My Ears Are Bent

by Joseph Mitchell

  “I like the roe,” said Mr. Burlingham. “I never yet been able to get enough shad roe.”

  Off Tarrytown the Captain pointed toward a distant hill. John D. Rockefeller was alive then, and the Captain said, “Old John D. lives up there some-wheres. What a man! Giving away them dimes. What a man!” Off Ossining he pointed to the cheerful lights of Sing Sing Prison, chuckled and said, “That’s the Country Club over there.” It must have been an old joke, but both the Captain and Mr. Burlingham appeared to enjoy it. They looked up at the prison walls and laughed.

  The Captain is a third-generation Hudson River man. He lives in Troy. He has been with the Night Line for forty-five years. A verbose person, he likes to recite poetry of the Edgar Guest variety to his officers, and on one wall of the pilot house he has tacked up an inspirational motto which states, “Be glad you are alive.” He is outraged by the reputation given the Night Line by vaudeville comedians.

  “People think the Night Line boats are full of loose women and gamblers and rum-drinkers, and it is an outrage,” he said, smacking the arm of his high chair with his fist. “We try to keep that element off the boats. There is a type of woman which rides up and down the river trying to get men in trouble. We call them ‘riders.’ We have a watchman, and if he sees one of them riding up and down the river night after night and stirring up trouble, he politely asks her to call a halt.

  “I used to go to vaudeville shows and hear them make jokes about the Night Line. All they had to do was just mention the Night Line and people would laugh. It burned me up. It is like Brooklyn. When they mention Brooklyn in a show people will laugh, but there is nothing funny about Brooklyn when you get there. It used to put me out. If I owned the Night Line I would sue people for damages that make dirty jokes about it.

  “All that talk about wild parties and gambling on our boats is exaggerated. It reminds me of a story. One night the watchman was walking past a stateroom and he heard a woman inside crying and yelling, ‘Stop! Stop!’ The watchman thought maybe some man had pulled a woman into his room. He knocked on the door and said, ‘What’s going on in there?’ The man inside yelled out, ‘Nothing’s going on, but something’s coming off! I’m pulling a plaster off my wife’s back!’ The watchman left in a hurry.”

  Captain Warner said he once took Father Divine and 2, 000 of his followers up the river on the Trojan for an excursion, and it was one of the most harrowing voyages he ever made.

  “It was a mess,” he said, snorting. “They would get together on the decks and jump up and down and clap their hands and make them remarks about ‘Peace! It’s wonderful!’ I went up to this Father and said, ‘I think it is fine for you people to worship the Saviour, but you don’t have to make so much fuss about it.’ The way they were jumping up and down I was afraid they would bust the stanchions. They were a peaceful bunch except for that. They don’t do any halfway job when they worship.”

  That night, however, life was dull on the Night Line, reminding one of the lobby of a resort hotel in the off-season. The Negro waiters, dressed in new starched coats, stood about the dining room staring gloomily at the vacant chairs. The little crowd of diners, quietly eating boiled beef with horseradish sauce or creamed chicken or mackerel, the traditional Hudson steamer dishes, displayed little gaiety as the Trojan proceeded up the river.

  A few went on the deck and watched the New York Central’s night expresses speeding toward Manhattan on the Hudson’s east bank. A few went forward and stood beneath the pilot house, watching Captain Warner throw his searchlight on sand and gravel scows moving sleepily down the river. A few sat around the bar and drank beer and cream ale—of the forty-nine passengers only five drank whiskey.

  It was obvious that they did not take the Night Line for a night of lechery. They took it for fresh air, or for a good night’s sleep, or to get to Albany.

  10. EXECUTION

  A bleak throng of relatives of three murderers who were to die in the electric chair huddled on the steps of Sing Sing Prison last night and waited. They passed around a quart bottle and whispered hoarsely. They still were sitting there when Robert Elliott, the State’s thin, bent little executioner, trudged up the steps and entered the barred lobby.

  “That’s Elliott,” whispered a taxicab driver, sitting with the relatives. “That’s the man that pulls the switch.”

  The relatives turned and stared. Elliott shook the gate and a keeper let him in. The executioner carried a little black traveling bag. He nodded to the keeper and went upstairs to prepare the utensils with which he would destroy the three men who succeeded, after a fantastic amount of trouble, in murdering Michael Malloy, the “durable barfly.”

  Elliott did not do as well as was expected last night because only three of the four men scheduled for death by electrocution reached the chair. Two hours before the time appointed for his death, the fourth man was given a respite of two weeks because someone believes he is a mental defective. So the State paid the executioner $450 for his night’s work, instead of $600.

  The three momentarily awaiting what is still referred to at Sing Sing as “the hot squat” were the principal members of the Bronx insurance-murder trust, the men who killed the barfly to get the $1,290 for which they had insured his life. That was back in February 1933. The matter was arranged in a grimy little speakeasy at 3804 Third Avenue, now a vacant store.

  Anthony Marino, 28, the proprietor, needed some cash and one night he said, “Business is lousy.” Frank Pasqua, 25, a Bronx undertaker, who was standing at the bar, thought the remark over. “Why don’t we insure Malloy’s life and bump him off?” he asked.

  Joseph Murphy, 29, whose real name is Archie R. Mott, a bartender in Marino’s speak, and Daniel Kriesberg, 30, a fruit dealer, who passed a lot of time in the speak, were selected to help with the murder.

  Malloy, a former stationary engineer, who had been a drunken derelict for many years, was insured. Then the murderers started treating him to poisonous whiskey. Malloy enjoyed it.

  They gave him oysters pickled in wood alcohol. Malloy enjoyed them.

  Then they gave him a plate of poisoned sardines into which bits of ground tin had been thrown. Malloy liked the sardines.

  The barfly was stubborn. They kept feeding him wood alcohol, and one night they took him, dead drunk, to a park, stripped him to the waist, threw several buckets of water on him, and left him to die. Next morning Malloy came into the speakeasy and said, “Give me some of that good whiskey. I’m about to freeze.”

  Twice he was purposely run over by a taxicab. That did no good.

  So, on the night of February 22, 1933, the gentle band took the barfly to a furnished room in the Bronx, rented especially for the event, and held a gas tube in his mouth.

  That killed him. Pasqua, the undertaker, got a doctor to sign a death certificate signifying that pneumonia killed the barfly. Then Malloy was buried in one of Pasqua’s cheapest coffins.

  But the insurance companies had the barfly’s body exhumed, and so last night four men waited in the pre-execution cells. They were to be executed at 11 P.M. At 9 o’clock a telephone call came from Acting Governor M. William Bray giving Murphy two weeks’ respite on the strength of his lawyer’s assertion that he had new evidence that Murphy was subnormal mentally.

  But no telegrams came for Pasqua, or Marino, or Kriesberg. Consequently, at a few minutes before 11 o’clock two prison vans backed up to the rear door of the prison’s administration building, within the walls.

  Into the vans climbed the thirty-odd men selected by the State to witness the execution of three of its citizens. The relatives, stubborn, still waited on the stone steps.

  The van rolled slowly through the prison’s yard and paused at the lane leading to the death house. The witnesses got out and stood under the bright lamp. They were ordered to walk single file down the lane.At the end of the lane two guards grabbed each witness and expertly frisked him. Then the witnesses, jostling one another to reach the front seats first, entered the ele
ctrocution chamber.

  It is a little room. On the right, as you enter, are five benches for witnesses. The electric chair is in the middle of the room. It rests on three sheets of rubber carpet.

  There is a sign above the door through which the doomed are escorted. It reads “Silence.” At this door stood Principal Keeper John J. Sheehy. He stood there, red-faced, solemn, fingering the bunch of keys at his belt. On one side of the chair was a white operating table. On the other was a wooden pail.

  Frank Pasqua, the Bronx undertaker, was the first to go. He wore carpet slippers, a gray sweater and an unpressed pair of flannel trousers. Father John McCaffery, the prison’s Catholic chaplain, walked beside him.

  The witnesses stirred in their seats when the pale, staring human shuffled into the room, and a keeper said, “Silence, please.” Pasqua sat down in the chair. He did not say anything. He stared.

  The priest held a cross in front of Pasqua’s gray face. Pasqua leaned slightly and kissed it.

  Elliott, the executioner, came into the room. He went to work methodically. He pulled the headpiece, the mask, over Pasqua’s face. Then he began strapping him into the chair. A keeper kneeled and adjusted the electrode to Pasqua’s leg.

  Elliott left the room. The switches are in another room. The witnesses could see Pasqua’s fingers clutching the wooden arms of the electric chair. He clutched so fiercely that his knuckles were white.

  The witnesses could hear Elliott pull the switch.

  It did not last long—only three minutes.

  They placed the pale little man, still staring, on the white operating table and wheeled him into the autopsy room.

  Then they brought in Anthony Marino, the speakeasy proprietor who needed cash. Elliott dipped the headgear into the brine pail. He brought it out dripping. He rubbed some of the water out of it. Then he placed it on Marino’s head.

  Marino smiled faintly. He kissed the ivory cross proffered by the priest. He kept on smiling. He crossed his legs, but a keeper nudged him and he uncrossed them so the electrode could be fastened to his right leg.

  Elliott, the precise little executioner, hurried off and threw the switch that sent 2,200 volts of electricity through Marino’s body. It took three minutes.

  It took only two minutes to kill Daniel Kriesberg, the wry-faced fruit dealer. He came in, not as pale as his comrades, and sat down. He was escorted by Rabbi Jacob Katz, the Jewish chaplain.

  As soon as the electricity whirred into the man in the chair the rabbi left the room, holding the Old Testament firmly against his breast.

  “All out,” said a keeper. “Walk quietly.”

  The relatives still were huddled on the prison steps. They got up and stood in the shadows, aloof, as the witnesses departed. A woman among them was moaning.

  One of the men drank the last whiskey in the bottle and threw it away.

  The relatives were waiting to claim the bodies of the three men who helped kill a barfly for $1,290. It took them a long time to kill Malloy. It took the State only sixteen minutes to kill them.

  CHAPTER VII

  It’s a Living

  1. THE YELLOW SLIP SHOWS FIFTY-THREE ARRESTS

  Harry Lewis, an unobtrusive, well-mannered fellow from the lower East Side, has been one of the country’s most accomplished pickpockets for thirty-five years. Frequenting such crowded places as theater lobbies, rush-hour subways and skyscraper elevators at noon, he has slyly pulled wallets from thousands of pockets. He has worked in many Eastern cities and a “yellow slip” at Police Headquarters shows that he has been arrested at least fifty-three times; the slip is by no means complete.

  He is forty-eight years old and he looks years younger, despite the fact that he is almost completely bald. The terse slip shows that he has worked under six aliases. The first time he was arrested he called himself Noah Berns. That was in 1901, and he was charged with being an incorrigible child. The last time he was arrested he called himself Harry Lewis.On this occasion he was standing in a hallway of the National Broadcasting Company’s studio on the eighth floor of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. At the time of his arrest, according to the complaint, he “had his left hand in the left trouser pocket of an unknown man.” The charge was jostling.

  A court stenographer telephoned me about Lewis. He said he thought Lewis was “unusually bright for a pickpocket.” I went up to talk with the pickpocket in the Seventh District Jail, a grimy structure beneath the Sixth Avenue elevated tracks at 317 West Fifty-third Street. Lewis was in a cell, waiting to be sentenced. When he was taken before Magistrate Michael A. Ford in West Side Court he refused to say anything except, “I guess I’m guilty.” In his cell he had two tattered wild west magazines and four packages of cigarettes. The stenographer said that when the jailer came to take him out of his cell to stand before the judge he turned down a page in one of the wild west magazines to mark his place. After putting in his guilty plea he went back to his cell and resumed his reading.

  I sent in a note and Lewis consented to see me. He came out and sat for a few minutes on a dirty wooden bench facing a row of cages in which new arrivals are placed. He was an erect, muscular person, with brown eyes and regular features. He was facing three years in the penitentiary, but he did not seem particularly disturbed by his predicament; later I found out that confinement had ceased to bother him. In the moving pictures a pickpocket usually is a cringing, shifty-eyed person, but Lewis had a frank gaze, and he spoke dispassionately about the way he made a living. I noticed that his hands were broad and that his fingers did not look nimble. He was dressed in a blue suit of a Broadway cut but apparently of good quality. His shoes and his shirt were new.

  “This is the first time I ever talked with a reporter,” he said. “What did you want to ask me?”

  “I wish you would tell me something about your racket,” I said.

  “Racket, hell!” said the pickpocket. “It’s not a racket. It’s petty thievery. I never had a racket. Picking pockets is no good any more. The officers on the P. P. Squad [the Pickpocket Squad] know my face and I get dragged in every time they see me. It’s like butting your head against a wall.”

  For emphasis the pickpocket slapped the dirty jail wall. The conversation was interrupted by a girl in one of the cages who wanted a cigarette. The pickpocket pushed a cigarette through the cage, lit it for the girl and gave her the package.

  “I would like to have a psychiatrist go over me because I am sure there is something wrong somewhere,” he said. “I must have a twist in my brain. It may be environment, even. I am an East Side boy and there was seven in the family and I had to get something in my belly some way. When I get a roll I am not a pickpocket any longer. I am a gambler then. When it goes the thing starts all over again.”

  He was asked to demonstrate the technique of picking pockets, but he refused.

  “The pickpocket is regarded as the lowest type of criminal,” he was told. “Do you have any pride in your work?”

  “Not particularly,” he said. “I would rather be a bookmaker. I like gambling better. I am more of a gambler than a pickpocket. I know I am considered the lowest type of crook, but that don’t mean anything. I mean, the cops are always calling me a cockroach and squawking about how I steal a poor man’s pay. Hell, I’m not the only one that steals the poor man’s pay. Everybody steals the poor man’s pay. There are plenty of bank presidents no better than I am.”

  The pickpocket’s face was tanned and he looked as if he had passed several weeks on a Florida beach.

  “I been in the sun,” he said, “but I won’t say where. I keep in shape. What gets most of the pickpockets is dope. That is the finale, when they start doping. Liquor, yes. Women, yes. But dope, no. That washes you up. When a pickpocket loses his nerve he starts doping. The most I ever done in a stretch was fifteen months, and if I could get out of this mess I would like to go straight.”

  “The detective said you always say you are going straight when they arrest you,” I said.

/>   “I wouldn’t say that,” said Lewis, with resentment in his voice. “I know picking pockets is wrong and all that sort of thing, but that’s not the point. I got to eat.”

  I asked the pickpocket several other questions, but he grew morose and would not answer them. He volunteered some information about his life in jail.

  “I sleep,” he said. “I am able to sleep for weeks at a time. I think I am abnormal that way. I can sleep out a sentence.”

  A moment later Lewis looked at me and said, “I don’t think we’re getting anywhere, buddy. If you’ll excuse me …” I asked him if I could send him some cigarettes, but he shook his head and said, “I got pals on the outside. They see that I get tobacco and magazines and that stuff.” Then he shook hands and went back to his wild west magazines. I left the jail and went down to Police Headquarters to see Captain William J. Raftis, the head of the P.P. Squad. I wanted to ask him how Lewis rated as a pickpocket. The Captain said that Lewis was good.

  “He has never been a lush roller,” he said. “I mean he has never picked the pockets of drunks. He has always worked on pants pockets. Anybody could rob a drunk on the subway, or a night worker catching a nap on the way to work. Some people get into such a deep sleep on the subway you could saw their legs off. Lewis often works with a confederate, who feigns drunkenness and crowds a victim. Then Lewis picks the victim’s pocket.”

  Captain Raftis said that most of the expert pickpockets started out quite young. Lewis began his career around 1904.

  “In those days,” said the Captain, “there were no compulsory education laws and kids could roam the streets and get into bad company. Also there were no laws directed specifically against pickpockets. We are not breeding many pickpockets now. My squad, and the various new laws, make it almost impossible for them to work. We have detectives working crisscross on the subway and watching all big crowds. Just as Lewis said, a pickpocket in these days is just butting his head against a wall.”