When a 23-year-old Eurasian woman calling herself Maria Wendt touched down at an airfield near Los Angeles in 1936, the press flocked onto the runway to capture the first images of her descending from the plane. Pathé, Reuters, Gaumont, all sent crews to capture the “woman of mystery” who had made fools of the FBI, who were none too happy about it. As the woman was escorted away by plain-clothes policemen, she pulled down her black hat to cover her face and wrapped her coat tight around her. The pressmen shouted questions. She ignored them. Not even a “No comment”.
A newsreel soon played at cinemas across the country with the voice-over: “A woman of mystery is aboard this plane. She is Maria Wendt, daughter of a Shanghai merchant, a dope smuggler, accused of bringing opium into America from China. Uncle Sam accuses her of being part of a big international narcotics smuggling gang.”
And Maria had been caught smuggling drugs into America. A lot of drugs. Sliced open at the San Pedro docks, her two cowhide trunks were found to be hiding silk bags containing 24.5kg of heroin worth US$375,000 (US$8.5 million in 2024 money) and perhaps US$1 million (US$23 million in 2024) when cut and sold on the street. It was the largest drug haul ever made in the United States at the time. And it soon transpired that Maria was part of an operation spanning several continents and multiple cities. But there was the possibility – did she even realise she was part of this sprawling operation?
Maybe Maria’s plight wouldn’t have taken up so many column inches or newsreel frames had the US not been in one of its periodic social panics about drugs. Foreign dealers poisoning America’s youth just as the country needed them most, the economy in tatters amid war cries in Asia and Europe: xenophobia had always been at the heart of the American war(s) on drugs. There were also Chinese drug lords in league with shadowy Europeans, turning innocent young women into drug mules, creating 200,000 drug addicts in mid-1930s America. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau declared war, as 570 agents were assigned to bust international drug rings targeting the US. And he needed good headlines. Just weeks after his declaration, Maria was arrested at San Pedro and the Brandstatter Ring were declared Public Enemy No 1.
Their tale is a complicated one. So where to start? Perhaps China. Before she arrived in LA, Maria had lived in that other great favourite sin city of Hollywood B-movies – Shanghai. There, better known as Maria Wen, she lived with her sister Constance and their father Wen Tsung-yao (Zongyao), a former classmate of Sun Yat-sen at Hong Kong’s Government Central School (later Queen’s College).
During the Qing dynasty’s dying days Wen had been appointed governor general of Tibet, before joining Sun’s 1911 Xinhai revolution and becoming an official in Shanghai. He was a man of the Chinese Republic, but Constance and Maria still found their father too traditional, life with him too constricted. They were Shanghai girls – modern, educated, excited about the world. In the early 1930s, Constance pursued medical studies, training to be a doctor. Maria took French and German classes and began working as a student nurse at the city’s Paulun Hospital. In 1932, aged 19, she became engaged to the Paulun’s superintendent, a 41-year-old Frenchman from Alsace called Albert “Al” Stey. Happy times? Perhaps at first, but it was that engagement that would lead to Maria’s arrest in LA and her notorious appearance on the newsreels.
In 1936, Stey arranged for Maria to travel to Yokohama, as a private nurse to a female patient in the Paulun being transferred home to Japan. But the patient never showed up at the docks. Her two large travelling trunks did, and Maria claimed she was told to board the ship, stay on board at Yokohama, and continue to San Pedro, where she would be met by someone who would provide her with a ticket to Mexico City, accompanying another patient. Maria agreed.
Her liner, the Japanese-operated Heiyo Maru, arrived in California in early August. Maria had been on board since Shanghai – she didn’t get off in Manila, Yokohama or Honolulu – and once it had docked, US customs agents boarded the vessel and arrested her. Morgenthau’s drug-busting squad had been hard at work.
American agents in Shanghai had sent cables alerting LA customs of Maria’s arrival. More agents in Mexico sent an alert about an incoming flight from Mexico City, so they followed one passenger to the San Pedro docks where they figured he planned to meet Maria off the Heiyo Maru, but, perhaps seeing her arrested and walked down the gangplank, the man slipped away.
In the customs shed, agents cut open the trunk linings and found packs of heroin. In photos, the bags piled high looked like a snow-covered mountain. Maria was detained, panicked, but maintained she was unaware of the stashed dope, and stuck with the Paulun-patient-that-never-showed story.
The authorities may have believed her, but she was devious about her true name and nationality – Maria Wendt, Maria Watanabe, Molly Wendt, Maria Wen … Chinese, Japanese, French, Alsace-German … In the papers she was variously described as Chinese, Eurasian or of mixed Chinese-Dutch heritage. She was photographed looking smartly dressed, but solemn, unsmiling, and never looking directly at the camera.
Scared and exhausted, her initial front collapsed. Maria promised to cooperate and tell all she knew. She was taken to a hotel as agents tried to work out her story, hiding her in case members of the ring she worked for decided to silence her before she could spill the beans. But the plan backfired. That night, Maria disappeared. She went for a bath and bolted out of a window, leaving the taps running and her female guards blindsided.
“Chinese Girl Eludes Federal Agents” mocked a newspaper headline. The five-foot-one, six-stone, 23-year-old, who had been in the country less than 24 hours, had outsmarted the cops. The newspapers speculated her bosses were afraid she would name names, surmising the drug dealers she worked for had abducted her. But the truth was she simply ducked out when her guards weren’t paying attention, and ran.
The possibility of kidnapping and transporting across state lines made the case an FBI matter. Ethnically Chinese FBI agents were ordered to search lodging houses and hotels in every Chinatown from LA to New York. A fruitless task. Al Cohn, San Pedro’s senior customs agent, told the New York Daily News, “The amount of money and dope involved and the possibility she might expose the higher-ups of the ring would cause the leaders to stop at nothing to make sure the girl wouldn’t talk.”
More prosaically, Maria had managed to board a plane to Newark as a regular passenger. She had two reasons to head to the East Coast: one, Constance had moved from Shanghai to work in a New Jersey hospital and Maria knew that whatever trouble she was in her sister would help. Two, she hoped to be able somehow to board a liner for Europe and disappear.
Constance bought Maria a ticket to Europe on a Chinese passport under the name Mayline Young. But, walking up the gangplank of the SS Deutschland of the Hamburg America Line in New York, Maria was arrested, wearing, as reported by Baltimore’s Evening Sun, “smoked glasses”. It was speculated she was intending to rendezvous with her fiancé, Al Stey, in Alsace, but the agents who arrested her on the dock had bad news. When news of her initial arrest had got back via the wire services to Shanghai, Stey had apparently committed suicide.
Maria was put in handcuffs. A demure, petite woman evading two large customs officers had been embarrassing. Eight armed guards flew with her back to LA, to waiting federal agents and those newsreel crews.
Now, Maria told all. Her fiancé had recruited her as a “carrier”, and in LA she was to turn the drugs over to his boss, a man called Naftale Laffelholz Brandstatter. But now French Concession police in Shanghai were claiming Stey may not have committed suicide after all. His body had been found in a Frenchtown alley and it appeared he had died from a massive heroin overdose. Frenchtown Sûreté reported unusual bruising around his mouth, as if he had been forced to swallow the drugs.
The papers then reported that another man had hanged himself in the luxury state room of a liner in New York harbour. The Department of Justice believed this man to be “the world’s No 1 narcotics trafficker”, gangboss Naftale Brandstatter. The LA Times speculated about a “dope ring death pact” after such a massive narcotics seizure. Someone in China would have been seriously out of pocket and looking for revenge.
In LA the authorities posted armed guards outside Maria’s hotel door and placed female agents in the room, fearing she, too, might attempt suicide, in addition to being the target of an assassin.
So who was this mysterious, supposed kingpin Brandstatter? It seems Treasury agents had been monitoring him since 1930. He was originally Polish though had lived in Shanghai, Havana, Mexico City and in the US, organising the movement of vast amounts of Chinese heroin. Maria denied ever having met him, but ship records showed that he had left Shanghai only slightly ahead of her for California, and then went to Mexico. Treasury agents believed it had been Brandstatter who had been waiting for Maria at the San Pedro docks when she first arrived, having flown to California from Mexico City to meet her (and that she knew perfectly well who he was). In their annual report for 1936, Treasury agents wrote that their Shanghai office had intercepted telegrams between Stey and Brandstatter, frequently mentioning “Maria”.
When Maria was arrested disembarking the Heiyo Maru, Brandstatter had fled to Havana, but the Cuban authorities had been tipped off by the Americans and they immediately deported him, putting him on a ship bound for New York. US agents boarded his ship, the Oriente, as it entered New York harbour and went to his cabin to arrest him, only to find that he had apparently committed suicide, hanged by his dressing-gown sash.
Drugs seized, Stey seemingly murdered in Shanghai, Brandstatter so terrified of arrest he committed suicide – Morgenthau’s agents speculated that the ring’s command structure went even higher. They had termed it the Brandstatter Ring, but its tentacles led back to China, straight to Shanghai. From there its reach stretched across the Pacific to America. More concerned than ever, agents moved Maria – the only one left alive to tell the story of the Brandstatter Ring – to the LA County Jail, sequestered her on an isolation wing, and set up a round-the-clock guard.
But Brandstatter was as high up the chain as they ever got. Maria was too lowly to know any more names. The Mexico City police, noting that Brandstatter had spent time in their jurisdiction, identified a man called Manitio Eghise, who had purchased a ticket for Maria to fly from LA to Mexico City. They considered him the Brandstatter Ring’s main Mexican contact. They went to arrest Eghise but found him dead, another apparent suicide, in his office. It seemed someone had the power to make hardened criminals kill themselves from New York to Mexico City to Shanghai … or that someone was clearing house.
Maria went to trial in November 1936. It was clear to her lawyer, Ames Peterson, as much as Federal Judge Albert Lee Stephens, that she was unwell. Her previous bolt to New York meant any bail had been swiftly ruled out. She arrived in court in a wheelchair, could speak only in a whisper, and during the hearing fainted several times. She tried to defend herself, claiming she had been used. And she had. All agreed Maria was a dupe for the smuggling ring but had nonetheless carried the drugs. Maria took the fall for the Brandstatter Ring. Guilty as charged for narcotics smuggling.
On January 11, 1937, Maria Wendt, a convicted narcotics smuggler, stood once more before Judge Stephens in an LA federal courtroom to hear her sentence. The newspapers, still enthralled, reported she looked pale, emaciated, sick. The jailhouse physician Dr Benjamin Blank had determined she was indeed dying of tuberculosis of the kidney. It was almost certain her sentence would be longer than her remaining life expectancy, six months at best, as Blank told the Reno Gazette-Journal.
Maria was forlorn – abandoned by her parents, left to take the rap by the men who had connived to persuade her to smuggle drugs, pilloried in the press. Nobody was on her side but lawyer Petersen, who had sought to portray Maria as more victim than criminal. He appealed to the judge to allow Maria to be deported to Shanghai, to die in her homeland rather than the federal prison. But Maria herself never asked to be deported. Terminally ill as she was, she was aware of the probable fate that awaited her back in Shanghai, most likely that of Stey, Brandstatter and Eghise.
Stephens instead handed her a 20-year sentence. After that, if still alive, she was to be deported to China. She wasn’t in her cell long before she had to be moved to LA General Hospital to have her diseased kidney removed by Dr Blank, who estimated the operation might prolong her life by a year if she was lucky. In May 1937, Maria was transferred to the women’s Federal Prison Camp, at Alderson, West Virginia. She was accompanied cross country by armed guards and a nurse. It is believed she died some time afterwards in prison of kidney failure.
And then Maria Wendt was forgotten. America’s periodic paranoia of narcotics turned into a nationwide panic about first, Nazi, and then, Japanese, spies as war loomed. In late 1939, LA customs held a public auction of seized and confiscated goods they didn’t need any more, and alongside a range of eclectic items in its stores – a pair of men’s silk pyjamas (worn), a gold cigarette case and lighter, a jade tree, exotic bird feathers – were “two trunks – formerly property of Maria Wendt – seized 1936”.
