A Most Unsavory Character
The most intriguing, and ultimately significant, munitions shipment from New York City was made by Leon Rasst, a notorious Russian émigré of most dubious character. Historian Michael C. Meyer identified Leon Rasst (often misspelled as Raast), as one of the financiers behind the arms of the German freighter Ypiranga, which triggered a US military intervention in Veracruz in 1914.
Rasst exemplifies the exotic characters that people our story, and thus merits discussion in some detail. Leon Moses Reichin (or Reichen, or Rychen) aka Leon Rasst, was born on July 17, 1866, in Homyel, Russia (today in Belarus). The Jewish family moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, around 1870, where his brother Josef (later José) was born in 1873. Leon would later use the more fashionable birthplace of St. Petersburg on various immigration forms. He left Russia sometime in the 1880s and appears on immigration records in Antwerp, Belgium, then Zurich, Switzerland. There he met and married his wife, Eliza (or Luise, Luisa, Elise). The couple had a daughter, Helen, in January 1896. In an apparently rushed departure, the Reichins shipped out to New York in February of that year. Upon arrival in Hoboken, customs inspectors could not help but notice the father’s “bulging pockets,” and searched him, while his wife and infant daughter went to a hotel. “Eighteen valuable gold watches were found in different parts of his clothing.” With Leon Reichin arrested, customs inspectors went to the hotel and searched Mrs. Reichin and her luggage but found nothing. On a hunch, or maybe hearing a strange rattle in the crib, the inspectors searched the baby. “Lifting up the long white dress of the wee maiden [they] found concealed in a necessary part of [the] baby’s clothing eighteen gold watches of great value.” The Reichin family thus entered the United States for the first time, making their mark with ample publicity, as newspapers excitedly covered the gold timepieces concealed in their baby’s diaper. Customs determined the value of the watches to be somewhere between $10,000 and $12,000 (around $250,000 to $300,000 in today’s value) and fined Reichin $100 for the attempted smuggling, while also confiscating the watches. The episode would foreshadow Reichin’s lifelong pursuit of petty crime, fraud, and miscellaneous crookedness.
The family moved to Puebla, Mexico, in short order. Reichin now changed his last name to Rasst, hoping to conceal his previous existence. The Swiss embassy in Mexico was not fooled. Apparently, the smuggled gold watches had not been Reichin’s. The family had barely settled in their new community of Puebla under the alias, when the Swiss government in September 1898 applied to the Díaz administration for “Leon Rasst, ó [aka] Leon Moses Reichin” to be extradited on a charge of fraud committed in Zurich, Switzerland. The crime amounted to 20,000 Swiss francs, matching the customs agents’ estimate of the value of the watches. The Mexican government refused to extradite the Russian immigrant on the ground that fraud was not covered as a cause for extradition, although the offense was punishable by penal servitude in Mexico.
That did not mean that Reichin aka Rasst would stay out of trouble in his newfound home. Far from it. In 1897 he was accused of robbery but beat the charges in court. In 1898, two trading companies Rasst had founded, Rasst, Headen y Compañía in Puebla and A.M. Davis and Company in New York, sold anything from semi-precious stones to coffee and liquor through German merchants and New York middlemen. The first documented victims were clients who paid down money for “six [railroad] cars” of onyx, which were supposedly stored in Veracruz. According to court documents, the onyx was already sold to someone else. Rasst used the value of the onyx orders to borrow money from a Mexican bank and private investors. He used those funds to buy a liquor factory.
These wild international trading schemes quickly turned into several court cases involving Mexican, German, and American plaintiffs. The fraud not only revolved around onyx, but also 50,000 German Marks worth of coffee, for which Rasst received down payments from a company in Hamburg but never delivered, and at least five loans he did not repay worth 60,000 German Marks. Through a fraudulent bond scheme, Rasst had signed most of the loaned money over to his wife, then declared bankruptcy for his two front companies. Judge Francisco Perez in Mexico City decided on July 9, 1898, that Rasst through his now defunct companies had cheated customers in Mexico, New York, and Hamburg, falsified documents, and “abused customers’ trust.” He was ordered to pay 10,000 pesos in gold and was sentenced to prison.
Rasst seemed to have only spent a few months in Belén, the notorious federal prison in Mexico City. The El Paso Daily Herald reported on January 6, 1899, that all but one charge against Rasst were dropped. “It is very likely,” mused the paper, “that Rasst is a free man by this time.” One would imagine that the Mexican government insisted on the 10,000-peso fine in gold. The paper claimed that Rasst was “the former Puebla banker.” Of course, the international fraudster was not a respectable “former banker” or anything of the sort. At that point he was a convicted felon who had done time. And this was not the only brush with the law for Rasst. Fresh out of prison, in 1900, he was sued for fraud once more. This case was dismissed.
By the turn of the century, Rasst was involved in various businesses: textiles, liquor, money lending, international trade, and real estate. While in prison, another child was born, albeit not by his wife. The baby died only one year later. After returning to Puebla from his stint in Belén, the convicted felon recovered some of his reputation. In a history of the city of Puebla, Rasst appears in the first decade of the twentieth century as a respectable Jewish businessman who owned a textile mill with the Teutonic name, “La Prusia.” The businessman also had another child in 1907, son Benjamin “Benno” Reichin Rasst Moses, this time with his wife. Rasst also acted as a broker for an investor in the Ferrocarríl de Capulac a Chachapa in 1909.
Without fail, fraud, illegal business schemes, and theft follow Rasst’s ventures like a putrid smell. In a pattern that stretched through twenty-six lawsuits against career criminal activity between 1901 and 1913, Rasst would be a defendant eighteen times; business partners had been cheated, loans not repaid, and investors had lost property and shares. And, a second pattern seems to be that he now hired good legal representation, such as the elite member of the Spanish community of Puebla, Manuel Sanchez Gavito. Instead of serving more hard time, he beat most of his accusers. According to historian Andrew Paxman, the crooked dealings and high-powered legal representation paid off. In the first decade of the twentieth century Rasst owned “at least four rural estates, various Puebla City houses, and a hotel.”
The illegal schemes Rasst devised in his criminal career also involved artificially, and, as it turned out, fraudulently, inflating his social stature. To that effect, he used the Russian government. By 1910, Rasst’s letterhead represented him a “consular agent” for the Russian Empire in the city of Puebla. Of course, once more, he was nothing of the sort. Puebla’s governor, Mucio Martinez, finally objected to Rasst’s misrepresentations that went so far that he even affixed the “Imperial Russian coat of arms … above his front door.” The governor threw him in jail in October 1910, and apparently had the fraudster roughed up a bit. But here shines Rasst’s brilliant career criminal mind: While in prison for impersonating a Russian diplomat, he convinced the Russian ambassador to Mexico, Alexandre Stalewsky, to come to his aid. The Russian government interceded and had Rasst released from prison.
Not content with just regaining his liberty, Rasst also wanted to continue the use of his fake diplomatic title. He apparently convinced the ambassador of his importance to Russian-Mexican commerce. Initially, the Russian government officially and categorically denied that the businessman ever received a diplomatic commission, but the Russian ambassador finally acquiesced to letting Rasst use the meaningless term “consular agent,” since “a predecessor might have promised it and failed to complete the paperwork.” Relentless in the pursuit of his accusers, Rasst even succeeded in having Governor Martinez publicly reprimanded, which reverberated all the way from Mexico to American newspapers. “In a message from Minister of Foreign Relations [Enrique] Creel, in which the minister says to the governor of the state that Rasst did not take the title of consul in bad faith, but that the accused man believed his appointment was legal. On this account, the minister urges that no steps be taken against Mr. Rasst.”
Rasst would use his fake title for the rest of his career. He even added to the title as needed. MID agent William Doyas reported in 1918 that Rasst “stated that he is a former Russian Consular Agent of Mexico” [not just Puebla]. Bureau operative Harry Berliner, always perceptive when it came to judging people, wrote in 1918: “Rasst is a Russian Jew of the lowest type and is a very slippery customer. Agent is personally acquainted with him.” It should be noted that Berliner, himself Jewish, did not likely cast Rasst in a negative light based on antisemitism.
