by Daniel Wakin
On February 3, the Brooklyn district attorney, William Geoghan, revealed some details. Quinn claimed he took the boat out on the day in question from West 96th Street for a fishing trip with two men he did not know. He headed south on the Hudson River to 48th Street, tied up, and went to eat at a lunch cart while waiting to pick up several other individuals. When he came back, Quinn said, his passengers and boat were gone. Using photographs supplied by the police, he identified the two men as the Oley brothers. That was enough for Geoghan to present evidence to a Kings County grand jury naming John Oley as a perpetrator in the Rubel case.
But prosecutors needed more. Oley and Geary were ensconced in Alcatraz, and with Manning, McMahon, and Francis Oley dead, Hughes missing, and Wallace in prison, investigators turned to one of their last options: Archie Stewart, who was imprisoned at Dannemora. John Ryan, the Brooklyn chief of detectives who had already questioned Stewart on previous occasions, and Francis Madden, an assistant district attorney and top deputy in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, spent four days in the summer of 1937 up at the prison trying to pry information out of him. They had no success. Then the warden and state corrections commissioner took a crack at Stewart—again without results. But a tiny opening had appeared from a surprising source.
The Bronx District Attorney’s office, for unrelated reasons, had brought an inmate from Dannemora down to the city and during questioning seized on a bit of information from the man: it seemed that Archie Stewart had a younger brother named Robert who had decided to take his life in a different direction. He was a probationary police officer in New York. It was the perfect opportunity. Investigators approached Robert, who pronounced himself willing to help. What motivated Robert? Was he the kind of guy able to sell out his own brother for the sake of ambition, as a way of currying favor to rise in the police force? Was he truly an upright future cop who believed that justice should trump blood ties? Did he know the best chance for his brother was to cut a deal? That latter is more likely, given evidence that emerged later showing Robert’s efforts to help out his sibling.
Whatever Robert’s motives, the investigators sent him up to Dannemora to work on his brother Archie. His efforts were met, at first, with disdain. Archie had no inclination to help his brother further the cause of law enforcement. Robert kept at it, stressing the shame Archie had brought on their family. Eventually, Robert must have said something that worked. After three days, Archie agreed to talk. (Robert later became a full police officer and was soon promoted to detective.)
The case was cracked. On October 13, 1938, Archie Stewart was brought to Brooklyn and testified before a grand jury. He identified the gang at the Rubel Ice Company as himself, Kress, Wallace, the Oleys, Geary, Quinn, Hughes, Manning, and McMahon. Stewart later retraced the crime scenes with the detectives and identified the recovered boats and the pushcart.
The whole story spilled out. According to Stewart, who somewhat grandiosely placed himself at the center of the narrative, he was the crime’s mastermind: he claimed to have come up with the idea for the robbery in June of 1934 and picked each new member of the gang. He planned the robbery, which was sketched out over nine separate meetings. He gave each member of the gang a task. He divvied up the proceeds. McMahon and Manning chose Kress, Stewart would later testify, to provide the two stolen cars. Kress drove one of them on the day of the robbery, he said. McMahon drove the other car. Hughes piloted the speedboat and Quinn handled the lobster boat.
Distancing himself from a potential gun charge, Stewart laid the responsibility for providing the weapons on Manning and McMahon—Manning the pistols and McMahon the machine guns. McMahon also made the initial contact with Hughes, for the boats, and Hughes brought Quinn into the affair. This was all according to Stewart, who was clearly looking for a deal with prosecutors by trading on his inside knowledge of the crime.
Stewart also suggested that investigators pay a call to John Oley and Percy Geary at Alcatraz. In October 1938, the relentless Ryan and Madden met with the two men. With nothing to lose, the convicts gave information implicating Gilbert, the doctor called to treat McMahon, and Quinn, the boat owner. Within short order, Gilbert was picked up and held on $50,000 bail. An affidavit described McMahon’s death from gangrene and infection, along with Gilbert’s role in helping cut off McMahon’s legs so his body could be stuffed into a trunk.
Police quickly grabbed Madeline Tully, the rooming house doyenne, hauling her out of a dingy walk-up apartment in Yorkville, on Manhattan’s far East Side. Just a few weeks earlier, Tully had finished serving a thirty-month sentence in connection with a raid on a rooming house she ran at 322 West 90th Street.
That raid gives a clear picture of the level of trust the underworld placed in Tully, and of her formidable criminal ties. Police at 90th Street arrested nine members of what was dubbed the Arsenal Gang and seized a sizable cache of firearms. It also serves as a reminder of the Upper West Side’s occasional violent history. The house on 90th Street, which was used as a hideaway and headquarters, sat just a few doors down from the building where police had carried out the notorious siege of Francis “Two-Gun” Crowley, who for a brief time in the early ’30s was considered the most dangerous man in New York. One of those arrested during the raid on Tully’s building was Albert Ackalitis, a West Side gangster and future waterfront crime boss who would one day rule Pier 18 and, from there, parts of the Hudson County docks across the river. It was believed that the Arsenal Gang’s leader was another criminal boss on the docks, Frank Peraski, a member of the New Jersey gang led by Charles Yanowsky, a friend of Jersey City Mayor John Kenny. The arrests of Ackalitis and Peraski demonstrate the close links between organized crime rings that operated throughout the city and the world of kickbacks, loansharking, illegal betting, and murder on the docks.
Tully appeared in court in Brooklyn on October 22, 1938 and was charged as a material witness in the Rubel case. Madden, the assistant DA, told the judge that Tully lived in the apartment where McMahon had been brought and later died. Madden asked for the same bail for Tully as for Dr. Gilbert, $50,000. But the judge, John Fitzgerald, set the amount at $15,000, ruling that Tully—despite her underworld bona fides—wasn’t “in the same class” as Gilbert. She was taken to the so-called “civil jail” next to the Raymond Street lockup in what is now Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
On a cloudy November 3, 1938, the indictment in the Rubel case was handed up. The Brooklyn Eagle gave it a banner headline: 9 INDICTED FOR RUBEL ROBBERY. Tully and Gilbert were named as accessories and seven others as participants: Wallace, Stewart, Kress, Quinn, John Oley, Geary, and Hughes. But only three members of the gang of ten would actually be tried: Kress, one of the two drivers, who was already in jail on a gun charge; Wallace, who was also in jail, for a bank robbery; and Quinn, the boatman. Three others were dead: McMahon, the victim of the self-inflicted shotgun wound; Manning, felled by a gunman on an upper Manhattan sidewalk; and Francis Oley, who had hanged himself at the Oneida jail. Hughes was either missing or in jail. Oley and Geary, the former rumrunners and kidnappers from Albany, were in federal prison. Stewart was to become the state’s key witness.
The prosecution was assigned to Hyman Barshay, a tailor’s son born in Russia who came to the United States at the age of seven. Growing up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, then a major destination for the city’s immigrant Jews, Barshay sold newspapers to earn money in high school, and from there went straight to Brooklyn Law school at night, working various jobs during the day. A brilliant young man, he graduated at the age of twenty and immediately landed in the prosecutor’s office. Barshay had an aloof, even severe character. Years after the Rubel case, Barshay was appointed as a judge on the state Supreme Court, where he was a stern presence.
At the time Barshay took over the case, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office was not considered a stellar example of prosecutorial skill. Geoghan, the DA, was a Philadelphia-born lawyer who moved to New York in 1906 and taught high school and college English.
Four years later, he went into private practice, then served as an assistant district attorney and ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1921, losing amid a Republican landslide. Geoghan’s honesty and loyalty to the Democratic machine were unquestioned. His competency as a crimefighter was another story. In 1935, the body of Samuel Drukman, a racetrack gambler and mechanic, was found in a car trunk at the Luckman Brothers Garage in Brooklyn. He had been beaten with a billiard cue and strangled. Two suspects were found in the garage, and they conveniently had blood on their clothes. A third suspect, the company’s owner, Meyer Luckman (father of the future football star Sid Luckman), was arrested outside.
Yet Geoghan’s office failed to win an indictment. State hearings on Geoghan’s removal followed, along with allegations that officials had been bribed to undermine the case. Governor Herbert H. Lehman, a Democrat, eventually absolved Geoghan of all charges, declaring him “an honest man.” But in an indirectly stinging rebuke to Geoghan, Lehman appointed a special prosecutor, Hiram Todd, to handle the Drukman case. The suspects were eventually convicted of second degree murder.
In 1939 Lehman appointed another special prosecutor, John Harlan Amen, to investigate official corruption in Brooklyn. One of Amen’s targets was Francis Madden, Geoghan’s top deputy and close friend, who was eventually convicted of taking bribes to protect an illegal abortion enterprise and was later disbarred.
Stewart Wallace’s lawyer was Burton Turkus, a man described as “suave, dynamic in conversation, sharp,” by the Associated Press reporter Sid Feder in the introduction to Murder, Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate, a book he and Turkus co-wrote about the notorious killing organization. Despite Feder’s description of his co-writer as a political independent, Turkus was politically connected and on the rise—a prominent Democrat in Brooklyn whose name was tossed around as a potential United States attorney, a member of the Elks and Knights of Pythias and various other clubs and lawyers’ organizations. He showed up frequently in the pages of newspapers, standing demurely behind or next to a happy client, wearing a homburg and pocket square in his buttoned suit jacket, his mustache trimmed into a flattened triangle. Turkus carved out a reputation as a divorce lawyer in the 1920s, often representing the aggrieved wife in cases, covered avidly by the papers, involving attempted poisonings, love triangles, and best-friend betrayals. It was perhaps the closest genre of that era to reality TV and Real Housewives dramas.
In another noteworthy case, Turkus represented Helen Walsh, the girlfriend of Francis “Two-Gun” Crowley, in her efforts to see the convicted killer on the eve of his execution at Sing Sing in 1932. Crowley refused to receive the young woman, who was arrested with him during the 90th Street siege—witnessed by scores of people filling the streets. She just wanted to sell her story to the papers, he said. “To hell with her,” prison officials quoted him as saying. Turkus also fought to dismiss an all-white jury about to hear a murder case against two black men—the first instance of challenging a jury’s racial composition in New York State, according to the Brooklyn Eagle. The case was rendered moot when the two men pleaded guilty. But the judge in the case—O’Dwyer—called on Turkus to submit his arguments anyway. It would not be the last time that O’Dwyer demonstrated his respect for the lawyer.
In Murder, Inc., Turkus explained how he came to be involved in the Rubel case. One day, O’Dwyer, who was to be the judge at the trial, buttonholed Turkus outside the Brooklyn criminal court building. “He turned on the irresistible charm which has been the man’s most remarkable asset as a public figure,” Turkus wrote. “‘I wish you would take the defense of this man Wallace,’” the judge told him. Turkus was reluctant. He was swamped with cases and “this had all the earmarks of a long drawn-out trial.” Turkus continued: “Besides, although no lawyer has the right to prejudge guilt, it is only human, at times, to sense no real defense. This case had exactly that flavor.” So he told O’Dwyer he’d rather decline. The judge countered with flattery: Wallace deserved a good lawyer, one as good as the top representatives that the other defendants had. “That was the O’Dwyer charm at work. Few have been able to resist it,” Turkus noted.
Kress, the car thief, was represented at first by Sam Leibowitz, a celebrated criminal lawyer, and later by Vincent Impellitteri, who would go on to serve as mayor of New York City from 1950 to 1953. Quinn had Caesar Barra as his courtroom defender.
Even though the police were confident that they had solved the case, the prosecution wanted more insider witnesses to ensure convictions. Brooklyn investigators traveled once again to Alcatraz, to try to persuade Oley and Geary to testify, but they refused. So they had to rely on Archie Stewart, who agreed to testify against his former co-conspirators in return for immunity. His residence did not change: Clinton Prison in Dannemora, where he was serving that thirty- to sixty-year sentence for the bank robbery committed with Wallace in Pine Bush, New York. Stewart was seeking leniency regarding his conviction for the bank robbery, and may also have been motivated by revenge. He bore a grudge against Kress.
On June 26, 1939, just short of five years after the robbery, the lawyers and three defendants appeared at the Kings County Courthouse for jury selection. The building, a neoclassical pile on Joralemon and Fulton Streets in downtown Brooklyn, was considered in desperate need of repair and improvements. But outside it was a glory of tall arches, pediments, and an imposing dome, all to be torn down in the following decade to make way for a modern civic complex. Inside the courtroom, tension was high. More than a dozen detectives carefully scrutinized the spectators’ gallery.
In his opening argument, Barshay described the case in stark terms. “I shall prove that each of the participants was assigned to a specific role,” the prosecutor told the jurors. “It was agreed that they were to apply Newskin to their fingertips to avoid leaving fingerprints, that each was to be unshaven for a few days prior to the crime, that each was to be dressed to appear like the workmen who congregate in front of the Rubel plant, that each was to wear smoked glasses and caps, that each was to hire a pushcart similar to those used by the peddlers and to present himself with his cart in the neighborhood of the plant on several days before the day of the robbery so their faces would not appear strange and arouse suspicion.” And he went on to say, “I shall prove that the plan was often rehearsed prior to its actual execution.”
The first witnesses to take the stand were bank officials, who testified about the sums of money that were carried by the armored car, and explained that the cash became US Trucking’s responsibility once in the car’s care. Lilienthal, one of the guards, despite the bitterness over his treatment by the armored car company, then took the stand and described the robbery but insisted that he could not recognize the three defendants. Conveniently, the one gang member he said he did recognize was not on trial. That would be Archie Stewart.
Stewart was the star witness, repeating the account he had given to the grand jury. He said he was with McMahon and Manning in June 1934 when they saw the armored car in Coney Island that served as their inspiration, adding, “We decided it would be an easy job to take over.” To trace the movements of the gang members, he used a six-by-four-foot blown-up photograph, with each player represented by a white square of paper pinned to the picture. Stewart testified that Kress took part in the robbery and received a $47,000 cut of the proceeds, the same amount as the other principals. Quinn and Hughes, Stewart said, produced and operated the boats used in the getaway, so each pocketed a half-share for their efforts. Wallace also received a half-share because with only one hand, he was considered half as effective. He did not explain what happened to the other half.
Charles Schlayer, a mechanic, testified that he repaired the speedboat used in the robbery and that Hughes, John Oley, Stewart, and Kress took the craft out for a jaunt in the Hudson River, a trip which the prosecution described as a test run. Schlayer said he remembered this event clearly because guards at the dock of a Ford plant in Edgewater, New Jersey, a narrow strip of town across the rive
r from a stretch of Manhattan extending from about 96th Street to 170th Street, refused to let the men land.
The defense countered by putting a Ford personnel manager on the stand to undercut the mechanic’s testimony. The manager testified that no armed guards were present at the plant that year. Quinn’s lawyer called to the stand three longshoremen, associates of his client, to say that on the day of the robbery he was hanging out on the street or in a saloon from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Manhattan’s “stovepipe” section, as the area just north of Hell’s Kitchen was then known. Quinn’s lawyer also tried to cast aspersions on the credibility of Stewart’s brother, the police officer, by seeking to introduce Dictaphone recordings. The recordings depicted a conversation between the patrolman and two longshoremen bosses. Presumably, the recordings would have shown some sort of involvement by the officer in illegal waterfront activity.
Stewart testified that he and Kress had met again in Sing Sing in 1937, where Kress was serving his sentence for gun possession and where he was still incarcerated at the time of the trial. Stewart said he demanded $500 more for McMahon’s medical treatment and burial, and that Kress gave him only $150. Stewart said Kress promised to come up with more, although how much more is unknown. But whatever the amount, it was enough for Stewart to keep after Kress. He asked several times for the rest of the money, with no success. Was the money really payback for McMahon’s treatment and burial? It may have been a shakedown, funds extorted with the threat that Stewart would do just what he was engaged in: implicating Kress in the Rubel crime.
But Stewart was also running out of money to pay his lawyers and cover the cost of printing legal documents. “I need the money you owe me,” he told Kress. Kress agreed to pay him through his brother-in-law, Harold Harkavy, a lawyer. Who could fetch the money, he asked Stewart. Stewart said he would send his brother Robert, the police officer who served as the middleman with prosecutors. Robert failed to procure the cash and Stewart went back to Dannemora. The matter was dropped.