Rent Increase Form - Fort Worth Housing Authority: Fill & Download for Free

How can New York City solve its deficiency of moderate lodging? Straightforward: Preserve the less expensive lodging we as of now have, and construct new lodging that New Yorkers can really bear. The issue is that the best ways the city can do that—reinforcing rent guidelines and building freely subsidized lodging—are currently illicit.The city's rent stabilization and rent control laws limit rent increments for individuals who live in the condos they spread, and furthermore give them the privilege to remain there, as long as they pay their rent and don't have their band practice at 3 in the first part of the day. In any case, since the mid '90s, proprietors have had the option to deregulate empty lofts in the event that they could raise the rent sufficiently high, first to $2,000 every month and now $2,500. This hits more youthful renters most noticeably terrible, as they weren't settled in before deregulation spread all through the city.In any event, the city needs to close this proviso, and reregulate the in excess of 200,000 lofts that have been deregulated since 1997.However, that would be illicit under a 1971 state law, the "Urstadt law," which restricts urban communities "with a populace of more than one million" from establishing more grounded rent controls than the state's. That places the city's rent laws in the hands of upstate and rural administrators who take a huge number of dollars from city landowners, yet can't be removed by city voters. The state Senate is glaringly manipulated for Republican control, and despite the fact that Democrats have caught a dominant part in two of the last three races, they've been thwarted by land agreeable groups dividing from to align with the GOP. Revoking the Urstadt law is basic.The state could likewise ensure occupants against unlawful rent increments by really upholding its laws against rent misrepresentation. Regular types of misuse incorporate landowners blowing up the expenses of redesigns, neglecting to enlist the loft's rent, and basically raising rents with no legitimate legitimization.The state lodging office, Homes and Community Renewal, doesn't explore a loft's rent except if the occupant gripes. That implies the inhabitant needs to realize they reserve the privilege to grumble, have some proof they were cheated, and be happy to go through a year or three battling with their proprietor. This is particularly hard for inhabitants who accept that their loft was wrongfully deregulated, as their leases will probably lapse before their case is resolved, and without the insurances of rent stabilization, they don't reserve the privilege to restore them.The organization could likewise change its authorization strategies from inactive to dynamic, punishing proprietors for not enlisting rents and examining significant rent increments without hanging tight for a protest, particularly for proprietors who have a background marked by extortion.The Avalon Fort Greene, worked with $22 million in charge reductions; studios start at $2,385 (by means ofAvalon CommunitiesThe best method to make moderate lodging is manufacture it, yet a Clinton-period administrative law disallows neighborhood governments from building any more open lodging than they as of now have. New York City's open lodging framework, the biggest in the nation, has 180,000 lofts, and very nearly 250,000 individuals and families on the sitting tight rundown for them.The other obstruction to building increasingly open lodging is budgetary. The New York City Housing Authority is so tied it can't make essential fixes, because of the city and state cutting off working help in the course of the most recent 15 years.The cash is out there. On the off chance that we accept that building new lodging expenses $100,000 per unit, imposing a $15 billion duty on the city's two most extravagant occupants, David Koch and Michael Bloomberg, would pay for 300,000 lofts, enough to house each of the 53,000 vagrants, everybody on the NYCHA holding up rundown, to say the very least—and still leave the two multibillionaires among the country's 25 most extravagant individuals, in front of Michael Dell, Paul Allen, and Rupert Murdoch.That sort of seizure is probably not going to happen shy of a communist transformation, however a 10-rate point charge increment on New Yorkers who make more than $10 million a year would get a comparable aggregate throughout the following decade.New York could likewise manufacture charitable centers financed by worker's guilds, similar to Penn South in Manhattan and Electchester in Queens, or restore the state's Mitchell-Lama program, which gave engineers tax reductions for building lodging that working-and white collar class individuals could bear. Mitchell-Lama made in excess of 120,000 such condos from 1955 to the mid 1970s. At Penn South, purchasing a two-room condo costs around $90,000, with support around $835 per month. (You have to win a lottery to jump on the holding up list.)The snag here is that building such advancements requires huge and generally modest (for example beneath advertise value) plots of land. Likewise, the Mitchell-Lama program offered landowners a moderate, consistent benefit, a feeble motivator in the post-1980 market. A few firms even have practical experience in purchasing Mitchell-Lama units and removing them from the program.Inhabitants of Trinity House, a reasonable Mitchell-Lama building, picketed proprietor Trinity School at its 300th Anniversary Convocation on Saturday, Oct. fourth 2008. Inhabitants and companions fought the tuition based school's arrangement to sell the structure - home to 199 occupant groups of low and moderate pay - to apartment suite engineer Pembroke CompaniesThis leaves the city with barely any prompt alternatives past a liberal form of stream down financial matters: giving expense and zoning breaks to extravagance advancement in return for including up to 20 percent of probably reasonable condos in their structures.Civic chairman Bill de Blasio's lodging program, planned to be declared May first, is probably going to concentrate on expanding this stream, by utilizing compulsory inclusionary zoning to require a bigger level of moderate units, and by utilizing lower wages to characterize "reasonable." (Former city hall leader Michael Bloomberg's program manufactured increasingly "moderate" condos for individuals who made more than $100,000 every year than for individuals who make under $33,000.)The Real Affordability For All alliance, a partnership of city lodging and network associations, has encouraged the city to require that at any rate a large portion of the lofts in charge financed new structures be reasonable.In greater expense territories, especially Manhattan, half could be held for low-pay families, $24,000 to $48,000 for a group of four. In the external wards and upper Manhattan, lofts would be divided into two halves between low-pay families and those creation up to around $80,000. (The city's 421a program, a '70s-vintage tax reduction planned to support development, is famous for sponsoring extravagance lodging: The Avalon Fort Greene, a midtown Brooklyn constructing that opened in 2009, got $22 million in charge decreases. Studios there currently start at $2,385.)The alliance has likewise asked placing more cash into continuing open lodging; advancing philanthropic advancement; sponsoring rents for low-wage laborers; permitting taller structures on undeveloped land in low-pay neighborhoods like East New York and the South Bronx; and giving minimal effort credits and duty motivations to assist proprietors with keeping up their properties on the off chance that they hold rents down. Tomorrow the gathering is energizing on the means of City Hall around early afternoon to push the chairman to receive their recommendations.Every one of these measures would be useful, however significantly more is expected to invert over 40 years worth of harm. Changing that tide will require taking on the city and state's most dominant political and monetary premiums and dismissing the belief system that a Russian tycoon's speculation is a higher priority than a human services helper bringing their family up in Flatbush.Steven Wishnia is a New York-based writer and performer, and the editorial manager of Tenant/Inquilino. He is additionally the creator of "When the Drumming Stops," "Leave 25 Utopia," and "The Cannabis Companion." His past work for Gothamist incorporates "Why The Push To Abolish Rent Control Is Stupid And Irresponsible.for more information of New York Real Estate

Well, I'd have to go with this guy- shown here after a rather nasty beat-down by a extremely loyal, brave and talented English butler on the family estate of one of America's greatest financial and banking dynasties... (WARNING- I might have gotten a bit carried away, and I've written a extremely lengthy answer, going into tht guy's story in great detail. Even so, it's well worth reading; and by the time you finish reading it, I'm sure you'll agree that he's probably the most fitting real-life Joker-analogue):This man is Erich Muenter, a University professor who taught German language. Accounts of his early life are sketchy. Muenter was apparently born in Germany about 1871 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1890; however, he would in his later life fabricate a host of stories as his tenuous grip on reality slipped away. He alternately claimed to have been born in Texas or Wisconsin, the son of German immigrants, or in the South as the son of landed aristocrats, or that he was of Finnish extraction forced to emigrate to the United States by Russian persecution. As such, his origin story, and thus his true identity, is still a mystery to this day (just like that of the Joker).Regardless of the fictions he contrived of his own origins, Muenter clearly evinced a natural gift for languages. He demonstrated fluency in German, French, Spanish, and Finnish. His German accent was almost imperceptible, except on the few occasions when he was seen by friends to explode in rage; most who met him thought he merely had a mild speech impediment. Muenter took his Bachelor’s degree in German at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1899. In 1902 Muenter married a young woman named Krembs, who acquaintances described as “a pleasant German-American woman,” and as a “a woman of striking beauty.” She taught school in Chicago for a brief period. 1903 found Muenter and his wife at Kansas State University where he took some graduate courses. There he authored a paper entitled “Insanity and Literature”, and his wife gave birth to their first child, a boy.In 1904, Muenter hit the big time: he was accepted for doctoral work at Harvard University, and was permitted to teach undergraduate courses in German language. One of the faculty members at Harvard said that “in the classroom Professor Muenter was very calm and precise, and had much charm of manner.” Muenter and his wife lived in modest rooms at 107Oxford Street in Cambridge which they rented from Thomas W. Hillier, a local livery stable owner. Hillier later recalled that the only evidence of strangeness Muenter was shown was the strange conviction that “a wonderful new language could be built up out of Gaelic and Scots” (actually, newspapers published the report as a language built from combining “Gaelic and Scotch” — which has a certain interesting potential in and of itself...)Yet his university colleagues saw dark oddities in Muenter’s behavior. There were three separate occasions on which neighbors accused Muenter of blowing out the gas lights in his bedroom in an attempt to asphyxiate his sleeping wife. Muenter claimed that the gas had been blown out by the wind — a common hazard in the days of gas lighting — and the neighbors’accusations were dismissed as over-active imagination. Certainly, his landlord had vouched for Muenter, claiming that Muenter had seemed genuinely concerned for his wife’s fate. Several friends recalled he obsessed over sexual matters (the details of which were apparently too risqué to detail in Edwardian newspapers) and one reported that he had, with some friends, formed “a secret organization for the study of medieval mysticism.”He showed moments of irrational behavior; he “discovered” a poem which he touted as a previous unknown masterpiece of German literature. A German literary society soon pointed out that it was a fairly well-known work of Goethe, and Muenter seethed with anger for months over the affair. Professor Hugo Münsterberg later recalled that while Muenter was at Harvard, “he often came to my laboratory for the purpose of borrowing books on insanity. Some of these he needed to write theses on insanity. Others he would borrow because he was interested in the subject.” Münsterberg thought Muenter was a “pathological study” even before he emigrated to the U.S., and that “the man was always interested in mysticism and metaphysics”. He added “I can scarcely imagine any man being a moreinteresting psychological study that this man Muenter.”While at Harvard, Muenter’s wife gave birth to their second child. By early 1906, she was pregnant a third time. But this time, something went terribly wrong. She was, from all accounts, a strong, healthy woman. Yet with this pregnancy, she seemed to grow weaker and weaker with each passing week. Friends of the family attempted to bring in a physician, Dr. H. B. McIntyre of Boston, to attend her in her confinement (imposed in accordance with the quaint but dysfunctional Victorian custom of keeping a woman housebound during the final months of pregnancy). But Erich Muenter would have none of it; he "did not believe in doctors", and his wife meekly acceded to the dismissal of Dr. McIntyre.On April 16th, 1906, Muenter’s wife died before she could give birth to their third child. There was no attending physician at her deathbed, in keeping with her husband’s requirements. Muenter turned her body over to a local undertaker, A. E. Long, to be prepared for burial; but Long, an experienced mortician, grew suspicious when he began embalming the body. There was something not quite right with the look of the woman’s internal organs. He called in Professor Whitney of the Harvard Medical School, who conductedan impromptu autopsy. He determined that Mrs. Muenter had died from the cumulative effects of numerous small doses of arsenic, and that throughout her confinement, her husband had fed his wife beef tea laced with poison.Long and Whitney went to the Cambridge police with their information, but before the Cambridge police could obtain an indictment for murder against Muenter, the case took a bizarre turn. Muenter took his two children, and his wife’s corpse, placed them all in an automobile and drove to Chicago. On the 19th of April, he had his wife’s body cremated in an attempt to destroy the evidence of his crime, abandoning his children (assumedly at his sister's, who lived in Chicago, but possibly abandoning them on the streets to fend for themselves), and fled the country to Mexico.He immediately set about creating a new identity for himself, selecting the name “Frank Holt”. In early 1907, “Frank Holt” appeared on the doorstep of Samuel Brothers, an American-owned gold mining company operating in El Oro, Mexico, a small gold mining town about a hundred miles north of Mexico City, seeking a position as a stenographer. One of the executives of the company, James Dean, recalled that “Frank Holt” had proved “an excellent stenographer, but kept aloof from every one in the company. This drew many comments and attracted attention to him. He had a worried look and gazed abstractedly into space for a long time frequently. He never spoke a word about his past, even when questioned closely.”While in Mexico, Muenter did not fully sever his ties to old acquaintances made before his wife’s murder. As he created his new persona as “Frank Holt”, he sent abusive letters back to his former associates at Harvard, still writing as Erich Muenter. He even took time to publish a rambling pamphlet which burlesqued the death of his wife, “and told in gruesome fashionhow he had put into practice his theories of revenge.” In it, he stated that the law had taught him that revenge was right. Police were quickly tipped off as to Muenter’s whereabouts, and dispatched investigators to Mexico City to track him down. Muenter was still a few steps ahead of them though: days before they arrived in Mexico, he had quit his job with the mining company, packed his few belongings and moved to Dallas, Texas, where he elected to enroll in a small Texas college, the Agricultural and Mechanical College, believing that in this intellectual backwater, it would be less likely that any of his former Harvard co-workers would stumble across him and reveal his identity.While there, he met a young lady, Leone Sensabaugh, the daughter of a prominent Dallas minister. They were soon married. He graduated in 1909with a degree in German language, and during the 1909-1910 term, he served as Assistant Professor of German at Oklahoma University. A local newspaper carried a notice when he joined the faculty: “Mr. Frank Holt, the new Instructor in German, is a graduate of the Fort Worth Polytechnic Institute and has spent several years of his life in Germany and speaks German as well as English. He has had several years of experience in teaching the language and comes highly recommended. He also speaks Spanish and French fluently and has studied at the University of Berlin, and studied in Rome and Paris and has traveled over Europe. He gave lectures on German literature in Berlin.”Most of the notice appears to be a concocted fiction of Muenter’s fertile imagination, an attempt to establish a past for the fugitive from Harvard. The university accepted his claims at face value without ever investigating his veracity. Muenter’s employment there was to be short-lived, however. He was frequently afflicted with insomnia, and would disappear from campus for days on end. Brooding over fancied injustices to himself, he grew increasingly angry that the chairmanship of the languages department had not been given to him, rather than to another professor who had served atthe university for many years, and he was soon dropped from the faculty.He left Oklahoma State University and then went on to take positions at several other prominent colleges. By 1912, he was back in the Ivy League, lecturing at Cornell. But Muenter never forgot that he was still a fugitive from justice. Learning that a former Harvard colleague, Professor Kuno Francke, was planning to visit the Cornell to give a short series of lectures, Muenter decided to take a short vacation to New York City rather than face being exposed. He did not return until the day after Francke departed.Then, everything changed with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. While the United States would not enter the war until 1917, there was still considerable anti-German feeling which made “Frank Holt” even more of an outsider than before. Though insisting he was born in the United States, Holt still spoke with a distinct German accent which aroused suspicion despite his being careful to hide his pro-German beliefs. Many prominent Americans were already pushing for U.S. entry into the war, including financier J.P. Morgan who had lent millions to the Russians and the British to promote the war effort. For all that he insisted he was a pacifist, Holt was outraged and wrote numerous letters to newspapers denouncing Morgan's use of his wealth to promote the war against Germany.Muenter informed the university that he would be resigning to accept a professorship teaching Romance Languages at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas, which was scheduled to open for its first classes in September of 1915. He packed his wife and children off to Dallas to livewith his father-in-law just before the term ended- and as he left Cornell, Muenter informed his colleagues that he intended to spend a few days in New York City doing research before rejoining his family in Dallas. But his wife and university colleagues hadn't realized the extent of Muenter’s obsession over American munitions shipments to Europe. With twisted hypocrisy, the man who'd had no compunction about slowly murdering his pregnant wife with arsenic had convinced himself that American arms shipments to the Allies were immoral, and must be stopped. The sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania by a German warship on May 7, 1915 had made American involvement in the war all but inevitable; and it would behis holy cause to bring an end to the bloodshed in Europe.While his wife was getting settled in their new home in Texas, Muenter checked in at Mills Hotel Number 3, located on Seventh Avenue at 36th St, for two weeks. It was a large but certainly not lavish hotel, where rooms rented for 30¢ a day, paid in advance. Clerks at the crowded hotel only recalled Muenter having stayed there because of the inordinate amount of mail he received, and because he had gotten into an altercation with another guest over a war notice posted on a newspaper stand which required intervention by police to stop. Muenter devoted his first week in New York City to gathering together the materials he thought he would need to end the flow of weapons to Europe.He traveled to Jersey City, New Jersey, where he purchased a .38 caliber Iver and Johnson revolver from John S. Menagh, a hardware dealer. With a box of cartridges, the pistol cost Muenter $2.25. He asked the hardware dealer if the gun came with a guarantee to “work every time.” Menagh frowned and explained that "revolvers didn’t come with that sort of guarantee". Muenter had actually wanted two pistols, but the .38 was the only handgun Menagh had in stock. Obligingly, he suggested that Muenter try the pawnshop of Joseph Keechan across the street. There, he purchased a used .32 caliber revolver. For both transactions Muenter gave his name as “C. Hendricks.”Muenter then rented a cottage in Bethpage (at the time called “Central Park”) from Louis Ott, a local real estate broker. He gave his name as “Mr. Patton” and told Ott that his physician had ordered him to move to the country for his health, and that he wanted a quiet, isolated place to live in. The two-room bungalow Ott offered him was perfectly situated off the main road and completely hidden by trees. The largest of the two rooms was only about ten feet square; the second, smaller room was used by the cottage’s owner are a storeroom for furniture. But it suited Muenter’s purpose, who divided his time between his rooms in New York City and the Bethpage cottage.he rented a bungalow in New York City under the name of “Patton”, and used the bungalow to put together his own quiet campaign against the U.S. government.For the next few days, Muenter traveled through New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania to find the single most important item he needed to execute his grand design. He was frustrated again and again, but finally, he found a company in Long Island City that offered to sell him what he so desperately wanted: a case of dynamite. The sales representative informed him that the company did not, of course, keep any dynamite on hand; it would have to be special-ordered and would be freighted to Bethpage by train. Every day for the next week and a half, Muenter visited the Bethpage Rail Road Station’s freight office with clockwork regularity, impatient for his shipment of high explosives.Muenter was so annoyingly insistent that the freight agent, George B. Carnes, finally lost his temper with him. Although the manufacturer, Keystone Powder Co. of Emporium, Pennsylvania, had shipped out the explosives immediately, the dynamite had lain in a Long Island Rail Road warehouse for nearly a week. The railroad’s safety regulations required that dynamite had to be moved on special trains that carried no passengers or regular freight. Finally, on the 28th of June, the first two of three cratesarrived for “C. Hendricks,” the same alias Muenter had used to purchase revolvers a few days before in New Jersey, each containing 120 pounds of 60% dynamite. Several small explosions started happening in Central Park, near the bungalow he had rented, as he started to create his own experimental bombs.He would later explain to Captain Thomas Tunney, head of the New York City Police Department’s “Bomb and Anarchist Squad”, that he made his devices by taping together three sticks of dynamite, then hollowing out a depression in one of the sticks and filling it with the heads of “trick matches” which he had obtained in a novelty joke shop in New York City. The matches were designed to explode when struck. He placed a glass vial filled with concentrated sulfuric acid, stoppered with an ordinary cork, upside down next to the hole filled with match heads. The sulfuric acid would eat slowly through the cork, until a few drops of acid landed on the match heads, causing them to ignite and explode the dynamite — a slow chemical detonator. Muenter had experimented over and over again with this arrangement until he could accurately estimate how long it would take forthe acid to detonate the bomb. The timing was perfect; The Fourth of July weekend was only a few days away, and now, Erich Muenter was ready to set off some fireworks of his own.Building the first of what would be several bombs, he traveled to Washington, D.C. on June 2 and managed to plant the bomb in the reception room of the Senate Capitol building (he couldn’t plant the bomb in the Senate chamber itself as he had originally intended), leaving the building at about 4 p.m. Passing a mail box, he dropped a handful of letters, addressed to the President of the United States and to the four major newspapers in Washington DC, into the slot and returned to his boarding house. He packed the few belongings he had brought with him into a valise, and for the next few hours, he wandered aimlessly around the streets of Washington. Late in the evening, he was back in the street outside the Capitol. At 10:30, Muenter was seen by a young couple, who were standing on the Senate terrace, pacing back and forth and staring at the windows of the reception hall. Muenter then apparently took a quick walk around the perimeter of the Capitol building before returning to his vantage point at the Senate terrace. Then he sat down on a bench at a nearby trolley stop.At 11:23 PM EST, the bomb exploded. Though there were no fatalities, since the building was unoccupied at the time, the Senate reception room was destroyed, and the blast even caused some damage to the Vice President’s office. The bomb blast was heard a mile away, and within a few minutes,the East Plaza outside the Capitol was filled with curiosity seekers. Satisified, Muenter walked three blocks to Union Station, arriving in time to catch the 12:10 train from Washington back to New York City. Both conductor J. L. Riland and head brakeman J. N. Purcell recognized Muenter when shown a picture of him. He wore a “cheap suit of light material with a stripe running through it” and a stiff brimmed straw hat, and was reported to have been wearing an extremely broad grin at the time.Muenter was sprawled out in Berth 6 of Car 27- and in one of the many little ironies of the case, Washington’s Chief of Police, Raymond Pullman occupied Berth 4 in Car 26 on the same train, going to New York City to follow up a lead on the Capitol bombing. In the letter he'd wrote to D.C. newspapers (which he signed “R. Pearce”), Holt took credit for the explosion which he intended as a statement about the supplying of arms to the war effort in Europe. “Sorry I, too, had to use explosives. (For the last time, I trust.) It is the export kind and ought to make enough noise to be heard above the clamor for war and blood-money. This explosion is the exclamation point to my appeal for peace! One editor said: There are times when one government may be expected to speak on behalf of other countries and of humanity in general. God bless you Mr. Editor, that was a timely word in this blood-money madhouse. Let us stop this colossal American crime!”But the bomb was only the beginning for Holt. Changing trains in Manhattan, Muenter boarded the Oyster Bay branch of the Long Island Rail Road. At about 8:30 a.m. on the morning of July 3rd, Muenter stepped off the train at Glen Street Station. He carried a suitcase filled with newspaperclippings which he hoped to use to convince Morgan that he should stop armaments shipments to Europe. Also in the suitcase were several sticks of dynamite. In Muenter’s coat, he carried two revolvers and a stick of dynamite. At Glen Street Station, Muenter hired Arthur J. Ford and his automobile (first in the fleet of Glen Cove’s “Yellow Taxi Company”) to drive him to the estate of J.P Morgan Jnr. and his family, a distance of two miles.Once at the mansion, Muenter started towards the house, before abruptly stopping and returning to the taxi. “Oh, I forgot,” Muenter said. “I have to get my card.” Ford watched Muenter open his suitcase, and thought he saw him withdraw a revolver and slip it into his pocket. Muenter then walked rapidly to the house, walked up to the front door and rang the bell. At the door, Muenter was met by Henry C. Physick, the Morgan family butler. “I want to see Mr. Morgan,” Muenter said, and handed him a worn business card which read: SUMMER SOCIETY DIRECTORY- Thomas C. Lester, representing.“What is your business with him?” Physick asked. “I can’t discuss that with you,” Muenter replied. “I am an old friend of Mr. Morgan. He will see me.”“You must tell me the business you have with him,” Physick reiterated.Muenter pulled out both revolvers, and shoved Physick out of the way.“Don’t dare try to stop me!” Muenter yelled. Muenter demanded where Morgan was. Physick thought quickly. Although he was well aware that Morgan was in the breakfast room with his house-guests, he told Muenter that he was in the library — at the opposite end of the house. Muenter raced down the hall towards the library, with Physick following a few paces behind. As Muenter entered the library, Physick turned and ran towards the breakfast room shouting “Upstairs, Mr. Morgan! Upstairs, Mr. Morgan!” Afraid to go into the breakfast room, for fear of tipping Muenter off as to Morgan’s exact location, Physick darted down a staircase to the basement to rally the staff to defend the household.“We were at breakfast in the room on the ground floor, when the butler was heard shouting from the main entrance by the library to Mr. Morgan to go upstairs quickly,” the British Ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice (who coincidentally happened to be attending the residence as a breakfast guest of the Morgans on that very day) later recalled. “We did not know what was the matter, whether it was fire or burglars, and the whole party left the table and ran up the rear staircase, which was nearest to the door.” At the top of the rear staircase they found Rosalie McCabe, an elderly nurse employed by the Morgan family to look after their youngest children. “What has gone wrong up here?” Morgan asked. “What do you want me for?”“Nothing has happened up here that I know of,” McCabe replied. “Everything has been quiet.”Morgan and his guests began a room by room search to try to figure out what had caused Physick to yell out. Sir Spring-Rice ran up to the third floor, where the guest and servants’ quarters were located, and noticed nothing amiss. A moment later, McCabe, who was standing near the headof the main staircase, located in the center of the house, criedout that a stranger was coming up the stairs. Muenter, realizing that he had been fooled by the butler, had started back to the main staircase.Along the way, he heard voices from a small side room. He entered to find Morgan’s younger children at play. He pointed a pistol at them. “Where is Mr. Morgan?” he asked. The children didn’t answer. Muenter demanded they follow him. Finding the main hallway deserted, he started up the main staircase, the children following a few steps behind. As Muenter reached the second floor landing, a loaded revolver in each hand, he yelled out “Now, Mr. Morgan, I have you!”Seeing the pistols, Mrs. Morgan heroically tried to place herself between Muenter and her husband. Morgan pushed her aside, and lunged at Muenter. Muenter fired two rounds into Morgan before he was smashed to the ground by the 220-lb bulk of the millionaire. He pulled the trigger two more times, but the gun misfired both times. Morgan landed with the weightof his body squarely on Muenter, and they struggled for a moment until Morgan managed to twist the revolver from Muenter’s hand. Completely by chance, Morgan had landed in such a way that he had accidently pinned Muenter’s left hand, holding the second revolver, to the floor in such a way that Muenter was unable to fire it.Morgan’s wife, Spring-Rice and Miss McCabe pried the second revolverfrom Muenter’s grasp. “I have a stick of dynamite in my pocket,” Muenter shouted. “Take care of it!” Realizing his attempt had failed, Muenter was overheard by Morgan’s valet, Bernard Stewart, to cry “Kill me! Kill menow! I don’t want to live any more. I have been in a perfect hell for the last six months on account of the European war!” By this time, Physick and a small phalanx of household staff, armed with make-shift weaponry, had reached the second floor. Physick had armed himself with the closest weapon that came to hand: a large chunk of hard coal. He used it to pound Muenter into insensibility as he lay beneath Morgan on the floor. After taking away his guns and tying him up for the police, another servant noticed the dynamite sticking out of Holt’s pocket, and the dynamite was immediately placed in a pail of water, just in time to avert an explosion which could have destroyed the Morgans' Manor.Satisfied his attacker would not escape, Morgan went to the telephone andcalled Dr. William M. Zabriskie, a local physician who lived on Highland Road and who attended to many of the Gold Coast millionaires when they were summering in Glen Cove. He calmly informed Zabriskie that he had been shot, and his services were needed. It was only then that Mrs. Morgan and the household realized that Morgan had been struck by Muenter’sbullets. Morgan assured them that he wasn’t in pain, and that the injuries were slight, as they indeed proved to be. Dr. Zabriskie then attended to Muenter’s injuries. Muenter was still dazed- when Zabriskie asked who he was, the only reply that Muenter would give was “Christian gentleman.” Although he looked much worse for wear after his encounter with Morgan and the coal-wielding butler, battered and bruised beyond recognition, all of Muenter’s injuries were superficial.A few minutes later, Justice of the Peace William E. Luyster, who presided over the Glen Cove Court House, and the local chief of constables, Frank E. McCahill arrived at the house. They collected Muenter and his pistols and dynamite and suitcase filled with newspaper clippings and carted him off to the Glen Cove Court House. Inside the Glen Cove Court House, Luyster and McCahill searched through Muenter’s pockets. They found a small slip of paper, on which was written the names of Morgan’s four children. He also had three ten dollar bills and an editorial cartoon clipped out of the Philadelphia Record. The cartoon showed Lady Liberty pointing to a crate of fireworks, representing the European war, and admonishing Uncle Sam that they are “dangerous fireworks”. More ominously, they found a schedule of sailings for merchant vessels leaving New York, on which several ship departures were circled.Muenter, still clinging to his identity as “Frank Holt,” explained to Luyster and McCahill in a quiet, methodical manner exactly what his plan for the Morgan household had been. “I have a well-trained mind and I studied for a long time as to what would be the proper course for me to pursue before Idecided to take the matter up with Mr. Morgan personally... I wanted to go to every manufacturer personally, and persuade him to stop this traffic. It was physically impossible for me to do this, but Mr. Morgan, with his great influence could do what was impossible for me, and so I decided to apply to him.”He explained that it had been his intention to take Morgan’s wife and children hostage. Muenter intended to seal them into a room while he forced Morgan to do his bidding to stop munitions shipments to Europe. He had planned to cut a small hole with his pocketknife in the doorway of the room he placed the Morgan family in, through which he intended to pass food during what even he perceived would have been a lengthy siege. At first, Muenter claimed that his shooting of Morgan had been accidental. “I shot to frighten him. You see, I wanted to talk to him. He came running angrily towards me as soon as I saw him and I shot to frighten him so that it would be possible to avoid a mix up and so I could place my arguments before him... The bullets which I intended to go wild struck him.”Muenter added that he “would not have been shot if he had not been violent,” concluding that “I admire Mr. Morgan’s courage. If hewould display a quality of moral courage equaling the physicalcourage he showed towards me, he would go down in history asa very great man.”But Muenter faltered in his story on at least one occasion, and admitted that his purpose had been to assassinate the financier. In Mineola, the interrogation of Muenter continued. The prisoner was weak, had lost a fair amount of blood from the pummeling that Frank Physic had given him, and had eaten little or nothing since he was brought to the Mineola jail. Thejailers were concerned that he had taken poison, and brought in Dr. Cleghorn to examine him. Cleghorn announced that Muenter merely had “an intestinal disorder which frequently was associated with mental diseases.”Throughout the interrogation, Muenter claimed that he “didn’t want to hurt any one” and that his singular purpose was to end America’s role in the carnage in Europe. A New York City police detective asked Holt if he was ananarchist. He shook his head. They asked him if he was a socialist. He said quietly “Not yet.” One New York City detective bluntly asked Muenter whether or not he thought he was insane. “I haven’t been able to settle that question yet,” Muenter responded matter-of-factly. Luyster and Weeks were extremely circumspect in offering their opinions relative to Muenter’s sanity; both suspected Muenter would try to raise an insanity defense at his trial. But Chief William J. Flynn of the United States Secret Service was more forthright. He pronounced Muenter “unbalanced.” The jail’s physician, Dr. Cleghorn, pronounced him “a fit subject for Matteawan.”Captain Tunney, New York City Police Department’s bomb expert, asked Muenter for details about how he had made the bomb which he had detonated in the Capitol, which the newspapers had dubbed “the infernal machine.” He played on Muenter’s ego, feigning amazement at how the German-languages professor could have devised such a brilliantly-conceivedtiming mechanism. “There wasn’t any guesswork about it,” Muenter saidproudly. “I had experimented, not once, but many times. I knew just what I was doing, and how to do it. I really didn’t take any chances, for all my observations had been checked up, and I knew when the bomb would go off almost to the minute... I knew how much time I had. So I hung around while the acid was eating its way through the cork. I pulled out my watch and said to myself that 'it ought to be going off pretty soon'. And, sure enough, it did go off pretty soon. Then I hurried to catch the train to New York.” Here, Muenter slipped again, explaining that the reason he'd had to hurry back to New York was “to kill Mr. Morgan.”Muenter also took a few minutes to complain to Warden Hults of the Mineola jail that the guards had shown him disrespect by calling him by his first name, and requested that he be referred to as “Mr. Holt”. The warden provided him with the latest New York City newspapers, in which he read the accounts of both the Capitol bombing and the shooting of Morgan. He pronounced the coverage “very satisfactory”, and told CommissionerWoods that he thought the publicity garnered from the acts would help him to "obtain his objective". He even offered his opinions on the Kaiser, the King of England, and the Czar of Russia: “It would be a good thing if they were blown up. Then the people would have some chance of getting their rights.” In his cell, Muenter was described as “a grouchy sort of man, not a crook... But a highly educated man with fine sensibilities... He is easily insulted, andquestioning him had to be a matter of extreme tact.”Throughout hour after hour of interrogation, Muenter refused to provide certain details about his plans, and especially about the quantity of dynamite he had on hand. Cryptically, he would only state that on Wednesday, July 7th, he would tell all. Some of the detectives working on the case believed that Muenter was trying to give his co-conspirators, either German agents or violent pacifists, time to escape the country. But otherswere beginning to feel that Muenter had something more ominous planned, something scheduled to occur in spite of Muenter being securely behind bars.It took several days for police to track down the trunk Muenter had placed in storage in New York City. They traced it to a warehouse operated above a livery stable and garage at 342 West Thirty-Eighth Street. The effort was well spent, however. The trunk contained an anarchist’s delight: 134 sticks of60% dynamite (carefully packed in sawdust), a box of blasting caps, coils of fuse, batteries, nitric acid, windproof matches, six wooden containers of mercury fulminate, smokeless powder, and three recently completed home-made tin can bombs. Each was five inches in diameter and eight inches high.New York City’s Inspector of Combustibles Owen Egan declared it “the greatest equipment for bomb making ever brought to New York.” The owner of the warehouse, R. L. Vaughan, was lucky to be alive; for days, he had been tossing it around the warehouse without a care. “Muenter was ready for anything with his little arsenal,” explained Egan. He added that “there is nothing in the argument that he must have had financial backing, for a good deal of what he had could be bought for fifteen cents a pound. I dothink, however, he must have had somebody to instruct him in bombmaking, for I do not see how he could have learned all he evidently knew unaided."It was not until July 6th that Muenter had the benefit of legal council. Muenter’s Cornell colleagues retained attorney Thomas J. Reidy, of the NYC firm of Clocke, Koch and Reidy to defend him. Reidy had known Muenter at Cornell, and in fact had been his landlord for much of the time he was there. He announced that “Frank Holt” had told him that he was wasn’t sure where he was in 1906 — he might have been in Germany studying German — but that he was “positive he was not Muenter.” While in jail, Muenter wrote out a lengthy polemic addressed to “The People” and gave it to Reidy to instructions to release it to the press.Reidy, instead, pocketed the document. “I intend to keep the notes which the prisoner has given to me,” Reidy told reporters. “Enough of his writings and statements has been printed already.” He asked that Muenter not be subjected to any more interrogations by the Secret Service or police. “He is very weak and his condition is serious. They must have obtained all the factsthey want from him by this time, and further ordeals might put his life in danger.” The Nassau County District Attorney consented. A few details were still unresolved, but in the three days they had to interrogate him, they had learned enough to put a solid case together.Muenter’s father-in-law hired attorney Martin Littleton to assist in his defense. Littleton met with Muenter in the afternoon. Muenter asked repeatedly whether his act had stopped the shipment of arms to Europe. He offered to waive a public hearing, saying he “did not want to cause the Morgans any more trouble,” and asked repeatedly as to Morgan’s condition.“I talked with him some time,” recalled Littleton. “It was obvious I was simply talking to an insane man. He would close his eyes and apparently doze off. I would ask him a question and he seemed to wake suddenly.”Muenter told his lawyer that the jail guards were refusing him access to newspapers. He grew so upset that Littleton stepped out into the corridor and grabbed a daily paper that a guard lad left lying there, giving it to him before leaving the jail. Dr. Cleghorn had received a report from Cambridge which detailed several operations which had been performed on Muenter. Reidy’s ban on police interrogation didn’t apply to physicians, so Cleghorn went to the Mineola jail and examined Muenter to see whether or not there were scars which matched the descriptions. They matched exactly. The Nassau District Attorney was also notified that a large contingent of Cambridge residents would be setting out that day for Mineola to try toidentify Muenter.Dr. Carlos F. MacDonald, a psychiatrist, was brought to the Mineola jail to interview Muenter. MacDonald pronounced Muenter a “paranoic of the reformatory type,” adding that his statements “...for the most part seem logical... when the subject is an abstract one, his mental weakness does not come out strongly. In his discussion of concrete facts, however, his wildnessis more apparent, notably when he describes how he thought he could imprison the Morgans, barricade the door on them, and prevent their rescue by laying a stick of dynamite on the table.”“Don’t you think you made a mistake in going there with two revolvers and trying to influence Mr. Morgan that way?” MacDonald asked. “The mistake I made was that I walked ahead of the children instead of after them,” Muenter responded. “If I could have gotten him and his family into the rooms and imprisoned them all there and kept them there with myself while he was planning the work, that is the work, that is why I brought thefamily there, so they couldn’t shoot off into the room, it would have set this off. If they shot into the room it would have exploded the dynamite. I would lay it on the table and say: ‘This is dynamite. If you shoot at me, go on. It is for the protection of all of us.’”“Didn’t you think that was an unusual way to protect them?” MacDonald asked. “The children were innocent of any wrongdoing.”“If the father wanted to kill the children by shooting into the room, he could do so, but he was informed beforehand that the dynamite was there,” Muenter repeated. “I would tell him that — ‘There is dynamite on this table, therefore don’t shoot into this room.’ It was to keep him from rescuing the children."“But suppose Mr. Morgan had told you that he would decline to accede to your plans?”“I would have said ‘All right; until you are tired.’ I would have held his family in prison.”MacDonald next asked Muenter whether or not he thought he had a legal right to take action against Morgan. Muenter responded that it had “nothing to do with legal right. My dear sir, this is war, you are mistaken.”“But we are not at war.”“You are wrong. We are at war. We are actually at war, we are killing thousands of people every day.”“But we haven’t declared war,” MacDonald reminded him.“Yes, we are doing it underhandedly,” Muenter replied.“Do you think that you, single-handed, could arrest the whole trend of an age?”“No, but Mr. Morgan could.” Muenter lamented over his failed plan. “It was the only thing that could have been done. If it had succeeded it would havebeen a very fine thing.”On that same day, on the 6th of July, Muenter’s wife received a letter fromher husband which had evidently written in the few hours while he was in Washington, when he'd been placing his “infernal machine” in theCapitol building. Of greatest concern was the paragraph stating that a ship would be sunk en route to England on the 7th of July. Muenter’s wife immediately brought the letter to the authorities in Dallas, who telegraphedthe Department of State in Washington that a bomb may have been planted aboard an England-bound steamship. The Department of State immediately forwarded the telegram to Secretary of the Navy Daniels. The news was quickly disseminated to the Secret Service agents, as well as to the New York City and Washington D.C. detectives.New York Police Commissioner Woods later recalled that “We had been worried for several days about what Holt, or Muenter, expected to happen on Wednesday. He had said several times that he was going to tell his story on Wednesday... On Sunday, when I tried to get him to talk to me about the dynamite, he said ‘I will tell you all about that on Wednesday, but on Wednesday the whole world will know.’ We did not feel that we could afford to regard his threats lightly, as if they were the boasts of an ordinary crank, because he had proved that he was a man of ability and one very likely, in view of the seemingly impossible things he had done already, to do what he predicted that he would do.” Woods sent his personal secretary, Guy Scull, by automobile to Mineola to beg Muenter to tell them which ship he had planted the bomb on. Unfortunately though, Scull would arrive ten minutes too late to get his answer.Muenter had already tried to kill himself on the night of July 5th, by slashing his wrists with the metal eraser retainer on a broken pencil. The effort was wholly ineffectual; a guard simply pulled the pencil from his hand. County jail authorities were certain that he was trying to starve himself to death, and gave instructions that if Muenter was not taking solidfood by the 7th, the guards were to force-feed him. Jail authorities were certain that he would try to commit suicide again, and he'd been placed on suicide watch, but personnel shortages made complying with the instructions impossible- only one guard was available per shift. The guard assigned to watch Muenter during the evening shift was Jerry Ryan, who'd arrived at 8:10pm. On the instructions of the jail warden, the cell door had been left open, to enable the watchman to rush into the cell and foil any more attempts by Muenter to commit suicide and escape the hangman's noose.“Oh, I want to sleep so bad,” Muenter told Ryan. Ryan told him to try to get some sleep. “I shall do everything I can to get some sleep,” Muenter said.“Then I’ll do all I can to keep things quiet for you.” Muenter laid down on his cot, face towards the cell door, and put his arm over his head. He seemed to doze off immediately, and for half an hour seemed to sleep. At 10:35 on the evening of July 6th, Ryan walked out of the cell to investigate a noise made by another prisoner, inexplicably leaving the cell door open and Muenter unguarded. With his guard no more than fifteen feet away, Muenter managed to slip out of his cell, scrambled up the cross-bars onto a railing on the second floor of the jail block, and dove head-first onto the concrete floor of the jail corridor, a distance of nearly twenty feet.His head struck the floor with such tremendous force that the noise of the impact sounded like an explosion, giving rise to a short-lived rumor that Muenter had smuggled a pressure-sensitive mercury fulminate blasting cap into the jail and had detonated it between his teeth. Ryan rushed back to the cell, nearly tripping over Muenter, who was lying dead on the floor in a pool of blood. The noise of the impact had sounded to Ryan like a pistol shot. He called for another jailkeeper to send for Dr. Cleghorn, that Muenter had shot himself. “As soon as Dr. Cleghorn came he flopped the body over, and I helped him,” Ryan later recounted to reporters. “I said, ‘He must have had a gun, because I heard an explosion’ and the doctor said ‘It looks as though he had blown his nut off’.”Cleghorn had been mislead by the reports provided to him by the jail guards. But more careful inspection failed to show any bullet wound; an autopsy later determined that he had died of a compound fracture and a cerebral hemorrhage. About ten minutes after Muenter killed himself, a team of New York City police detectives led by Guy Scull arrived to interrogate him about his plot to blow up a munitions ship at sea. Frustrated, a few of them went on to Bethpage, hoping to find a clue in his bomb laboratory there, while the remainder returned to the City. Nassau County District Attorney Smith was furious, as Muenter’s death had cheated him out of what would have been one of the most celebrated court cases of the era. In Dallas, the Rev. O. F. Sensabaugh stated that he would not inform his daughter of Muenter’s suicide until the morning. “Of course, we are terribly sorry to hear of Frank’s death, but there is little I can say.”Investigators working on Muenter’s threat to sink either the Philadelphia or the Saxonia learned that both ships had left for Liverpool from NYC on the 3rd. Both were owned by J. P. Morgan. However, although he had originally intended to target the Saxonia or Philadelphia, Muenter’s plan had run afoul of an anonymous shipping agent’s cost-cutting efforts. Muenter hadn't specified that he wanted the package shipped on a specific vessel, so the shipping agent had held them aside for a few days to get a lower shipping rate onboard another Morgan-owned vessel, the SS Minnehaha.The Minnehaha was registered to the International Merchant Marine, a Morgan subsidiary. It was valued at $1 million. On the day Morgan was shot, she had been berthed at Pier 58, at the foot of West Sixteenth Street in Manhattan. The next day she was moved to Gravesend Bay in Queens to take on a cargo of more than $6 million in war supplies bound for Great Britain. The cargo included 2,800 cases of shrapnel shells, 1,723 cases of artillery cartridges, 1,000 cases of cordite explosive, 1,400 cases of TNT, 3,000 barrels of motor oil, 66 hogsheads of rum, 230 horses bound for service with the British Royal Artillery, and several hundred tons of desperately needed food bound for the British people — wheat, flour, pork, beef, and poultry. Unlike the Saxonia or Philadelphia, she was also carryinggeneral freight.Minnehaha left the Port of New York at 7:14 p.m. on July 4th. At half an hour past midnight on the morning of July 7th, her wireless operator intercepted the message, intended for the Philadelphia and Saxonia, that bombs may have been placed aboard England-bound vessels. Her captain, a long-time International Mercantile Marine employee named Claret, orderedthe small boats swung out in case an explosion occurred and it was necessary for the crew to abandon ship. At 4:15 in the afternoon of the 7th — right on time with Muenter's threats — the bomb exploded, with the blast flinging crewmen ten feet into the air. Following the explosion, a largefire broke out, filling the ship with dense smoke. Fighting acrid smoke and flames, the crew had to shift a large portion of the cargo in the hold in order to get at the fire. Then they closed the hold and flooded the compartment with live steam to try to suffocate the flames. Luckily, the general freight had been placed in its own separate hold, on the opposite side of the ship from the high explosives- and it was in the general freight compartment that Muenter's bomb had been placed.The assorted residents from Cambridge, sent down at the request of the Cambridge police detectives to try to positively identify Erich Muenter, arrived the morning after his death. A police sergeant checked Muenter’s dental records with the teeth of the late “Frank Holt”; it was certainly the right man. His former landlord, the two newspaper reporters, and the mayor of Cambridge all positively identified the body as being that ofErich Muenter. Muenter’s death certificate filed with the Hempstead Boardof Health officially listed him as “Frank Holt”, rather than Erich Muenter, born in Wisconsin, rather than Germany, on 25 March 1875. Originally, the Sensabaugh family had planned to have the body buried in Ithaca, rather than Dallas, to spare Leone the horror of a funeral. However, she decided that she wanted him buried near her home.On July 9th, County Coroner Walter P. Jones convened a formal inquest at Hempstead to determine the cause of death. After the short testimony of Dr. Cleghorn, Jones announced that he was satisfied that Muenter had committed suicide by leaping to his death from the bars of his cell. However, for the sake of thoroughness, he adjourned the hearing until the 16th. He wanted to hear the testimony of several of the other inmates of the jail present when Muenter killed himself. At the same time the inquest went into recess, the Nassau County Board of Supervisors announced that they would be undertaking a full investigation to determine whether or not negligenceat the jail was responsible for Muenter’s death. In 1914, the Nassau County Jail had scandalized the region when it was revealed that prison guards were engaging in “orgies” with female prisoners. Five guards were indicted and found guilty. Certainly, the Board of Supervisors wanted no part of another such debacle.Ryan began to feel that the county was planning to scapegoat him for Muenter’s death. He gave a protracted interview to a newspaper reporter at his home in Spring Valley, steadfastly held to his story that he was not asleep at his post. “I had plenty of sleep before I went to work. I particularly remember that I had slept all day Tuesday. I didn’t dare to go to sleep while I was watching Muenter, for I had my revolver on me and he knew it. I was afraid he might try to take it away from me.” He showed his revolver to the reporter. “It has been loaded this way for two years, so you can see he wasn’t shot with my gun.”“I have never decided whether Muenter jumped to his death or was shot or shot himself. It seemed to me like there was an explosion. Whatever it was that made the crash, I am not going to make a crack now, but everything is coming out. I am not going to be made a goat of in this thing. Now, I want it understood that I had nothing to do with the door’s being open. Thatwas all arranged for when I got there. After I had gone to see what the noise was I had heard up the cell block, leaving Muenter apparently asleep, I heard the explosion and ran back to find him lying in a pool of blood. When the officials came I walked away; I was sore because he had put one over on me.” As to his not closing the cell door before he investigated, Ryan said, “That was probably carelessness on my part. I knew he could not get away. I knew I would only be away a second. Yes, I did violate my instructions when I left the prisoner alone."At the end of the investigation, after the Board of Supervisors convened a meeting behind closed doors with District Attorney Smith, they issued the following typewritten statement to the press: 'The Board of Supervisors, at a conference with the District Attorney, agrees with the District Attorney that there has been a great neglect of duty at the jail as to the custody of one Frank Holt, who committed suicide on July 6th, 1915. The District Attorney is doing everything in his power to investigate and find out who is directly responsible for the act and will lay the whole thing before Sheriff Pettit on his return, and, if the facts warrant, further action will be taken and the persons responsible dealt with according to law...'However, after the press conference, District Attorney Smith said that the Board of Supervisors was “creating false impressions” and that in facthe was not investigating the jail. “What is all this fuss about?” he asked reporters. “There is no question that there has been negligence. We all know that.” Smith laid full responsibility for laxity at the jail in the lap of Warden Hults. “There is nothing to investigate. It is admitted there was negligence. The Warden is responsible. He made a mistake in judgement. He should have had two guards. He had, however, to deal with Holt, who was so weak a ten-year-old boy could have handled him. Two doctors had examined him and we were thinking of sending him to the hospital.” Newspapers called Muenter “the most loosely guarded and most important prisoner ever in the custody of Nassau County.” A former Nassau county official told reporters from the steps of the Mineola Court House “Nassau County is lucky Holt killed himself. If he hadn’t, he might have walked away from us.”So, there you have it. A story where it isn't just one man, Erich Muenter, who can be compared to The Joker, but where practically every other individual of any significance involved along the way can be compared to other Batman characters; the Morgans can be compared to the Waynes, Henry C. Physick can be compared to Alfred T.C. Pennyworth, D.A. Smith can be compared to D.A. Harvey Dent, Dr. William M. Zabriskie can be compared to Dr. Leslie Maurin Thompkins, Commissioner Woods can be compared to Commissioner Gordon, Dr. Cleghorn can be compared to Dr. Hugo Strange; the list goes on and on, and it's just about the most perfect fit imaginable.Basically, think of this tale as our Earth's take on the foiling of a near-perfect clone of Batman's origin story- one where the Joker decided to try and kill Thomas and Martha Wayne by storming Wayne Manor instead, but where Alfred Pennyworth's quick thinking and rallying of Wayne Manor's staff managed to foil his assassination effort and save the Waynes' lives, and the Joker subsequently managed to successfully kill himself on the second attempt (unlike in the comics, where he's tried to kill himself innumerable times and always failed).Perhaps on a parallel earth, Erich Muenter succeeded in his effort to kill the Morgans, and elected to escape Mineola prison and resume his insane campaign of terror on the streets of NYC, deeming it to be more worthwhile than killing himself in the spur of the moment. And thus, provided the incentive for the orphaned Morgan children to don their capes and cowls ,and become that particular reality's version of the Bat-Family. With a bit of Captain America-style war patriotism and anti-German sentiment added to the mix for good measure, of course...

Marutha Nayagham Pillai (1725 – 15 October 1764)Early yearMaruthanayagam Pillai (correctly Mathuranayagam Pillai) alias Muhammed Yusuf Khan was born circa 1725 in the village of Panaiyur, in Rammnad 'country' in a Hindu farming family of Vellala caste. [1] (Yusuf Khan: The Rebel Commandant by S.C.Hill-1914, page 1). (See also [2] History of Tinnevelly by Caldwell). Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (who was in the service of Muhammed Ali Khan Wallajah, the Nawab of Arcot, for three years), mentions in his 'Genuine Memoirs of Asiaticus' [3] (2nd Ed 1785, page 160), that Yusuf Khan was of royal extraction and high descent. The Scots Magazine (for the year 1765, page 264) tells of a letter written by a gentleman in the East Indies to a friend in Scotland, from the military camp before Palamcottah, dated 22 October 1764 (a week after his hanging), wherein Yusuf Khan is said to be 'descended from the ancient seed of that nation'[4]. According to an ancient Tamil manuscript 'Pandiyamandalam, Cholamandalam Poorvika Raja Charithira Olungu', the Pandiyan dynasty in Madurai was founded by one Mathuranayaga Pandiyan [5]. Yusuf Khan was believed to be his descendant.Being too restless in his youth, he left his native village, and converted to Islam.To make a living, he served as a domestic hand at the residence of the French Governor Monsr Jacques Law in Pondicherry. It was here he befriended another French, Marchand (a subordinate of Jacques Law), who later became captain of the French force under Yusuf Khan in Madurai. Whether Yusuf Khan was dismissed from this job or left on his own is unclear now. He left Pondicherry, for Tanjore and joined the Tanjorean army as a sepoy (foot soldier).Education & early careerAround this time, an English captain named Brunton educated Yusuf Khan, making him a learned man well-versed in several languages. From Tanjore he moved to Nellore (in present day Andhra Pradesh), to try his hand as a native physician under Mohammed Kamal, in addition to his career in the army. He moved up the ranks as Thandalgar (tax collector), Havildar and finally as a Subedar and that is how he is referred to in the English records ('Nellore Subedar' or just 'Nellore'). He later enlisted under Chanda Sahib who was then the Nawab of Arcot. While staying in Arcot he fell in love with a 'Portuguese' Christian (a loose term for a person of mixed Indo-European descent) girl named Maasa (?Marsha /?Marcia), and married her.Carnatic warsIn 1751, there was an ongoing scuffle between Muhammed Ali Khan Wallajah, (who was the son of the previous Nawab of Arcot Anwaruddin Muhammed Khan hence the rightful claimant) and Chanda Sahib his relative and a pretender, for the throne of Arcot. The former sought the help of British and the latter the French. Chanda Sahib initially succeeded and became the Nawab, forcing Muhammed Ali to escape to the rock-fort in Tiruchirapalli. Chanda Sahib followed and with the help of the French, besieged Trichy. Muhammed Ali and the English force supporting him were in a grim position. Ensign Robert Clive, (who had earlier joined the East India Company as a writer) with a small English force of 300 soldiers made a diversionary attack on Arcot to draw away Chanda Sahib's army from Trichy. Chanda Sahib dispatched a 10,000 strong force under his son Raza Sahib to retake Arcot. Raza Sahib was aided by the Nellore Army and Yusuf Khan as a Subedar must have been in this force. At Arcot, and later at Kaveripakkam, Chanda Sahib’s son was badly defeated by Robert Clive, and it was now Chanda Sahib's turn to escape to Tanjore where he was killed by Mankoji, a Tanjorean general. The English quickly installed Muhammed Ali as the Nawab of Arcot and most of Chanda Sahib's native forces defected to the English.Establishment of military careerYusuf Khan's military career started during the Carnatic Wars. Under Major Stringer Lawrence, Yusuf Khan was trained in the European method of warfare and his natural talent in military tactics and strategy blossomed to its full potential. Over the next decade, as the Company fought the French in the Wars of the Carnatic, it was Yusuf Khan's guerrilla tactics, repeatedly cutting the French lines of supply, that did the French in, particularly during Lally's siege of Madras in 1758.Thomas Arthur Lally was to later describe the role of the Nellore Subedar's sepoys in these words: "They were like flies, no sooner beat off from one part, they came from another."By 1760 Yusuf Khan had reached the zenith of his career as the 'all-conquering' military commandant. (A few years earlier he had been given the rank of 'Commandant of Company's sepoys'). His greatest supporter during this period was George Pigot, the English governor in Madras. Yusuf Khan was held in very high esteem even after his death by the English and in their opinion he was one of the two great military geniuses India had ever produced; the other being Hyder Ali of Mysore. Yusuf Khan was regarded for his strategy and Hyder Ali for his speed. Major General Sir. John Malcolm said of him almost a fifty years later,"Yusuf Khan was by far the bravest and ablest of all the native soldiers ever to serve the English in India".Control of MaduraiGoing back to 1734, when the Madurai Nayak King Vijaya Ranga Chokkanatha Nayak died in 1731, he was succeeded by his widow, Queen Meenakshi, who acted as Queen-Regent on behalf of a young boy she had adopted as the heir of her dead husband. She had only ruled a year or two when an insurrection was raised against her by Bangaru Thirumalai, the father of her adopted son, who pretended to have claims of his own to the throne of Madurai approached Safdar Ali Khan, the son of Dost Ali Khan, the Nawab of Arcot with a couple of millions, while the queen sought Chanda Sahib, Safdar Ali Khan's brother-in-law.At this time the Madurai Nayak ruler was a feudatory to the Mughal emperor in Delhi, whose local representative was the Nawab of Arcot, and an intermediate authority was held by the Nizam of Hyderabad, who was in theory the subordinate of the emperor, but the superior of the Nawab. The treacherous Chanda Sahib after extracting a huge amount from the queen humbled Bangaru Tirumala and later murdered him. After a few years Chanda Sahib breached the agreement with the queen and assumed control of Madurai, keeping the helpless Queen Meenakshi under house- arrest in the rock-fort at Trichy. The haples queen soon consumed poison. After the death of Chanda sahib in the last of the Carnatic wars, Madurai kingdom came under Mohammed Ali's (the incumbent Nawab of Arcot) control, who in turn gave the tax collection rights of the whole Madura kingdom to the British, from whom he had borrowed huge sums of money.The polygar system had evolved with the extension of Vijayanagar rule to Tamil Nadu by the Nayaks. It was the brain-child of Aryanatha Mudaliar (Thalavaai Mudaliar), the celebrated Tamil general and prime minister of Viswanatha Nayak, the first Nayak ruler of Madurai. The country was divided into provinces or Palayams (pronounced Paalayam). Each palayam usually consisting of a few villages, was placed under the control of a Palayakkaran (Polygar or Poligar as mentioned in the English records) who was expected to provide in return, an annual tribute and military service to the Madurai ruler. Given their numerical strength, extensive resources, local influence and independent attitude, the Polygars came to constitute a powerful force in the political system of south India. They regarded themselves as independent, sovereign authorities within their respective Palayams. The early struggle between the southern Polygars and the East India Company, although essentially a battle over tax collection, had a strong political dimension. The English perceived the polygars as a rival power and treated them as their inveterate enemies, allowing their hostility full expression in their accounts. The East India Company, eager for revenue, opposed the manner and scale in which the Polygars collected taxes from the people. The issue of taxation, more specifically, who was to collect it, the traditional rulers or the rapacious new collectors from overseas —lay at the root of the subsequent uprising.The Polygars from Tirunelveli, Madurai regions and Sivaganga and Ramnad, were unwilling to pay taxes (kappam or Kist) to Mohammed Ali, a weak Nawab, nor ever recognized the British in the guise of tax collector. In 1755 the Nawab and British having valid reasons to quell these rebellious Polygars dispatched a huge army to the south under Col. Heron and Arcot Nawabs brother Mahfuz Khan, accompanied by Yusuf Khan as bodyguard. Mahfuz Khan and Col. Heron burnt several villages and razed down several temples, then ransacked and looted lot of towns, melting several rare statues from Hindu temples. This infuriated Yusuf Khan, who lodged a complaint with the British. Later Col. Heron was courtmarshalled.During this time the French under Thomas Arthur Lally surrounded the British fort in Madras. Yusuf Khan during the night launched a surprise attack on the French troops packing them away.Sent to MaduraiIn 1756, March Yusuf Khan was sent to Madurai to collect taxes and restore order. But during that time Madurai was under control of one Barkadthullah of Chanda Sahib days, with the support of Hyder Ali of Mysore. During this time an old Fakir climbed the top of the Madurai Meenakshi Temple and was preparing to build a dargah for himself, which angered the locals. Barkadthullah justifying the Fakirs attempts further added fuel to the fire. During this time Yusuf Khan arrived with little as 400 troops to take control of Madurai, showing his brilliance in defeating Barkadthullah’s large army, with Barkadthullah fleeing to Sivaganga Zamin and the Fakir, got whacked out of the town.After assuming control of Madurai, the results were small. Disturbances still prevailed every where, the Kallars ravaged the country in every direction, the Hyder Ali, the soldier of fortune, who was in Madura and was with difficulty beaten off, and no revenue worth mentioning could be collected. The British tried in vain to induce the Nawab of Arcot to recall his brother, Mahfuz Khan, who was undoubtedly the cause of all the trouble, and soon afterwards to meet their needs elsewhere; compelled them to withdraw Muhammad Yusuf. His departure was the signal for wilder anarchy than ever. The company's garrison in Madura could only just collect, from the country directly under its walls, enough revenue to support themselves; on the north the Kallans, and in the south Mahfuz Khan had thrown himself into the arms of the principal Polygars and was beyond the reach of argument or reason.Once again in MaduraiThe Company accordingly sent back Muhammad Yusuf to the country, renting both Madura and Tinnevelly to him for a very moderate sum of five lakhs annually. By then the Maduari Meenakshiamman temple was in dire straits, with the temple lands occupied and plundered by hoodlums; looting and dacoity rampant in countryside. Yusuf Khan immediately restored the lands back to the Temple, and by the spring of 1759 he began by teaching the Kallans a wholesome lesson. Cutting avenues through their woods, he shot them down without mercy as they fled, or executed as malefactors any who were taken prisoners. He went on to reduce the rest of the country to order, and soon had sobered by various methods all the polygar and made himself extremely powerful. Also he renovated the tanks, lakes and forts damaged by Hyder Ali, restoring law and order. By now whatever he did increased revenue to the Nawab’s and British coffers.Controversial wars with PalayakkarsDuring this time Yusuf Khan battled with Puli Thevar, a polygar of Nerkattumseval (Original Name was Nelkettaanseval), a small town to the south-west of Madurai. Puli Thevar was rebelling against the Nawab and the British. Yusuf Khan (marudhanayagam) broke the alliance between Travancore Raja and Puli Thevar by convincing Raja of Travancore to enter into an alliance agreement with Arcot Nawab. Yusuf Khan captured some of Puli Thevar's forts which were earlier tried unsuccessfully by the British and Nawab forces under Mohammed Ali. In 1760, on the war for Netkattanseval or the Puli Thevar war, Yusuf Khan suffered humiliating defeat at the hands of Puli Thevar. It has been historically recorded through local legends and folk songs which say that Yusuf Khan and his forces were literally driven away from Netkattanseval and were chased all the way back to the outskirts of Madurai by Puli Thevar and his forces. But later in 1761, when about ten thousand strong infantry along with more advanced military weaponry of British East India company were employed against Puli Thevar's only two thousand strong infantry who were only equipped with bronze age weapons such as lances and swords, Puli Thevar was captured but only after a brutal fight. Puli Thevar's army even though many times smaller in size and less advanced in terms of weaponry managed to cause severe casualties over the nawab and company forces. Upon capture, Puli Thevar was sent to Sankarankovil where he was planned to be hanged. However, Puli Thevar later escaped from Sankarankovil and believed to have been disappeared upon escape with no further details about him available.(Puli Thevar is today recognized by the Government of Tamil Nadu as a freedom fighter). Also during this time the Dutch captured the town of Alwartirunagari, to which Yusuf Khan retaliated by chasing them back to their ships anchored at Tuticorin.Start of the disputeReports of Yusuf Khan's brilliant victories now filled the Arcot Nawab with jealousy and alarm that he might depose him. Yusuf Khan by now instructed all the traders to render taxes directly to Yusuf Khan, while the Arcot Nawab wanted to have taxes routed through him. The British Governor (by now the British were good enough to have one) “Lord Pigot”, diplomatically advised Yusuf Khan to do as per Arcot Nawab’s order, also some British traders supported the same citing Yusuf Khan as Nawab’s employee. To make matters worse the Nawab’s brother Mahfuz Khan started planning to poison Yusuf Khan, with the whole hearted support of the Nawab.In 1761, and again in 1762, he offered to lease Tinnevelly and Madura for four years more at seven lakhs per annum. His offer was refused, and whether he was enraged at this, or whether he thought himself powerful enough to defy his masters, he shortly afterwards threw off his allegiance and began to collect troops in an ambition to be the lord of Madurai.Around this time some British traders reported (or rumored), to the Nawab and the Company, on Yusuf Khan” as encouraging people with anti-British sentiments, spending vast sums on his troops”.Nawab, in turn with the British sent Capt. Manson with orders to arrest Yusuf Khan.Meanwhile Yusuf Khan sent a note to Sivaganga Zamindari reminding them on their pending Tax arrears. Sivaganga’s Minister and General came to meet Yusuf Khan in Madurai, and after not getting their expected respect, got a rude warning, citing annexure of certain territories for the failure of arrears. The enraged Sivaganga Zamindar, immediately ordered Yusuf Khan to be “captured and hanged like a dog”. Meanwhile, Ramnad Zamin’s general Damodar Pillai and Thandavarayan Pillai met the Arcot Nawab in Trichy, complained on Yusuf Khan’s plunderings of Sivaganga villages, his cannon manufacturing plant in association with a certain French Marchaud, whom he befriended earlier, with plans for a war against the Nawabs.Arcot Nawab and the British quickly acted by amassing a huge army. For a start they aroused Travancore Raja against Yusuf Khan (As by now the Travancore state fell smoothly into British charms).In the ensuing battle, the Travancore raja was defeated and the British flags in his domains were chopped and burnt, and joined hands with the French and also hoisted the French flag on the Madura Fort. When Governor Saunders in Madras (now Chennai) called Khan Sahib for a meeting, he refused evoking the wrath of the East India Company. By now, Delhi’s shah and Nizam Ali of Hyderabad, the Arcot Nawab’s overlords proclaimed Yusuf Khan as the rightful legal governor of Madurai and Tirunelveli regions. While Arcot Nawab along with the British was hell bent on finding a reason to capture and kill Yusuf Khan.Tide against Yusuf KhanHaving turned the tables against most of them, Yusuf Khan had enemies lurking around him everywhere. Earlier working for the Arcot Nawab and British he earned the wrath of Mysore, and had slaughtered most of all rebellious Polygars who were anti-British, and the remaining were on the prowl. Now the Tanjore, Travancore, Pudukkotai, Ramnad, Sivaganga kingdoms joined with the British and the Arcot Nawab to attack Yusuf Khan, who by this time had proclaimed himself independent ruler of Madurai and Tirunelveli. In the First siege of Madurai in 1763, the English could not make any headway because of inadequate forces and the army retreated to Tiruchi citing Monsoons.Meanwhile the Nizam Ali of Hyderabad once again proclaimed Yusuf Khan as the Rightful governor, while the Arcot Nawab and the British issued death sentence for Yusuf Khan as “to be captured alive and hanged before the first known tree like a dog”.Final BattleIn 1764 again the British troops surrounded the Madurai Fort, this time cutting supplies to the fort. Hence Yusuf Khan and his troops went without food and water for several days inside the fort (surviving on Horse and Monkey meat according to European sources) but held on with great energy and skill, renovating and strengthening the fort at great expense, and repelling the chief assault with a loss of 120 Europeans (including nine officers) killed and wounded. At the end of that time little real progress against him had been made, except that the place was now rigorously blockaded.Meanwhile the Arcot Nawab consulted Sivaganga General Thaandavaraaya Pillai, along with Major Charles Campbell, hatching a treacherous plot to bribe Yusuf khan’s Dewan Srinivasa Rao, Marchand the captain of the French mercenaries and Khan’s doctor Baba Sahib. One morning, when Yusuf Khan was offering his prayers inside the fort, Marchand, Srinivasa Rao and Baba sahib went in quietly and pinned Yusuf Khan to the ground and tied him up using his own turban. Hearing this commotion, one youth called Mudali, close to Yusuf Khan, raised an alarm. He was quickly caught and cut down. As the news of the coup reached Yusuf Khan's wife, she rushed to the scene with a small posse of troops. But they were helpless against the well armed French and other European mercenaries, standing guard around the fallen ruler. Under cover of darkness and an even darker veil of secrecy, Marchand whisked away Yusuf Khan out of the fort and handed him over to Major Charles Campbell, who commanded the English among the besiegers. Unfortunately, the major part of Yusuf Khan's native forces remained totally unaware of the fateful drama that had been enacted inside his house, that morning.The next day, in the evening of 15 October 1764, near the army camp at Sammattipuram, on the Madurai- Dindigul road, Yusuf Khan was ignominiously hanged as a rebel by Muhammed Ali Khan Wallajah, the Nawab of Arcot. This place is about two miles to the west of Madura, known as Dabedar Chandai (Shandy), and his body was buried at the spot.What motives forced the three main conspirators, who were Yusuf Khan's close confidantes, to betray him? It is said that Yusuf Khan had once flogged Marchand with a whip (the first time a European officer had been whipped by a native ruler) and so he was waiting for an opportune time to take revenge. It is also possible that extreme misery of the people and soldiers inside the fort (because of the prolonged siege) might have forced the Dewan Srinivasa Rao and Baba Sahib, the physician of Yusuf Khan to decide that handing Yusuf Khan over to the English, would make them lift the siege and relieve the people of their intense agony and suffering. They might have imagined that Yusuf Khan would be sentenced to brief imprisonment and/or fine as punishment and let off later on.Legends of his deathOne legend is that he was hanged three times before he finally died. The brief story is that the first two attempts at hanging failed as the rope snapped and only the third attempt was successful. The superstitious Nawab ordered the body of Yusuf Khan to be dismembered into many pieces and bury them in different parts of his domain. As the story goes, his head was sent to Trichy, arms to Palayamkottai, and the legs to Tanjore. The remaining part of the body was buried at Madurai. In 1808, a small square mosque was erected over the tomb in Samattipuram, in Madurai, which exists to this day on the left of the road to Theni, at Kaalavaasal, a little beyond the toll-gate, and is known as 'Khan Sahib's pallivasal'.At the time of his death, Yusuf Khan had a son, who must have been 2 or 3 years old. Yusuf Khan's wife Maasa and the little boy vanished from the pages of history after the hanging. According to local tradition, Yusuf Khan's wife Maasa died soon after her husband's demise and the little boy was brought up in strict secrecy by Srinivasa Rao (Yusuf Khan's Dewan) in Alwarthirunagari. Srinivasa Rao might have felt that the little boy had better chances of surviving there as the people there were kindly disposed towards Yusuf Khan; he had once saved Alwarthirunagari, a few years previously, from a Dutch invasion. As per Maasa's last wish, and to maintain secrecy, Srinivasa Rao named the boy Mathuranayagam (which was the original Hindu name of Yusuf Khan) and brought him up in the Christian faith (Maasa was a Christian). Yusuf Khan's descendants later moved to Palayamkottai.The descendants of Baba Sahib, Yusuf Khan's physician, live around Krishnan Koil in Virudhunagar District. They still practise native medicine and bone-setting.The Madurai fort,[6] which Yusuf Khan had defended so passionately during the two sieges in 1763 and 1764 was pulled down in end of the nineteenth century. His lodgement, according to the French map,[7] must have been inside the Main Guard Square (Menkattu Pottal in Tamil; Menkattu is a corruption of Main Guard), a quadrangle bounded by West Avani Moola Street, Netaji Road and West Pandian Agil (Agali) Street. Yusuf Khan must have lived in the main bastion of the ancient Pandian fortress, also known in Tamil as the Moolai Kothalam (main corner tower; Moolai in Tamil means corner) at the angle formed by the West Avani Moola Street and the South Avani Moola Street. The four Avani Moola Streets, the North, the West, the South and the East were situated just inside the ancient Pandian fortress, which was almost a square. Just outside the fortress walls was the ancient moat, which obviously has been filled up by the Nayak rulers and the site of the moat can only be guessed by the names of the streets running near or perhaps on the moat itself, like the West Pandian Agil Street (Agil is a corruption of Agazhi). King Viswanatha Nayak extended the city limits further and the new fortress walls were built outside the Masi Streets. The ancient Pandian city of Madurai had the early Meenakshi Amman Temple at its centre; surrounding it were twelve concentric Ring Roads, each named after a Tamil month. The innermost ring road was Chithrai and the outermost Panguni. As the temple underwent periodic expansions over the centuries, the street adjacent to the temple premises retained the name Chithrai Street. Now, only three of the ancient twelve streets can be identified; Chithrai, Avani and Masi.The fort in Palayamkottai,[8], he had repaired and used so well during his earlier wars with the poligars, was dismantled in the middle of the nineteenth century. Only parts of the western bastion, (now housing "Medai Police Station" ), the eastern bastion (now housing the Tirunelveli Museum) and a few short segments of the eastern wall are remaining. to see a plan of the original fort in Palayamkottai, see the map between pages 466 and 467 [9].CharacterTradition has many stories to tell of this remarkable man, a scion of the ancient Pandiyan dynasty, who started his life as an ordinary peasant and by his military genius rose to the pinnacle of royal power when he became the ruler of the land, only to lose it all after a couple of years by the treachery of his comrade-in-arms. His executive ability is sufficiently indicated in the report (see below) from Colonel Fullerton - dated March, 1785 and entitled 'A view of the English interests in India'--which was republished in Madras in 1867. This says that in Tinnevelly and Madura 'his whole administration denoted vigour and effect. His justice was unquestioned, his word unalterable; his measures were happily combined and firmly executed, the guilty had no refuge from punishment.' It concludes by saying that '...wisdom, vigour and integrity were never more conspicuous in any person of whatever climate or complexion.