The Heroic Gangster_The Story of Monk Eastman, From the Streets of New York to the Battlefields of Europe and Back

by Neil Hanson

  Occasionally the public would be roused to outrage by some particularly flagrant abuse of the law and the police would flex their muscles and raid brothels, gambling dens, and thieves’ kitchens … which almost invariably proved to be models of decorum because the owners were tipped off in advance. A few token criminals were arrested, convicted, and jailed, but in the main they were loners, those without political connections or who had tried to cheat the police of their share. Meanwhile, street gangs operated with the tacit consent of police and politicians, and institutionalized corruption permeated every aspect of the life of the city.

  An investigation into corruption by the Lexow Committee in 1894, albeit highly selective and partisan, had concluded, “We see the powers of government prostituted to protect criminals, to demoralize the police, to debauch the public conscience and to turn governmental functions into channels for private gain.”13 Evidence of such corruption was not hard to uncover. A representative of the committee sent to serve a bench warrant upon a brothel owner, Madame Hastings, retired in confusion without serving the warrant when he found her entertaining several city officials and a judge of the criminal court, and the commissioner of police ordered a policeman who raided a brothel owned by Madame Sadie West to go back and apologize to her.14

  The Reverend Charles Parkhurst, minister of the Madison Square Church and president of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, became one of the most fervent campaigners against crime and corruption. In his “rustic innocence,” Parkhurst thought the police were there to repress crime, but it now began to dawn on him that, like Tammany Hall, their principal object was “to protect and foster crime and make capital out of it.”15 Tammany was not so much a political party as a business that fostered the crime and vice from which it profited, and protected criminals from the law.

  On February 14, 1892, Parkhurst used his Sunday sermon to launch a blistering attack on the vice and corruption that riddled New York. “While we fight iniquity, the mayor and his whole gang of drunken and lecherous subordinates shield and patronize it; while we try to convert criminals, they manufacture them.”16 The “polluted harpies” of Tammany Hall were “a lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot,” and New York had become “an industrialized Sodom” from which even the established Church sometimes profited; Trinity Church was the city’s largest single owner of slum and whorehouse properties.

  Accompanied by Charles Gardner, a private detective who later published a pamphlet describing their experiences, and John Langdon Erving, the son of well-to-do parents of unimpeachable social standing, Parkhurst took to visiting the most sordid parts of the city so he could himself bear witness to New York’s degradation. In order to pass incognito, Gardner first had to adjust the clergyman’s outfit: “the coat was cut in ministerial fashion, the trousers had the very aroma of the pulpit about them.”17 After supplying him with a more suitable outfit, Gardner also greased down Parkhurst’s flowing locks, though he left the muttonchop whiskers untouched.

  In one low dive on Cherry Street, Parkhurst watched little boys and girls not more than ten years old buy whiskey and beer in bottles, pans, tin cans, and pitchers, and he also visited an opium den on Mott Street, but it was in the brothels and bordellos that the reverend’s fortitude was tested to its limits. In one he was greeted by a young woman asking, “Hey, whiskers, going to ball me off?”; on Water Street he saw half a dozen prostitutes “soliciting men to enter the resort with the same air that a Grand Central Station hackman asks you to ‘have a cab’ ”; and on Elizabeth Street a naked woman smoked a cigarette standing on her head and then asked the good doctor if he’d like to see her other acrobatic feats for three dollars.18 He witnessed a naked “dance of nature” at the bordello of Hattie Adams, where he also played “leapfrog” with the dancers, an exploit that earned him a great deal of public derision when it was revealed, though it was afterward made clear that he had not removed any of his clothing, apart from his hat, and “would not permit any of the customary variations.”

  Parkhurst also witnessed a “French Circus” in the house of Marie Andrea, “one of the most infamous resorts in New York City.”19 Gardner could not bring himself to describe “the unspeakable horror of it,” but Parkhurst, whose constant refrain was “Show me something worse!” peered through his glasses at the whole “circus” without a murmur of complaint. However, in Scotch Ann’s “Golden Rule Pleasure Club” in a dingy basement in Greenwich Village, the doctor’s nerve finally cracked. In each room was a young man “whose face was painted, eyebrows blackened, and whose airs were those of a young girl. Each person talked in a high falsetto voice and called the others by women’s names.” When the nature of the establishment was explained to Parkhurst, he fled from the house at top speed. “Why, I wouldn’t stay in that house,” he gasped, “for all the money in the world.”

  When Parkhurst preached about what he had seen, he forced police into a temporary show of enforcement of the law. Inspector Byrnes’s men descended on several brothels, including Hattie Adams’s, and, telling them they were acting on Parkhurst’s orders, forced the prostitutes out into the snow without even allowing them to get their coats. As a result, the living room of Parkhurst’s Madison Square vicarage was invaded by irate whores, but he managed to convince them of his good intentions while his wife served them tea and cookies.20

  Despite Parkhurst’s campaigning and a horrific crime rate, politicians and police continued to conspire in corruption, protecting Monk and his fellow criminals and sharing their spoils. Men who profited from crime and vice held power in most large American cities at the time. That was “true in no other civilized country in the world,” and it was true of New York above all other American cities.21 Corruption extended from the top to the bottom of the city government. The salary of every single city officeholder was subject to an assessment of 5 to 10 percent, paid to the “wiskinskie” of Tammany Hall, and, despite a lack of testimony from “Boss” Croker, “urgent business demanding his presence in England throughout the investigation,” the Lexow Committee had succeeded in demonstrating that virtually every member of the police department paid bribes and “subscriptions” to Tammany. There were rich rewards for those who did so. The wardman in each police precinct collected payments from brothels, illegal saloons, and gambling dens. The money was passed from the wardman to the captain and then made its way up the police hierarchy, “with appropriate subtractions at each step.”22

  When Theodore Roosevelt became president of the police board in May 1895, following the election of a reform administration after the Lexow Committee’s revelations, one of his first acts was to cancel the annual police parade, saying, “We will parade when we need not be ashamed to show ourselves.”23 Roosevelt also introduced new physical standards and a series of compulsory examinations for policemen, but his attempts to enforce liquor legislation drafted by rural conservatives and prohibitionists made him deeply unpopular in the city. He was swept from office and the old system of bribery and corruption restored at the 1898 election, the first held following the enlargement of New York to the five boroughs, incorporating the formerly independent city of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island.

  The incoming administration of Mayor Van Wyck was corrupt even by New York’s dismal standards. His victory meant control of sixty thousand employees—with all the power of patronage that implied—and an annual budget of over $90 million, plus tens of millions more from rents, fees, fines, interest, bond sales, premiums, and the other scams and skimmings by which Tammany politicians enriched themselves. Van Wyck’s supporters jubilantly celebrated the fact that the town was once more to be “wide open” (i.e., wide open to corruption).24 If proof were required, an inquiry into the American Ice Company’s monopoly, which had allowed it to double its prices, later revealed that, on an official salary of $15,000 a year, Mayor Van Wyck had somehow acquired $680,000 of Ice Company stock. Just like the Lexow Committee five years earlier, the Mazet Committee of 1899 found eviden
ce of wholesale corruption in New York, but had little more long-term impact than its predecessor.

  In return for their bribes, owners of brothels, bars, and gaming dens were shielded from new competition; “operators encroaching upon a territorial franchise were very promptly closed down by the police.”25 However, police protection was an expensive commodity. One madam of a string of brothels revealed that she paid thirty thousand dollars a year, and the wealth of police chief Alexander S. “Clubber” Williams offered even more glaring proof. Nicknamed in tribute to his brutality as a patrolman when he famously claimed “there’s more law in the end of a policeman’s nightstick than in a decision of the Supreme Court,” Williams had announced himself as a young policeman by selecting two of the toughest thugs in his district, flattening them with his nightstick, and then pitching them through the window of the saloon that was their preferred hangout. Toward the end of his long and lucrative police career, he admitted that, despite his modest official salary, he had accumulated enough wealth to have acquired a substantial estate in Cos Cob, Connecticut, with a purpose-built $39,000 dock for his yacht; a large house and several other properties in Manhattan; and a dozen bank accounts, all awash with cash. All this, he told the investigating committees with disarming sincerity, was the product of property speculation in Japan. In addition to his bribes and takings from the crime on his turf, Williams also received a substantial commission on the sale of a brand of whiskey called Hollywood Whiskey. Any saloonkeepers or brothel owners who didn’t push it were liable to police raids and revocation of their licenses.

  Another police chief, William S. “Big Bill” Devery, a huge man, rarely without a big cigar, conceded that in a single year, police graft was something over three million dollars, but even that was a considerable underestimate of the sums annually grafted, swindled, and extorted.26 In 1900, The New York Times published a detailed account claiming that in the previous year, the owners of gambling houses alone had paid a total of $3,095,000 to the “Gambling House Commission”—an entirely unofficial body consisting of two state senators, a representative of the poolroom proprietors, and the head of a city department. The commission also illustrated a curious anomaly: when there was an honest chief of police and no central downtown “fix,” the small fry of the police got most of the graft, but when corrupt politicians were in control, they took the bulk of the graft and the police had to be content with what was left.

  Whichever hands the cash stuck to most readily, New York was “a graft-ridden town.”27 Given the scale of the corruption, it was one of the wonders of the age that New York finally emerged from this blighted era so well endowed with great public buildings, libraries, museums, parks, and open spaces, but it “paid dear tribute for every forward step … Imagination fails at picturing the metropolis that might have been, could the city throughout the [nineteenth] century have been guided and controlled in the light of present-day civic ideals.”

  6

  THE GANGLAND CODE

  Monk’s share of the graft and criminal activity on offer had already been substantial enough to allow him to purchase a large detached house for his mother, Mary, in the upmarket suburb of Richmond Hill on Long Island.1 It stood on a large plot of land and included a barn where Monk kept his pigeons. The house also accommodated his married sisters, Lizzie Reynolds and Francine Wouters, their husbands, and Lizzie’s three children. Later, Monk may also have bought separate houses for Lizzie and Francine; by 1910, both were living in properties near Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

  Monk also treated himself to one of the first automobiles in New York, a grandiose and luxurious machine that looked like “the by-blow of a Venetian gondola.”2 He had now become something of a lowlife celebrity, an attraction in his own right for the elegant slummers coming from uptown for the vicarious thrill of an evening in the Bowery. His fame even reached the ears of a visiting English writer, P. G. Wodehouse, who subsequently used a thinly disguised Monk as the basis for a fictional character he christened Bat Jarvis:3

  Mr. Jarvis’s reputation was far from being purely local. Broadway knew him, and the Tenderloin. Tammany Hall knew him. Long Island City knew him. In the underworld of New York his name was a by-word. For Bat Jarvis was the leader of the famous Groome Street Gang, the most noted of all New York’s collections of Apaches. More, he was the founder and originator of it … Off-shoots of the main gang sprang up here and there about the East Side. Small thieves, pickpockets and the like, flocked to Mr. Jarvis as their tribal leader and protector and he protected them. For he, with his followers, were of use to the politicians. The New York gangs, and especially the Groome Street Gang, have brought to a fine art the gentle practice of “repeating”; which, broadly speaking, is the art of voting a number of different times at different polling-stations on election days. A man who can vote, say, ten times in a single day for you, and who controls a great number of followers who are also prepared, if they like you, to vote ten times in a single day for you, is worth cultivating. So the politicians passed the word to the police, and the police left the Groome Street Gang unmolested and they waxed fat and flourished. Such was Bat Jarvis.

  As his fictional portrait suggests, Monk had become a very prominent figure in the underworld, but his largely Jewish gang also had “a feud code like that of the Kentucky Mountains” with their nearest and fiercest rivals in both size and influence, the Five Points Social Club, better known as the Five Pointers.4 This “great Italian band of cutthroats and pimps” was led by Paul Kelly from his headquarters in a room over a dive on Great Jones Street, near Third Avenue, across the street from the green lamps of the police station. The windows carried a crudely lettered sign: PAUL KELLY ASSOCIATION. A series of boot marks on the splintered door bore witness to past police raids, and the room was as filthy as the staircase leading to it, and furnished only with a ramshackle table and a few battered stools. The walls were decorated with cheap lithographs and woodcuts of prizefighters and East Side politicians, including a prominent portrait of “The Big Feller”—Big Tim Sullivan—which hung “like a bland heathen divinity on the walls of all the Bowery dives.” “An odor of stale beer and cigarettes, combined with many indescribably more evil smells, filled the place.5 Half a dozen youths, several of them obviously not yet of voting age and all somehow conveying the impression that their chief aim in life was to look tougher than they really were, sat quarrelling over a greasy pack of cards.”

  Despite his Irish-sounding name, Kelly was an Italian immigrant, born in 1876 and christened Paolo Antonini Vaccarelli (or Paolo Corelli, according to one New York newspaper).6 Since the Irish were still the dominant, though fading, ethnic group on the East Side, Kelly took an Irish name, just as Monk had adopted the name Delaney, “after the common custom of both the Italian and Jew of his class.”7 When Kelly first appeared in the Bowery in the mid-1890s, he worked as a lowly clerk in an Italian bank. In the evenings he entertained himself in the Bowery, where his charm won him “the favor of the tired women who frequented McGurk’s and the other dives,” but also earned him “not a few thrashings from bigger and stronger competitors.” Kelly learned quickly; he became a professional boxer, “acquired some reputation as a lightweight scrapper,” and formed alliances with other young toughs.

  From those beginnings had grown Kelly’s Five Points gang, named for the intersections of the five streets that defined their territory, an area once ruled by the Irish “Dead Rabbits.” Kelly, however, drew adherents from all over the city. Among them was Salvatore Luciana—better known as Charles “Lucky” Luciano—who grew up in Monk’s territory near First Avenue and Fourteenth Street, but began his criminal career selling heroin and morphine under Kelly’s protection around Mulberry Bend.8 Ciro Terranova, the future “Artichoke King,” was another Kelly gang member; so, briefly, was Alphonse “Scarface” Capone.

  Monk and Kelly were polar opposites. Despite the slightly flattened nose that spoke of his former career as a professional boxer, “Dapper” Paul Kelly w
as a handsome dandy with olive skin and brilliantined dark hair.9 He fit well the description of the New York gunman coined by one writer: “exquisitely scented, wearing silk socks, silk ties to his tan shoes, with rings on his well-kept fingers and a gold-watch on his well-kept clothes.” Another newspaper description of him dripped condescension, describing Kelly’s clothes,

  which the Bowery accepts as the pink of fashion and gentility, pointed patent leather shoes of the type still stylish in that region, some flashy jewelry, and a watch, which by right of possession at least, is his own … It is darkly hinted that in Italy before the East Side got him, he belonged to the aristocracy, but was forced into exile by an unfortunate affair of the heart with a beautiful lady, also moving in the highest circles of society.10 There are some members of the gang who have told this so often in the Bowery that they almost believe it themselves.

  Whatever some uptown sophisticates may have thought of him, it was undeniable that Kelly was far from a typical denizen of the Bowery. He spoke four languages, could hold his own in a conversation about fine art, had a ready wit and an engaging smile, and was rarely without a woman on his arm.11 His New Brighton Dance Hall, “one of the flashiest palaces of sin in the city,” was often frequented by New York’s upper-class socialites, who went slumming for the vicarious thrill of experiencing a little of the wicked, seamy side of life—and meeting a real gangster like Monk or Kelly only added to the excitement.