FRITZ DUQUESNE FRIEND TO LEADERS, ENEMY TO NATIONS.

Byline: Jeremy Bagnott Daily News Staff Writer

Title: "Counterfeit Hero: Fritz Duquesne, Adventurer and Spy"

Author: Art Ronnie

Data: 390 pages, Naval Institute Press; $29.95

Our rating: Three Stars

In 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, a newly naturalized American citizen posing as a rumpled Dutch botanist combed waterfront dives in Brazil, Venezuela, Dutch Guiana and Nicaragua, looking for crews of English merchant vessels. When he found one, he would single out the dumbest sailor and bribe the man to carry aboard a package containing orchid bulbs for a friend at the ship's destination.

Deadly mishaps would ensue.

The packages contained high explosives, or sometimes a "fiery cigar," a powerful incendiary device consisting of a lead tube containing potassium chlorate and sulphuric acid separated by a copper disk. When the acid ate away at the disk and mixed with the other chemical, it resulted in an intense, white-hot flame that would cause pandemonium aboard a ship at sea.

He is credited with sinking as many as 22 British ships, setting 100 others ablaze and burning the waterfronts of two towns. He became one of the British Empire's most wanted men.

The man was Fritz Duquesne - filmmaker, newspaperman, soldier of fortune, philanderer, big-game hunter, saboteur, spy, impersonator, assassin and, finally, U.S. federal prisoner. His remarkable life is the subject of "Counterfeit Hero: Fritz Duquesne, Adventurer and Spy," by retired Los Angeles Herald-Examiner reporter Art Ronnie.

So fantastic is his subject, were "Counterfeit Hero" not a biography but a spy novel, it would undoubtedly get Ronnie drummed out of any fiction writers association.

"Counterfeit Hero" vividly recounts the life of a man whose private crusade against the British Empire thrust him into three major wars, took him to four continents and required him to consort with moneyed aristocrats and waterfront pimps with equal aplomb.

By age 20, Duquesne had studied at Oxford, at the Ecole Militaire in Brussels, fought eight duels and had gained a reputation as "the handsomest man and deadliest swordsman in Europe."

As a Boer officer conducting hit-and-run raids against British forces in his native South Africa, he was revered by both sides, acquiring the sobriquet "Black Panther of the Veld."

Duquesne's seething hatred for Great Britain, his raison d'etre, was rooted in having discovered the smoldering remains of his family's farm, which an English patrol had burned as part of the scorched-earth policy of the Boer War's architect, the hated Lord Kitchener. (Duquesne would later be credited with assassinating Kitchener.) He would learn from a farm hand that the patrol had hanged his uncle, raped and shot his sister, and led his mother away to a British concentration camp.

Repeatedly captured by the British and each time escaping, he stowed away aboard an America-bound merchantman, jumped overboard in the Chesapeake and, through Boer sympathizers in the United States, landed a job as a reporter with the New York World.

His travel writing and lecturing caught the attention of the White House, where he became an African hunting adviser to Theodore Roosevelt and later was brought before the U.S. House of Representatives as an expert on African animal species. He also worked as a publicist for the young financier Joseph P. Kennedy.

However strong was his allegiance to America, his adoptive land, his hatred for Britain was greater and resulted in his spying against the United States during World War II for Germany and being rolled up along with 32 other others in what J. Edgar Hoover called the greatest spy roundup in American history.

Perhaps the greatest tribute to Duquesne was paid him at age 65. Confined to a maximum-security cell while serving an 18-year term for espionage at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, a prison official classified the now-ailing and feeble prisoner as still "one of the most dangerous criminals in the United States."

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Photo (1--2) Fritz Duquesne as "the handsomest man in Europe" in 1897, left, and a U.S. federal prisoner in 1954.