Man with the Sawed-Off Leg and Other Tales of a Ne

by Daniel Wakin

  In his testimony, Kress denied most of the allegations against him regarding Stewart’s demands, and offered a different version of his contacts with Stewart in prison. Kress testified that one day he told some fellow inmates that he had a lawyer brother-in-law who was looking into his appeal. Stewart overheard the conversation, Kress continued, said he was interested in using him, and asked for his name and address.

  To explain his connection to the robbery charges, Kress came up with a rather flimsy story. He claimed that Stewart effectively threatened to implicate him unless he was paid to stay quiet. Here is Kress quoting Stewart: “Listen Kress, I have a very expensive lawyer handling my appeal, and I need dough. I don’t care where or how I get it. I got my brother hustling all over New York, but I don’t care how or where he gets it either. I want you to kick back that dough or else it will be just too bad for you.” And here is where Kress cast himself in an innocent light, complaining that he “never received a nickel from anybody for that.” And Stewart wouldn’t receive a cent from him.

  Barshay, Kress’s lawyer, called Harkavy to the stand to back up his client. Harkavy described a series of encounters with Robert Stewart and growing demands for money. “You know it would be rather unhealthy for Joe if a contribution was not made,” Harkavy quoted Robert Stewart as saying. “Archie could make it pretty hot for Joe, make things very uncomfortable for Joe.” Harkavy resisted but finally caved. “Your threat worked and has scared Joe’s mother to such an extent that he has given me—Joe’s father has given me some money for you,” Harkavy testified.

  When Quinn and Kress took the stand, both denied outright taking part in the robbery. Kress also specified that he had no involvement in any planning, the getaway, or division of the loot and did not even know the other gang members. He denied seeing Schlayer, the mechanic who was said to have repaired the speedboat. He did, however, admit to something else: being a loser. He called himself “a loafer and a gambler and the black sheep of my family.”

  In his summation, Barshay called the heist “the crime of the century.” Like a good trial lawyer, he anticipated the defense’s closing statements by saying that his case involved no exaggeration and lacked “phony witnesses.” By that he meant witnesses who did not know what they were talking about because they were not there. Stewart had been—and though no choir boy, he was eminently well placed to give the inside story. Barshay spoke for two hours, ending at 10:30 p.m., at which point O’Dwyer adjourned the trial until 10 the next morning.

  On the day of defense summations, the lawyers managed to shave away some aspects of the case, persuading O’Dwyer to dismiss the charges of assault and grand larceny. The jury would now have to decide only on first-degree robbery charges.

  In their closing arguments, the defense employed a time-tested strategy: kill the messenger. They argued that Archie Stewart, the insider who had provided the bulk of the evidence against their clients, was actually the guilty party—guilty, they argued, of manufacturing a plot to implicate the defendants.

  “Archie Stewart is a human cobra if ever I saw one,” Turkus railed. “Archie Stewart tells you that his only motive in testifying in this trial is to gain immunity from prosecution for participating in the Rubel job. You can’t believe that. His motive is to gain his release from the sentence of thirty to sixty years he is serving in Dannemora prison for his part in the Pine Bush National Bank robbery.

  “If you want to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for him and send him back on the public with a gun in his hands, go ahead and convict three suckers who are defendants in this case. Stewart Wallace, my client, is an old man with only one hand. He could have made the same deal. He could have made a deal to put Kress and Quinn in jail to save his own skin. But he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t tell lies to put the finger on others.”

  Indeed, the Court of Appeals would later cast doubt on Archie Stewart’s account, saying there were “contradictions and improbabilities in his testimony and it did not always square with other established facts.” His veracity, the court added, “was open to the gravest suspicion.” Turkus, in cross-examining him, at one point sought to undermine his credibility by connecting him to unrelated killings. Specifically, Turkus asked Stewart if he was responsible for the murder of one John (Ky) Costello in Manhattan, a crime that had not been solved. No, Stewart replied, he was not. It was a line of questioning insisted on by Wallace. He had gone so far as to tell O’Dwyer he would represent himself if those questions were not asked.

  The case went to the jury at midday on July 12. Because Judge O’Dwyer had dismissed the grand larceny and assault charges, the jurors had a simple choice to make: conviction or acquittal on one count of first-degree robbery for each defendant. On the first afternoon of deliberations, the jurors asked to re-hear portions of testimony. Dinner arrived at 7:45 p.m., and within an hour and fifteen minutes, they were back at work.

  The night dragged on. At 3 a.m., the verdict came back for all three defendants: guilty. When the verdict was announced, none of them displayed any reaction. In explaining the verdict later, Wallace’s lawyer, Turkus, said the defense had little room to maneuver: “The state had too many loaded guns,” he wrote in Murder, Inc. The verdict was cast as proof that no crime, no matter how minutely planned, was immune from discovery. On its editorial page, the Brooklyn Eagle opined: “That the long arm of the law was able to strike so effectively, even after the passage of nearly five years, demonstrated once more that the cleverest of crooks are unable to plan and execute a really perfect crime.”

  When sentencing time came, Wallace could have gotten up to sixty years as a second-time offender, but O’Dwyer gave him thirty years, and made the term run concurrent to the thirty years Wallace was already serving for the bank robbery. Kress and Quinn faced the same maximum, but received a ten- to thirty-year sentence.

  At sentencing, Wallace demonstrated a burst of altruism and sought to clear his co-defendants, declaring that while he may have been guilty, they took no part in the robbery. “I want to make a statement,” he said. “I’m guilty of this crime, but these two men are not. For the record, I want to state that there were not ten men involved but only nine and these men are not two of the nine men who committed this crime.”

  Lawyers for Kress and Quinn jumped on the statement, and asked O’Dwyer to keep their clients in the city jail system, in Brooklyn, for forty-eight hours before ordering their transfer to a state prison. That would give them time, they said, to file a motion for a new trial based on new evidence. But the judge turned them down, saying the matter was up to the Department of Corrections. He said he did not want to take responsibility for sending the men to the Brooklyn jail, especially since it had taken on a porous quality: two inmates had escaped the previous week.

  O’Dwyer, the future crusading prosecutor, also did something that these days would be unheard of in a criminal trial. He called the prosecutor, Barshay, and Ryan, the police inspector, up to the bench to deliver his congratulations.

  The money, all $427,950 of it, had disappeared.

  CHAPTER 18.

  No. 337: Miss Havisham’s House: “Freedom Was Mine”

  Within a quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havisham’s House, which was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it.

  —Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

  FOR A READER OF DICKENS’S NOVEL Great Expectations, the melancholy weirdness of Satis House, the mysterious mansion where the corpse-like Miss Havisham, living in a state of suspended imagination, receives Pip, is unforgettable. I was a serious Dickens reader in my teen and college years, and somehow I transferred my idea of Satis House to a nearby building that had been part of my own childhood, though not to Pip’s extent. It was on my corner growing up and it is another palazzo with a name, River Mansion. The address is 337 Riverside Drive.

  Compared to the limestone Beaux-Arts airiness of its sisters to the south, No. 337 gives off a lonelier air, with its red brick facade and scragg
ly bushes behind metal fences. Ornate columns reminiscent of the medieval Cloisters up the Hudson flank the main entrance facing 106th Street. The columns are topped by a small stone porch set in front of a window, crowned by a cornice with lion heads on the brackets. A stone framework rises up two stories above the first floor, uniting two floors’ worth of windows to the left and right side. The stonework is weighty. Limestone adornments stand in contrast to the wine-red brick.

  In 1903, barely a year after the building was completed, another single woman took ownership, but she was altogether unlike the spurned and sad Miss Havisham. The new owner, Julia Marlowe, had divorced her husband just three years earlier. But in her own way, she may have been almost as lonely as Dickens’s creation. Marlowe, who was hurtling toward the celebrity of being America’s most famous Shakespearean actress, was a woman isolated by incipient fame. The house, too, remained lonely. Marlowe was constantly on the road.

  She was born Sarah Frances Frost in 1866, in Caldbeck, a village in the English Lake District, and ended up in the United States due to a family mishap.

  The newspaperman Charles Edward Russell, in a fawning 1926 biography, Julia Marlowe: Her Life and Art, told the story. He wrote that her father, a storekeeper named John Frost, perhaps drunk and flush with a winning day at the races, engaged in an impromptu horse-and-buggy race with another driver and cracked his whip in triumph as he passed by his opponent. “You have knocked out my eye!” the man screamed. “Panic terror seized upon John Frost,” Russell wrote. “Visions of jail, the county assizes, life imprisonment or even the gallows possessed him.” Hence the need for immediate escape, which actually proved unnecessary. The other driver, it turned out, was faking his injury.

  However valid the reason, the fearful Frost adopted his mother’s maiden name of Brough, made his way to Liverpool, and boarded a ship for the United States. His wife Sarah followed with their four children, including the six-year-old Sarah Frances, in 1872. Adopting the new family surname, Sarah Frances became Fanny Brough. The family began their American life in Olathe, Kansas, near Kansas City, where John Brough opened a store. After several moves around the frontier, the Broughs eventually settled in Cincinnati.

  Part of midwestern cultural life at the time were operettas performed by children, touring from town to town. According to Russell, the eleven-year-old Fanny answered a newspaper ad for a child-cast production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. She was accepted and began a long tour, making her debut as a “Pinafore” sailor in Ironton, Ohio. A manager took her in hand, and by eighteen, Fanny Brough had played an equal number of roles as her age. Acting and singing lessons, a carefully conceived stage name, big Shakespearean roles: Sarah Frost knew exactly what she wanted—stardom under a proscenium.

  Helped by her mentor and teacher, the actress Ada Dow, Sarah—now named Julia Marlowe—arranged for a one-time-only appearance at the Bijou Theater in 1887 to introduce herself to the New York theater world. She played Parthenia, the heroine of Ingomar, the Barbarian, a potboiler romance set in ancient Greece. Parthenia, the daughter of the captured Greek Myron, instructs the barbarian chieftain Ingomar in the ways of sentimental love. The part had the memorably mawkish couplet, “Two souls with but a single thought / Two hearts that beat as one,” often incorrectly attributed to Keats. The theater critic for the New York Times, Edward A. Dithmar, wrote: “Julia Marlowe: remember her name, for you will hear of her again.” Her career was launched.

  Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet followed. Marlowe toured, returned to New York, and then scored a major commercial success as Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII, in When Knighthood Was in Flower, which she directed. The play—which was adapted from a novel that also would become the inspiration, as noted, for the hit silent movie starring Marion Davies, the future owner of 331 Riverside Drive—ran for six months in 1901, and she reprised it the next season. “I had about as ‘starry’ a part as anyone could aspire to,” she was given to say in Julia Marlowe’s Story, a first-person hagiography by her future husband and longtime acting partner, Edward Hugh Sothern. “Indeed Mary Tudor was on the stage from the rise of the curtain in each of the four acts till its fall. Every mood of all the characters I had ever played seemed packed into its compass. The public wanted ‘pep,’ and here it was by the bucket and cartload.”

  “From the moment Mary Tudor entered,” Julia continued in this starry-eyed account, “I felt assured and in high feather. I went from act to act with spirits unbounded and unflagging. The play was bringing within my grasp all I had longed for through so many hard-working years. Freedom, independence, the right to choose without restraint. That greatest of all blessings, the direction of my own will, and the right to seek happiness in my own way. How I had waited, longed for this moment! As the curtain rose and fell the audience applauded and finally broke out into cheers. My whole body throbbed with the exertion and the sense of victory.”

  That first season alone “made me a fortune sufficient to render me independent for the rest of my life,” she continued. “The second season I more than doubled it. Freedom was mine.” Russell, the newspaperman, who says in his book that he was Marlowe’s main business advisor, estimated her earnings after just a few weeks of the run at $50,000.

  The fortune paid for a mansion in Highmount, New York, a town in the Catskills where she spent the summer of 1901. “I began to feel that I had taken root in the world,” Marlowe says in her book. Russell, for his part, depicts her as a woman yearning for a home, “a place into which she could go and shut the door and shut out with it the world of struggle and noise.”

  That home was beckoning on Riverside Drive. In the fall of 1903, Marlowe paid $68,000 for 337 Riverside Drive and its 8,500 square feet, according to the Real Estate Record, or the equivalent of $1.8 million nowadays (in the New York real estate market, it would probably go for many times that). Marlowe paid mostly in cash. Despite that yearning for a home, Marlowe may never have actually settled in permanently. That was the conclusion of Russell, who wrote a half-dozen years later that she “at last reluctantly sold it.” Much of her time was spent on the road, touring in regional theaters and in London. The New York Sun reported on May 16, 1906, that Marlowe was “now at her home, 337 Riverside Drive, under the care of her physician, Dr. J. E. Stillwell” after being forced to cancel performances of Romeo and Juliet in Ottawa because of illness. The New York Tribune elaborated, saying, “It was given out that she was suffering from a nervous breakdown.” The Trib also reported rumors that Marlowe and Sothern had argued, or that they did not like the arrangements for an upcoming engagement at the Academy of Music in Brooklyn and wanted to get out of the commitment. Representatives of the actress engaged in spin control, denying the rumors.

  “Freedom, independence, the right to choose without restraint,” Marlowe wrote. What a contrast to another actress, Marion Davies, whose career received a boost from the same narrative, When Knighthood Was in Flower, just a few years later. Freedom? Independence? The right to pursue happiness in her own way? None of these ever came within Davies’s grasp, no matter how successful she became in the eyes of the public. Both women found success and financial support, but Marlowe was truly independent while Davies remained trapped in a gilded cage of her own, the one constructed by William Randolph Hearst.

  A third woman contemporary on the block, Lucretia Davis, took another path to self-sufficiency: marriage. Marlowe did not need the protection of a man because of her talent. Davies seized on one regardless of talent, and lived forever with a taint of shame. Lucretia Davis found independence another way, through a respectable marriage to a solid citizen who took on the stewardship of her birthright, a baking soda company. Remarkably, Lucretia and Julia shared the same photo spread in the January 13, 1907, edition of the New York Times. On the left page, Marlowe’s portrait appears under the headline “Popular with New York Theatregoers.” On the right, we see Lucretia, grouped with “Some Well Known Society Folk.”

  Whether or not
Marlowe ever lived at River Mansion very much, she sold it to her neighbor Anna Faber, the wife of the pencil maker Lothar Faber, in late 1906, after owning the building for just three years. The Fabers moved out a few years later and resettled down the block. We have heard their story.

  In 1904, Marlowe and Sothern began their reign as the great Shakespearean couple of the era. They married in 1911 (Marlowe’s first marriage, to the actor Robert Taber, had lasted from 1894 to 1900). Her greatest roles included Viola in Twelfth Night and Julia in The Hunchback by James Sheridan Knowles. Marlowe retired from the stage in 1916 but made occasional appearances until 1924.

  The final chapters of her life were subdued. After Sothern died in 1933, she went into seclusion, emerging only in 1944 to open an exhibition of her costumes and memorabilia at the Museum of the City of New York. She died at her apartment at the Plaza Hotel in New York on November 12, 1950.

  Marlowe was famed for her rich, musical voice, which she exercised while practicing her parts during long walks through Central Park. With her square, heavily cleft chin, strong jaw, and expressive eyebrows, Marlowe was not considered conventionally beautiful, but observers admired the expressiveness of her face. The humorist and sometime theater critic Robert Benchley wrote, “Julia Marlowe has the unique distinction of being the only living actress who has kept me awake throughout an entire performance of Shakespeare.” Arthur Symons, a British critic, said she was “not only lovely as Juliet, she was Juliet.” A series of Victrola recordings from the early 1920s of Shakespeare scenes by Sothern and Marlowe reveal a warbling, crooning, R-rolling style of recitation that has a quaint aspect now.

  By 1909, River Mansion had passed to Matilda Brower, a widow, whose household included a daughter, a son and his wife, two grandchildren, three Finnish servants, and an English nurse. The next recorded residents were the family of the businessman John McKinnon, who in September 1914 announced that his daughters Lillian Clare and Madeleine Agnes were engaged. Lillian was getting married to the melodiously named Maltby Jelliffe of Jersey City, and Madeleine found her match across the street: Kenneth Marwin of 340 Riverside Drive. How convenient Riverside Park would have been for the two couples. I imagine Maltby coming to town by ferry and hiring a car to head north, meeting Lillian, her sister, and Kenneth under the Franz Sigel statue. I see each strolling arm in arm, one pair in front of the other, a happy quartet out for warm evening walks in the summer before the start of World War I, discussing their weddings.