Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  Against the Evidence remains by far the densest and most detailed account of the Becker case. Like Klein, Logan became convinced of the policeman’s innocence. Her book—heavily researched in the newspapers of the time—intelligently lays out the vast number of discrepancies in the prosecution case; it is a veritable gold mine of information, extremely thought-provoking and generally reliable. Its defects are a confused chronology and a complete lack of bibliography and footnotes. Fortunately, the Andy Logan Papers, held in the New York Public Library, contain a dozen boxes relating to the research Logan undertook before writing her book, and these papers have been used to verify and source a number of statements that I was otherwise unable to track down in the newspapers of the time.

  A third book on the Becker case—the second published—proved less useful than Klein’s and Logan’s works. Jonathan Root’s The Life and Bad Times of Charlie Becker is patchily researched and contains several instances of outright invention. I have used it only very occasionally, and then with caution.

  When it comes to researching the story of New York itself, the historian is spoiled for choice. Virtually every aspect of the city’s political, social, and economic life has been well illuminated by recent studies, from the highest of high society down to and including the everyday existences of boardinghouse lodgers and Bowery bums. Luc Sante’s intoxicatingly anecdotal Low Life, while perhaps understandably distrusted by academic historians, is based on wide reading and remains a vivid introduction to the realities of life in a great city. I must also mention Gotham, by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, a masterful, inclusive, and wonderfully readable study of the whole of New York’s history up to 1898; at the established pace, Wallace’s much-anticipated follow-up volume—covering the period from 1898 to the present day—is due in a little over a decade, and I will be waiting for my copy. No author, though, has taught me more about the thoughts, the sounds, and the rhythms of New York in the first half of the last century than has Joseph Mitchell, the renowned New Yorker correspondent, several of whose incomparable essays touch, if only tangentially, on my own subject. My respect for him grows all the time.

  Notes on the Text

  PREFACE

  “ ONLY ONE HAS BEEN EXECUTED FOR MURDER” At the time of writing, two other police officers sit on death row, awaiting execution for murders committed in 1995. One, Antoinette Frank of the New Orleans Police Department, was found guilty of the cold-blooded killing of two employees of a Vietnamese restaurant she had been hired to protect in her off-duty hours, together with the murder of a member of her own department who had the misfortune to be on the premises when she arrived after closing time intent on robbery. The other, Jack Ray Hudson Jr., shot and killed two fellow policemen who had caught him attempting to steal money, guns, and drugs from an evidence lockup in Yuma, Arizona. In New York, meanwhile, two retired police officers—Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa—found guilty of working as hit men for the Mafia received life sentences that were subsequently overturned on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. Their trial revived memories of the Becker case in the New York press.

  It is possible that other cases have occurred; indeed it surprises me that Charles Becker has retained his dubious distinction for as long as he has. But I have never, despite several searches, found any reference to the execution of another American police officer convicted for crimes committed while in uniform. The only reference work I have found on the subject, Michael Newton’s Killer Cops: An Encyclopedia of Lawless Lawmen (Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited, 1997), mentions only Becker, Frank, and Hudson.

  “ CROOKEDEST COP” Luc Sante, Low Life, p. 249.

  1. WIDE-OPEN

  BROADWAY GARDEN Richard O’Connor, Hell’s Kitchen, p. 93; Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York, p. 259; Robert Stallman, Stephen Crane, p. 220.

  THE YOUNG MAN DESCRIBED New York Sun, Sept. 17, and Journal, Oct. 17, 1896.

  THE YOUNG MAN AND THE CHORUS GIRLS New York Sun, Sept. 17, and Journal, Sept. 20, 1896; Stallman, op. cit., p. 220.

  DESCRIPTION OF THE REDHEAD New York Journal, Sept. 17, and Crane’s testimony and pictures in the same paper, Sept. 20, 1896.

  SHIRTWAIST Leon Stein, of the Ladies’ International Garment Workers’ Union, describes the shirtwaist, in his history of The Triangle Fire, p. 160, as “a cool and efficient bodice garment, generally worn with a tailored skirt,” which conveyed the image of “a bright-eyed, fast-moving young lady, her long tresses knotted in a bun atop her proud head, ready to challenge the male in sport, drawing room, and, if properly equipped with paper cuff covers, even in the office…. The secret of its perennial popularity was in its lines…. The bouffant quality of the fabric enhanced the figure it enfolded.”

  BECKER New York Sun, Sept. 17 and Oct. 16; Journal, Sept. 20 and Oct. 17, 1896; Stallman, op. cit., p. 220; Christopher Benfey, The Double Life of Stephen Crane, p. 175.

  GERMANS IN THE NYPD Levine, p. 42; Cornelius Willemse, A Cop Remembers, p. 82; Lardner and Reppetto, NYPD, p. 61.

  “MARKEDLY INTELLIGENT” For standards prevalent in the NYPD of 1896, see Levine. Becker’s unusual intelligence was mentioned by a number of contemporaries. Thomas Mott Osborne, warden of Sing Sing prison, for example, doubted that Becker was guilty of the crime he would eventually be charged with on the grounds that “if such a man had set his mind on murder, he would have made a better job of it.” Rudolph Chamberlain, There Is No Truce: A Life of Thomas Mott Osborne, p. 308. From this perspective it is also noteworthy that Becker’s son became a professor at the University of Wisconsin, that his grandson was a doctor of history, and that his great-granddaughter was at one time one of the leading female chess masters in the United States. Private information on the Becker family from Mary Becker, wife of the policeman’s great-grandnephew, Todson Becker. THE ENCOUNTER WITH BECKER My descriptions of the participants’ thoughts and actions are taken from Stephen Crane’s third-person account, written almost immediately after the event. New York Journal, Sept. 20, 1896. For the location of the nearest transport links to Broadway Garden, see Eric Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City, pp. 106–7.

  SATAN’S CIRCUS Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham, pp. 955–9, 1068; Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros, pp. 204–5. Definitions of the district’s boundaries vary from source to source, and the district itself shifted subtly from year to year. According to Luc Sante, however, the neighborhood comprised a sixteen-block strip of the West Side, stretching between Twenty-fourth and Fortieth Streets and from Fifth Avenue across to Seventh. Sante, Low Life, p. 185.

  PROSTITUTION IN SATAN’S CIRCUS Gilfoyle, op. cit., pp. 58, 205–8; Sante, op. cit., p. 188. “

  UNNATURAL PRACTICES” Gilfoyle, op. cit., p. 165.

  BECKER’S REPONSE New York Sun, Sept. 19, and Journal, Sept. 20, 1896.

  “TWO-THIRDS IRISH” During the 1850s one officer in every four had been born either in Ireland or to Irish parents; by 1888 the figure was six in every ten; and by 1910, three-quarters of the entire New York Police Department was Irish. Levine, pp. 23–25, 42–43.

  AT THE STATION HOUSE Olov Fryckstedt, “Stephen Crane in the Tenderloin,” pp. 141–42, 145.

  “DORA CLARK” New York Sun, Sept. 16, and Journal, Sept. 17 and 20, 1896; Stallman, op. cit., p. 229. For her real name, see the Sun of Oct. 16, 1896.

  RUBY YOUNG’S PROFESSION New York World, Oct. 16, 1896. Stallman, Crane’s biographer, (op. cit., p. 229) asserts that Young was a “kept woman,” the “mistress of a wealthy man living at the Waldorf.” This seems to be incorrect. Young had indeed had an assignation with one of the Waldorf’s guests on the night in question. But she had taken him to her own room on East Eighty-first Street, which argues against any long-term relationship. And, had she really been a rich man’s mistress, there would have been no need for her to work as a streetwalker, as she evidently did; Becker later testified that he had known her for about two years. Sun, Oct. 16, 1896. For the prostitute’s “drift,” see the eloquent
comments of Sante, op. cit., pp. 179–80.

  THE YOUNG MAN AND THE SERGEANT New York Journal, Sept. 20, 1896.

  “WHAT HE WAS THINKING WAS…” Ibid.

  “BOHEMIAN IN THE BEST SENSE” New York Journal, Oct. 17, 1896.

  CRANE’S SUBJECTS Keith Gandal, The Spectacle of the Poor, pp. 90, 126. For the details of the author’s experiences in the slums, see also Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1186, 1189. Crane’s experiences as a beggar were based on a night spent in line at the yeast manufacturer Louis Fleischmann’s Model Vienna Bakery, next to Grace Church, which during the day sold sweet rolls and coffee and after midnight distributed a third of a loaf free to each of the local indigents who lined up to take advantage of this charity—thus popularizing the term “breadline.”

  “QUEER” Fryckstedt, op. cit., p. 140.

  CRANE, OPIUM, AND THE NEW YORK JOURNAL Ibid., pp. 140–1; Journal, Sept. 20, 1896; Benfey, op. cit., p. 174; Logan, p. 109; Stallman, op. cit., pp. 219–20.

  CRANE’S THOUGHTS New York Journal, Sept. 20, 1896.

  CRANE’S “PLOT” For the Boston Traveler, see Frykstedt, op. cit., p. 151. The vast majority of Stephen Crane’s biographers have chosen to accept his own version of these events, portraying him as an innocent, even chivalric, figure in this case. My account of the reporter’s aims and motives follows the reinterpretation offered by Benfey, op. cit., pp. 171–81, which I find more thoughtful and considerably more persuasive. “It seems,” Benfey writes, “highly likely that Crane knew precisely who Dora [Clark] was. It should be remembered that he set out to ‘study the police court victims in their haunts,’ and Dora was such a victim…. The coincidences are less glaring if we assume that Crane was cruising for a crisis, and that the chorus girls flagged down Dora Clark as someone who might help spark one…. It’s probably closer to the truth to say that the target for entrapment was Officer Charles Becker himself, and that Dora Clark was the bait.”

  DOUBTERS New York Journal, Sept. 20, 1896; Stallman, op. cit., pp. 219, 221.

  AT THE POLICE COURT New York Sun, Tribune, and Journal, Sept. 17, 1896; Frykstedt, op. cit., pp. 135–36; Stallman and Hagemann, Sketches, pp. 219–21, 261–62; Stallman, op. cit., pp. 222–25, 233–34; Benfey, op. cit., pp. 171–74.

  BECKER DESCRIBED Pictures of Becker were published in the New York Journal of Sept. 19 and Oct. 17, alongside a description in the former case. See also Logan, p. 3.

  ROSENBERG There were in fact no black officers in the New York Police Department at this time. The first, Samuel Battle, was not appointed until the summer of 1911, and he faced considerable hostility from his brother officers, all of whom refused to patrol with him. New York Times, June 29, July 28, and Sept. 26, 1911.

  CRANE’S STATEMENT TO THE PRESS New York Journal, Sept. 19 and 20, 1896. On Crane’s typescript—an early draft of a piece for the Journal, now in the Barrett Crane Collection—see Stallman, op. cit., p. 586. All this made first-rate copy for New York papers. Most of the court reporters were inclined to favor Crane—he was, after all, a fellow journalist, and in any case they did not like the police—and many of the accounts that appeared the next day took the obvious line, comparing Crane to the hero of his famous novel. “The red badge of courage,” concluded an admiring column in the city’s biggest daily, “flamed with a new brightness as Mr. Crane walked away.” Still, not every paper published on September 19 agreed. Association with “women in scarlet,” the Chicago Dispatch wrote, was hardly proof of courage of any description.

  AFTERMATH New York Tribune, Sept. 29; Journal, Oct. 8, 11, and 17; Times, Nov. 2, 1896; Stallman, op. cit., pp. 221, 225–26, 228–29; Frykstedt, op. cit., p. 152. Chicago May, whose real name was May Sharpe, was using the alias “May Kane” at this time. At the beginning of November, she and Young fought a second battle in the New York streets. Both were again arrested. New York Times, Nov. 2,1896. The combative May also got into a fight with one of the witnesses at Becker’s police trial. As the people in the courtroom filed out at the end of the hearing, she was set upon by one of Crane’s friends, Miss Effie Ward, who “made an energetic attempt to tear out all her hair.” May responded “by trying to scratch out Miss Ward’s eyes.” New York Sun, Oct. 17, 1896.

  FREQUENCY OF POLICE TRIALS Lexow, p. 54. The incidence of charges brought against members of the police peaked at an astonishing 4,000 in 1875. On average, the rate generally ran at 1,500 to 1,700 charges per year; Augustine Costello, Our Police Protectors, p. 560.

  AT THE POLICE TRIAL New York World, Oct. 16; Sun and Journal, Oct. 17 and 18, 1896; Fryckstedt, op. cit., pp. 153–61; Logan, pp. 110–11; Hamlin Garland, Roadside Meetings, pp. 203–4; Stallman, op. cit., pp. 227–30. The charges against Becker were formally dropped a week before Christmas. According to the Middletown Daily Argus (NY), Dec. 17, 1894, “the only evidence against the officer was given by Mr. Crane, and the Police Commissioner seems to have reached the conclusion that he has dealt so much with fiction that he does not know where the truth ends and fiction begins.”

  POLICE HARASS CRANE James Richardson, New York Police, p. 262.

  2. KING OF THE BOWERY

  BECKER’S BIRTH The date of Becker’s birth remains in some doubt. The birth of a child named Charles Becker on the date given is recorded in the nearest village, Callicoon Center, but the Becker family’s genealogical research has revealed another record for the birth of a child with the same name dated exactly three years later. Records of the Callicoon Center Evangelical Church and birth registers kept in the Sullivan County Record Office, copies in MBC. Given the coincidence of both name and date, it seems one of the two records may be a misdated copy of the other. The best evidence favoring the earlier date is Becker’s statement, on his conviction for murder, that his age was then forty-two; New York Sun, Oct. 25,1912. Oddly enough, Becker’s birthplace was not much more than twenty miles from Port Jervis, the childhood home of Stephen Crane; the two men, who were practically identical in age, thus grew up together as near neighbors.

  DISTANCE FROM NEW YORK This is the distance between Callicoon and New York as the crow flies. The distance by rail, in Becker’s day, was closer to 140 miles.

  “NO ONE CAN MAKE MORE THAN A BASE LIVING…” Becker to Mary Weyrauch, Nov. 14, 1913, MBC.

  HEINRICH BECKER AND HIS FARM Heinrich Becker appears to have dropped the German form of his given name on his arrival in New York and was known as Henry to his neighbors in Sullivan County. The German version of the name, however, appears on his tombstone, still clearly visible in the little cemetery at Callicoon Center. For the locale, see James Quinlan, History of Sullivan County, pp. 167–68; it is indicative of the low level of the early population of the county that Quinlan can devote nearly a page of this work to the story of the Becker family, down to recounting the results of a specific hunting expedition. For other accounts of the family’s history, see the Sullivan County Democrat, Aug. 6, 1912, and family genealogies in MBC, based for these generations of the family on correspondence with the church authorities in Bebra, Hesse-Kassel, and extracts from the records of Callicoon and Sullivan County mentioned above.

  CALLICOON DEPOT J. S. Graham, The Callicoon Historian, pp. 40, 54–55. Today its name has contracted to a simple “Callicoon”—a word that, incidentally, comes from the Dutch “Kollikoon,” which is said to have derived from the call made by the wild turkeys that once abounded in the district.

  “VARIOUSLY AS A BROKER…” Mary Becker, personal communication, Nov. 28, 2004, author’s files.

  BECKER’S YOUTH IN CALLICOON CENTER For the testimony of Philip Huff and Baltazer Hauser (both of whose names are incorrectly given by the source), see the New York Herald of Aug. 2, 1912. For the correct spellings of the witnesses’ names, see Quinlan, op. cit., p. 168, and Sullivan County Democrat, Aug. 6, 1912. For the date of Becker’s departure to New York, see the Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915.

  THE NEW YORK OF 1890 Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham, pp. 943–44, 1040–88, 1116–17, 1228; Luc Sant
e, Low Life, pp. 23–45; John Kouwenhoven, Historical Portrait of New York, pp. 381, 393; Ric Burns and James Sanders with Lisa Ades, New York, pp. 182–215, 236, 262; Eric Homburger, The Historical Atlas of New York City, pp. 110–11, 126–28, 136–37; Albert Fried, The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America, pp. 16–17; Daniel Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913,” Journal of American History 78 (1991), p. 542; Marc Eliott, Down 42nd Street, p. 77.

  ICE TRUST New York World, Apr. 4, 1900; Oliver Allen, The Tiger, pp. vii–ix.

  “DENSE CAT’S CRADLES…” Overground telephone wires were already on the way out by 1890; the great blizzard of 1888 had demonstrated the vulnerability of such utilities—two-thirds of Manhattan’s telephone and electricity poles were brought down by the worst storm of the century, which deposited drifts of snow as much as thirty feet deep in places—and the city had begun a major program of burying its millions of cables belowground. The speed of change accelerated further after October 1889, when thousands of New Yorkers were distressed at the sight of a Western Union lineman who had been electrocuted while making repairs to an overhead cable in the busiest part of the business district. The unfortunate electrician hung, caught in the still-live wires, for more than an hour before the power was turned off, with blue flames spitting from his mouth. Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1068; Burns, Sanders, and Ades, op. cit., p. 200.

  HORSE-CARS As well as being slow, the horse-cars were inconvenient. Vicious competition between the various companies holding monopolies on various routes made it almost impossible to travel from place to place without a number of inconvenient and expensive changes. Traversing the length of Fourteenth Street, for example, meant making three changes and paying four fares. Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1057.