by Neil Hanson
Governor Odell and the state superintendent of elections, John McCullagh, issued threats and appeals to the police, naming the leaders of the gangs of repeaters and citing the poolrooms and “disorderly resorts” that were the centers of colonization operations in the city.21 They claimed that a vast number of names were illegally registered; one gang member boasted that he not only intended to vote under each of the eight names he himself had successfully registered, but also under the seven names fraudulently registered by another member of the gang who had been forced to flee the city. However, Odell’s and McCullagh’s appeals to the police went largely unanswered. Policemen knew where their loyalties lay; like the gangs, they also benefited from political protection and from the police graft that Tammany tolerated, or even put their way.
When reform candidates and their supporters vowed to flood the East Side with outside poll-watchers, Big Tim Sullivan ridiculed the threat and issued the ominous warning that if attempts were made to “bring down a lot of football-playing, hair-mattressed college athletes to run the polls by force, I will say now that there won’t be enough ambulances in New York to carry them away.”22 Despite the best efforts of Odell and McCullagh, the election was widely regarded as one of the least honest in New York’s tarnished history. The polls did not open until the afternoon, but by six o’clock on election morning, there were ten to fifteen Jewish and Italian repeaters in line at every election booth in the district. They were “thoroughly drilled” and “a regular commissary department furnished them with breakfast and luncheon, whiskey, cigars, and even benches to sit on.”23
Sluggers routinely intimidated supporters of rival candidates, and even election officials. When an election inspector claimed to have been kicked, beaten, and struck on the head with a bottle by a member of the Eastman gang, his demands that the police arrest the man were “met with indifference”; Magistrate Hogan at the Essex Market Court refused to issue a warrant.24
Big Tim was convincingly elected in his district, but an even more dramatic illustration of the changing face of Lower Manhattan occurred in the Second Assembly District, where Big Tom Foley was standing against another Tammany politician, Paddy Divver. Divver, an old-style Irish politician in what used to be an Irish immigrant stronghold, was routed by Monk’s confederation of Jewish and Italian gangs. The “old-time Irish residents and ‘repeaters’ howled with impotent rage.25 They were outnumbered, held back from the polls, and in many instances calmly blackjacked. The police did not interfere.” When the vote was counted, Foley had won with a two-thirds majority. His later election as sheriff of New York “probably exceeded all previous records for ‘repeating’ at election time.”
Monk could furnish a minimum of four or five hundred sluggers and repeaters on election days, each one worth five to ten votes at election time and ten to twenty at primaries, when scrutiny by election officials was even more lax.26 One group of gang members did the repeating, while others formed strong-arm gangs, beating up any deputies or policemen who tried to arrest any of the repeaters. If the polls were carefully watched, “guys with whiskers”—bearded men—were preferred:
When they vote with their whiskers on, you take ’em to a barber and scrape off the chin fringe. Then you vote them again with side lilacs and mustache. Then to a barber again, off comes the sides and you vote ’em a third time with the mustache. If that ain’t enough and the box can stand a few more ballots, clean off the mustache and vote ’em plain face. That makes every one of them good for four votes.
Scores of repeaters were even issued deputy sheriffs’ badges. Having beaten all previous records for stuffing ballot boxes, by way of celebration they began firing revolvers in the street, “like a crowd of cowboys in a Western mining town.”27 When police patrolmen arrested any of the men, their accomplices, whose badges outranked those of the patrolmen, insisted on taking charge of the prisoners, then led them around the corner and released them again.
The election day was reported by The New York Times under the headline QUIET DAY AT THE POLLS: ONLY 282 ARRESTS.28 Despite prima facie cases against them, 90 percent of those arrested for electoral fraud, including the chairman of a district board of election inspectors and a state senator, were discharged. The state superintendent of elections picked his words with care in describing this as “a riddle.”
When Monk or one of his toughs was arrested, word would come down to release him, or a Tammany Hall bondsman would arrive to secure bail. Big Tim Sullivan personally provided lawyers and thousands of dollars of sureties as bail for men accused of election fraud.29 The bail was usually forfeited and the case deleted from the records, because the gang members gave false names and addresses and then melted away when released, but politicians like Big Tim regarded the loss of bail money as simply a necessary election expense.
Whenever Monk or his men did appear in court, Tammany-appointed lawyers were there to defend them. On one occasion Monk and a couple of “stalls” were caught red-handed attempting to rob a man in a streetcar—“working the rattler,” as it was known in the underworld. They beat up the conductor and a policeman who tried to interfere, surrendering only when confronted by a squad of bluecoats. Despite overwhelming evidence against them, they were all acquitted when the case went to court. “The politicians always sprung him,” one New York detective complained. “He was the best man they ever had at the polls.”
The only authority Monk was answerable to was Tammany Hall. When Congressman Goldfogle, a staunch ally of Big Tim Sullivan, had his “kettle” (Bowery slang for a watch) stolen in a crowded streetcar, the enraged congressman appealed to Sullivan for his help. “Instantly the word was passed out that the ‘Big Fellow’ was sore, and that the watch must be returned or there would be trouble.”30 There were no witnesses to the theft, no evidence of who was responsible, yet within twenty-four hours the congressman had his watch back, without any intervention by the police. “The word of Timothy D got to the ‘Eastmans,’ and they gave it up.”
Monk’s chief rival, Paul Kelly, was also under the protection and control of Tammany Hall and Big Tim. “Over them his power is absolute; for them his word is law.31 To whisper ‘it’s the Big Fellow’s order’ closes the most captious mouth.” Even when Kelly committed an assault and robbery so blatant that it could not be ignored, his case was “so manipulated by the police before it came to sentence that for an offense that should have cost him ten to twenty years, Kelly got nine months.” As Recorder Goff complained, “The conduct of the police in this case was shameful.”
The cozy arrangement by which crooked politicians, corrupt policemen, and gangsters rigged elections, fixed court cases, and shared the proceeds of crime was only occasionally threatened. Anticorruption candidates were sometimes successful in gaining election despite blatant Tammany gerrymandering and vote-rigging, but the appetite of New York’s citizens for reform rarely lasted more than a single mayoral term. As “Boss” Croker remarked after Tammany lost an election, “Our people could not stand the rotten police corruption.32 They’ll be back at the next election; they can’t stand reform either.”
When Asa Bird Gardiner, Tammany’s nominee for district attorney at a subsequent election, shouted “To hell with reform!”33 at a campaign meeting, it was promptly adopted as the Tammany slogan. After the votes, genuine and bogus, were counted, “the Wigwam” had duly reestablished its control—“Tammany is not a wave, it’s the sea itself”—and the Tammany politicians at once set about constructing “a new, perfected system of blackmail and bribery … New York is New York again.”
For Tammany, the mathematics of voter fraud were straightforward. The two thirds of a million registered votes of the city were divided so closely along conventional party lines that only a slight balance was needed to secure control of the government. The crucial votes were supplied by Monk’s federation of criminal sluggers and repeaters, giving Tammany bosses an iron control of both their own party organization and the city. “The government of the second larg
est city in the world … depends at bottom upon the will of the criminal population—principally thieves and pimps.”34 Yet Tammany’s “corruption with consent” also relied on the corruption of the city’s wider population. “The people are not innocent … no doubt that was not new to many observers. It was new to me … The people themselves get very little; they come cheap, but they are interested.”
5
THE ROGUES’ GALLERY
For Monk—who grew wealthy from the corrupt and immoral earnings generated by his ever-growing gang—New York City proved a rich criminal territory. Home to several million citizens, more than any other American city, New York was the epicenter of manufacturing, finance, and the wholesale and retail trades. By the end of the nineteenth century, the value of American industrial production had already surpassed that of Britain, France, and Germany combined, and eighty of the one hundred largest U.S. companies were headquartered in New York.1 Yet even in the era in which New York was surpassing London as the richest and most powerful city in the richest and most powerful nation on the planet, it still retained much of the feel of a Wild West town.
The U.S. murder rate was from ten to twenty times the murder rate of the British Empire.2 Other crime was rife as well, and law enforcement was virtually nonexistent, though, as one senior police officer pointed out, in some parts of the city they had “perfect devils to deal with. Within the last week, half a dozen of my men have come into the stations with their clothes actually torn off them.”
The police met force with force, using clubs—“billys” and “nightsticks”—made of locust wood, which was less prone to splitting than hickory or oak.3 Billys were short clubs, whereas nightsticks were twenty-two inches long and one and three-eighths inches thick. They were used by the predominantly Irish-American police with such vigor and brutality on poor New Yorkers, especially those of eastern and southern European origin, that police stations were colloquially known as “slaughterhouses.” Apart from cracking heads, police clubs also had another use; while London policemen blew whistles to call for assistance, New York cops beat on the sidewalks and the iron manhole covers with their nightsticks, producing an unnerving drumming sound that was audible even above the relentless noise of the city streets.
On a triangular site bounded by Broome, Grand, and Centre streets, police headquarters was a four-story building, surrounded by iron railings and approached by a steep flight of stone steps. The granite exterior carried a minimum of decoration; the only touches of color in its drab gray façade were the striped awnings screening the windows from the fierce glare of the summer sun. The records of every arrest, charge, conviction, place, and term of imprisonment entered in the leather-bound police blotter kept at each station house were consolidated at headquarters, and portraits of thousands of known criminals were kept in the “Rogue’s Gallery” in a room on the first floor. Monk’s likeness was among them, Number 5,844.4 Arrested men made strenuous attempts to distort their features as the photograph was taken in the hope of escaping future detection, often in vain.
The museum of crime on the first floor of police headquarters displayed pictures of the most notorious of these criminals, alongside examples of the tools of their trade: lock picks, sledgehammers, drags, drills, jimmies, blowpipes, jackscrews, dark lanterns, powder flasks, “no end of dirks, knives and pistols, and a good assortment of black caps and ropes of murderers that make one shudder to look upon.”5 The first floor also housed the criminal record room, the night captains’ room, and the detectives’ main assembly room, where the daily lineup of criminals took place. In order to pick up the first news of crimes and arrests, every newspaper kept a reporter permanently stationed at police headquarters, and they reported the crimes and wars of the Eastman gang with “a sensational minuteness of detail that does its share toward keeping up its evil traditions and inflaming the ambition of its members to be as bad as the worst.”6
For police purposes, the city was divided into three inspection districts, each under the control of an inspector, and subdivided into twelve precincts, controlled by a captain. In turn the precincts were divided into patrol beats or posts, with roundsmen maintaining a watch on individual patrolmen. With rare exceptions, those who wished to join the police had to pay a bribe to do so, and Tammany influence ensured that loyal supporters of the Wigwam were disproportionately represented among those new recruits—one of the reasons why the New York City Police Department had always contained so many Irishmen. Policemen then bought their promotions from their superiors—in the 1890s the going rate for promotion from patrolman to roundsman was $300, and from roundsman to sergeant $1,600—and then set about reclaiming the money in bribes, kickbacks, and the proceeds from the gambling, prostitution, and robberies to which they routinely turned a blind eye.7 The only policemen potentially exempt from the normal system of purchases, bribes, and kickbacks were the handsome, powerful-looking men recruited for the Broadway Squad, whose main role was to patrol the eponymous thoroughfare, keeping petty criminals at bay so that New York’s more respectable and affluent citizens could continue to cherish the illusion that the city as a whole was similarly well policed.
The system was virtually self-perpetuating; the only way to recoup the money paid to join the force in the first place, and for every promotion thereafter, was to partake of the graft on offer. As one policeman remarked, “Of course there are cops who have never taken a dollar, at least I’ve heard about them, but I never saw one.” Those principled policemen who somehow slipped through the net, refusing to pay or accept graft, or insisting on arresting “connected” criminals, were banished to “the Goats.” Once the nickname for the shantytown on the marshy ground that would become Central Park, where squatters lived with their goats and foraging pigs, the Goats had come to mean any district remote from the rewards and opportunities of downtown and midtown Manhattan.8
Even when policemen had not been bribed to look the other way, criminals routinely escaped the law, often making use of the parallel universe of the rooftops, crowded with pigeon coops, that acted as a secondary sidewalk linking the tenements high above the city streets. Criminals could make their way from building to building along the rooftops as quickly as the pedestrians on the sidewalk moved several stories below. There was a gap of only three feet between the rear tenements on Cherry and Hamilton streets, and criminals being chased by the police ran up to the roof, jumped the gap, and were through a skylight, down the stairs, and off up the street before the police had even rounded the corner.9
The criminal gangs operated with virtual impunity within the areas they controlled, but their territories were rigidly defined. The Lower West Side was the last stronghold of the Irish, and the Lower East Side was divided between the Italian and Jewish gangs—and they rarely strayed into the respectable uptown or downtown districts, where the solid citizens went about their daily business largely untroubled by crime.
The financial district had not always been so crime-free. Wall Street had once been plagued by gangs of bank thieves, forgers, and pickpockets, and thefts of cash and securities from bank messengers and bank tellers, and even from counting rooms, banks, and vaults, were commonplace.10 When Inspector Thomas Byrnes took charge of the detective department, he tackled the problem of crime in the financial district by discreetly renting an office on Wall Street at his own expense and installing nine of his detectives there. He then established “dead-lines” at Fulton Street and Fourteenth Street. Any known pickpocket, thief, or other blue-collar criminal found south of Fulton Street or north of Fourteenth Street was picked up and, unless he could provide a valid reason for being there, was clubbed with police nightsticks and sent to Blackwell’s Island as a habitual criminal. Later a special room in the stock exchange was set aside for the detectives.
The system worked so well that robberies around Wall Street declined dramatically. On occasion Byrnes even arranged the return of goods that had been stolen; in separate incidents, diamonds and valuable papers were r
eturned by thieves, with the compliments of the inspector.11 Byrnes was rewarded by the grateful members of the stock exchange with stock tips, “good things,” and gratuities—the source, so he claimed, of $350,000 worth of real estate and $292,000 in cash, held in his wife’s name, that he accumulated. He was also given a handsome $500 gold watch at a presentation that was only slightly marred by the theft of the president of the exchange’s splendid new fur-lined overcoat during the ceremony.
Although Byrnes’s dead-line system curtailed the extramural activities of Lower East Side criminals to some extent, there were also other slum areas with their attendant gangs above the Fourteenth Street dead-line, which was supposed to “fence off the good from the bad.”12 Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side, the Rag Gang’s territory on the East River at Thirty-ninth Street, “Battle Row” on East Sixty-third Street, and “the Village” at Twenty-ninth Street and First Avenue—where the roof of almost every tenement was piled with bricks and missiles for bombarding police—were as tough and lawless as Monk’s Lower East Side heartlands. Nor did the dead-line system do anything to restrain the white-collar criminals who robbed savers and investors through frauds and share scams. While crime was reduced south of Fulton Street and north of Fourteenth Street, between those dead-lines, Monk and the other crooks of the Lower East Side enjoyed a virtual free rein, provided they paid the police protection money or gave them a slice of the action.