Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  The mayor’s policy had its disadvantages, however. For one thing, only a tough and vigorous police commissioner could make it work. For another, it demanded the creation of special squads of ordinary patrolmen, based at headquarters and reporting directly to the commissioner himself. These men would conduct the raids that had hitherto been carried out at precinct level and—properly led and supplied with detailed information—might well succeed in closing down establishments that had hitherto enjoyed police protection. Placed under the command of any but the most incorruptible of men, however, the proposed headquarters squads could become a serious embarrassment. Whatever the deficiencies of the old system, crooked police captains had at least been forced to restrict their grafting to a single precinct. Gaynor intended the new squads to operate throughout New York. An ambitious man devoid of scruples could use that sort of opportunity to levy graft in quantities that even Clubber Williams had never dreamed of.

  Plainly, then, the choice of commissioner was crucial, and Gaynor spent some time pondering the move. What was required, he concluded, was a man of undoubted integrity, a proven leader with some experience of organizing special squads. Only one likely candidate existed, and in the last week of May the mayor announced his decision. His choice was the man who five years earlier had drafted Charley Becker into the assembly of grudge-bearers that had brought down Max Schmittberger. The city’s new police commissioner would be Rhinelander Waldo.

  Waldo was an attractive candidate in many ways. He was independently wealthy, possessed impeccable manners, and belonged to the East Coast elite—his name was in the Manhattan Register and his mother, a habitué of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel was (as a reporter noted) “one of the Rhinelanders.” All of this made it seem inconceivable that the new man would yield to the temptations of graft. Better yet, although he scarcely looked the part (in his mid-thirties, the new commissioner still possessed a featureless baby face and favored brilliantined hair), Waldo had a military background. He had graduated from West Point, served with the U.S. Army in the Philippines, and, in addition to his short spell as deputy police commissioner, had run the New York Fire Department for several years.*29 He also had a passion for police reform, having spent some months in London and become convinced that the reputedly incorruptible British police should become the model for the New York force. Finally (a point not lost upon the mayor), Waldo was less forceful and more biddable than his predecessor, a tough Brooklyn judge named James Cropsey, who had angered Gaynor by standing up to him. If nothing else, the new commissioner’s staid upbringing and impeccable manners would stop him from challenging the mayor in the press.

  Waldo arrived at police headquarters on Centre Street late in May 1911. The new commissioner was apparently too busy putting Gaynor’s plans into action and too naïve and too busy plotting reform to notice that his own office was filled with dubious officials loyal not to the forces of modernity, nor even to Mayor Gaynor, but to the sachems of Tammany Hall. His deputy commissioner, George Dougherty—who had charge of the Detective Bureau—was a former Pinkerton detective gone bad who had become an active grafter; his secretary, Winfield Sheehan, a onetime cub reporter with the New York World, was even more slyly influential. Sheehan had used the contacts he’d made during his years as a journalist to position himself as point man for several influential politicians who needed to wield influence over the police. Among his closest acquaintances was Big Tim Sullivan, who was (it would emerge years later) using Sheehan to administer the flow of graft collected from gambling houses in the city. Throughout Waldo’s time at police headquarters, Sheehan covertly represented the police on the infamous “commission” Sullivan had established to regulate gaming in Manhattan, sitting alongside state senators from Brooklyn and Manhattan. He kept an agreed percentage of the graft himself, and even the generally cautious newspapers of the day were prone to note that he seemed mysteriously affluent for an official living on a salary of $75 a month. But if Waldo ever heard the rumors that swirled around his assistant, he made no attempt to investigate them. A man of independent means who lived in the finest style himself, he apparently saw nothing unusual in a secretary who maintained a fancy bachelor apartment and employed a Filipino manservant.

  Deficient though his powers of observation may have been, Waldo was an energetic administrator. In his first few months in office, no fewer than four new units were created. First came a new Vice Squad, then the so-called Secret Squad, established in June 1911 to carry out undercover work among Manhattan’s criminals. There were also two Strong Arm Squads, set up to suppress New York’s gambling houses. Waldo took no chances in selecting their leaders. The first of the Strong Arm Squads was led by “Honest Dan” Costigan, the second by the equally incorruptible Lieutenant Riley.

  Establishing special squads based at headquarters had been tried before, of course. New York’s first-ever Strong Arm Squad had been set up as early as 1853 by Richard Walling, the outstanding figure in police history in the years that separated High Constable Hays from Clubber Williams. Its purpose had been the suppression of the street crime perpetrated by the boldest of Manhattan’s gangs. In Commissioner McAdoo’s time, the department had put together an Italian Squad to tackle an explosion in violence and extortion among Sicilian and Neapolitan immigrants and a Vice Squad, under Costigan, to break up poolrooms. But neither raiding nor the use of strong-arm men had ever worked for long. Raids invariably raised hackles—not only at Tammany Hall, which stood to lose financially from the suppression of vice, but also among all those concerned by the infringement of civil liberties. And the members of the various squads had, as McAdoo admitted, to be watched constantly and transferred frequently to keep down corruption.

  Nonetheless, all went well for a short time, and Waldo, emboldened by his success, decided to create yet another unit, this time to crack down on the street-corner toughs who still ruled over some parts of the city. His decision was prompted by complaints from a Wall Street lawyer who had been appointed to administer several houses held in trust on East Ninety-seventh Street. Deciding to visit his new properties, the man was alarmed to discover that the surrounding district was controlled by the Car Barn Gang, a group of rowdies recruited from the East River docks. The Car Barners—who were led by a former Sunday-school student by the name of Freddie Muehfeldt—were heavily armed and so confident in their power that they brazenly posted placards around the borders of their domain ordering the police to keep out. Seeing these, the Wall Street man prudently declined to exercise his rights, turned back, and placed a call to Waldo, who sent half a dozen officers up to East Ninety-seventh Street to find out what was going on. The patrolmen were promptly set upon, beaten up, and stabbed—not fatally—an affront that no commissioner, least of all an ex–army broom like Waldo, could afford to ignore. Within days he had pulled together what became known as the Special Squad, a group of twenty “huskies” whose sole duty, the newspapers were informed, was “to travel about the city and hand out generous doses of strong-arm medicine to any and all who show unmistakable signs of being in need of it.” To take charge of the new unit, Waldo needed a man with physical presence, a commanding personality, and the willingness to bend, if not to break, the rules. Casting his mind back half a decade to his days as a deputy commissioner, his choice fell on Charles Becker, who by now held the rank of lieutenant.*30 Early in the second week of July 1911, Becker was plucked from the Madison Street precinct and given command of the Special Squad.

  Becker’s first task was to break up the Car Barn Gang—an assignment he completed successfully, though not without running considerable risks. Smashing his way into the gang’s headquarters at midnight with six men, Becker narrowly escaped serious injury when one of Muehfeldt’s gangsters, up on the first floor, hurled a large iron pot full of boiling water at his head. Several Car Barners were arrested in the ensuing fracas and the remaining members rounded up a few nights later when the lieutenant cannily timed a second raid to coincide with one of the gang’s mar
athon drinking sessions. After that the Special Squad moved on to tackle the Gophers, a murderous band headquartered in Hell’s Kitchen, and then what one reporter referred to as “the Negro toughs of San Juan Hill,” a black gang from north Harlem. Both groups were dispersed in a series of running fights in which Becker—disguised on one occasion as a longshoreman—played a leading part.

  Even in 1911 the establishment of a squad of toughs whose job it was to beat up New York’s hoodlums and hangers-around on street corners raised some eyebrows in the city, but Becker’s conspicuous success stilled many of his critics. Whether or not the billy clubs and blackjacks wielded by the Special Squad were really likely to end the menace of the gangs (rounding up suspects as mere loiterers meant they received short sentences in the House of Correction rather than the long terms in a state prison that might have resulted from more orthodox detective work), New Yorkers did feel safer as a result of the lieutenant’s efforts. Within a few weeks, Becker and his men were famous.

  Celebration of the exploits of the Special Squad reached its zenith when, to reassure the public that the gangster scourge was being tackled, someone at police headquarters arranged for a journalist to interview Charley Becker and his strong-arm men. The resultant article, published in an August issue of the New York Times, introduced readers not only to Becker himself—“standing over six feet in his socks, tipping the scale over 200 pounds, broad-shouldered, with the eyes, jaw and fists of a fighter”—but also to a group of patrolmen so larger than life that they could scarcely have been further from the anonymous thugs imagined by their critics. Among the ranks of the Special Squad was one of the police department’s few Jewish officers, Ajax Whitman—the “Strong Man of the Police Department,” who was pictured in a skintight leotard and cross garters, posing with circus dumbbells. Whitman’s brother Nathan was also one of Becker’s men. He gloried in the title of the “Yiddish Irishman” and specialized, for no readily apparent reason, in disguising himself as an Irish laborer. Patrolman John D. O’Connor, who could no doubt have carried off that pose more convincingly than Nathan Whitman, had been bafflingly assigned instead to patrolling Manhattan’s swimming spots in search of “undraped bathers” he was photographed looking rather awkward, his brawny arms folded protectively over a Victorian-era swimming costume that hung down to his knees and his upper lip sporting a magnificently waxed mustache that could not have survived contact with sea water for long. The remaining members of the squad included the “Strong Arm Dude,” M. B. Conlon; “Old Sleuth” Faubel, who was not especially elderly and took his name from a dime-novel hero of the day; John J. Bones—who made a seedy-looking “corner tough”—and Joseph “Eat ’Em Up Alive” McLaughlin, whose attempts to disguise himself as a workingman had left him looking disconcertingly like Nathan Whitman’s twin. The last member of the squad to be photographed by the Times was Patrolman George “Boots” Trojan, Becker’s expert on gangs. Trojan was a noted bruiser described by his lieutenant as “being as good as four ordinary men to go into a muss with.” The Times’ reporter delicately forbore to mention exactly how this renowned fighter had earned his nickname.

  It was not long before the exploits of the Special Squad earned Becker promotion of a sort. In October 1911, just as the cold weather came in and sent the street gangs scurrying for cover, Commissioner Waldo announced that the strong-armers would be redirected to crack down on gambling and graft. Becker’s men would join those employed by Costigan and Riley in raiding roulette houses and poolrooms; henceforth, their main duty would be to shut down Manhattan’s illegal gaming establishments. Becker was thus elevated from chief persecutor of the corner yahoo to a position of real power in the city. The assignment to police Manhattan gambling was his golden opportunity, and he took it.

  Waldo had chosen his man carefully. Becker, he knew, was an officer who achieved results. But, more than that, he was a man of intelligence and ambition whose police career had thus far proved a disappointment. Charley Becker had never been the sort of cop happy simply pounding a beat, but despite his efforts over the years there had been no more famous cases, no swift promotion, and the lieutenant seems never to have been considered for the more prestigious and rewarding career of a detective. The flash-pan flare of fame that he had so briefly experienced during the Stephen Crane affair may have kindled an appetite within him—but, if so, the hunger raging inside nearly two decades later must have been awfully strong.

  By 1911, then, Charley Becker was a man desperate for an opportunity, and the offer of that chance—Waldo no doubt calculated—shouldhave been enough to earn his loyalty. Bringing men in from the precincts to run squads out of Centre Street had always been a tricky business, for not every officer could be relied on to act with the necessary diligence. Becker, on the other hand (as one disgruntled fellow officer spit), was a man who “would raid his own crippled grandmother if he thought it would make him look good at headquarters.” His fierce ambition promised that he would be an asset to the commissioner and a threat to ordinary cops.

  Waldo certainly had had no complaints about the way in which Lieutenant Becker set about his new assignment. For nine more months, his men were rarely out of the news. Between them the three “strong-arm squads” led by Becker, Costigan, and Riley launched more than two hundred raids and made 898 arrests. Most of the targets were selected by either Waldo or Mayor Gaynor, acting in response to tip-offs received from “members of the public” who were—it seems more than likely—in many cases rivals of the gamblers being informed on. All three Special Squads thus found themselves plunged into a dangerous maelstrom of opposing business interests, but Becker seems to have carried out his orders fearlessly no matter what his targets’ political connections, at least twice in the face of ill-aimed fusillades of bullets. When Freeman’s celebrated roulette palace on West Thirty-eighth Street was raided in February, it was the first time the club and its gentlemanly customers had been so inconvenienced in eighteen years. A few weeks later, the strong-armers burst into the Lincoln Hotel on Columbus Circle, rounded up a large number of the establishment’s high-class call girls, and then proceeded to batter their way through the building, smashing down doors, until they found the place where the hotel’s managers were hiding. This embarrassing disruption to the Lincoln’s discreet and highly lucrative prostitution racket was a severe annoyance to the hotel’s owner, Sam Paul, whose temper hardly improved when his stuss joints began to be raided, too. By the summer of 1912, the influential Paul was furious with Becker and the Strong Arm Squad and even angrier with Herman Rosenthal, whom he strongly suspected to be the mysterious informant who had been passing information concerning his establishments to the mayor.

  Not all of the Special Squad’s targets were politicians. Becker and his men also raided a number of dives run by crooks, including poolrooms controlled by Chick Tricker and Jack Sirocco, two of the best-known gangsters of the day. In most cases the strong-armers’ methods were direct and uncompromising; having broken into a gambling house, they would produce hatchets and systematically wreck all the equipment in the place. Since the rooms were invariably classed as private clubs, the police had no right to detain their occupants indiscriminately. But they could and did carry warrants naming the people they expected to find gaming in the establishments they raided. Those who were actually discovered on the premises could be arrested.

  It did not take long for New York’s newspapers to pick up on the campaign, and over the winter many of the major dailies gave over hundreds of column inches to the Strong Arm Squads and their raids. Most of this coverage was devoted to Lieutenant Becker, who apparently enjoyed seeing his name in print. Early in 1912, Becker went so far as to hire his own “press agent,” a fly-by-night newspaper tipster by the name of Charles Plitt, to keep reporters informed of his activities. Plitt wasted no time in filling the dailies with dramatic accounts of his client’s raids, and before long even the august New York Times had taken to reporting the strong-armer’s successes. A story publish
ed in the second week of February 1912 drew a lively portrait of one late-night action:

  Lieut. Charles Becker, head of the Special Duty Squad, met twelve of his men shortly before midnight Thursday night at Ninth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. They piled into waiting automobiles already partly filled with axes, sledge hammers, and other wrecking outfit. The three automobiles swung into West Thirty-seventh Street, and drew up in front of a house on the north side of the street, near Eighth Avenue.

  As Becker knocked at the door a little shutter opened and a Negro looked out and instantly closed the opening. As he scurried away, the axes began to fall on the door. Half the squad started around to watch the rear exits. The police had to batter down a sheet-iron door to get into the hallway. There, another “ice-box” door confronted them. They battered this down and smashed their way into the dancing and assembly room of the “club.”

  There were nearly a hundred persons in the place…. Three men who had arrived early in the evening on an automobile slumming tour were very popular, for they had proved not only good spenders but excellent singers. They were members of Becker’s force, and the only policemen in the place when the raiders broke in.