by Mike Dash
From Dougherty’s perspective, though, things were not yet quite clear-cut. The prisoners all denied their guilt; Webber, the first to be detained, had been so certain he was not a suspect that he had asked the cab that brought him to headquarters to wait, since he would “be back in five minutes.” And, taken into court the next day, the gamblers maintained their silence. Bald Jack Rose’s main contribution to these initial hearings, the newsmen covering the case observed, was to turn up dressed in a “nifty” new suit: The procurer was “a symphony in brown,” Swope told his readers, “from his tie to his shoes, save that he wore a pink-striped shirt,” and Vallon informed the magistrate he had been “awfully drunk” on the night of the murder and could not remember much about it. Bridgey Webber devoted most of his efforts to intimidating Whitman’s witnesses. At least one man, a barber who had heard the shots outside the Metropole and reached the spot in time to identify the gambler, wilted under Webber’s baleful gaze and decided that he was no longer sure that it really had been Bridgey he had seen “running like hell” from the Metropole. “Didn’t you just tell me in that other room that you saw Webber?” demanded an astonished Whitman. “I—I think I did,” the man replied. “I am not sure about it…. Judge, I’m under oath, and I’m not sure now.” The DA had the witness charged with perjury.
Ultimately it was Shapiro who ended this impasse. Under increasing pressure from the district attorney’s men, who by July 25 were threatening to make him a scapegoat for the whole affair, the chauffeur at last made a detailed confession describing the events of the sixteenth. Shapiro’s new testimony was far from complete—he still had more sense than to implicate Zelig’s gunmen and claimed to have taken no active part in events whatsoever—but it was still enough to condemn the imprisoned gamblers.
“I picked up Rose and Sam Schepps,” his statement began,
and drove them back to Webber’s. I waited there about twenty-five minutes and was looking out of the corner of my eye when I saw Jack Rose come out of Webber’s place. With him were three men…. Then Rose came over to where I was and as they got in I noticed that Sam Schepps was one of them and Harry Vallon was the other. The third man I couldn’t make out at first because Rose kept him behind the others and held him back to whisper something in his ear. Then, when this fellow put his foot on the step, Rose patted him on the back and said, “Now make good,” or something like that.
I then started with my passengers toward the Metropole and as I turned into Forty-third Street I saw Jack Rose in the shadow on the north side of the street. Someone in the car said, “There’s Jack now,” and one of the others said, “Close your trap, you damn fool.”
I stopped along the south side of the street about one hundred feet east of the Metropole entrance. Vallon, Schepps and the third man got out of the car and Vallon told me not to move away. I felt that there was something going to happen, but I didn’t know what it was….
I was dozing when I heard the first shot. I had thought this was to be a “beating-up” party, but I realized it had turned to murder. There was nothing for me to do but start the car at once, which I did. The gunmen piled into the car and one of them ordered me to “beat it.”
Word of Shapiro’s revelations reached the imprisoned gamblers and their lawyers on July 25. The next day, a Friday, was spent in conference. Webber had become suddenly talkative, it emerged, and—hearing of this—the attorneys representing Bald Jack and Harry Vallon “advised their men to throw themselves on Mr. Whitman’s mercy.”
It seemed only a matter of time before all three confessed. There was still some doubt as to exactly what the prisoners would say, but even a casual reader of the daily papers realized that the DA was really interested in just one thing. Rose’s lawyer, for one, saw no harm in giving the waiting throng of newsmen a taste of his client’s evidence.
“Everyone knows,” the attorney smiled, “that the shadow of the police hangs over this crime.”
Becker’s position worsened further during the last days of July with the publication of a series of devastating disclosures concerning his income from grafting.
Both the DA’s office and the press had been searching for evidence that the lieutenant had been banking illicit payments for several weeks. It was—as most policemen and most lawyers knew—difficult to show that any officer had accepted bribes. Virtually all grafters were paid in cash, often via intermediaries, and took good care to keep no records that could possibly incriminate them. But over the years reformers had found ways of implying what could not be proved. Clubber Williams’s career had not survived the revelation that he was the proud owner of a steam yacht and an estate in Connecticut. Lieutenant Becker’s Achilles’ heel proved to be his new home in the Bronx.
Reporters had little difficulty in pinpointing the property. The house, noted the World, sprawled over no fewer than four substantial lots and was considerably larger and more elaborate than its neighbors. It rose three stories and—most incriminating of all, to the American’s reporter—included an empty garage. In 1912, as the newspaper observed, no ordinary lieutenant on a salary of $2,250 a year could reasonably have hoped to buy a car.
A few among the charitable and the naïve accepted the lieutenant’s hasty explanation that he and his wife had both saved hard for nineteen years to pay for the property—a response that owed much to the example set by Clubber Williams and his mysterious landholdings in Japan. But Becker and his wife had altogether less luck in answering their critics when Whitman began to uncover the details of their bank accounts, beginning with the news that Helen had paid in $3,000 in a single morning at one institution where that sum was the maximum customers were allowed to deposit in a month. A “flood of cash,” totaling nearly $50,000, was subsequently tracked to nearly a score of bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes. It was far more money than the Beckers could account for, although some (the lieutenant offered) had been borrowed from his brother, some represented savings set aside from Helen’s years of teaching night school, and a good proportion of the rest was cash moved, for no apparent reason, to and fro between accounts that the DA had inadvertently “miscounted.”
Over the coming months, Becker’s attempts to explain all this suspicious wealth would get considerably more elaborate. Windfalls from dead relatives would figure heavily. But few people, then or later, ever believed that his money had come from anywhere but the brothels and gambling houses of Satan’s Circus, and in consequence the policeman lost most of what little sympathy New Yorkers might have felt for him.
The exposure of Becker’s clandestine bank accounts was a severe setback for the couple—more serious, in some respects, than the allegation that he had ordered the death of Herman Rosenthal. A criminal’s story of a plan to murder another crook was one thing—the policeman, for one, shrugged off those charges as just the sort of behavior one might expect from self-confessed villains. But the exposure of Becker as a grafting cop was another matter altogether. The public found it easy to believe tales of police corruption, and before long, hostile reports of Becker’s dubious service with the Strong Arm Squads began to fill the newspapers. That was bad news for the lieutenant, but—more than that—it was also a serious concern to the real powers in the city. Tammany was terrified. With Whitman, a Republican, in the DA’s office, the cop-hating Gaynor at City Hall, and recollections of the Lexow hearings still fresh in many people’s minds, the last thing Boss Murphy could afford to sanction was another corruption scandal. When Whitman’s prisoners started talking, the sachems of Tammany suddenly found themselves as one with the gamblers of Satan’s Circus and the senior officers of the NYPD. Their most pressing concern became to deflect Whitman from pursuing his inquiries into their particular domains.
Under normal circumstances, Tammany looked after the police. Preserving corrupt cops from prosecution made sense: It kept embarrassing news out of the press, it guaranteed the loyalty of the men who gathered money for the Hall, and it minimized disruptions to the flow of graft.
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br /> There can be little doubt that Becker expected protection. It is scarcely plausible that the lieutenant had been able to extort tens of thousands of dollars from gambling houses with strong political connections without the approval of Tammany—or at least of Big Tim Sullivan. It follows that very large sums—at least half a million dollars,judging from the cash in Becker’s bank accounts, had been channeled upward from the lieutenant’s collections—sufficient, surely, for him to expect help at such a crucial juncture. And for several days after Rosenthal’s murder, it did seem that Becker might walk away from the affair unscathed. He received a visit from State Assemblyman Fitzgerald, a well-known ally of Big Tim’s, who told the press that Becker was obviously innocent. Waldo put out a statement declaring that he would not so much as suspend his onetime favorite without “real evidence”—which, the commissioner implied, was not likely to appear. Even William Gaynor, no friend to the police, observed that Herman’s statements were scarcely to be trusted. When, on July 18, Becker was summoned to spend half an hour at City Hall, the chief topic of his conversation with the mayor was the policeman’s regrettable willingness to meet Rosenthal at the Elks’ Club ball; the gambler’s murder was barely touched on. “Do not bend a single bit to clamor,” Gaynor now instructed Waldo, “and especially to clamor chiefly created by hired press agents and the gamblers with whom you are at war, and those corrupt newspapers which have been all along and are now at the service of gamblers.” It is scarcely surprising that when Becker met a gaggle of reporters the next day, he was “swaggering in his manner.” The lieutenant, one newsman added, “wore a smile constantly and appeared to take his predicament very lightly.”
In truth, however, Becker’s position was not so strong as he believed. To begin with, Tammany Hall was no longer the monolith that it had been when the policeman had begun his career. Then Tammany had still controlled not merely the city government and the police but the judiciary as well. Two decades later time and scandal had loosened the Hall’s grip on power, and Charles Murphy, its new boss, depended far less on the police for help than had his nineteenth-century predecessors. All this made it less likely that the Hall would come to the rescue of a corrupt policeman, no matter how valuable his services had been.
To make matters worse, Becker badly underestimated Whitman’s determination to drag him into the Rosenthal affair. The lieutenant seemed to have expected that the statements of “mere criminals”—no matter how damaging—would not be taken seriously by the DA or the press, and it seemed not to have occurred to him that the sworn depositions of several gamblers, not one, might be enough for Whitman to take action. And while Becker recognized that his adversary would seek to generate political capital from the case, he was taken aback by the speed with which the district attorney rounded up Herman’s enemies and contrived to get them talking.
Perhaps the biggest mistake that the policeman made, however, was to depend on Big Tim Sullivan. Becker’s faith in Tim’s ability to damp things down in Satan’s Circus was not unfounded; Sullivan had kept the peace for years, to the benefit of police, politicians, and gamblers alike. Despite his long friendship with Rosenthal, moreover, the Tammany man had nothing to gain by permitting the gambler’s murder to become a scandal. But—no doubt quite unknown to Becker, who lacked political connections and had met Big Tim in person only once—by the summer of 1912 the boss’s power was nearly gone, his health suddenly in terminal decline. Visitors to Sullivan’s headquarters at the Occidental Hotel were left to cool their heels in the bar, casting bored eyes over the famed erotic fresco on the ceiling; Tim was far too ill to see them.*45
Late that July—at the very time a fit and healthy Sullivan might have used his influence to see that Herman’s murder was swiftly tidied up—Tim passed the point of no return. He spent the last days of the month incapacitated by symptoms that included “bouts of manic depression, delusions of food poisoning, violent hallucinations and threats of suicide.” In August he was no better. And in September, soon after attending the funeral of his estranged wife, Sullivan suffered a complete nervous breakdown and was hurried out of town to be confined in a private sanatorium in Yonkers. He was only forty-nine years old, and even his enemies had expected him to rule over the vice district indefinitely. Now he was gone, and with his family in disarray, Mayor Gaynor indifferent, Rhinelander Waldo weak and ineffectual, and Tammany distracted by the looming squabble over the Sullivan legacy, no power in the city could stop District Attorney Whitman. Any attempt on the part of Becker’s superiors or the Tammany sachems who shared his graft to offer him protection risked giving the dangerously powerful DA an excuse to broaden his inquiry. Long before the end of July, rumors began to sweep along Fourteenth Street. If it would only shut up the DA, the whisper ran, the politicians planned “to let Becker take the brunt of things,” “to have him ‘take the splash,’ to ‘let him drop.’”
The signs were already there for those who wished to see them. A few days after the murder, Becker had been stripped of the command of his Strong Arm Squad and reassigned to a desk at headquarters. The squad itself was broken up; two-thirds of the policeman’s men were transferred to Dan Costigan’s command and the rest did mundane clerical tasks alongside their former chief. The Sun, which maintained a cozier relationship with Tammany Hall than did most of its rivals, took to reminding its readers of the identity of the major suspect in the case, running a panel headlined WHAT BECKER DID YESTERDAY. And a reporter who called to find the lieutenant closeted with his attorney noted that the easy smile was gone. Becker, the newsman told his readers, now had “stern lines in his face, and his manner was nervous.” “I am not going to make any statement whatever,” he scowled when the journalist knocked. “I am not going to say a single thing.” His lawyer hustled the man out of the room.
By now the New York press was scenting blood. Posses of reporters ambushed Becker on his daily journey to and from the office. Others combed through yellowing files of clippings to rake up scandals from his past. Swope—well informed as usual—was the first to pose awkward questions about the lieutenant’s dismal marital history, and when a rumor reached Newspaper Row that Becker had killed himself, a large pack of journalists hurried to Deputy Commissioner Dougherty’s office to get a comment and were disappointed to see the man himself come down the steps, decidedly alive. “Well, boys, I have committed suicide, as you can see,” the policeman shot sarcastically as he clattered past them, face set grim.
Becker clearly felt the pressure mounting. Soon after Rosenthal’s death he publicly proclaimed his willingness to testify before Whitman’s grand jury on police corruption—a decision that would have meant waiving his immunity from prosecution. Refusal to cooperate, Waldo had advised him, would be no different from confessing guilt. The dailies also got wind of Becker’s summons to another meeting with his superiors, and when the lieutenant emerged onto the street, he was instantly mobbed by reporters firing questions. Once again Becker brushed his interrogators angrily aside and stalked away, flashbulbs popping all around him. But (noted the Tribune’s man) on this occasion he at last lost his temper with the swarm of newsmen trailing him:
As he left City Hall, photographers followed, taking pictures of his back to the considerable amusement of passers-by. Every few steps, Becker would whirl on them in fury, snarling, “Arrest that man!” to no one in particular. We were reminded of nothing so much as the Red Queen, in Alice in Wonderland.
There was some temporary respite on July 22, when Becker received another permanent assignment, this one to an obscure precinct in a corner of the Bronx. His new station house was on Bathgate Avenue, near 177th Street, far enough from most reporters’ beats to keep them at arm’s length for a while. The locals were not too happy to have such a notorious character billeted on them—a few vocal community leaders protested that the posting was an insult to the borough—but Becker himself was probably happy enough to be away from his tormentors. He was assigned clerical duties once again (it was simply to
o much trouble to send him anywhere in public) and spent the next week engaged in “roundsman’s work,” sorting papers at a desk placed conveniently in full view of the precinct captain.
Being absent from headquarters brought problems of its own, of course. Becker was no longer in any position to hear of developments in the Rosenthal affair as they occurred, much less to know what might be going on in Whitman’s office. No doubt friends and colleagues on the force kept him informed as best they could. Yet the lieutenant had little option but to follow most events through the pages of the daily press, which continued its blanket coverage unabated into the last week of July.
On the whole, the news was bad. Deputy Police Commissioner Dougherty was now openly discussing the likelihood that Becker would be charged with murder, “smashing his fist down on the desk in front of him,” one paper said, to emphasize his point and voicing the opinion that “any farmer sitting under his own apple tree with a straw in his mouth” could see that the lieutenant had a lot to hide. Honest Dan Costigan was popping up before Whitman’s grand jury, complaining that Becker had deliberately ruined several of his carefully planned raids.*46 And William Shapiro’s memory of the events of July 16 was still improving day by day. The chauffeur now gave a vivid account of how Harry Vallon had leaped back into his cab after the shooting, brandishing a smoking revolver. Vallon, Shapiro added, had struck him over the head with the gun while ordering him to “step on it.”