, tried to escape by jumping into the Tidal Basin, a Potomac estuary with an average depth of 10 feet.

The officers pulled her out, handcuffed her when she tried to jump in again and returned her to the car, where they found Mr. Mills and several other occupants intoxicated. Mr. Mills was bleeding from his nose and facial scratches, and Ms. Foxe had two black eyes. An officer drove her to a hospital and the others to their homes.

The incident might have gone unnoticed, but a television cameraman came upon the scene and recorded it. The police filed no charges, and Mr. Mills issued a statement that cast events in an innocent light. But within days the outlines of a political sex scandal began to emerge. Mr. Mills, facing voters in November, returned home to campaign and was narrowly re-elected to his 19th term.

But under withering publicity detailing his alcoholism and peccadilloes with Ms. Foxe, including an impromptu appearance at a Boston burlesque stage where she was performing, Mr. Mills checked into an alcoholic-treatment center, resigned as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and did not run for re-election in 1976, ending a 38-year congressional career.

Ms. Foxe, capitalizing on her notoriety, changed her sobriquet to “The Tidal Basin Bombshell” and sharply raised her performance fees. She began commanding $3,500 a week at the Silver Slipper and upped her rate to $30,000 for a two-week engagement at Club Juana in Orlando, Fla.

In her first week there, she was charged with indecent exposure for stripping nude. She pleaded not guilty, and the charge was dropped for insufficient evidence. But as a flood of new offers poured in, she announced her retirement from stripping and became a film actress and tell-all author.

Ms. Foxe (her real name was Annabel Battistella) in December 1974 at Club Juana. Finding fame from the Tidal Basin episode, she commanded $30,000 for a two-week engagement at the Orlando, Fla., club. — Credit…Ron Galella, via Getty Images

Ms. Foxe appeared on television talk shows and in Las Vegas nightclubs, was featured in Playboy magazine in 1976 and 1977 and starred in several movies as herself, including “Posse From Heaven” (1975), about a stripper who becomes a guardian angel to a cowboy, and “This Is America” (1977), a documentary featuring car crashes and a nude beauty contest.

Her 180-page paperback, “The Stripper and the Congressman” (1975, with Yvonne Dunleavy), detailed an affair that began after she and her Argentine husband, Edwardo Battistella, met Mr. Mills and his wife, Polly Mills, in their building in 1973. The couples became friends and went dancing together.

Then, the book said, Mr. Mills began visiting the Silver Slipper often. He took Ms. Foxe on a three-week junket to Antigua and promised to marry her if he could get a divorce. Ms. Foxe’s husband, with whom she had three children, divorced her just before the affair was publicly disclosed. Mr. Mills, as a recovered alcoholic who counseled other alcoholics, remained married to his wife until his death, at 82, in 1992.

With the proceeds of her new career, Ms. Foxe bought an eight-bedroom home in Westport, Conn., where the three children spent much of their teenage years. In 1980 she married her business manager, Daniel Montgomery. They had a daughter and were divorced in 1985.

Ms. Foxe, who went by Ms. Montgomery in her later years, is survived by her children from her first marriage, Grace McGarry, Alex Montgomery and Maria Ibanez-Lasater; and seven grandchildren, according to the Tampa Bay Times announcement. Her daughter from her second marriage, Melanie, died in 2017.

Ms. Montgomery moved to St. Petersburg, Fla., in the late 1980s, and undertook a series of challenging late-in-life academic pursuits. She earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Tampa in 1995 and a master’s in marine science (in 2001) and a master’s in business administration (2004) from the University of South Florida, all with magna cum laude honors.

“I’m not sure what her motivation was, but we were all very proud of her accomplishments,” Alex Montgomery said of his mother in a 2019 interview for this obituary. “She was a very intelligent woman. Remarkable. She also became a scuba-diving master at the University of South Florida and went to Cozumel, Mexico, to do some underwater filming.”

She was born Annabel Villagra on Feb. 14, 1936, in Nueve de Julio, Argentina, one of three children of Oszaldo and Concepcion Villagra. Annabel and her brother, Nilo, and sister, Norma, grew up in an intellectual household. Their father was the medical officer of Nueve de Julio, a small city near Buenos Aires named for Argentina’s Independence Day, on July 9, 1816.

Annabel attended local schools. Hoping to be a doctor, she enrolled in a pre-medicine program at the University of Buenos Aires but left after a year. She married Mr. Battistella in 1956. She began dancing professionally but soon found that stripping was more lucrative. The family emigrated to the United States in 1963.

In a turbulent life of family and financial pressures, she told People magazine in 1975, she attempted suicide twice and had several abortions and a series of cosmetic surgeries to turn up her nose, flatten her stomach and enhance her breasts. But among the benefits of her fame, she said, was a modest affluence — and at least one rave review of her book.

“I loved it,” her daughter Maria, then 16, told People.

To which Ms. Foxe added: “My children do not care what I did. I guess they think I am a good mother and a good woman — that’s all that matters to them.”

New claims surrounding Malcolm X assassination surface in letter written on former NYPD officer’s death bed

JULIA JACOBO

Sun, February 21, 2021

New allegations surrounding the death of Malcolm X have surfaced in a letter written by a former New York City Police Department officer on his death bed.

On Jan. 25, 2011, Ray Wood, who was serving as an undercover police officer on the day of Malcolm X’s death, wrote a letter in which he admitted he “participated in actions that in hindsight were deplorable and detrimental to the advancement of my own black people.”

When Wood was hired by the NYPD in 1964, his job was to “infiltrate civil rights organizations” to find evidence of criminal activity so the FBI could discredit the subjects and arrest its leaders, Wood wrote in the letter obtained by ABC News.

Wood’s handler devised the arrest of two of Malcolm X’s “key” security detail members in a plot to bomb the Statue of Liberty days before his 1965 assassination, Wood wrote. The plot involved three members of a Black “terrorist group” and a Canadian woman who were planning to dynamite the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell and the Washington Monument, the New York Times reported on Feb. 16, 1965.

“It was my assignment to draw the two men into a felonious federal crime, so that they could be arrested by the FBI and kept away from managing Malcolm X’s door security on February 21, 1965,” Wood wrote. “… At that time I was not aware that Malcolm X was the target.”

PHOTO: Malcolm X reacts during a speech at a rally . (Time Life Pictures/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images, FILE)

Malcolm X was assassinated in Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom while addressing the Organization of Afro-American Unity on Feb. 21, 1965. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of his murder.

Wood alleged in the letter that “his actions on behalf of the New York City Police Department (BOSSI) were done under duress and fear,” adding that he could have faced “detrimental consequences” if he did not follow the orders of his handlers.

“After witnessing repeated brutality at the hands of my coworkers (Police), I tried to resign,” he wrote. “Instead I was threatened with arrest by pinning marijuana and alcohol trafficking charges on me if I did not follow through with the assignments.”

Wood wrote that, as he faced failing health, he was concerned that the family of Thomas Johnson, one of the men convicted of killing Malcolm X, would not be able to exonerate him after Wood died. Johnson was arrested at the Audubon Ballroom the night Malcolm X was killed to protect Wood’s cover and “the secrets of the FBI and NYPD,” Wood wrote.

Wood placed his full confession into the care of his cousin, Reginald Wood Jr., and requested that the information be held until after his death.

“It is my hope that this information is received with the understanding that I have carried these secrets with a heavy heart and remorsefully regret my participation in this matter,” Wood wrote.

PHOTO: Malcolm X gestures during a speech at a rally. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images, FILE)

Wood’s cousin, who wrote the book “The Ray Wood Story,” published earlier this month, described Wood to “Good Morning America” as a “good man that was tricked and forced to betray his own people.”

“And he felt ill and remorse for that,” Reggie Wood said.

Last year, the New York City district attorney’s office launched another investigation into Malcolm X’s death and those convicted after the documentary “Who Killed Malcolm X?” aired on Netflix.

In response to an ABC News inquiry, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office stated, “Our office’s review of this matter is active and ongoing.”

CONTINUE READING AT

Rennie Davis, ‘Chicago Seven’ activist, dies at 80

FILE - In this Feb. 28, 1970, file photo, the seven defendants in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial hold a press conference in Chicago after the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals granted their request for bail. Left to right, Lee Weiner, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, (behind Hoffman), Jerry Rubin and John Froiners. Dellinger holds his granddaughter, Michelle Burd. Davis, one of the “Chicago Seven” who was tried for organizing an anti-Vietnam War protest outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago that turned violent, has died at age 80. Davis died on Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2021, of lymphoma at his home in Berthoud, Colo.

By James Anderson | AP

Feb. 5, 2021 at 1:12 p.m. EST

DENVER — Rennie Davis, one of the “Chicago Seven” activists who was tried for organizing an anti-Vietnam War protest outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago in which thousands clashed with police in a bloody confrontation that horrified a nation watching live on television, has died. He was 80.

Davis died Tuesday of lymphoma at his home in Berthoud, Colorado, his wife, Kirsten Liegmann, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

A longtime peace activist, Davis was national director of the community organizing program for the anti-war Students for a Democratic Society and was a protest coordinator for the Chicago convention.

Some 3,000 anti-war demonstrators clashed with police and Illinois National Guardsmen on Aug. 28, 1968, near the convention. Police clubbed demonstrators and carried out mass arrests. Davis himself was seriously injured and taken to a hospital. An investigative commission later described the clash as a “police riot.”

Davis and four co-defendants — Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and David Dellinger — were convicted of conspiracy to incite a riot during the “Chicago Seven” trial in 1969 and 1970. A federal appeals court overturned the convictions, citing errors by U.S. District Judge Julius Hoffman.

Co-defendants John Froines and Lee Weiner were acquitted. An eighth defendant, Bobby Seale, was tried separately, convicted of contempt and sentenced to four years in prison. That conviction also was overturned.

Davis was “one of the most important nuts and bolts organizers of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and the early 1970s,” said David Farber, a distinguished professor of history at the University of Kansas who has written four books about the 1960s — including “Chicago ’68” — which details the anti-war protests in Chicago.

Unlike the more famous members of what became known as the “Chicago Seven” — including Hoffman and Rubin — Farber said Davis “was not a celebrity, but he was a very essential organizer for the anti-war movement.”

“He was the one negotiating with the (Mayor Richard J.) Daley administration, trying to get permits and the right to march and rally,” Farber said. “He was the hands-on organizer … doing very practical, pragmatic things.”

He said the protest became famous not because of how many people showed up “but because a commission later determined that there had been a ‘police riot.’” And because of the TV coverage of the Democratic Convention, “images of this protest were seen all over the United States and indeed all over the world,” Farber said.

Police targeted Davis and beat him on the head with batons, Farber said.

“It became a famous example of how a local government could stop protests from happening. It’s very relevant today,” Farber said.

In 1971, Davis also organized a mass demonstration against the Vietnam War that was designed to tie up traffic in Washington, D.C.

Davis’ wife said his legacy goes well beyond his pacifist activism. He moved to Colorado, where he studied and taught spirituality and entered the business world, selling life insurance and running a think tank that developed technologies for the environment. He became a venture capitalist and a lecturer on meditation and self-awareness, Liegmann said.

She said he pursued a spiritual path designed to create awareness of the planet even as he was dispensing business advice as a venture capitalist.

“Everybody knows him as the ’60s activist, and really what he would want to be remembered for is his vision for a new humanity — the magnificence of who we are,” Liegmann said.

Davis was born on May 23, 1940, in Lansing, Michigan, and raised in Berryville, Virginia. He graduated from Oberlin College and earned a master’s degree from the University of Illinois.

Davis got his start as one of the key community organizers for Students for a Democratic Society in the mid-1960s, Farber said. Davis was originally based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but helped oversee community organizing projects nationwide.

In the early 1970s, Farber said Davis became disillusioned with the more violent course the anti-war movement was taking.

“One of the things people always said about Rennie Davis was that he was a gentle man. He was not a rabble rouser, he was not an angry, hostile person. He deeply believed in a more just and fair and equitable society and pursued it nonviolently all his life,” Farber said.

In addition to Liegmann, Davis is survived by three children from previous marriages: daughters Lia Davis, 44, and Maya Davis, 28; and a son, Sky Davis, 26; as well as three siblings and two grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements were pending. Liegmann said a public memorial would be held at a future date over social media.

“He is so beloved that I owe that to the world,” she said.

___

Associated Press writer Rick Callahan in Indianapolis contributed to this report.

Rennie Davis, ‘Chicago Seven’ activist and leader of New Left, dies at 80

Three members of the Chicago Seven — Rennie Davis, center, with Abbie Hoffman, left, and Jerry Rubin — hold a news conference in 1970.

Emily Langer

Feb. 4, 2021 at 12:19 a.m. EST

Rennie Davis, one of the leftist activists collectively known as the “Chicago Seven” who were tried in federal court for their role in instigating the clashes at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, an event that sealed his place in the annals of the counterculture, died Feb. 2 at his home in Berthoud, Colo. He was 80.

He had been diagnosed two weeks earlier with lymphoma, said his wife, Kirsten Liegmann.

Along with organizers such as Tom Hayden, Mr. Davis was an early leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, the wide-ranging activist organization that became a defining element of the New Left. Mr. Davis assisted Hayden in drafting the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the SDS, and he remained a force on the political scene through the rest of that decade.

With his short hair and bookish glasses — a Washington Post reporter once described him as looking “more like a seminarian than a revolutionary” — Mr. Davis appeared at least superficially to be an outlier among his more hirsute colleagues.

The son of a top economist in the Truman administration, he had grown up in the Washington suburbs and then on his family’s chicken farm in rural Virginia, where, he boasted years later, he became the chicken-judging champion of the Middle Atlantic.

He turned to activism as a student in the late 1950s and early ’60s at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he joined the SDS and initially occupied himself with efforts to bring about greater economic equality in poor communities.

“He was profoundly committed to mobilizing people and very skilled at it, very articulate, very well-organized — an interesting combination of somebody who had oratorical skill and at the same time organizational smarts,” said Todd Gitlin, a former SDS leader, professor at Columbia University and author of books including “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.”

Gitlin described Mr. Davis as “very personable and magnetic,” someone who “recruited supporters with ease.”

Mr. Davis’s interests gradually expanded to include marshaling opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Tensions over the conflict boiled over at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago as Vice President Hubert Humphrey defeated U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.), who had campaigned on an antiwar platform, for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Thousands of demonstrators had gathered in Chicago, where violent confrontations with police and the National Guard ensued. Mr. Davis recalled being struck in the head and knocked to the ground. “I was on the ground crawling with my two arms trying to get away and just being clubbed and clubbed and clubbed,” he told the Guardian newspaper of London years later.

A federal commission convened to review the incident described the events as tantamount to a “police riot,” with law enforcement officials responding in disproportionate fashion to the actions of protesters, some of whom were peaceful and some of whom were seeking to provoke.

The next year, Mr. Davis was among eight defendants — the others included Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, John Froines and Bobby Seale — indicted on charges stemming from a conspiracy to incite a riot. They were known initially as the Chicago Eight and became the Chicago Seven after the charges against Seale, a Black Panther leader, were moved to separate proceedings and eventually dropped.

“In choosing the eight of us, the Government has lumped together all the strands of dissent in the sixties,” Mr. Davis told the New York Times. “We respond by saying the movement of the past decade is on trial here.”

The dramatic, at times circuslike courtroom saga held national attention on the Chicago Seven for months. Five of the defendants, including Mr. Davis, were convicted of crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. They appealed, and in 1972 a court overturned the convictions in a decision that criticized conduct by the judge and the prosecutor.

Decades later, the trial remains the subject of abiding public fascination. A film about the episode, “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” written and directed by Aaron Sorkin and featuring actor Alex Sharp as Mr. Davis, was released last year.

As the 1960s gave way to the ’70s, Mr. Davis appeared to become increasingly militant, particularly in his opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1970 he told a gathering of Columbia students that if the 1960s had called for sit-ins, then the new decade demanded the burning of banks.

“If this generation is to survive,” he said, according to an account in the Times, “it has to begin to fight.”

Mr. Davis speaks to antiwar demonstrators in Washington on May 2, 1971.

Traveling to communist North Vietnam, he later wrote, he “started to feel like someone who had slipped into one of the American colonies from Great Britain to witness a small band of freedom fighters during our own country’s war of independence.” In 1971 he helped organize the May Day demonstrations in Washington, where protesters — thousands of whom were arrested — erected barricades throughout the District to voice their opposition to the war.

Protesters shut down D.C. traffic before. It helped end the Vietnam War — and reshaped American activism.

Two years later, Mr. Davis announced that he planned to forgo traditional activism and pursue a more just social order as a devotee of Guru Maharaj Ji, a 15-year-old Indian mystic who had cultivated an international following.

“I would cross the planet on my hands and knees to touch his toe,” Mr. Davis said in 1973, describing the guru’s teachings as a “practical way to fulfill all the dreams of the movement of the early sixties and seventies.”

The announcement prompted bewilderment among admirers as well as critics.

“It was one thing for Tom Hayden to marry a well intentioned if slightly flat-headed movie star,” journalist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in The Post, referring to Hayden’s marriage to actress Jane Fonda, “or some of the other movement heavies to turn into the psychological basket cases a number have become.”

But “Rennie,” von Hoffman continued, “was the most stable, the calmest, the most enduring of that group of young people who set out to change America at the beginning of the 1960s.”

Von Hoffmann attributed Mr. Davis’s conversion at least in part to the dissolution of the protesters who had once surrounded him.

“In the spring of 1970, this generation believed it could overcome all,” von Hoffman quoted Mr. Davis as saying, “but then came the summer . . . drift and no direction and by the fall of 1970 we really did lose the generation. The activists continued but after that it wasn’t the same. People went into the country, they were into drugs and into themselves.”

Rennard Cordon Davis was born in Lansing, Mich., on May 23, 1940. He attended high school in Clarke County, Va., where he was student body president, worked on the newspaper and yearbook, and played varsity basketball in addition to his activities with the 4-H club.

He graduated from Oberlin in 1962 and later received a master’s degree in labor relations from the University of Illinois. At the start of his involvement with the SDS, he led the Economic Research and Action Project, an initiative that placed activists in low-income communities and sought to organize what they described as an “interracial movement of the poor.”

Mr. Davis’s marriages to Luane Abend and Valerie Albicker ended in divorce.

Besides Liegmann, whom he married in 2018, his survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Lia Davis of Lakewood, Colo.; two children from his second marriage, Maya Davis of Boise, Idaho, and Sky Davis of Denver; a sister; two brothers; and two grandchildren.

At the time of his death, Mr. Davis was chairman of a foundation established, according to its website, to remake a human society that has become “a wrecking ball to every natural living system” and to forge “an unstoppable force for a new way of living on Earth.”

“I try not to be reckless,” he had told in The Post in 1971, “and try to avoid confrontations that can lead to prison or death, but I’ll never stop working. . . . I’m really pulled toward a life that lets you keep in touch with yourself.”

The woman who helped protect Lincoln from the men who tried to kill him in 1861

A portrait of Kate Warne, the first female detective employed by Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, in 1866.

By Petula Dvorak

Feb. 15, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EST

Her invisibility, born of 19th-century sexism, was Kate Warne’s most powerful asset.

Because no one suspected that the beguiling woman mingling in Alabama social circles was a private eye hunting a master embezzler.

The secessionists flirting and gossiping with the lovely “Mrs. Cherry” at Baltimore galas didn’t worry about tipping off the charming Southern belle to their assassination plot.

And while a city bristling with weapons, rumors, assassins, spies and officers anxiously waited for the heavily guarded President-elect Abraham Lincoln to pass through Baltimore on the way to his 1861 inauguration — and possibly straight into a trap — they ignored the young widow accompanying her unusually tall, invalid brother in a sleeping berth headed to Washington.

Lincoln’s first inauguration met with threats of kidnapping, killing and militias

President Abraham Lincoln sits for a portrait on Feb. 5, 1865. (Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress/Getty Images)

Warne rode in that berth, alongside Lincoln, all the way to the Capitol that night. Her sleepless vigilance inspired her company’s slogan: Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency — We Never Sleep.

The story of America’s first female private detective started the way most private-eye stories begin — a pretty dame walked into a Chicago office in 1856.

“In a very pleasant tone she introduced herself as Mrs. Kate Warne, stating that she was a widow, and that she had come to inquire whether I would not employ her as a detective,” Allan Pinkerton wrote, in “The Expressman and the Detective,” one of his many memoirs.

“At this time female detectives were unheard of,” Pinkerton wrote. “I told her it was not custom to employ women as detectives, but asked her what she thought she could do.”

Warne told Pinkerton “that she could go and worm out secrets in many places to which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access.” He was impressed with the 23-year-old and decided to hire her.

“True, it was the first experiment of the sort that had ever been tried; but we live in a progressive age, in a progressive country,” he wrote.

Not long after he hired her, Pinkerton dispatched Warne to Montgomery, Ala., to befriend the wife of the main suspect in a crime the nation was talking about — the $50,000 robbery (about $1.5 million today) of the Adams Express Company.

Warne made herself at home in Alabama, befriended the wife, got the confession and even found the buried cash. The New York Times followed the case on its front pages.

“She succeeded far beyond my utmost expectations, and I soon found her an invaluable acquisition to my force,” Pinkerton wrote.

That Alabama training would serve her well on the biggest assignment of her career in 1861, when America was deeply divided and she could mingle easily among increasingly agitated Southerners.

A bust of Lincoln sits in the window of the district offices of Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) in Springfield, Ill. (Daniel Acker for The Washington Post)

“It was whispered that there was a plan … to blow up the Capitol and seize the arsenal and navy yard; that Washington soon would be isolated, with railroad tracks torn up, bridges burned, telegraph wires destroyed; that armed secret societies were springing up throughout Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, ready and geared for action,” wrote Norma B. Cuthbert, introducing the collection of Pinkerton papers from the Huntington Library in “Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot,” which she edited.

“To this end every scheme focused on eliminating Abraham Lincoln, and Baltimore was generally conceded to be the logical site for the trap to be sprung,” Pinkerton had written.

On his 11-day, whistle-stop tour from Springfield, Ill., to his Washington inauguration, Lincoln was planning a stop in Baltimore. That’s where Pinkerton sent the best agent for the job — Warne.

She went by Mrs. Cherry or Mrs. Barley, poured on the Southern accent she learned in Alabama and pinned a black and white cockade — the knot of ribbons signaling allegiance to the South — to her chest. She partied with the secessionists at the legendary Barnum’s City Hotel, described by some as one of the most opulent in America at the time. It was also the secessionists’ headquarters.

There, she learned of the various plots to kill Lincoln. The most plausible one, according to Pinkerton’s account, was a plan to attack Lincoln while he was getting into the carriage that would take him from his Pennsylvania train when it arrived at Calvert Street Station, across the city and to his Washington-bound train.

Pinkerton tried to persuade Lincoln to cancel all his stops — especially the one in Baltimore — but Lincoln insisted on keeping his schedule, which included dinners and speeches and a flag-raising over Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The man who called himself Lincoln’s bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, tried to give the president-elect a revolver and Bowie knife for protection. Pinkerton was horrified and wouldn’t have it.

When Lincoln’s future secretary of state, William H. Seward, independently heard about the Baltimore plot and urged Lincoln to believe it, the president-elect finally listened to Pinkerton and Warne and went along with the plan they hatched to get Lincoln through Baltimore.

The president wore an old overcoat, a soft hat and possibly a shawl over his shoulders. The accounts vary.

Lincoln takes the oath of office as the 16th president of the United States on March 4, 1861. (AP)

In her report about that night, filing it as “M.B.” (Mrs. Barley), Warne described how she bought four tickets in Philadelphia for a sleeping berth to Washington via Baltimore and set out ahead of time to secure them. They were unlike any she’d seen before: not reserved by ticket, but rather, a first-come, first-served free-for-all. So she tipped the conductor a half-dollar to keep the four she had selected unoccupied as she waited for Lincoln, Lamon and Pinkerton.

The president-elect was friendly, she wrote, even though he was surprised that a woman, rather than a cavalry squad, would whisk him through Baltimore.

“I believe it has not hitherto been one of the prerequisites of the presidency to acquire in full bloom so charming and accomplished a female relation,” Lincoln told her.

Her description of the president-elect in her report was not so generous:

“Mr. Lincoln is very homely, and so very tall that he could not lay straight in his berth,” she wrote.

She stayed awake, by Lincoln’s side, the entire night. Lincoln was safely delivered to Washington.

Telegraphs from Pinkerton (known as “Plums”) confirmed the success: “Plums has Nuts.” Yes, Lincoln wasn’t Eagle or POTUS. His code name for this operation was “Nuts.” When Waldo Porter Johnson, one of the peace delegates gathered in Washington to try to avert a civil war, heard the news, he blurted: “How the devil did he get through Baltimore?”

Warne inspired Pinkerton to hire scores of female detectives, making Warne the superintendent of all of them.

During the Civil War, Pinkerton and Warne went undercover in Southern society, posing as a partying couple and gathering intelligence for the Union. After the war, Warne continued her adventures, going undercover as a fortune teller or befriending a murder suspect’s wife to solve cases and make headlines.

Warne died in 1868 of pneumonia and is buried in the Pinkerton family plot. Her name is misspelled on her tombstone as “Warn.” She was either 34 or 35; her birth month is unknown.

“She was a marked woman amongst her sex, with a large, active brain, great mental power, and excellent judge of character, and possessed of a strong, active vitality,” said an obituary in the Democratic Enquirer.

“In her career while she lived she developed that her sex could do much more than had ever before been ascribed to their sphere,” the obituary reads. “She leaves a void in the female detective department which it will be difficult ever to fill. As she lives, so she died, a strong, pure, devoted woman.”

Lincoln, by then, was already gone: fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth inside Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, just weeks after his second inauguration. This time, it was his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, by his side, not Kate Warne.

Father of Capitol rioter helped thwart potential 2005 terrorist attack linked to Oklahoma City bombing

Updated Feb 14, 9:00 AM; Posted Feb 14, 9:00 AM

Supporters of then-President Donald Trump try to break through a police barrier Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol in Washington.AP File Photo/Julio Cortez

By Gus Burns | fburns@mlive.com

The FBI says Karl Dresch of Calumet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was part of the crowd that stormed and breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in what some have described as an attempt at domestic terrorism.

Nearly 16 years prior, in March 2005, his father, Stephen Dresch, helped the FBI thwart a potential terrorist attack linked to anti-government Oklahoma City bomber and Lapeer native Terry Nichols.

Karl Dresch, 40, is now behind bars facing federal charges of entering and remaining in a restricted grounds; disorderly and disruptive conduct; disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, illegal demonstrating in a Capitol building and tampering with a witness, victim or informant.

If convicted, Karl Dresch could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison for his role in the Capitol attack by supporters of President Donald Trump that resulted in the deaths of a police officer and four rioters, including one who was fatally shot by Capitol police and three others who died of “medical emergencies.”

It isn’t the first time someone from the Dresch family has made national news.

On April Fool’s Day 2005, FBI investigators removed long-hidden explosive materials that had been stashed in a home previously owned by Nichols’ in Herington, Kansas, in part, based on a tip provided by Karl Dresch’s father.

Retired FBI spokesman and Special Agent Jeff Lanza remembers arriving to the scene and relaying what few details were available to curious reporters and TV news crews waiting nearby.

“It would be an amazing coincidence that the same family would have information pertaining to two very, very important and historical events in our county’s history,” Lanza said when contacted by MLive this week.

By 2005, Nichols had been convicted and sentenced to life in prison, where he remains today, for his role in the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. His co-conspirator, Timothy McVeigh, died by lethal injection four years prior.

“There was some lead that there was either weapons or materials related to weapons, like blasting caps and things like that,” said Lanza, who now earns a living giving speeches about cybersecurity and identity theft protection.

“It was just a couple weeks shy of the 10th anniversary of the bombing, so making that discovery was not only interesting but also coincidental on timing,” he said. “I know stuff was found under a foot or so of gravel that was under the stairwell. It was an area that wasn’t searched during multiple searches of Nichols’ house.”

The tip that led FBI agents to bomb-making materials beneath Nichols’ house in central Kansas came through Stephen Dresch, who learned about it from imprisoned mobster Anthony Scarpa Jr., a high-ranking member of the infamous New York City Colombo crime family.

Scarpa Jr. told Dresch he learned the information during a conversation with Nichols. Scarpa Jr. and Nichols were both serving federal prison sentences in Colorado, Scarpa Jr. for conspiracy to murder and drug trafficking.

Nichols told the Oklahoman newspaper weeks later that rumors he was plotting a second terrorist attack using the explosives on the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing were false.

Stephen Dresch, who died at 62 in 2006, worked as an international, for-hire — and sometimes pro bono — investigator.

He developed a relationship with Scarpa Jr. while investigating the mafioso’s hit-man father, Gregory “Grim Reaper” Scarpa Sr., said Angela Clemente, a forensic intelligence analyst and congressional consultant who worked with Stephen Dresch at the time.

Muskegon-born Clemente, who now lives in New Jersey, teamed with Dresch in 1998 to investigate an FBI agent and mob informant handler, Roy Lindley DeVecchio, who would eventually be indicted on allegations that he protected and sometimes gave confidential information to Scarpa Sr. that the mobster used to commit at least four murders in the 1980s.

The case was later dismissed, but Stephen Dresch and Clemente developed a strong bond through their work. She compared Stephen Dresch to a father figure.

“He was fantastic,” Clemente said of Karl Dresch’s father. “I’ve never met anybody more honest and transparent.”

Stephen Dresch earned a Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1970. After working as a professor at universities, including Yale and Rutgers, he became a dean and professor of Michigan Technological University’s School of Business and Engineering Administration in Houghton, near Calumet, between 1985 and 1990.

There, he did some of his first freelance detective work, uncovering financial corruption stemming from university fundraising efforts. He resigned in 1990 and embarked on a short-lived political career, serving in the state House from 1991 to 1992 as a Republican. Subsequent campaigns for U.S. House and to regain his state House seat failed.

He served on the Board of Scholars for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which describes itself as a nonprofit research and educational institute aimed at advancing free markets and limited government, and he was the focus of a documentary named “The Anthrax War,” which explored his international investigation into 2001 anthrax attacks across the globe.

“A Republican-leaning libertarian from the notoriously independent-minded upper peninsula of Michigan … Dresch wore the physical trappings of an iconoclast,” a description of Stephen Dresch on the documentary website reads.

By the time filmmakers Bob Coen and Eric Nadler began working with Dresch, “age had bleached his full beard and long hair; years of chain smoking had stained his fingers and teeth.”

“He looked, many would comment, more like the Unabomber than a tireless crime buster who harried the FBI to catch America’s most-wanted. But even in the last years of his life there was an unquenchable youthful light in his eyes — a ray of determination to somehow lessen the badness caused by the overwhelming abundance of malefactors.”

The description of Dresch said he “gave off an aura of mild wackiness and might be written off as a ‘conspiracy nut,’” if he didn’t have so many facts to support his claims.

Clemente said Dresch adored his wife, Linda, whom he married at age 19. Oddly, she said, she doesn’t recall him mentioning his son Karl Dresch, who would have been about 18 when they first spoke.

Stephen and Linda Dresch had four children together, including another son and two daughters.

Clemente said Stephen Dresch was a big proponent of government transparency and often said, “sunlight is the best disinfectant for corruption.”

His years of fighting for truth and justice, often against institutions of power, left Stephen Dresch drained and dejected near the end, Clemente said.

“Before he died, he felt that no matter what we do (to fight against corruption), it’s not going to get anywhere,” she said. “I think he had kind of given up and decided the system is just too bad and us trying to correct it is not working. I think he felt kind of tired.”

She described him as politically neutral, “not a conservative and not a liberal,” and said he would never have condoned the violence his son is accused of participating in at the Capitol.

“Right from the start of our acquaintance I have been continuously impressed by Stephen’s intellectual capabilities, breadth of knowledge, personal courage and, above all, his profoundly patriotic attachment to the ideals of the American Revolution,” former Michigan Tech Professor Karol I. Pelc said in one tribute published by the Mackinac Center about Stephen Dresh following his death in 2006. “I will forever remember the stimulating discussions with Stephen ranging in their scope from philosophy to economics and politics.”

Clemente said Stephen Dresch was diagnosed with lung cancer and died soon afterward; she offered him one of her lungs for transplant, she said. He declined.