Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  In an attempt to spare ordinary prisoners from the even more oppressive atmosphere on death row, the dozen or so murderers in the condemned cells were sequestered in a brand-new block that had been erected a little distance from the main bulk of the prison. The Sing Sing death house was regarded, in the prison service, as a model of its kind. It had its own cells, kitchen, and hospital and its own power supply (for all the lurid rumors, it was simply not true that lights in the village dimmed whenever an execution took place)—even a room where the bodies of condemned men were autopsied after their electrocution. Becker spent half an hour a day in the house’s narrow, cinder-floored exercise yard (his daily routine was to run around the yard half a dozen times and while away the remainder of his time slamming a ball against the wall) and was given more or less unfettered access to newspapers, pen, and paper. In some respects, then, death-house regulations were less stringent than those in the prison proper. But the looming inevitability of execution, and fear of what the procedure would entail, was profoundly unsettling. According to Squire, the sound the death-row prisoners dreaded most was the insistent rasping noise that reverberated from the autopsy room as he sawed off the top of an executed prisoner’s skull.

  The weeks and months in Sing Sing passed slowly for Charles Becker. He was permitted to receive visitors no more than once or twice a week, and there were limits to the number of letters each man could send and receive. But the inquisitive newsmen who followed his progress reported that he adapted well to the conditions. The once-corrupt and brutal cop, they wrote, had found a measure of redemption within the bleak walls of the prison, displaying, in extremis, reserves of character and decency that surprised those who had never known him well.

  Not only did Becker discover, on death row, true pleasure in reading for the first time in his life (his favorite work was Measure for Measure: “There is so much in it that fitted my case, and some terrific passages on death in it, too”*60 ); he also helped and comforted the men in the other condemned cells. “He found,” one New York journalist concluded,

  qualities in himself that he had not drawn on before. No formal social life was permitted among the men in the death-house, but every sound carried. He began to read aloud in the evenings—Western stories were especially popular among the prisoners, he said. As he built up seniority, Becker became a kind of counselor to the other men on the block. In a small, grotesque world, he had reached the top at last.

  The condemned man’s principal preoccupation during his first months in Sing Sing was marshaling a case for an appeal, and his first difficulty was in finding new attorneys. John McIntyre had resigned from the case shortly after the verdict on his client was announced, and John Hart had left New York to practice law in California. Becker himself was now in straitened circumstances; the whole of his money, it appears, had been expended on his defense, the cost of which had apparently topped $20,000. Funding for an appeal was obtained by remort-gaging the house at Olinville Avenue, but even then the lieutenant could no longer afford a lawyer of McIntyre’s repute. His choice eventually fell on Joseph Shay, a vocal and enthusiastic attorney who came cheap but had little experience of the criminal courts. Shay had hitherto specialized chiefly in personal-injury cases and on one occasion had been suspended by the New York bar as a chronic ambulance chaser.

  As Becker whiled away the hours in the Sing Sing death house, his wife struggled to adapt to life without him. The big house on Olinville Avenue was in a lonely spot, she found, “and sometimes I have thought that it has a sinister air, with its gray walls painted over in broad red lines that form strange oblongs on dull concrete. Few people pass here and rarely a carriage or an automobile. At night the street is dark and quiet under the rustling trees.” She could not even think of the place as home, “for my husband has never lived there.”

  Soon after moving in, Helen began to suffer from a bizarre series of accidents and setbacks. When the new house was broken into on her first night in residence, she obtained a guard dog she called Bum. But “Bum bit a milkman, and the milkman put the case in the hands of a lawyer named Rosenthal—think of that!—and finally a policeman shot poor Bum.” Then, shortly before Christmas 1913, Mrs. Becker’s maid, a girl named Lena Schneider, contrived to smash the glass top shielding her employer’s dining room table and, “reading her discharge in the broken pieces and utterly forlorn,” committed suicide in her room by swallowing sixty grains of corrosive sublimate.*61 The policeman’s wife bought herself a pet canary for company after that, but the bird died, too.

  Worse followed. By the winter of 1912, Helen, who was now thirty-eight, was heavily pregnant with her first child. In January there were complications. She was taken to the hospital, where she spent four weeks under observation and endured a prolonged labor before giving birth, on February 1, by caesarean section—a very dangerous procedure at the time. It did little good. The Beckers’ baby (“It was a little girl, just what I wanted”) was overdue and weak, and the child died later the same day. Charles Becker had liked the name Ruth for a girl, but his wife called the baby Charlotte and had her buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

  When word of her daughter’s death got out, Helen was deluged with messages of sympathy. But it did not take the newspapers long to discover that there was another side to her story. Charlotte Becker’s death, one reporter wrote, “had been the result of a decision made in the delivery room by her mother. She had been given the choice of saving her life or the child’s, and had chosen her own. She did not deny this.”

  Inevitably, Mrs. Becker forfeited the public’s sympathy, and the earlier, friendly mail gave way to letters denouncing her as a betrayer of the ideals of motherhood and even as a murderer. “One correspondent pointed out that there were now two cold-blooded murderers in the family. Another mentioned Lady Macbeth.” Helen tried hopelessly to explain that she’d had little choice:

  The birth of my baby was delayed, and the long wait was terrible. At the last moment I was told I had to decide whether to take a chance on my life or the baby’s. I had no more than a minute or two to balance my instincts against the situation. If I died, and my husband’s appeal failed, the child would soon become an orphan. Then again I thought of the position my husband was in, there in prison under sentence of death, and I knew that my life would be more help to him than the baby’s. So I decided that if there had to be a choice, my life was to be saved.

  The attempt did her little good. New York’s opinion of Helen Becker changed irrevocably after her baby’s death. Once the schoolteacher had been praised as an ideal wife and partner: loyal, nurturing, supportive, and womanly. Now she seemed something altogether steelier. Sitting in her parents’ apartment in Brooklyn, even little Viña Delmar caught the mood:

  I know Mamma pictured Helen Becker lying in a hospital bed sobbing her heart out for the dead baby. I do not think it was that way for Helen Becker at all. I am sure she interpreted the loss of the child as a clear sign from Heaven that nothing was to hamper her hard struggle to save Becker. I think she concerned herself with the religious aspects of the baby’s birth and death, rejoicing that life had not fluttered away before the sacraments could be administered. I think that then Helen Becker had lain quietly upon her pillow, wondering who could get her an interview with President-elect [Woodrow] Wilson.

  In his cell in Ossining, meanwhile, her husband wept—the only tears that he had shed since his arrest.

  Becker’s hopes were dealt a further blow when the trial of Whitey Lewis, Lefty Louie, Dago Frank, and Gyp the Blood began three weeks after his conviction. The same judge, Goff, presided, with predictable results. This time the case was over in only a week—the gunmen had been unable to afford expensive representation—and the jury returned its guilty verdict in slightly under half an hour, “a speed unprecedented in the history of first degree convictions in the county,” according to the most ancient court official the swarm of pressmen could locate.

  There were abundant echoes of the Beck
er trial in the proceedings. Jack Rose was once again Whitman’s star witness, outlining in hushed tones the steps that he had taken to recruit the killers, and Goff, too, was his usual self, hurrying things along at a great pace and delivering a jury charge that left little doubt he believed the four men guilty. The gunmen were vocal in their condemnation of Justice Goff—“The jury would have convicted a priest after that stuff,” was Whitey Lewis’s reaction to Goff’s summation—and particularly angered by the judge’s habit of referring to them solely by their nicknames. Certainly Goff’s convenient verbal tic lent a distinct air of East Side menace to the proceedings, and a dock containing Lefty Louie, Whitey Lewis, and Dago Frank undoubtedly appeared a good deal more authentically criminal than one holding Louis Rosenberg, Jacob Seidenschmer, and Francis Cirofici. “Surely,” Harry Horowitz’s lawyer groaned, in a rare moment of effectiveness, “it is a wonderful aid to the conviction of a man, presumed innocent, to have him described by the trial judge himself as ‘Gyp the Blood.’”

  Each of the four defendants had denied, under oath, having anything to do with Lieutenant Becker, but most New Yorkers ignored this inconvenient fact and felt that the slew of guilty verdicts confirmed that the right decision had been reached in Becker’s trial. Few, outside the gunmen’s immediate families, expressed much regret when their appeals were all rejected and the members of the gang were executed in April 1914. Whitey Lewis was the only one of the four to die loudly protesting his innocence—“They’re perjurers,” he insisted as the straps were tightened around him. “I swear by God I didn’t fire a shot at Herman Rosenthal”*62—and Lefty Louie, who had received a good deal of religious instruction while in jail, went so far as to compose an open letter, warning “other East Side boys” of the dangers of falling in with the street gangs of the slum districts. Dago Frank, the odd man out, who had been a late recruit to the conspiracy and who had consistently denied playing any part in the killing, was dragged kicking and struggling to his death, a crucifix clutched tightly in each hand. The other men went quietly and unaided. It took less than half an hour to kill them all.

  The bleakness of the gunmen’s end and the tedium of Becker’s drab Sing Sing existence contrasted sharply with the lives of the four gamblers whose evidence had placed the doomed men in the death house.

  Shrugging off public disquiet that several self-confessed killers were to go free, Whitman honored the immunity arrangements he had offered his key witnesses and released all four the day after the verdicts in the gunmen’s trial came in. Sam Schepps was released from custody at lunchtime on November 21, 1912, and promptly announced his intention to leave New York. But the reporters in attendance displayed far more interest in the release of Rose, Vallon, and Webber, which followed a few hours later. Webber, the newsmen wrote, was released just in time to join his ermine-clad wife on board a liner sailing for Havana, and even Bald Jack Rose—who had spoken on the witness stand of his fear that friends of Zelig’s would come gunning for him—seemed in the highest of high spirits.

  Bridgey Webber had a case of champagne brought in. Newspapermen wandered up and down the cell blocks interviewing keepers and other inmates about the habits of the four celebrities…. Fifteen hundred people clogged 53rd Street to watch the departure of the three gamblers. Beautifully pressed, smelling of lavender water, and each swinging a cane, Bridgey, Vallon and Bald Jack climbed in to a large touring car—not a Packard—that awaited them at the door. “I will be at the office of my lawyer, to meet any gangsters who might care to see me,” Rose shouted out of the window as the car started up, and they rode off towards Second Avenue in fits of laughter.

  If Bald Jack and his friends ever really feared violent retribution from either Becker or the remnants of Jack Zelig’s gang, they certainly recovered their nerve quickly enough. Rose and Vallon were often noticed strolling through Satan’s Circus during the early months of 1913, and Sam Schepps went so far as to renege on his promise to leave town and opened up a jewelry store on Broadway. It was there, on one hot afternoon, that Helen Becker came by appointment to meet Jack Rose and plead with him to tell the truth about her husband. Rose, scarcely surprisingly, proved unresponsive, and Schepps, equally predictably, seemed most concerned to boast about his own importance. “I hold the secret of the Becker case, and I will tell the Governor if he asks me,” the con man told a small group of reporters, adding sotto voce that there was not really that much he could do: “Do you want that I should go so far as to bring Charley Becker back to Broadway and I take his place in the electric chair?”

  Becker, for his part, placed no faith in Schepps and his coterie of criminals. For nearly eighteen months after his conviction, however, the lieutenant was buoyed by news from both New York and Albany and seemed confident that there was still a chance of an acquittal. One positive development concerned Joseph Shay, Becker’s ineffectual, ambulance-chasing lawyer, who suddenly resigned from the case citing the unexpectedly demanding nature of criminal practice, to be replaced by a more eminent, able, and harder-working litigator by the name of Martin Manton. Becker’s new attorney, who had earned the nickname “Preying” Manton for his ability to set cunning courtroom traps, was considerably more expensive than Shay, and Helen Becker was forced to pay his bills by signing over the deeds of the couple’s house to him. But Manton had one inestimable advantage in her husband’s eyes. He was the law partner of a renowned orator called Bourke Cockran, an influential Democrat who had been Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall for the fours years from 1905 to 1909. Cockran had had a falling-out with Charlie Murphy after that, and his partnership with Manton was “mainly an office-sharing arrangement,” anyway. But he was a celebrated advocate, and Becker no doubt felt that even a tenuous link with Tammany was better now than no link at all. Manton got quickly to work, and soon proved his worth by digging up several important new witnesses.

  Even better news came from Albany in January 1913 when a group of the lieutenant’s friends and supporters engineered a meeting with the new governor of New York State, William Sulzer. Sulzer, a protégé of Big Tim Sullivan’s, agreed to reexamine the Becker trial and was presented with “a mass of affidavits and other evidence to prove his innocence.” The governor apparently possessed privileged information—perhaps it came from Sullivan himself—for he assured the deputation that he “knew some things bearing on the case” and asked Becker’s supporters to wait for the verdict of the court of appeals. If the policeman was refused a second trial, Sulzer promised, he would step in to save him.*63

  Helen, who was permitted to visit her husband in the death house for ninety minutes every week, noticed a definite improvement in the condemned man’s demeanor after that, and so did the newspaper reporters who occasionally trooped up to Ossining to file updates on the case. “Becker,” said the Herald, “behaved almost as if he was the Czar of the Tenderloin once more. With Manton on the case he had recovered much of his old chestiness and swore he still expected to be released.”

  By the first months of 1914, then, Becker’s prospects appeared considerably improved. Manton’s work on his client’s appeal was well advanced, and there were ample grounds, the new attorney promised, on which to argue that the policeman had been denied a fair trial, from the court’s failure to admit key pieces of evidence to Justice Goff’s apparent eagerness to help the prosecution. Then there were Manton’s new witnesses. Unlike McIntyre and Shay, the new defense team had done considerable spadework and managed to uncover a mass of fascinating testimony. Among Manton’s discoveries were the two men who owned the car in which Webber and Schepps had sworn they were driven to the Harlem Conference (their names, somehow in keeping with the case, were Moe and Itch) and the superintendent of a building that stood just across the street from the one vacant lot then present on West 124th Street. According to the chauffeurs, they’d had no doings with any of the gamblers on the June evening Whitman had belatedly established as the date the conference had taken place—which put the witnesses’ account of the fatal me
eting into considerable doubt. And according to the building superintendent, the lot where the fatal meeting was supposedly held had been a thirty-foot-deep hole in June 1912. How, Manton queried, was it possible that the four gamblers who had testified against his client could have failed to mention such a dramatic landmark?

  Of course, Charles Becker did not have things all his own way during the long months following the verdict, and just when the lieutenant and his defense team had begun to feel genuinely confident of their chances, the prospects of an acquittal darkened once again. One severe blow landed in the late summer of 1913, when William Sulzer fell out with Boss Murphy. The dispute between the two men did not last for long; when Sulzer refused to offer Tammany several attractive pieces of patronage that Murphy thought his due, the boss, in an impressive show of political muscle, simply had the governor impeached and replaced with a more pliant deputy. That removed the safety net that Becker had depended on. Then Whitman got to work undermining Manton’s new evidence for the defense.

  With the gubernatorial elections coming up, there was no way that the DA could possibly afford to let the case on which his reputation had been built disintegrate, and Becker’s old nemesis proved more than willing to match “Preying” Manton trick for trick. More or less as soon as the policeman’s attorney had submitted his imposing dossier of evidence to the court of appeals, stories began to crop up in the press hinting that the district attorney, too, had much improved his case. Over the course of the next few weeks, prosecution witnesses popped up at strategically placed intervals, announcing one after another that they had been approached by Becker’s agents and offered vast sums—$2,000, $5,000, $10,000—to testify for the defense. The fact that several of the men concerned, including the Luban brothers and Sam Schepps, had been so badly compromised by their maulings in the first trial that Whitman would scarcely dare to call on them again made no apparent difference. Soon after that, a number of lowlifes who had testified at the gunmen’s trial began alleging that they, too, were being pressed by the defense. At least one witness claimed that Becker’s brother John, the detective, had coerced him into perjuring himself, and each in his own way implied that the Becker brothers hoped to keep the four gangsters alive pending an appeal. After that, Swope and the World pitched in with a series of alarmist stories alleging that the lieutenant’s old friends at police headquarters were raising a huge defense fund in Satan’s Circus. The vision of Gyp the Blood and his companions dodging their appointments with the electric chair, and of hordes of brothel keepers and gamblers digging deep into their pockets to save a corrupt cop proved nicely calculated to revive New Yorkers’ inbred fear of the police, and by the time the Becker appeal was heard, few citizens recalled that Whitman and his team had not produced a single piece of evidence to prove any of the claims.