Satan's Circus

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by Mike Dash


  The incident had now blown up into a serious affair. Charges of this sort could be answered only at a “police trial”: a formal hearing before one of the city’s four police commissioners at which both parties would be represented by attorneys. Such trials were not uncommon at the time; there were an average of more than 1,000 of them in New York each year after 1889, this at a time when there were only 4,000 or so men on the whole force. But they were not to be taken lightly. Officers found guilty of serious misconduct could lose their jobs, and fines and suspensions were commonplace.

  Becker was in trouble, and he knew it. The policeman was sufficiently concerned to have the date of his hearing put back twice, to allow more time for the gathering of evidence. He also found the money to hire a shrewd, experienced attorney by the name of Louis Grant. But his final preparation was perhaps the most significant. On the afternoon his trial was scheduled to begin—October 15, 1896—Officer Becker rallied the support of colleagues from the West Thirtieth Street station, and when he made his way down Mulberry Street to the hearing, he did so in the company of a bodyguard. Callow patrolman though he was, Becker entered the headquarters building surrounded by a phalanx of policemen made up of every member of his precinct not on duty at the time.

  Police trials seldom lasted longer than an hour or two, but this would prove to be the longest in the department’s history. Becker and his adversaries, Young and Crane, reported to police headquarters at 3:00 P.M. as asked. Commissioner Frederick Grant*2 kept them waiting while he handled other business, and the proceedings did not get under way until after ten in the evening. Despite the lateness of the hour, however, Grant declared his intention to complete the trial that night. Crane canceled a supper engagement, dined off a brought-in sandwich and a bottle of beer, and was finally called to give evidence at 1:00 A.M. The proceedings did not draw to a close until 2:40 A.M.

  Much of that time was taken up by a parade of twenty or so men and women from Satan’s Circus who testified for Becker. Lawyer Grant had corralled a throng of cabdrivers and prostitutes to support his client’s story—just the sort of people, cynical reporters observed, who depended heavily on the goodwill of the local beat policeman for their living. These witnesses gave similar accounts, some insisting that they had seen Young and her friend the chorus girl touting for business on the street corner, others confirming that the redhead worked regularly as a prostitute.

  The testimony with the greatest potential to damage Young came from the girl’s new enemy, the intimidating Chicago May. “A huge blonde whose diamond earrings seem as big as hickory nuts,” May earnestly testified that Ruby had promised her $25 to give false evidence against Becker. The patrolman, Young had told her, “must be broken.” When he had been, she would take a ship to Europe.

  Chicago May’s undoubted lies had less impact than they might have thanks largely to Young’s lawyer, David Neuberger. His vigorous cross-examination destroyed what little credibility the Irish streetwalker had:

  “What’s your occupation?” Mr. Neuberger asked this woman, whose blushes are not visible.

  “I’m a typewriter,” she replied.

  “On what machine do you typewrite?”

  She did not know.

  “Name one typewriting machine.”

  She could not.

  “Did you earn those diamonds with your wages as a typewriter?”

  Still, Neuberger did not have things entirely his own way. Lawyer Grant landed his share of stiff blows, most of them on Stephen Crane. The men of the Nineteenth Precinct had evidently used the weeks before the trial to dig for evidence discreditable to the novelist, and Becker’s counsel marshaled the facts relentlessly. Was it not true, Grant began, that Crane actually derived most of his income from the immoral earnings of prostitutes? The author denied it. Well, the attorney went on, had he not recently shared a house on West Twenty-second Street with several unmarried women? “I refuse to answer,” Crane muttered in response to this suggestion, “because it would tend to degrade me.”

  Scenting blood, Grant went on to describe the detritus the police had uncovered in a search of the writer’s apartment. An opium kit—lamp, needle, pipe, and scraper—had been discovered among his possessions. The lawyer tried hard to get Crane to confess that he had used it, and though the witness argued convincingly that the layout was merely a souvenir brought home from his newspaper investigations, he was forced to admit that he had lived for six weeks that summer with a woman who was not his wife. To straitlaced New Yorkers of the time, such an admission was shocking enough. What made it worse was the revelation that the couple had taken a room in a brothel where the girls were well known for robbing their clients. Thoroughly angered and ashamed, Crane nonetheless refused to name the girl he had shared the place with. “On what ground?” an exultant Grant demanded. “Because it would tend to degrade me,” the writer mumbled once again.

  Nearly an hour of this examination ended with Crane utterly humiliated. “So thick and fast did Lawyer Grant fire the red-hot questions at the witness,” one reporter in the courtroom noted, “that he finally put his hands up to his face as if to prevent them burning into his brain.” At that moment the young writer recognized the wisdom of Sergeant McDermott’s warning. He did indeed have mud all over him.

  Of course, the Journal, Crane’s own paper, exploded in an editorial, the whole interrogation was typical of the excesses of New York’s police, “part of a deliberate and despicable scheme of intimidation by which any voluntary witness in a trial for police outrage may become a victim.” But that scarcely mattered when, inevitably, Crane’s revelations supplied the headlines the next day, which was what Becker had wanted. The real issues of the trial—Ruby Young’s veracity and the patrolman’s supposed brutality—were obscured and forgotten. By the time Commissioner Grant retired to consider his judgment, none of the principal players in the drama retained much credibility as a witness.

  In these circumstances the verdict was a formality; Becker was acquitted. The consequences for his accusers were equally predictable. Ruby Young continued to be harassed by the men of the Nineteenth Precinct whenever she dared set foot in Satan’s Circus. And Stephen Crane discovered that the Manhattan police, when roused, made formidable enemies. For the rest of his short life—he died in 1900 at the age of only twenty-nine—the novelist prudently remained well beyond the grasp of the NYPD. He left town almost immediately to report on the insurgency in Cuba and was scarcely ever seen in New York again. On the one occasion that he did return, in 1898, Crane was recognized in a theater lobby by a patrolman who instantly attempted to arrest him.

  As for Charley Becker, who left court surrounded once again by a guard of brother officers, he had learned a good deal about the power of his badge. Three years of unblemished service had been put at risk, and he owed his triumph solely to the support of his colleagues. Becker was still new enough to the uniform to remember his own days as a civilian. But something had changed inside him since that night at Broadway Garden. He was a policeman’s policeman now.

  CHAPTER 2

  KING OF THE BOWERY

  CHARLEY BECKER WAS NOT a native New Yorker. He had been born, in July 1870, on a farm some eighty miles from Manhattan and grew up in what was one of the poorest districts of upstate New York. His upbringing was harsh: The Becker farm was isolated, the land barren, the living uncertain, the family itself austerely religious. He was the youngest child in a family of ten, born to a father who died when Charley was only four years old. He appears to have shown no sign, in his youth, of hating life in the tiny, closed community where he grew up—a place that offered few real opportunities and little to look forward to except a life of backbreaking work. But he left home at the first opportunity, aged only twenty, and headed straight for the city. For Becker, New York offered the temptations and rewards that his birthplace never could.

  Becker was a third-generation American. His grandfather, Heinrich Becker—born in Hesse-Kassel, in the western reaches of Germ
any, at the tail end of the eighteenth century—was a wood turner. His father, Conrad—also born in Germany—was a farmer who wrested a living from a parcel of land in a desolate spot in the western reaches of Sullivan County, on the border between New York State and Pennsylvania. Even in 1870 the district was still frontier country: barely settled, scarcely tamed. There was only one real town, Callicoon Depot on the Delaware River: a ramshackle settlement, with a population of fewer than six hundred, so unprepossessing that even a local writer promoting the place as a summer residence for city folk admitted that it had “no claim to beauty.” The hinterland, meanwhile, consisted largely of impenetrable forest, filled with panthers and deer and dotted here and there with tiny settlements so small that they were scarcely even hamlets.

  Callicoon had its advantages, of course: The air was clear, the water pure, and the little town nestled in the foothills of the Catskills, shielded from the worst of the winter winds. But it was notorious, in equal measure, for the poverty of its soil. The Becker farm, two miles south of the tiny village of Callicoon Center, stood—the first historian of the district noted—“in the woods beyond the bounds of civilization,” and after paying for his land, Heinrich had “but little, if anything, left except his wife and children.” Foul weather reduced the family to near starvation on several occasions; wild animals devoured their crops; and when a harvest was brought in, the only means of transporting it to market was on the elder Becker’s back, “a journey which required three days for its performance. There was no road better than a trail through the woods, which was made visible only by marked trees.”

  It was not until the 1870s—by which time Conrad Becker had six sons to help him on the land—that the farm became at last productive. A sliver of road, snaking through the forest, now ran the seven miles to town, and the Depot had in turn been linked to New York by rail. Even after Charley’s birth, however, his father and grandfather were both forced to work occasionally as carpenters in order to earn money. “No one,” the future policeman wrote of his childhood home, “can do more than make a base living on it, and a poor one at that.”

  The sheer effort required to extract a living from the Beckers’ impoverished plot is eloquently illustrated by the fact that not one of Conrad’s sons remained at home to take over the farm. The three eldest of the Becker boys—Franklin, Howard, and Paul—abandoned Callicoon for California, and of them only Paul ever returned. The roguish fourth son, Jackson, fled soon afterward, preferring (as a member of his family recalls) a rootless existence spent “variously as a broker, a searcher for gold, an osteopath or probably a chiropractor, and a con man.” The fifth, John, left home around 1888, seduced by the lures and snares of New York City.

  Charley himself thus came to manhood in a home where there were few male influences. His father died, aged fifty-two, in 1877. His octogenarian grandfather followed five years later. And of his numerous brothers, only John was close enough in age to be a friend. Brought up by a widowed mother, the pet of several older and unmarried sisters, Charley experienced a relatively solitary childhood. Neighbors remembered him as an able, decent child who worked hard and never seemed to get into trouble. According to Baltazer Hauser, who owned a farm adjoining the Becker property for sixty years, “Charles Becker was one of the most honest and best boys I ever knew.” Another local resident had similar memories. “Becker’s people were the very best of neighbors,” recalled Philip Huff, the son of a local lumberman, “and Charley Becker was an honest and very bright boy. I never knew him to do anything wrong or get into trouble of any kind.”

  Only one of Becker’s early acquaintances, indeed, had a bad word to say of him. “There was,” Hauser confessed, “only one thing about him that could be criticized; that was that he was headstrong. He would always do the right thing or quit.” It was this mulishness, perhaps, that prompted the boy to leave the village as soon as he turned twenty. His brother John—a year his senior—was planning to join New York’s police department, and it may be that his encouraging reports persuaded Charley to take his chances in Manhattan. In the autumn of 1890, Becker packed a bag and hitched a lift to Callicoon Depot. From there the great metropolis was just a train ride away.

  The New York, Ontario and Western Railway took the best part of three hours to clack and rattle Becker into the heart of the city. For much of the journey, the engine threaded through the same wooded, unspoiled countryside in which the farm boy had grown up. But as the little steam train with its smoke-smeared carriages began to puff its way along the Hudson River, the view through its grimy windows changed. Farms, woodland, and open spaces receded from view, to be replaced by a seemingly endless parade of houses and apartment buildings, offices, saloons, factories, warehouses, and wharves, sprawling out to the horizon in all directions. For a boy brought up in a village of perhaps two hundred people, it must have been an overwhelming sight. And these were simply the outskirts of the greater conurbation to the south: New York.

  It was already possibly the greatest city on the planet. London was bigger, Paris and Vienna more cultured. But no rival could match Gotham for vigor or the sheer pace of its growth. Seen from the perspective of just over a century, the New York of 1890 still seems in most respects quite modern. True, the first subway was still fourteen years away, Grand Central Station would not be completed for more than two decades, and—in the absence of refrigeration—elections could still be won and lost over the cost of ice.*3 The city’s tallest building was Trinity Church, at 284 feet, and its most ambitious office tower soared a mere eleven stories. But New York was changing with astonishing rapidity. Steel-frame construction and the safety elevator—the twin inventions that made skyscrapers practicable—were about to add a third dimension to the city. Downtown Manhattan’s unique steam heating mains had been laid in 1881, the Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883, department stores had begun springing up along Sixth Avenue, and the cat’s cradles of telephone wires festooning the streets announced the introduction of modern communications.

  The electric light, meanwhile—introduced to New York in 1880—had transformed the old gaslit thoroughfares, and cable cars and elevated railways made their appearance almost simultaneously. The former, which traveled along tracks at street level and were powered by endless steel belts, had severe drawbacks, among them lethal momentum. (“Once a motorman gripped the cable,” one critic of the system explained, “his streetcar was jerked along at thirty miles per hour, far faster than horses. Speed couldn’t be varied at corners, so cars whipped passengers around spots like Dead Man’s Curve at Union Square, gongs clanging wildly.”) The latter, a product of the Rapid Transit Act of 1875, proved more successful and soon took the place of the city’s old-fashioned horse-drawn trams, at least on routes running north and south through Manhattan. By 1890, El lines ran along—or rather over—Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth avenues, their trains puffing their way from stop to stop at twelve miles per hour and linking hitherto-distant suburbs such as the Bronx to the great shopping and entertainment districts downtown. Overhead tracks girdled the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn with long lines of fragile-looking iron pillars that plunged the streets beneath them into shadow, and the trains themselves spewed out noise and ash as they chugged along, their progress marked by clouds of soot that swirled briefly over the heads of passing New Yorkers before settling like grimy snow upon the pavements. With the lines complete, it became possible to leave home in Washington Heights, in the far north of the city, and reach Wall Street in less than an hour.

  Industry flourished in the crowded city. Manhattan was a center of the tobacco, print, and textile trades, the last of which employed as many as 80,000 workers—most of them in sweatshops of the nastiest and most exploitative kind—and shipping from all over the world crowded into New York’s magnificent harbor, bringing cargoes of raw materials for factories, coal for power, and labor, in the form of boatloads of immigrants. By the time the American Tobacco Company opened its new offices there in 1890, Manhat
tan was already home to eighty of the United States’ hundred largest companies and could claim to be the country’s economic hub.

  The New York that Charley Becker found when he first came to the city was, in short, not merely an impossible dream for the millions of new Americans who arrived by sea but a pungent lure to the out-of-towners who rolled in by rail, the city that offered everyone everything:

  Wall Street supplied the country with capital. Ellis Island channeled its labor. Fifth Avenue set its social trends. Broadway (along with Times Square*4 and Coney Island) entertained it. Its City Hall, as befitted an unofficial Capitol, welcomed heroes and heroines with keys and parades and naval flotillas, and paid farewell respects to national leaders by organizing processions along Manhattan’s black-draped streets. New York, moreover, was the nation’s premier source for news and opinion; like a magnet, it attracted those seeking cosmopolitan freedom; and as the biggest city of the biggest state it exercised extraordinary influence in national politics.

  The product of a century of rapid change was clear to see. In 1800 the northern edges of New York fell roughly along Houston Street, no more than two miles from the southern tip of Manhattan. By 1890 the city had swollen to engulf the entire island, twelve miles long and two miles wide, and spilled onto the mainland to the east. Not every inch of ground was covered yet; rickety shantytowns and even grubby little farms still survived in the shadow of the fashionable Dakota Apartments, just completed on the Upper West Side, and streets in several outlying districts, laid out in anticipation of future construction, remained for the time being nearly empty, with only a building or two dotted along their lengths. Yet the speed with which New York had grown still amazed outsiders. The city’s population had risen from less than 75,000 in 1800 to 1.6 million nine decades later; that of the neighboring borough of Brooklyn from a mere 4,000 to 800,000. When the British novelist Arnold Bennett visited the Bronx a short while later, he was shown around “an area where five years previously there had been six families, and where there are now over two thousand.”

 

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