Which meant, of course, that James Lotan was in the best position of anyone in Portland to go into the illegal-immigrants-and-drugs business. Which he promptly did by reaching out to a business friend, a recently widowed Scot named William Dunbar, probably through the Arlington Club. The two of them soon had a good working plan, and it really did look like a good one. Dunbar was the owner of Turner Flouring Mills as well as a wholesale grocery business called Dunbar Produce and Grocery. He also co-owned the Merchants Steamship Company, a shipping firm with a fleet of two full-size blue-water steamships. The Merchants Steamship vessels were then busy hauling Turner Mills wheat and flour across the Pacific Ocean to China — Dunbar really was the guy who opened that trade line for Oregon. But the ships were coming back from China in ballast, which bothered Dunbar a lot. Like a stereotypical Scot, he hated the waste of those empty journeys. 
The Stark Street Ferry in roughly 1889. With the opening of the first Morrison Street Bridge a few years before, the writing was on the wall for the ferry at this time, but it was still a busy operation. By 1894 when the city finally agreed to buy it, though, the right-of-way had become worthless and the equipment had deteriorated nearly to scrap value.So the plan became to fill those empty steamships up with people — Chinese workers, who each paid a steep price for the chance to be smuggled into the U.S. to work on labor gangs.
THIS SCHEME MADE both Dunbar and Lotan a lot of money, and probably would have kept on doing so if Dunbar had not gotten greedy and decided to go into opium smuggling as well. Well, actually, Dunbar probably wasn’t the one who decided to start smuggling opium. Most likely that innovation came from Dunbar’s business partner, the co-owner of Merchants Steamship — a flamboyant, morally flexible cigar merchant named Nat Blum. The problem with opium was, although the stuff was still legal, it was taxed very heavily. That meant smuggling the stuff in without paying the tax was tantamount to stealing money from the government. When Dunbar smuggled a Chinese guy into the country to work, that was illegal, but nobody really cared; it was a big country, and there was lots of work to be done. But when Dunbar smuggled a barrel of opium into the country, the government lost thousands of dollars in tax revenue. 
A drawing from early in the trial. Coblenz was one of the customs inspectors working under James Lotan. William Dunbar was one of the other defendants. The Oregonian’s coverage was much less thorough than the Telegram’s, especially after Lotan’s involvement became apparent, but the Oregonian did have the advantage of a staff artist.Most likely, Lotan didn’t know about the opium until his partner’s steamships started getting raided. Reading between the lines (criminals tend not to leave very complete records) it appears the opium was Nat Blum’s idea. In any case, Blum did most of the day-to-day management of the opium operations. The idea was that the drugs would be rolled off the deck of the steamship in a lonely stretch of the Willamette River, before they reached the port, and would be retrieved by some of Blum’s cronies later on. Those cronies — guys like Bunco Kelley and Bob Garthorn, not to mention Nat Blum himself — would be the biggest weakness in the plan, at least when it came to the opium. Put simply, they were just super incompetent. They lost nearly as much opium to theft, accident and seizure as they actually brought in. And they brought a lot in — this was an industrial-scale operation, probably totaling well over five tons of product.
BY NOVEMBER 1893, the jig was just about up. One of the Merchants Steamship Company’s two steamers had been seized by the federal government in Astoria, and the federal prosecutor in Portland was asking a grand jury to return indictments against Lotan, along with Dunbar and Blum and a number of their underworld cronies. Seid Back, the most prominent Chinese businessman in Portland, was also on the hook. The ensuing trial held Portland spellbound. But Lotan hadn’t much need to worry. The roster of court officers at this trial reads like an excerpt from the Arlington Club directory. Lotan was represented by future Senator Charles W. Fulton. Joseph Simon himself (remember him?) came back home from his cushy Washington D.C. position on the Republican National Committee to represent another defendant. Perhaps most outrageously, federal prosecutor John Gearin — who had just been appointed by President Grover Cleveland as special prosecutor for opium frauds — was, in the case of this particular opium fraud, on the side of the defense. Also, the judge was one of Simon’s former law partners, and the jury foreman was fellow Arlington Club member Charles Ladd. So the trial ended with a hung jury. The word on the street was that the vote was 11 to 1; jury foreman Ladd had refused to vote to convict his friend. A new trial would have to be scheduled.
|
As historian MacColl writes, “Lotan, supported throughout the ordeal by his Establishment and Arlington Club comrades, survived with his reputation more or less intact.” It has to be noted, though, that Lotan didn’t stay president of the Oregon Republican Party for long after his indictment came down. No political party, even one as dominant as the GOP was in 1890s Oregon, can risk too much of that kind of publicity.
SO, THAT’S THE end of the story as far as James Lotan was concerned. But you may be wondering about my admittedly clickbaity introduction to this story. How, exactly, could a sleazy, venal crook like James Lotan be credited with saving the world from the Nazi menace and/or global thermonuclear destruction? Those of you who are familiar with the story of Yosuke Matsuoka, the young Japanese lad who grew up on the Portland waterfront and afterward became the most important Imperial Japanese diplomat of the 20th century, know exactly where I’m going with this. Yosuke Matsuoka was the son of a failed shipping magnate in Japan who came to the U.S. to try to mend his family’s fortunes for his widowed mother. He came to Vancouver when he was 12. There he met Dunbar, who was processing in another cohort of Chinese laborers to be smuggled into Portland. Dunbar sort of informally adopted the gregarious young lad and brought him home to serve as a companion for his 14-year-old son, Lambert. So young Yosuke grew up in the Dunbar home, kind of like the character of Hadji in the old Jonny Quest cartoons. He grew up surrounded by all the players from top to bottom of what had to be the biggest and most well-connected drug-smuggling operation in American history. When he returned to Japan after graduating from the University of Oregon, he believed he knew America as well as he knew Japan ... based on having lived there for half his life. Of course, his experience of America was basically from the perspective of a regional organized-crime family, like the Corleones in The Godfather. 
Yosuke Matsuoka was on the cover of Time Magazine for the July 7, 1941, issue. (Image: TIME)And as a top-ranking Japanese diplomat, Matsuoka always thought of Americans as being like the waterfront toughs and cowboy-capitalists he palled around with in the 1890s — guys who respected guts and strength. Which is why, in 1940, Matsuoka worked so hard to forge an alliance between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. He figured being an official ally of the most powerful country in Europe would give Japan the strength and credibility to stand up to the U.S. The result was the Tripartite Pact, which turned Japan into an Axis power. After that, Japan was a tripwire that the Roosevelt Administration could tug on to get the U.S. into the war with Nazi Germany. Which, of course, is exactly what happened (whether the tugging was incidental or deliberate). So, here’s the sequence: Dunbar starts smuggling operations — which leads to Dunbar meeting Matsuoka and adopting him — which leads to Matsuoka getting a very wrong impression of America and Americans — which leads to Matsuoka bringing Japan into an alliance with Nazi Germany — which leads to Pearl Harbor and World War II — which leads to Hiroshima and Nagasaki — which leads to the leaders and warlords of the entire world having seen with their own eyes what nuclear war looks like, before they’re ever entrusted with the power to unleash it. But that whole sequence of events could never have happened without James Lotan, the small-time political crook, looking around to see who might be able to help him make some quick dirty money, and reaching out to his recently widowed friend William Dunbar.
|
