CORRUPTION IN POLICE
“MURDER SQUAD”
How Far Does It Go?
Witnesses Suppressed, Bribes Taken
ARE THE BOWERY BUTCHER
MURDERS PART OF IT?
by
A. M. Fitch
The Municipal Police have a “Murder Squad” of supposedly crack detectives whose job it is to solve the often grisly murders that afflict this great city. Of late, we have seen two particularly horrific examples of same, namely those committed by the so-called “Bowery Butcher.” Those crimes remain unsolved by the “crack” Murder Squad. Recent discoveries by this reporter, which we will reveal today and in subsequent days, demand answers to urgent and vital questions about these “stars” of our Municipal Police.
We have learned that a witness made herself known to the police immediately after the first of these gruesome killings, telling the “coppers” that she had seen the victim in the New Britannic Hotel in the company of a “good-looking young man.” Did the New York Police applaud her willingness to help them? They did not! What they did was send two officers of the Murder Squad, Lieutenant John Cleary and Sergeant Thomas Grady, to visit the witness in order to intimidate and humiliate her!
Did Cleary and Grady use the witness’s information to look for the “good-looking young man”? They did not! They were too busy hunting down the victim’s husband to fish for a “reward” for keeping his name and his wife’s identity out of the newspapers and off the police blotter.
It can now be told that the husband of the first victim, who was mistakenly identified by the police as a “lady of the night”—an allegation that the police have never retracted—is in fact the wealthy industrialist Roscoe G. Harding, whose Murray Hill townhouse is one of the showplaces of that part of the city. Interviewed by this reporter, Harding admitted that he paid Sergeant Grady one thousand dollars to hide the fact, attested to by a reliable witness, that his lovely young second wife had been in the New Britannic Hotel with another man.
As if this was not enough, Cleary and Brady also visited the manager of the New Britannic Hotel and received money from him to keep the hotel’s name out of the investigation of the Bowery Butcher murders, even as a witness was connecting the first victim of those murders to his hotel.
Lieutenant Cleary may be too busy with managing his properties in New York to bother unduly with the cases of the Murder Squad. This reporter has uncovered at least five tenements in the names of Cleary’s wife and his two brothers, not to mention Cleary’s own handsome brownstone dwelling in Brooklyn Heights and a summer “cottage” in Far Rockaway that we are told rivals some of our better uptown villas in its palatial accoutrements. The estimated value of these properties—not to speculate about others that may yet be found scattered around Manhattan and Brooklyn—is more than two hundred thousand dollars. Where, Lieutenant Cleary, does an honest policeman find that kind of money on a detective’s salary?
In tomorrow’s edition, we will look deeper into the methods of crooked cops. We will show the brazenness with which Grady demanded money of tycoon Harding. We will quote the manager of the New Britannic Hotel directly to reveal how threatened he felt when Cleary and Grady held him up for an additional five hundred dollars. We will look into a mysterious entity within the police called “The Club” to see how, and how far, corruption has spread through certain offices of 300 Mulberry Street despite the recent Lexow Commission report on cleaning up this malodorous piece of moldy cheese.
And we will ask—and answer—other questions: How close is the connection between the New Britannic Hotel and the Bowery Butcher’s murders? Is it because the murderer himself is so close to the hotel that the manager has tried to conceal its association with the crimes? (Remember: the first murder was not committed in the Bowery! The body was carried there from another place. Could that place be a certain hotel? Remember that the first victim’s body was washed! Where better to wash a corpse than the farther recesses of a metropolitan hotel?)
What do the police know that they are not telling us, and why? What do they know about certain organs that were missing from both victims? What have they learned from the murderer’s grisly clues—especially the victims’ eyes? Or are they not investigating these murders at all, for reasons of their own?
Read about it tomorrow.
Louisa folded her hands on the newspaper. Minnie had indeed triumphed—the story on the front page, the headline “above the fold,” which Minnie had told her was the preferred spot. But had she gone too far in suggesting so strongly a connection between the murderer and the hotel? In accusing Cleary and Grady by name?
Oh, Minnie, Minnie.
She went to the lift and downstairs and put herself into one of the telephone closets while Reception connected her with the Express switchboard. When she reached the newsroom, she said, “A. M. Fitch, please.”
“Not here. Too early.”
“Can I reach her at—” But he had already rung off. And of course she couldn’t reach Minnie where she lived, because Minnie had said that she didn’t have a telephone. And Louisa didn’t even know where Minnie lived.
She called again and asked the newspaper switchboard to leave a message on Minnie’s desk to call Mrs. Doyle as soon as possible.
Louisa pushed herself up and opened the door and found Manion standing there. They looked at each other; he looked away, back. He said, “I saw you come down.”
“Yes, good morning.”
“You seen the papers?”
“Of course.”
He shuffled, seemed unsure of himself. “How have you been?”
“I’ve been fine, Mr. Manion.”
“Using the cane now.”
“Yes.”
“Nice cane.”
She waited, out of politeness, then said, “I have to go.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” He turned away and vanished into the lobby. She went back to her room in the annex, the ankle as painful again as if it had been kicked.
***
“Who the fuck is A. M. Fitch? I’ll fucking kill him!”
“It’s a girl, Jack.”
“A girl! What the fuck!” Cleary picked up a brass ashtray with a brass-plated female nude on it and threw it against his office wall. “How did she find out this shit? Who talked?”
“I dunno, Jack, I dunno—”
“It’s all about me! Not you; she didn’t touch you! For Christ’s sake, Grady, she’s put a hot poker up my arse. Jesus H. Christ. I’ll fucking kill her, I mean it.”
“Jack, Jack, you gotta think. It’s in the paper; they can’t take it back. It’s too late for all that.”
“Some cunt ramrods me, and I’m supposed to sit on my thumb?”
“It’s Roosevelt we gotta worry about. We gotta have a story for him.”
“Story, shit! She’s got my tenements in there, my house, the place in Rockaway! I told that shyster we oughta put them in phoney names, he says, oh no, that’s trouble down the road. I’ll bet everything I got that that cunt was into the records, looking for my family’s names. How come she didn’t find anything a yours?”
“I put it where they can’t find it.”
“Where’s that, between your buns? Well, they’ll find it there soon enough, Roosevelt’ll have you bend over while he shines a dark lantern up your hole. Jesus!”
“Jack, we gotta have a story.”
“Yeah, great. So make up a story.” Cleary threw himself into his desk chair. “What are those fucks out in the office doing, laughing at me? They better not. I’ll have their nuts.”
“I thought if we said we took the money from Harding and Carver because we were trying to see who was bribing cops—”
“We gotta find a way to make that rag retract the whole thing. The New York Express! Who ever heard a them doing a story like this? Who d’they think they are, fucking Joseph Pulitzer? Somebody must have something on them—or maybe on this cunt, what’s her name? Fitch. Jesus. I want her fired. I want every word taken back. You got me? You got what I want?”
“Jack, Jack—”
“Tell ya what. I’ll go to Byrnes. He’s tight with Tammany. They know all the dirt. What we’ll do is—”
There was a knock on the door. Through the frosted glass, they could see the pink blur of a face, the dark column of a suit. Cleary and Grady looked at each other. Cleary shouted, “Not now! Later!”
The knock came again. “You stupid shit, I said not now!”
The door opened. The young Harvard graduate who served Roosevelt stood in the doorway. “Commissioner Roosevelt wants to see you.”
“Hey, ah, I didn’t know it was you. Sorry. We were—”
“Now.”
Cleary looked at him as if he were readying himself to kill him. Then he tightened the knot of his tie and pulled back his shoulders. “Sure. Come on, Grady.”
***
Detective-Sergeant Dunne came out of the City Mortuary and stood on the pavement to wait for Cassidy, who was always behind. When Cassidy had joined him, Dunne said, “I don’t like to be told by a flunky to get a warrant. Especially a flunky who works for the same City of New York that I do.”
“Can we get a warrant?”
Dunne pulled deeper into his overcoat. “Maybe. If that newspaper isn’t lying, Harding must have been here to identify her, so his name should be on the release certificate. But they won’t let us see the certificate, or the visitors’ book, or the death certificate. How do you suppose that newspaperman—Fitch?—got his information? Or is it all lies to sell newspapers?”
“I hope you noticed that threatening the flunky that you’d tell Roosevelt didn’t exactly make him shit himself.”
“More like he knows something about Roosevelt that I don’t. He laughed!”
“So what d’we do?”
“We get a warrant. Then we go ask Harding himself.”
An hour later, Dunne walked down the brownstone steps of Roscoe G. Harding’s house on Thirty-Fourth Street. Cassidy was leaning against the police carriage. He looked up, his face asking the question for him.
Dunne said, “I didn’t even get in the front door. Roscoe G. ‘isn’t in to the police.’ Make an appointment, was the word.” Dunne’s jaw came out. “I don’t like to be stiffed, Cassidy.”
“So what do we do?”
Dunne sighed. “Find ourselves a crapper and have a think.”
***
Terrible Teddy was in full enraged-bull fettle. His eyes were wide; his pince-nez flashing; he smelled of sweat and testosterone. His high voice was, at its quietest, a bark, at its loudest a roar. His office was a jungle, and he was the king.
“Corruption!” He smacked his fist into a palm. “You stink of corruption! I have made fighting corruption the hallmark of my time in this office, and you stink of it! A lieutenant! A man with the responsibility of an entire squad on his shoulders—a man who should be an example, a model, a paragon! And you sink to the level of the lowest patrolman in the poorest ward in this corruption-riddled city! I could have found a more honest man among the vagrants of Chatham Square!
“And you, Grady. A sergeant. Eighteen years on the Metropolitan Police. How many of those years have you had your palm out for the bribe? How many years have you held the bag open so they could pour the money in? Thieves, both of you! Crooks! Criminals! You are worse than the malefactors you are paid to pursue. A hundred times worse. A thousand! Because you are paid to be honest. A word, I am sure, that has no meaning for you.
“Well? Well? Speak up. Tell me how you came to this desperate place.”
Cleary made a sound in his throat like the wheezing of a frightened deer. His eyes met Roosevelt’s dead on, as if he were the most honest man in the world and had nothing to hide. He made his voice strong as he said, “Mr. Roosevelt, it was this way. It’s all lies.”
Roosevelt had his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets. His belly rounded a little as he leaned backward. “What’s all lies?”
“The newspapers. They’ll print anything. The Express is the worst of the bunch. That’s how she got away with it—they’ll print anything.”
“Who is ‘she’?”
Cleary made the sound in his throat again. “That was a woman wrote those lies, sir. Her name is Fitch. She uses initials—what are they again, Grady?”
“A. M.”
“Anne-Marie. Yes. Annie Fitch. Now, I have a confession to make, Mr. Roosevelt, but I ask that it never leave this room.”
Roosevelt simply stared at him.
“The way it is, Mr. Roosevelt, me and Annie Fitch had a…well, you know, people being what they are, we had a—”
“Are you trying to hint at an illicit liaison, Cleary?”
“The very words, sir. Yessir, and I made a fool of myself over her, and then we had a falling-out, y’see, and she swore vengeance. And you see it in this morning’s newspapers.”
“Are you saying that a hundred and fifty years ago, Peter Zenger went to trial so that your paramour could print lies about you, Cleary?”
“I don’t know Zenger, sir, but I know she printed lies, yessir.”
Roosevelt looked at Grady. “How about you? Did you have an affair with this woman, too?”
“Uh, no, sir. But she musta just drug me in for ballast, like. For the weight.”
“Weight! There isn’t a moral balance in the world that you’d tip down a fraction of a degree!” Roosevelt went behind his desk. He stood looking down on them, his thumbs now in the armholes of his vest. He said, “You are both suspended without pay effective this morning at eight o’clock. This has already been cleared with the Chief of Police. You will both consider yourselves under house arrest while a thorough investigation is made of everything that was printed in the Express newspaper. Until I learn otherwise, I will continue to think that you are both a disgrace to the Municipal Police. Now get out of my sight.”
Cleary’s face worked its way through several expressions and settled into one of hurt dignity. Grady bent his head as if he were afraid the Commissioner was about to hit him. They went out silently; as they did, the Harvard man caught the door and came in, closing it behind him.
“This morning,” Roosevelt intoned, “I am ashamed to be associated with this police department.”
“But are they?”
“Of course they aren’t!” Roosevelt sat in his desk chair and gnawed on his knuckles. “Cleary gave me a cock-and-bull tale that wouldn’t have fooled a three-year-old. What have you found?”
“I spoke with Roscoe Harding, who’s rightfully enraged. He says that it’s true that they asked for money to pay off journalists. I gather he didn’t mind bribing people; it’s not getting the result he wanted that’s set him off. He’s talking about a lawsuit.”
“Let him sue the newspaper. Cleary said, by the way, that the author of that wretchedly written piece is a woman. Can that be true?”
“Unlikely, Chief, but I’ll check. We have a man on his way to interview Carver of the New Britannic; I suppose it’ll be the same story—gave money to pay off journalists, and so on. Concerned, like Harding, for his public reputation.”
“And apparently utterly unsurprised that two New York police detectives had their palms out.”
“Quite. I’ve sent a clerk down to City Hall to delve into the records and double-check what was in the newspaper. One of our colleagues in the Brooklyn force is going to have a look at Cleary’s house; the address is apparently quite a good one. We’ll have to check the Brooklyn real estate records, too.” He lit a cigarette, offered the open case to Roosevelt, who refused, and snapped it shut. “It’s all quite damning, Chief. Do you want to turn it over to the Ethical Squad?”
“Not yet. I wish to know first whether we have an argument with the newspapers. We must be absolutely sure that we aren’t skating on the thin ice of journalistic fiction.”
“You can’t make this stuff up, Chief.”
Roosevelt gave a kind of snort. “All right, get me the head of Ethical; tell him I want to discuss charges. Then get me the department legal brains. And somebody who knows the banks and real estate. We need to put our heads together to see how we follow the money, and how far.” He folded his hands in front of him. “So far, you know, this is ‘peanuts,’ as the saying is. That is its charm. Its routineness, its common vulgarity. I suppose that we have here two policemen who have spent their lives taking bribes. Are they the end of the yarn that will pull the whole ball apart, or are they simply a thread that will unravel a bit of the skein and leave the rest intact? That is a mixed metaphor, although the general field of subject matter is the same, namely that of women’s work—knitting and sewing. I wouldn’t do it if I were writing.” He pushed out his mustached lip. “If it’s only the two of them, then they’ll serve as an example to all the other sergeants and lieutenants who are ‘on the take.’ I cannot presume to put the fear of God into them, but I can certainly put in the fear of Roosevelt!”
***
Louisa had tried twice more to call Minnie at the newspaper. The first time, a bored male voice had said that she wasn’t in; the second time, a different male voice asked who it was, meaning that Minnie was in. He’d gone off, presumably to tell her, and when he came back, all he said was, “She isn’t here.” And he had rung off.
She won’t talk to me. She was there and when she knew who was calling, she refused to talk to me.
Louisa went up to her room. She hadn’t expected Minnie to reject her like that. She had thought that they would both treat what had happened as a bit of foolishness, a reversion to girlhood. A “crush.” She took hotel notepaper from the pigeonhole in the desk and wrote: “Dear Minnie, I hope you feel as silly as I do at this moment. I think we’ve stumbled over a pebble on the path to friendship. We shouldn’t take it seriously. I do want to see you and talk this out thoroughly and finally so that we can go on being real friends. Yours sincerely, Louisa (Doyle)”
She had to take it down to Reception to have it mailed, for the annex lacked the rather clever mail chutes that allowed guests in the hotel proper simply to drop their letters through a slot. The chutes had glass fronts; it was rather amusing to wait by the elevator and see several envelopes plummet past, headed one couldn’t guess where.
Minnie would have the note tomorrow. Then she would telephone or come by. Nonetheless, Louisa was upset. Worried, saddened, deflated: she couldn’t describe her condition. As if I were feeling a bit ill and were waiting to be very ill. Or as if I were waiting for something terrible to happen. She paced back and forth in her small bedroom, then a little after five could stand it no more and went downstairs yet again. She gave Reception the number of the Express; she corraled one of the boys and led him to the telephone closet. She gave him a coin.
“Here is what I want you to do. When you get the switchboard at the number that will be called, tell them you want the newsroom. When you get the newsroom, ask to speak to A. M. Fitch. If they ask who’s calling, tell them you have some information. Understand? ‘I have some information.’ Then, when Miss Fitch—it’s a woman—comes to the telephone, hand the earpiece to me and leave the closet. Do you understand?”
She thought that his male voice would keep Minnie from knowing who was calling. And that, in fact, was what happened: the boy did as he had been told; he handed her the earpiece; Louisa, face red and heart pounding, had leaned close to the mouthpiece and had said, “Minnie, it’s Louisa.”
And the call had ended as Minnie had rung off.
She hates me. She corrected herself: She fears me. She corrected herself again. Or herself.
***
At nine o’clock that night, Minnie Fitch was reading over the proofreader’s corrections on the next day’s article, nodding her head and making almost no marks on the typeset copy. She thought it was good, awfully, awfully good. She had had to dance very fast over things she hadn’t been able to learn, most of all how well or badly the Murder Squad had done in finding the Butcher, but the piece was intriguing and rather racy, as she had intended. Her editor had said, “It’ll sell papers.” From him, that was high praise.
She tried not to think of Louisa, because to think of Louisa was to think of The Moment. The Moment of The Kiss. Every time she thought of it, it was as if she’d been hit with something. How had such a thing happened? How could she?
She sent the pages back to composition and looked around to see what things she wanted to take home with her.
“Fitch!”
She turned. “What?”
One of the older reporters was standing at the far end where the telephones were. “It’s for you, again!” They were all pissed at her because most of the calls had been for her that day—cranks, admirers, a few threats, doubtless from cops. And calls from Louisa.
“Man or woman?”
“A man. Your heart’s desire.”
She wound her way among the desks. None of the usual remarks came her way. That’s what a move above the fold did for you—respect, some real, some fake, a lot of envy, but an improvement either way.
“Fitch here.” She was prepared for Louisa’s voice again, ready to hang up.
“Ah, it’s a female you are!” It was a good voice, a little hearty, certainly Irish, apparently good humored.
“I’m sorry, I’m busy; we’re putting out a newspaper. What is it you want?”
“Oh, darlin’, if I went into that, we’d be all night. It’s not what I want, it’s what I’m offering, y’see.”
“Okay, what’re you offering?” Her heart was beating too fast because of fear that it had been Louisa. She tried to take a deep breath.
“It’d be in the way of information, love. Ye do pay for information, now, don’t ye?”
She became cautious. “Sometimes. Depends.”
“On the quality, I hope, because what I’ve got is the best, the very best.”
“About what?”
“What would it be, darlin’, but the coppers and that hotel ye wrote about.”
“How come you have that kind of information?” Louisa had been driven out of her head; she was thinking another scoop, above the fold, a move up…
“Amn’t I what you’d call close to them, dear.”
“You a cop?”
He laughed. “That would be telling.”
“And the hotel?”
“I don’t want to say too much without I’m paid, y’see? I’ve awready had an offer from the World; they come to me, not me to them, but as I thought ye’d broke the thing, I’d give you first crack. Fer a consideration, as it were.”
“Come to the Express newsroom. I’ll wait until ten.”
“Aw, no, darlin’, I wasn’t born yesterday, as the saying is. Ye got to come to me. Alone. I don’t want to find meself with five lawyers and two tough boys instead of a dear woman, as I know you are.”
“Where?”
“Ye know the fountain in Bowling Green?”
She thought of the place: the very foot of Manhattan, all commercial buildings now, the fountain derelict. But well lighted at night. She hesitated—the caller could be a crank, a hoodlum, a cop wanting to take revenge for Cleary and Grady. Even a cop sent by Cleary and Grady. That worried her: how far would somebody like Cleary go to get revenge?
She said, “People will know where I’m going, get me? Just so you won’t try to get cute.”
“I’m never cute, darlin’, as you’ll see when you get a look at me mug. The fountain at ten o’clock?”
She didn’t like it. Yet she knew she had to do it; it was part of the business. Still… She said, “Give me a detail that’ll convince me. Give me a reason for trusting you enough to go out.”
There was a silence. Then he said, “The doorman at the New Britannic. He knows more than he lets on. Lots more. And that’s all I’ll say until I see some silverbacks.”
“What’s he know?”
“That would be tellin’ without bein’ paid, darlin’. Will ye meet me, yes or no?”
In for a penny, in for a pound. “Ten o’clock at the fountain.”
She rang off. Ten minutes to get over there, spend an hour with him, that would be eleven; then back if he gave her anything good—could she get it into the later editions tomorrow? Only if it was something big. What? Maybe what he’d said—things the doorman knew. Maybe about the French maid who’d disappeared, maybe more than that. Like what? Good Christ, could he have meant the doorman was him? Was she about to get the whole thing? Her heart thumped.
When she left the building, she had told nobody anything. She was going home, she had said. She was afraid they would steal her scoop.
***
Alexander Newcome was in a dive called The Golden Pit on MacDougal Street. He was still more or less sober but on his way to being good and drunk. He intended to be very good and drunk. And he wanted to do something for which being good and drunk was the best state.
The Golden Pit was a low place reached by a flight of stone steps down from the street. The patrons were men, a lot of them badly dressed and not too clean, but some of them were like Newcome, older and well turned out. The spiffy ones didn’t have much to do with each other; the poorer, younger ones did. A few of both sorts sat at tables, but there were only three tables in the whole place, and everybody else either stood or they sat on benches like church pews that ran around the walls. A bar took up one side of the room; the other walls—there were only two, the room triangular—except for scuffed wainscoting and a few cheap engravings, were bare.
Newcome was on his feet. He moved slowly around the room, a glass in his hand, because if you went to the Pit, you had to buy a drink. You didn’t have to drink it, however; Newcome had been advised not to, as the drinks were said to contain things like benzene and turpentine and shoe dye for color. So Newcome circulated slowly, as most of the well-dressed men did. When he had made a complete circle and come back to the bar he rested his back against it and put his glass down.
“Another?” a barman said at once.
“Not yet.”
“You’ve held on to that one pretty long.”
Newcome thought he’d rather gag down the contents of the spittoon than drink what was in the glass, but he didn’t say so. He wanted to get drunk, but not here, and he wanted to get drunk, but not alone.
He looked around the walls. On his right, below an engraving of the Colosseum, was a face he hadn’t noticed before, probably a new arrival. Newcome, who was wearing a silk hat and a cashmere overcoat and who had a silver-topped stick in his right hand, cocked an eyebrow.
The young tough by the wall looked back with rather a sneer.
Newcome tipped his head back as a summons.
The young man looked at him, his face sullen, his arms crossed, then shrugged and came slowly toward Newcome, weaving around other men who were in his way.
“Yeah?”
“I thought you looked as if you needed a drink.”
“Not the shit they serve here.”
“I was thinking of moving on to more salubrious climes.”
“Where’s that at?”
“I was thinking of Street’s, and then perhaps the Burnt Rag for some giggles. And then perhaps a Turkish bath to rid ourselves of the after-effects of what we’ve drunk, and then someplace private.”
“I wouldn’t mind that.”
“Your enthusiasm is infectious.”
“Don’t talk down to me, awright? You get snifty wit’ me, I’ll give you a couple good ones.”
“Only a couple? I’m disappointed in you.”
“My name’s Phil.”
“Well, Phil, my dear, why don’t we get out of this hole and find ourselves a spot where we can get beautifully drunk together and see what the night will bring.”
Phil looked around. He shrugged. “Suits me.”
Newcome nodded slowly, as if Phil had confirmed something rather sad. He had a fleeting nostalgia for somebody nicer, younger, fresher. He smiled and nodded toward the door. Phil was what was on offer.