by Mike Dash
Return to text.
*31Some idea of the scale of such deceptions can be found in a report issued by Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose agents on one occasion stood by while the police raided a supposed gambling den, finding only “a crap layout worth $10.” One hour later Comstock’s men burst unannounced into the same establishment and seized more than $2,500 worth of high-class gambling equipment.
Return to text.
*32Kelly’s nickname—not entirely deserved—dated to his early days in New England, where in 1888 he had umpired a crucial baseball game between Boston and Providence and famously refused a $10,000 bribe. In the 1890s, he became a boxing referee and was the first to exercise the prerogative of calling off all bets if he suspected that a bout had been fixed. Kelly ran foul of Big Tim Sullivan in 1898 when he did suspend betting on a fight between “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and Tom Sharkey in which Corbett’s second entered the ring, resulting in the heavyweight’s disqualification. Sullivan—who had wagered $13,000 on a Sharkey victory—angrily ordered Kelly’s gambling house to be raided by the police the next day.
Return to text.
*33As the law stood in 1912, Rosenthal could have barred the waiting patrolman from reentering his premises if he vacated the building for even a minute. Once the guard on the club was lifted, the police could have reentered only by securing another warrant, which would have required fresh evidence of impropriety.
Return to text.
*34Sullivan, a former bodyguard of Hearst’s, had grown up on the East Side and been best man at Herman’s second wedding. Like several of Rosenthal’s friends, he was Jewish but had changed his name in order to escape the anti-Semitic prejudice of the day and stay in with the Irish-run Tammany Hall—his real name was Jacob Reich. He now ran a depot where parcels of the World, the American, and the Globe and Mail were broken down and bundled up for sale by thousands of adolescent vendors and liked to be known as “The King of the Newsboys.” This work would not normally have given him access to any journalists, but Sullivan, like Rosenthal, was a loudmouth and a busybody. He made it his business to be in and out of newsrooms all the time and boasted incessantly to anyone who would listen about his contacts in the press.
Return to text.
*35The newsman hired as a result of Pulitzer’s order, the mercurial wordsmith Esdaile “Doc” Cohen, undoubtedly did shake up the newsroom. Clarke recalled that he was sitting at his desk one afternoon when “suddenly, a loud crash as of splintering wood, accompanied by a roar—which, although remindful of a lion, was identifiable as human—sounded above the click of typewriters, the rattle of the city news-tape, and the tattoo of telegraph instruments. My eyes swung to the cause of the disturbance: a large man with a large head, bald on top, blue eyes behind gold-bowed spectacles, graying mustache above wide-opened mouth, over noticeable chin. He was erect beside his desk…waistcoat open and flapping, he raised clenched fists over his head and said loudly and distinctly: ‘God damn it. God damn the World. God damn all the editors. God damn Mr. Pulitzer. God damn everybody.’“I was more than astonished; I was paralyzed for a moment. I expected that this wild man instantly would be seized and restrained until the police or operatives from the handiest psychopathic establishment arrived. But no one seemed to pay any other than amused attention…. He stooped, picked up a chair, dashed it to the floor with most satisfying sound effect. Then he said suddenly and quietly, with a sweet smile: ‘God damn it. I’m going to buy a drink. Who will accompany me?’”“‘Just letting off steam,’ head office boy Alex Schlosser explained to Clarke. ‘That’s nothing.’”
Return to text.
*36Shaughnessy was a pitman at one of Rothstein’s gambling clubs.
Return to text.
*37Rose’s alopecia was the result of a severe bout of typhus.
Return to text.
*38A term for a pickpocket specializing in the theft of jewelry.
Return to text.
*39In 1911 one informant had confessed to the police that Zelig quoted fixed scales for the commission of various crimes, the exact fee depending on the prominence of the intended victim:
Slash on the cheek with a knife…$1 to $10
Shot in leg…$1 to $25
Shot in arm…$5 to $25
Throwing a bomb…$5 to $50
Murder…$10 to $100 and up
Return to text.
*40The Considines had first partnered Sullivan years earlier, at Miner’s Theatre on the Bowery. Within months they would also be in business with Arnold Rothstein, backing a sumptuous new gambling house known as the Holley Arms Hotel out on Long Island.
Return to text.
*41A few years later, Woollcott was, of course, a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, a famed gathering of wits that numbered among its members Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker.
Return to text.
*42The police response was similarly muted. None of the dozen or so murderers responsible for these other killings was ever caught.
Return to text.
*43Whitman evidently meant Detective File and Lieutenant Frye.
Return to text.
*44The benefits of taking a public stance on the police corruption were brought home to Whitman just a few days later, when he received a visit from the industrialist William Schieffelin, representative of a group of wealthy “Simon Pure” reformers. (A Simon Pure was a hypocrite who made a great public show of virtue, named after a Quaker character in an early-eighteenth-century play.) He and his friends, Schieffelin said, wanted to offer the DA financial assistance in his quest to crack down on the NYPD. The next day, Whitman let it be known he would be a lot more comfortable running the Rosenthal investigation from somewhere other than his dingy office in the Criminal Courts Building. Schieffelin obliged, and the DA spent the next five months working from a luxury suite in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. “Whenever we had any problems,” one of his staff recalled, “Whitman would pick up the phone and make a call, and a couple of hours later Schieffelin would come in with a bundle of money. Those Simon Pure fellows were really generous. They were so grateful to have someone working hard to clean up the city.”
Return to text.
*45Sullivan succumbed rapidly to his illness. The symptoms first emerged in April 1912. Shortly after Rosenthal was shot, he had to be confined to his home; six months later he was certified insane. The disease that crippled him was never publicly identified, but members of Tim’s own family believed that he was suffering through the last stages of syphilis.
Return to text.
*46On at least one occasion, Costigan testified, he and his men were interrupted in the midst of searching a suspected gambling house when Becker came crashing through a side door minus a warrant—thus neatly invalidating all the evidence that they had gathered. The implication was that the panicking owners of the club had placed an urgent phone call as soon as Costigan appeared, reminding the lieutenant of the protection money they had paid, and Becker had responded by hurrying straight over.
Return to text.
*47“Would avenge you, you mean,” Zelig’s lawyer hurriedly interjected at this point. “That’s what I said, avenge me,” replied his client, grinning.
Return to text.
*48A contemporary term, derogatory in tone, used to describe some insignificant factotum of a more important man.
Return to text.
*49Or perhaps not. According to the City Hall reporter Andy Logan, the DA’s man and the desk clerk “were discovered some time later at London’s luxurious Savoy Hotel where they had been living for several weeks while they labored, more or less arduously, over the terms on which Coupe would agree to return. Eventually the desk clerk accepted a check for five hundred dollars and a round-trip first-class ticket good on any Cunard liner. The two men would arrive back in New York too late for Becker’s trial but in time for that of the four gunmen…. In the end [Coupe] was never called to testify in either, and he eve
ntually used the other half of his ticket to go back to Liverpool, where he reportedly invested his five hundred dollar payoff in a thriving pub.”
Return to text.
*50How this weapon found its way from the NYPD to Davidson was never properly established. Its former owner, Patrolman Christopher Maher, claimed to have left it accidentally in a saloon a year and a half earlier. The bartender, traced and questioned, swore he had returned the missing pistol to its owner; and a pawnbroker from Jersey City came forward to admit that he had sold the gun to the assassin. The pawnbroker did not disclose, however, how the gun came to be in his possession.
Return to text.
*51“Mr McIntyre,” the New York Sun observed of the passage of the trial that preceded this exchange, “was many times over-ruled. He kept the stenographer extra busy entering exceptions to the Justice’s decisions.”
Return to text.
*52In the letters referred to, Jake Luban attributed to Jack Rose the words ascribed in court to Becker. Two weeks after Morris Luban testified, another sibling, Alexander, visited the Brooklyn district attorney to demand the return of the $3,000 bond he had posted on his brother’s behalf. “The family is through with him,” Alexander Luban said. “Morris is no good…. I’m sure he was nowhere near the bath at the time he described.”
Return to text.
*53This was not the first time that Goff had intervened to halt a cross-examination during the Becker trial. Toward the end of McIntyre’s questioning of Morris Luban, the judge had peremptorily ended the examination. On this occasion, too, John Hart had risen and asked to be permitted to continue in McIntyre’s stead. “No,” Goff said, and ordered an adjournment.
Return to text.
*54McIntyre’s annoyance was understandable. “Try and think again, Mr. Schepps,” he had urged a few minutes earlier as the witness blandly dodged another pitfall. “I don’t have to think very hard to answer your questions,” Schepps had scornfully retorted. “I’m answering them all right.”
Return to text.
*55Jerome’s testimony, while slight, was actually intriguing: Jack Rose, at one point in his evidence, had recalled taking a call from Lieutenant Becker and indulging in a long, incriminating conversation in which Becker had advised him to “lie low” for the few days after the murder. Quite unknown to the gambler, Jerome had happened to be present when this call was placed. He was prepared to swear that the conversation had lasted less than sixty seconds, which—had the jury believed him—might have gone some way to discrediting some of Bald Jack’s other recollections. Goff disallowed his testimony on the grounds that while Jerome remembered Becker picking up a receiver and asking to speak to Rose, the former DA could not swear that the man who had come to the phone really was the gambler. Waldo attempted to testify that it had been he, and not Lieutenant Becker, who had ordered a police guard to be placed in Herman’s house—a revelation at variance with the central thrust of Whitman’s evidence. Goff ruled this testimony irrelevant.
Return to text.
*56Probably he was. Sullivan, unlike Rose and the other gamblers, never signed one of Whitman’s immunity agreements and remained in jail until May 1913, when he was released. At that time Whitman told the press that the distributor’s trial for murder would begin soon. It never happened, but the indictment remained on Sullivan’s record until his death a quarter of a century later.
Return to text.
*57Writing decades later, Andy Logan, the New Yorker’s fabled City Hall correspondent, probably got as close to the real answer to this puzzle as anybody when she hazarded, “Since Shapiro’s lawyer, Aaron Levy, had been on hand for the final negotiations that had ended with Becker’s indictment, it seems probable that his conversion had been plotted months before. Five formal immunity agreements might have seemed rather much, and this present maneuver took care of the matter nicely.”
Return to text.
*58“The man of the hour,” Viña Delmar wrote, “was District Attorney Whitman. He was getting more attention in New York than Mr. Woodrow Wilson. After all, Whitman’s promises already had been kept, his deeds accomplished. One could read almost anywhere that he was the champion of civilization and that morality had triumphed only because Mr. Whitman had not rested.”
Return to text.
*59The system was a simple one. First offenders wore one stripe, second offenders two, and incorrigibles with four offenses or more to their names sported the completed “zebra” uniform.
Return to text.
*60Another favorite was Captain Scott’s South Pole diary, which Becker apparently clung to as a symbol of the freedom he had lost. The diary certainly provided him with a bizarre form of release: “One thing I would like to do after clearing up the Rosenthal case,” he told a disbelieving newsman, “is go to the North Pole. That diary of Scott’s is one of the greatest things ever printed.”
Return to text.
*61Bichloride of mercury, a highly toxic fungicide.
Return to text.
*62This was very likely true. Lewis was a notoriously poor shot who probably would not have been trusted to hit Herman even at close range.
Return to text.
*63“I intended to commute Becker’s sentence,” Sulzer added a decade later, “and then to pardon him. I was convinced of Becker’s innocence without considering the affidavits submitted.”
Return to text.
*64Osborne was well known to many of the prisoners. One of his most famous experiments, undertaken a year earlier, had been to spend a week in the Auburn jail as a prisoner himself, an experience that resulted in a book, Within Prison Walls, and only enhanced the warden’s natural sympathy for the men in his charge. The prisoners, in turn—so Osborne’s biographer asserts—“trusted him completely. His absolute confidence was all the protection he needed.”
Return to text.
*65Becker’s mother, Mary, was then ninety-two years old, blind, and had not been informed of her son’s conviction—she was told “police business” was keeping him from visiting her.
Return to text.
*66As governor, Whitman wielded almost total power over appointments to the court of appeals. It was surely noteworthy, critics said, that Frank Hiscock—a Republican judge who had been scathingly dismissive of Goff’s handling of the first Becker trial—voted silently with the majority during the second appeal and that Hiscock soon afterward was promoted to be the court’s senior judge, at a considerably enhanced salary.
Return to text.
*67Swope had, however, attended the execution of the four gunmen. He had sat perched like some gangly bird of prey in the front row, and—one journalist wrote later—“other reporters there insisted they were surprised he didn’t at the last moment step forward and pull the switch himself.”
Return to text.
*68On losing office, Mitchel immediately volunteered for military service and was sent to train as a pilot. On July 6, 1918, while completing his course of instruction in Louisiana, the former mayor fell out of his plane at five hundred feet and plunged to the ground, dying instantly at the age of only thirty-eight. It was thought he had forgotten to fasten his seat belt.
Return to text.
*69Big Tim’s vote-winning adaptability was still in evidence before his final illness struck. The members of an Irish gang were caught harassing Orthodox Jews in his cousin Florrie’s district. When word of this reached Sullivan, he spoke with the police; the toughs’ clubhouse was raided, their landlord threw them out, and Tim promptly rented the rooms himself and had them turned into a synagogue.
Return to text.
*70Swope was the first writer to use the word “Inside” in the title of a book to denote exclusive or privileged access—a device that has been widely copied since. He had always been an innovator. In his youth he was the only newspaperman in St. Louis to wear spats. In New York, in 1928, he became the first man to affect midnight blue evening dress; within a short while it had become an accepted s
ubstitute for black. Swope is also stated to have been the first man brave enough to wear zippered bathing trunks in public.
Return to text.
*71 Combine two ounces of applejack, the potent New Jersey cider brandy, with the juice of half a lemon and a scant half ounce of grenadine. Shake well with cracked ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. As one drinks writer points out, the name pretty much suggested itself. “The cocktail is based on apple jack and it’s rose-pink. Play on words.”
Return to text.
*72The safecracker got away in a canoe made from a hollowed-out tree accompanied by four other prisoners, none of whom lived to reach freedom. According to underworld legend, Guerin ate them.
Return to text.
Copyright © 2007 by Michael Dash
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data
Dash, Mike.
Satan’s circus: murder, vice, police corruption, and New York’s trial of the century / Mike Dash.—1st ed.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Murder—New York (State)—New York. 2. Becker, Charles, 1870–1915. 3. Police corruption—New York (State)—New York. 4. Rosenthal, Herman, d. 1912. I. Title.
HV6534.N5D37 2006
364.1'323—dc22 2006025714
MAPS BY JACKIE AHER
eISBN: 978-0-307-39522-1
v3.0