by Daniel Wakin
The criminal escapades of John Oley and Percy Geary—the bootlegging, the burglaries, the shakedowns, and other activities—formed a prelude to something much bigger, a crime that captured headlines—and later inspired a major work of fiction—before the Rubel case seized the public’s attention. In some ways this crime, a high-profile kidnapping, was a rehearsal for the detailed organizing that went into the armored car robbery: the differentiated roles, the precise timing, the intricate travel arrangements, the many moving parts. It made sense to bring in Oley and Geary for the Rubel endeavor. They had a good track record for that sort of thing.
CHAPTER 2.
Origins: “A Benefit to the Neighborhood”
IN LATE AUGUST 1664, FOUR BRITISH frigates and some two thousand military men serving Colonel Richard Nicolls, a forty-year-old Dutch-speaking Englishman, glided into lower New York Harbor. Nicolls, under the authority of James, Duke of York, arrived to take control of the New Netherland colony from the Dutch and soon engineered its surrender to the British crown. Nicolls was appointed governor of the territory and began dispensing land patents; in 1667–1668, he granted one for the land running from what is now West 89th Street north to West 107th Street, and roughly from what is now Central Park West to the Hudson River, to Isaac Bedloe, a city alderman and merchant who gave his name to Bedloe’s Island, the future repository of the Statue of Liberty.
The Bedloe patent fell within a district that the Dutch called Bloemendael, or vale of flowers, after a town near Haarlem in the Netherlands, and termed Bloomingdale by the English. The Dutch had never settled the area, and for centuries it was probably the hunting ground for a nearby Native American tribe, the Weckquaesgeek, a branch of the Algonquians. An old Native American trail, expanded in the late 1600s to transport tobacco grown in the area, became known by the 1700s as the Bloomingdale Road. Wealthy families established country estates along the route, which was the main artery heading into the city on the western side of Manhattan.
Humphrey Jones bought a chunk of land from West 99th to West 107th Streets. His estate was anchored by the Humphrey Jones Homestead (also referred to as the Ann Rogers House after a later owner), a stone house dating back to before 1752. It was located west of what is now West End Avenue, between 101st and 102nd streets. Through the early 1800s, the surrounding area was empty and green and full of farmland. In an oft-quoted passage from his A History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker, Washington Irving described Bloemendael as “a sweet rural valley, beautiful with many a bright flower, refreshed by many a pure streamlet and enlivened here and there by a delectable Dutch cottage, sheltered under some sloping hill, and almost buried in some embowering trees.”
Large institutions began moving in, among them an insane asylum where Columbia University now sits, and the Leake and Watts Orphanage, part of which still stands on the site of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. By the mid-nineteenth century, several hotels were established for Manhattan residents seeking to escape the summer heat. An inkling of the changing nature of the neighborhood came in 1851, when the Hudson River Railroad put down tracks along the waterway.
With the end of the Civil War, Manhattan’s population was growing, making the island ripe for development. The large estates became juicy targets for land developers. The 105th–106th Street parcel of the Rogers Farm was sold in 1864 to Augustus Whiting, a Newport socialite, after being subdivided into thirty-four lots. The price: $16,700, or about $240,000 today. The rest of the farm was also broken up. But what is now the densely populated Upper West Side remained a no-man’s-land. “Craggy slopes, running streams, and malarial pools marked the bleak and rocky land,” wrote Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. “It was barely accessible to downtown civilization.” A lone horsecar line only reached 84th Street; beyond that, travelers needed a stagecoach. Even as late as 1876, cows were still pasturing around 100th Street.
Around the same time, city planners decided to carve out open space for a narrow park along the river, extending from 72nd Street to around 130th Street. It was an imperfect site. Though providing impressive views of the Palisades cliffs across the Hudson, the area encompassed a long slope to the river, and the Hudson River Railroad tracks cut off access to the water. Nevertheless, the park was created following the vision of Frederick Law Olmsted between 1875 and 1910, with the tracks eventually hidden underground. Today, on a quiet night, lonely train whistles can still be heard in the blocks close to Riverside Park.
The planners also transformed Bloomingdale Road into a wide avenue called the Boulevard, which opened in 1869, and which in 1899 was renamed Broadway. In 1881 the northern extension of the 9th Avenue El ran along today’s Columbus Avenue, allowing for even more development in the neighborhood. Still, growth was spotty. The first Riverside mansions started sprouting in the 1880s at the edge of an area that remained largely vacant except for a few lonely wood- or brick-frame houses, goats, and stables. Then the speculators arrived, hoping to attract the wealthy with elegant townhouses. The northward extension of the subway, which ran along Broadway and opened in 1904, along with a campaign by the New York Herald extolling the area, helped drive land speculation. Grand apartment houses rose on the avenues. Tenements filled in the side streets, and the groundwork was laid for the Upper West Side’s supremely eclectic nature, a neighborhood of artists and businessmen, leftists and eccentrics, lowlifes and working stiffs. Peter Salwen, in his history, Upper West Side Story, called the area, with remarkable precision, a “quirky, sordid, hustling, grandiose, hopelessly overarticulate hodgepodge of a neighborhood.” The architecture was similarly exuberant in its variety, encompassing notes of the Art Deco, Beaux-Arts, neoclassical, Edwardian, Italian Renaissance, Georgian, Romanesque Revival and neo-Gothic styles—sometimes a fistful in one building. Back at the end of the nineteenth century, hopes that the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition would arise in Riverside Park also fueled a sense of civic betterment that lingered on in succeeding decades and led to monuments in the park, like the Soldiers and Sailors memorial, Grant’s Tomb, and the statues of Samuel Tilden, General Franz Sigel, Lajos Kossuth, and Joan of Arc. (Chicago eventually won the exposition, and it became known as the Chicago World’s Fair.) More institutions arrived in the last decade of the 1800s, including Columbia University and St. John the Divine.
Riverside Drive was seen as a potential rival to Fifth Avenue. In 1895, the New York Times gushed, “There is no boulevard in all the world that compares with Riverside Drive in natural beauty.” In fact, there was no shortage of boosters. In 1899, the architect Clarence True, who bought land along the drive and built houses on it, published a volume presenting photographs of Riverside mansions and extolling the avenue’s glories, declaring Riverside Drive “the most ideal home-site in the western hemisphere—the Acropolis of the world’s second city.” The Herald’s campaign included encomiums like this from 1890: The Upper West Side is “sure to become within the next twenty years, perhaps the location of the most beautiful residences in the world. The advantages of pure air and beautiful surroundings, glimpses of the New Jersey Hills at the end of each street, with the glitter of the Hudson between; the nearness of the parks and the accessibility of the district will be insurmountable factors in popularity.” Any current resident can still attest to those charms.
While the reality would never match such grandiose descriptions, the wealthy did make their way to Riverside, where impressive houses were being built for them. Eight of those houses arose between 1899 and 1902, dressed in the elegantly tailored Beaux-Arts style redolent of Paris and Old World gentility. Born at the dawn of the American Century, these structures on Riverside Avenue (as it was officially called until formally renamed Riverside Drive in 1908) between 105th and 106th Streets had different architects and builders, but all were bound by covenants requiring them to be “a benefit to the neighborhood.” Developers committed themselves to keep the manmade surroundings beautiful—a challenging t
ask given that squatters abounded along the waterfront, together with stables, feed stores, coal storage depots, commercial piers, and those railroad tracks with the racket of spark-spewing trains and the stench of the pigs and cows they sent to slaughterhouses in the southern part of the island.
The buildings on Riverside Drive between 105th and 106th streets must have seemed new and fresh in a city of brownstones. They were clad in limestone and light-colored brick, adorned with bright awnings outside the windows to keep the rooms inside cool. Edith Wharton, in The House of Mirth—set in the decade before Nos. 330–337 Riverside were built—has the character Lily Bart glance at “the new brick and limestone house-fronts, fantastically varied in obedience to the American craving for novelty, but fresh and inviting with their awnings and flower-boxes” in a downtown street. It was a description easily applicable to Riverside.
The Riverside buildings came to life in two clumps. One developer, Joseph A. Farley, built Nos. 330, 331, 332, and 333, using the architecture firm of Janes & Leo, a frequent collaborator that was also building a row of townhouses around the corner on 105th Street and the glorious Dorilton apartment house on 71st and Broadway at about the same time. Perez M. Stewart, a former commissioner of buildings, built Nos. 334, 335, 336, and 337 with his partner, H. Ives Smith. The pair were a huge force in creating the Upper West Side neighborhood as we know it. In the 1890s, their firm erected more than 100 buildings on the swath between West End and Riverside Drive, from 75th to 107th streets.
For Nos. 334, 335, and 336, Stewart and Smith used the plans of Hoppin & Koen, a firm that also designed the old police headquarters on Vesey Street, a firehouse on West 43rd Street, and many other private homes. A different architect, the prominent Robert D. Kohn, designed No. 337, known as River Mansion. He was barely thirty years old. The men behind these buildings were among the first colonizers of the mid-northerly reaches of the island of Manhattan.
Kohn was born in 1870 in Manhattan. He graduated from City College in 1886, received an architecture degree from Columbia University four years later, and like most ambitious American architects studied from 1891 to 1895 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he absorbed the elegant style that would infuse River Mansion and its neighbors. The mansion was one of his earliest commissions, along with No. 322 West 106th Street next door and Nos. 352 and 353 Riverside Drive. Kohn was also the associate architect, with Carrere & Hastings, of the school of the New York Society for Ethical Culture at 2 West 64th Street and the apartment house at 33 Central Park West. He went on to design office and institutional buildings, and commercial structures such as warehouses and factories, as well as apartment houses.
Kohn was also one of the relatively few American architects to be influenced by the Vienna Secession movement. Buildings he designed in that style include the Seeman Bros. warehouse on Perry Street in Greenwich Village and the New York Evening Post building at 20 Vesey Street. In the 1920s, Kohn designed additions to Macy’s department store and worked on Manhattan’s cathedral of a synagogue, Temple Emanu-El on upper Fifth Avenue.
Farley, the developer of the southern group of our townhouses, was a major figure in the neighborhood’s growth. His father was Terence Farley, a prominent builder and a former alderman connected to Tammany Hall and the Boss Tweed crowd. Starting in 1897, Joseph Farley built several dozen residential buildings, many of them between 105th and 108th Streets on the West Side. (His brothers James and John also were real estate developers.)
Building Nos. 330, 331, 332, and 333 required him to put up a large sum of money: $430,000, the equivalent of nearly $12 million these days. The Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, the real property bible of the day, greeted the structures with considerable fanfare. The four buildings “represent all that is latest in fashionable dwelling construction, and are furnished with all the devices for insuring the convenience and comfort of their occupants,” the Record said in its October 4, 1902, issue. The homes were designed, the publication continued, “with artistic correctness and finished with taste,” and reflected what the Record called Farley’s “ingenuity” in planning. One example: “the placing of handsome billiard rooms in the front of the sub-basements of the inner houses.” The Record went on to praise the “magnificent views of the Hudson River and the Riverside Drive,” a location described as “airy, cheerful and salubrious.” The green verge between the service road in front of the buildings and Riverside Drive itself provided some seclusion, it said, and went on to say that continued “high class” improvement in the area meant they were a good investment.
Sadly the publication’s optimistic language of 1902 ran at odds with reality. Housing was in a slump at the time, and Farley could not sell his four buildings. Deeply in debt, he declared bankruptcy just two months after the article appeared. The “latest in fashionable dwelling construction” were foreclosed upon and auctioned off in 1903. His woes were not over: on March 8, 1904, a policeman showed up at Farley’s office and arrested him for larceny. He was accused of taking out a $20,000 loan from the Fifth National Bank and putting up worthless paper as collateral. A lawyer for the bank claimed that Farley, in applying for the loan, had lied about his property holdings. Farley’s brother James came to court and put up the $10,000 bail, using his house at 3 East 71st Street as collateral.
But Joseph Farley was a scrapper and in May he struck back. After an appellate court ordered his release, Farley sued the bank officials for $50,000. He had backing for the action from the appellate court, which had declared that the police officer who arrested Farley and the magistrate who allowed the arrest deserved “severe condemnation” for acts that were “illegal and arbitrary.” The court rejected the idea that Farley had committed “larceny,” calling the transaction a loan on a note.
The bankruptcy proved just a blip on the block’s luster. The speculation of Farley and Stewart and Smith had left a noble row of buildings facing a new park and a new century. They were soon to be peopled by wealthy manufacturers, self-made men, and one self-made woman.
CHAPTER 3.
The Kidnapping: “You Are His God Now”
NINETEEN-NINETEEN WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE year the Democrats broke the Albany Republican machine, whose boss was William Barnes, the wealthy owner of the Albany Evening Journal. The election held that year was brutal, filled with allegations of chicanery, and in the end the Republicans swept local offices. But the seed for their eventual demise was planted. A Navy veteran of Irish stock named Daniel O’Connell won barely enough votes to take one of the few positions captured by the Democrats: city tax assessor. This was the only elected job he would ever hold. But his political power became supreme.
O’Connell went on to become chairman of the Democratic Committee of Albany and thus the satrap of one of the most powerful political machines in the nation. “The tenacity of the Machine he built in those years is unique in the history of the country,” William Kennedy wrote of the figure who held sway until his death in 1977 at ninety-one. “Since the early 1920s the O’Connell Machine had swept almost all city and county offices, held control of the county legislature and all local seats in the State Senate and Assembly.”
The O’Connell empire included the Hedrick Brewing Company, which Dan O’Connell and his brother John, known as Solly, had a stake in. Solly was also linked to Albany-area gambling operations and was effectively the family’s connection to the underworld. In 1933, Solly’s son John was managing distribution for the brewing company, which had re-emerged into legitimacy with the repeal that year of Prohibition.
John, or Butch, as he was known, was twenty-four, an imposing, 225-pound lieutenant in the National Guard and the scion of the O’Connell family. He lived with his father, blocks away from Daniel and two other O’Connell brothers in Albany. On July 7 of that year, an hour past midnight, Butch pulled up in front of his two-story wooden house, where a widow’s walk topped a small colonnaded porch over the front door. He was coming home from a date.
As O’Co
nnell’s car came to a stop, a man was waiting. He yanked open the passenger door, jumped in, pushed O’Connell out of the driver’s side, and walloped him with a gun. With the help of an accomplice, he tied up O’Connell, blindfolded him, and shoved him into a new Pontiac sedan parked nearby. Then the trio drove off to New Jersey.
The man who pistol-whipped O’Connell that night was Percy Geary and his accomplice was John Oley, who was celebrating his thirty-second birthday. Together with Oley’s bootlegging partner, Manny Strewl, they had come up with a brazen plan to kidnap a member of the city’s most powerful political family. The memory of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, despite the crime’s disastrous outcome, was fresh in their minds. And with the repeal of Prohibition, a new source of income was needed; robbing armored cars was, in fact, only one option.
To carry out the kidnapping of Butch O’Connell, Geary and Oley had needed capital. Bank robbery was deemed the answer. Before snatching their prey, Geary had arranged a meeting to discuss such a heist with Leonard Scarnici, a Springfield, Massachusetts-born hitman for “Legs” Diamond and fellow gangster Waxey Gordon. (Scarnici was in the employ of Dutch Schulz for his most celebrated murder: that of Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, himself a practitioner of murder for hire, who was slain in a hail of machine-gun bullets while inside a phone booth on West 23rd Street in Manhattan on February 8, 1932.)
In May of 1933, Scarnici and his men held up a bank in the city of Rensselaer, New York, across the Hudson River from Albany, to raise money for the kidnapping. In the course of the robbery, someone tripped a silent alarm. Two policemen responded, and a bloodbath ensued. Two of Scarnici’s men were killed, but so was Detective James Stevens. The take was a measly $2,000.