Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  Charles Becker, meanwhile, was still wide awake. He had attended the fights at Madison Square Garden earlier that evening, had a drink at a hotel, and then given several friends lifts home in Colonel Sternberger’s touring car—passing only a block from the Metropole as he did so—before returning to his own apartment off 165th Street at 2:00 A.M. Helen was lying in bed waiting for him. She got up to make her husband a roast beef sandwich; Becker ate it slowly. He had just finished when a telephone in the apartment rang. He and his wife exchanged glances; the number was private and unlisted.

  Mrs. Becker picked up the phone and handed the receiver to her husband. The caller was Fred Hawley, Becker’s reporter friend from the evening Sun.

  “Charley, have you heard the news?” asked Hawley.

  “What news?” Becker replied.

  Hawley told him. Becker seemed incredulous, asking the reporter if he was drunk. “No, Charley, listen to me,” Hawley begged. “Herman Rosenthal has been killed. I am working on the story and want a statement from you. What do you know about it?”

  There was a brief pause before Becker’s voice came back down the line. “I don’t know anything about the murder,” he said, speaking with care. “But I do know a lot of things about Rosenthal. I am mighty sorry he has been killed because I had the goods on him and was about to show him up for keeps.”

  Hawley scribbled in his notebook. “I think you ought to come down,” he finished. “I think you ought to get on the job.”

  Becker talked over Hawley’s suggestion with his wife. “I didn’t know what to do,” he admitted later. “I told Hawley if I come downtown people may think that I have come down to gloat over the death of a man who has attacked me. If I don’t come down, the newspapers will say that when told about Rosenthal’s death I evinced no interest or emotion.” In the end curiosity got the better of the lieutenant and he decided to go. It took him until three-thirty to get to the subway station at Times Square; by then the street outside the Metropole was quiet again, and he headed for West Forty-seventh Street instead. He arrived at the precinct house shortly before 4:00 A.M, just as a large, slate-colored touring car drew up outside. It was the missing Packard taxi. Several policemen jumped down, flung open a passenger door, and dragged a stocky man with dark, wavy hair into the station. The prisoner was Louis Libby; he looked very apprehensive.

  A cordon of patrolmen held back the knot of reporters gathering outside the Sixteenth Precinct. Becker, still wearing his civilian clothes, brushed past them and hastened up the steps in Libby’s wake. The first room that he came to was Captain Day’s office, which was crowded with policemen and officials. The lieutenant was about to enter when he noticed Inspector Hughes raising a hand to wave him off. Becker backed out, startled, and as he did so, he glanced down at the figure sitting in the captain’s chair. The eyes that met his were not Day’s. They belonged to District Attorney Whitman.

  The police had traced the Packard easily enough. The registration details supplied by Gallagher and Coupe led them downtown to a garage on the north side of Washington Square, where Acting Captain Arthur Gloster found a gaggle of mechanics cleaning cars. Accosting one of them, Gloster demanded to be shown around. The second or third vehicle he came across was Libby’s Packard, which had been reversed into its parking space. Its plate, 41313 NY, was clearly visible.

  “When did this come in?” Gloster asked the garage hands.

  “Twelve o’clock. It has been down to Coney Island,” one of them replied. The policeman reached out a hand and ran it across the Packard’s hood. It was still hot to the touch.

  “Keeps warm a long time, doesn’t it?” Gloster observed with a grim smile.

  The garage doors were all secured, and several patrolmen set off to find the taxi’s owner. They traced Libby and his partner Shapiro to a boardinghouse on Stuyvesant Place and hauled both men out of bed. By the time they got back to Washington Square, Gloster had gotten the mechanics talking. One of them admitted that Libby had returned the taxi to the garage shortly after two-fifteen. When he did so, the man added, he had told them to spin the Coney Island story to anyone who asked. Gloster had heard enough. He bundled the chauffeur and his partner into the murder car and headed for the Sixteenth Precinct.

  Lieutenant Becker hung around inside the station house for nearly half an hour after Libby was brought in. At one point, when he caught Whitman’s eye, he told the DA he wanted to go into the station’s makeshift morgue to view Rosenthal’s corpse. Whitman—so he said later—at once suspected that the lieutenant was planning to plant evidence of some sort in a pocket. “Never you mind going near it,” he snapped back. “I’ve been all over that body.” Defeated, Becker retreated to the pavement outside the precinct building, where he slouched against an iron railing trading theories with waiting newsmen. Most of the reporters thought that rival gamblers had arranged the murder, but the lieutenant disagreed. “I’ll lay you five to one it was some of Spanish Louis’s gang,” he said.

  At about 4:30 A.M., Becker felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned; it was Inspector Hughes.

  “Have you seen the body yet?” Hughes asked.

  “No,” Becker replied.

  “We’ll get a look at it,” Hughes said, and he led Becker into the station house’s yard. The two men peered through a window into the back room where the corpse was lying. It was still covered in blood. “Whoever done him, done him good,” Hughes muttered. He and Becker then walked together back inside the precinct building, where they found a highly unorthodox lineup under way. Libby, dressed in greasy overalls and his chauffeur’s cap, was standing in the middle of a row of plainclothes officers, all of whom were wearing suits. Unsurprisingly, Thomas Coupe, the Elks’ Club clerk, had no trouble picking him out.

  “That’s him,” Coupe declared. The clerk then gave a statement, positively identifying the chauffeur as the man who had killed Rosenthal. Libby, he added, had not been alone in the touring car but had fired all the shots.

  Coupe’s deposition crowned a satisfactory night’s work for the police. At dawn the DA went out onto the front steps of the precinct house and gave the waiting reporters a full statement. Coupe, Whitman said, had made a firm identification and could describe the murder and the scene in detail. “He will make a splendid witness,” the district attorney added. Then he ducked back into the station to continue his investigation.

  In the course of the next day, things returned slowly to normal in the Sixteenth Precinct. Whitman relinquished control of the station house shortly after breakfast, returning to his usual office in the Criminal Courts Building and leaving Day and his men to get on with the tedious job of typing up statements and collating evidence. One of their first tasks was to inventory Rosenthal’s possessions and move the body to the morgue at Bellevue Hospital. The contents of the dead man’s pockets proved to consist of some keys, his handkerchief, and a little over $85 in cash. Herman had not been armed and had told friends he would never carry a gun, insisting, “If they are going to get me, they will get me.”

  Shortly after Whitman’s departure, Rhinelander Waldo appeared to give his own brief statement to the press. The murder of underworld figures was not uncommon in New York, and incidents of this sort did not usually attract attention; at least six similar crimes were committed in July 1912—two on the same day that Rosenthal was shot—and none received more than a few weary lines of coverage in the press.*42 But the death of such a prominent informant, just hours before he was scheduled to give evidence of spectacular police corruption, was no ordinary affair, and Rosenthal’s murder was the lead story in every daily paper in the city. Waldo knew that he and his men would be expected to solve the crime and that failure to bring the investigation to a successful conclusion would badly damage his career. Few were surprised when the commissioner announced that the full resources of his department would be thrown into tracing Herman’s killers.

  Waldo’s determination to bring somebody to justice for the Metropole shooting was only inc
reased by the knowledge that many New Yorkers suspected the police themselves of arranging the affair. The late edition of Swope’s World reported that the NYPD had been reduced to “a state of terror” for fear that Rosenthal’s death would be traced to its doors. The same paper openly speculated that the gambler’s enemies on the force had organized the shooting and expressed surprise that Becker himself had yet to be suspended from duty and was apparently not even a suspect.

  So far as Inspector Hughes and the men responsible for investigating the murder were concerned, however, the matter was not quite so clear-cut. Their only real leads were still Libby and Shapiro, and the two chauffeurs were refusing to say much about the events of the previous night. Most of the morning was devoted to questioning the pair, but progress remained slow.

  To the newspapermen still clustered outside the station house, this was hardly surprising. Experienced correspondents who had been inside the building reported that Hughes’s handling of his prisoners had been extremely peculiar. The two suspects had been let out of their cells, and reporters from several papers were shocked to find them standing in a corridor unsupervised, deep in conversation. Even when Libby and Shapiro were brought up to the interview room, they were interrogated with unusual restraint. When Aaron Levy—a lawyer with long experience of defending East Side “characters” who had agreed to represent both prisoners—arrived at the Sixteenth Precinct late in the afternoon, he was startled to discover that neither of his clients had been beaten up. “I was certainly surprised to find both men sound as a dollar when I first saw them,” Levy confessed to the waiting members of the press. “Usually men who are picked up for a cowardly murder are given such a third degree that they are not very presentable in court twenty-four hours afterwards. But these two boys were looking fine.”

  In fact—though the reporters did not know it—Hughes had every reason to be cautious. By the middle of the afternoon, he had discovered that Libby had a solid alibi; the chauffeur had spent the previous evening in his room, and no fewer than five of his fellow lodgers came forward to confirm that they had seen him there. And, to complicate matters further, lawyer Levy decided that both his clients would give their statements not to Hughes but straight to the DA. This was clever thinking; no policeman was going to take too many liberties with Libby and Shapiro under such circumstances, at least not while the memory of Gallagher was so fresh in their minds.

  By the end of a long day of questioning, then, Hughes had coaxed no more than a few scraps of information from his suspects. Libby readily admitted that he had known Rosenthal slightly; both men had once been members of the Hesper Club. He agreed that Jack Zelig was one of his best customers. But he denied all knowledge of the murder and said that he had no idea who the Packard’s passengers had been. Shapiro, meanwhile, had confessed to driving to the Metropole. Hughes guessed, given the history of the car, that he must have known that his customers were gangsters. But there was no way of proving it, and the chauffeur refuted that charge indignantly. He had been as shocked as anyone, he said, when Rosenthal was shot. Shapiro even claimed not to have recognized his passengers, adding that when he had been slow pulling away in the aftermath of the murder, one of them had pistol-whipped him into driving faster—an odd thing to do to a trusted associate. An ugly bruise along the hairline on the driver’s scalp seemed to support this claim.

  It was only at the end of a frustrating afternoon that the police finally obtained the information they really needed: the name of the man who had phoned to book the taxi to the Metropole. The caller, they were told, was Bald Jack Rose. “The car,” lawyer Levy confided to reporters after talking with his clients, “was hired from the Café Boulevard stand by telephone. The man making the call said his name was ‘Jack,’ and the [operator], who had rented the car many times to Rose, claimed he recognized the voice.”

  It was a vital breakthrough. If the police could now track down Jack Rose, he could lead them to the gunmen in the Packard; in all likelihood he also knew who had hired the men and why. But Rose was a known stool pigeon of Becker’s, and the new information was important for another reason: It promised to link the gambler’s employer, Becker, to the crime.

  In 1912 leads of this sort rarely remained unpublished for long, and by evening most of New York’s dailies had been tipped off about Rose. Only a handful chose to publicize the story, which was still uncorroborated at this point. The World, predictably, was one of those that did.

  Swope’s paper had no doubt what Rose’s involvement meant. “Herman Rosenthal,” it proclaimed in ringing tones next morning,

  was murdered in cold blood by the System.

  The System is the partnership between the police of New York City and the criminals of New York City.

  The System murdered Herman Rosenthal because he threatened to expose it and had begun to expose it…. It murdered him because he came to the World office Saturday night and made affidavit as to the System’s activities. It murdered him because he had declared that he would submit his evidence to the press of New York and make public the criminal profits that the police derive from the protection of lawbreakers. It murdered him in a desperate effort to save itself from destruction.

  It was left to District Attorney Whitman to add the coda that the World merely implied. The DA had spent the day inspecting the murder scene and trying to discover why the men on patrol near the Metropole had not done more to catch the fleeing gunmen; he did not return to his apartment until three on the morning of July 17, twenty-four hours after he had been hustled out of bed by Swope. But when he did so, the newsmen were still waiting for him.

  Several reporters cornered Whitman in the lobby of the building and pressed him for a statement. They wanted to know more about Libby and Shapiro, naturally. But they also wanted to hear the DA’s theories about the motive for the murder.

  Whitman had by now reached some firm conclusions on the subject. He professed himself astonished that the police on duty in Satan’s Circus had managed to obtain half a dozen different numbers for the murder car—“all of them wrong”—and said that he believed “there was much police interest and activity behind the slaying of Rosenthal.”

  “I accuse the Police Department of New York,” the DA added in conclusion,

  through certain members of it, with having murdered Herman Rosenthal. Either directly or indirectly, it was because of them that he was slain in cold blood with never a chance for his life.

  I have the necessary proof that there were five policemen there, two were within 100 feet of it, one was within 40 feet at the time the crime was committed,*43 and not one of them attempted to do anything that would naturally be done by the police under the circumstances…. Five men were able to shoot to pieces the head of a Grand Jury witness and escape without being even seriously inconvenienced…. The police permitted this murder and deliberately allowed the murderers to escape.

  Whitman did not add that Charles Becker was one of the members of the force to whom he was referring, but he might as well have. By the early hours of July 17, the lieutenant was already the DA’s leading suspect.

  CHAPTER 8

  RED QUEEN

  IT MAY HAVE SEEMED blindingly obvious to Charles Whitman that Becker and the New York cops had ordered Herman’s murder, but others were not so sure. Rosenthal had had so many enemies that even his fellow gamblers were not entirely sure how many men had wished him dead. When Horace Green of the Evening Post gained access to Rosenthal’s home on the night before the funeral, posing as an acquaintance, he was struck by the morbid suspicion displayed by even Herman’s closest friends. “The murderers had not yet been caught,” Green wrote, “[and] it was common knowledge that the criminals lurked in the neighborhood, and that, in order to avoid suspicion, they would appear among the chief mourners. Therefore, each eye was turned against its neighbor, and each man, as he passed you, asked the silent question: ‘Did you shoot Herman Rosenthal?’”

  The dead man’s body lay in an open casket, a
tribute to the undertaker’s craft. Lillian Rosenthal, looking fatter than ever in a billowing crepe gown, had begged Sam Paul and Bridgey Webber to meet the funeral expenses, and her husband’s old rivals had obliged. But neither man attended Rosenthal’s interment, on a stuffy afternoon two days after he was killed, and only a few of Herman’s friends cared to be seen in the cortege. The funeral director’s men were pressed into service as pallbearers, and no more than a handful of relatives followed the coffin to the cemetery. There were some flowers but, conspicuously, no cards. “Herman Rosenthal a live gambler with a bank roll and a generous hand was a hero,” Swope explained in the World. “Herman Rosenthal a murdered ‘squealer’ was a thing to be shunned.”

  None of these considerations, naturally, prevented thousands of curious New Yorkers from flocking to West Forty-fifth Street at the time appointed for the funeral. So dense were the crowds outside the Rosenthal apartment that Viña Delmar and her father, over from Brooklyn to pay their respects, found it impossible to get within sight of its front door. “Traffic was blocked from Fifth Avenue to Broadway,” the girl recalled.

  People stood on roofs, climbed poles, and leaned from every available window to see Herman’s coffin carried from No. 104. Thousands filled the streets, perspiring and struggling to draw a step nearer to the waiting hearse. Mounted policemen vainly attempted to disperse the crowds. They backed horses into groups where brawls had suddenly exploded. They scooped fainting women out of the mob. They rescued lost children and picked up a man who had died from a heart attack. They snarled and barked and, finally, by threatening mass arrests, they cleared a passage through which Herman could be taken away forever from Forty-fifth Street.