Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  Even at two in the morning, the streets around Broadway were generally busy, filled with revelers, gamblers, prostitutes, their clients, and the dregs of the theater crowd. During the summer months, Satan’s Circus was even busier than usual, as New Yorkers sought refuge from the clammy heat by lolling outside on fire escapes or pacing the streets in search of the slightest breeze. Yet on this particular July evening, West Forty-third seemed oddly quiet.

  The street outside the Metropole had begun to clear soon after Bridgey Webber left the building. By about 1:40 A.M., the taxi line near the hotel—which was always crowded in the early morning hours—had emptied as a dozen cabs were dispatched one by one on a variety of errands, most of them to the outer boroughs of New York. Several men and women who had been loitering in the vicinity of the Metropole were asked to move on by tough-looking men one passerby recalled as “East Side types.” Most took the hint and walked quickly away. By ten minutes to two, there were only a handful of pedestrians outside the hotel. According to one witness, Herman Rosenthal’s old partner Beansey Rosenfeld was among them. Another was an employee of Webber’s who stood loitering by the hotel door.

  A few minutes later, the silence that had fallen over West Forty-third was broken by the growl of a powerful automobile engine. A large gray touring car, its roof down and its headlights on, had turned left off Sixth Avenue. The car drove slowly toward the Metropole, pulling over to the south side of the street as it approached. It was a Packard taxi, registration 41313 New York—the same car, owned by Louis Libby, which had been used to shoot up Jack Sirocco’s café in the spring. The driver coasted to a standstill thirty yards from the hotel, leaving the motor idling. A moment or two later, both passenger doors opened and three or four dark-suited figures got out and walked toward the Metropole, coming to a halt in the shadows opposite its entrance. The Packard’s chauffeur and another man stayed in the car.

  They did not have long to wait. At three minutes to two, a round figure appeared silhouetted in the doorway of the Hotel Metropole. Herman Rosenthal had come to claim his due.

  Rosenthal stood blinking in the dazzle of the hotel’s lights, his sweaty handkerchief protruding from a pocket, his Havana still dangling from one plump hand. Just ahead of him, a figure wearing a felt hat lifted a hand to the brim as if in signal and then darted away. Instantly the men waiting opposite hurried across the street toward him, pulling revolvers from their jackets as they came.

  Herman squinted uncertainly from side to side, evidently trying to locate the man who had called him from his table. He did not seem to realize that anything was wrong. The Metropole’s arc lights had blinded him—“the illuminations were as powerful as a spotlight on the stage,” one man who knew the scene explained—and he might not even have sensed the arms now thrusting out toward him. His eyes were given no time to adjust; a moment later the unnatural quiet enveloping West Forty-third was shattered by the crisp staccato of several shots. The gambler was hit immediately, blood erupting from his face, his knees buckling as he crumpled facedown on the pavement. His unlit cigar tumbled from slackened fingers, somersaulting on the concrete. A thick sheaf of morning papers slipped out from beneath his arm and fell softly to the ground, shrouding his body with headlines shouting his name while, beneath the flimsy pages, a sticky, spreading pool of blood matted his hair and began to run toward his nose and mouth. In another moment the assassins were crouching over him. “I gotcha!” one of them exclaimed.

  Investigation would eventually establish that at least three rounds were fired. The first bullet had missed its target and embedded itself at head height deep in the wooden frame of the Metropole’s front door. But the second had struck Rosenthal in the face, passing through his cheek and jaw and shattering some teeth. At least one fragment lodged itself in the gambler’s neck as he pitched forward and began to fall; and at that instant the third round had entered Herman’s head an inch above the hairline, piercing his skull and destroying his brain. The fatal bullets had been fired from a range so close that burns caused by muzzle flash had etched themselves onto the dead man’s skin.

  At the first sound of gunfire, the driver of the Packard gunned its engine, and the slate gray car emerged from the shadows, turning a lazy half circle in the street. Rosenthal’s killers leaped onto its running boards, and the vehicle moved away at a sedate pace, gathering speed as it headed east down Forty-third Street and turned left onto Madison Avenue. New Yorkers ambling along Madison watched as the vehicle accelerated noisily into the distance, the men on the running boards scrambling in as it went.

  The sudden crack of gunfire had been clearly heard within the Hotel Metropole; at least one customer looked up in time to see the muzzle flashes from the murderers’ revolvers. The men and women in the café who rushed to the doors to discover what had happened found the street outside already filling as pedestrians came running from as far off as Broadway. They were too late to get a good look at the gunmen but just in time to see one of the gambling types from the café walking unhurriedly onto the street. This man stepped casually over the body lying in his path, turned and bent at the waist, his hands thrust deep in his pockets as he studied Rosenthal’s bloodied face. “Hello, Herman,” he said, smiling. Then he straightened up. “Good-bye, Herman,” the man added, and walked swiftly away.

  News of the shooting spread through Satan’s Circus like wild fire. By five past two, ten minutes after the murder had occurred, a crowdfifteen or twenty people deep had formed around the body. Many members of this mob were gamblers with little reason to like Rosenthal; one reached over and tugged at the corpse’s shoulders, turning Herman onto his back and exposing his wounds for everyone to see. Word of the dead man’s identity passed swiftly through the crowd.

  It took only a few minutes for reporters to arrive. One of the first men on the scene was the owlish Alexander Woollcott—then covering police affairs for the New York Times but soon to become the same paper’s theater critic*41 —who came puffing up from Broadway. Woollcott had reported plenty of murders in his time, but the scene awaiting him outside the Metropole stuck firmly in his mind. “I shall always remember the picture of that soft, fat body wilting on the sidewalk,” he recalled in later years.

  I shall always remember the fish-belly faces of the sibilant crowd which, sprung in a twinkling from nowhere, formed like a clot around those clamorous wounds. Just behind me an old-timer whispered a comment which I have had more than one occasion to repeat. “From where I stand,” he said, “I can see eight murderers.”

  The police who hurried to the scene did what they could to control the milling crowd, but chaos prevailed for nearly a quarter of an hour, and by then the heaving mass of rubberneckers had grown to be several hundred strong. Eventually Jim Considine summoned a waiter from the Metropole, and a hotel tablecloth was pressed into service as a makeshift shroud. A platoon of forty police reserves, called from nearby precincts, appeared and cleared a space around the body. Soon after that, a doctor arrived to examine the corpse; death, he concluded, had probably come instantly. At about two-thirty, the bloody cadaver was rolled onto a stretcher and loaded into in a police ambulance, which made its way, bell tolling, to the Sixteenth Precinct station house a quarter of a mile away. After that, the vast crowd of spectators gradually dispersed. Among those glimpsed leaving the scene was Bridgey Webber, who set off at a smart pace toward Times Square.

  The clean getaway effected by Herman Rosenthal’s murderers was a considerable embarrassment for the police. No fewer than six officers had been within a hundred yards of the Metropole when the killing took place: One was standing on duty on Seventh Avenue, another on Broadway, and two more had paused for a moment on the corners of West Forty-third itself. A fifth man, Lieutenant Edward Frye, was walking east along the same street only thirty yards or so from the hotel, while the sixth policeman, Detective Billy File, had actually been sitting in the Café Metropole, only a few feet from Rosenthal, when the gambler rose to go onto the street. File, a
burly former boxer who had once sparred with the heavyweight Jim Corbett, was off duty, and his attention was focused on the girl singer he was entertaining, but he reacted quickly to the sound of gunfire, leaping to his feet, drawing his revolver as he rose, and thrusting a passing waiter to one side as he made for the door. Finding it already blocked by a press of fellow customers desperate to discover what the commotion was about, File lost valuable seconds forcing his way through the crowd. By the time he reached the pavement, the taillights of the fleeing Packard were already receding into the distance.

  Looking quickly up and down the street, File spotted a single taxi sitting parked in some shadows; its driver had been asleep for nearly half an hour and had escaped being moved on by the unofficial dispatcher at the taxi stand. Rousing the drowsy cabbie, File—joined by Lieutenant Frye—hand-cranked the cab and set off in pursuit. By the time the men reached Madison Avenue, however, the Packard was long gone. They cruised as far north as Fifty-ninth Street in search of it before abandoning the chase and returning disconsolately to the Metropole.

  While Frye and File were gone, other patrolmen began interrogating members of the crowd. Several bystanders came forward to tell confused accounts of the murder; there was very little agreement between them. Some said that one killer had done all the shooting, others that two or three different men had fired. Several had seen the passengers from the Packard crossing the street, but a waiter from the Metropole said he thought a single assassin had been crouching behind one of the giant plant pots that stood outside the hotel entrance, while a pedestrian insisted that five shots had been fired from a moving car. The one thing all the witnesses agreed on was that none had gotten a clear look at the gunmen. The only descriptions the police came up with were of anonymous-sounding men with average builds and unremarkable clothes, their faces concealed beneath the brims of hats.

  The best hope of tracing the killers seemed to be locating their vehicle. Automobiles were not so common in New York City in 1912 that the sudden appearance of one, driving at speed at well past two in the morning, would not attract attention, and it transpired that several men and women on both West Forty-third Street and Madison Avenue had turned to watch the murder car as it roared by. Several had noted the plate—one witness had even jumped in front of Frye and File’s taxi to shout out the details as they sped past. The trouble was that bystanders recalled the number differently. By the end of the night, the police had collected no fewer than seven different versions. According to the desk sergeant who recorded the first details of the killing in the police blotter at the Sixteenth Precinct, the dead gambler

  was shot and killed by four unknown men about 24 years, white, 5 feet 5 or 6, smooth faced, dark complexion and hair, who after shooting Rosenthal jumped into a waiting automobile No. 13131 NY or 14131 NY.

  Several other witnesses insisted that the number had been 43131 NY. On that basis, so far as the baffled detectives leafing through their statements could see, almost any combination of the numbers 1, 3, and 4 might be the correct one.

  One witness, though, did not think he had the right number for the gray Packard; he knew. Charles Gallagher, an unemployed cabaret singer, had been walking toward Broadway when he heard the shots. Moments later the Packard had swept past him, men still clinging to its sides. He got a good look at the plates and—elbowing his way through the mass of people flocking to the hotel entrance—found Patrolman Thomas Brady beginning to take statements. Several members of the crowd were shouting out versions of the license plate—all wrong. Eventually the singer caught Brady’s eye.

  “No,” he insisted. “41313 NY is the right number.”

  The policeman seized Gallagher by the shoulders, hustled him backward through the crowd, and pressed him up against the hotel wall. He did not seem grateful for the information. “You’re wanted as a material witness,” Brady snapped, summoning a colleague.

  The second policeman hurried Gallagher away to the Sixteenth Precinct building, where he was told to give his story to a harassed sergeant. The desk man wrote it down. “Name?” he asked, and Gallagher told him. “Address?”

  “I’ve already given it to the detective,” the singer protested. “I don’t want any notoriety.”

  At this the sergeant lost his temper. “He’s a witness. Lock him up,” he snarled to a patrolman, and the astonished Gallagher was hauled off to the cells.

  “They didn’t give me a chance to explain that I only wanted to help them,” he told a World man the next day. “By the way they treated me I began to think they thought I was the man who shot Rosenthal.”

  The singer’s escort fumbled with some keys, opened the door of an empty cell, and propelled him roughly into it. Gallagher slumped down on a wooden cot as the heavy door swung shut, and the authorities’ best hope of solving the Metropole shooting was left fuming behind bars.

  It did not take long for word of the murder to reach the better parts of town.

  Rhinelander Waldo was the first senior official to learn of Rosenthal’s demise; the telephone in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton rang at about 2:30 A.M. The commissioner responded to the news by barking out, “Ye Gods!” Then, assured by his assistants that the local precinct had things well under control, and deciding he would rather not disturb the irascible Mayor Gaynor in the middle of the night, Waldo went back to bed.

  At roughly the same time, Herbert Bayard Swope was bulldozing his way into the Sixteenth Precinct building on West Forty-seventh Street. Like most newspapermen, Swope was a confirmed cynic, particularly when it came to the police. He knew that Rosenthal was far from popular with the NYPD, especially now, and especially among senior officers, who resented the allegations he had leveled against three of their number in the press. The World man looked on in growing anger at the chaos enveloping the station house; he was astonished to hear so many different versions of the license plate bandied about, and he found the desk policeman’s treatment of Charles Gallagher still more of a concern. In Swope’s opinion the cops were doing their best to lose the Packard’s number; if they were left to their own devices for much longer, the whole investigation might easily be compromised. There was only one thing he could do. The reporter pushed his way to a telephone and placed a call to DA Whitman.

  Whitman was fast asleep in his apartment on East Twenty-sixth Street when the insistent ringing of the phone jerked him awake. He stumbled out of bed and picked up the receiver. At the other end of the line, shouting to make himself heard above the hubbub of the station, Swope rattled off a hurried summary of events at the Metropole, then told the district attorney that he really ought to get over to the Sixteenth Precinct right away. Whitman demurred. Surely, he grumbled, this could wait until morning.

  “No. You’ve got to come right now,” Swope said.

  “But I’m in bed. I’ve got my pajamas on,” the DA wailed. In the end Swope was forced to hail a taxi, drive to Whitman’s home, and virtually drag him into his clothes. The two men then went down to the street, got back into the cab, and headed for West Forty-seventh Street.

  Thanks to Swope’s intervention, the district attorney arrived at the Sixteenth Precinct not long after 3:00 A.M. He went straight to a vacant office and sat down at the desk. As he did so, the phone rang. This time the caller was the precinct captain, William Day, one of the men accused by Rosenthal of graft. Someone had finally told Day that the most sensational murder in years had been committed on his doorstep, and the captain was telephoning to find out whether it was really necessary for him to come all the way back into town from his home in Brooklyn to take charge. Having had his own sleep rudely disturbed, Whitman was in no mood to be merciful. Yes, he told the captain, ice in his voice, it certainly was. For good measure the district attorney had Day’s boss, Inspector Edward Hughes, routed out of bed as well. Then he settled down to try to find out what was going on.

  Whitman’s first discovery was Gallagher. Hearing from Swope and several other newsmen that a vital witness had been detained, he
had the angry singer brought up from the cells. It took the DA several minutes and more than one apology to calm Gallagher down and get his story, but when he did, he realized the number matched the details given by another witness by the name of Thomas Coupe, a desk clerk at the Elks’ Club across the street from the Metropole. It had been Coupe who had leaped into the path of Billy File’s taxi shouting out the details of the murder car; like Gallagher, he had the number right. The vital lead was passed on to a bleary-eyed Inspector Hughes as he entered the station house. Hughes hastened off to check the details in a register.

  In the midst of this confusion, no one had thought to tell Lillian Rosenthal of her husband’s death. The news was eventually broken by a reporter from the American who arrived outside Herman’s apartment on West Forty-fifth Street shortly before three in the morning. The house was dark, and he had trouble gaining admittance; the patrolman still stationed inside was suspicious, thinking this was another of Rosenthal’s ruses to lure the police out of his home. But at length the door opened and a disheveled Mrs. Rosenthal appeared. When the reporter told her what had occurred, she collapsed in hysterics.

  “I had a premonition that something terrible was going to happen,” she sobbed to her visitor. “When Herman left home I felt certain all was not right, and I told him so. He just laughed—he always laughed. He had been warned so many times, and it’s true I’ve told him so frequently that I feared for something, that he—well, he just went.” When she had recovered herself somewhat, Mrs. Rosenthal asked the newspaperman to take her to the Metropole. She threw what the reporter thought looked like an “automobile duster” over her bulky frame and slipped into some shoes. But the second she stepped out onto the pavement, she collapsed again. By the time the American’s man had calmed her and gotten her down to the hotel, Herman’s body was long gone and there was little left to see.