Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  For ten days nothing happened. Twice Rose returned to Zelig’s table—“I said, ‘Rosenthal is still at it, but I don’t see those fellows at it’”—and twice Zelig reassured him—“They are on the job. I will see them again today.” Then, at the end of the first week of July, the four gunmen tracked Rosenthal to the Garden Café on Seventh Avenue. Seeing that he was with his wife, however, and suspecting that a dark-clad figure loitering conspicuously outside might be a detective, the gangsters withdrew—though not before Herman had noticed them skulking around within his line of vision.

  Rosenthal seems to have misinterpreted this incident, imagining that it was simply another effort to intimidate him, rather than a botched attempt at murder. But he was, by now, certainly frightened enough to put his own threats into action. Next morning he hurried downtown to call on Herbert Bayard Swope at the offices of the New York World, and with Swope’s help he swore two lengthy affidavits, which the newspaper published on July 13 and 14. Both statements were, as Rosenthal intended, “dynamite.” The first charged that a police lieutenant—unnamed—assigned to enforce New York’s gambling laws had in reality been Rosenthal’s business partner. It caused a sensation. Having assured himself of the city’s attention, Herman followed up that revelation by naming Becker and two Satan’s Circus officers—Inspector Hughes and Captain Day—as grafters in his second, far more detailed statement.

  Lieutenant Becker was alarmed and infuriated by the second affidavit. He responded to Rosenthal’s allegations that same afternoon, announcing that he would sue for criminal libel. But his anger was nothing to that of the Tenderloin’s gamblers, who were all too easily convinced that Herman would bring the authorities down upon their heads. “Rosenthal’s going to ruin it for everyone,” one gambling-house habitué complained. And from all around him, in the gaming room, there were murmurs of assent.

  The most attentive reader of the New York World for July 14 sat in an office on the second floor of the Criminal Courts Building. His name was Charles Whitman, and he was the city’s district attorney.

  A slight man of below-average height, with a thin and drooping mouth, craggy nose, wide-set hazel eyes, and wavy brown hair that he parted in the middle, Whitman had succeeded the long-serving William Travers Jerome in 1910. He was the son of a noted Connecticut pastor, fiercely moral and “obedient to fundamental ethics,” and had never felt entirely at home in the city. And though he was already forty-four years old, he was relatively new to public service, having eked out a living for many years as a teacher and a lawyer of middling ability.

  Like his energetic predecessor, Whitman was no friend of Tammany. He was a Republican and a onetime supporter of Seth Low, who had secured himself a last-gasp nomination as a magistrate on the day that Low left office. With no prospects of advancement under Tammany, it was not until four years later that the future DA contrived to save his fast-fading career. Capitalizing on a dispute between two Democratic factions, Whitman secured a modicum of power by getting himself elected chairman of the New York Board of Magistrates.

  This close brush with political extinction seems to have galvanized Whitman, who suddenly became a whirlwind of ambition and activity. Aping the exploits of Roosevelt and Jerome—on whom he plainly modeled his public persona—he launched a high-profile campaign against the “clean graft” payments traditionally made to the police by bail bondsmen who wished to make sure that it was their name that the cops passed to suspects in the station house. Whitman also made a point of targeting the plethora of late-opening saloons, personally touring the streets after hours and—whenever he found a dive operating in violation of the law—calling for help from any nearby beat policeman. Together the magistrate and the patrolman would raid open saloons, much to the cop’s disgust, Whitman taking care the next day to keep the city’s papers abreast of his activities. The press caught on soon enough, and it was not long before Whitman was being hailed throughout New York as “the raiding judge.” It was this publicity that eventually helped him win election as district attorney with a majority—astonishing for a Republican in New York—of nearly 30,000 votes.

  Now, in 1912, with reelection looming, Whitman was looking for a new cause: something that would reinforce his reputation as a reformer and keep him in the public eye. Rosenthal’s affidavits, with their lurid revelations of police corruption, clearly had the potential to spark just the sort of furor that he was looking for. And plainly it was the district attorney’s duty to investigate such serious allegations. The day that the second of the depositions was published, placing Becker’s name in the public domain, Whitman summoned Herman to his office.

  Of course, a politician with Whitman’s well-developed instincts knew that a mere gambler’s tale would never be enough to provoke a real sensation. Rosenthal would need to produce firm evidence of Becker’s under-the-table involvement in his gambling house to really interest the DA, and though Whitman listened carefully to Herman’s statement, he seemed to be far from impressed. Probably he could see that it would be almost impossible for the gambler to prove his charges and foresaw that the police could simply deny that what Herman claimed was true. The initial meeting between the two men lasted only thirty minutes, and it seems likely that Whitman would never have seen Rosenthal again had Swope, anxious to keep the story alive, not pressured him.

  The World man had to push hard for a decision, even following Whitman up to Newport over the long weekend in an attempt to badger him into calling Rosenthal again and asking the gambler for better evidence. It required considerable persuasion, but eventually Swope did extract a brief statement from the DA, which was published in the World the next day. It didn’t sound much like the Whitman whom other reporters knew, and there were plenty of men down on Newspaper Row who thought the DA’s words, as published, had “a distinctly Swopean flavor.”

  “I have had Rosenthal’s charges under investigation for some time,” the statement began, inaccurately.

  I have no sympathy for Rosenthal the gambler, but I have a real use for Rosenthal who, abused by the police, proposes to aid decency and lawfulness by revealing conditions that are startling…. The trail leads to high places [and] the situation is best described as “rotten.” This man will have the chance to tell his story to the Grand Jury.

  Swope’s bosses were relieved to receive a telegram containing Whitman’s statement. WHAT YOU SENT SAVED THE STORY, the World’s city editor replied. But Swope was still not satisfied. He pressured Whitman to abandon his comfortable country-house weekend and return to New York to pursue the investigation, first hand. Eventually, worn down, the district attorney conceded the point. He boarded a train bound for Manhattan. Swope trailed him, seated in the next carriage.

  According to New York gambling legend, it was after his first meeting with Whitman that Herman Rosenthal became aware that he was being followed. Badly frightened already by his encounter with Zelig’s gunmen in the restaurant, Herman at last understood that his life was in real danger. “He managed to elude his trailer,” recorded Leo Katcher,

  and, seeking some haven, rushed to the Rothstein home on West Forty-Sixth Street. He found Rothstein there. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “Give me the money and I’ll get out of town.”

  “You’ve waited too long,” Rothstein said.

  “Let me have the five hundred,” Rosenthal pleaded. “I’ll go ’way someplace and hide.”

  “You’re not worth five hundred to anyone any more,” Rothstein said.

  “Then you can go to hell.” Rosenthal stormed from the house.

  Charles Whitman arrived back in New York late in the afternoon of July 15, hot, tired, and more than half convinced that his journey had been a waste of time.

  Forewarned by Swope’s excellent intelligence, Whitman was unsurprised to discover an anxious Herman Rosenthal loitering at his office in the Criminal Courts Building. The gambler had been waiting in an airless room for several hours, and his pink silk shirt and collar were stained with grim
e and sweat, which he dabbed away with a large handkerchief. Frightened though he was, however, he remained as stubbornly self-righteous as ever. He begged the DA to press charges against Becker.

  Publicly Whitman seemed sympathetic; it was, after all, rare for any gambler to openly volunteer sensational disclosures. Privately, though, the DA was not sure there was much that he could do. There was certainly no prospect of putting Rosenthal in front of a grand jury—the only body capable of handing down indictments he could act on—without at least one witness who would back him up. But all Herman’s efforts to persuade other gamblers to testify had failed. No fewer than six men, whose names he had supplied to Whitman—they included Sam Paul, Bald Jack Rose, and even Bridgey Webber—had, scarcely surprisingly, declined to be drawn into the affair. “The gamblers in this town are a bunch of quitters,” the disappointed Rosenthal had told one newspaper reporter after yet another fruitless attempt to scour the dives on Second Avenue. Meanwhile the district attorney typed a statement for the press:

  This office is ready to present to the Grand Jury any evidence, properly corroborated, which involves the corruption of the police department…but I have no right to waste the Grand Jury’s time by presenting to it witnesses whose statements consist of little more than rumor or hearsay and upon which no action would be justified.

  From Becker’s point of view, the press release was a relief. The DA seemed more or less ready to drop the matter. From Rosenthal’s perspective, though, the press statement could scarcely have been worse news. Whitman seemed determined to shrug off complaints that he had risked his life to make.

  The gambler was now fully aware of what he had done. His encounter with Jack Zelig’s men at the Garden restaurant had shaken him. The discovery that he was being shadowed around the streets of Manhattan had left him very apprehensive. Now rumors were flying that harsher sanctions were being planned. “It was,” Jack Rose remarked, “in the air that Rosenthal was running a big risk acting the way he did,” and by that afternoon Herman himself shared that opinion.

  “You’ll find me dead one of these days,” the gambler told the DA glumly when his statement had been made. “And you’ll find they’ve planted a gun on me.”

  Whitman snorted. This was New York, he said, not the Wild West. “Oh, you may laugh,” Herman shot back, “but the gangs are already around my house.” Perhaps, the DA replied, but the case had such a high profile that no one would dare to take action.

  Rosenthal did not seem reassured. “Better men than I am have been killed when the police wanted them out of the way,” he muttered darkly. “They will get me and you’ll never know who did it.”

  It was early evening by now, and time for Herman to go. But he still hoped to get corroboration for his statements and begged for the chance to talk to Whitman one more time. The problem, the gambler added nervously, was that he could not risk being seen calling yet again at the Criminal Courts Building. “They will get me if they see me coming here,” he said.

  Perhaps Whitman felt sorry for Rosenthal. Perhaps he simply wanted to get the whole affair over and done with as quickly as possible. Either way, he relented. There would be no need for the gambler to travel all the way downtown; he could come to the DA’s home and complete his business there.

  The two men parted shortly before eight that night with a clear understanding. Herman would call at Whitman’s apartment on Madison Avenue at seven the next morning.

  CHAPTER 7

  “GOOD-BYE, HERMAN”

  THREE DAZZLING ARC LIGHTS, white and garish, blazed in the darkness that had fallen over Manhattan, mercilessly illuminating the peeling facade of a narrow, six-story building on the north side of West Forty-third Street. Although most respectable New Yorkers were in bed by now, the temperature in the city still hovered in the eighties, and the building’s two doors both gaped open. Inside, passersby could glimpse a shabby lobby, hung with cheap lace curtains, and the entrance to a dimly lit café. The sounds of chatter and laughter and of a pianist pounding out the latest ragtime tunes mingled together and drifted from the interior.

  This was the Hotel Metropole, owned by Big Tim Sullivan in partnership with the gamblers Jim and George Considine,*40 and once one of the jewels of the Sullivan empire. By the summer of 1912, admittedly, the hotel was so far past its prime that it was close to bankruptcy. But even in its present depressed state, the Metropole had two saving graces in the eyes of its loyal customers. The first was its location, a mere fifty yards from Times Square in the heart of Satan’s Circus. The second was a coveted twenty-four-hour liquor license—obtained through Sullivan’s influence—which allowed the Café Metropole to remain open around the clock and attracted a lively late-night crowd. The hotel was particularly popular with boxers, gamblers, and actresses.

  A few minutes before midnight on July 15, the most notorious gambler in New York City waddled up West Forty-third and turned in to the lobby. Herman Rosenthal was clad in the same rumpled pink shirt he’d been wearing a few hours earlier at his meeting with Whitman and dabbed at his damp forehead with a bright silk handkerchief. Barely pausing to glance around, he rolled into the café and slumped down at a table for four, sweating profusely.

  Summoning a waiter, Herman ordered himself a Horse’s Neck—bourbon, ginger ale, and a twist of lemon—and three large Havana cigars. He seemed nearly prostrated by the heat, swatting listlessly at the clammy air with the cardboard fan he clutched in one fat hand. But the gambler’s eyes were still bright and alert. The waiter who delivered his drink noted that they darted constantly from side to side, between an exit opening onto the street and the connecting door to the hotel.

  Precisely what Rosenthal was doing at the Metropole that night was never fully ascertained. Certainly Herman knew the hotel well; it stood only two blocks south of his home, and he was often to be found in its private gaming room (run by Arnold Rothstein) or taking refreshment in the café. But to walk knowingly into a place filled with gamblers, men whose very livelihoods were threatened by his conniving with Whitman, was to invite—at the very least—harsh words; and to dawdle in a restaurant only hours before a dawn appointment with the DA struck some men as eccentric, even for a night owl such as Herman.

  There were many, Whitman prominent among them, who were certain that the gambler was thoroughly embittered and had every intention of giving evidence as planned the next morning. But others, including some of Rosenthal’s oldest friends, were equally convinced that Herman had no intention of doing anything so dangerous. These men felt sure that the gambler had come to the Metropole to keep some other appointment and that he expected to be met—perhaps by Rothstein, perhaps by some emissary from the Sullivan clan—and paid as much as $15,000 for his silence. At seven the next morning, they contended, Herman Rosenthal fully expected to be standing not at the door of Charles Whitman’s apartment but on a platform at Grand Central Station, waiting for the train that would take him out of New York.

  Whatever the gambler’s intentions, he was plainly in no hurry to leave the Café Metropole. At around ten to one, he invited three passing acquaintances to join him, and the four men spent more than half an hour in animated conversation. When these companions rose and left, Rosenthal looked up and peered around him, scanning the faces of the other diners for people that he knew.

  “What do you boys think of the papers lately?” he smirked to a knot of gamblers at a nearby table. “You aren’t sore at me, are you?”

  “You’re a damned fool, Herman,” one of them replied—or so the papers reported the exchange the next day.

  A few minutes later, while Rosenthal was sipping at another drink, the door leading to the Metropole swung open and another gambler entered. It was Herman’s sworn enemy, Bridgey Webber. Glancing from side to side, Webber circled swiftly around the room, brushing past his adversary as he did so.

  “Hello, Herman,” said Webber in a pleasant tone.

  If Rosenthal was surprised to be addressed so politely by a man whom h
e had once tried to have killed, he gave no sign of it. “Hello, Bridgey,” he returned with equal affability. But Webber wasted no more time on pleasantries. He continued his circuit of the room, leaving the café at a brisk walk by the same door through which he had entered.

  Herman finished off his drink and glanced at his watch. It was now twenty minutes to two. He pushed back his chair and heaved himself to his feet. “I guess the morning papers must be up,” he declared, knowing perfectly well that most of the Metropole’s customers could guess the likely headlines in the press. Stepping out into the street, Rosenthal found a newsboy near the hotel entrance. He bought seven copies of the New York World—which led with his allegations against Becker—and took them back to the café. As he reached his seat, Herman waved the paper over his head in triumph. “What about that for a headline?” he crowed to the men at the next table, pressing copies into their hands.

  Rosenthal settled back into his chair, spreading open his own World and smiling to himself. He read the news attentively for a few more minutes. Then, just after five to two, he was interrupted by a short, well-dressed stranger who had entered the café through the street door and come up to his table.

  “Herman,” the newcomer said, “there’s somebody wants to see you outside.”

  Rosenthal seemed unsurprised to be accosted in this way. He set down his drink, gathered up the remainder of his papers, and, clutching at the last of his cigars, rose from his chair and followed the unknown man into the night.