WEST GERMANY: Mercedes on the Range

It was straight, stock-in-trade western fare. From all over the courtroom, angry cattlemen glowered at the captured rustler. And the rustler himself, a bull-necked hombre who liked heavy gambling and fancy women, was perfectly cast. All that marred the illusion was the scene of the trial—not Dodge City but Düsseldorf—and the repeated references to the rustler’s favorite steed: a Mercedes 300 limousine.

On the face of the evidence, it was hard to see why Master Butcher Albert Roden, 50, chief defendant in last week’s trial of “the King of German Cattle Thieves,” had ever turned to rustling at all. For years, his butcher shop on Düsseldorf’s Rethelstrasse, manned by his two sons and his bleached-blonde wife, Anna, had been grossing $2,000 a week. But as the trial progressed, a painfully familiar story emerged: in 1951 on a jaunt to nearby Bad Neuenahr Casino, Roden caught the roulette bug, began to drop as much as $1,200 at a session. The following year, when tax inspectors handed him a bill for nearly $8,000 in back taxes, Roden, unable to pay, remembered the dying days of World War II, when he kept his retreating Wehrmacht unit in meat by slaughtering cattle in the open fields of East Prussia. With Ewald Mischker, 48, a Düsseldorf stockyard worker, as his accomplice, Roden began to prey on the North German range.

The Gunman. Cruising the Autobahnen by daylight in Roden’s Mercedes, the butcher and his sidekick spotted likely herds of beef cattle grazing near the highways. Returning by night, Roden would cover his well-cut suit with a butcher’s apron, work a steer or heifer out of the herd, and stun it with an airgun slug. Then, slaughtering and quartering the animal in less than half an hour, Roden would stow his kill in the trunk and back seat of the Mercedes and race back to Düsseldorf. There in the morning, he offered his customers fresh cuts of beef, complete with faked, blue government-inspection stamps.

Though Roden paid off his tax debts within a year, he could not quit. For more than six years he averaged a raid a week, stealing in all some 400 cattle, worth $90,000. Even after giving Mischker his cut, Roden had enough left over to finance his roulette losses and to set up a beauty parlor for his girl friend, Widow Irmgard Wakulenko, 38.

Farewell, Old Pal. Early last year, Mischker began to harp uneasily on an old German proverb: “The pitcher goes to the well until it breaks.” To replace Mischker, the insatiable Roden enlisted his 22-year-old son Jürgen, but on Jürgen’s second night out with Father, a motorcycle cop, suspicious at the sight of so young a man driving so expensive a car, came over to investigate and spotted the beef in the back seat. With the pitcher plainly broken at last, Roden confessed all, and last week, as his trial wound to a close, he was clearly headed for the kindest fate a rustler can expect: a long stretch in prison. Worse yet, as part of his punishment, the state prosecutor was demanding confiscation of Rustler Roden’s trusty Mercedes.