by Daniel Wakin
The doctor was prone to hyperbole. “A friend gave me a bottle of supposedly good rye not long ago,” he told the Times. “I splashed a little on the desk in opening the bottle. It took all the finish off.”
“I had some liquor analyzed recently, and the laboratory reported that it contained more than the .02 percent of fusel oil [a mixture of alcohols] that the body will tolerate. It was moonshine liquor. The coloring matter was ordinary caramel. It didn’t actually contain wood alcohol but it was poisonous none the less. The instances of blindness and sudden death are only a small percentage of the ills caused by this suicidal stuff.”
In August 1934, Gilbert performed a different sort of medical science: amputation. He was paid the $1,000 procured by Francis Oley to sever Bennie the Bum’s leg in a room in an upper floor of the rooming house, with several of McMahon’s confederates present. Gilbert’s efforts were to no avail. McMahon had lost too much blood, and he died within one day or three—sources vary. He had had some help in easing himself out of this life. McMahon drank enough to be declared drunk by the medical examiner at the time of death.
Gilbert then received another assignment. McMahon’s confederates decided to stuff his body into a steamer trunk so it could be disposed of more easily. But McMahon was a bit outsized for the trunk they had found. So Gilbert was asked to amputate the other leg. The coroner later found, in a negative appraisal of Dr. Gilbert’s handiwork, that the crudely hacked off legs were stuffed into empty spaces around the body, which had been folded over to fit in the trunk.
In the middle of this macabre business, the doorbell rang, freezing the men with fear. Three of them crept down the wooden staircase. As two hid next to the inner doorway with guns drawn, the third, Stewart Wallace, opened the door and was confronted by a policeman in the embrace of a woman. The officer, it seems, had accidentally leaned against the doorbell inside the vestibule while kissing his companion. Stewart, wearing a coat over a shirt spattered with McMahon’s blood, thought exceedingly quickly. “You ought to be ashamed waking people out of a sound sleep at this hour of the morning,” he barked, according to Jack Alexander’s New Yorker account. “What would the commissioner say if I reported you?” Ignorant of the gruesome proceedings that had taken place just a few floors away, the policeman backed off with his companion.
When the medical work was done, the doctor was paid another $1,500 to cover the costs of McMahon’s burial, a false death certificate, and a payoff to an undertaker. The gang took up a collection for the burial.
For whatever reason—inconvenience? greed?—McMahon’s burial never took place. Four days later, a caretaker named Tony Tarantino left his home on West 74th Street in Manhattan and walked down the block to a four-story townhouse, occupied by one Louis Stotesbury, a former adjutant general of the New York National Guard. The caretaker planned to clean up a small concrete yard outside the building. But before he could start, Tarantino noticed something unusual: a black tin trunk, studded and trimmed with brass, wrapped in rope and oozing what appeared to be blood. Tarantino called the police. They found a body inside the trunk, face down, his legs detached. He was accompanied by a black jacket with gray pinstripes wrapped up in paper and a wad of medical cotton. The only clues were a cleaner’s tag and a torn bit of newspaper with a headline that read, “4 Thugs Killed Church Head at Service.” A fingerprint check revealed the corpse’s identity: Bernard McMahon. His identity was confirmed by his brother John. Nine pellets were embedded in what remained of his left leg. The trunk was found four blocks from the home of Gilbert, the doctor who tried to save McMahon and then amputated his legs.
Police at first had no idea that McMahon had been involved in the Rubel job. In fact, they had ruled out the notion. The trunk seemed to be foreign, lending later credence to the idea that Madeline Tully, the Slovakian-born lodging manager, had provided it. Investigators never figured out where the trunk had been between the time it received McMahon’s body and its discovery four days later.
The day after McMahon was disposed of, the gang members gathered at a Queens apartment and divided up the loot, which was contained in packets of common denominations stamped with the total amount on the outside. Manning announced the amounts and Geary tallied them up, arriving at a total figure of $427,950.
Before the money was divided, about $5,000 was subtracted: $2,500 for Gilbert’s fees and the rest for Tully and other miscellaneous expenses. The remainder was divided into nine parts of $47,000 each, even though ten men had taken part. That was because the boatmen, Quinn and Hughes, had early on agreed to split a share. They took their $23,500, tossed it into shopping bags, and left. Geary handed out the other shares. John Oley used an empty potato sack as a satchel. Others had brought briefcases or twine and packaging paper. All agreed that McMahon’s family should receive his share. There’s no evidence that the gang fulfilled the promise.
Two central characters—Manning, an originator of the plan, and Geary, the professional brought in to provide muscle and guidance, were the last two to leave. Carrying valises stuffed with bills, they hailed a taxi and went to the old Pennsylvania Station.
An insurance company immediately reimbursed the businesses that had lost money in the robbery. The crime claimed other casualties: All three guards lost their jobs.
CHAPTER 12.
No. 334, Continued: “Four Out of Five Have It”
THIRTEEN YEARS BEFORE THE RUBEL ICE gang used 334 Riverside Drive as a field hospital, it was changing hands from the Takamine family to another self-made success story: Richard Forhan. Forhan was born in 1866 in County Clare, Ireland, to American parents who traveled widely, and he practiced dentistry in Denver, Colorado, for nearly two decades. He developed an astringent to help prevent gum disease for his patients, shared it with colleagues for professional use, and in 1913 brought the formula to New York to try selling it as a consumer product. The astringent eventually became Forhan’s Toothpaste, which was promoted with one of the most ubiquitous advertising lines of the 1920s: “Four out of five have it.” The “it” was pyorrhea, or gum disease. Forhan sold the company in 1929, but the brand lived on for years, particularly in South America and Europe.
The Forhans were so prominent that Governor Al Smith attended the lavish wedding of one of their three daughters, Rea, in 1927 at the Church of the Ascension, on 107th Street, where David Canavan’s funeral had taken place. Mayor Jimmy Walker was also among the wedding guests, along with the police commissioner, George McLaughlin. Rea’s husband was William Pedrick, vice president of the Fifth Avenue Association. After a honeymoon in Palm Beach and Nassau, the young couple went to live south of the Seven Beauties at 90 Riverside Drive.
Even years after they left No. 334, the Takamines’ stamp remained: the Japanese furnishings and decorations they had lovingly installed. It must have been a treat for the Forhans to live in such an unusually decked-out home. But it turned out not to have been such a blessing.
One night, a year after Rea’s wedding, Forhan was away in California on business, leaving his wife home with two maids. It was a cloudy, cold evening in March. A heating duct under the staircase in the basement overheated, causing fireproofing to fall off and setting the carved adjoining woodwork on fire. The flames spread quickly, trapping Mrs. Forhan in her bedroom on the third floor and sending smoke billowing out toward the park. Neighbors clustered on the sidewalk below as she leaned out of her window, on the verge of panic. They shouted for her to wait for the firemen. Meanwhile, the two maids, Delia Morrisey and Marie Holdwig, were stuck on the fifth floor and screamed for help. Mrs. Forhan had called her son-in-law, William Pedrick, as the fire started and he rushed up from his own Riverside home, arriving in pajamas and slippers. He and a fireman ran up the stairs to rescue her from a window ledge. But the blaze was preventing access to the maids, who were leaning, terrified, out of their windows two stories above. So Fireman John McFarland of Hook and Ladder Co. No. 40 climbed up to the roof of either No. 333 or No. 335 next door (reports do n
ot specify) and lowered himself by a rope to their level. Other firefighters extended a section of ladder to them and McFarlane reached over and held himself and the two women against it. All three were lowered to safety. His actions earned McFarlane a citation for bravery.
Mrs. Forhan’s neighbors, the Faber family in No. 335, took her in for the night. There is no mention of where the maids went to stay. The fire charred much of the Japanese artwork and furnishings that had been left over from the Takamine days.
Forhan spent $200,000 to repair the damage of the fire, but it was not enough to keep him at No. 334, and he put the house on the market. In 1929, the India Society of America, led by Hari G. Govil, a supporter of and correspondent with Gandhi, acquired the option to buy No. 334 for $22,000. The society launched a $300,000 fund-raising campaign to make the purchase, establish an endowment, and turn the townhouse into an India Center, with an auditorium, art gallery, library, and temple brought from India. Nothing came of the plan, a victim of the stock market crash and Depression.
Forhan and his wife divorced in 1932 on grounds of “continuous quarreling.” One big quarrel concerned a trust fund he established for his wife and children. Mrs. Forhan sued to gain access to $850,000 in the trust that she said was owed her—money that Forhan invested in a company that controlled No. 334. Forhan finally found a buyer for the townhouse in 1933—the Aeon Realty Co., which flipped it to another real estate concern, the Barlock Realty Co. The proceeds of the sale may have been used to pay Mrs. Forhan’s claim.
In 1933, the same year he parted with No. 334, Forhan also sold his waterfront estate in Mamaroneck. Forhan died at his East Side home in Manhattan in 1965, a year shy of his hundredth birthday.
In a curious footnote, No. 334 would have another run-in with the law thirty years after the Rubel gang’s gruesome interlude there. Pauline Sargent, twenty-three, who lived at No. 334 in 1968 while a student in the general studies program at Columbia University, had taken part in the protests that swept the campus that spring, including the week-long occupation of five Columbia buildings. Sargent was part of the group that occupied Fayerweather Hall and was arrested when police swarmed through the buildings and broke up the protests. She and fellow student Miriam Ziegellaub were the first two protesters jailed in the Columbia protests when Judge Amos Basel of Criminal Court sentenced them each to fifteen days in prison.
They had pleaded guilty to a trespassing misdemeanor. Judge Basel said the right to dissent was protected by the Constitution, but that those who committed civil disobedience must pay the price. “There were thousands of students who went to Columbia who wanted to go to school, who were not allowed the right of access to their classes and their professors,” Basel said. “I don’t see any moral justification for this act. The law cannot condone what you did.” A Supreme Court judge ordered the two released the next day on $1 bail pending an appeal of the sentences as excessive.
CHAPTER 13.
The Hunt: “A Motion Picture Director’s Dream”
WITHIN MINUTES OF THE RUBEL ICE Company robbery, emergency calls quickly reached the police precinct at Bath Avenue and Bay 22nd Street, a four-minute walk away. What ensued was the kind of law enforcement response that today would be reserved for a major terrorist attack.
All available detectives in Brooklyn were summoned. Sirens blasted the air. Assistant Chief Inspector John Sullivan rushed in to Brooklyn from Manhattan. Police cruisers poured through the neighborhood and officers stopped cars with two or more men for questioning. Patrols scouted every highway passing through Brooklyn. Marksmen and squad cars took up positions at the entrances to the three bridges over the East River connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan—the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg spans. Even the Hudson River crossings were watched. When investigators heard from witnesses later in the day that the gang was seen boarding boats, a marine operation was launched. Police boats went on patrol, and two police planes took off from Floyd Bennett Field to survey the waters. Investigators began checking marinas, garages, and yacht basins on Long Island and along the coast. Two Coast Guard cutters were deployed to check anchorages in Long Island Sound and along the Jersey shore. As Jack Alexander wrote in his New Yorker piece about the heist, “By nightfall the chase had turned into a motion picture director’s dream.”
Word came from on high: Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had personally demanded that the robbers be caught. Sullivan, the assistant chief inspector, predicted that given the amount of money and number of perpetrators involved, solving the crime was inevitable. A former member of the State Crime Commission, Thomas Rice, rather oddly noted that the operation had a flaw: its meticulous planning. “The Brooklyn crime was perfect in preparation, operation and getaway—and that is where the whole scheme may be expected to break down,” he said. “It was too elaborate.” He proved to be partially right. Adding the wrinkle of the boat escape provided important clues that helped police identify the perpetrators.
Journalists and lawmen displayed an almost breathless admiration for the complexity and success of the plan, a reflection of the way gangsters were mythologized in the 1930s. “I don’t know of any instance in my time when the thieves went to so much planning, and everything worked out to perfection,” Sullivan told the Brooklyn Eagle. The Eagle’s Frank Emery, in the lead story on the paper’s front page, wrote: “Besides agreeing that the holdup was the most daring and sensational in the city’s history, police were also agreed on numerous other points. First, that the perpetrators, from their daring and expert seamanship, were probably former rum runners and hijackers who have been hard-pressed for cash since Prohibition repeal. Second, that the crime was executed to a point of precise perfection, indicating thorough planning of probably several months and direction by a ‘master mind’ more cunning than a Capone and nervier than a Dillinger. Third, that the getaway seems to have been as thoroughly planned as the execution of the holdup and had probably been completed before the police, at 3:30 p.m., learned that the machine gunners had taken to sea.” How right he was on all counts, except perhaps the hyperbolic criminal namedropping.
Dozens of people had witnessed the crime or were in the immediate vicinity, and it was not surprising that confusion reigned about exactly what had happened. Some witnesses said five men jumped out of the cars that were trailing the armored car, others said twelve. Some said that six machine guns were involved. Others thought that three cars were involved. In all, the police took down the names of twenty-two witnesses, including the three guards in the truck. None were able to pick out suspects from mug shots. Either they were shown the wrong mug shots, or their unshaven faces and costumes helped mask the gang members’ identities.
At the same time, physical evidence abounded. A key item was the machine gun dropped by Manning and picked up by Lilienthal—but Lilienthal’s handling of the weapon obliterated any fingerprints, and the serial number had been filed off. The police went over the pushcart carefully and even found the man who built it—but he could provide no information about its buyer, except that he had paid $10.
The blue Lincoln was found abandoned near Bay 35th Street, close to the Ben Machree Boat Club. Thomas Maitland, a captain who berthed his boat at the club, told police that he saw several men leave the car and jump aboard a mahogany speedboat carrying canvas bags. Other witnesses described events at the shore and gave descriptions of the boats. Loomis Wolfe—who either worked nearby at the Bensonhurst Fuel Distributing Corporation or as the superintendent of lumber yards at Cropsey Avenue, depending on the account—said that in the morning he saw a Lincoln turn off Cropsey onto Bay 35th Street. Several men disembarked from a boat at a nearby pier and got into the car. The Lincoln reappeared shortly after 1:30 p.m., Wolfe said, whereupon two men jumped out, ran to the pier, and hopped aboard a launch. Another witness, described in news reports only as a “Negro” without a name in the casual racism of the day, said he had told the gang members that they were trespassing on private property.
The Lincoln bore st
olen license plates and was determined to have been stolen from a Mrs. Anna Friedman of 217 Beverly Road in Brooklyn some three months earlier. The Nash was found three blocks away, at Bay 38th Street. It had pulled up around 12:40 p.m., witnesses said, and several men had gotten out and headed for the water.
In the evening of the day after the robbery, a tugboat captain passed on a tip to the police. Hours after the heist, he said, he saw a man hammering on the hull of a lobster boat, apparently trying to fix it. But after reading the detailed account of the robbery in the newspapers the next morning, the captain read something more suspicious into what he had seen and directed police to where he had observed the boat. Police found the dory, scuttled in Jamaica Bay off Beach 79th Street in Arverne, in the Rockaways.
A check quickly determined that the boat was registered to a John Donahue.
On the fifth day after the heist, another tip led to the discovery of the second boat, the Gar Wood speedboat, off Beach 72nd Street. The registration number had been filed off, and someone had tried to do the same with the motor number. But the job was not thorough enough. Members of the police crime lab were able to raise the numbers. They telegraphed the factory that made the boat. The answer came back: its buyer was, again, a Mr. John Donahue. The boat identifications proved to be an early and critical break in the case.