The Gangs of New York

by Herbert Asbury

  Among the most widely known of the luxurious houses that catered to the gambling proclivities of the gay throngs which nightly promenaded Broadway were the establishments of Honest John Kelly, William Busteed, Sam Emery, Davy Johnson, Dinky Davis, and John Daly; while across town beyond Fifth avenue, at No. 5 East Forty-fourth street and next door to Delmonico’s famous restaurant, was Richard Canfield’s. Canfield also owned the resort at Saratoga Springs which had been established by John Morrissey in 1867, and had enhanced its great natural beauty by the addition of a restaurant, Itahan gardens and an art gallery, the most celebrated feature of which was a portrait of Canfield by his friend James McNeill Whistler. Canfield’s place in Forty-fourth street was the most famous gambling house in the United States, and was operated without molestation until the fall of 1902, when a member of the Vanderbilt family was reputed to have lost one hundred thousand dollars in a single night’s play. Naturally, there was vast indignation, and a few days later, on December 1, 1902, the place was raided by William Travers Jerome, District Attorney, who had started a war against gambling which resulted in the closing of many noted houses. For a year after the raid Canfield’s doors were barred and his windows shuttered, but thereafter it opened for short periods until late in 1904, when it was again invaded and an indictment procured against Canfield, charging him with being a common gambler. He pleaded guilty and paid a fine of one thousand dollars, and then retired from business, closing his Saratoga house also. During the next ten years the Forty-fourth street place was occasionally used as a gambling resort, but Canfield had no connection with it after his indictment. He Uved quietly until 1914, when he died following a fall in the subway. He left an estate appraised by the Tax Department at $841,4S5.

  Honest John Kelly acquired his sobriquet in 1888, when as a baseball umpire he refused a bribe of ten thousand dollars to make decisions favoring Boston in a game with Providence. He came to New York in the late nineties and opened a gambling house, and as his prosperity increased he operated in various parts of the city. But his most celebrated place was the brown-stone building at No. 156 West Forty-fourth street, which is still pointed out to tourists by the guides of the sight-seeing wagons. Throughout his long career Kelly was notoriously at odds with the police, and often boasted that his persistent refusal to pay for protection compelled him to purchase many new doors and windows to replace fixtures wrecked by indignant detectives. The most destructive of the raids upon Kelly’s occurred in 1912, when the doors, windows and furniture were smashed by a squad of policemen armed with axes, fire hatchets, and crow bars. Kelly then abandoned his Forty-fourth street estabhshment and opened the Vendôme Club in West 141st street, but he retained ownership of the former property, and the police always suspected that he continued to use it for gambling purposes. From 1918 to 1922, while Richard E. Enright was Police Commissioner, a uniformed policeman paced back and forth in front of the building day and night. Kelly finally sold the structure to a Republican pohtical organization. During the last years of his life he operated a place at Palm Beach, Florida, but without notable success. He died on March 28, 1926, at the age of seventy.

  No proof was ever produced that Big Jack Zelig numbered such houses as Canfield’s, Kelly’s, and Busteed’s among his clients, although it was often reported that Monk Eastman had received commissions from Canfield and that Zelig was paid a considerable sum to keep his gunmen out of Honest John’s. The major portion of Zehg’s gambling house business came from such second-rate places as those operated by Bald Jack Rose, Harry Vallon, Bridgie Webber, Sam Schepps, and Herman, otherwise Beansy, Rosenthal, all of whom were more or less prominently connected with the Becker-Rosenthal case. Rosenthal’s connection, indeed, was extremely prominent: he was murdered.

  In seeking such gang business as bombing, raiding, shooting, and stabbing from houses of this class Big Jack Zelig had considerable competition from no less a personage than Paul Kelly, who had moved down from Harlem about 1910 and opened the New Englander Social and Dramatic Club in Seventh avenue, just north of the Roaring Forties. There he had established a headquarters for the remnants of his gang, and for the next two years his gunmen were notable figures of the theatrical district, and responsibility for many shootings and stabbings was laid at their door by the police. Detectives often raided Kelly’s resort at the behest of the District Attorney and the few honest officials of the police department, but never found evidence sufficient to warrant closing the place. Kelly, indeed, was of great aid to the raiding officers; he appeared always to know when a visit was in prospect, and met the detectives at the front door or on the sidewalk, and ceremoniously conducted them through the establishment. But they never found anything more immoral than a dozen of his henchmen playing checkers or dominoes.

  Herman Rosenthal was always in trouble, either with the police or with his fellow gamblers. He first appeared in the underworld as a bookmaker at the race tracks, and in 1910 opened a gambling house near Kuhloff’s place at Far Rockaway, on Long Island. But he was soon raided, for Kuhloff possessed great influence and resented Rosenthal’s efforts to capture his chentele. Rosenthal then became interested in the Hesper Club in Second avenue, and was almost immediately embroiled in a dispute with Bridgie Webber and Sam Paul, who were having great success with the Sans Souci Music Hall in Third avenue near Thirteenth street, not far from Rosenthal’s place. The trouble was intensified when two of Big Jack Zelig’s gangsters waylaid Webber and gave him a terrible beating, and thereafter for several years Rosenthal found the hands of practically every policeman, politician, and gambler in the city turned against him.

  He opened a house in West 116th street which was soon closed by the police, and then started a more elaborate establishment in West Forty-fifth street near Broadway, which was frequently raided and twice wrecked by bombs. But according to the testimony of Bald Jack Rose during the Becker-Rosenthal trials, the gambler finally made his peace with the police by accepting Lieutenant Charles Becker, head of the Gambhng Squad, as a partner. For a few months Rosenthal prospered, but in March, 1912, he incurred the enmity of Becker by refusing to pay five hundred dollars for the defense of the policeman’s press agent, who had been charged with killing a man during a raid on a dice game.

  Lieutenant Becker retaliated by raiding Rosenthal’s house in West Forty-fifth street on April 15, and Rosenthal publicly threatened to reveal to the District Attorney, Charles S. Whitman, the extensive ramification of the system under which the gamblers obtained protection. Rosenthal’s enemies then determined to put him out of the way, for the notoriety which he was receiving threatened the extinction of gambling and the loss of vast fortunes by both policemen and gamblers. In June, 1912, Big Jack Zelig was approached while under arrest in the Tombs, and as the

  Police Lieutenant Charles Becker

  Herman Rosenthal

  Lefty Louie and Gyp the Blood

  Whitey Lewis

  Big Jack Zelig

  Dago Frank

  price of freedom agreed to furnish gunmen to murder Rosenthal, and to see that the killing was properly carried out. He was provided with a fund of two thousand dollars, and gave the commission to Gyp the Blood, Lefty Louie, Dago Frank, and Whitey Lewis. A few days later, in the early part of July, the four gunmen went to the Garden Café in Seventh avenue with the intention of killing Rosenthal as he sat at dinner with his wife, but their nerve failed them and they retreated without firing a shot.

  On July 13, Rosenthal made an affidavit which was published in The World next morning, in which he swore that Lieutenant Becker was his partner and had received twenty per cent, of the profits of the West Forty-fifth street gambling house. These disclosures caused a tremendous sensation, and District Attorney Whitman promptly summoned Rosenthal to the Criminal Courts building. The gambler agreed to make his long delayed revelations, and on the evening of July 15, 1912, was in conference with the District Attorney for several hours. About midnight he walked into the dining-room of the Hotel Metropole in We
st Forty-third street just east of Broadway, and was still at supper some two hours later when a man came in from the street and told him he was wanted outside. Rosenthal stepped to the sidewalk, and was shot through the heart by the four gunmen who were waiting for him in an automobile. The murderers escaped, but all were captured within the next few weeks, and Lieutenant Becker was arrested on July 29. Gyp the Blood, Dago Frank, Lefty Louie, and Whitey Lewis were brought to trial in the early fall, and Big Jack Zelig was expected to be one of the state’s star witnesses, for he had testified before the Grand Jury that he had furnished the gunmen at the behest of Becker and Bald Jack Rose. But on October 5, 1912, the day before he was to have appeared in court, Zelig was shot and killed by Red Phil Davidson as he stepped aboard a Second avenue trolley car at Thirteenth street.

  But even without Zelig’s testimony the four gunmen were convicted, and on April 13, 1914, were put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison. Lieutenant Becker was also found guilty of murder in the first degree, and his appeal for clemency came before Charles S. Whitman, who had meanwhile been elected Governor. Whitman refused to commute the sentence, and Becker was electrocuted on July 30,1915. His friends insisted that he had been jobbed, and when his body was prepared for burial his wife attached to the top of the coffin a silver plate with this inscription:

  CHARLES BECKER.

  MURDERED JULY 30, 1915 BY GOVERNOR WHITMAN.

  The plate was not removed until Police Inspector Joseph A. Faurot had convinced Mrs. Becker that she was liable to prosecution for criminal libel.

  THE PASSING OF THE GANGSTER

  THE POLICE made a gallant gesture late in 1910 against several of the gangs which had incurred their displeasure, or had operated with such boldness that public sentiment made even the politicians fearful of protecting them; and when the smoke of battle cleared away half a score of the most noted figures of the underworld had been imprisoned. Among the eminent heroes who thus passed from the scene were Newburgh Gallagher and Marty Brennan, of the Gophers; Willie Jones, of the Gas Housers; A1 Rooney, of the Fourteenth Street Gang, and Itsky Joe Hickman, who had proclaimed himself ruler of the remnant of Paul Kelly’s old Five Pointers. And, as we have recorded, Kid Dropper, Johnny Spanish and Biff Ellison. The police believed that Dropper and Spanish had become joint captains of the same gang when Paul Kelly moved uptown, but later it became clear that they controlled separate groups. However, until a woman came between them they were boon companions, and engaged in many joint enterprises.

  There was much shooting and clubbing in Hell’s Kitchen before Gallagher and Brennan were safely on their way to Sing Sing, and the police were not loath to end their foray against the ferocious Gophers. But the capture of their leaders had demoralized the gangsters, and within a few months a campaign was begun which resulted in their dispersal, though not in their complete submission. For many years the Gophers, and the earlier Hell’s Kitchen gangs before them, had found the freight cars and depots of the New York Central Railroad, along Eleventh avenue, a fruitful source of plunder, and at length, unable to obtain relief by ordinary process of law, the railroad organized a special police force which had no other duties than to stop the depredations of the Gophers. Many of its members were former policemen who had suffered grievously at the hands of the gangsters, and they welcomed the opportunity for revenge; unhampered by the politicians they went joyfully into the West Side and clubbed the Gophers from one end of Hell’s Kitchen to the other, or, as an admiring patrolman phrased it, from hell to breakfast. And when the gangsters resorted to firearms the private watchmen beat them at their own game and shot straighter and faster. Many thugs were wounded and several sent to prison, and there was scarcely a Gopher who did not receive a sound thumping. Within a few months the new force had devastated Hell’s Kitchen with clubs and blackjacks, and thereafter the Gophers avoided railroad property as they would a plague. To this day a New York Central watchman is regarded as the natural enemy of the Hell’s Kitchen hoodlum.

  As a result of these activities, the Gophers split into three factions, the most important of which came under the domination of Buck O’Brien and Owen Madden, who was widely known in the underworld as Owney the Killer. The third group, small in numbers, called itself the Sullivans and swore allegiance to a leader of that name. But Sulhvan was ineffectual and accomplished little, and when the time came for the partition of the Gopher kingdom he was left out of the reckoning. Buck O’Brien formally assumed the overlordship of the area from Forty-second street north to Fifty-ninth, and from Ninth avenue to the Hudson River, and maintained his supremacy therein against occasional attacks by the Parlor Mob, which roared down from the sixties and attempted to drive the O’Briens below Fiftieth street. Owney the Killer occupied the territory below Forty-second street, and ranged southward as far as the domains of the Hudson Dusters and the Marginals commanded by Tanner Smith. Madden was on friendly terms with Smith, and for all practical purposes their gangs were one. But he was a bitter enemy of the Dusters, and his gang frequently engaged them in bloody combat.

  Madden was almost the exact antithesis of Monk Eastman; he was sleek, slim and dapper, with the gentle smile of a cherub and the cunning and cruelty of a devil. He was born in England, but came to the United States at the age of eleven and was only seventeen when he acquired his nickname of Owney the Killer. He was but a year older when he assumed command of one of the Gopher factions, and had scarcely passed his twenty-third birthday, with five murders chalked against him by the police, when he was imprisoned. He was a crack shot with a revolver, and an accomplished artist with a slung-shot, a blackjack, and a pair of brass knuckles, not to mention a piece of lead pipe wrapped in a newspaper, always a favorite weapon of the thug. The police regarded him as a typical gangster of his time—crafty, cruel, bold, and lazy. Until he went to jail he had never worked a day in his life, and often boasted that he never would. Once when a Headquarters detective, at the request of a newspaper reporter, asked him how he spent his time, Owney the Killer obhgingly wrote this record of his activities over a period of four days, carefully omitting anything which might incriminate him.

  Thursday—^Went to a dance in the afternoon. Went to a dance at night and then to a cabaret. Took some girls home. Went to a restaurant and stayed there until seven o’clock Friday morning.

  Friday—^Spent the day with Freda Horner. Looked at some fancy pigeons. Met some friends in a saloon early in the evening and stayed with them until five o’clock in the morning.

  Saturday—^Slept all day. Went to a dance in the Bronx late in the afternoon, and to a dance on Park avenue at night.

  Sunday—^Slept until three o’clock. Went to a dance in the afternoon and to another in the same place at night. After that I went to a cabaret and stayed there almost all night.

  Soon after the breakup of the Gophers, Owney the Killer was accused by the police of murdering an Italian for no other reason than to celebrate his accession to the throne, but several important witnesses found it convenient to disappear, and detectives could not find sufficient evidence to justify a trial. A year later William Henshaw, a clerk, was killed on a trolley car at Ninth avenue and Sixteenth street after he had quarrelled with Madden over a girl, and before he died in New York Hospital gasped that Owney the Killer had shot him. Ten days later three detectives found Madden skulking in the doorway of a Hell’s Kitchen tenement, and captured him after a chase over the housetops along Tenth avenue. But he was not convicted, for again the witnesses vanished. Nevertheless, the successive arrests frightened him, and for several months he was careful to give the police little cause for offense, and temporarily checked the cop fighting which so delighted the heart of the true Gopher. During this period of quiescence Madden and Tanner Smith organized the Winona Club, designed to serve as a joint rendezvous, and engaged rooms in a house owned by Dennis J. Keating, an honest horseshoer, who knew nothing of what manner of men he had accepted as tenants. The gangsters soon made the Winona Club a blot upon a
n otherwise fair neighborhood; they engaged in drunken revels and made the night hideous with the sound of their bickerings and brawlings. Less than a week after they had moved in Keating, whose own home was on the ground floor, chmbed the stairs to tell them that the neighbors were complaining, and that unless they were quieter he would evict them. He found Owney the Killer and Tanner Smith at a table discussing affairs of state over a bottle of

  whiskey, while half a dozen members of both gangs lounged about the room listening to the music of a piano thumped by a gifted thug.

  “You’ll have to keep quiet up here,” said Keating, “or I’ll put you out of my house.”

  “You’ll put me out of your house?” said Madden, smiling gently. “Mister, did you ever hear of Owney Madden? Yes? Well, Mister, I am Owney Madden!”

  Keating stared at the celebrated gang chieftain for a moment, and then turned and went downstairs. Thereafter he was afraid to tell even the police about the gangsters and their doings, for he knew they would hold him responsible for whatever happened— and the Gophers were noted for the quickness and inventiveness with which they obtained revenge; the least Keating could expect was a bomb under his house. But finally a tenant of a neighboring house complained, and Patrolman Sindt was dispatched to investigate. He departed in haste as soon as he learned with whom he had to deal, and appealed to the captain of his precinct for aid. Sergeant O’Connell and a squad of reserves were sent to the house, but Madden’s spies had given him word of their coming, and they found the gangsters behind barricaded doors, against which the furniture had been piled. The demand of the police for admittance was greeted with threats and curses, and when Sergeant O’Connell began to thump the door with his nightstick a bullet crashed through a window and grazed a policeman’s skull.