On May 24, 1956, the City Hospital of Welfare Island (New York) recorded the death of one of its patients, a seventy-eight-year-old man who had been in poor physical and mental health for a couple of years. . But taking a look at his life, it could be said that few lived it as intensely as he did. His name was Frederick Joubert Duquesne and he had gone through so many ups and downs that few novels could imagine such a character.
Frederick was born in the British Cape Colony in 1877, into a Boer Huguenot family of French descent, being the eldest of three brothers. His father combined the tasks of the farm where they moved, in the Transvaal Republic, with the profession of hunter, which his eldest son learned as a child. He gained great experience in it and admired the cunning and ability of the black panther to catch its prey so much that in the future that would be his emblem and his nickname, Black Panther .
These were difficult times for the Boers, harassed by the British, but also by the Zulus, who, although they had been defeated eleven years earlier, in 1888 took up arms again under the leadership of Dinizulu, the son of King Cethswayo. The new war was brief but in its context the farm was raided and Frederick, barely twelve years old, had the opportunity to kill a man for the first time; he also did it with the iklwa (a short spear that the Zulus used as a sword) that he seized from a warrior, in defense of his mother. They then had to join other families to fend off an impi attack. (Zulu regiment), as a result of which the entire family of his uncle, Piet Joubert, a hero of the First Boer War, died. 
Seeing how things stood, the Joubert Duquesnes sent Frederick to Europe, where his biographers say he studied at Oxford University and the Académie Militaire Royale in Brussels (although there is no documentary record of his passing through those institutions). In any case, after traveling for a while, in 1899 he returned to his homeland because a new war had broken out between the British and the Boers and he wanted to collaborate. He did so with the rank of lieutenant, being shot in the shoulder during the siege of Ladysmith, as a result of which he was promoted to captain. Then, at the Battle of Colenso, he was captured and sent to Durban, where he staged what would be the first of a long series of escapes that characterized his life.
In the late spring of 1900 we find one of the most unheard of and romantic episodes in his eventful biography; also one of the most controversial, because it is not very clear and there are those who question its veracity. In the face of the British offensive against Pretoria, it was decided to transport the gold from the Mint and the National Bank to the Netherlands, where President Paul Kruger had taken refuge. The value of the merchandise amounted to 680,000 kilograms in bullion, but the part of the cargo assigned to Frederick disappeared after a brawl between those in charge of its custody, who killed each other; Only he and some native porters survived, whom he ordered to hide the ingots in a grotto... and they never heard of it again.
The war continued and the balance tipped on the British side. Retreating to the northeast, Frederick's men ended up being captured by the Portuguese when they crossed the borders of their Mozambican colony, being transferred to Lisbon. He escaped with the help of the daughter of one of the guards whom he charmed and ended up in England, where he enlisted in the army and was posted to South Africa in 1901. He was not a defection but quite the opposite:an infiltrator, whose dislike He reached a point of no return to that country when he found that his family's farm had been razed to the ground, his sister raped and murdered, and his mother dying in a concentration camp.
That hatred was concentrated on Herbert Kitchener, who to confront the Boer guerrilla tactics alternated brutality with scorched earth, winning the war but at the cost of harsh criticism, not only in the rest of the world but also in Great Britain itself. For this reason, in 1901, Frederick recruited twenty assistants to develop a campaign of attacks and kill him in Cape Town. The conspiracy was discovered and he, being part of the British army, was accused of treason and sentenced to execution. At the last moment, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in exchange for information on the Boer crypto codes; Frederick would maintain as long as he provided them with fake ones.
The strong walls of the castle where he was confined could not dissuade him from trying to escape; but he had no luck and was transferred to a prison on Bermuda Island, considered safer. However, on the night of June 25, 1902, he jumped the barbed wire, swam two and a half kilometers without caring about the sharks and managed to get to safety by contacting collaborators, thanks to whom he arrived in Baltimore (USA) hidden in a boat.
As the war ended that year, he thus began his American stage working as a journalist for the New York Herald and other newspapers, in addition to publishing three novels. In 1908 he went to Port Arthur as a correspondent on the Russo-Japanese conflict; he also reported on the Spanish War of Melilla (that of the Barranco del Lobo) and that of the Belgian Congo. Another war he got into was the marital one:in 1910 he married the American Alice Wortley, whom he would divorce eight years later.
But before he became the unexpected protagonist of another curious episode. Given his experience on the subject, former President Teddy Roosevelt chose her to be his hunting advisor and thus accompanied him on his famous African safari. It had started when the New Food Supply Society put into practice his bizarre plan to solve the meat shortage in the US:import hippos and release them in the swamps of Louisiana to turn them into game species (which would also help keep the water hyacinth at bay). Frederick was consulted on the matter at the urging of his old enemy Frederick Russell Burnham who, though an American, had commanded the British Scouts in the Boer War and knew him well. In the end, there were no hippos in the US, but Frederick earned citizenship, granted in 1913.
Meanwhile, the world continued its mad war race. In 1914 the First World War broke out and Frederick saw an opportunity to take revenge on Great Britain. Through a businessman of German origin he was recruited as a spy for the Kaiser, posing as a businessman to organize attacks against British merchant ships in South America and report his movements to German embassies. He is credited with the sinking of more than twenty ships and the icing on the cake was that he had previously contracted loads on them with one of his aliases, so that he demanded the payment of the corresponding compensation from the insurers.
That false personality was discovered by MI5, which forced him to leave his base of operations in Brazil to go to Argentina - he spoke several languages - and, to get rid of the enemy secret services, he hired an article in a Bolivian newspaper reporting of his death at the hands of indigenous people in the Amazon. What was never entirely clear was the story he told about his revenge on Kitchener. He said that, posing as a Russian aristocrat, he met him aboard the HMS Hampshire , managing to report his position to the German submarine that torpedoed him; Frederick would have managed to escape on a raft shortly before, while the hated British soldier sank with the ship. No document is preserved to prove it.
In 1917 he enriched his resume by inventing an electromagnetic naval mine which he tried to sell to the US Navy, since this country had just entered the war. Instead, he did not get a job on the Panama Canal, as he intended. Incredible as it may seem, Frederick remained above suspicion in the US thanks to his good looks and his people skills. However, the war priority detracted from his adventure and hunting lectures, so he invented another persona:he was now Captain Claude Stoughton, a veteran Australian cavalryman who had fought in many battles and received three bayonet wounds. /P>
With that identity he toured for the benefit of the Red Cross, recounting his semi-fantastic adventures and becoming very popular... until that same year he was arrested for insurance fraud. Unfortunately for him, German documents were found in the search of his house implicating him in the sabotage of ships, in the deaths of several British sailors and even one informing him of the award of the Iron Cross. He was able to delay extradition to Britain for two years by faking paralysis in one of his legs; When the term was already expiring and his transfer was being prepared, he sawed through the bars of his dungeon and fled disguised as a woman.
It's amusing to know that the typical "wanted" bulletin distributed by the police still said that the fugitive couldn't move his right leg. The thing is that Fritz He, as he was nicknamed, arrived in Mexico and from there jumped to Europe, where he stayed for the next few years. In 1926, with things calming down, he returned to New York with a new identity. This time he called himself Frank de Trafford Craven and went to work in the publicity section of the famous film production company RKO. For the next five years he alternated his personality with his real one when he traveled to Manhattan.
But they had not forgotten him, as he believed. In the spring of 1932 he was again arrested by the FBI and prosecuted; Surprisingly, the British considered that his crimes had expired and did not claim him, so he was finally released without charge. Two years later, with Hitler already in power, Frederick was drafted into the Order of 76 , a nationalist anti-communist organization opposed to the New Deal of the newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (that entity would merge in 1937 with the Silver Shirt Legion of America , the expression of Nazism in the US).
Frederick carried out his spy work under the alias DUNN until, through a double agent, the FBI detected his name and recalled his previous resume. Three agents were immediately assigned to track him down and record his conversations. Although Frederick was aware of this, he did not flee and in June 1941 he was arrested along with thirty other spies who made up what became known as the Duquesne Spy Ring (Duquesne Circle of Spies), the largest espionage case in the country's history. Documentation on US war material and movements of his navy was seized from him, which unfailingly compromised him.
The ensuing trial took place in an uncomfortable context for the defendants:the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The process began on January 2, 1942 and a month later, with the US entering the war, the sentence was handed down:Frederick received eighteen years in prison. Considering that he was already sixty-four, that meant he would probably die behind bars. It was not so; He went through several penitentiary centers while his health progressively deteriorated and in 1954, given his precarious state, he was released having served fourteen years of sentence. Even today it is difficult to separate the real from the fictitious in his life.