South African Boer and German soldier, big-game hunter, journalist, and a spy. He fought on the side of the Boers in the Second Boer War and as a secret agent for Germany during both World Wars. He worked as a covert field asset in South Africa, Great Britain, Central and South America, and the United States, where he gathered human intelligence, led spy rings and carried out sabotage missions. He went by many aliases, fictionalized his identity and background on multiple occasions, and operated as a conman. As a Boer spy he was known as the "Black Panther". In World War II he operated under the code name DUNN, and in FBI files he is frequently referred to as "The Duke." He was captured, convicted, and escaped several prisons. During the Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, Duquesne was captured and imprisoned three times by the British and once by the Portuguese, and each time he escaped. On one occasion he infiltrated the British army, became a British officer, and led an attempt to sabotage Cape Town and to assassinate the commander-in-chief Lord Kitchener. His team was given up by an informant and all were captured and sentenced to death. After a failed attempt to escape prison in Cape Town, he was sent to prison in Bermuda, where he escaped to the United States and became an American citizen. In World War I, he became a spy and ring leader for Germany and during this time he sabotaged British merchant ships in South America with concealed bombs and destroyed several. He sometimes purchased insurance on merchandise he shipped on the vessels he sabotaged and then filed claims for damages. He became known as "the man who killed Kitchener" since he claimed to have guided a German U-boat to sink the HMS Hampshire on which Lord Kitchener was en route to Russia in 1916. Forensics of the ship does not support this claim. After he was caught by federal agents in New York in 1917, he feigned paralysis for two years and cut the bars of his cell to make his escape, thereby avoiding deportation to England where he faced execution for the deaths of British sailors. In 1932, he was again captured in New York by federal agents and charged with both homicide and for being an escaped prisoner, but was set free after Britain declined to pursue the wartime crimes. Between wars, Duquesne served as an adviser on big game hunting to U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, a publicist in the movie business, a journalist, a fictional Australian war hero, and head of the New Food Society in New York. During the Boer war he had been under orders to kill Frederick Russell Burnham, Chief of Scouts in the British Army, but in 1910 he worked with both Burnham and then Rep. Robert Broussard to lobby the U.S. Congress to fund the importation of hippopotamuses into the Louisiana bayous to solve a severe meat shortage. Duquesne often took on many identities, reinvented his past at will, attached his ancestry to aristocratic clans, granted himself military titles and medals, and spoke of many battles, some fact and some fictional. The last time he was captured and imprisoned was in 1941 when he and 32 other members of the Duquesne Spy Ring were caught by William G. Sebold, a double agent with the FBI, and later convicted in the largest espionage conviction in the history of the United States. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison, with a 2-year concurrent sentence and $2,000 fine for violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He began his sentence in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, along with fellow German spy Hermann Lang. In 1945, Duquesne was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, due to his failing physical and mental health. In 1954, he was released owing to ill health, having served 14 years. His last known lecture was in 1954 at the Adventurers' Club of New York, titled "My Life – in and out of Prison". He died at City Hospital on Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island) on 24 May 1956 at the age of 78 years.
∼Cremation: 1956-05-29
Case #110916