Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  According to Rose’s account, the gambler could not believe at first that Becker meant it:

  I said do you mean you want Zelig’s friends to go…and threaten him that they will beat him up? why no he said. I want him murdered shot, his throat cut, any way that will take him off the earth. he went further he said if anybody will Murder Rosenthal nothing can happen to them. he would take care of that. and if these men down town don’t accept the job tell them that not one of them will be left on my roundups…. I will frame every one of them up and send them up the river for carrying concealed weapons.

  Of course, the gambler added, “all this [occurred] while I was only thinking of my position the fear of the vengeance of the crowd who…were accusing me of Jobbing Zelig.” Rose, in short, felt he had no choice but to obey the lieutenant, but he had never met Zelig and had no experience of procuring murder. Instead he had gone to see his friends Vallon and Webber and begged them to help; through them, he had been put in touch with Whitey Lewis and Lefty Louie. Bald Jack had supplied some money in order to get Zelig bailed, and the gangster’s followers, in return, had agreed to murder Rosenthal.

  There was plenty more to Rose’s deposition—Becker, the stool pigeon wrote, had cunningly arranged matters so that the murder would be written off as a dispute among gangsters—but the lasting impression left by Bald Jack’s account was of a policeman so consumed by his own importance that he had believed himself invulnerable. “He said if [Rosenthal] only could get croaked that night how lovely everything would be…don’t worry no harm will come to anyone…he said if I saw the squealing _____ I would of liked to take my knife out and cut a piece of his tongue out and hang it on the Times Building as a warning to possible future squealers.”

  Even after the shooting, Rose explained, the lieutenant had continued to assure him all was well: “I kept getting messages from Becker…advising me to sit tight and not worry as he was looking after everything including my family.” But “I was sorely troubled and the talks I had with my [attorney] convinced me that I ought to tell all…and Vallon and Webber were only anxious to join in and tell all as we realized we were tools and were going to be made the scapegoats.”

  Bald Jack’s lengthy confession was, thus, hugely incriminating—perhaps sufficient in itself, if the gambler was actually believed, to secure Becker’s conviction on a charge of conspiracy to murder. But District Attorney Whitman faced one all-but-insuperable problem in permitting Rose, Webber, and Vallon to tell their story on the stand. New York law clearly stated that the evidence of criminals was not admissible as evidence where it concerned events in which the witnesses themselves had been involved. There was clearly every reason why such a provision should exist; without it, any group of crooks might conspire to place the blame for a crime upon some hapless colleague. But Whitman knew he had no chance of prosecuting Becker, let alone of pressuring the lieutenant into betraying “the men higher up,” unless he could produce an independent witness—a man with no apparent involvement in the Rosenthal affair—willing and able to corroborate what the three prisoners were saying.

  As things turned out, the solution to the DA’s problem was Sam Schepps. The rotund and bespectacled “fake jewelry man,” a friend of Webber’s and sometime “lobbygow”*48 to Rose, whom chauffeur Shapiro had identified as one of the passengers in the fatal Packard taxi, had fled town soon after the murder—on the advice, it would emerge, of Bald Jack’s lawyer. That meant he had not been a party to any of the negotiations entered into by Whitman’s trio of gamblers. Just as conveniently, Schepps was picked up, on August 10, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, as Whitman was beginning the tricky process of piecing together his case. The fugitive had called in at the local post office to mail a letter, unaware that the postmaster, Fred Johnson, was also a United States deputy marshal with a keen eye for famous faces. Schepps’s photograph had been emblazoned across half the papers in the country when it was announced he was wanted for questioning, and Johnson had harbored doubts about the stranger in his town for days. When the arrest was made, the marshal had his prisoner searched and quickly discovered proof that he had indeed found Schepps. Even more intriguingly, the arrested man was carrying a letter from Jack Rose, and the envelope he had brought with him to post contained the lobbygow’s response.

  Bald Jack’s missive was a short note begging Schepps for help. “Dear Sam,” the letter began, “I don’t know what you have heard or read, but it has got down to the stage where the electric chair stares us in the face.” The gambler went on to explain the negotiations he had conducted with the district attorney and swore that he had extracted Whitman’s promise that the same guarantees of immunity would be extended to Schepps. “My advice to you is to let me send a representative of the district attorney to bring you here,” Rose finished. “This would prevent the police getting you and putting you through a third degree.” Schepps, for his part, appeared suspicious that Bald Jack’s letter was a trap: “Your letter followed to me and contents noted. All I can say is I am mighty sorry it has turned out this way for you, dear old pal…. What you asked of me I considered very carefully and looked at it from all sides, and find I am in very bad regardless of the leniency you say Mr. Whitman holds out for me. That you had a guilty knowledge of the facts before its perpetration is a fact from your confession. So why do you want me to corroborate a few lies[?]” Schepps had, in other words, been dubious as to the wisdom of surrendering, not least because he and his friend had had no chance to agree on a story: “I am willing [to come only if] you will expect me to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, or else to write word for word what you expect of me.”

  Now that Schepps was in custody, however, circumstances changed. Within hours of the arrest, the plump con man’s lawyer was closeted with Whitman in New York, agreeing to what were evidently favorable terms for his client’s full cooperation. “DON’T TALK TO ANY PERSON UNTIL YOU REACH NEW YORK AND SEE WHITMAN, WITH WHOM SATISFACTORY ARRANGEMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN YOUR BEHALF,” the attorney wired to Hot Springs. While Schepps waited for one of the district attorney’s staff to come and fetch him, he was detained not in jail but in the town’s plush Marquette Hotel, and when the first New York newsmen to reach the resort arrived, they found the man they had come to see relaxing in a nearby steam bath.

  To use Schepps as a corroborator, Whitman first needed to dispose of several inconvenient pieces of testimony linking his new witness to Rosenthal. Shapiro’s statement that Schepps had traveled with him in the “murder car” was one. Another was Rose’s unfortunate confession that he had handed his lobbygow the $1,000 required to secure the four gunmen’s services, and that Schepps, in turn, had passed the cash to Gyp the Blood (the fake jewelry man had been popularly referred to as “the murder paymaster” by the Manhattan papers after that). Once Schepps was back in New York City and had signed the papers agreeing to testify in exchange for the usual immunity, both witnesses changed their stories. Bald Jack said his earlier statement had been the result of “too hasty recollection.” In fact, he now remembered clearly, he himself had paid off Lefty Louie.

  Realizing how vital Schepps was to his case, Whitman left nothing at all to chance. The lobbygow was sent to join Webber, Vallon, and Rose in the cells, where—so Becker’s attorneys would allege—all four men were given ample time to talk through the case and align their evidence. The DA himself went down to Hot Springs to take depositions from any potential witnesses to whom Schepps had talked, a maneuver that had the effect of making it difficult for the defense to obtain useful testimony in the resort. And by the time the case was ready to go before a jury, Schepps had been maneuvered into a bizarre but legally imperative position. He was now a “nonaccomplice corroborator”: a man who just happened to have been present more or less throughout the planning of Herman’s murder but who had not overheard a word of the discussions taking place between Webber, Rose, and Vallon—not to mention Lieutenant Becker, of course. Yet (or so the district attorney would contend), this accom
plished con man had been too naïve to realize at the time what all the whispered conversations meant. Nor had he actually participated in the planning or aided in the commission of the crime.

  By the time that Schepps appeared in jail, his privileged status was attracting the envy of his friends and fellow prisoners. Whitman’s key witness had not been charged with the capital crime that the three gamblers in the cells had been indicted for—the worst offense logged against him was vagrancy—and had experienced none of the terror that Vallon, Rose, and Webber had felt when they suspected they were facing execution. Schepps, moreover, received a weekly “salary” from Whitman, and—according to one journalist, who saw the correspondence—was permitted to send out to a store on Fifth Avenue for luxuries including “an eiderdown, two feather pillows, a large rug, two folding chairs, and six pairs of white silk socks at $2.50 a pair.” When this extravagance became known, the “murder paymaster” acquired a new nickname. Schepps was now “the Beau Brummel of vagrants,” a man whose “faultlessly cut clothes of a modish pattern” put even the well-dressed Jack Rose in the shade.

  “It’s not fair,” Webber moaned, according to the American. “How come you get the special privileges?”

  “That’s because you aren’t the corroborator. I got pulled in last and got to be the corroborator,” said Schepps.

  “I wish I’d of been pulled in last. Then I could of been the corroborator,” Bridgey sighed.

  In truth, none of Whitman’s witnesses had much cause for complaint. While Charles Becker languished in his narrow cell and Zelig and his gunmen hid out in their various apartments, farmhouses, and hired rooms, Webber, Vallon, Rose, and Schepps were living rather more comfortably. The gamblers, having successfully persuaded the DA that their fear of retribution was genuine, had been sent not to the dank and depressing Tombs but to the smaller, much more modern West Side Prison, a building up on Fifty-third Street that soon became known to the press as “Whitman’s Ritz.” They spent most of their time out of their cells and were allowed to play cards, organize athletic contests among themselves, and receive a succession of laundrymen and tailors who combined to ensure that the gamblers remained expansively well dressed. Spurning the ordinary prison fare, the men ordered in their meals from Delmonico’s and other fancy restaurants.

  Like Becker, the gamblers and their friend Schepps were also permitted visits from their wives. The amenities in the West Side Prison were evidently superior to those in the Tombs, however, for early in August, Bridgey’s wife, Pearl Webber, was able to throw a party in the jail. When Becker’s lawyer, Hart, got to hear of this, he was nearly apoplectic, sarcastically suggesting to one newspaper reporter that the four witnesses were living the lives of emperors: “All the delicacies of the season make up their repast. Chiropodists are furnished to treat their feet and manicurists to cut and highly polish their fingernails. Tutors are provided to instruct them in the modern classics. American Beauty roses adorn their cells each day.”

  The advantages enjoyed by Whitman’s witnesses were certainly not limited to their superior accommodation. The three gamblers and their associate also enjoyed first-rate representation. James L. Sullivan acted as attorney for Rose and Vallon, and the man who had cannily bundled Sam Schepps out of town was known to have excellent contacts at Tammany Hall. Schepps himself was represented by the equally well-connected Bernard Sandler. Bridgey Webber, however, trumped his companions by securing the services of Max Steuer, a renowned advocate, famous for his modest demeanor and undemonstrative style, who was (the New York Times observed) “called by some the greatest criminal lawyer of his times.” Steuer (who, oddly, had been quoted in several newspapers to the effect that he would never get involved in the Rosenthal affair) was best known for being Big Tim Sullivan’s attorney. He accepted $10,000, in cash, as a retainer from Bridgey’s wife.

  Charles Becker’s advocates were not in Steuer’s league. John Hart, who had been the lieutenant’s lawyer for several years, was a former assistant in the district attorney’s office of no special distinction. He and Becker realized that they needed to bring in someone with a higher profile—not to mention more experience with murder trials—but the two men struggled to find a man prepared to take the case. Hart’s first suggestion was that Becker hire his old boss, William Travers Jerome, and there can be little doubt that the former DA would have made a formidable adversary for Whitman. Unfortunately for Becker, however, Jerome refused to take the case unless his client made a clean breast of his grafting. This the policeman would not do—in part, it seems, because he feared a jury would believe almost anything of a man who had confessed to enriching himself from vice and in part because he still held out the hope that he could simply go back to his old job in the event of an acquittal.

  The next lawyer to be suggested was Martin Littleton, a stocky genius with “a kind of magic in his language,” but Littleton had been Max Schmittberger’s attorney and had faced off against Becker in the police trials of 1906. He declined to get involved. In the end, Becker was forced to settle for his third choice: an old-style Tammany lawyer named John McIntyre, whose extensive experience of capital cases (he had been practicing for nearly forty years) was offset by a florid, windy style. It was widely supposed that McIntyre had been the choice of Helen Becker, an Irishwoman herself, and that Helen had been impressed by the attorney’s successful defense of two Fenian terrorists, tried in London years earlier for plotting to blow up the Houses of Parliament and with them Queen Victoria. If McIntyre could obtain an acquittal in London on a charge like that—the argument went—he might do equally as well for Becker.

  The Tammany man took the case early in August and with it a retainer of some $13,000. Exactly who had paid his fee remained a matter of speculation. There was a strong rumor that Tammany Hall itself had footed the bill, on the strict understanding that no mention would be made in court of Big Tim Sullivan or any other sachem who might or might not be living off the proceeds of Satan’s Circus vice, but not a shred of evidence of such a deal ever materialized. Given the rapidity with which the Beckers’ secret bank accounts were stripped of their assets at this time, it seems much more likely that Helen Becker paid McIntyre with the proceeds of her husband’s grafting.

  The remaining members of the defense team scarcely matched McIntyre in experience. Apart from Hart, who stayed on as an assistant counsel, Becker employed two lawyers in their twenties, Lloyd Stryker and Paul Whiteside. Stryker, in particular, would go on to a distinguished career. But in 1912, neither man had any real experience with murder trials, and both had been in private practice for less than three years. With little money available to pay the fees of other assistants, Becker found himself forced to depend heavily on his wife for unpaid legal aid.

  Had Helen Becker not existed, one eminent New York reporter noted, “it would have been impossible to invent her.” She was too perfect, with her simple clothes, modest demeanor, and unshakeable faith in her husband—“a character” (recalled Viña Delmar, whose mother was one of Helen’s most fervent admirers) “so unbelievably pure, courageous, and devoted that her equal had never been met outside the pages of a sentimental novel.” Newspapers, particularly the women’s pages, lauded Mrs. Becker even as they lined up to condemn her husband, and her popularity rose still further when it became known that—after seven years of marriage and at the age of thirty-eight—this delicate wisp of a woman was expecting her first child. “The fascinating thing about Mrs. Becker was that she had not been created by a lawyer, who hoped to soften public attitudes toward her husband,” Delmar thought. “Mrs. Becker was just naturally so saintly that one could only marvel…. She had chosen to teach children crippled in mind or body. She had systemized her life so that marketing, cooking and house cleaning were all capably managed without stealing time from her husband, her classroom, or her never-ending search for ways to improve the future of unfortunate children.”

  Fortunately for Helen, her pregnancy and her prior service qualified her for
a full year’s leave of absence from those pupils, which she immediately dedicated to helping with the case. She began by carrying messages from her husband to McIntyre, progressed to spending long nights alone working through piles of legal documents, and before long was making her own attempts to locate new witnesses. Small wonder that what impressed Viña Delmar most

  was Mrs. Becker’s present course of action, her gallant search for what she believed to be a hidden truth sufficiently powerful to free her husband…. This quiet, respectable girl had taken to walking the streets of the Times Square district after midnight, seeking out people who might be in possession of useful information. It was reported that she would smile shyly at a cab driver, a doorman, or a newspaper vender and say, “I’m Helen Becker. Can you help me? Is there something you know which you have not told? Or have you heard of someone whose silence is working against my husband?”

  Of course, not everyone believed in Mrs. Becker’s utter goodness even then, not when it emerged that—on the day after her husband’s arrest—she had set out for the commercial district armed with a bag full of bank books and had meticulously consolidated more than $18,000 of the couple’s tainted savings into a single, readily accessible, account. But no one who knew Helen doubted that she was the sort of woman any man would want as his wife, were he facing the possibility of execution. “New York in 1912,” Delmar pondered, looking back, “was no gentler than it is today, nor was it more perceptive. Few knew that they were facing a woman indomitable enough to try anything, intelligent enough to know there is self-forgiveness for everything except inaction.”