Fritz Duquesne: Boer Gold, a Hippo Bill and America's Largest Spy Ring

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Fritz Duquesne was born in 1877 to a Boer family of French descent in the Cape Colony of South Africa and grew up hunting in the bushveld with his father. At 12 he killed a man attacking his mother, and soon after he fought in a river gun battle in which an uncle, an aunt and their infant were killed. He took the black panther as his personal emblem and was later known as the Black Panther. In the Second Boer War, which began in 1899, he was reportedly put in charge of a wagon of gold from Pretoria bound for Portuguese territory; after a deadly dispute among the escort, the gold was hidden in a cave and never delivered, feeding the legend of Kruger's millions. Returning home, he found his family farm destroyed, his sister assaulted and killed, and his mother held in a British concentration camp.

Captured after a plot to assassinate Lord Kitchener, he escaped from a prison camp in Bermuda by swimming about a mile and a half at night and reached the United States around 1902. He reinvented himself as a journalist and big game expert, became Theodore Roosevelt's shooting instructor, and in 1910 lobbied Congress with Frederick Russell Burnham, a British scout once ordered to kill him, to import hippos into Louisiana. Working for German naval intelligence in World War I, he sank more than 20 ships with time bombs, faked his death, and was arrested in New York in 1917 for insurance fraud. In 1941 the FBI broke the Duquesne spy ring, the largest espionage conviction in American history, and he received 18 years. Released in 1954 in failing health, he died in New York at 78.

• He was condemned in Cape Town but avoided execution by agreeing to translate Boer codes, which he claimed he mistranslated.
• The hippo plan aimed to clear invasive water hyacinths from Louisiana's waterways while easing a national meat shortage.
• His ship bombs used acid eating through copper wire to trigger a spark at sea, hidden in crates labeled as mineral samples.
• At Bellevue Hospital he faked paralysis for nearly two years, then cut his cell bars in May 1919 and escaped dressed as a woman.
• FBI cameras behind a two-way mirror in a Times Square office filmed him pulling plans for the M1 Garand rifle from his sock.