Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  Swope’s role in the Rosenthal affair made him famous throughout New York. His paper awarded him a byline—still a rare honor at that time—and, during the First World War, sent him to Europe on two occasions to report on the fighting. Inside the German Empire, a collection of Swope’s dispatches from Imperial Germany, won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1917,*70 and by the early 1920s he was probably the most celebrated reporter in the United States. In the course of the next three decades, that fame spread throughout the world. When the old newsman died in 1958, the Columbia School of Journalism dedicated a room in his name.

  Swope took full advantage of his new position. He became renowned as a host, and between the wars he got to know, apparently, everyone worth knowing in America and much of Western Europe. Among his more intimate acquaintances were Harpo Marx, Noël Coward, and John Barrymore; he was also on first-name terms with Howard Hughes, Woodrow Wilson, Al Smith, Adlai Stevenson, Joseph Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill. Humphrey Bogart once played an impromptu game of football in Swope’s front hall; Douglas Fairbanks Jr. met his second wife there. None of these friendships—Swope himself was fond of saying—would ever have been possible had it not been for Charley Becker.

  While Swope’s star rose, the Sullivans’ sank swiftly. The family lost most of its power after Big Tim’s death and had, in truth, been in decline for years. Florrie had died a lunatic in the summer of 1909, and Sullivan’s cousin and trusted adviser Little Tim went the same way that same year, expiring from an undiagnosed “psychopathic trouble.” Christy Sullivan fought on but gambled away virtually all of his personal fortune, also that same year, in a failed attempt to win election as sheriff of New York; he retired from Manhattan politics in 1915. At about the same time, Paddy Sullivan, Tim’s brother, quarreled with the Tammany boss who ran the city’s Third Assembly District and could never be sure of his support within the Hall thereafter.

  For a while Paddy did keep up the old Sullivan tradition of hosting a free Christmas dinner for the poor of the Bowery, but the practice was eventually abandoned around 1918. “Now indeed,” lamented Alvin Harlow, the chronicler of the famous street, “the giants were all departed, and nothing left but petty gangsters and ragamuffins.” Even the Occidental faded away. The vast erotic fresco over the bar began to flake and crack not long after Becker’s execution, and—stripped of Sullivan’s prestige—the name of the place was changed and it became the dull and desperate Commercial, “just another cheap wayfarers’ hotel.” By 1931, Harlow observed, it was slipping into deserved obscurity. The oldest hotel in the whole of New York, and Big Tim’s headquarters and home for many years, now differed little, except in size, “from the other forty- and fifty-cent upstairs hotels of the Bowery—a small, tile-floored office, shower baths, and a faint odor of disinfectant.”

  Charles Whitman, who had built a career on New York’s disgust with Tammany and police corruption, never became president. He served two terms as governor of New York State, from 1914 to 1918, but his administration was widely viewed as undistinguished, even at the time, and historians have proved no less critical. Very little in the way of useful legislation was enacted, and much of Whitman’s time and energy was devoted to courting popularity in preparation for his expected bid for the White House. As late as 1917, he left Albany for several weeks to drum up more support on a whistlestop tour of the United States.

  Whitman’s conviction that he might one day go to Washington was certainly not mere vanity. During his first days as governor, when memory of his stewardship of the Becker case remained strong everywhere, “Whitman for President” clubs sprang up around the country, and Woodrow Wilson himself was heard to say that the former DA was his most likely opponent in 1916. But Whitman’s advantage gradually dissipated as his political ineffectiveness became obvious. He failed to secure the Republican nomination for the presidency, losing out to Charles Evans Hughes, and found himself facing stiff competition in his attempt to secure reelection in New York’s gubernatorial contest. His Democratic opponent was none other than Samuel Seabury, who fought the election with the unlooked-for help of Thomas Mott Osborne. Osborne resigned his post as warden of Sing Sing in order to campaign against Whitman, citing Becker’s execution as “the vilest of crimes.” In one open letter, Osborne regretted that he could do nothing to change the past. “But,” he went on,

  I do desire to influence the future…to the end that no man so weak as yourself—so shifty, so selfish, so false, so cruel—may be entrusted with further power.

  Many of those who had followed the former DA’s career felt that Osborne had a point. “Whitman isn’t a great Governor,” opined the New York Call, “not even a fairly decent Governor—he’s just a temporizing, fence-fixing little politician.” Even the sober Times had grown disillusioned by now, suggesting that Whitman’s “entire political standing is based upon the convictions in the Rosenthal murder case,” and for a long time the election seemed finely balanced. In the end the governor won, thanks largely to the final collapse of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, which had split the Republicans for several years. Thousands of Progressives returned to the conservative fold in time for the ballot, and when the ballots were counted, Whitman had secured reelection by 154,000 votes.

  The governor was still haunted, nonetheless, by wraiths from his past. Jack Rose turned up in Albany in 1914, seeking a favor on behalf of a friend sentenced to Sing Sing for attempted murder. Whitman signed a pardon for the man. Jacob Luban, who had been on the DA’s payroll for months in 1912, found himself back in prison serving twenty years for forgery. The governor saw to it that his sentence was commuted. Becker’s remaining partisans were not alone in wondering if their old nemesis was buying the silence of men who could still seriously embarrass him, but the lieutenant had long vanished from the front pages by this time, and no one of importance made any real attempt to learn the truth.

  Whitman’s second term in Albany was in any case overshadowed by his escalating dependence on alcohol. Despite courting the religious vote by hinting that he would come out in favor of Prohibition, he appeared drunk in public on several occasions, prompting one sardonic reporter to observe that “some of the Governor’s new friends don’t seem to realize that when he says he favors a dry Manhattan, he doesn’t mean what they mean by it.” New York gossip attributed Whitman’s drinking to “a desire to escape the huge accusing ghost of Becker, the dead policeman, which, according to rumor, could be seen tramping its beat night after night along the stone battlements of the old Albany State House.” It came as no surprise when the governor failed to win a third term in office in 1918. The man who beat him was Al Smith, a large and popular Irishman and a Tammany loyalist through and through, who was widely regarded as Tim Sullivan’s political heir.

  Whitman did bid once more for high office. In 1922 he sought the Republican nomination for the presidency but lost to Herbert Hoover. He returned to New York, where he was humiliatingly defeated in a bid to regain his old job as district attorney, winning fewer than one-third of the votes. After that embarrassment he retired to private practice. He died in 1947 at the age of seventy-eight.

  Many of the other men associated with Becker’s prosecution served out distinguished careers.

  John Goff completed his term on the New York Supreme Court bench, retiring at the beginning of 1919 only because he had reached the upper age limit for judges in the city and returning to his farmhouse and his fancy herons. He died toward the end of 1924, a month or so shy of his seventy-seventh birthday.

  Samuel Seabury’s public profile benefited considerably from his stewardship of Becker’s second trial. He went to the court of appeals in 1915, dabbled in high politics with Roosevelt’s Progressives, ran against Whitman, and was even talked of at one point as a possible presidential candidate. He continued to oppose Tammany Hall, and when, in 1931, another investigation into corruption in New York was ordered, Seabury was chosen to lead it. The evidence he uncover
ed showed that under the long succession of Democratic mayors who had ruled the city in the twenties, the NYPD had slipped back into some of its old ways. A stool pigeon named Chile Acuna (“The Human Spittoona”) testified that he was paid $150 a week to help frame prostitutes swept up in vice raids. Several police officers explained that the vast and unexplained sums found in their bank accounts were “racetrack winnings” or the generous gifts of dead relatives; Officer Robert Morris claimed to have been handed forty thousand-dollar bills on the street in Coney Island by a wonderful “Uncle George” who conveniently dropped dead a week or two later in California. In time the investigation reached the upper echelons of the city’s government, and Tammany’s Jimmy Walker—a three-term mayor best known as the author of the sentimental ballad “Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?”—was forced to testify. Walker was charged with accepting more than a million dollars’ worth of bribes, and in September 1932 he resigned. This time there was no way back for Tammany Hall. The scandal of the Seabury hearings finally damaged it beyond repair.

  Of the lawyers involved in the Becker case, James Sullivan, Jack Rose’s attorney, became U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, thanks in part to the enthusiastic endorsement of Charles Whitman. He was removed from the post a few months later after a special hearing into his “scandalously corrupt” behavior. The New York World, of all newspapers, led the anti-Sullivan campaign, revealing that within a few days of his arrival the attorney had telegraphed friends at home in New York to advise them to join him: “The pickings are fine.”

  Bourke Cockran, the most distinguished member of Becker’s defense team, continued to display a willingness to take on unpopular causes. He represented Tom Mooney, the principal suspect in an infamous San Francisco anarchist bombing in 1916; Mooney, although found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, was eventually reprieved and pardoned. At about the same time, Cockran abandoned the Progressives to return to the Democratic Party and to Tammany. He nominated Al Smith as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 1920 and opposed the introduction of Prohibition before dying of a brain hemorrhage in 1923. John McIntyre joined his old adversary Goff on the New York Supreme Court bench in 1916. Frank Moss continued to serve as assistant DA until Mayor Mitchel came in, then wrote an impenetrable book entitled America’s Mission to Serve Humanity, which was published in 1919. He died soon afterward, aged sixty-one. Lloyd Stryker, who had worked on McIntyre’s team and never wavered in his belief in Becker’s innocence, became perhaps the most celebrated defense attorney in New York. “Preying” Manton, however, became the leading disgrace of the legal profession. While serving as senior judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1939, he was caught taking backhanders and convicted of “running a mill for the sale of justice.” In the end Becker’s old counsel went to prison for two years. At his trial it emerged that in the eleven months following his appointment to the court—a period in which his official pay was less than $10,000—he had contrived to wipe out debts of $710,000 and banked an additional $750,000 in graft. “Presumably,” one reporter noted, “he looked back on his most famous client as a piker.”

  Most of the policemen caught up in the case enjoyed less dramatic careers than Martin Manton. Rhinelander Waldo never held another job of consequence after his dismissal as police commissioner at the end of 1913; he died in 1927 at the age of only fifty. John Becker, Charley’s brother, who had supported him throughout both trials, retired soon after the execution and went back to live in Sullivan County. He never married, and boarded with friends in Callicoon Center until his death in 1938. Max Schmittberger, Becker’s old opponent, did better; he was promoted to chief inspector, but although he consistently professed his honesty, he never quite shook off suspicions that he returned quietly to his grafting ways each time the reformers were thrown out.

  Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist who had saved Schmittberger’s job after the Lexow hearings, believed implicitly in the policeman’s honor and became his firm supporter. But even Steffens—who once watched Schmittberger merrily cracking the heads of striking workers with his nightstick—had to admit that his protégé, “like all converts, was worse than the accustomed righteous [and] cared nothing for the technicalities of the law. ‘To hell with the Constitution!’ he shouted once at some Reds who cited that sacred instrument as a guaranty of their rights. He was still a policeman, in this and in other ways.”

  The other police chief who had shaped Becker’s career died in the same year as Schmittberger, 1917. Clubber Williams lived rather quietly in his final years, having squandered virtually all of the spectacular wealth he had amassed in nearly three decades of service; when he died, the newspapers were shocked to discover that his estate totaled a mere $14. But Winfield Sheehan, Waldo’s gnomic, strangely affluent assistant—the man often suspected of membership in Tim Sullivan’s gambling commission—did pretty well for someone who had started out as a cub reporter on the World. He moved out to California during the war, found an opening in the film business, and by the early 1930s had emerged as head of the Fox studio, winning an Oscar there for Cavalcade in 1933. Today Sheehan’s fame, such as it is, rests chiefly on the part he played in the discovery of Rita Hayworth, whom he spotted dancing in a nightclub. But a year or two earlier, the old New Yorker had also arranged a Hollywood screen test for a prop boy whom the veteran director Raoul Walsh had told him might make it as a cowboy star.

  The two men watched the test together. “He’ll do,” Sheehan concluded. “What did you say his name was?” “Morrison,” replied Walsh. “Marion Morrison.” It was Sheehan who renamed the youth John Wayne.

  Thomas Mott Osborne’s career as a reformer was very nearly destroyed not long after Becker’s execution, when a committee appointed to investigate conditions at Sing Sing discovered that homosexuality was rife throughout the prison. One inmate admitted that he had sold himself to nearly two dozen fellow prisoners in a mere three months, and the recriminations that followed soon spiraled out of control. In the last days of 1915, Osborne found himself indicted on six counts. The allegations against him ranged from neglect of duty to the charge that he himself had sodomized men placed in his charge.

  It cost the warden the better part of $75,000 in legal fees and payments to the famed private detective Val O’Farrell to get the charges dropped; even then their taint lingered for the rest of his career. Few were surprised when Osborne left Sing Sing in the autumn of 1916 and went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to be commander of the naval prison there. He retired not long afterward, retreating to his home in Auburn.

  Osborne met with a bizarre end, dropping dead, aged sixty-eight, on his way to a masquerade party. When the police found the blueblood reformer’s body sprawled in the street, he was wearing false whiskers, a suit several sizes too small for him, and a set of slip-on goofy teeth.

  The surviving members of the group that had secured Becker’s conviction went their separate ways after the lieutenant’s trials, falling out among themselves so utterly that they seldom agreed on anything again.

  William Shapiro’s career as a chauffeur was ended by the Becker affair. He had his driver’s license revoked, and the infamous gray Packard had to be sold. His partner Louis Libby, deprived of his main source of income, turned to pimping instead, making a living for a while off the earnings of his wife. The oily and egotistical Sam Schepps tried his hand at the antique-furniture business, to which his talents as small-time con man undoubtedly suited him. His taste for cigarettes and good living did him in eventually, however; he died in 1936. Harry Vallon flitted from job to job on the Lower East Side—at one time giving his occupation as “chandelier salesman”—before vanishing entirely; no one knows what became of him. James Marshall, the tap-dancing perjurer whose evidence had secured Becker’s second conviction and effectively condemned him to death, also disappeared for many years. But he returned in the end to his old stomping grounds uptown, just a block or two from the spot where the fateful Harlem Conference was
said to have occurred, and was to be found running dice games in the district as late as 1947. Bridgey Webber, on the other hand, secured himself a comfortable position at a factory owned by his brother-in-law. The onetime dognapper and poker magnate spent the remainder of his life making cardboard boxes in Passaic, New Jersey.

  Bald Jack Rose bought himself a wig. Thus disguised, he abandoned the Satan’s Circus card rooms and turned his hand to setting up a company called Humanology Motion Pictures. The idea, supposedly, was to make moralistic shorts. When the necessary funds were not forthcoming, Rose instead forged himself an improbable evangelical career, dressing in black from head to toe and drawing church congregations numbering in the hundreds to his addresses on “Life in the Underworld.” He pursued this line of work for several years, albeit with diminishing returns. By the time Becker stood trial for a second time, Rose had been reduced to lecturing in YMCA halls, and during the First World War he sometimes made appearances at army camps.

  Eventually tiring of the religious circuit, Bald Jack went into catering, it is said with considerable success. During the Roaring Twenties, he sold rotisseries in Connecticut and on Long Island. For many years his name was preserved in the form of a “Jack Rose” cocktail, served in Broadway bars and consisting of applejack, grenadine, and lemon juice.*71 He died in October 1947 at the age of seventy-two.

  Not every associate of Becker’s went straight. Chicago May, the lieutenant’s old acquaintance from the Stephen Crane affair, continued her criminal career into the 1920s, working variously as a pickpocket, a blackmailer, and a whore. She married twice and lived for shorter periods with a long succession of crooks, the most notable of whom was the famed Chicago safecracker Eddie Guerin.