by Mike Dash
There was a short recess before Frank Moss stood to summarize the prosecution case. At least one newspaper pointed out that the assistant district attorney was far more balanced than McIntyre had been—“restrained, courteous and fair…. When he quoted testimony, he quoted all that bore on the point in question, inverting nothing, suppressing nothing”—thus contriving to imply that he had the stronger case. Moss’s summation was carefully constructed to rebut that just made by the defense. Four men had fired at Rosenthal, the prosecutor said, and there was no doubt that they were Zelig’s gunmen. Rose had been nothing but a puppet, carrying out Becker’s orders because he was terrified of what would happen to him if he shirked. Schepps was merely “an accessory after the crime,” and Becker had “prostituted himself as a policeman”—the closest that Whitman and his men dared come to mentioning his earnings from the graft.
The bearded, earnest Moss cut such an upright figure that very few of those in court noticed his occasional recourse to subterfuge. But the assistant district attorney pulled a neat trick when he dismissed Jack Sullivan’s testimony that the killers had discussed the possibility of framing Becker in the distributor’s presence—“I ask you to consider the improbability of that…. Is Rose a fool?”—without drawing attention to the fact that his own case rested heavily on similar contentions. According to the prosecution, after all, Becker had been so drunk with power that he never bothered to disguise his intention of killing Rosenthal and openly discussed his plans in front of strangers. Moss’s view of Bald Jack was considerably more respectful. Rose’s crucial testimony, he told the members of the jury, could be relied upon, not least because it matched precisely the evidence he had given to the grand jury. This last suggestion was such a naked lie that McIntyre leaped to his feet, “choleric with rage,” to interject by shouting, “That claim is not true, and the assistant district attorney knows it!”
The twelve jurors got a night to think over the evidence before Judge Goff delivered his charge the next morning. Most of the spectators in the court, and many of the newsmen, still believed that the case was finely balanced at this point, Whitman’s plainly superior presentation of the prosecution argument being offset by the plainly dubious character of so many of his witnesses and the presumption of innocence that still lay in Becker’s favor. McIntyre and his team reassured their client that the outcome would be a hung jury or an acquittal. In the district attorney’s office, meanwhile, no more than five men among the entire staff of several dozen expected anything but a verdict of not guilty.
Goff’s charge to the jury changed all that. It badly damaged Becker’s hopes. Most of the judge’s three-hour discussion of the evidence consisted of a formal instruction to the jury on a variety of points of law. But his recapitulation of the evidence, more than one reporter thought, was far from neutral. Each plank in the prosecution case was presented as fact. The meeting at the Murray Hill Baths was discussed as though it had happened the way the prosecution said it had, not as though it might never have occurred. The Harlem Conference likewise. Even Morris Luban’s evidence was given renewed credibility, and the forger’s account of the threats issued by Becker at the Lafayette Baths was repeated without comment. Becker, the judge concluded this portion of his charge, had telephoned Jack Rose on the day before the murder to tell him, “There is still time. It will look as if the gamblers did it.”
Goff’s instructions regarding Rose and Schepps were no more helpful to the defense. Goff ruled that no testimony proved that Schepps had had foreknowledge of the murder; the jury should not conclude that the fake-jewelry man was in any way an accomplice in the murder. Bald Jack’s reliability as a witness went unquestioned. Toward the end of his discussion of the case, the judge even read “at some length and with apparent interest and pleasure from Rose’s testimony” before closing with the admonition that “Becker, in law, must be held responsible for everyone who acted in pursuance of his instructions.” It was, the lieutenant admitted to the newsmen who clustered around him for a comment as the jury filed out, “virtually a direction to find me guilty.”
The Becker jurors retired to consider the evidence shortly before 4:30 P.M. The policeman and his supporters waited for the verdict in the sheriff’s office along the hall; the district attorney and his men settled down in a separate room a little way away. John Becker, by then a lieutenant of detectives, sat close to his brother; so, too, did Clubber Williams, old by now and rather drunk. Helen’s brother, John Lynch, and a small group of friends and defense lawyers stood or sat awkwardly nearby. Sandwiches and coffee were brought in, but few people felt hungry, particularly when the strains of lustily sung martial hymns came drifting down the corridor from the DA’s office. Frank Moss, it transpired, had organized the junior members of the prosecution team into an impromptu Christian chorus.
Time slunk by. Prior to the judge’s charge, Becker had been optimistic of a favorable verdict; he had even asked Helen to wear her best dress to court so they could go out to celebrate that evening. Now he felt more equivocal, and so did his wife: “Lawyers and everyone,” Mrs. Becker would say,
kept reassuring me right along…but while we were waiting for the jury to come in, I was nervous and did not feel like talking to people. Charley and I sat in the sheriff’s room hour after hour, waiting. People crowded in to see us and speak to us, and they brought rumors that the jury had disagreed or that the last vote was so and so. It was very annoying, for they really knew nothing about it.
Now it was 8:00 P.M., now 10:00, now 11:00. The panel had been out for six and a half hours. Each tick of the clock raised Becker’s spirits a fraction higher. It was common knowledge that juries took more time to bring in not-guilty verdicts than they did to find a man guilty as charged.
It was five minutes to midnight when news finally reached the sheriff’s office that the verdict had come in. Becker was led away down a set of stairs while Helen hurried back along the hall, but the jurors’ sudden reappearance had been so unexpected that she reached the courtroom late and found it already full.
“I ran as fast as I could,” the schoolteacher recalled,
but when I reached the door it was closed and they would not let me in. An attendant gave me a chair and I sat down with people pressing around me—for they all knew who I was. I waited three or four minutes—it seemed a long time—and then the door flew open.
A reporter rushed out shouting “Guilty!” He saw me just as he spoke and felt sorry for me—he told me afterward. But he could not stop the word, or alter the fact. They had found my husband guilty of murder in the first degree.
CHAPTER 11
RETRIAL
WELL,” SAID EMORY BUCKNER, the eminent Republican, “that does it. That makes Whitman the next Mayor of New York.”
The outcome of the Becker trial proved highly satisfactory to most of the participants. Whitman emerged from the Criminal Courts Building as the most celebrated district attorney in living memory, his reputation burnished and his career enhanced.*58 “Telegrams of congratulation poured in upon him from all over the country in scores,” Swope reported, “[and] letters by the hundred came from friends, admirers and even strangers.” The reforming Committee of Fourteen, which had spent a decade crusading against New York vice, passed a resolution declaring him “one of the great heroes of the age.” On New Year’s Eve 1912, the DA was guest of honor at a dinner for more than a thousand people held at the Astor Hotel. There he was toasted by Senator William Borah: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things. We will make you ruler over many.”
Whitman himself relished the attention; indeed, there were hints, after the triumph of the Becker verdict, that he had his heart set on something grander than a mere mayoralty. “I’d like to be Governor,” the DA told the man from the Evening Post, who noticed the “snap in his broad powerful jaws and a glint in his choleric hazel eyes,” and so many New York Republicans saw Whitman as a man with the potential to run successful
ly for high office that several committees were swiftly formed to raise the money needed to launch the crusading anti-vice campaigner on a national political career. A fund-raising dinner was organized at the Café Boulevard downtown, which was—no doubt coincidentally—the very spot where chauffeurs Libby and Shapiro had once had their taxi stand. Whitman was cheered to the echo when he rose to make a speech and promised that his first step would be to run for mayor. Only then, he explained, would he have the power to reform the police, “an evil which threatens the existence of civilized society. Beside it, all other questions seem to be of minor importance.”
Whitman did run for mayor the next summer, but as it happened his political career got off to an unexpectedly shaky start. In Democratic New York, no Republican could hope to be elected without standing on a Fusion slate of the sort that had swept Mayors Strong and Low to power. In 1913 the Fusion forces had two mayoral candidates to choose from, Whitman and a young Irish-American alderman named John Purroy Mitchel. When they cast ballots, the vote went 44 to 43 in Mitchel’s favor. Whitman was confirmed as the Fusion candidate for a further spell in the DA’s office, but he let his supporters know that he hoped to run again, this time against William Sulzer, the Tammany governor of the state, in the gubernatorial election of 1914.
Whitman was far from the only man to emerge from the Becker prosecution with his reputation gleaming. Frank Moss, the earnest hymn singer, became a huge hit on the reformist chicken-in-a-basket circuit. And John Goff was widely praised for his handling of what one newspaper correspondent called “a great trial,…a model trial.” The judge invited a dozen pretty young society women to watch the sentencing, and when they arrived in court, “wearing bright-colored silk gowns and large hats,” he graciously entertained them in a side room, serving them cordials and—as a special dispensation—permitting the windows to be opened and the blinds drawn up.
A few minutes later, as his guests gazed up at him adoringly from an enclosure just below the judge’s dais, Goff sentenced Becker to die in the electric chair.
Lieutenant Becker lost just a little of his fabled self-control when he heard his sentence pronounced. Reporters in the courtroom saw him flicker almost imperceptibly and suck in a breath. But the moment passed. “Becker, with death staring him in the face,” Swope wrote, “was the same stiff-jawed, level-eyed Becker yesterday that he used to be when at the zenith of his power as master of Satan’s Circus. Only for fractions of moments did he show emotion in his hard, heavy countenance. Then the emotion was either sympathy for his wife, or utter, bitter contempt for those whose testimony resulted in the verdict of guilty.”
The courtroom, which had been noisy before the verdict was brought in, was suddenly so quiet that everyone in the room clearly heard the snap of handcuffs as the sheriff fixed them to the policeman’s wrist. Then a clerk stood, told the defendant to raise his right hand, and asked him to swear to his name, age, nationality, and religion. “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” added the clerk. Becker started to say “No,” then paused and corrected himself. “I have never been convicted of a crime before,” he managed.
The lieutenant retained sufficient self-control to walk briskly away with the sheriff, looking now (one prosecuting attorney complained) as though he were about to have a good conduct medal pinned on him. He was taken back to the sheriff’s room, where he found Helen already waiting, too discouraged to talk. After half an hour, word came that the prisoner was to go back to the Tombs. A crowd of reporters were waiting in the corridor, and Becker—having remained silent for so long—seemed more than willing to talk to them. “They have convicted an innocent man,” he told the reporter from the Sun.
I can prove this and I will do it when I get a chance. There is not the slightest question but that these men who testified against me were all liars, the worst of perjurers. They perjured their souls black, and I can prove it.
The next day another crowd of friends and relatives gathered to witness Becker’s departure from the city. The lieutenant was to be sent to Sing Sing prison—a notoriously grim and brutal jail, worse even than the Tombs, but the only place in New York State at which executions were carried out. The well-wishers included Becker’s brother John, several of his sisters, some farmers who remembered Charley as a boy and had come down from Callicoon Center to offer their support, and a clutch of colleagues from police headquarters, many of them with their wives. Few, even the toughest beat policemen, maintained much self-control as the condemned man was hustled off toward the railway station.
“Everybody was crying but us two,” Helen Becker said.
You see, once when I visited Charley before the trial, I noticed the wife of another prisoner crying; and right then I made up my mind that I would never get hysterical and cry and annoy my husband. It does no good and it distresses people. I have made many visits to my husband since then, but I have never broken down or cried before him, although I have felt like it.
We said a few words and then they took him across the bridge, and later on he was driven to the Forty-second Street station in the prison wagon. I went on the subway, and I got there ahead of the crowd, and when I told the gateman who I was, he let me go aboard the train before the others…. When my husband reached the train a big crowd was following him. He was handcuffed now, and guarded by seven sheriffs. There were dozens of reporters and we were all packed into the smoking-car. I was the only woman there. They let me sit in the seat beside my husband. One reporter leaned over so close to us that his head was almost between Mr. Becker and me…. We could have no private conversation.
Alighting from his train at the village of Ossining, Becker found that he was expected to walk the three-quarters of a mile from the railway station to Sing Sing itself. The crowd that had been waiting for him at the station trailed along behind him and merged seamlessly into another throng already gathered by the prison gates as the little party arrived. Becker, who stood head and shoulders taller than most people in the crowd, was the sole focus of attention.
Warden James Clancy was waiting by the gate with several of his guards, and the jailers cleared a path for Becker and the sheriffs as they approached the jail. “When I saw my husband coming up the hill with a string of reporters after him,” Helen Becker continued,
I almost broke down, but I controlled myself. A prison guard came to me and said, “Better go away and avoid these reporters. Come back in half an hour.” So I went away and when I came back they took me down to the death house where my husband had been brought. We went through a long stone passage with iron doors and little iron windows where people peek out at you, and when we passed the punishment cells I had a feeling I almost wished Charley had died before he came here. Finally we stopped before a cell, and there was my husband. I never saw such a look of agony on anybody’s face—a gray look. He did not say anything—he could not talk—and they told me to come back the next day. I did come back, and this was the beginning of many visits to the death house.
Sing Sing was indeed an awful and depressing place, ninety years old and as famously unsanitary as the Tombs itself. The prison hunched on the banks of the Hudson, thirty miles north of New York (hence the expression “sent up the river”), and was completely enclosed within high walls. Massive cell blocks, hand-hewn by Sing Sing’s earliest prisoners from the dirty gray marble that abounded in the district, loomed five stories high on either side of grimy concrete walkways. The largest of these blocks contained nothing but row upon row of windowless, one-man cells—eight hundred in all, each measuring no more than seven feet long by three feet wide, fronted by thick, close-hatched iron grilles, and equipped with nothing more than a cot, a chair, a jug, and a slop bucket.
Conditions in Sing Sing were, in fact, past their worst by the time Becker arrived there in the autumn of 1912. “Lockstep,” a time-honored but degrading method of marching inmates together in long, shuffling crocodiles, had been abandoned at the turn of the century, and the inmates’ traditional uniform of
black-and-white-striped jackets and trousers—made famous by cartoons and early movies, and traditionally used to distinguish among prisoners*59 —went the same way five years later. Sing Sing inmates were now dressed in gray trousers and shirts, topped with small round caps, and many of the harsher punishments that had been used to maintain discipline in the nineteenth century—including near drownings and the hanging of malefactors by their thumbs—had long been discontinued.
The jail nonetheless remained horribly depressing. Men spent as much as twenty-three hours a day locked up in their cells; there were few opportunities for exercise, and virtually all games were banned. The primary recreation—especially popular among the jail’s large population of illiterates—was checkers, played on the paper boards that most prisoners kept by their beds, by men who called out moves to neighbors in adjacent cells. Inmates were entitled to only one bath and one shave a week, and few survived long years of this regime without displaying at least some signs of mental anguish. According to Dr. Amos Squire, who became prison physician not long after Becker first arrived at Ossining, one of his principal duties was “to knock on the door of each dark cell daily to discover if the occupant had fallen ill, or lost his mind.”