by Mike Dash
Thanks at least in part to Helen’s efforts, Charles Becker continued to hope for an acquittal as August shaded to September. It was still rare, after all, for any New York policeman to be convicted in a court of law, and lawyer McIntyre assured him that Whitman’s case was far from watertight in some respects. Even the DA had to admit that Becker did not know Jack Zelig and had never once set eyes on the four gunmen. McIntyre also expected to demolish Whitman’s central argument in court. The notion that a police officer might have wanted Herman Rosenthal dead was one thing, the Tammany attorney said, but the idea that the shooting was a case of murder by proxy, twice removed, was surely considerably less plausible. Becker seemed reassured. “They have no one to testify against us but criminals,” a fellow prisoner heard him tell one visitor in the Tombs. “No jury on earth is going to believe them.”
Becker would have been a good deal less optimistic had he known the lengths to which District Attorney Whitman was going to obtain a conviction. Aware, as any good lawyer should be, of the flaws in his own case, the DA had spent the last week of August and early September working hard behind the scenes to tip the scales of justice in his favor. First, he appointed Assistant District Attorney Frank Moss to help prosecute Becker; the bearded, pious Moss had huge experience of trying cases of police corruption dating back to his days as a junior counsel on the Lexow Committee of 1894. Next, Whitman nudged Justice John Goff, another veteran of the Lexow investigation, into launching a judicial inquiry into the apocryphal story that the police had found letters from Charles Becker on each of the arrested gunmen. He also approved, although he did not instigate, the creation of yet another municipal investigation into police corruption. The Committee to Investigate Police Graft—brainchild of a Republican alderman by the name of Henry Curran—began hearing evidence from a long parade of witnesses that August.
Little came of either Goff’s hearings or the Curran committee, and Goff eventually concluded that the rumored Becker letters did not actually exist. But the twin investigations added greatly to the clamor in New York that summer, and, by September, no fewer than five separate inquiries into police corruption were running in the city. Goff’s, Curran’s, and Whitman’s own grand jury hearings attracted most of the attention, but Mayor Gaynor had formed a special committee of his own, while a group of “concerned citizens,” meeting on August 12, had voted to fund their own private inquiry into the misdeeds of the police. This flurry of activity suited the district attorney perfectly. It would have been a brave New Yorker who insisted, in the weeks leading up to Becker’s trial, that there was nothing wrong with the city’s police.
Had Whitman confined himself solely to stoking up public opinion against the police, he would have done Charles Becker’s prospects a good deal of harm. As it was, the DA still had one more ace to play. In normal circumstances, the lieutenant would have been tried late that coming autumn in New York’s Court of General Sessions. But in the third week of August, Whitman went to see John Dix, the Governor of New York State, and persuaded him to transfer all the cases arising out of Rosenthal’s murder—including the Becker prosecution and the separate trial planned for the four gunmen—to the State Supreme Court of New York County. This had the effect of removing the lieutenant from the purview of the General Sessions judges, whom Whitman felt were lenient and unreliable. It also placed Becker under the jurisdiction of none other than Justice Goff.
There could scarcely have been a more ominous choice. Goff—cold-hearted, humorless, and so short as to appear stunted—had made his name two decades earlier exposing Clubber Williams and Inspector Byrnes, and nothing that had happened since had revised his low opinion of the police. By now living on a farm upstate, where he kept rare breeds of heron, he was a confirmed cop-hater, who had always taken considerable delight in persecuting corrupt officers. As a Supreme Court judge, he built a fearsome reputation for indulging what one of Becker’s lawyers termed “the most odious vice which is incident to human nature, a delight in misery merely as misery.” Goff was (in the opinion of Newman Levy, an attorney who played no part in the Rosenthal affair) “the cruelest, most sadistic judge we have had in New York this century.”
The judge’s dislike of the police was bad enough. Even more alarming, from Becker’s point of view, were the close ties he had built to Whitman’s office. Goff was an old colleague of Frank Moss—the two men had worked together for Dr. Parkhurst’s Society for the Suppression of Crime and then for the Lexow Committee—and knew the DA himself well enough to invite Whitman to the farm upstate; the pair spent the time talking over the issue of police corruption and, by Whitman’s own admission, “ironing out a few kinks in the Becker case” as well. There were many in New York’s legal community who felt that the judge should disbar himself from Becker’s trial. Goff, naturally, disagreed. The case, he ruled, would go ahead as planned.
Well, almost as planned. Whitman’s final maneuver, soon after Goff’s appointment, was to prevail upon the judge to bring Becker’s trial date sharply forward, to September 12—less than two months after Rosenthal’s death and only a week after the lieutenant was formally arraigned for murder. This, one reporter observed, gave the defense team “probably the shortest allotment of time in history for the preparation of a major criminal case,” and McIntyre was predictably outraged. He hurried before Goff, pleading that his preparations for the trial were not complete and pointing out that several hundred prisoners arraigned months earlier than his client were still awaiting trial. Becker, the Tammany man added, could not hope to get a fair hearing “in the midst of clamor and hysteria,” and while public opinion was being prejudiced with “diabolical and infamous lies.” Goff threw out the petition, and it was only by scrambling to obtain a hearing before a second Supreme Court justice that McIntyre eventually succeeded in obtaining a postponement. It was no more than a partial victory, though. Thanks to the DA’s maneuverings, Becker’s trial would still get underway disconcertingly quickly. Proceedings were now scheduled to commence on October 7, 1912.
Whitman and McIntyre both completed their preparations for the hearings early in October.
The district attorney’s case was relatively straightforward. Whitman would rely on his collection of minor gamblers and lowlifes to implicate Becker in the planning of Rosenthal’s murder. Jack Rose would be the prosecution’s most important witness; his testimony, Whitman hoped, would persuade the jurors that there had been a conspiracy to end Herman’s life and that the police lieutenant had led it. To do this, Rose would have to explain not only how the scheme was conceived, but also how and where the plans were laid. He would describe meetings between Becker and the gamblers at which the murder was discussed, and detail the manner in which the assassins themselves had been recruited and paid. Webber and Vallon—the DA planned—would back up Rose, and Schepps would corroborate the story.
John McIntyre, meanwhile, was in a far weaker position than the DA. The old Tammany advocate knew it would be hard to convince a jury that his client had played no part in the conspiracy to murder Rosenthal, if only on the general principle that it is notoriously difficult to prove a negative. Securing Becker an acquittal, moreover, meant surmounting two nearly insuperable obstacles. First the defense would have to refute the prepared statements of Jack Rose—no easy matter, when the gambler’s recollection of the dates and times required to plan a point-by-point defense remained conveniently vague. Then McIntyre and his team would have to persuade the court that Becker was a man of integrity and honor, incapable of ordering Herman’s death.
In this respect, the attorney’s task was rendered all but impossible by his client’s history of grafting. Jerome had been right about one thing: failure to make a clean breast of the corruption issue fatally hamstrung Becker’s case, not least because it made it virtually impossible for the lieutenant to testify in his own defense. The second Becker was under oath, McIntyre realized, Whitman would expose him as a criminal. Evidence of his corruption and his secret bank accounts
would all become admissible. And no jury was likely to believe that a man banking $40,000 a year or more from vice—twenty times his annual salary—was incapable of murder. Innocent or guilty, Charles Becker risked conviction on a capital charge because he was a grafter.
Soon there was only a week to go before the opening of the trial. Then six days, five days, four. The papers filled with talk of the tactics likely to be adopted by the prosecution and defense. Most newspapermen and the majority of ordinary New Yorkers, it seems safe to say, believed Becker to be guilty, although a good proportion of their number also guessed that he would somehow be acquitted—as policemen, in their city, mostly were. In Brooklyn, Viña Delmar’s family was split on the issue; the girl’s father was convinced Becker was guilty, her mother just as certain he was innocent.
There was the usual idle speculation regarding surprise witnesses. Whitman was known to have sent a man all the way to London to fetch back Thomas Coupe, the Elks’ Club clerk who had watched the Packard taxi flee the Metropole; perhaps he knew something vital and incriminating.*49 As for the defense, Becker had prevailed upon his old friend Bat Masterson to catch a train to Arkansas and take depositions there to undermine Sam Schepps.
The greatest mystery of all was Zelig. Details of the gangster’s testimony to the grand jury six weeks earlier had still not been released, heightening uncertainty as to exactly what the man might say if and when he came before the court. Lawyers for both sides announced that Zelig would appear for them. According to Whitman, he was planned to be “the principal witness for the state” the gangster, Swope heard,
would have testified that Rose and Vallon came to him several times, saying that Becker wanted Herman Rosenthal removed and asking him to provide the necessary gunmen. Zelig would not have admitted he did furnish the men, but his testimony concerning what Rose and Vallon told him would have been a strong and substantial corroboration of Rose’s confession.
According to McIntyre, however, this was nonsense. Why had Zelig not been subpoenaed by the DA, and perhaps jailed to prevent another flight, if his testimony was so vital? “The fact is that Zelig had been subpoenaed as a witness for the defense…to refute statements by Rose that Becker had requested Zelig to furnish the gunmen,” the old attorney said.
As things turned out, the thorny issue of the gangster’s loyalties would not be put to the test. Shortly after eight on the evening of October 5, not much more than a day before the lieutenant’s trial was scheduled to begin, Zelig was sitting at his usual table at Segal’s International Café on Second Avenue when the telephone rang. The caller was a woman the gangster knew, a manicurist who ran a salon a few blocks to the north. Probably Zelig had a relationship of some sort with her; in any event, she asked him to call at her apartment. Joking about the girl’s request with several of his friends, Zelig left the café and hopped on board a streetcar heading up Second Avenue. He found a seat toward the front of the carriage, alongside a right-hand window.
As the trolley rattled north, the gangster was too preoccupied to realize that he was being followed. The moment he had emerged from the International Café, a small-time crook by the name of “Red Phil” Davidson had darted from a nearby doorway and run after his streetcar, catching it as it slowed and leaping onto the running board. Clinging tightly to the outside of the carriage as it hurried along, Davidson edged forward until he was only a foot or two from Zelig’s seat. He then drew a .38 Smith Wesson from his pocket, placed the barrel of the gun behind the gangster’s right ear, and fired. Zelig slumped forward, bloody and dying, while Red Phil jumped down and fled in the confusion. As he hurried along Fourteenth Street, however, the assassin was spotted by a patrolling policeman and arrested.
Zelig’s body was taken to a nearby morgue. The contents of his pockets proved intriguing. They included four letters, heavily bloodstained, from the imprisoned gunmen, assuring their leader that they were doing well in prison, and a highly incriminating collection of papers relating to the Becker case. One was an “advertizing contract” signed by Libby and Shapiro, stipulating that Zelig would be paid $100 a month from the proceeds of their taxi business. Another scrap of paper listed the home address of a lieutenant of police, and two others the full details of a pair of witnesses to the shooting at the Metropole—just the sort of information that a man who wished to influence the outcome of a trial might need. One thing that wasn’t found during the search was the $500 in cash that the gangster had been handed as he left the International Café Zelig’s money, as was usual in cases of this sort, was almost certainly stolen by the police.
News of the gangster’s shooting broke within a few minutes of the murder and, the New York Times reported, “staggered the District Attorney as a physical blow might have done. He threw up his hands and exclaimed: ‘My God, what next? I don’t know what to do.’” Whitman, the paper added, had been warned only the previous day by Bald Jack Rose that “Zelig will never live to see the trial start. Watch. He’ll be the next one they get.” The World and other Manhattan dailies, meanwhile, rushed out extras to hullabaloo the murder. Second Avenue “was in uproar” when word of the attack came through.
Most of the talk, of course, concerned the motive for the shooting. Red Phil’s wife said that he had drunk heavily the previous night and seemed “highly excited” in the morning; there were many who felt this meant that he had planned the killing. Some theorized that Davidson had been acting under orders from the Jack Sirocco crowd, who saw the run-up to the Becker trial as the perfect moment to revenge themselves on Zelig without attracting much suspicion. Most, though—given the portentous timing of the shooting—took the view that Zelig had actually been killed to stop him from telling what he knew about the Rosenthal affair. Zelig, in this interpretation of events, had joined Herman Rosenthal as a victim of Lieutenant Becker’s ruthlessness, and suspicions that Davidson had been “put up to the job” hardened considerably when it was discovered that the gun he had used to kill his victim was a police-issue revolver.*50
Manhandled to the nearest station house, the killer himself was adamant that the murder had had nothing to do with the Becker case; Zelig had cheated him out of $400, he explained. But it did not take detectives long to discover that none of Red Phil’s acquaintances believed a word of this story; the idea that a lowlife such as Davidson—a pimp with a sideline in poisoning horses—had ever had so much money to his name was laughable, they said. In later statements, the killer changed his story and claimed that Zelig had blackjacked him the day before and stolen a mere $18, but even this tale was disputed. According to several East Siders who spoke to the press, Red Phil and his victim had fought when Davidson suggested Zelig was “a stool pigeon for Becker.” The police—publicly at least—insisted that the shooting was no more than “a private and personal matter,” the result of a dispute between criminals, and this was the line taken by the Manhattan press.
The mystery of Jack Zelig’s death was never properly resolved. Red Phil, tried for the killing, pleaded guilty and so avoided giving any evidence that might have offered clues as to his motive. He was rewarded with conviction on a charge of second-degree murder and released after serving just twelve years. As for Zelig himself, the gangster got a full-blown East Side funeral, “with 40 carriages of mourners” and a crowd supposedly 10,000 strong milling outside his apartment. He left a wife and son and little money, a reputation as the great protector of the Jewish quarter, and a considerable question mark over his true role in the Becker-Rosenthal affair.
“Jack Zelig,” detective Abe Shoenfeld wrote, in what amounted to a eulogy,
is as dead as a doornail. Men before him…who had been the leaders of so-called gangs were as pygmies compared to a giant. If they were to stand alongside of Zelig they would consider it an honor.
This man cleared the East side dance halls and academies of Italian pimps…. He cleared the East side of Italians who were wont to hold up stuss houses, and legitimate business places. He cleared the East side of
Italians who could be seen walking through the streets with Jewish girls—whom they were working into the business of prostitution. He has prevented more holdups and things of a similar nature, in his career than one thousand policemen…. He died as he lived [and] while his friends are sorry he was killed by one of his own race, they rejoice that he was not killed by an Italian.
As the thousands of mourners wound their way back from Zelig’s interment in Brooklyn, the newsmen assigned to cover events for their papers hurried off to file their stories. It was midafternoon on October 7, which meant there was ample time for those working for the morning titles to file reams of copy. And on any other Monday, a funeral such as Zelig’s would have received extensive coverage in the press.
On this day, though, a far bigger story was brewing in New York—one so big that the gangster’s funeral was thought worth no more than a paragraph or two. On the far side of the East River, in the Criminal Courts Building, the trial of Police Lieutenant Becker was getting under way.
CHAPTER 10
FIVE MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT
THE JURY GATHERED IN the courtroom leaned forward slightly as District Attorney Whitman rose to deliver his opening statement. “The murder of Herman Rosenthal,” the DA began, “was the most cunning and atrocious of any time and any country…. We are going to claim that the real murderer, the most desperate criminal of them all, was a cool, calculating, grafting police officer.” With this, Whitman gestured to the bulky figure sitting in the dock. Lieutenant Becker, who was wearing an ill-fitting dark gray suit that clung damply to him in the Indian-summer heat, did not return his gaze.
Judge Goff’s sweltering courtroom occupied part of the first floor of the same Criminal Courts Building, just in front of City Hall, where Becker had been arraigned. By the early autumn of 1912, the shoddy workmanship that had gone into the structure was plain for all to see; the external walls had sagged and buckled, and there was talk of condemning the courthouse once and for all. “It is,” wrote the lawyer Arthur Train,