The Man with the Satchel

James Street in Newark, N.J. is like many U.S. city streets, almost a community in itself. Its atmosphere is faded elegance: a row of weather-beaten brick fronts with an occasional grubby little tobacco or tailor shop tacked on. In close-knit James Street, people keep tabs on their neighbors.

In September 1942, the dour, thickset man was first seen around Mrs. Marianna Mayer's James Street lodginghouse. His 12-by-16-ft. room on the parlor floor contained a daybed, couch, wardrobe, desk and a three-foot shelf of romantic German novels. Each morning he left the house at 8:30 for his job in Newark's Downtown Club. There he worked as a bookkeeper, and did not have even the opportunities a bus boy had to overhear talk among the club's members--mostly business executives engaged in making ships, radars, airplane parts. At 5:30 he returned to his room, almost always carrying a bulging briefcase. The neighbors tagged him "The Man with the Satchel."

Some evenings and on Sundays, he took walks with his landlady, who clung snugly to his arm. Otherwise he seemed to have no friends. Storekeepers found him quick-tempered, particularly when they had no cigarets for him. But even the most suspicious of his neighbors did not connect Mrs. Mayer's lodger with many unexplained neighborhood happenings. Sometimes, for hours, strangers sat in parked cars with motors running, only to drive away, return again. At night other strangers prowled the block.

Invisible Ink. Last week the strangers in parked cars proved to be FBI men. They arrested the man with the satchel. Carl Emil Ludwig Krepper, as a Nazi agent. They charged that 1) he had agreed to maintain a refuge for Nazi saboteurs in the U.S.; 2) he had sent a code letter to Germany, and received back two letters in code from his wife, Bertha, who is still in Germany.

In newspaper accounts from the triumphant FBI, residents of James Street quickly learned more about their neighbor: he was a naturalized citizen, and a Lutheran pastor for more than 20 years in northern New Jersey, until a trip to Germany in 1941. In Berlin, said the FBI, he had talked with Walter Kappe, boss of the Nazi saboteur school. When he returned to the U.S. (via Barcelona, nine days after Pearl Harbor) he quit the pulpit, became a bookkeeper.

The eight Nazi saboteurs who landed in the U.S. by submarine in June 1942 led the FBI to Krepper. As the FBI methodically ran every inch of the saboteurs' clothing through invisible-ink developers, an address appeared on a plain white handkerchief. It was: "Pas [Pastor] Krepper, Route 2, Rahway, N.J."

This was only a mail address, but it led the FBI on to Carl Krepper on James Street in Newark. The man with the satchel was patiently shadowed for 30 months. Then the FBI pounced.

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