Top Hoodlum

by Anthony M. DeStefano

  The reason why Hans Fuhrmann would disappear was that he could make a lot of money crewing any one of the Rum Row smuggling vessels as a ship’s master plying the waters off Long Island. It was good money, and just about every other able-bodied sailor in the area was doing the same thing. As soon as local saloons were closed, others popped up. Prohibition had given Long Island a gold rush economy. The local cops knew that and when Annie Fuhrmann called them after she sustained a beating the officers told her to shut up.

  “‘He is a good fellow, too,’” Annie remembered one of the local cops telling her after she had been smacked around by Hans. “‘All the bootleggers are good fellows. You think I am going to arrest him and hurt my own graft. Not on your life. You better go back to bed and forget this.’”

  In the days before a woman had a number of social service agencies to turn to in cases of abuse, Annie Fuhrmann’s options were limited. The cops were no help and since none of the money Hans earned found its way to Annie Fuhrmann’s purse, she decided she had had enough. One day in mid-May, 1925, she traveled into Brooklyn and walked into the offices of the Brooklyn Eagle, the borough’s big daily newspaper. She figured that the only way to get her husband out of the bootleg trade was to reveal what he was doing and hope that her information would wake up federal investigators so they would arrest the “higher-ups” responsible for the smuggling of alcohol. To show how serious she was, Annie Fuhrmann gave the newspaper the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the many bootleggers she claimed to have personally met. She also talked about smuggling plans the men talked about in her presence.

  “He is always in debt,” Annie Fuhrmann told the newspaper about her spouse. “He gets drunk and loses his money at poker. I have had to pawn our furniture to keep alive.”

  There were times when Annie Fuhrmann admitted sailing with her husband when he delivered as much as 2,300 cases of whiskey to City Island in the Bronx and farther north to Port Chester. She claimed that most of the big bootleggers had come to her house at some point to do business with Hans.

  “I know them all,” Annie Fuhrmann said. “I have handled their money to pay the men. I have heard them talk of their plans. I have heard them talk of fixing this man and that. I know just how they operate.”

  The Brooklyn Eagle got a sensational scoop from Annie Fuhrmann and her struggles against the grip rum had on her husband. But no doubt conscious of the libel laws at the time, the newspaper only presented the initials of the names of the men Fuhrmann claimed were involved. However, the newspaper did forward the complete information, full names included, to the U.S. Attorney for Brooklyn and a woman by the name of Mabel Willebrandt, who was the highest ranked lady in the Department of Justice and was in charge of liquor prosecutions. Willebrandt said the information from Fuhrmann was of “distinct value” and passed it to other officials in charge of smuggling investigations in New York City and Long island.

  In its blockbuster articles, The Brooklyn Eagle reported that Annie Fuhrmann said the main bootlegging headquarters was in a hotel “not far from Times Square.” She could have been referring to Costello, Dwyer, or some other syndicates in the area.

  A couple of months passed and Hans Fuhrmann still had not shown up back home. There didn’t seem to be any movement on the investigations, at least none that Mrs. Fuhrmann was aware of. Traveling back to Brooklyn, she again pleaded with prosecutors to help find her spouse. Although she didn’t know it, Hans Fuhrmann had actually been arrested on the freighter Nantisco, which had been seized off of Astoria with a cargo of lumber and 3,000 cases of liquor from Nova Scotia. However, Hans Fuhrmann had been using an alias: “Oscar Nelson of Greenport, L.I.”

  Told of the name, Annie Fuhrmann asked investigators to describe the man and they told her as much as they could, including the fact he had a tattoo on his left hand.

  “That’s it!” Annie Fuhrmann blurted. “That’s just what he looked like.”

  Hans Fuhrmann, had been released after being grabbed in the Nantisco seizure. But for reasons only he knew, he didn’t return home to his wife. Still, he had an upcoming court date and Annie Fuhrmann vowed to be there when he showed up.

  “I’ll be here then too,” she told federal agents. “I know that when he is sober and away from the big liquor smugglers, he’s willing enough to give up that sort of life and go straight. That is what I want him to do—go straight.”

  Some federal investigators and prosecutors were at first coy about the value of the intelligence information that Annie Fuhrmann provided. But it became clear that the leads were turning out to be useful. She also seemed to convince her husband to become a paid government cooperating witness, something Annie Fuhrmann had already become. As the Fuhrmanns talked, investigators began to focus on William Dwyer, Frank Costello, and a host of other suspects such as Irving Wexler, known also as Waxey Gordon and a cabal of other Jewish gangsters who had been immune from prosecution but who were major Manhattan bootleggers.

  Bootlegging had always been a violent trade. Hijackings, gun battles, and even skirmishes at sea between the Coast Guard and smugglers took lives. The loss of life among the smugglers at the hands of government agents was one thing that further turned off the public to Prohibition. State police in New York, with sticky fingers for payoffs, sometimes got involved in ripping off bootleg convoys and in one case a corrupt cop was wounded in a shootout near Montauk. But the profit motive of bootleggers drove them to take risky and foolhardy action to bring liquor through Rum Row. In one case, Dwyer’s men used an unseaworthy vessel known as the William J. Maloney to pick up liquor, only to have it sink with the loss of its twelve crew members.

  The sinking of the William J. Maloney, the explosive claims by Annie Fuhrmann, and the general lawlessness in New York City, where there were an estimated tens of thousands of speakeasies being supplied by numerous bootleggers, finally became too much for the federal government. By the fall of 1925, the top federal Prohibition official in Washington, D.C., a former military man named General Lincoln C. Andrews came to Manhattan and shook up the local Prohibition enforcement operation. On September 24, 1925, he arrived in New York and replaced the federal administrator for the Prohibition district. He and Manhattan U.S. Attorney Emory Buckner then met to go over what to do about the international activities of the city bootleggers who they expected to be bringing in large hauls of liquor.

  The situation in the city was pressing because just days before Andrews arrived, investigators appeared to profit from Hans and Annie Fuhrmann’s information by conducting raids in a suite of offices near Times Square in the Longacre and Knickerbocker Buildings based on information that in part came from the Fuhrmann family. By then, both Annie and Hans had decided to become government agents of a sort. The seizure by federal agents of the vessel Nantisco, upon which Hans Fuhrmann had been the master, was the first large ocean-going ship they had taken. As it turned out, the Nantisco first traveled to Nova Scotia, took on a load of timber and then met up with a Rum Row ship and took on 500 cases of Scotch. As brazen as the Nantisco was in its voyage, it was seized as soon as it entered New York harbor and docked in Astoria, the area where Frank and Edward Costello’s garages were located.

  As word of the raid circulated, it became known that the Fuhrmanns had indeed furnished valuable information for the investigation. Since Hans Furhmann had actually crewed the smuggling ships he gave investigators critical leads about the actual operations of the bootleggers. When officials raided the Longacre and Knickerbocker buildings, Hans Furhmann was present with investigators and helped identify some of the suspects. Some agents feared that the publicity the Fuhrmanns had received put their lives at risk.

  The main organizer of the Nantisco ring was Irving Wexler, whose sobriquet “Waxey Gordon” was said to have come from his days as a pickpocket when he waxed his fingers to help separate wallets from the pockets of their owners. Wexler had a contact in Nova Scotia to help pull off the liquor deal. Early in his bootleg career Wexler had teamed u
p with Max Greenberg, and the duo brought in whiskey from Canada across Lake Michigan to Detroit. When Wexler and Greenberg wanted to expand they went to Arnold Rothstein, who had been Costello’s early investor, for cash. According to Rich Cohen in Tough Jews, his history of Jewish gangsters, Rothstein agreed to fund Wexler but only if he switched his operation and started taking his liquor cargo from Europe via Rum Row. During raids in Manhattan, the federal agents found documents that showed how the European bootlegging trade worked, as well as the customers and the warehouses used to store the product. The agents also seized over two dozen bottles of Scotch.

  Wexler wasn’t arrested initially because he was out of the country with his family on a vacation. He would later surrender. His other conspirators, including Greenberg, represented a substantial Jewish group of bootleggers and made clear to prosecutor Buckner that he was wasting his time going after small operators when so many ships were targeting New York. Buckner asked for—and got—the help of squads of agents and police officers to carry out a big offensive. That didn’t bode well for Frank and Edward Costello, as well as their partner in crime William V. Dwyer.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “THE GREATEST ROUNDUP”

  EVEN BEFORE THE MASSIVE CHRYSLER BUILDING opened in 1931 to take the title for a short time as the world’s tallest building, the middle of any weekday morning at Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street in Manhattan was a busy place. The five-story building at number 405 Lexington Avenue was just around the corner from bustling Grand Central Terminal and a host of office buildings. Park Avenue was one block down the street. On the particular morning of December 3, 1925, around 11:00 A.M., the streets turned out to be busier than usual—much to the distress of Frank and Edward Costello, and a great many of their friends.

  In coordinated action, federal Prohibition agents hit Frank Costello’s office at 405 Lexington and those of William V. Dwyer at the East River Savings Bank building at Forty-second Street and Broadway with warrants for their arrest. Scores of other men were sought. Other offices were being sought in places like Montauk Point and Hempstead on Long Island, as well as Astoria, Bayside, Jamaica and Belle Harbor in Queens. Agents even went to New London, Connecticut, where the Coast Guard had offices. The warrants didn’t give much detail but in the case of Costello they essentially accused him of violating the Volstead Act.

  In the weeks before the raids, a curious mailman whose route covered 405 Lexington came across a man in the building working rather secretively. The man had visited the rental office and said there was some trouble with nearby telephone service and had traced the wires to 405 Lexington. The office manager led the man, who was actually an NYPD officer, to the basement junction box for the telephone service. Secretly, the detective placed a tap on the telephones going into Costello’s suite of offices and returned the next day to admonish the postal worker to keep things secret.

  “These wires are being tapped,” said the detective to the postman. “If there is any leak, you are the only outsider who knows anything about it.”

  The tapping was being done so that investigators could have a better sense of when people were in the Costello office and move in for an arrest. They hoped to grab Costello with his gang and take away all kinds of records. The mailman naturally felt put on the spot by the detective but kept the secret until the day of the raid.

  As it turned out, Frank Costello wasn’t at 405 Lexington Avenue when the agents arrived there. He happened to be that morning in Hempstead at the home of C. Hunter Carpenter to visit a parcel of real estate in the town of Babylon on the south shore of Long Island. Costello at this point in his life was holding himself out to be in the real estate business and listed a business address for himself in Jamaica, Queens. Costello was interested in buying some property, and both Carpenter and another man named Percival Corson were interested in acting as brokers for the deal. Given Costello’s activities, he likely wanted the property to hold bootlegged liquor. It was 10:00 A.M. and Costello, Carpenter, and Corson where getting ready to drive away when they had two visitors who suddenly drove up in a roadster.

  “As we were about to start from Mr. Carpenter’s back yard, an automobile entered Mr. Carpenter’s private driveway and two men, who said they were government agents, and who were armed, told us that a Mr. Foster wanted to see us at his office over in Manhattan at two o’clock that afternoon,” Costello remembered later in an affidavit he filed.

  Carpenter remembered both of the agents, identified as C.V. Schneider and Mr. Green, actually drawing their pistols as they approached the car. The agents said they had warrants for the arrest of the three but wouldn’t serve them if they agreed to accompany them peacefully back to Manhattan. Costello and his colleagues told the two agents that they were planning to go to Babylon to look at real estate. Since there was still four hours before the time Foster wanted to see them, Costello and his group thought they could easily go on the short business trip and get into Manhattan in time. While it might seem unusual during an arrest situation, the two agents agreed and accompanied Costello and his associates in Corson’s car to Babylon. The group then went back to Carpenter’s place and prepared to split up: Costello and Corson got into one car with one of the agents; Carpenter and the other agent, C.V. Schneider, got into a different vehicle. Then things got peculiar.

  Schneider suddenly remembered that he needed to try and collect evidence, so he left the car and went back toward Carpenter’s house, telling him that he needed to use the telephone. Carpenter said he watched Schneider and saw that instead of using the telephone he began rummaging through the real estate broker’s desk, taking papers, check books, ledgers, and all sorts of documents that he found. Carpenter bolted from the car and went back into the house, telling Schneider he had no right to seize his documents. Besides, none of the materials related to bootlegging. Schneider ignored Carpenter and told him that since he had a warrant for his arrest he could do what he wanted. If he had a problem, Carpenter should tell it to the judge, said the agent.

  By the time Costello and his two friends got back to Manhattan, the roundup had grabbed a number of the other suspects, most notably Dwyer. Costello and his brother had generally been under the public radar in terms of bootlegging, having avoided arrest until now. The big fish, at least as far as the newspapers were concerned was Dwyer, who was identified as the “widely known race track owner.” The bust was said to involve what was touted as “the greatest roundup in the history of Prohibition” and based on the allegations the case was unprecedented. Estimates of the business the Costello-Dwyer ring did ran anywhere from $40 million to $60 million yearly, sums that would amount to $557 million to $835 million today accounting for inflation.

  Dwyer, the big fish, was charged with running an international “rum ring controlling many millions in money, ships and liquor.” General Andrews himself is said to have directed the roundup. There had been many bootlegging busts over the years, each one always touted as bigger than the last. But now Dwyer—and Costello—were alleged to be masterminds behind a wholly unprecedented liquor ring, one in which they were said to have had an intelligence service, thanks to Costello, that rivaled anything the federal government had arrayed against them. For the last two years, a federal prosecutor said during the initial court appearance of the defendants, the conspiracy was responsible for bringing into New York harbor a greater part of the bootlegged liquor hitting the marketplace.

  What made things worse for the government was that the Dwyer-Costello combination had no trouble bribing members of the Coast Guard with “money, wine, women and song.” The night before the big raids in Manhattan, federal agents arrested four members of Coast Guard vessel No. 126 when the vessel docked for the night. That particular vessel sometimes went out to Rum Row, and took cases of liquor ashore as well as helped lost smuggling boats find their way so that the booze could be off-loaded and stashed, officials charged.

  The U.S. District Court in lower Manhattan was where the Costello broth
ers, Dwyer, and the other defendants were brought for an initial appearance before a federal judge. The main issue in these first appearances, aside from the entering of not-guilty pleas, was what to do about bail for each of the nineteen people who were arrested, a group that would grow with more arrests to over fifty people. Dwyer was the first of the group to appear before Judge Henry Goddard and his entry into the courtroom was memorable for the confidence he showed. “He had a broad smile,” The New York Times reported. “He wore several large diamonds, including a swastika ring set with gems.”

  The prosecutor was an assistant U.S. attorney named Henry Stichman, who told Goddard that Dwyer, both Costellos, and one William Gallagher specifically brought in some five months earlier a load of just over 4,000 cases of liquor hidden under the coal of the steamship Augusta. Smugglers often hid contraband under all sorts of cargo, so this was no surprise.

  “This man,” Stichman said pointing to Dwyer, “is the leading figure against whom the energies of the Prohibition Department in this case has been directed. By him, various Coast Guard officials have been bribed, the bribery having been done through Dwyer’s agents in the Augusta case, so that the vessel was enabled to proceed up the Hudson River to Yonkers.”

  The prosecutor described how the bribery insured for over two years that the Coast Guard would protect the smugglers. The payoffs of some of the lowly paid Coast Guard men, which included wining and dining, took place sometimes at Dwyer’s restaurant, the Sea Grill on Forty-fifth Street. The more Stichman talked in court, the more apparent it became how sophisticated the Costello-Dwyer ring was. One of their vessels, a power boat named Klip, had armor plating and was so fast that it was able to elude Coast Guard vessels, dodging around river craft while agents fired shots, narrowly missing members of the public. The smugglers had piers on the West Side of Manhattan by Christopher Street, and just north of the Fulton Fish Market by the Brooklyn Bridge. At least twenty-four vessels, including a half-dozen schooners and eighteen speedboats were used to move the liquor.