SWINDLING SOCIOPATH

‘‘Crime of the Century!” roared The Times of London headline. On a clear Saturday in December 1875, a massive explosion had caused dozens of casualties, many fatal, in the German port town of Bremerhaven. A prominent American businessman living in Germany, William King Thomas, had insured a barrel of caviar that had slipped off its winch while being loaded aboard the passenger liner Mosel, on which Thomas was booked to England. Unexpectedly, the barrel exploded with a roar that was heard even in Hamburg, 60 miles away. Approximately 80 people were killed outright in the explosion and 50 more injured. Soon, Thomas was found fatally wounded in his cabin. He had shot himself, having left a note admitting his culpability for the catastrophe. The “caviar” was in reality dynamite and had been connected to a timer that Thomas had planned to go off days later while the Mosel was sailing in the Atlantic, its fate forever unknown, its perpetrator free of suspicion. Thomas intended to have disembarked by then. Instead, the “accident” would earn him a dubious posthumous sobriquet, “The Dynamite Fiend.”

The malign soul responsible for this tragedy was no American businessman. William King Thomas was an alias used by Alexander “Sandy” Keith, a native of Scotland who initially rose to prominence as a key Confederate sympathizer in the port city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Keith was, however, a scurrilous rogue, a sociopath motivated not by a desire to aid the South but by his own greed and a penchant for violence.

Keith’s evil nature has left many at a loss for words. Fellow blockade-runner John Wilkinson described him as “a coarse, ill-bred vulgarian of no social standing in the community.” Charles Tinker, a Union codebreaker