All the President's Men: a local angle

I watched on tv this evening All the President's Men.  I love the movie, and it's probably about my fifth viewing.  Now is the time for the cliché about "always discovering something new."  In the scenes shot around famous Washington buildings and monuments, the camera often dwells, just for a frame or two longer than seems natural, on the sightseers--kids on a school field trip, tourists standing in line.  If I noticed them before, it never occurred to me that some ironic commentary might be intended.  All the innocent, patriotic heartlanders come to pay homage to the sacred sites while "Woodstein" was figuring out who controlled the slush fund to pay the burglars and dirty-tricksters who worked for the Nixon administration.

I'd forgotten a local angle, too.  At one point in the movie, Woodward places a call to Kenneth Dahlberg, Midwest finance chair of the Committee for the Re-election of the President.  Dahlberg lived in Orono, Minnesota, a tony suburb of Minneapolis on the north side of Lake Minnetonka, west of the city.  In the movie, he sounds frazzled on the phone, and one feels that a guilty conscience about his part in the corruption is the likely cause.  But then he says he's upset because his neighbor has just been kidnapped, and locals of a certain age will immediately realize that he's referring to "the Piper kidnapping," one of the great unsolved crimes in Minnesota history.  On July 27, 1972, Virginia Piper, wife of Harry Piper--the family name is the Piper of the firm then known as Piper Jaffray & Hopwood--was kidnapped while gardening outside her home.  Apparently, that was the day that Bob Woodward called the Pipers' neighbor, Kenneth Dahlberg, to ask how a check made out to him for $25,000 had ended up in the possession of one of the Watergate burglars.  The kidnappers left typewritten instructions at the Piper home requesting the delivery of a million dollars in unmarked 20-dollar bills, according to precise instructions, the next evening, which was a Friday.  Against the advice of the FBI, Mr Piper got 50,000 twenties into a duffel bag and, unaccompanied and unsurveilled by law enforcement, drove a circuitous route to "a dark parking lot behind a seedy bar in the shadow of downtown Minneapolis."  He then went inside the bar to make a phone call in which he was to receive his next instruction, and while he was inside the bar the duffel bag holding a million dollars was removed from his car.  I don't know if the name of the bar is in the public domain, but if it is, and you are a Piper kidnapping aficionado, I'd love to know its name.  If it remained open for another few years, I may well have been there.  

So that was Friday night after the Thursday kidnapping.  I distinctly remember that I played golf with my dad and a neighbor at Gross Golf Course, in northeast Minneapolis, that Saturday: the neighbor and my dad talked about it all through the round.  That morning, a Twin Cities clergyman had received a phone call from a man who described Mrs Piper's whereabouts, and a few hours later--maybe while I was playing golf--she was found handcuffed and chained to a tree in the Jay Cooke State Park near Duluth.  She spent two nights alone in the woods.  

The twenties were unmarked, but their serial numbers were recorded, and only about $4000--a couple hundred bills--have ever turned up, mostly scattered around southern Minnesota.  About two weeks before the 5-year statute of limitations would have run, a couple of lifelong but small-time criminals--Donald Callahan and Kenneth Larson--were arrested and charged with the crime.  At trial, they were convicted, but two years later the conviction was thrown out on appeal and a subsequent trial resulted in their acquittal.  Lots of people doubt they had it in them to pull off such a crime and suspect they were either just the "muscle" or completely uninvolved.  In any event, the crime is officially unsolved, and some people believe there is, somewhere in Minnesota or perhaps western Wisconsin, a bag holding 990 k cash buried in the ground.  

Nixon and his men, however, are known to have been guilty.

Comments

[Lemmermöhle Annegret]

Hey Mr. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffmann!
Sitting in a small village in Germany, Münster and think about a lot things which happens in Cinema and TV. At the moment i look horse races and the life of Coco Chanel. We have here a lot of trouble and the politics and presidents go a difficult way. What i can do i wait for the next elections in Germany. I like to look Zootopia and funny Judy Hopps so i come through this complicated time. I wish you a good time and you have made very good films like the Clou, the horse whisperer or the parfume Annegret Lemmermöhle Eckenerstr. 5 48147 Münster Germany

[Annegret Lemmermöhle]

Sitting here in my little Münster Germany. Have seen The Mentalist and Criminal Minds. At the morning a rainy day. Music: Have you ever seen the rain. Germany is swimming at the moment, thats not really good. Wish you a good day. Annegret Lemmermöhle Eckenerstr. 5 48147 Münster Westfalen Deutschland