by Daniel Wakin
The haul was $427,950, a not unusually large sum. William Dempsey, a vice president of the United States Trucking Corporation, later said that Tuesdays were the busiest days of the week and it was not uncommon for the armored car on the Rubel route to carry anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000. (This was the era before Internet banking and wire transfers, when large sums of cash routinely traversed the nation’s streets and highways.) Although this was half what the gang was hoping to score, $427,950 amounted to the largest sum of money stolen from an armored car in the nation’s history up to then. It would have been greater if the gang had not left behind $29,000 in heavy-to-carry coins.
Reporters quickly pieced together what had happened based on accounts from witnesses. William Kelly, a caretaker of the tennis courts and a military veteran, was on the street working on the car belonging to Carolyn Bannister, the teaching pro who owned the tennis establishment. Kelly astutely observed what was happening and quietly made his way to the courts, warned the players that a holdup was underway, and told them to lie down. The players took a while to believe him, but eventually did.
“I looked out and saw an armored car coming down the street,” Kelly said. “The man with the pushcart wheeled the cart out in front of it while the man nearby ran up and got out the machine gun. I knew something was wrong then and gave the warning about stray shots.”
Bannister, who was playing on Court 1, told the Eagle, “A man with a pushcart appeared shortly after I started and watched the game, looking through the wire screen. I thought it funny a pushcart man should be so interested in tennis, but I never guessed he had a machine gun hidden in the cart. At 11 o’clock,” she continued, “I moved to an inside court and at 1 o’clock, just before 1 it was, one of the men employed here ran in and said: ‘Everybody down, down on the ground: there’s a holdup.’ There were about eight of us on the courts, and we all dropped without knowing what was happening. Then there was a roar of autos down the street and we learned the details.”
After the armored car was lightened of its load, John Oley climbed out and jumped into the Lincoln, where he was quickly joined by his brother and Geary. Kress got back in behind the wheel. Then McMahon took the driver’s seat of the Nash with Stewart and Francis Oley aboard while Manning kept his gun trained on the people lying under the loading platform.
Manning then backpedaled toward the Nash. Just as Manning was climbing in, McMahon, at the wheel, released the clutch too quickly. The car leaped forward before Manning had gotten all the way inside, causing him to drop his Tommy gun in the street. After he tumbled in, the two crews tore off, with the cars rounding the right turn onto Cropsey Avenue off of Bay 19th on two wheels. In a bit of daring, Lilienthal picked up Manning’s machine gun and jumped into the armored truck with his colleagues. They gave chase, spraying bullets at the getaway cars.
The Lincoln, license plate 1-L-5075, zoomed through the next cross street, 18th Avenue, and past a playground of the Children’s Aid Society, which was crowded with youngsters. The potential for tragedy was great here, as a team of private security guards raced after the fleeing gangsters, firing wildly while children played nearby. The children were unaware of the danger; some said later that the shooting sounded like cars backfiring. Lilienthal fired seven more rounds as the Lincoln shot through the next cross street, Bay 17th Street.
The guards gave up the chase and the Lincoln doubled back to head south again and arrived at the water’s edge, at Bay 35th Street, sixteen blocks away from the robbery site. Wallace and Quinn were standing by on a twenty-six-foot white Sea Bright dory, the Popeye, fitted out as a lobster boat. Its bow was pointed and its stern square, with an open cabin behind a windshield and a broken-off boarding ladder on the right side.
Hughes was manning a twenty-eight-foot mahogany-sided Gar Wood speedboat. When the men in the Lincoln arrived, they loaded some of the bags of money, labeled PUBLIC NATIONAL BANK and BROOKLYN-MANHATTAN TRANSIT COMPANY, onto the speedboat as John Oley, Manning, McMahon, and Stewart scrambled aboard. Hughes handled the tiller and Oley and Stewart sat along the sides as if they were out for an afternoon’s pleasure cruise. Francis Oley, Geary, Wallace, and Kress jumped onto the lobster boat with Quinn at the helm. If approached, they planned to say they were out for a fishing expedition. A supply of fishing tackle would help give credence to their story.
A mug shot of the Rubel gang member Percy Geary, who was wanted in the kidnapping of John O’Connell in Albany. The New York Times/Redux.
Joseph Kress handled the wheels for the Rubel gang: he stole the cars used in the heist and drove one of them during the getaway. The New York Times/Redux.
John Oley, right, an Albany hoodlum and Rubel gang member, after being caught following a jailbreak. He is shown handcuffed to a confederate, Harold Crowley, with the Syracuse police chief, George Peacock, in the middle. The New York Times/Redux.
Percy Geary was arrested after escaping from the Onondaga County jail. Associated Press.
William O’Dwyer, left, presided as judge in the Rubel heist trial and Burton Turkus served as the defense lawyer for Stewart Wallace. Here, a year later, O’Dwyer is the Brooklyn district attorney and Turkus an assistant DA. The New York Times/Redux.
The Davis family of No. 330 Riverside Drive: Jennie, R. B., and Lulu, below, in photographs that telegraph the family dynamic. It’s the baby-faced Lulu who poses with R. B., the old Civil War vet, not his wife. Courtesy of Brenda Steffon.
The Davis family had been living here in 330 Riverside Drive for just two years when this picture was taken.
Dr. Jokichi Takamine, one of the great biochemists of his time, owned No. 334 Riverside Drive. Courtesy of the Great People of Kanazawa Memorial Museum.
Marion Davies, the mistress of No. 331 and William Randolph Hearst, in 1922, the year of her breakout film hit When Knightood Was in Flower. The New York Times/Redux.
The Shakespearean actress Julia Marlowe owned 337 Riverside Drive when she opened the 1905-1906 New York season as Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew at the Knickerbocker Theatre. The New York Times/Redux.
CHAPTER 10.
No. 334: Adrenaline and “Sakura, Sakura”
ON THE COOL SUNDAY MORNING OF April 28, 1912, while David Canavan the contractor was probably taking his breakfast in 333 Riverside Drive and William Ahnelt, the magazine publisher who lived in No. 331, might have been looking over layouts or pondering his circulation, a compact man with a white mustache, its tips elegantly waxed upward, walked down the steps from the entrance to 334 Riverside Drive. (Twenty-five years later, members of the Rubel gang would haul their wounded comrade up those same steps.) The man was Jokichi Takamine, a Japanese scientist who spoke English with a combination of Scottish burr and Dutch gutturals, a sober, highly contained man who had isolated the hormone that causes less-controlled humans to panic and flee. The discovery helped make him the fortune that led to No. 334’s purchase.
Takamine was also a major figure in the Japanese community in the United States. He helped bring about Japan’s donation of thousands of cherry trees to Washington, DC, and, closer to home, was a member of a committee of Japanese residents who donated cherry trees to New York City. The trees were planted in Sakura Park, a two-acre rectangle named after the Japanese word for cherry blossom just north of Riverside Church, bordered by Riverside Drive and Claremont Avenue, and less than a mile up Riverside Drive from Takamine’s townhouse. The gift came in conjunction with the Hudson-Fulton celebration of 1909, which commemorated the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the river that bears his name. But the first shipment of trees destined for the park was lost at sea and a replacement had to be sent. So only now, three years later, was Takamine on his way to a dedication ceremony.
Some 5,000 people were on hand for the event. Thirteen little girls wearing flowery kimonos planted the last thirteen of the trees and performed a Japanese dance. An orchestra played excerpts from The Mikado (at the time, sadly, one of the principal representations of Japan
ese culture in the West), patriotic airs, the Japanese national anthem, and the cherry tree anthem—“Sakura, Sakura.” Takamine delivered the main address, in which he thanked the United States for bringing to Japan “the seeds of Occidental civilization.” He was carrying out a self-imposed mission of bringing the Japanese and Americans closer together.
“Those seeds have taken root in fertile soil and have brought forth a harvest, which is today the wonder and admiration of the world,” Takamine said, according to an account of the festivities in the New York Times. “We people of Japan are not ungrateful. We do not forget what we owe to this wonderful young republic. Our affection for this country is deep-rooted, and has increased with every step of our national development, as, let us hope, the roots of these trees will with each passing year take deeper root in your American soil.” Takamine pulled a rope, and the American and Japanese flags fell away from a commemorative tablet (since lost).
The Japanese consul general, Yasutaro Numano, delivered the final speech. He spoke of the reservoir of goodwill between the two countries and added what in retrospect seems an ominous note: “If the occasional voice of an alarmist is heard proclaiming the danger of war between the two countries, I think we have all learned that it is the voice of a demagogue or man speaking from selfish and ulterior motives. Like the Americans, the Japanese are a peace-loving people. That our friendship may never be doubted or our interests conflict I am sure is the devout wish of us all.” (Fun fact: Sakura Park is also home to a statue of General Daniel Butterfield, a Civil War figure from the family that founded American Express and who is best remembered for composing “Taps.”)
Takamine was essentially one of the world’s first biotech entrepreneurs and a contributor to the vigor of the American economy at the beginning of the twentieth century. The inventiveness, commercial drive, and energy that fed America’s economic rise was strongly driven by European immigrants. But Takamine is an example of the lesser-known contributions of Asians, and while his remarkable story is little known in the United States, he is celebrated in scientific and business circles in Japan. One of the brightest young minds of his generation, he was singled out by the Japanese imperial government to help put the nation on the industrial map, ended up bringing his discoveries to the United States at a time of rising anti-Japanese sentiment, built major businesses, and became an important figure in the earliest years of relations between the two countries.
Takamine was born in Takaoka, a small town on Japan’s western coast in 1854, the year that Commodore Perry and his armed squadron crowbarred Japan into opening trade with the west. His mother’s family owned a sake brewery and his father was a doctor. Within a year, the family moved to the nearby town of Kanazawa, known for its sixteenth-century castle. Jokichi was a precocious little boy, and such boys were often sent to study in Nagasaki, one of the few Japanese cities with Western contacts. So at twelve, a tender age for such a long journey, he embarked for the distant city to study science, learning English from a Dutch family (which forced him to work as a houseboy). As a result, he spoke English with a Dutch accent for the rest of his life.
Jokichi went on to medical school in Osaka four years later, but after discovering a love for chemistry, he abandoned the course and entered the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo, where he studied chemical engineering on a government scholarship.
Japan in those years was intent on harnessing Western technology in the making of its own products, and Takamine was one of the chosen, a rising talent in science deemed worthy of absorbing knowledge abroad. So he was sent to study technology at the University of Glasgow in Scotland (where he picked up his slight Scottish burr). His specialty there was the manufacturing process for fertilizer.
The government brought Takamine back to work for the nation’s Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. But the man was too valuable to be stuck in a bureaucracy. In 1884, Takamine found himself in New Orleans, sent by the imperial authorities to take the post of co-commissioner at the yearlong Cotton Exposition. He took lodging at a large, dilapidated boardinghouse in the French quarter run by the strong-willed Mary Hitch, the wife of a Union officer who passed through New Orleans during the Civil War. The Hitches had five daughters; Takamine began courting the eldest, sixteen-year-old Caroline—twelve years his junior—teaching her tea-making ceremonies and the Japanese national anthem. They became engaged, with Mary’s approval, despite the rarity of an American-Japanese match in the 1880s. The couple became fodder for the newspapers. It was a bold move for a young woman in the South, given the few Japanese nationals in the United States at the time and the often ugly stereotypes projected on them.
At the Cotton Exhibition, Takamine became intrigued by the use of phosphates as fertilizer, and he returned to Japan to test them out—as well as break the news of his engagement to his family. The phosphates tests were successful; the marriage announcement less so. The family was not happy with such an untraditional marriage, for it was viewed as inevitably harmful to Jokichi’s social standing and business prospects.
Takamine remained in Japan for several years, establishing the Tokyo Artificial Fertilizer Company based on the phosphate experiments and also serving with the Bureau of Patents and Trademarks—good experience for his industrial future. He returned to New Orleans and married Caroline on August 10, 1887.
For the hard-working scientist, a honeymoon did not mean a European tour or jaunt to Newport, but a visit to South Carolina to investigate fertilizer plants and to Washington to study patent law. Caroline must have been a devoted wife to take the grand fertilizer tour. Eventually, the couple made it to California to embark for Japan and their lives as a young industrialist couple. They began a family: Jokichi Jr. was born in 1888 and Eben in 1889.
While working at the fertilizer company, Takamine had a sideline: developing an enzyme that would break down starch into sugar, a necessary step before fermentation. These enzymes were called diastases (later, amylases). The starches involved were corn, rice, and wheat, the raw stuff of alcoholic drinks, and Takamine’s diastase could cut the fermentation time for grain alcohol from six months to forty-eight hours. He proudly called his enzyme takadiastase. It was the enzyme in rice mold, known scientifically as aspergillum oryzae, or koji in Japanese, and had uses in making soy sauce, miso, and sake.
Despite Jokichi’s scientific success, life was not happy for the Takamines in Japan. Caroline was isolated, unable to speak the language, lonely, and unwelcome, facing downright hostility from her mother-in-law. The cold, the lack of privacy, the primitive plumbing, and the pervasive odor of fertilizer all afflicted her.
Takamine fared better with his mother-in-law, Mary Hitch. She and her son-in-law corresponded frequently, often discussing business matters. She had taken an active role in promoting his work in the United States and had loaned him money. In 1890 she sent a telegram: a whiskey distillery in Chicago was interested in his enzyme. The enterprising Mary even established a firm called the Takamine Ferment Company, installing herself as president.
So the Takamines moved to the United States to make their fortune. He set up a factory in Peoria and began marketing takadiastase to the American beer and distillery industry as a faster, cheaper, and more productive agent than malt, which was commonly used in the West to break down starches before fermentation. Just as the American Caroline was ostracized in Japan, Takamine’s Japanese origins did not endear him to the distillers. Nor was he a favorite of the companies that made malt, which takadiastase threatened to replace. The whiskey distillery where his process was being applied, on the verge of production, burned in a mysterious fire, leading to financial disaster. Takamine began suffering from hepatitis and his health declined precipitously.
However, he recovered both physically and financially and applied for an American patent for his process to make takadiastase—the first application in the United States for a microbial enzyme. With the help of young scientists he brought over from Japan, Takamine discovered that the
enzyme would be much more profitable as a treatment for dyspepsia because of its ability to catalyze the breakdown of starch in the stomach. Takamine persuaded Parke-Davis, a Detroit-based pharmaceutical company, to license it as a product. It was one of the company’s early big hits, and for the first time, this government-groomed Japanese scientist’s work was proving to be highly profitable. Products soon followed, with names like “Dr. Takamine’s Taka-Diastase” on the packaging. Parke-Davis took him on as a consultant.
Takamine moved on to another project for Parke-Davis: attempting to isolate the active substance in the adrenal glands of sheep, which were in plentiful supply at the nearby Chicago stockyards. Scientists at the time had discovered that adrenal gland secretions could pump up the blood pressure in lab animals. Takamine moved to New York in 1897, where he set up his own lab in a basement on East 103rd Street to work on isolating the activating substance. Somewhat abruptly, he removed his mother-in-law from the leadership of the company and took over himself, deciding that a burgeoning international company could not be led by a woman. Mary died a few months later.
Soon Takamine’s scientific work would lead to a greater success—indeed a landmark discovery in the annals of science. But accusations of intellectual theft and stealing credit would cloud his triumph.
As he pursued the adrenaline research, Takamine paid a visit to the lab of John Abel, a distinguished scientist at Johns Hopkins University, where Abel had been working on a similar project. He brought some of Abel’s methods home with him.
Among the young Japanese scientists Takamine employed in his Upper East Side lab was a twenty-three-year-old chemist named Keizo Uenaka. Uenaka worked long hours on the adrenal gland project, often falling asleep in the lab. Results were elusive. On a hot June night in 1900, he went home exhausted, without washing out the equipment. The next morning, he noticed crystals had formed in an unwashed test tube. It turned out to be an isolated form of adrenaline. Takamine, as director of the laboratory, quickly filed a patent and published several scientific papers under his name—without Uenaka’s. He also trademarked the substance.