like today’s residual oil, that others were just dumping. With just a little boiling or light refining, he found, the oil could fetch a premium price. The seven-year-old 615-gallon truck would be used to collect the fuel – which was also known as black oil – from area refiners and repurpose it as a cleaner alternative to coal.
As New Jersey faced the economic depression, Leon was among millions struggling, trying to launch his fledgling fuel delivery business. With his strategy in place for getting residual oil on the cheap to customers, he was able to turn a profit and buy up more trucks.
By 1938, Leon had amassed about 10 trucks and moved the business to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he bought a piece of land on the waterfront, purchased some secondhand oil storage tanks, and started an oil storage terminal on the Raritan River.
The Hess family moved from Asbury Park to nearby Loch Arbour, buying a $16,000 house. His sister, Rebecca, then called Betty, worked as a teacher, and Leon and Harry continued to live at home. Henry, the eldest, had moved to New York City, where he worked as an insurance counselor and lived with his wife, Ada, and son, Robert.
As Leon’s business empire expanded in Middlesex County, New Jersey, he met David Wilentz, who was becoming a political heavyweight in the region. Leon respected the man greatly, called him governor12 (an elected position he toyed with running for but never actually achieved). Leon’s connection to Wilentz was critical in helping to shape his success. Wilentz would become his friend, adviser, and, ultimately, father-in-law and help support Leon’s transformation from “lazy” coal-hauler to oil baron.
Against a backdrop of unemployment and breadlines, voters were incensed by headlines insinuating that the Republican-dominated Middlesex County Board of Freeholders, a local governing body, was corrupt and misspending the taxpayers’ hard-earned money.
Behind the headlines in local papers was David Wilentz, a 35-year-old Democrat who had taken over a fairly hapless political organization, the Middlesex County Democratic Party. The son of Latvian immigrants who owned a wholesale tobacco business, David had a passion for making the political system more just. The third of six children, David had grown up in Perth Amboy. After finishing high school, he worked for a local newspaper as a copy boy and sports reporter. Commuting at night to New York University, he studied law and was admitted to the bar. He served in World War I as an Army lieutenant. Upon returning from the war, he immersed himself in the world of New Jersey politics and married Lena Goldman, the daughter of Russian immigrants.
In 1929, Wilentz, who was elected the county’s Democratic chairman, ordered an audit of the Republican Board of Freeholders’ expenditures, which was then reviewed by a grand jury. The grand jury failed to return indictments of any of the politicians.
Still, the whiff of corruption was strong and roiled the dissatisfied public. Wilentz, who at that time was serving as the city attorney of Perth Amboy, leveraged this dissatisfaction to his party’s advantage in the 1929 election. He seized upon a small detail to paint a picture of a political elite that was out of touch with the populace: the freeholders had been giving away engraved fountain pens with their own names on them – an expense that Wilentz made sure was perceived as frivolous.
The fountain pen scandal led his party to victory in the county. This 1929 success was an early building block of a political machine that would last for 50 years, during which only one Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, ever won an election in Middlesex County,13 where Wilentz anointed local politicians, governors, and even senators.
As a result of Wilentz’s efforts for the party, Hudson County Democratic boss Frank “I am the law” Hague recommended him for appointment as attorney general by Governor A. Harry Moore.14 Moore appointed Wilentz to succeed William Stevens as attorney general in January 1934. In a political system in which the currency was a few words from the right person, the value of Wilentz’s network was rising. He and his wife, Lena, and their three children, Robert, Warren, and Norma, moved to a larger house in Perth Amboy. While David’s parents had immigrated, and he was just one generation removed from the experience similar to the one Mores Hess had, Lena’s family was more established, and together, the Wilentzes developed a comfortable home life.
Upon his appointment as attorney general of New Jersey, he began immediately to make his mark on the state’s political landscape. He wielded wide-ranging power, naming lawyers to boards like the state highway commission, as he became a kingmaker in the party, able to boost or halt political careers. Following an investigation into prosecutorial failings, Wilentz was also appointed to serve as prosecutor of Monmouth County, replacing Jonas Tumen, who was charged with “misdemeanors and nonfeasance.”
Just a year into his tenure as attorney general and months into being Monmouth’s prosecutor, he was in the courtroom trying his first capital case – the kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son from his home in Hopewell Township. The child had been abducted from Lindbergh’s home, and posters of the dimpled baby were highly publicized during a 10-week search for the boy. The family paid a huge ransom – $50,000 – in exchange for false information on the child’s whereabouts. Ultimately, he was found dead in Hopewell Township. A nation that had celebrated Lindbergh as a hero just a few years before was in shock. Wilentz was tapped to try the case, and he would become a celebrity in the process.
An elaborate case with over 100 witnesses and truckloads of evidence, this was the prosecution that would make Wilentz’s career. Bronx housepainter and carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptmann stood accused of the 1932 crime, after he was linked to ransom money that Lindbergh had paid. While Hauptmann repeatedly proclaimed his innocence, Wilentz described him as “Public Enemy No. 1, an animal lower than the lowest form.” Lindbergh, who became world-famous in 1927 with his solo flight from Long Island to Paris, brought star power to the trial, which garnered national and even international attention, and was called “the Crime of the Century” (an overused term, to be sure, but this was one of the first trials involving both a horrific act and a celebrity in an era of rapt media attention). In a statement in court that was printed in full, spanning two pages of the New York Times, Wilentz called for the death penalty for Hauptmann. “For all these months since October 1934, not during one moment has there been anything that has come to the surface of life that has indicated anything but the guilt of this defendant, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and no one else. Every avenue of evidence, every little thoroughfare that we traveled along, every one leads to the same door: Bruno Richard Hauptmann.”
Wilentz gained notice for his aptitude and zealousness in the courtroom. He ultimately won the conviction that sent Hauptmann to the electric chair in 1936. The case was widely examined by legal scholars in the generation that followed, as Hauptmann’s widow continued to insist upon his innocence. But Anna Hauptmann’s attempts to overturn the verdict after her husband’s death – the last of the cases decided by a federal court in Philadelphia just hours before Wilentz died in 1988 – were all unsuccessful in reversing the verdict.
Wilentz and his wife, Lena, were celebrities after the trial, with their photos appearing in newspapers all over the country as they traveled. Speculation arose that Wilentz would run for governor, but he insisted he would prefer to stay behind the scenes. New Jersey, he quipped, was not ready for a Jewish governor.
Instead, he was appointed to a second term as attorney general. Even after he left office to establish his own law firm, many people still referred to him as “general.” For his party, he was a commanding officer, pulling people aside and telling them to run for office, and discovering untapped political talent in hidden corners.
Beyond his sharp rhetoric, Wilentz had gotten a reputation during the trial for cutting a conspicuous figure, with cameras outside the courtroom capturing his sassafras-colored felt
Peter Hess Friedland eulogy for Leon Hess; Warren Wilentz eulogy for Leon Hess.
“Ex-Democratic Boss Wilentz Dead at 93,”
“Former Attorney General David Wilentz Dies at 93,”
