Target Manhattan

Eastlake (Cont’d)

But you finally got through to the Federal Reserve Director in Washington, didn’t you?

Yes. It took some doing. My secretary tracked him down. He was over at Treasury, having lunch with somebody. We finally patched through a line to him.

At what time?

Must have been about one thirty, one forty.

What was said in that conversation?

I spelled out the situation. He absorbed it as quickly as you could expect, but a thing like that takes some getting used to. He asked me a lot of questions. I only had answers to a few of them. I guess he wasn’t completely satisfied. He said he’d have to get back to me. He said he’d call Maitland himself, and then he’d have to talk to the FBI Director.

And did he?

Well, I wasn’t there, you know.

This isn’t a court proceeding. We have no rules against hearsay evidence. We’re simply trying to compose an overall picture.

All right. As far as I know he talked to both of them-Maitland and the FBI in Washington. Anyhow, he called me back and said he’d talked to them.

Fine. And what was the result?

He said it looked like we’d better go ahead arid give them the money. He was having a letter-order prepared, and as soon as he signed it, he’d put it on the Xerox-phone to me so that I’d get a facsimile copy of it in case there was any flak. But he told me not to wait for it to come through, it would take at least an hour. He told me to go ahead and order the money put together and sent over to the Merchants Trust.

At what time did you receive that instruction?

By the time he’d called Maitland and asked all his questions, and then called the FBI chief and talked to him, and then called me back-let’s see, it must have been right around two fifteen in the afternoon, give or take five minutes.

And how long did you anticipate it would take to get the money to Maitland’s office?

Well, it had to be counted, didn’t it? Not note by note, but stack by stack at least. And it had to be packed into some sort of carry-containers. And we had to arrange for a guard on it in transit, and we had to whistle up an armored truck. Figuring on traffic and time-in-motion and all the rest of it, I called Maitland and told him he couldn’t expect to get delivery in less than an hour and a half.

In other words the earliest you could promise it would be a quarter to four?

I told him we’d make every effort to do it faster than that, but it didn’t look humanly possible to shave very much time off that estimate.

You were aware that the deadline for delivery was three o’clock?

Yes. I was. But there was nothing I could do about it.