Once Upon a Time in New York

by Herbert Mitgang

  FARLEY: A tin box.

  SEABURY: Is it the type of tin boxes that are specially manufactured and designed to serve as a receptacle for cash?

  FARLEY: It is.

  SEABURY: Giving you the benefit of every doubt on sums from your official vocation and other gainful pursuits, the $83,000 extra you deposited in 1929 came from the same source that the other money came from?

  FARLEY: Yes.

  SEABURY: Same tin box, is that right?

  FARLEY: That is right.

  SEABURY: Now, in 1930, where did the extra cash come from, Sheriff?

  FARLEY: Well, that is—. My salary check is in there.

  SEABURY: No, Sheriff, your salary checks are exclusive of the cash deposits which during the year you deposited in those three banks.

  FARLEY: Well, that came from the good box I had. [Laughter]

  SEABURY: Kind of a magic box.

  FARLEY: It was a wonderful box.

  SEABURY: A wonderful box. [Laughter] What did you have to do—rub the lock with a little gold, and open it in order to find more money?

  FARLEY: I wish I could.

  Spurred by Judge Seabury, Governor Roosevelt personally summoned Sheriff Farley to Albany to give him a last chance to explain the sources of his mysterious fortune. The Tammany Sachem arrived in morning coat and stand-up collar, looking more like Jeeves than an arresting officer, but his formal attire couldn’t help him. He had become a figure of public ridicule. Governor Roosevelt used the sheriff’s appearance before him to establish an unofficial code of conduct (with the help of Samuel I. Rosenman, his legal adviser and frequent speech-writer in Albany and later in Washington, where he was familiarly known as Sammy the Rose) for all government officials in the state:

  “As a matter of general sound public policy, I am very certain that there is a requirement that where a public official is under inquiry or investigation, especially an elected official, and it appears that his scale of living or the total of his bank deposits far exceeds the public salary which he is known to receive, he, the elected public official, owes a positive public duty to the community to give a reasonable or credible explanation of the sources of the deposits, or the source which enables him to maintain a scale of livng beyond the amount of his salary.”

  Roosevelt removed the dishonored sheriff from his shrievalty. The fact that Farley had once contributed $20,000 to Roosevelt’s political campaign fund didn’t save him. There was too much evidence against him to let him off easily; it was all out in the open and Roosevelt had no other choice.

  Because of the Tammany links between the discredited sheriff and City Hall, Jimmy Walker decided to mount a counterattack against Judge Seabury. Through his assistant, Charles F. Kerrigan, he claimed that the Seabury investigation was concerned only with the “private affairs” of city officials and not with their public service. (The newspapers, which had covered up his own private affairs of the heart, were beginning to be a little bolder in discussing the mayor’s relationship with Betty Compton). In a communication to the Republican leaders who dominated the state legislature, Kerrigan said that the Seabury hearings were “a futile waste of the money of the taxpayers.”

  Tammany and the town’s Democratic bigwigs made an effort to cut off the funds to Judge Seabury and his staff. They claimed that the investigation was harming the city’s credit rating, the banks, and the stock market. Irwin Steingut, an influential assemblyman from Brooklyn, claimed that Judge Seabury sought another $150,000 for his investigation and “that does not include his personal fee, which is expected to be at least another $150,000.” Although Seabury himself was a longtime Democrat, Assemblyman Steingut said that “the Republicans are attempting through the investigation to collect propaganda material at the expense of the State.”

  Another Tammany hack, Assemblyman Louis Cuvillier, a minority member of the legislature’s investigative committee, protested: “It has dawned upon the millions who live in New York and love New York that their city, the greatest in the world, is getting a daily black eye from the counsel to the committee. The conviction is growing among the people that there is something sinister, something cruelly unfair, about this investigation. Let us stop this criminal waste of funds and end the dismal failure of this committee.”

  Next, Jimmy Walker’s corporation counsel took the bold step of refusing to honor the salary vouchers of Seabury’s staff of lawyers and accountants. The trick didn’t work; it only infuriated the reformers and investigators. Judge Seabury brought a writ of mandamus against Mayor Walker and Comptroller Charles W. Berry. The state Supreme Court issued an order to force the corporation counsel to release the money.

  As the investigation continued, a “tin box” brigade of corrupt officials paraded through the courtroom. In addition to the Tammany sheriffs, registers, and county clerks, one of the more colorful witnesses to appear before Judge Seabury was a woman: Miss Polly Adler, a self-described “student of the human condition.” As Arnold Rothstein was the gambling czar of New York, Miss Adler could lay claim to being the czarina of prostitution. Everybody knew that when you winked and said you were going to one of Polly Adler’s places for a good time, you weren’t going there to say your paternoster. The public wanted to know “who’s who after the sun goes down,” as the New York World-Telegram put it, “and what connection if any exists between the police and the profession of which Miss Adler is the acknowledged chatelaine.”

  Delicately, Judge Seabury asked her if it was not true that a number of Tammany leaders—including the mayor himself—had “celebrated” important events in her house-that-was-not-a-home. Miss Adler’s recollection failed her a number of times. Confronted with a check that she had made out to a vice squad cop to protect her winsome young ladies from arrest, she feebly denied that the signature was hers.

  In words and pictures, the New York Daily News covered Miss Adler’s appearance as a scandal that besmirched the good name of the city of New York. Even The New York Times reported the questioning of the city’s leading “vice entrepreneuse.” Her raunchy business, the editors rationalized, deserved to be recounted in the columns of the family newspaper as a cautionary tale. For the delicate sensibilities of its readers, The Times didn’t call Miss Adler’s places whorehouses but, more politely, “houses of ill-repute.”

  Before Miss Adler testified publicly, she made an appearance before Seabury and his assistants at their offices in the state building at 80 Centre Street. That was the key to the Seabury-Kresel investigative method: to get witnesses to spill their guts privately without courtroom rules of evidence or objections from defense lawyers.

  There was a little unspoken trickery involved here. The Seabury-Kresel team’s usual procedure was to tender witnesses a “request” subpoena that began “You are hereby requested . . .” (rather than “commanded” or “ordered”). A “request” didn’t require a court order. Few witnesses were aware that they had a choice in the matter. Some witnesses were tipped off that they were about to be grilled at 80 Centre Street and avoided process servers or disappeared. In such cases, Seabury used the press to flush them out Friendly reporters who tracked down missing witnesses received special treatment from the Seabury staff.

  (In future investigations of alleged misconduct in Washington—involving officials up to and including the president of the United States—a “special counsel” under the attorney general would use a similar technique, leaking information to favored columnists and broadcasters. This investigatory style became known as trying your case in the press.)

  During her private session, Miss Adler said that Irving Ben Cooper’s “piercing eyes never left my face and his silence was like an attack.” Cooper, one of Seabury’s toughest “boys,” had copies of her bank and brokerage accounts in front of him to see if there were payoffs to police and public officials.

  “Cooper wasted no time on the amenities and began firing questions at me the moment I came into the room,” the enterprising whorehouse madam recalled. “Did
I know a certain man? No. Had I been at a certain place at a certain time? I didn’t remember. For what seemed hours he continued to throw names at me, and I continued to deny knowing all except those who could not possibly be hurt by our acquaintanceship. At the end of the long afternoon, Cooper glared at me out of sharp blue eyes that seemed to bite into me: ‘You are positive you don’t know these men?’ ‘Positive.’ ‘You understand, Miss Adler, that everything you say is being taken down by a court stenographer?’ You’re telling me, brother, I thought to myself. But aloud I said demurely, ‘Yes, I understand.’ ”

  The investigation made no effort to prosecute Miss Adler. For a while, the low-level police payoffs stopped. Ironically, traffic in Miss Adler’s houses became even more profitable as their existence became better known to the citizenry.

  Seabury’s staff discovered that three methods were used by police making arrests of women charged with prostitution. The first was known as the direct case: the arresting officer obtained entrance to the premises and collected evidence. The second, the indirect case, arose when neighbors complained about the proximity of the whorehouses. The third, most prevalent method was to use “the unknown man”—a stool pigeon.

  Under the one-sided law, the sex act itself was no misdemeanor, but when the woman accepted money for the purpose of prostitution, she committed a crime. Even though the officer entered the room while the act was in progress, the stoolie could not be held. He was usually on the vice squad’s payroll as an informant rather than a participant.

  As the referee rooting out corruption in the magistrates’ hearings, Judge Seabury and his boys examined 1,059 witnesses at 80 Centre Street. The minutes covered 15,356 pages. “Some of this testimony seemed to me, in view of the public interest involved, to require presentation at public hearings,” Seabury told the Appellate Division justices. Beginning in September of 1930 and continuing for eight months, open hearings were held in which 299 witnesses were interrogated. Their testimony covered 4,596 pages.

  During the hearings, a Runyonesque character appeared on the witness stand who captured the town’s bawdy imagination, as much for his name as for his activities. Chile Mapocha Acuna, thereafter the subject of wisecracks in which he was called the “Human Spitoona,” was a stool pigeon employed by the police vice squad. He joined other stoolies with such colorful nicknames as “The Dove,” “Pinto,” “Chico,” and “Harry the Greek.”

  Acuna, a diminutive thirty-one-year-old native of Santiago, Chile, had been betrayed by the vice squad on grounds of “extortion” and had spent a year in the penitentiary. He walked into the Seabury offices during the first week of the investigation and joined a score of other witnesses, both voluntary and subpoenaed, who were sitting on a bench waiting to be examined by the lawyers. When Acuna was called in, he confessed that he knew a number of policemen who had committed perjury to obtain the conviction of innocent women.

  “Is this thing on the level?” Acuna asked. Having been double-crossed by the vice squad, he knew that his life wouldn’t be worth more than the cost of a bullet if he testified openly. Seabury and Kresel assured him that the investigation was indeed on the level and that he would be protected. At Seabury’s request, Police Commissioner Edward P. Mulrooney assigned six police lieutenants to guard Acuna around the clock. Mulrooney warned them that they would never make captain if Acuna was “accidentally” killed. After three days of hesitation, Acuna said he was willing to go public.

  “He became a witness without parallel in the history of American jurisprudence,” Seabury declared.

  On the witness stand for four days, Acuna told his story to Kresel. While serving as a waiter in Reuben’s, a Broadway restaurant frequented by actors, he became acquainted with two detectives who often ate the famous heavyweight sandwiches, on the house. They suggested that he inform them of any crimes he might hear of, either in talks with patrons or among his friends in the Latin-American community. As a stool pigeon for two years, Acuna averaged about $100 a week—twice what he made as a waiter. In addition, the detectives sometimes paid him a share of the shakedowns after raids on houses of prostitution.

  “This is how it worked,” Acuna told Kresel before a packed courtroom. “I went into a whorehouse. The vice cops and I set our watches together. They would give me a five- or a ten-dollar bill in marked money, whatever it cost. I went into the house and had a woman or girl, whoever was available. I’d go into a room so that when the officers came in I would be in a compromising position with the girl. I would also see if she had any marks on her body, so that if the officers arrived late, and we were already dressed, they could identify her in court and say that they had seen her undressed and that they had seen those marks on her body. Then they arrested her, shook down the house, and brought the girl to court the next day. The magistrate asked me if I gave her any money. I said, ‘Five dollars, your Honor, marked. I found the money under her pillow.’ ”

  In a more sophisticated operation, which Acuna called the doctor’s racket, the stool pigeon, posing as a patient, entered an office while the doctor was away and demanded treatment for some made-up ailment. Despite the protests of the nurse, he would place money in a conspicuous place in the office and begin to undress. Just as he dropped his pants, the cops would break in and arrest the nurse for prostitution. This would be followed by more payoffs to drop the phony case. Unless there was a protest by the doctor, the ruse worked.

  The “landlady racket” was another kind of shakedown. After renting a room in a boardinghouse and paying for it in marked money, the stoolie brought a woman he called his wife to the room. Soon after, the police broke into the boardinghouse, arrested the girl for offering herself as a prostitute, and arrested the landlady for running a house of prostitution. The vice squad officers thus obtained double graft, from the unsuspecting woman and the entirely innocent landlady.

  When business was slack, the vice squad swooped down upon Harlem, broke into people’s apartments, and made arrests at random. The magistrates believed the cops rather than the innocent women accused as prostitutes. Sometimes, Acuna said, false arrests were made to keep up the monthly averages for the precinct houses. In this way, some women languished in jail for as much as a hundred days. If the vice squad members didn’t maintain cash flow, their captain would reduce them in rank and assign them to pound a beat on Staten Island.

  Acuna gave the names of fifty policemen and numerous other stool pigeons who were involved in the schemes. Some of the houses of prostitution were connected to saloons. Acuna had collected thousands of dollars a month from speakeasy owners. He shared these payoffs with police officers and vice detectives from the West Sixty-eighth Street precinct station in Manhattan. The ex-stoolie was able to identify them all by name.

  Police Commissioner Mulrooney suspended every policeman, from patrol officer to deputy inspector, who was identified by Chile Mapocha Acuna. For the first time, Mayor Walker half-apologized for the crimes: “I will confess that I have been more or less shocked by the framing of innocent women,” he said. “However, we must not look upon conditions with an eye to the past. We do not want to break down the morale of the police department.”

  Seabury’s boys began to accumulate testimony showing that scores of people who worked in and around the lower criminal courts—clubhouse lawyers, bondsmen, clerks, court attendants, assistant district attorneys—were receiving a share of the payoffs in vice cases as well as in matters resulting from gambling arrests and convictions.

  “The ring operating mainly in the women’s court is a shocking example of the lengths to which distortion of law to illegal ends was carried in the magistrates’ courts,” Seabury reported. “It was made up of interlocking halves, the lawyers, the bondsmen and the fixers, on the one hand, and members of the so-called vice squad and their stool pigeons, on the other. The magistrates sat back and permitted this outrageous spectacle to be enacted before them day in and day out. What I am criticizing is the supineness of the magistrates in the face
of palpably perjurious testimony by police officers.”

  The honor of being the first police officer during the Seabury hearings to claim the existence of a magical tin box kept in a bank went to Lieutenant Peter J. Pfeiffer. A check showed that he made five visits a month to the bank vault He explained that he did so not to put in cash but to inspect, over and over, his insurance papers. A police lieutenant who also had a tin box in a bank vault said that he didn’t keep cash there, either: he visited the vault once a week only to put in and take out his wife’s earrings.

  A police officer named James Quinlivan said that he kept his money at home in a box as well as in a large trunk. He claimed he had won $9,000 on a horse named Flora Belle, on a tip given to him by a drunken jockey. Pressed for details during his cross-examination, he couldn’t remember the jockey’s name. For that matter, nobody could find a horse named Flora Belle.

  Another police officer, Robert E. Morris, explained to Kresel that he had a wonderful “Uncle George” who handed him forty $1,000 bills one day on a street in California. The next thing that happened was that Uncle George dropped dead. “Where did you keep the $40,000?” Kresel asked him. “Right in the house,” Officer Morris replied. “Where in the house?” “I had it in a box.”

  The Seabury-Kresel team decided that their mandate required them to investigate every magistrate in New York City. One by one, they called in the lower-court judges to see if they were fit to hold office. The first interrogations were held in private; then some judges were asked to repeat their testimony in public. Suddenly there was a wave of resignations.

  In one case, the departure of Magistrate Francis X. McQuade “obviated the necessity for a trial.” Through a dummy, Magistrate McQuade was a stockholder in the Polo Grounds Athletic Club, a corporation organized to sponsor boxing matches in New York. He had also served as treasurer of the New York Giants before his services were dispensed with by the National League team’s owners. The sports-minded magistrate also had a piece of the Havana Casino, a gambling establishment in Cuba; he received 5 percent of the casino’s income.