Once Upon a Time in New York

by Herbert Mitgang

  For years afterward, sightings of Judge Crater were reported in good-time resorts all over the world. But Case No. 13595 was never solved. To this day, it’s still on the books.

  The murder of Arnold Rothstein and the mystery surrounding Justice Crater’s disappearance stuck in the public’s mind. The reputations of important personalities in city and state politics—including the mayor and the governor—came into question. Rexford G. Tugwell, one of Roosevelt’s closest advisers and a member of his original “Brain Trust” in Albany, said that New York liberals saw “weakness instead of shrewdness” in the governor’s reluctance to discipline Tammany and blow the whistle on Jimmy Walker and his ineffectual commissioners.

  W. Kingsland Macy, the powerful Republican boss in the polo-playing precincts of Suffolk County in Long Island’s horse country, attempted to gain political capital by the scandals. He called for the state legislature to investigate the governance of New York City, long a Democratic stronghold. Broadway, the GOP leader said, is “the most densely populated and most effectively police-patrolled area in the city or in the United States.” How, Macy wondered, could the Rothstein murder have taken place without the police identifying and tracking down the perp or perps?

  Pursuing his own ambitions, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Charles H. Tuttle, got into the act because he hoped to run on the Republican ticket against Governor Roosevelt. What helped Tuttle to gain the nomination was his revelation that Rothstein wasn’t just a big-time betting man but also “the prime factor in a colossal and criminal combination operating in narcotics here and abroad.”

  Spurred by Kingsland Macy, Republicans put heat on Governor Roosevelt. They introduced a bill to start an investigation of New York City’s affairs. But the Tammany leaders—most of whom held well-paid no-show jobs as county clerks and keepers of various seals and records—were not anxious to have the state look too closely at the inside workings of the Walker administration.

  Retaliating, the Democrats offered a resolution in the state legislature calling for an investigation of all the towns and villages in Macy’s home territory. One of Tammany’s elder statesmen maintained that “a little light should be shed on Suffolk County, too.” Indeed, the wealthy county was known as a hotbed of cronyism in awarding contracts for repaving its endless roads and in cutting real estate deals with local Republican officials. The Democratic resolution failed, but the Republican bill made it through the Republican-ruled legislature.

  Governor Roosevelt vetoed the state legislature’s first attempt to examine the Walker administration. In rejecting the Republican effort, which was clearly designed to embarrass him in 1930, Roosevelt declared:

  “I do not base my official disapproval on the obvious political aims, as shown by the announcement of its purpose in the press before it was introduced. Such an inquiry defies precedents and adds unheard-of duties to the Governor to meddle in the affairs of every city and county.”

  But a few years later—as more evidence of malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance came to the surface about Jimmy Walker and the departments of the City of New York—F.D.R. was forced to authorize a state investigation at the very moment that he began to make plans to pursue the presidency.

  The ground had begun to shift under Walker and Tammany’s leaders. Reform groups and the press demanded action; at the same time, Roosevelt did not want to succumb to obvious Republican political pressure in Albany. It was a delicate balancing act: the governor still needed Tammany’s support in New York City. But by 1932—a presidential election year—Roosevelt had to show the national Democratic leadership that he could be independent and stand up against corruption and criminality in his own state.

  Police Commissioner Whalen needed to do something to appear active and divert attention from the Rothstein fiasco. With Mayor Walker’s approval, he decided to cleanse the city of New York—not of its organized criminals and gangsters but of its “Reds.”

  As for Walker, a notorious nonreader, his knowledge of Marxism would barely have filled a thimble. His interest in foreign affairs was limited to what gossip he had traded at expensive watering holes and Michelin-starred restaurants during his frequent junkets to Europe.

  “It seemed evident that New York was becoming a hotbed of communism,” Whalen said. “There may not have been many in the Party then, but they were all real Tartars, making up for any lack of numbers by their energy and ability to outshout others. It was here in New York that their far-reaching program for the future of the Party in America was being prepared.”

  Nowadays we tend to think of anticommunist witch-hunts as a product of the wild McCarthyite accusations of the early 1950s. In fact, relatively few people were prosecuted or deported during that time, although reputations were destroyed and individuals lost jobs, particularly in the entertainment field. The 1920s, by contrast, were rife with police actions against thousands of people and with abrogations of the First Amendment in the name of anticommunism.

  To compare militant trade union members, and the student radicals arguing about socialism and fascism on the campuses of Brooklyn College and City College, with the hordes of Genghis Khan, as Commissioner Whalen did, sounded far-fetched to New York’s civil libertarians. But no one stopped him.

  Whalen’s operation would, in fact, resemble that of A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general of the United States from 1919 to 1921, whose infamous raids against Reds lumped together college-cafeteria radicals, Socialists, anarchists, members of the International Workers of the World, and activists on union picket lines. Palmer’s right-hand man in the pursuit of those branded alien radicals was J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Department of Justice’s General Intelligence Division, who was rewarded for his Red-hunting activities by being named director of the FBI.

  Jimmy Walker’s favorite commissioner—at least, his favorite for the moment—said that one of the toughest problems he faced as the city’s top cop was how to break up Communist demonstrations held in public squares. To do so, Whalen decided to infiltrate the Communist Party with fifty young probationary officers. They actually joined the Party, paid their dues, and participated in the endless lectures and debates on the glories of Marxism and dialectical materialism.

  Under the command of the Bronx chief of detectives, Henry Bruckner, these special cops were formed into an anti-communist “Intelligence Squad.” From a secret headquarters, the police spies sent daily reports through their own switchboard directly to the police commissioner, who then shared the information with Mayor Walker.

  “Red infiltration was the greatest enemy of this country and our city,” Whalen claimed. In his opinion, New York’s other problems—the schools, subways, housing, welfare, crime in the streets, bribery and corruption—were less important than chasing homegrown Reds who carried not weapons but banners.

  The police commissioner, a good family man, particularly disliked women radicals:

  “The girls in these Communist groups were urged to wear long hatpins in their berets so that at a moment’s notice they could pull them out and use them effectively against horses, policemen and detectives as they surged back and forth in the crowds. These women Communists were taught to yell hysterically in rasping, fiendish voices in order to create panic and give the impression that a massacre was taking place. Some women would fall in assumed unconsciousness before the oncoming police and horses, and others were directed to jump at the police and tear at their faces with fingernails.”

  When a crowd of 100,000 demonstrators gathered in and around Union Square for a march on City Hall to air their grievances about police harassment directly to Mayor Walker, Commissioner Whalen assembled an army of cops to thwart them. The force included a thousand police reserves, three hundred mounted police, and a hundred motorcycle cops. Whalen enlisted the fire department to help his armed forces. Firemen with wrenches stood by at all the hydrants in and around Union Square, prepared to turn them into water cannons against the people. Blocked by the
police and firemen, the demonstrators were unable to march below Fourteenth Street.

  Thereafter, Whalen’s men in blue—otherwise known as New York’s Finest—were nicknamed Whalen’s Cossacks.

  Unlike Walker, Whalen was not beholden to Tammany Hall, because he had a job waiting for him at Wanamaker’s whenever he decided to quit. He was sworn in as police commissioner on December 18, 1928, but after a year and a half he resigned and returned to his more lucrative job running the department store. Though there was no open break with the mayor, Whalen felt that Walker had ceased to approve of some of his policies. He was informed by someone on the inside at City Hall that the mayor had said, “Well, we won the election. Now Grover can go.” Even if the remark was only a wisecrack, such talk did not endear the mayor to the police commissioner.

  The true reason for the break in their friendship was never disclosed by either public official. But some of Whalen’s associates believed that it had to do with the conditions he imposed upon Walker before agreeing to take office. In his 1955 autobiography—Whalen, who thought rather well of himself, unabashedly titled it Mr. New York—he revealed these terms:

  1. That the Mayor would not make any requests of the Police Commissioner for appointments, transfers or promotions during my tenure of office.

  2. That I would reduce any police officer whose advancement in the Department had been due to political “pull.”

  3. That I would immediately retire the Chief Inspector and the Commanding Officer of Detectives regardless of their friendship with the Mayor and replace them with men of my choice without consulting the Mayor.

  4. That my term as Police Commissioner would be for one year only.

  5. That I would tolerate no interference in cracking down on professional gambling, including any that might be going on in Tammany clubhouses.

  6. That I would reorganize the Police Department on a sound basis.

  These terms were tough; almost insulting. To Whalen’s surprise at the time, Mayor Walker replied that he would accept all of them. But the conditions cut too close to the bone of political appointments. Some years later, Whalen said, “During my tenure as Police Commissioner, Jimmy Walker never violated any of the terms of the agreement but, as I had predicted, I lost his friendship.”

  Speaking of Jimmy Walker’s choice of Whalen in the first place, Congressman Fiorello La Guardia said: “It takes more than a silk hat and a pair of spats to make an efficient Police Commissioner in the City of New York.”

  Despite his Red-bashing, Whalen did not change the lax conditions in the force during his brief tenure. Had he been allowed to stay on longer, there might well have been some improvements in the management of the police department.

  Actually, in the era of Prohibition, the job of police commissioner was a nearly impossible assignment.

  “The twin symbols of the 18th Amendment were the Tommy gun and the poisoned cup,” observed Herbert Asbury, a social historian. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which went into effect in 1920, banned the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” From then until its repeal by the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933, the country was divided between “wets” and “drys”—those who wanted to repeal the Amendment, as a well-intentioned failure to regulate people’s lives, and those who believed that booze was the root of all evil.

  It was a debate that had been going on almost from the beginning of the Republic. Thomas Jefferson encouraged the development of viniculture as an alternative to the production of hard liquor, while James Madison believed that “for the good of the country” young men should abstain altogether. Abraham Lincoln, who did not drink, recalled that during his youth in Indiana and Illinois, intoxicating liquors came forth “like the Egyptian angel of death, commissioned to slay, if not the first, the fairest born in every family.”

  Yet for all its good intentions, Prohibition chiefly succeeded in turning ordinary citizens into lawbreakers. As Mark Twain said of earlier efforts to regulate the sale of liquor, “Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure or even diminish it”

  New York was already considered sin city by bluenoses when Jimmy Walker became mayor in 1926. The Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals called New York “a foreign city run by foreigners for foreigners and according to foreign ideas.” The Episcopalians said, “We regard voluntary total abstinence from all intoxicants as the obligation of the city.”

  The Prohibition laws resulted in bootlegging and the making of bathtub gin and other home brews that could kill as well as intoxicate. It also caused hijacking—truckloads and boatloads of whisky were stolen from rival gangs, often at the point of a sawed-off shotgun. A subculture of lawbreaking developed to circumvent the Federals and the local gendarmerie. Beer and liquor flowed into New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Canada and Mexico were the major sources of rum-running. Liquor flowed across some four thousand border crossings between the United States and Canada alone. Boats carrying whisky landed at all the Great Lakes ports. When the waterways were frozen, sleds were used to transport whisky over Lake Erie. There were fifteen hundred Prohibition agents, but they were greatly outnumbered by the bootleggers.

  The Federals wanted New York’s police to do more about finding and shutting down stills and speakeasies. There was a feeling in Washington and Albany that Mayor Walker winked at the lawbreakers. Upright officials in both political parties felt that His Honor set a poor example by dropping in at nightclubs during his nocturnal rounds. The uptown “speaks” favored by Walker were patronized by playboys and ladies of the night; more than Scotch was for sale there. And everyone knew that some of the tonier nightclubs were controlled by gangsters.

  In the Southern District of New York, Mabel W. Willebrandt, an assistant U.S. attorney who supervised the Prohibition agents, feuded with Mayor Walker about his failure to enforce Prohibition. With a touch of sarcasm, she said that the mayor himself would make a first-class inspector of nightclubs.

  Walker was ready with a wisecrack: “If I were to qualify as an inspector I don’t think I should need to become a reckless purchaser of orchids or of Staten Island Champagne to learn facts that are known to virtually everyone.”

  His retort was directed against Mrs. Willebrandt and her federal agents: she had encouraged them to buy orchids and champagne for their wives and girlfriends while on the job. By playing the role of big spenders, the agents were able to stay undercover—until they flashed their badges at the end of a boozy evening.

  Prohibition brought its share of laughs but also its share of hardships to the many people who did not patronize the fancy speakeasies. There were illegal corner and basement saloons where workingmen gambled their wages for the hard stuff, where prostitutes plied their trade, where drunks were rolled, and where ward bosses bought votes for a bottle of hooch.

  Two publicity-minded federal agents, Moe W. Smith and Isadore (Izzy) Einstein, kept the tabloids busy describing their exploits busting the owners of stills and speakeasies. They didn’t mind if the boys with clunky Speed Graphics accompanied them on their appointed rounds, as long as their pictures later turned up in the newspaper rotogravure sections.

  The euphonious team of Izzy and Moe tickled the local burghers with their antics. Even if their disguises didn’t fool anyone, their clownlike rubber noses and false whiskers became the team’s hallmarks. In Harlem they wore blackface—fooling only themselves; in the classier nightclubs, tuxedos; in country clubs, knickers. What they could not hide was their girth. Izzy was five feet tall and tipped the scales at 225 pounds. Moe outweighed him.

  Once, Izzy Einstein met Albert Einstein and asked him about his line of work. “I discover stars in the sky,” said the famous scientist. Izzy replied, “I’m a discoverer, too, only I make my discoveries in the basements.”

  In five years, Izzy and Moe arrested more than four thousand violators of the law and smashed five million bottles of
bootleg beer and whisky. Instead of winning medals and promotions, however, the two agents were invited to retire “for the good of the service,” probably because they had drawn too much attention to themselves.

  Izzy and Moe ended their careers as life insurance salesmen and respected members of the Grand Street Boys Association, a social club that encouraged good deeds on the Lower East Side and raised money for charities. The club was one of Jimmy Walker’s favorite hangouts.

  During his brief tenure in office, Commissioner Whalen claimed that there were 32,000 speakeasies in New York City. They were discovered in the most unlikely places: tearooms, restaurants, cellars, the penthouses of apartment buildings on both sides of Central Park. One speakeasy was fronted by a synagogue.

  The inlets of Long Island served as ports of call for small boats unloading hard liquor. Once in a while, bathers at Coney Island, New York’s playground for the poor and middle classes at the ocean end of Brooklyn, heard the boom of small cannon as the Coast Guard fired warning shots across the bows of unregistered speedboats suspected of carrying contraband whisky Sometimes the whisky was dumped to lighten an unregistered vessel so it could make a fast getaway. To the delight of beachcombers from Coney Island to Montauk Point, 120 miles away at the eastern tip of Long Island, cases of whisky sometimes washed up on the sands.

  Garages in the two-family houses of Brooklyn were often rented as hiding places for the small trucks that transported liquor from ships to landfalls after dark. In the neighborhoods of Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, bottles of booze could be heard rattling in and out of the garages in the middle of the night. It was the better part of wisdom for homeowners picking up a few extra dollars not to ask what the unmarked trucks carried.

  Fortunes were made by gangsters as well as by otherwise legitimate businessmen engaged in importing and selling liquor to a thirsty nation. The price of illicit whisky rose by an average of 520 percent during the thirteen years of Prohibition. Raids on speakeasies and gambling dens—and payoffs to the police—were so common that they were hardly worth reporting unless celebrities were caught.