Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

Sante, Luc. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. London: Granta Books, 1998.

  Sharpe, May. Chicago May: Her Story. New York: Macaulay Company, 1928.

  Sloat, Warren. A Battle for the Soul of New York: Tammany Hall, Police Corruption, Vice and the Reverend Charles Parkhurst’s Crusade Against Them, 1892–1895. Lanham [MD]: Cooper Square Press, 2002.

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  Steffens, Lincoln. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace Company, 1931.

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  Steinberg, Allen. “The ‘Lawman’ in New York: William Travers Jerome and the Origins of the Modern District Attorney in Turn-of-the-Century New York.” University of Toledo Law Review 34 (2003).

  ———. “The Becker-Rosenthal Murder Case: The Cop and the Gambler.” In Frankie Bailey and Steven Chermak (eds.), Famous American Crimes and Trials. Westport [CT]: Praeger, 2004.

  ———. “The Becker Case and American Progressivism.” In Amy Gilman Srebnick and René Lévy (eds.), Crime and Culture: An Historical Perspective. Aldershot [England]: Ashgate, 2005.

  Stevens, John. Sensationalism and the New York Press. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

  Stoddard, Theodore Lothrop. Master of Manhattan: The Life of Richard Croker. New York: Longman’s Green, 1931.

  Stout, Glenn, and Richard Johnson, Yankees Century: 100 Years of New York Yankees Baseball. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

  Stryker, Lloyd. The Art of Advocacy. New York: Cornerstone Library, 1965.

  Thomas, Lately. The Mayor Who Mastered New York: The Life and Opinions of William J. Gaynor. New York: William Morrow, 1969.

  Valentine, Lewis. Night Stick: The Autobiography of Lewis J. Valentine, Former Police Commissioner of New York. New York: Dial Press, 1947.

  Veiller, Bayard. The Fun I’ve Had. New York: Reynal Hitchcock, 1941.

  Weiss, Nancy. Charles Francis Murphy, 1858–1924: Respectability and Responsibility in Tammany Hall Politics. Northampton [MA]: Smith College, 1968.

  Werner, M. K. Tammany Hall. Garden City [NY]: Doubleday, Doran, 1928.

  Willemse, Cornelius. Behind the Green Lights. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.

  ———. A Cop Remembers. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1933.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Research conducted in various archives in New York City and Sullivan County was partly funded by a generous travel grant made by the Society of Authors, to whom I tender grateful thanks.

  Satan’s Circus would have been a much poorer book without the unstinting help I received from a number of people along the way. In Canada, Mary Becker of Kingston, Ontario—wife of Charley Becker’s grandnephew, the late Todson Harvey Becker Jr.—made her private collection of letters, papers, and family histories freely available to me. In the United States, John Conway, historian of Sullivan County, kindly read and criticized the sections concerning Becker’s youth in upstate New York, and Sandra Vossler of Humboldt County, Nevada, researched the later life of Becker’s second wife, Letitia, on my behalf. I would also like to thank Diane Hess of the Sullivan County Democrat, Howard S. Becker, Susan J. Becker, and Rachel Kahan. In Jerusalem, Hadassah Assouline arranged access to Abe Shoenfeld’s reports on Lower East Side criminals, archived among the Judah Magnes Papers. In New York and London, Sean Desmond, my vigorous new editor at Crown; Sara Holloway, my valued editor at Granta; and Patrick Walsh and Emma Parry, my agents—all strong supporters of the project—proffered invaluable advice and support. At home, Penny and Ffion made writing the book not merely possible but pleasurable. I can never properly express my gratitude for the sacrifice both have made on my behalf.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Thug

  Batavia’s Graveyard

  Tulipomania

  Borderlands

  The Limit

  *1Satan’s Circus housed a greater concentration of prostitutes than any equivalent area in the country: A dozen brothels clustered along West Thirty-first Street alone, and as many as 5,000 girls plied their trade within the narrow confines of the district as a whole. Various streets developed specialties of their own. The French Madame’s, and other dance halls on Sixth Avenue, offered the cancan and (in private booths) explicit sexual exhibitions called circuses. “Soubrette Row,” as West Thirty-ninth was known, was famed for prostitutes who “resort to unnatural practices [fellatio], and as a result the other girls will not associate or eat with them.” Meanwhile, up on West Fortieth Street, some of Manhattan’s more ambitious streetwalkers brazenly sought customers among the worshippers who attended the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell’s church, prompting the outraged preacher to complain that “harlots would stand across the streets on Sunday evenings in unbuttoned dresses, soliciting men as they left our service.”

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  *2He was the eldest son of former president Ulysses S. Grant, and no relation of Becker’s lawyer.

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  *3In April 1900, the American Ice Company (which had muscled its way to an effective monopoly over the supply of ice to the city) announced that it was doubling its prices from 30 cents to 60 cents per hundred pounds. This put its product—the only effective preservative of milk, medicines, and numerous foods—beyond the reach of many poor New Yorkers and would certainly have led to a sharp increase in infant mortality, food poisoning, and general discomfort had not an enormous public outcry forced a reversal of the decision. In the course of the subsequent inquiry into how American Ice had secured exclusive rights to unload its product at city piers, it was revealed that New York’s $15,000-a-year mayor, Robert Van Wyck, owned—and had apparently not paid for—$680,000 worth of ice-trust stock. The resultant scandal was generally agreed to have cost the Democrats the municipal elections of 1901.

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  *4In 1890—and until 1904—known as Longacre Square.

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  *5These, the muckraking journalist Jacob Riis recorded, varied from relatively salubrious twenty-five-cent properties, where “guests” could at least expect their own bed, flimsily partitioned, down through fifteen-cent dives, where the residents slept four deep on filthy bunks, to ten-cent properties, where “the locker for the sleeper’s clothes disappears. There is no longer need of it. The tramp limit is reached, and there is nothing to lock up, save, on general principle, the lodger.”

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  *6Situated on the Bowery, Suicide Hall swarmed with prostitutes and had earned its name from the frequency with which despairing girls downed drafts of carbolic acid or flung themselves from its balconies to their deaths on the dance floor below; as word of their deadly proclivities spread, the place become a gruesome sort of tourist attraction, and it was said that McGurk’s lurid business cards circulated among sailors in every major seaport in the world. The Hall’s bouncers, led by a fearsome former gangster known as “Eat ’Em Up Jack” McManus, specialized in ejecting obstreperous customers who had complained of being cheated by the place’s infamous headwaiter, “Short Change” Charley—a man regarded as the master of the art of proffering change in three-cent pieces in place of dimes.

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  *7Equivalent to $780 million today, some 80 percent of which was split among only five men.

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  *8Popularly known, thanks to a face that had received some severe blows in fights, as “Flat-Nose Dinny.”

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  *9Parkhurst’s adventures—heavily covered by the press—shocked and amused New York in equal measure. The magnificently bearded minister had been accosted in the first saloon he entered by a teenage girl demanding, “Hey, whiskers, going to ball me o
ff?” and then propositioned by more than fifty whores along one block of Bleecker Street—all of them touting for business within the hearing of a beat patrolman. Later Parkhurst visited a “tight house” (where all the girls wore tights) and called in at Hattie Adams’s celebrated bordello on West Twenty-seventh Street, where he was treated to a cancan exhibition that climaxed with one Amazonian blonde kicking away a derby hat held six feet off the floor. It was not until his detective introduced him to the Golden Rule Pleasure Club, a specialist brothel operated by a madam known as “Scotch Anne,” that Parkhurst flinched. The house, down in Greenwich Village, was located in a darkened basement divided into flimsy wooden cubicles and inhabited by heavily made-up men in women’s clothing who chattered away in artful falsettos and gave each other female names. The minister, bemused by this outlandish sight, had to be taken to one side and told that the denizens were male prostitutes. At this even Parkhurst turned and fled, calling, “Why, I wouldn’t stay in that house for all the money in the world!”

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  *10“There is more law in a policeman’s nightstick,” Clubber liked to say, “than in a decision of the Supreme Court.”

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  *11Mayor of New York from to 1909 to 1913.

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  *12At its peak this legendarily corrupt practice received fat retainers from virtually every thief, gangster, brothel keeper, and abortionist in the city. All seventy-four madams rounded up during a purity drive in 1884 named Howe Hummel as counsel, and at one time the firm represented 23 of the 25 prisoners awaiting trial for murder in New York’s Tombs prison and had an undeclared interest in the twenty-fourth. William F. Howe—a trial lawyer with a shady past, noted for his corpulence, diamond jewelry, and florid style—handled the criminal work. His partner, Hummel, a rake-thin, runtish genius (he stood less than five feet tall), specialized in civil cases and was widely celebrated for his skill in spotting loopholes in the law. Hummel once found an error in procedure that led to the release of 240 of the 300 prisoners on Blackwell’s Island; on another occasion the partners invoked a technicality that, had it been allowed, would have set free every prisoner then awaiting trial, or recently convicted, of first-degree murder in the entire state. The firm flourished until 1907 from offices opposite the new police headquarters on Centre Street. Its cable address was LENIENT.

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  *13Police nightsticks were formidable things. Twenty-six inches long, an inch and three-quarters thick, and made of locustwood—light but strong—they could easily kill if brought down hard enough on a man’s head. “All you got to do,” Lincoln Steffens was informed by one veteran officer, “is to tap the extremities, head or feet, so as to send a current through the spine…. It’s the funniest sight in the world to see the effect of a proper lick with the stick on a man’s two feet. I remember the first time I got one just right. That bum rose, stiff as a stick; he didn’t bend a knee or move an arm. He just rose up, running…. It was beautiful.”

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  *14A famous place, noted in the middle 1890s as “every slummer’s first stop,” where pickpockets operated en masse and the singing waiters included a young Al Jolson.

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  *15In 1874–76, Goff had been one of the organizers of the renowned Catalpa expedition, in which a New Bedford whaler had sailed halfway around the world to rescue six convicted Irish rebels from a penal colony in western Australia. The venture, popularly known as Goff’s Irish Rescue Party, had been successful, severely humiliating the British government of the day.

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  *16The results of this campaign were certainly intriguing. On his first nocturnal excursion down Third Avenue, Roosevelt stumbled over one beat policeman slumped asleep in a butter tub in the middle of the pavement, his snores loud enough to be heard across the street. Another was found engaging a prostitute, and half a dozen others were mysteriously absent from their posts. Only a single cop was patrolling his beat in accordance with the regulations, and seven malefactors were hauled into headquarters the next morning to explain themselves.

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  *17The reformers did not give up even then, of course. Dr. Parkhurst in particular fought on almost until his death in 1933, at the advanced age of 91. The old thunderer’s departure was an unusual one; Parkhurst fell from the roof of his summer residence while sleepwalking.

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  *18Becker’s lodge was the Polar Star, 245, FAM, of New York.

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  *19Aside from scandalizing New Yorkers with the nude statue of Diana that he erected atop the three-hundred-foot tower (modeled on the Giralda at Seville) that soared over the second Madison Square Garden, White later became the victim in a celebrated society murder. He was shot dead by his mistress’s cuckolded husband while watching a performance of Mam’zelle Champagne.

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  *20The game of faro was played thus: The first card drawn from a dealing box was regarded as dead. Thereafter cards were pulled out two at a time, the first in each pair being the bank’s and the second the players’. If a gambler bet on, say, the dealing of a four, and a four was drawn on the bank’s turn, he lost. If the card emerged on the player’s turn, he won. If two fours were drawn together, bets were split. The game’s influence can be gauged from the number of faro terms that found their way into everyday English. Players tracked the cards that had been dealt by “keeping tabs,” and they “broke even” when they bet a card to win and lose an equal number of times; other preferred “stringing along,” a method for betting on twenty-one different groups of cards simultaneously.

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  *21Richard Canfield, according to another estimate, paid $1,000 a month—in cash, across a table at Delmonico’s—to ensure that his premises received protection, plus between 15 and 25 percent of his profits.

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  *22The sex trade was, indeed, the reason the district had developed as it had. The first whorehouses in Satan’s Circus, which had opened not long after the appearance of the big theaters and concert halls nearby, had drawn such raucous crowds that they quickly drove the old inhabitants of the area north. Landlords unable to attract middle-class tenants were thus forced to choose between “dividing their properties into multiple-family dwellings for working-class tenants, or lease to agents who in turn rented to prostitutes and madams who could afford high rents,” as one historian of prostitution explains. Bordellos were the more profitable option, and before long, dozens had sprung up between Carnegie Hall and the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, sometimes twenty to a block. These were, of course, relatively high-class operations, and the sex available in Satan’s Circus was generally more sophisticated than that sold, say, down on the East Side.

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  *23His real name wasn’t Bridgey, of course. It was Louis. He had earned his nickname at the turn of the century by indulging in an all-too-public affair with a two-hundred-pound prostitute called Bridget.

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  *24He was, one New York paper wrote, “big bodied and muscular and could deliver more knockouts with his right than any man his size or double it for that matter.” In civilian life Spanish Louis had gone by the name John Lewis, but he claimed to have been born in Argentina and spun tales to his acquaintances of his noble Spanish blood. In fact—at least according to the crime historian Herbert Asbury—he was born into an Orthodox Jewish family from Brooklyn.

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  *25Asked by an investigating committee whether a man’s affiliations affected his chances of promotion, Police Commissioner York, of Tammany, guilelessly replied, “Oh, things being equal, it certainly does—and it ought to. I’d favor a Democrat every time if circumstances were alike…. Every day in the week and every hour in the day.”

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  *26Becker’s efforts were successful, too. By the end of 1902, the ineffectual Partridge had been di
smissed and Francis Greene, the new commissioner, had adopted modifications to the Two Platoon system that—while still requiring men to devote an average of twelve hours a day to the department—did allow them to work to a fixed rotation and take sixteen hours off every other day.

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  *27In the end Schmittberger wriggled free again. His lawyer protested that the raids were part of a conspiracy, hinted darkly at the motives of Becker and the other members of the street-cleaning squad, and argued that the inspector’s only “crime” was the technical one of endorsing the reports of the local precinct captain, who had certified the district clear of vice. It was a Pyrrhic victory, however, for Schmittberger was never let loose in Satan’s Circus again.

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  *28The moment of the shooting was captured for posterity by a photographer for the Evening World, who happened to be composing a portrait of the mayor when his would-be murderer (a former dockworker laid off as a result of Gaynor’s cost cutting) pressed a revolver to his neck and fired. When the resultant print—destined to become one of the most celebrated news photographs of all time—was placed on the desk of the World’s editor, Charles Chapin (“a man who, according to his staff of reporters, had a legendary imperviousness to human suffering, especially theirs”), his response was exultant: “Blood all over him! And exclusive, too!”

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  *29A job that had, just two months earlier, put Waldo in charge of tackling the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist fire, a hideous conflagration that claimed the lives of 146 mostly young, mostly female garment workers trapped on the upper floors of a building off Washington Square in which the doors leading to the fire escapes had been locked in an attempt to prevent pilfering.

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  *30Not as the result of promotion. The rank of sergeant had recently been abolished and all sergeants redesignated as lieutenants. In 1911 Becker was one of no fewer than six hundred men holding the new rank in the NYPD.