Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  From Becker’s perspective the results of this third brush with Max Schmittberger must have seemed satisfactory. He continued to serve with the street-cleaning squad for a while, carrying out raids on gamblers for two more months, and in January 1907 was advanced to the rank of sergeant—a promotion made, over the heads of a number of more experienced roundsmen, as a reward for good work in Satan’s Circus. There, however, his career stalled again. Becker spent most of the rest of the decade performing mundane duties in precincts up and down Manhattan. His service included desk work downtown and an unglamorous spell of duty with the Traffic Squad.

  For once, however, Becker did not care; he may even have welcomed the less onerous duties he was now assigned. There were, at least for a while, simply too many distractions in his own tumultuous private life, most of which stemmed from the deterioration of his relationship with his second wife. The marriage was all but over by the first weeks of 1905. And in March, Letitia sued him for divorce.

  The Becker marriage had been unhappy for some time. There had been no more children to follow Howard, who was five by the time his mother went to court, and according to the second Mrs. Becker her husband had been compulsively unfaithful to her almost since their wedding day. There had been numerous casual conquests, among them several girls whom the policeman had met along his beat, and a few more serious affairs. The attentions that Becker paid to an Irish girl named Alice Lynch, his wife sourly observed, “were of the devoted sort.”

  “Charley Becker was not a good husband,” Letitia concluded a few years later.

  [He was] a quick-tempered man, headstrong and with a will of iron. At times he would take me into his confidence, and at other times he would endeavor to deceive me. He was away from home most of the time. Long after I knew that he was not keeping his marriage vows, when he had cast me aside to devote himself to other women, I stuck to him. I did this for our son. I was a mother and that always came first…[but] his actions became such that any self-respecting woman could no longer call him husband. I finally was simply compelled to sue for divorce.

  Legal separations were still unusual in 1905, and neither party could hope to avoid the taint of scandal. Nonetheless, Becker did not contest his wife’s suit and may even have cooperated with it, since the court papers suggest that he allowed himself to be discovered alone with another woman in a hotel room. (Adultery was then the only grounds for divorce in New York State.) So anxious was he to be rid of her that he voluntarily entered into an agreement that required him to pay her a large sum in alimony and child support. This ensured that the case was concluded swiftly, and the couple’s divorce became final in June 1906. According to family lore, Becker’s older sibling, Paul—a forty-eight-year-old bachelor—agreed to minimize the fuss by wedding his brother’s wife and getting her and her son away from the city. It is certainly true that Letitia was next heard of in Reno, Nevada, where she and Paul Becker married in August 1909. Paul supported his new family by working in the mining business.

  There can be no doubt that Charley Becker’s eagerness to be divorced owed much to his involvement with another woman. The affair with Alice Lynch had cooled by 1905, but Becker soon transferred his affections to her sister, Helen, a petite and pretty schoolteacher a year younger than he was. Unlike the strong-willed Letitia Stenson, Helen was tender and supportive. She soon became the most important person in Becker’s life.

  Helen Lynch was the daughter of a saloonkeeper and had lived in New York for three decades. By 1905 she was working at Public School 41 on Greenwich Avenue, where—according to an autobiographical sketch set down in 1914—she met Becker on his rounds and he courted her at the school gate. “In the afternoon he would come for me, and we would take a drive, or we would go to luncheon,” she recalled. Within a few months of first meeting, the couple was engaged; a year later, when the divorce came through, they married.

  Charles and Helen Becker were similar in many ways. Both had grown up in modest circumstances; both were clever and articulate—the position of teacher was one of the few open to educated women at the time. And, though each had nine brothers and sisters, both felt oddly solitary. “When I was little,” Helen reminisced, “my father thought that no other children were quite good enough for me, and I got the habit of keeping to myself. Until I met [Charles] I had been very much alone—I never had a woman friend that I confided in very much. My only friend was my husband.” Perhaps because of all they had in common, the couple seem to have been genuinely happy. There are no hints that Becker embarked upon further affairs after 1906, and the tone of the letters he and his wife exchanged when separated remained warmly affectionate. “He,” one journalist discovered, “called her My Queen and she called him Charley-boy or Charley-lover.”

  For the first time, Becker was an attentive husband. Unlike many New York policemen, whose idea of off-duty recreation was a visit to a saloon, a brothel, or a ball game, he made a point of returning to the couple’s small apartment at the end of each patrol, and when Helen transferred to P.S. 90 on West 148th Street to take charge of the “overage graduating class”—a group of “backward pupils” with more or less severe learning difficulties—her spouse took an active interest in the children’s progress. “He would often correct papers for me, or write out report cards, and he knew the name of each girl in my class. Each day I would tell him everything that happened.”

  There were, nonetheless, strains on the new marriage. Becker spent a lot of money on his wife—“We used to drive a good deal in the parks and out in the country,” she recalled, “[and] he would often take me out to dinner at restaurants and then to the theater”—and there never seemed to be much to spare. Matters were complicated by the divorce, which certainly drained Becker’s finances; well over a quarter of his $2,000 annual salary went to Letitia in alimony, and even after her remarriage there were still child-support payments to make. According to the second Mrs. Becker, her former husband could ill afford to formalize their voluntary arrangement and threatened that if she ever attempted to make the payments the subject of a legal order, he would “force her into the jurisdiction of the New York courts.” Even when Helen’s income was factored in, she and her husband did not believe themselves comfortably off, and for three years she taught night school to earn extra money, traveling all the way from their apartment on West 165th Street down to the southern tip of Manhattan to complete what amounted to a fifteen-hour working day. “During our seven years of married life,” she later recalled,

  I did all the housework, the cooking, the cleaning, everything except the washing, and I taught school besides…. I always got up at six o’clock in the morning…. We never had a servant, and our rent never exceeded forty dollars a month…. That does not look as if we were very rich.

  Shortage of cash led Becker to search anxiously for new ways of making money, and—for a policeman rising in the force—the only likely source was graft. Three successive Tammany election triumphs—in 1903, 1905, and 1909—undid so much of the work of the reformers that many New York cops were once more dabbling in corruption, if not so openly, so profitably, or in so organized a fashion as they had during the 1890s. By the last years of the decade, money flowed into the choicest precincts from nearby gaming clubs and brothels much as it always had; if anything, Charles Murphy’s decision to dissociate the Democrats from prostitution meant that larger sums were available to the police than ever before. All indications are that Becker’s desire to stay clean wavered accordingly. Whatever the policeman’s real views on the matter, though, he had little opportunity to make much from corruption before 1910. Neither desk jobs in downtown precincts nor assignments to the Traffic Squad offered real potential for profit. Becker was forced to look on in frustration as others raked in the graft instead.

  All this changed, however, in 1911, a year that saw Becker achieve a degree of prominence in Manhattan for the first time in half a decade. Oddly enough, he owed this opportunity—indirectly at least—to a man who was no
t merely one of the most remarkable figures in the history of the city but perhaps the fiercest critic of its police. Becker’s unlikely benefactor was none other than the new mayor of New York: Judge William J. Gaynor.

  Mayor Gaynor was in his early sixties when he took office on the first day of 1910, old for a public servant. A scrawny, bearded Irishman, twice married, once divorced, and renowned in his Supreme Court days for standing foursquare behind the Bill of Rights, the judge had long dreamed of making his mark upon the city. But he had not actually embarked upon a political career until a few months earlier, when Boss Murphy had concluded that Tammany’s best chance of victory in the forthcoming elections lay in producing a candidate of unimpeachable integrity. Gaynor fit the bill—perhaps rather too well. Incorruptible, unbiddable, and fair (not to mention so austere that he covered the three and a half miles between his Brooklyn home and City Hall on foot each day in every weather), the newly elected mayor infuriated his sponsors by flatly declining to dispense the expected patronage to Tammany. To Boss Murphy’s vexation, moreover, he was soon so popular that he was virtually immune from attack.

  New Yorkers loved Gaynor for the punishing hours he worked, for his unqualified support of the working man, and for the blunt advice he famously dispensed to all who asked for it. It was not uncommon for the mayor to occupy a quiet hour by summoning a stenographer and reeling off tart replies to his many correspondents. To a man who wrote to pass on lurid gossip: “Dear Sir, I care nothing for common rumor, and I guess you made up the rumor in this case yourself. Very truly yours, W. J. Gaynor, Mayor.” To a woman who requested help in finding a husband: “I regret to say that I do not know anyone I can recommend to you. You can doubtless make a better selection than I can, as you know the kind of man you want. Of course, it may be very hard to find him, but no harder for you than for me.” And to a man from Arkansas City who wrote in search of a wife: “How could I recommend any good girl here to you? You may not be so attractive as you think you are.”

  The mayor’s other marked attribute was a ferocious temper. Thin-skinned and famously cantankerous, Gaynor became even more irritable after a botched assassination attempt in August 1910 left him with a bullet immovably lodged in his larynx, his voice reduced to a rasping whisper and his body racked by hour-long spasms of coughing.*28 From that date on, he vented his anger ever more volcanically on anyone in range. The mayor might, on a good day, be sweet-natured and reasonable. For the most part, though—as the Sun observed—he “fought without gloves, he liked to swat; he was more than a ‘good hater,’ he was a pitiless scorner of many; and he turned not the other cheek but the other fist to those who assailed him.”

  There was plenty for Gaynor to do. In the six years since Seth Low’s fall, Tammany had packed New York’s government with greedy partisans, many of them hopelessly unqualified for the jobs they held. The mayor swept these men aside, “booting the leeches and drones off the municipal payroll with the efficiency of a patented eviction machine,” and replaced them with competent professionals selected for their ability. He reduced costs by firing hundreds of freeloading supernumeraries and pledged to “crush into the earth” officials caught pillaging the public purse.

  Gaynor’s greatest efforts, though, were directed to reforming the police. The mayor ordered an end to arbitrary arrests, pointing out that nearly one in four of those detained in New York (60,000 out of 262,000 in 1909) were released without charge within a day. Observing that the NYPD routinely broke up strikes and dispersed meetings organized by socialists and anarchists, he instructed officers to protect pickets and marchers, so long as the protesters obeyed the law. And when he discovered that a squad of patrolmen had smashed its way into a poolroom on Park Row, destroyed all its equipment and arrested sixteen people without the appropriate warrant, he not only set the prisoners free and denounced the cops’ actions as “mob violence” but advised the gamblers concerned that they would have been justified in resisting arrest “to the last extremity.” Throughout his term in office, Gaynor also made a habit of descending unexpectedly on New York’s magistrates’ courts, where he searched through piles of writs and affidavits in search of breaches of due process. These measures worked. By the end of 1910, the number of arrests had fallen by a third, police behavior had noticeably improved, a number of the force’s most unrepentant clubbers and grafters had been summarily dismissed, and morale among the rank and file was soaring.

  That left the problem of graft, which—for all Boss Murphy’s stance on prostitution—remained a vital source of revenue for the political machines. Putting an end to decades of corruption was an intractable problem, the mayor candidly admitted, not least because so many dubious practices had become so thoroughly ingrained. Gaynor’s solution was to weed out grafting politicians along with corrupt officials. “As soon as I became mayor,” he recalled midway through his term,

  I began with one department after another to rid it of politics and graft, for they go hand in hand…. Graft had been deep-seated here for over 40 years in most of the departments [but] I think it will be admitted that I have driven [it] out of nearly all of them.

  Gaynor’s first target was the most visible manifestation of the graft: violation of the Sunday closing law. By 1910 several thousand taverns and bars were trading on the Sabbath. Many did so openly, lights blazing; the rest preferred to adopt at least a veneer of discretion, shuttering their front windows and admitting patrons through a welcoming rear door. The problem was so widespread that it “touched the whole police force, and had defied the efforts of other mayors to abolish or even control it.” It was widely rumored that several million dollars of Liquor Dealers’ Association (LDA) dues found their way directly into the pockets of New York’s district bosses. Millions more were collected by ordinary patrolmen on the beat.

  “The way it worked,” one writer explained,

  was simple. A policeman, observing a saloon open and crowded on Sunday, would walk in and announce that his duty required him to arrest the bartender or owner, or both, for breaking the law. If the bartender slid a few dollars across the mahogany, the policeman would forget about his duty, accept a drink, and move along. But if the bartender balked, he was collared and marched to the station house to ruminate in a cell overnight. Then he would be put to the expense of engaging a lawyer and a bail bondsman (usually those recommended by the arresting officer) and suffer the ignominy and annoyance of a trial on trumped-up charges, and pay a fine. Meanwhile, his bar remained closed while his competitors were serving the customers he had lost.

  It was not surprising, in such circumstances, that most bars chose to pay up.

  Gaynor’s solution to the saloon graft problem had the virtue of simplicity. First he called in the LDA and ordered its members to cease paying protection money. Then he issued instructions to the police, forbidding patrolmen, on pain of dismissal, from entering licensed premises or speaking to their owners. Uniformed officers, Gaynor instructed, were to observe while walking the beat what bars were opening illegally and were to report violations not to their captains but directly to the district attorney’s office, where intelligence would be collated and indictments prepared. Plainclothes detectives were permitted to venture into premises that kept a rear door open but were forbidden to make on-the-spot arrests. There was, in short, to be no contact whatsoever between policemen and tavern keepers, nor any opportunity for precinct captains to blackmail the owners of the city’s bars by threatening to close them down. In this way Gaynor hoped to cut off the graft at its source.

  Remarkably, the plan worked. Fierce pressure was placed on inspectors and captains to enforce the mayor’s new orders, and, to the surprise of most New Yorkers, violations fell to a mere handful within a fortnight or so. Stubborn owners were dealt with by the plainclothesmen, and by the beginning of 1911 saloon graft had been practically wiped out for the first time in living memory. One barman, who had spent thirty-five years working in New York’s liquor trade, testified that he had never k
nown a time “when the laws were so nearly enforced in their intent as they are today. Mayor Gaynor has done away with the collector who used to come around from ‘the man higher up.’” The city’s newspapers were effusive in their praise. “We do not remember who it was that cut the Gordian knot,” wrote Outlook admiringly, “but his name might have been Gaynor.”

  Of course, the drying up of saloon graft did not mean an end to police corruption. The majority of crooked officers simply looked elsewhere for funds, chiefly to the age-old staple of raking in payments from gambling and prostitution. These trades, being already illegal, were more difficult for the mayor to legislate. But Gaynor was convinced that what had worked for the saloon business could be made to work elsewhere, too, and that spring he set about reordering the way in which the NYPD policed vice. The mayor’s solution, once again, was to strictly limit the number of men tackling the problem, but this time he went further than he had before. “It was,” he explained to one newspaper editor toward the end of his term, “an awfully difficult task…. We tried to cope with this by narrowing the contacts of the department with the sources of the graft. I could see no other way. [In the end] we narrowed such final contact down to a single point, namely, the Commissioner himself.”

  Gaynor’s new strategy was truly radical. Responsibility for the suppression of vice had hitherto lain with New York’s fifty or so precinct captains, each of whom had gathered information and ordered raids in his own district. In theory at least, the advantage of this system was that each captain possessed the local knowledge required to maintain strict control over gambling and prostitution in his precinct. In practice, as we have seen, the majority had always exploited information for their own ends, permitting favored houses to operate so long as they maintained appropriate discretion, raking in graft in the form of protection payments and deflecting or ignoring the complaints of angry citizens. Transferring responsibility for policing brothels and gaming clubs to police headquarters and forbidding precinct cops from mounting raids meant that captains could no longer offer ironclad protection and opened up the possibility of collating intelligence from all five of the city’s boroughs. Gaynor hoped that this would make it easier to curb graft and deal with the most influential madams and gamblers, some of whom controlled premises all over the city.