Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series

by David Pietrusza

  On July 29 Whitman indicted Becker. Bald Jack Rose, Bridgey Webber, and Harry Vallon had all confessed to their roles in the murder. All claimed that Becker ordered their actions. All swore that Lefty Louis, Whitey Lewis, Gyp the Blood, and a fourth gunman, Dago Frank Cirofici, did the actual shooting.

  Whitman lost interest in four of his original suspects: Sam Paul, Jacob Reich, William Shapiro, and Louis Libby. Shapiro and Libby gained immunity as material witnesses. Jack Sullivan vouched consistently for Becker's innocence (and for Rose, Webber, and Vallon's duplicity). He remained indicted, but never went to trial. Sam Paul, an ally of Lower East Side Republican chieftain Sam Koenig, walked away scot-free.

  Whitman now possessed three key witnesses against BeckerRose, Webber, and Vallon-but all were admitted accomplices. Under New York law, a defendant could not be convicted solely upon the testimony of an accomplice. That left Whitman with no case whatsoever. To solve this problem, Whitman, Rose, Webber, Vallon, and their attorneys created the improbable fiction that Sam Schepps-wit- ness to numerous meetings with Becker and present at numerous other critical junctures-had not actually participated in the crime. Schepps, a con man at heart, played the part eagerly.

  Meanwhile, public unease grew regarding Commissioner Waldo. Yet Waldo retained Mayor Gaynor's unrestrained support. "You have the hardest police situation in the world to deal with," Gaynor wrote Waldo. "We have in this city the largest foreign population of any city, and a large number of them are degenerates and criminals. The gambling of the city is almost all in their hands, not to mention other vices and crimes. The published names of every one connected nearly and remotely with Rosenthal and his murder shows them to be of this same class of lawless foreigners to which he belonged."

  Not surprisingly, some observers-especially prominent Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise-interpreted Gaynor's remarks as anti-Semitic. The short-tempered Gaynor denied hostility to Jewish voters, but refused to apologize, especially to Wise, a longtime adversary. "I cannot help Rabbi Wise," Gaynor sniffed. "He is supposed to be a preacher and a charitable man. That he has borne false witness against me concerneth him more than it concerneth me. He seems to read the Hearst newspapers and accept their statements as true. What a howling wilderness the mind of such a man must be."

  Months passed before Becker's murder trial, and odd events overtook New York City's Democratic Party. In 1912 many Republicans wanted Charles Whitman to run for governor. He refused, claiming that he wanted to wrap up the Becker case. In actuality, 1912 was the year of the disastrous Teddy Roosevelt-William Howard Taft feud that split the Republican Party and elected Woodrow Wilson president and scores of other Democrats nationwide-not a good year for ambitious Republicans. Tammany boss Charles Francis Murphy had reluctantly backed East Side Democratic Congressman William Sulzer for governor and, as payback, demanded that Sulzer appoint Murphy's business partner, James E. Gaffney, state highway superintendent. Sulzer refused. Soon they tangled on other issues, and by August 1913 the assembly (led by Aaron J. Levy, now assembly majority leader) impeached Sulzer. In October the state senate removed him from office.

  As Sulzer's career exploded, Big Tim Sullivan's mental state unraveled. It had been deteriorating even before Rosenthal's death. In 1912, The Big Feller's supporters realized he wasn't stable enough to serve in the State Senate-and elected him to Congress. But he never did return to Washington. His mind worsened, and in July 1913 he sailed for Europe, hoping for improvement. When he returned, he was worse yet. He wandered away from the hotel where his family had sequestered him. They found him on the streets and moved him to his brother Paddy's house in the Bronx, where he was guarded round the clock. One night, after playing cards with four retainers, Big Tim escaped again.

  Two weeks later, at the Bellevue morgue, a police officer chanced upon an unidentified man scheduled for a pauper's grave. "It's Big Tim," he exclaimed. "God rest him!"

  A New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad employee had discovered the body near Pelham Parkway, on their tracks. The first police officers to arrive on the scene unanimously thought the corpse oddly cold for one just run over by a train. They surmised that someone had planted it there. Despite the corpse's expensive attire and gold jewelry, no one-including three detectives later disciplined for inaction-bothered tracing its identity. No one transported the remains from the Fordham morgue to the main Bellevue morguewhere it should have gone immediately-for more than a week. The coroner, who had known Sullivan for years, failed to identify him (even though the deceased's face was unscarred). Indeed, no one had recognized a man whose eventual funeral attracted 75,000 mourners, including sixteen congressmen and four United States senators, and whose main floral display contained 3,000 American Beauty roses and 2,000 white chrysanthemums.

  It was as if someone in power wanted "The Big Feller" to disappear, and had tried to arrange for it to happen. After all, some said his mental acuity was returning and that he felt like talking about his old friend Beansy Rosenthal.

  Meanwhile, Mayor Gaynor had broken completely with Tammany and in September 1913 announced his campaign for reelection as an independent. The next day, badly needing rest, he sailed for Europe aboard the liner Baltic. Back in 1910 Gaynor had narrowly missed assassination, shot in the neck at point-blank range by a deranged former city dockworker. His health never fully recovered. On September 10, His Honor died in his sleep as the Baltic approached the Irish coast.

  On the afternoon of October 5, 1913, two days before Charles Becker's trial began, an inebriated Big Jack Zelig exited Siegel's Coffeehouse on Second Avenue and boarded a northbound streetcar. A block later, a tall man jumped on, worked his way toward Zelig, aimed his .38 caliber revolver and shot Big Jack behind the left ear. Thirty-year-old all-around hoodlum Red Phil Davidson said he murdered Zelig because Big Jack had robbed him of $400 (or $1,800, depending on which story he told). Nobody believed him.

  Zelig had said publicly that he wouldn't testify against Becker. The defense had scheduled him as one of their witnesses. District Attorney Whitman had claimed he would actually end up testifying for the prosecution. Nobody ever really knew what Big Jack Zelig had to say. We do know that someone didn't want him to say it.

  In this miasma of disgrace and death, Charles Becker finally stood trial in October 1913. Bald Jack Rose's story had already been leaked to the papers. He told of his approaching Zelig to kill Rosenthal. Zelig, then jailed on cooked-up concealed weapon charges, had refused. Rose then traveled to the Bronx to convince Lefty Louie and Whitey Lewis to assassinate Rosenthal on Becker's behalf. When Lefty and Whitey protested that they no longer carried guns ("We don't carry them anymore since this trouble of Zelig's"), Rose warned them that if they didn't bump off Rosenthal, Becker would have them arrested anyway. "Well, it don't make any difference. Zelig didn't have one [a gun] either. Now if you go downtown at all, you are gone [framed]," he said. They came onboard.

  Rose claimed that Rosenthal was to have been killed on an evening in early July while dining at West 50th Street's Garden Restaurant. But when his assassins spotted private detectives (whom they believed to be in Whitman's employ), they retreated. This incensed Becker, who told Rose: "All that's necessary is to walk right up to where [Rosenthal] is and blaze away at him and leave the rest to me. Nothing will happen to anybody that does it. I will take care of that ... Walk up and shoot him before a policeman if you want to. There ain't nothing to fear."

  Rose also revealed to the press that he phoned Becker from a public phone booth in the Times Building, at 3:00 A.M., one hour after Rosenthal's murder. "Hello there, did you hear the news?" he asked. "Yes," Becker responded, "and I congratulate you."

  Rose told of meeting Becker after the police lieutenant witnessed Beansy Rosenthal lying lifeless at the West 47th Street station house. Said Becker:

  It was a pleasing sight to me to see that squealing Jew lying there and if it had not been for the presence of Whitman I would have cut out his tongue and hung it on the Times Building as a w
arning to future squealers.

  During the actual trial, Rose held the room spellbound, revealing such other details as when Becker ordered:

  I don't want [Rosenthal] beat up. I could do that myself. I could have a warrant for any gambling house that he frequents and make a raid on that place and beat him up for resisting arrest or anything else. No beating up will fix that fellow, a dog in the eyes of myself, you, and everybody else. Nothing for that man but taken off this earth. Have him murdered, cut his throat, dynamited, or anything.

  Bald Jack Rose proved as effective a witness as a prosecutor could desire-the right mixture of the straightforward and the dramatic. Bridgey Webber and Harry Vallon provided reasonably credible accounts, but other prosecution witnesses were virtually worthless. Sam Schepps' tale, a narrative of wide-eyed innocence told by a smirking con man, proved completely unbelievable, as did most of Whitman's shady supporting cast. Charles Becker refused to take the stand. Presiding judge John W. Goff (appointed to the case by Tammany-backed Governor John Dix) ran roughshod over Becker's counsel John F. McIntyre and in his charge to jurors reported every prosecution allegation as fact. The jury had no trouble sending a corrupt cop like Becker to the chair. If justice and the law collided, justice would triumph.

  The New York State Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, had other ideas. In a blistering decision, it ripped Rose, Webber, Vallon, and especially Schepps as "dangerous and degenerate" and unworthy of belief. It condemned judge Goff's handling of the case:

  ... the defendant certainly was entitled to a scrupulously fair and impartial trial where nothing should be done to prejudice his case or to obscure the minds of the jurors ... We do not think that the defendant had such a trial. We think that he suffered grievously from the erroneous disposition both of questions of law and discretion.

  In May 1914 Charles Becker received a new trial. His first conviction resulted largely from Sam Schepps's corroborating testimony. Now Schepps's word was less than worthless. District Attorney Whitman (seriously thinking of running for governor in that year, with the Democrats now at each other's throats) badly needed another conviction and, to obtain one, another corroborating witness. He got one in James Marshall, a black professional buck-and-wing dancer, and former stoolie for Lieutenant Becker.

  In Becker's first trial, Rose, Webber, and Vallon claimed they met Becker at West 124th Street and Seventh Avenue. There, Becker impatiently ordered Webber to stop dallying and move ahead with murder. "Before Bridgie arrived Becker was telling us he was going to raid a crap game," Harry Vallon noted, adding what seemed to be irrelevant detail to his account. "There was a little colored boy on the other side of the street and [Becker] called him over and spoke to him."

  In April 1914 Whitman located the "little colored boy"-Mar- shall; put him on his payroll; and convinced him to testify that he had seen Becker, Rose, and company on that Harlem street corner. That same month, Gyp the Blood, Lefty Louis, Whitey Lewis, and Dago Frank went to the chair at Sing Sing, each protesting his innocence to the end.

  When Becker stood trial again in May 1914, it was a less acrimonious replay of his first trial, with a significantly altered cast of characters. The patrician, and more even-tempered, judge Samuel W. Seabury replaced Goff. James Marshall substituted for Sam Schepps as chief corroborating witness, and Becker had two new attorneys, W. Bourke Cockran and Martin T. Manton.

  Manton was an unknown, but the Irish-born Cockran had served in Congress, as a judge, and, more importantly, as Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall. He was a brilliant orator-Winston Churchill modeled his speaking style upon Cockran's. Decades later Churchill could rattle off long passages of Cockran's oratory. Cockran didn't want to defend Becker, but old friends in Tammany convinced him otherwise. When Seabury rejected Cockran's very first motion, that a prejudicial atmosphere existed and the trial be postponed, Cockran walked off the case.

  Becker and Manton still thought they couldn't lose. Whitman's case was too flimsy, his witnesses too untrustworthy. Judge Seabury instructed the jury on May 22, 1913. They came back in one hour and fifty minutes. The verdict: guilty.

  Becker's team couldn't believe that a jury unhectored by the likes of a judge Goff could convict him. That his fate hung upon James Marshall's testimony particularly rankled Becker. From Sing Sing, he wrote: "You must know that the testimony of the little crapshooting coon was pure and unalloyed perjury of the ranking kind ..."

  His accusation was soon substantiated. In February 1915 Philadelphia police arrested Marshall for wife-beating. At the station house Mrs. Marshall charged her husband with telling "all them lies about that policeman in New York." Two reporters witnessed her outburst and printed her charges. Marshall admitted his wife's claim-then retracted his retraction.

  The controversy surrounding James Marshall's testimony provided Becker and Manton with hope, and Manton filed a 540-page brief with the Court of Appeals. For good measure, Manton charged Seabury with "extreme partiality." This time-even with Marshall's flip-flopping-the court had no trouble affirming Becker's conviction.

  In November 1914 New Yorkers had elected a new governor. While Becker's team had counted on a second trial, and now lost it, the governor they would have to appeal to for mercy-mercy, not justice-was their nemesis, Charles Seymour Whitman.

  Whitman would not extend it.

  Becker had one card left to play: the King of Spades himself, Big Tim Sullivan. On July 21, 1915-less than a fortnight before his scheduled execution-Becker released a 10,000-word apologia for not only his dealings with Herman Rosenthal and Bald Jack Rose, but for his entire soiled career. Becker finally introduced Sullivan into the drama, contending that the kindly old "Big Fellow" had innocently loaned $12,500 to Rosenthal for what turned out to be Beansy's gambling house, and Big Tim, fearing his name might be dragged into controversy if Beansy kept talking, wanted the gambler silenced. As Becker told it, he-Becker-merely wanted Rosenthal left alone:

  My private telephone rang, and a man describing himself as Mr. [Harry] Applebaum, Senator Sullivan 's private secretary, said the Senator wanted to see me. He said the matter was urgent and the Senator must see me tonight and added, "I will call for you in about thirty minutes in an automobile and take you down to meet him." Mr. Applebaum appeared, accompanied by Jack Rose, and said the Senator was waiting at the Circle Theater. All three of us went to Sixtieth Street, where Sullivan stepped out of a limousine and invited me to his private office. We went up two flights of stairs, and on entering his room, he asked me. "What about this Rosenthal affair?" I said. "There's nothing of it," he said. "It must not be allowed to go any further. Rosenthal has gone so far now, he can't be stopped. He must be got away. "

  "That, " I said at once, "would be the very worst thing could happen to us. Everybody would say that either you or I had caused his disappearance, and naturally it would seem that, if we induced him to leave, it must be because he had something discreditable to reveal."

  The Senator answered. "Where a fire of this kind is started, there is no knowing where it will reach. Rosenthal has always been very close to me politically and personally, and once inquiry starts they reach into election matters. And secret investigations of elections by grand juries have always been sources of great trouble. Whatever happens in this row between you two, I want you to promise me that you will never mention the fact that I spoke to you about letting Rosenthal open." This promise I gave. He expressed very warm appreciation of my attitude, and coming downstairs, just as we emerged from the building, he said: "I would give $5,000-yes, $5,000-to have prevented this thing or to stop it now if I could. "

  Harry Applebaum supported Becker's account. Jack Rose denied it. Big Tim had ordered, hinted at, or in some way acquiesced in a gambler's murder, and that is why so many people so high up at Tammany Hall had cut their deal so quickly with a Republican district attorney to protect the former East Side chieftain. But at this point, over a year and a half after Becker's first trial, fewer and fewer people cared what a
dead political leader had done. Time indeed moves on. They did care if a living crooked cop had crossed the line into murder, and had long since decided that he had.

  Nagging questions of prosecutorial propriety remained. Even Governor Whitman, in the privacy of his own conscience, had to admit he had manipulated the system, witnesses, and evidence to secure a conviction. He cut deal after deal, buying testimony with immunity and with cash. He had whitewashed Tammany, relied on the testimony of murderers and perjurers. He had suborned perjury, most notably from his two key witnesses: Sam Schepps and James Marshall.

  Yet, he must have justified it all to himself. Beating "The System" wasn't easy. People were afraid to talk and were right to be afraid. When you had a chance to finally make a dent in the whole rotten operation, to trap a man like Becker, you did what you had to. Whitman did what he had to do, and if it made him governor-and maybe someday president-there was nothing wrong in that.

  Was Becker really guilty? Whitman had to ask himself. Guilty even discounting what Schepps and Marshall and even Bald Jack Rose had to say? Two juries thought so, hadn't given much consideration to the alternative. Becker did have a motive. He was brutal enough to order a man killed. He was arrogant enough to think he could get away with it.

  If Becker was innocent, why was he so intimately involved with so many of the guilty: Rose, Webber, Vallon, Schepps? If he was innocent, by what remarkable coincidence had he deposited Jack Sullivan at the murder scene a half hour before the crime? Why had police cleared the sidewalks outside the Metropole to facilitate a murder? Why had they let the murderers escape? Why had they failed to obtain the correct license number? Why had they ignored, abused, and then locked up the man with the correct number? Why, if Becker didn't want Rosenthal killed, had Bald Jack Rose phoned him in the middle of the night with the good news? Why if Becker had really planned on suing Beansy Rosenthal to defend his good name (and thus be subject to testifying), did he fail to take the stand in two trials to save his very life? Becker had amassed $100,000 in graft ($65,000 in one bank account alone). His friends on the force and in Tammany had raised a huge defense fund for him. Yet by 1915 his wife had to sell their home in the Bronx. Why? Becker's defense team was expensive-but not that expensive. Were Becker's defense attorneys buying their own witnesses with Becker's money?