Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  There was pandemonium when Becker pushed through the opening the axes had made. As the men filed in behind him, the crowd suddenly separated, and at the other end of the room a colored woman stepped from behind a partition and raising a revolver began to fire. The third shot had gone crashing into the woodwork of the door and everyone was cowering when the lights went out. Three times more the woman fired, and then Becker sprang forward with his revolver in his hand.

  “Look out!” he shouted, and then other revolver shots came and the crowd in the darkness came to life and charged the narrow entrance. Becker fired above the heads of the attacking force and at the same time the policemen at the door began to fire. They drove the crowd back. The lieutenant quietly groped his way down the room until he came to Walter Herbert, Republican District Captain, who is charged with being the proprietor of the place.

  “You turn on the lights,” he said, and to emphasize his command he shoved his revolver against the man’s stomach. Herbert did not argue. He backed against the wall and switched the lights on. More than twenty shots had been fired, but after that there was no trouble.

  By now Becker’s new celebrity had had a marked effect upon his social life. He came to the attention of Colonel Henry Sternberger, a National Guard commander who made a habit of loaning out his car to police officers whom he particularly admired; soon the lieutenant was being chauffeured around town in a handsome tourer. He established friendships with several of Manhattan’s best-known crime reporters, including Deacon Terry of Hearst’s American and Fred Hawley of the pro-Tammany Sun. Perhaps Becker’s most cherished new acquaintance, however, was Bat Masterson, sports editor of the raffish Morning Telegraph—a newspaper whose front-page cheesecake photographs of chorus girls and detailed coverage of racing made it the title of choice in New York’s poolrooms and barbershops. Masterson was renowned throughout the country as a former Wild West lawman and gunfighter who had—so rumor had it—killed at least twenty-six men during his years on the frontier and whose encounters in western cow towns with the likes of Wyatt Earp and “Mysterious Dave” Mather had become the stuff of legend. Safely retired now to an apartment off Times Square, Masterson turned out a thrice-weekly column covering boxing, crime, and politics. He had the reputation of having scarcely missed an important fight in nearly thirty years, and his job and famous name gave him access to ringside seats. For Becker, an avid boxing fan, he made an invaluable friend.

  Of course, even the relatively modest fame that the lieutenant thus attained was double-edged. Regular newspaper coverage of the strong-arm men and their exploits meant that the squad’s routine brutality was also exposed. When one of Becker’s men maimed an eighteen-year-old boy by smashing his arm with a pool cue, reporters noticed. More seriously, the lieutenant’s assiduous courting of publicity made other policemen look bad. Costigan and Riley and their men received far less coverage than did Becker and his, and—perhaps egged on by the press—Becker’s squad soon began to make more raids than their colleagues. By July 1912, nine months after Waldo’s campaign got under way, they had been responsible for closing down no fewer than a hundred gambling houses: half, rather than the third that might have been expected, of the total raided across the city. Such successes reflected poorly on the other squads, whose lieutenants were vying with Becker for the rank of captain.

  It was not long before Becker’s displays of thrust and ambition began to make him enemies; by the summer of 1912, Sam Paul was far from the only influential gaming-house proprietor with cause to hate him. Each raid the lieutenant carried out cost gamblers money. Each item of equipment smashed had to be replaced. Each arrest meant that lawyers had to be hired and fines paid—and there was always the possibility of prison. Nor could Becker’s men expect to be applauded by colleagues who saw their own efforts passed over in the rush to praise the Strong Arm Squads. “I can say that Becker knows that he is very unpopular in the Police Department,” one lawyer commented. “He has been an ambitious man.”

  Had mere ambition been the worst of Becker’s sins, of course, he would have had comparatively little to worry about. In truth, however, the lieutenant’s appointment to police vice in Satan’s Circus brought with it temptation of a sort that few policemen of his generation would have been able to resist. Twenty years earlier Becker’s mentor, Clubber Williams, had made his fortune in the district. Bill Devery, ten years later, had done much the same. Charley Becker—a man who was no stranger to grafting, who needed money, and who was more than halfway through a career that otherwise promised relatively little—was far too steeped in the discreditable traditions of the department to spurn such a golden opportunity. Within weeks, perhaps even within days, of his appointment, he had begun to exploit his new position for every dollar it was worth. And by the summer of 1912, with an audacity that amounted to recklessness, he had built up an extortion racket of a size and reach unseen in Manhattan for a decade.

  Lieutenant Becker was in a strong position to demand protection money from New York’s gamblers. With a whole squad of strong-arm men at his back and a certain leeway to conduct raids as he saw fit, he could make life impossible for those who dared to cross him. Becker had no choice but to act on the orders he received from Gaynor and Waldo, of course, and that meant that the protection that he offered was never ironclad. But there were ways around that problem: reasons a planned raid might have to be postponed, perhaps even for months, and—when the time did come—tip-offs phoned anonymously to those who had paid their assessments, advising them to hide their best equipment and warn off valued customers.*31 In time-honored fashion, Becker would then arrange for some elderly roulette wheels and fading faro banks to be smashed to pieces to ensure that things looked good, and his strong-arm men would make at least a handful of arrests. Only the most acute observers—and there were not many of them, either at police headquarters or among the city’s journalists—would notice that few of the clubs raided by Becker actually closed down for more than a few days. Nor was it generally realized that only a tiny percentage of the gamblers arrested by the strong-armers ever saw the inside of a prison cell. It was a simple matter for the lieutenant to arrange for crucial evidence to be lost or for his men to be afflicted with conveniently hazy memories when cases came to court. Thus while nine hundred or so men were certainly arrested between October 1911 and July 1912, the charges against more than eight hundred were dropped. Of the hundred who did appear in court, the great majority were issued with suspended sentences and fined between $2 and $50—sums so small as to be no deterrent to a seasoned gambler.

  Becker’s corruption was not generally known, though it soon became the subject of gossip among the police themselves. Newspapers may have heard talk of the doings of the Special Squad, but they could not publish without cast-iron evidence. Gaynor and Waldo remained ignorant even of the rumors for several months at least. But it is inconceivable that Becker could have operated on the scale he did without the tacit approval of at least some of his superiors. That meant, of course, that the money extorted from the city’s gamblers was shared. Each of the men who approved of the actions of the Special Squad—they apparently included Sheehan, Waldo’s corrupt secretary—would have received a portion of the cash, and every precedent suggests that a large part of the proceeds eventually found its way to New York’s politicians. In addition, Becker must have had to pay off most if not all of the members of his squad, and a further share, amounting to perhaps 10 percent of the total collected, would have been retained, as commission, by the agents he employed to make “collections” from the gaming houses on his behalf.

  It is all but impossible, in these circumstances, to calculate the full extent of the lieutenant’s grafting, but his corruption was evidently staggering. Contributions were levied from at least one hundred Satan’s Circus clubs, and the total collected across the city as a whole was said at the time to have amounted to $1.8 million in just nine months: the equivalent of $2.4 million a year, a figure not far short of the $3 millio
n that the New York Times calculated had been raised across all five boroughs twelve years earlier. Each monthly “assessment” totaled anywhere from $50 to $500, depending on the size and profitability of a house. On one occasion Honest John Kelly,*32 one of the best-known gamblers in the city, parted with $2,500 to purchase protection for his string of clubs. Nor did Becker rely on extortion alone for his considerable income. Gamblers who did not meet his demands were raided and forced to watch as the cash discovered in their establishments was gathered, counted, and “confiscated,” never to be seen again. According to one well-connected club owner, he was robbed of $8,000 in this manner.

  Whether the payments extorted by the policeman and his associates really totaled $2 million—and it seems unlikely that they did—the amounts that Becker personally banked between October 1911 and July 1912 certainly averaged at least $10,000 a month, the equivalent of more than $155,000 a month today. No fewer than fifteen private bank accounts controlled by the lieutenant were eventually traced—some in his own name, others opened jointly with his wife, and a few that had been concealed under a false name. The cash paid into just nine of them totaled nearly $60,000. Some $29,615 had been squirreled away in the Corn Exchange Bank of Washington Heights between November 1911 and August 1912, and another $21,000 was deposited in other branches of the same bank between April and July. A further $3,500 was paid into the Empire Savings Bank in April and $3,000 placed in the vaults of West Side Savings in May. Other accounts and safe-deposit boxes hid amounts ranging from a few hundred dollars to $2,000. Nor did all the money Becker made find its way to a bank. In the spring of 1912, he and Helen paid $9,000, in cash, for a handsome mock-Tudor house in Williamsburg, a comfortably middle-class district of Brooklyn. They continued to live in their old apartment, but Becker began visiting his new property regularly to fix it up.

  Superficially, the lieutenant’s position seemed secure. There was, after all, little that Becker’s victims could hope to do to halt the constant drain upon their profits; their businesses were illegal, and to make any formal complaint would be tantamount to confessing to a crime. Nor would the mayor, Commissioner Waldo, or even the newspapers be likely to believe the word of a professed criminal over that of a policeman. The least hint of dissent simply invited retribution at the hands of the Special Squad. By the end of 1911, Becker felt confident enough to abandon the inconvenient practice of collecting payments in bulky packages of cash. A handful of trusted gamblers, astonishingly, began to pay their dues with personal checks.

  It was not long, nonetheless, before the first threats to Becker’s security emerged. As early as Thanksgiving 1911, a journalist friend working for the Hearst newspapers warned that several of his victims were plotting to expose him. The suggestion worried Becker sufficiently for him to call on Waldo and request a transfer back to ordinary duties, but the commissioner was so pleased with the Special Squad’s work that he dismissed the idea out of hand. A few months later, in March 1912, Waldo himself began to receive pseudonymous letters revealing the location of several gaming houses. After a while one of the writers—the same “Henry Williams” who had offered tips concerning Herman Rosenthal—began denouncing the strong-armers, too. In a letter dated March 27, “Williams” told the commissioner, “I would like to have you investigate quietly Lieutenant Becker. He is now collecting more money than Devery, and it is well known to everyone at police headquarters. Please do this and you will be surprised at the result.”

  Further denunciations followed, until Waldo felt compelled to act on them. Fortunately for Becker, he chose to do so by passing the complaints to Winfield Sheehan for investigation. Sheehan, unsurprisingly, merely forwarded them on to Becker, and he in turn boldly sent them back to the commissioner, accompanied by a polite note suggesting that he was probably not the best person to investigate himself. Whatever Waldo did with the complaints thereafter, no proper inquiry was ever established, and when further anonymous denunciations arrived at the commissioner’s office, they were sent on to the officers concerned as well. Nothing was done.

  Even so, Becker sensed disaster looming. He had been greedy, extorting a very large amount of money in only a short time, and probably he felt that the system he had created had started to run out of control. Once he and his associates began to levy contributions from a club, they could hardly stop, and too much was being demanded from too many influential people for the process to continue indefinitely. Worse, nothing was being done to mollify those whose businesses were being drained of cash. Becker was simply too junior to run so large a racket properly, for while he had the power to make good on his threats, he could not always keep his promises. The old masters of police protection—men such as Bill Devery—had been at least as avaricious and corrupt. But Devery had also been chief of police, and when he swore that a club would not be raided, he meant what he said. Charley Becker, on the other hand, was “just a little lieutenant” (as Gaynor once described him) and had to raid where he was told. That made the protection that he offered much less valuable. By the summer of 1912, it was only a matter of time before he upset one too many people and found himself in trouble.

  Becker knew it, too. Shortly after the first letters from “Henry Williams” began arriving at headquarters, he called in to see Waldo. Once again he urgently requested a transfer, and for a second time Waldo turned him down. The commander of the Special Squad protested, but he had no choice. So Lieutenant Becker went back to work, grafting and raiding, raiding and grafting, dancing a tarantella of his own devising that by now could have only one end.

  The appearance of three vigorous police strong-arm squads on the streets of New York was the worst possible news for Herman Rosenthal.

  The gambler’s fortunes had not improved in the long months since Gaynor came to power. His falling-out with Beansey Rosenfeld had been a violent one, and when the pair’s stuss house in “Little Russia” was closed down, Herman had arranged for Rosenfeld to be beaten up by Tough Tony, the same thug he had earlier employed to “take care” of Bridgey Webber. Then, when Rosenthal attempted to reopen their old premises, Beansey’s friends retaliated by sending a hoodlum of their own to bomb the club. The explosion blew off most of the front of the house, bringing Herman’s attempts to operate on the Upper West Side to a sudden end. Shortly thereafter Rosenthal retreated to Second Avenue, where, with the closure of the Hesper Club, he found himself reduced to running a pair of low-grade stuss houses and his old—and still-illegal—off-track-bookmaking service. None of these three businesses made much money, and even when the income from all three was combined, it scarcely guaranteed a living.

  It was not long before Rosenthal’s financial worries sent him scurrying back to Big Tim Sullivan. Sullivan was struggling with problems of his own: His political power continued to decline, and there were rumors that Charles Murphy and his allies at Tammany Hall were attempting to squeeze the overmighty district boss out of the lucrative midtown graft. But Tim was still a rich man and remained unfailingly generous to his friends. Rosenthal emerged from their meeting with another loan, this one, he boasted to his friends, for the sum of $5,000. Better yet, the gambler received Sullivan’s permission to try his luck in Satan’s Circus.

  Herman appeared in midtown Manhattan in the autumn of 1911. He was almost the first of the Lower East Siders to be permitted to do business within the borders of Satan’s Circus, which had hitherto been the preserve of much-better-connected gamblers. The only other East Side figure with a presence in the district was none other than Bridgey Webber, whose connections with Sullivan’s rivals at Tammany Hall had won him a concession to set up a poker parlor on West Forty-second Street and a faro house three blocks to the north. There was, in short, plenty of room in Satan’s Circus for a downmarket gambler from a working-class part of town. Rosenthal, however—provocatively and more than a little rashly—chose to rent premises practically opposite Webber’s faro club, purchasing the lease on a four-floor brownstone at 104 West Forty-fifth Street.
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  Big Tim’s blessing, and his generous loan, had offered Herman one more chance to make something of himself. The signs are that he recognized that this might be his final opportunity; certainly he was determined not to fail. The new premises were done up in considerable style, three floors (and nearly all of Sullivan’s $5,000) being given over to sumptuously furnished rooms offering faro and roulette. In order to save on his customary hotel bills, Rosenthal reserved the fourth floor for himself. He turned it into an apartment and installed his second wife, Lillian—a massively built woman who resembled an operatic soprano without the voice and indulged a gaudy taste in embroidered gowns, big hats, and fancy hairstyles. (“She was fat,” young Viña Delmar mercilessly observed, “and she wore a purple satin dress and a pearl necklace at three o’clock in the afternoon.”) Between them the couple got the establishment ready by midautumn. Herman put the word out among the gambling community, and on November 17, 1911, he opened for business.

  Unfortunately for Rosenthal, his expenditure and effort were in vain. The new club was not a success; indeed, it was a catastrophic failure. The reason for this was simple: The gambler’s extensive preparations had not included payoffs to the police—he hoped, presumably, for Sullivan’s protection—and only two days after the roulette wheels had begun to spin, he was summoned to an urgent meeting by Inspector Cornelius Hayes, the officer in overall command of the district. The fact that Hayes was able to make such an approach with impunity suggests that Mayor Gaynor’s policy of reducing contact between the police and the vice trade was not working all that smoothly; in any event, he and the gambler sat down in the back room of a local restaurant, where, according to Herman, Hayes demanded payments totaling $1,000 a week and threatened to close him down forthwith if the cash were not received. Rosenthal, who had no money left, refused, with inevitable consequences. On November 19, a squad of Hayes’s men descended on West Forty-fifth Street, broke down Herman’s door, and smashed all his equipment. The damage was so extensive that the gambler had no choice but to remain closed. He had been in business just four days.