In the spring of 1862, tens of thousands of letters re-entered the Viennese postal circulation stamped with an inscription that recorded their delay without explaining it: “Misdirected, subsequently forwarded.” They departed for Paris, Graz, Linz, Italy, and yet more distant destinations. Some had languished for nearly a year. All had passed through the selfsame sorting hall, and many had been unsealed before being returned to their addressees. The chronicle in the New Pitaval lays this vast deflection to a single postal clerk, Karl Kalab, whose duties granted him access to ordinary correspondence at the very moment it changed hands.
The central post office of Vienna daily received the mail dispatched from dozens of district offices and neighbouring villages. The envelopes were sorted seven times a day in a vast hall where several clerks distributed the letters according to their destination. Kalab had been employed there for years. He had risen through the ranks, had been entrusted with an advance of postage stamps for sale, and had subsequently assumed the responsibility of standing in for the comptroller tasked with superintending certain workstations. His customary round required him to unbind the packets of local mail, verify registered consignments, and lay ordinary letters upon the sorting table.
This post afforded the material condition for the thefts. Ever since 1858, Kalab had possessed the key to a locked drawer beneath his desk, intended for parcels encumbered by postage fees. He made of it a hiding-place. While sorting the post, he would retain ordinary letters in his palm, turn his back to his colleagues under pretext of handling local bundles, and slip the envelopes through an aperture concealed beneath a shutter. The drawer was almost never opened by other officials; after the deposit system was altered, it fell virtually into oblivion.
The earliest complaints might well have pointed towards the clerk who handled the post, but they failed to do so. Delays mounted, and the administration requested certain correspondents to furnish the missing addresses together with the dates of posting. Kalab’s superior informed him of these inquiries and entrusted him with tracing the reported letters. He duly retrieved them, the compiler relates. In the eyes of his superiors, this feat merely confirmed his zeal. In the sorting office, the clerk who so willingly kept watch over his fellows was thus enabled to pass himself off as the very man who redressed their negligences.
In the spring of 1862, letter-carrier Mermon observed that Kalab frequently held letters back during the sorting. He initially surmised that he was setting them aside out of hesitation over their destination. Yet Kalab did not act in this manner whenever the comptroller’s eye was upon him. Mermon thereupon watched him more narrowly and surprised him in the act of wrapping a bundle of letters before sliding it through the aperture into the drawer. He alerted Comptroller Kurzweil, who established that envelopes were indeed concealed within.
On the 8th of April, an investigating commission, which included a police commissioner, convened at the sorting office. Kalab was ordered to surrender the key to the drawer. Seized with dread, he admitted to having slipped a packet inside, and twenty-four letters were discovered, all deposited the preceding day. In the work-desk he was then using, forty-four further packets came to light. Kalab confessed that for the past three months he had been taking letters, opening them, and stealing their contents. He estimated his spoils at three hundred florins. An audit of his stamp funds also revealed a surplus of 117 florins, which he explained as his salary; this explanation was straightway demolished by a colleague who had collected the said salary in his stead as repayment for a loan.
The commission then escorted him to the civic hospital, where he claimed to lodge. He broke down on the way, imploring to be taken back to the office to make a full confession. The investigators, however, insisted upon inspecting his actual lodging in the suburb of Neubau. The rented room was so cramped that he had had the table removed merely to be able to move about. The wardrobes, a valise, and a chest of drawers were crammed with bundles of letters. There were 1,659 packets still tied with twine, containing 56,284 dispatches. Elsewhere lay 799 opened letters, 1,655 empty envelopes, and cancelled postage stamps peeled off, gummed anew, and readied for second use. The hearth contained paper ashes; Kalab had burned a portion of what he took.
The tribunal directed that the letters be delivered the very next day to the central office so that they might resume their transit. The inviolability of correspondence had to be respected; the magistrate considered that the duration and yield of the thefts could be reconstructed by other means, at least approximately. Over the course of two days, twenty clerks counted the letters, examined the stamps, and affixed to every envelope the rubric noting the delay. The 56,284 unopened dispatches formed but a portion of the aggregate. Taking into account the opened letters and the empty envelopes, the chronicle estimates the minimum recovered at nearly 58,000 letters, and values the stamps affixed to them at 8,200 florins.
The wrapping papers enabled investigators to trace the enterprise still further back. Nearly 1,400 sheets, bearing dates from November 1859 to April 1862, had served to bind the bundles. Comparing these with the average number of letters per packet, the chronicler reckons thousands of certain thefts for individual months, before advancing a possible grand total of 200,000 letters since 1856. This latter figure is by no means a judicial calculation: it is an extrapolation by the author, grounded in part upon the paper Kalab was said to have burned for firewood. The true span and scale of the depredations thus remain distinct from what was materially seized.
The letters contained, moreover, tokens and messages whose worth was not to be measured by weight alone. The narrative cites several instances: a railway employee awaiting his family’s arrival in Vienna found no one at the station, his letter having lain buried among Kalab’s effects; the urgent missive of a woman in childbed, calling for a midwife, reached its address only two years later; manuscripts dispatched to theatre directors never reached their destination. These episodes, chronicled by the compiler, bring home the human consequences of an interception whereof the victims often did not even suspect they had been robbed.
The investigators sought to fathom how so modest a salary could have consorted with the acquisition of property. Kalab had entered the service with scarce any means; a colleague had paid his initial caution-money. Yet he had subsequently purchased two houses in Hietzing, furnished them, and sustained his parents financially. He told various acquaintances that the properties belonged to a wealthy aunt or to a count. At his trial, he invented a creditor named Michael Minkov, who was supposed to have entrusted him with funds and promised to make him his heir. No witness could corroborate this man’s existence. The prosecution set these fabrications against his earnings and acquisitions, while Kalab attributed his gains to lottery tickets and the resale of stamps.
On the 23rd of September 1862, the Regional Court of Vienna opened the proceedings. Kalab maintained that he had gained little, claiming to have begun out of a desire to expose the disorganisation of the postal service and to protest against the wretchedness of official salaries. In the written confession he had tendered beforehand, he claimed to have intercepted the letters merely to draw the attention of the authorities; he admitted, however, that he had continued to carry them away and unseal them. The chronicle sets these justifications against the houses purchased, the envelopes recovered, and the long series of dated wrappers. The judicial narrative, as reported, does not mistake his apologia for proof.
The legal characterisation of the offence shifted through the successive stages of appeal. The Regional Court convicted him of abuse of official authority. It dismissed the charge of embezzlement of entrusted property: the letters had not been directly delivered into Kalab’s custody, but handled in the course of sorting. Upon appeal by the public prosecutor, the Higher Court added the count of theft, inasmuch as his official position had afforded him access to the dispatches he subsequently purloined. The Supreme Court distinguished between the abuse of authority constituted by the abstraction of the letters and the theft of the valuables enclosed within the envelopes, which had been entrusted neither to the post nor to Kalab. On the measure of punishment, all three judicial instances concurred: ten years’ penal servitude in the fortress-prison of Stein.
The compiler asserts that the losses far exceeded the monies recovered, and that certain letters had rent families asunder, delayed vital intelligence, or ruined commercial enterprises. The immense figure he advances for the entirety of the dispatches belongs to his own conjecture; the judgment itself rested upon the seized bundles, the depositions, the dates, and the recovered articles. At the conclusion of the affair, the ink stamped upon the envelopes could not undo what had been irretrievably lost. It testified merely that a letter might at last resume its journey, after secrecy, time, and public trust had already perished between the hands of a clerk.