Top five reasons Grover Bergdoll got away with his crimes for so long.
1) He was wealthy. Grover had access to about a million dollars in 1920 with additional funding from his mother, Emma. He converted cash to gold, hid it in his mansion, and retrieved it during the Great Depression.
2) He bribed his way out of jail. Grover and Emma paid attorneys and politicians with connections all the way up to the White House to get out of jail long enough to escape. It was an incredible ruse of a story that he needed to fetch his buried gold in the western Maryland hills.
1920 mug shot of Grover Bergdoll, Philadelphia police officers with Bergdoll’s 1917 Hudson escape car, and one of Bergdoll’s many illegal license plates. US Department of Justice and Philadelphia Public Ledger images.
3) Grover had friends and relatives in Germany. Following WWI, the United States had limited diplomatic relations with German states. Also, Grover hid as a fugitive in a part of Germany (Baden) where US Army detectives could not legally operate without cooperation from German police. Sympathetic German authorities protected Grover for years.
4) Grover outsmarted federal agents. Grover traveled and hid in the US under fake names in a hotel and tent in the Maryland mountains and as a recluse in his magnificent Philadelphia mansion. Police and federal agents were handicapped by lack of transportation and access to warrants to search for Grover.
5) Grover used violence to fight off bounty hunters. Several attempts to kidnap Grover in Germany and return him to trial in the US failed because he had security, guns for protection, and cooperation from Germans to fend off his Army and civilian attackers. Even the Nazis protected or ignored Bergdoll.
Grover’s long line of freedom in Germany is detailed in The Bergdoll Boys.