Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  one of the gloomiest structures in the world…. Tier on tier it rises above a huge central rotunda, rimmed with dim mezzanines and corridors, and crowned by a glass roof encrusted with soot, through which filters a soiled and viscous light. The air is rancid with garlic, stale cigar smoke, sweat and the odor of the prisoners’ lunch. The corridors swarm with Negroes, Italians, blue-bloused Chinese, black-bearded rabbis, policemen, shyster lawyers and their runners, and politicians, big and little.

  Goff’s courtroom had seen many famous trials. Those with long memories recalled that it was the same one in which a captivating showgirl named Nan Patterson had been acquitted for the murder of her wealthy lover, a much older man who had (the girl successfully averred) committed suicide by shooting himself in the back while the couple was sequestered in a hansom cab. But the Becker case was something else entirely. The oldest New Yorker could scarcely remember a prosecution like it. It was “the trial of the century,” several newspapers suggested, and public interest was such that accounts of the evidence occupied the first, second, and third—and sometimes fourth and fifth—pages of every Manhattan daily for the duration of the proceedings. Nor was interest in the case confined to New York. The Becker case featured as prominently in virtually every American newspaper, large and small, and in most of those published in London and Paris, too.

  The proceedings got under way promptly at 1:00 P.M. on October 7. Becker had spent the morning discussing the case with a guard from the Tombs and taking an active part in a final pretrial conference with his lawyers. The principal topic of conversation was undoubtedly the best way to handle the selection of the jury. The lieutenant had definite views on the sorts of jurors who would offer him the best chance of acquittal: He wanted married men, preferably blue-eyed and tall. Married, because he wanted the jury to reflect on the enormous consequences a guilty verdict would have for Helen and her unborn child; blue-eyed because “blue-eyed men are the most intelligent” and tall because, as McIntyre explained, “Becker, as a big man, didn’t want to run the risk of entrusting his fate to a little man who might have a grudge against all six-footers.”

  These stipulations slowed the process of jury selection considerably, and so did the long list of questions Becker’s attorneys insisted on putting to each potential juror. Some were sensible and obvious—McIntyre asked every candidate if he was related to any member of the prosecution team or had a grudge against the police. Others were more revealing. Each man, when he stepped forward, was interrogated as to whether he had met Inspector Schmittberger. McIntyre also wanted to know if he was prepared to convict on the testimony of accomplices. Whitman’s oddest challenge, meanwhile, was to an apparently ordinary businessman who informed the court that he had been out of the country from mid-July until the beginning of September. When the potential juror admitted that he had not read a single word of newspaper coverage about the case, the DA stepped briskly forward and had the man ejected from the panel.

  With so many questions to ask, and so much at stake, the selection of the Becker jury took far longer than usual. At the DA’s request, a special “blue ribbon” panel, 250 strong and made up of well-educated jurors, had been assembled for the case. Two-thirds were automatically disqualified when they confessed that they had already made up their minds about the case; this number doubtless included many who simply did not relish deciding a case involving gangsters and powerful policemen. The remaining candidates were weeded out more slowly. After two full days of questioning, only eight jurors had been seated, and McIntyre had used all but a handful of the thirty peremptory challenges he was permitted. A further hundred prospective jurors had to be assembled, and the twelfth and final member of the panel was not seated until early on the fourth day of the trial.

  It is, to say the least, debatable whether the pains McIntyre took over the selection of the jury were justified. They certainly enraged Judge Goff, who had long possessed a reputation for being “willing to sacrifice almost any legal nicety to get proceedings over and done with.” Goff had canceled a planned holiday to take the case and made it clear early in the proceedings that he wanted the entire hearing over and done with in a maximum of two weeks—an astonishingly short time for a case of such importance. It would (as the judge himself observed) set a new speed record for a major murder trial. With almost a quarter of the available time already gone, Goff ordered the court into day and night sessions, a decision that meant proceedings dragging on well into the evening, sometimes as late as 11:00 P.M. The long sessions exhausted jurors and attorneys alike and made it harder for the men in the jury box to focus on the facts. To make matters worse, whenever McIntyre or one of Becker’s other attorneys dwelled on a piece of evidence or strove to hammer home an advantage, their attempts to create an effect would be interrupted by Goff’s urgings from the bench that they should “go along,” “get along,” that “time is too precious.”

  Late nights and long hours were not the only problems confronting Becker and his lawyers. Conditions inside the courtroom were thoroughly uncomfortable. The case had attracted so much attention that every one of the two hundred seats that could be crammed inside was filled, and overcrowding was exacerbated by the inclemently hot autumn weather. As temperatures inside the room rose into the high seventies, a handful of electric fans were brought in to help swirl the muggy air, but several of the jurors complained that they were having difficulty hearing testimony over the whirring of the blades. Goff had the fans turned off and, when the sounds of passing horses and roller-skating children drifting in from the busy street outside proved equally distracting, ordered all the windows sealed as well. Before long, everyone in his court was sweating and swiping at the lifeless air with court documents or newspapers. And as the case proceeded under its stifling blanket of humidity, Goff added one further refinement. “Have the shades drawn low,” the judge hissed in his characteristic thin whisper. “There is not enough gloom in this courtroom.”

  The character of Justice Goff loomed large over the proceedings from the start. The judge glared down from the dais at one end of the room, a martinet who reveled in his power over a one-room kingdom. The sheer force of his personality lent him considerable presence. “Upon the bench,” recalled Lloyd Stryker, one of Becker’s junior attorneys, “sat an old man with white hair and piercing, cold, blue eyes. A superficial glance might have given the impression of quiet kindliness and serene benignity. Some said that he resembled a figure in a stained-glass window, yet how mistaken and how tragic an allusion this was…. He had a cold heart and a sadistic joy in suffering. From his face the mask of benignity was soon laid aside, and as I gazed up at the bench, I felt like some four-footed denizen of the jungle that suddenly stares into the cold visage of a python.”

  From the perspective of those who encountered him in court, Goff’s principal attributes were a hair-trigger temper and an invincible sense of his own rightness. With the possible exception of Whitman, all the attorneys in the room were terrified of the judge’s snappish flares of irritation and unwillingness to tolerate the least hint of dissent. “That saintlike son of a bitch,” State Assemblyman Abraham Levy once called him, while a City Hall reporter recalled that “distinguished members of the bar, at the height of their careers, confessed to waking up in their beds in a cold sweat, having heard in nightmares the sound of that low, sibilant voice saying, ‘Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, guilty!’—a verdict he pronounced, it seemed to them, with joy.”

  Strangely for a man with such an awesome reputation, Goff was poorly qualified to be a judge and possessed at best a shaky grasp of legal technicalities. An Irish immigrant who had first arrived in the country as a child in the wake of the terrible famine that had struck his homeland during the 1840s, he had been forced to leave school at an early age in order to help provide for his family. Though Goff did later take night classes at Cooper Union, the celebrated public college in downtown New York, he remained more or less self-taught and never obtained any formal degree. Even the judg
e’s politely worded entry in the Dictionary of American Biography confesses that “he could never be described as a scholar” and “was not profoundly learned in the law.” Goff’s real talent, his partisans observed, was as an “uncanny prestidigitator”: a cunning manipulator of procedure who had a thorough understanding of human nature and rarely bothered with the legal niceties that hamstrung less bullheaded men.

  From the first day of the trial, Goff orchestrated the proceedings to suit himself. A publicity fiend who adored to see his name in print, the judge barred the general public from his court in order to increase the space allocated to reporters. Testimony dragged on for hours at a stretch, sometimes without breaks for lunch or dinner. The recesses that were granted were short in any case. “A sufferer from ulcers, Goff made do with a bowl of milk and crackers and a swig of Irish whiskey at mealtimes,” one reporter wrote, “and saw no reason to make allowances for others whose appetites were stronger than his own.” Fifteen minutes for lunch and a slightly longer break at suppertime were typical throughout the trial.

  In person Goff was tall, quiet, darting, and mercurial, and it quickly became clear to most observers that Becker’s choice of attorney had been a mistake. John McIntyre—florid, corpulent, and prolix—irked the judge intensely. Oddly enough, the two men shared nearly identical backgrounds; both were Irish, and both had supported revolutionary Fenian independence movements in their youth. But there the similarities ended, and McIntyre’s overwrought interjections soon began to fray Goff’s famously short temper. On only the second day of the trial, when the defense attorney protested one too many of the judge’s rulings,*51 Goff turned on McIntyre in fury and warned him that “the interruptions which have occurred may have exceeded the bounds of propriety.” If McIntyre persisted with his objections, the judge snarled, he would have him arrested and ejected from his court. After that exchange, Becker’s relatives and friends were not the only ones to feel that Goff displayed a heavy bias against the defense.

  With jury selection at an end, Charles Becker prepared carefully for his day in court. Wisely deciding to present his most serious and sober side to the twelve jurors, he entered the room at McIntyre’s left hand, looking almost scholarly with a small pair of pince-nez glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. The policeman had dressed entirely in black—even, the Sun noted,

  to the four-in-hand scarf worn in the low collar that exposed his full, muscular neck…He approached the railing in with long strides, throwing glances this way and that over the crowd. His glances found the person that he sought, his wife, who sat well forward. He smiled slightly, nodded just perceptibly, and passed on as she waved smilingly.

  The next time Becker rose to his feet it was to enter a formal plea of not guilty to the charge of murder, and the rest of the press corps at last had the opportunity to take a good look at the man they’d been writing about in so much detail for so long. New York newspapermen generally disliked and distrusted the police, and many of the reporters assigned to cover the trial were distinctly unimpressed by the big lieutenant’s presence. “The personality of Becker is not a pleasing one,” the man from the American observed.

  The defendant is powerful of physique, his heavy body topped by a bullet-like head. There is no hint of the finer things in life in his make-up. His hands are hairy, sinewy; his black hair has not a touch of gray in it. His large nose…reveals to the student of physiognomy the fact that arrogance and relentless pursuit of any object are the strongest features of his being. Charles Becker is steeped in the memory of the power that was his. His gaze is brilliant, sardonic, menacing. I am very glad that someone dear to me will not sit on that jury and hold the life of Charles Becker in his hands.

  With Becker’s plea recorded, Whitman rose to deliver his opening statement. Goff, meanwhile, seemed more preoccupied by the activities of Becker’s wife, who took a chair inside the rail leading to the judge’s chambers that placed her directly opposite the jury. Helen was by now visibly pregnant and looked—one smitten newspaperman reported—“small, charmingly feminine, and cheery” in her beaver hat and a blue silk suit that several observers pointedly remarked looked rather too expensive for a mere policeman’s wife. She sat there almost motionless throughout the DA’s hourlong address, gazing beseechingly at each juryman in turn. Goff evidently considered this an attempt to influence proceedings, for when Whitman sat down, he ordered Mrs. Becker over to the far side of the room, a few seats along from the jury benches, where the members of the panel could not see her. “That,” she remembered a few months later, was “the one day I thought I should lose my strength and sink to the floor…I had to walk across the room with every one staring at me. I almost fainted.”

  The opening stages of the prosecution case were not dramatic. Whitman spent a little time outlining events outside the Metropole, calling a series of witnesses whom McIntyre did not bother to cross-examine. Patrolman Brady and Detective File described hearing shots and finding Rosenthal lying on the pavement, dead; a police surgeon and a doctor detailed the gambler’s wounds. The next two witnesses—Jacob Hecht, a waiter at the Metropole, and Louis Krause, another waiter who had been outside the hotel when Rosenthal emerged—described the murderers. Hecht had seen one man raising a pistol with three others lurking behind him. Krause described the way in which another man leaving the Metropole appeared to signal to the gunmen, and said he had seen three gunmen and noticed Bridgey Webber running from the hotel.

  Krause’s evidence was the first to damage Becker’s case. The waiter insisted that he had watched Jack Sullivan approach Rosenthal’s body, roll it over, and then “turn to one of the shooters and laugh.” Since Sullivan was expected to appear as a witness for the defense, this was a potentially serious problem for McIntyre, and the lawyer spent some time trying to shake Krause’s story. The defense attorney raised eyebrows with the revelation that the waiter’s lawyer was James Sullivan, the same man who represented Bald Jack Rose. But it was Krause who landed the first really telling blow of the proceedings. He had testified before the coroner that he could not be certain who had gunned down Rosenthal. Now he unhesitatingly identified three of Zelig’s men. How, asked McIntyre, with studied insolence, could he be so certain of their faces?

  “I am a waiter,” Krause shot back. “It is my business to remember faces.”

  McIntyre did what he could to discredit the stream of prosecution witnesses, but without a great deal of success. He asked one loiterer outside the Metropole—who had confidently identified one gunman despite his confessed difficulty in seeing without glasses—whether it was true that Whitman had paid him $2,500 for his testimony; Goff disallowed the question and had it stricken from the record. Whitman thus triumphed in the opening exchanges, and in general the DA handled the judge far better than did his opponent. He hustled through his witnesses as rapidly as possible—this had the added advantage of allowing him to gloss over any inadequacies in their testimony—and the case that he outlined was strikingly straightforward. Acute observers in the press box noted that very little of it concerned Becker, whose name had not yet been mentioned at all in more than a day and a half of testimony.

  Whitman’s main preoccupation at this stage of the trial seemed to be to produce the four imprisoned gunmen as frequently as possible—ostensibly in order to allow his witnesses to identify the men. In fact, this was scarcely difficult; far from having the quartet displayed as part of some conventional police lineup, Lefty, Whitey, Gyp, and Dago Frank were hauled into court in chains, over the Bridge of Sighs, and arrayed together in the dock. Lewis, who had white-blond hair, was impossible to miss, which made it a comparatively simple matter for a succession of the DA’s witnesses to work out who was who. Even then Thomas Ryan—the taxi driver whom File had found asleep outside the Metropole—had second thoughts when brought face-to-face with the killers. Shooting a glance at Lefty Louie (who stood “with lips drawn back until the white strong teeth glistened savagely” and looked “like some wild animal at bay
”), Ryan stammeringly declared that he was no longer quite sure of his identification.

  “The parading of the gunmen in and out of the courtroom,” it was later pointed out,

  was most likely done to establish the evil nature of the characters involved in the murder and, by showing them off within a few feet of Becker, to encourage the jury to think of him as part of the gang. The gunmen were an ugly looking crew and had not been favored with the special attentions of the tailors, barbers, and manicurists said to be in regular attendance on Bald Jack Rose and his fellow gamblers. The question before the court, however, was not whether the gunmen had killed Rosenthal but whether Becker had had a hand in it.

  Judge Goff’s renowned vindictiveness was sharply on display throughout this phase of the trial, and most of it was directed toward McIntyre. “This is a court of justice,” he snapped at the defense attorney after one particularly windy intervention. “It is not a place for a display of eloquence or emotion.” But Goff reserved his greatest scorn for McIntyre’s repeated attempts to have evidence prejudicial to his client ruled inadmissible. The attorney’s repeated protests at the parading of the four gunmen drew an especially sharp response: “You may consider,” the judge hissed, “in each instance [that] you have made an exception and that I have overruled it. That will expedite matters.” Reporting this exchange the next day, one New York paper remarked that Goff “kind of dripped each word on McIntyre so that it foamed up a little before the next one fell.”