Counterfeit Hero

Book excerpt: Friends called Duquesne "the best company in the world." Prison officials considered him "one of the most dangerous criminals in the United States." FBI agents hot on his trail found him "likable." At one time or another the South Africa-born soldier of fortune was a prisoner of war, explorer, African hunting adviser to Teddy Roosevelt, inventor, reporter, novelist, publicist for Joseph P. Kennedy's movie company, stockbroker, womanizer, spy, murderer, and certified lunatic. Thanks to the classic 1945 movie The House on 92nd Street, he is best remembered as the central figure in a ring of thirty-three Nazi spies arrested in New York City in 1941. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called their arrest "the greatest spy roundup in U.S. history," and their trial was one of the nation's longest and most celebrated. For Duquesne, it was the end of a forty-year adventure.