by Neil Hanson
A cheap, nickeled .32-caliber revolver with five empty chambers in the cylinder was later found on the steps of the B.R.T. subway entrance at Union Square, by the same policemen who had been first on the scene after the shooting.6 Suggestions that the gun might have been Monk’s were laughed off by police. “The Monk wouldn’t carry a cheap gat,” one plainclothes officer said.7 “The man who planted that ‘Young America’ beside the body of the Monk didn’t know him. If he was packing a gun, it would be one of the best … As far as we can learn, the Monk hadn’t packed a gun in months.”
Perhaps forgetting past shootouts like the Battle of Rivington Street, Police Commissioner Enright cited Monk’s killing as proof that
there is a new kind of crime abroad in the land … it is the “Wild West” sort of crime.8 We used to read about it in dime novels … but it is only since the close of the war, where many young men learned to use firearms for the first time, that we began to have this form of spectacular crime … We had assaults and robberies in the old days, but the implement was the slug iron, the sandbag or brass knuckles. The gun … was not so much in evidence.
As they turned their attention to the search for Monk’s killer, New York police were forced to confess that the Penn Street address they had for him was false. They had no idea where he had been living and were ignorant of most other aspects of his life, as was demonstrated by their insistence that Monk and his father were both really called William Delaney, and that his parents were still alive—his father had died in 1888, his mother in 1903. They then released details of Monk’s rap sheet—his criminal career as far as they knew it—listing some of the aliases he had adopted:
John Eastman, December 1902: New York City, assault, discharged9
Joseph Morris, August 1903: Freehold, NJ, felonious assault, discharged
William Delaney, December 1903: New York City, suspicion of homicide, discharged
William Delaney, December 1903: twice arrested as a suspicious person and twice discharged
William Delaney, April 1904: felonious assault, ten years in Sing Sing, by Recorder Goff
John Marvin, Buffalo, burglary, discharged
William Delaney, July 1915: Albany, burglary, two years and eleven months in Dannemora
Even that was a far from complete account of Monk’s criminal career. The police claim that Monk had first been arrested in 1902 was ten years wide of the mark; in fact, he’d been arrested in 1892, and he was convicted and sent to Blackwell’s Island for three months in 1898. Police were so much in the dark about the killing that it was first alleged that Monk might have been shot somewhere else and then thrown from a taxicab outside the subway. Although police now embarked on a belated roundup of gangsters and former associates, they admitted that no immediate arrests were expected, for the leads they were following were “as vague and shadowy as the life of Eastman since he forsook his old haunts and ways of crime.”10
Robbery was ruled out as a motive for Monk’s killing when his pockets were found to contain $144, a heavy watch and chain, two pairs of gold spectacles, a bunch of keys, and a Christmas card addressed to “E. Eastman.”11 It was signed with the name “Lottie” and postmarked Brooklyn, but that was all the police knew about the woman. Yet again they displayed their ignorance about him when claiming that Monk “was understood to have had a wife who died several years ago, but his closest friends did not believe he ever married again, nor did they know of any woman with whom he had been closely associated.” The fact that he had been living alone in a single room was enough to persuade police to state that Monk had “tired of women … Once, years ago, he was ‘turned in’ by a ‘moll’ and since then he often had been heard to voice rather positive opinions about the opposite sex.” How this belief chimed with their disclosure that they were seeking the woman, Lottie, who had signed Monk’s Christmas card, in the hope of learning something of importance, was not explained.
Police kept watch on the morgue, seeking to detain someone who might aid them in their search for the murderer, but the only person who went to the morgue to view Monk’s body was Charley Jones, who said he would take charge of his old friend’s body and arrange his funeral if no one else came forward. “He was a good guy,” Jones said.12 “I’m trying to find some of his folks. If I can’t, I’ll take care of the body. He was regular, he’d do as much for a pal. I’ll come through for him as I know he’d come through for me.”
Jones volunteered his interpretation of his old friend’s death, suggesting that some “young squirt gunmen” eager to make a name for themselves in Monk’s former kingdom might have shot him out of sheer bravado. Jones then somewhat diminished the impact of his previous statements about Monk’s reformed life by adding that if he was “over in Manhattan after all this time on any business, you can bet it was big business and no piker affair.”
With little or no hard evidence, other theories about Monk’s death were soon being circulated, and almost the only thing on which all concurred was that Monk had not merely been shot in a drunken argument. One theory, probably originating with the police since it insisted that Monk’s real name had been William Delaney, claimed that the killing was the result of a gunman’s vendetta and that Monk had been “associating with professional gamblers.13 He had no known means of support but had plenty of money,” an assertion at least partly borne out by the $144 found on his body. Another newspaper report, based on yet more anonymous police sources, suggested that the killing was premeditated and the real reason for Monk’s death was a dispute about the profits from drug peddling and bootlegging.
The narcotics squad added their weight to that theory, stating that Monk was the head of an organized band of drug sellers, employing twenty agents.14 In an attempt to substantiate those claims, New York police then fed newspapers with reports supposedly emanating from the Brooklyn police that Monk had taken up with a criminal gang there that had been planning an old-style shootout in the streets with a rival gang. Brooklyn police immediately refuted those claims. Captain Daniel J. Carey, head of detectives in the section of Williamsburg where Monk had been living, said he had led a quiet and apparently respectable life since he moved across the river. Far from knowing that Monk had joined a new gang or rejoined his old one, and that the rival gangs were arming for battle, Carey said the Brooklyn police did not even have Monk under surveillance, and he had last been seen a few months before by a detective who had known him during his criminal career. “I am not Monk Eastman anymore,” he had told the detective. “Tell the world that I am going straight.”
Corroboration of that appeared to be offered by his furnished room on Driggs Avenue, a dismal, unheated little bedroom for which he paid $2.50 a week. Even when that address had been passed on to the New York police by their counterparts in Brooklyn, a search of the property and an examination of Monk’s belongings failed to yield any useful clues. The police were later forced to admit that they had found no evidence that Monk had been involved in any sort of large-scale crime; if he was making big profits from drug running and bootlegging, there was little sign of it in his dingy furnished room in Williamsburg.15 Monk had claimed to be a bartender at the Court Cafe at Broadway and Driggs Avenue, not far from the house, though in reality, police said, he was employed as a bouncer—bringing his life full circle from his early days at the New Irving Dance Hall in the 1890s.
Yet another theory about the crime, believed by many in the underworld, was that Monk had been shot because he was suspected of being an informer. “Whipped by drink and drugs … a victim of cocaine and opium for years …‘Monk’ had squealed and for that had made himself a marked man, doomed to die.”16 Despite his claims that Monk had not been seen for months and his denials of having him under surveillance, Captain Carey was said to have paid a second visit in ten days to Monk’s room on Driggs Avenue on December 23, just three days before the killing.17 That fact alone might have been enough to mark Monk out for a gangland execution, but in addition, two officers from the narcotics
squad had also called on Monk in the same month. Still loyal to the code by which he had lived all his adult life, Monk had refused to give them information, but rumors about his involvement with the police persisted, and one officer conceded that it would be no surprise if Monk had been shot because someone thought he had “squealed.”18 Others claimed that Monk’s boasting had become tiresome to his associates, though that alone scarcely seemed enough to merit a death sentence.
Police sources then backtracked, further muddying the waters. In a curiously worded statement they “would not deny” that they had secured information leading to the exposure of an opium ring, but they then went out of their way to deny that Monk had been killed for informing.19 Instead, they stressed their belief that Monk, “drunk and quarrelsome, had brawled once too often,” claiming that he had been particularly aggressive since retuning from the war. Whatever the truth of that, it was widely believed that the police, whether eager to avoid deterring other potential informers or for some other, more opaque reason, had invented the story of Monk’s involvement in bootlegging.
Newspapers also interviewed Morris Pockett, who claimed to be Monk’s best friend and insisted that Monk made an “honest” living selling pigeons he had coaxed to the roof of his building back to their rightful owners for twenty-five cents each.20 Pockett denied that Monk was involved in any crime and said that his only excursions to Manhattan were weekly trips to a Turkish bath. He and some of Monk’s other friends cited his kindness to children and animals as proof that “he really wasn’t a ‘bad guy.’ ”
Like Pockett, Monk’s comrades from the 106th Infantry dismissed all the calumnies against him, and two comrades, John J. Boland and Monk’s former platoon sergeant, “Hank” Miller, whom Monk had rescued from the battlefield at Vierstraat Ridge, put up funds for a burial with full military honors. “Mr. Edward Eastman did more for America than presidents and generals,” Boland said with some hyperbole.21 “The public does not reward its heroes. Now they are calling Mr. Eastman a gangster instead of praising him as one of those who saved America. But we’ll do the right thing by this soldier and give him the funeral he deserves.”
After a death certificate, number 33332, Manhattan County, was issued, listing Monk’s occupation as a machinist in the auto trade, his body was taken from the dead house—the morgue at First Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street—to be prepared for the funeral. Monk’s wife did not put in an appearance. If Worthy—last heard of living in the Big Bend area of Texas—was aware of his death, or even alive herself, there was no trace of her at the morgue, or at the funeral parlor of A. C. Yannaco on Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn, where his body was taken. When his two married sisters, Lizzie Reynolds and Francine Wouters, perhaps shocked by the killing and fearing unwelcome publicity, also failed to claim the body, the medical examiner surrendered it to Monk’s army comrades. Soon afterward a man wearing the uniform of a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy arrived at the dead house and asked to see Monk’s body. Told it had already been removed, the man, who refused to give his name, said, “I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to see him again.22 It was Monk Eastman who set me going straight. I met him twenty years ago on the Bowery. I was a sailor then and what he had to say to me made a big difference.”
In the funeral parlor’s cold, marbled back room, Monk’s body was prepared and dressed for burial, surrounded by stacked coffins and the ritual satin shrouds in which women were buried: “white ones for dead virgins, lavender for the young married, purple for the middle-aged and black for the old.”23 Monk then lay in state in the funeral parlor, dressed in his army uniform. The American Legion wounded men’s button with a silver crest in the center was pinned on his left breast, with the insignia of the 27th Division on the left shoulder, three service stripes on the left sleeve, and two wound stripes on the right. Monk’s name, the dates of his birth and death, and the simple legend our lost pal.24 gone but not forgotten were inscribed on a silver plate on the lid of the oak coffin. Mrs. Yannaco told reporters that, though several men and women had visited the funeral parlor to see the body, they showed no signs of grief and appeared to her to be “mere curiosity-seekers rather than old partners of the Cherry Hill battles in the days before ‘the Monk’ thought of regeneration and restored citizenship.”
On the evening of December 30, a whiskey-sodden wake that lasted all night took place in one of the Lower East Side bars on Monk’s old turf, and at two o’clock the following afternoon, New Year’s Eve 1920, he began his final journey. Well before the scheduled time for the funeral, a corps of detectives had spread themselves throughout the neighborhood.26 Two men who had been among the party in the Blue Bird Cafe on the night of the shooting were arrested, though police later admitted that neither was the killer, who was still at large.
While police patrolled outside, the Reverend James H. Lockwood, pastor of the South Third Street Methodist Church, gave a brief address at the funeral parlor. “It is not my province to judge this man’s life,” he said.27
His Creator will pass judgment; He possesses all the particulars and is competent to judge any soul. It may startle you to hear me say I wish I had known this man in life. We may have been reciprocally helpful. It has been said there is so much bad in the best of us, so much good in the worst of us, that it does not become any of us to think harshly of the rest of us. That is one way of saying “let him that is without sin cast the first stone.”
The pastor said he had been told of many incidents in Monk’s life that showed he was made of “the right kind of stuff.”
After the address, two dozen of Monk’s former comrades from the 106th Infantry, under Lieutenants Michael J. Davidson and Edward McNeeley, formed an honor guard, and the coffin, draped with the American flag, was borne out of the funeral parlor on the shoulders of eight uniformed veterans. Despite the thin fall of gray, gritty snow cloaking the ground, a crowd of several thousand men, women, and children had gathered outside the funeral parlor long before the procession departed; one estimate put the crowd at ten thousand.28
The pallbearers led the funeral procession along South Fifth Street to the Williamsburg Bridge Plaza, and then on to Keap Street, where they halted while the coffin was transferred to a hearse for the long climb to Cypress Hills Cemetery. The windows of the tenements along the route were filled with faces staring down, silent, as the cortege of six black limousines and twenty horse-drawn carriages moved slowly past. Thousands lined the sidewalks, and thousands more fell into line behind the column of mourners, their breath hanging like mist in the still, frosty air, as the cortege made the five-mile journey through the snow. Although it was rumored that Monk’s sisters were among the crowds thronging the sidewalks, friends failed to spot them, and Mrs.29 Yannaco subsequently revealed that Lizzie and Francine had paid their last respects to their brother at the funeral parlor late the previous night.
Despite the bitter cold, the first groups of mourners, the majority of them women, had begun to arrive at Cypress Hills as early as two o’clock that afternoon. “Mothers with lines of hardship on their faces trudged along the soggy roads behind carriages bearing crying infants to the farthest end of the grounds,” where Monk’s body was to be laid to rest. Each train arriving at the cemetery gates brought further mourners until by 4:15, when the procession appeared, there were six hundred people from all walks of life waiting beside the freshly dug grave in the cannon grounds of the cemetery, the site of the long-demolished Cannon Street Baptist Church.
Mere curiosity alone was not enough to explain the presence of so many on such a harsh winter’s day. Like his army comrades, the majority of Lower East Siders must have been there because in some way Monk had touched their lives. For them at least, memories of past kindnesses—a handout of money or food when they were destitute, a dose of rough justice enacted on their oppressors—must have outweighed the wrongs he had inflicted. The people of the Lower East Side, an often despised and ignored underclass, had turned out to pay their last tribute to one
of their own.
Several thousand more mourners arrived behind the cortege as it turned in through the gates of Cypress Hills and the oak coffin was carried into the chapel of rest. There Monk lay in state as a line of serving officers and men filed past, paying their last respects. They included Monk’s former divisional commander, General O’Ryan, several officers from his old regiment, and many former doughboys with campaign medals pinned to their jackets. There were others there, too: police; sharp-suited mobsters and their bodyguards; a few scarred and aging street toughs, uncomfortable in their unaccustomed, ill-fitting suits; and more throngs of poor Lower East Siders, all paying homage to New York’s most celebrated gangster and most unlikely war hero.
When the coffin was carried to the gravesite, the mourners spilled over the pathways and climbed onto the other graves for a better view, trampling the fresh-fallen snow into gray and grimy slush. After Pastor Lockwood had read the committal, Sergeant Miller of Company G walked slowly forward and spoke.
The character of Eastman—I knew him as “Pop” when he was a buddy of mine—has been blackened in the press.30 But we knew him as an honest-to-God man. He was a real soldier. He saved my life on September 2, 1918, when our company was attacked and caught near Vierstraat Ridge. “The Monk” was wounded. He saw me fall with a bullet through my right shoulder. He crawled to me, picked me up and carried me to the rear. He saved my life. He was a real man. That’s why I cannot forget and why I am here.