EPILOGUE
THIRTY MILES AWAY, in New York City, Arnold Rothstein sat at his usual table in Jack’s twenty-four-hour café, just down the street from the Hotel Metropole. At twenty minutes to six, the conversation at the table slowed, then stopped, and each member of the gambler’s party fumbled in his waistcoat for a pocketwatch. Rothstein’s was large and made of gold. He set it on the table before him and gazed at it in silence, watching as the hands swept their way inexorably toward the time set for Becker’s execution.
At 5:45 A.M. precisely, the gambler picked up the timepiece, snapped shut its cover, and led his friends out into another New York morning.
“Well,” he said evenly, “that’s it.”
Becker’s corpse was brought back to New York City late that afternoon. Three men heaved the heavy coffin up the steps to Helen’s new home at 2291 University Avenue in the Bronx shortly before 4:00 P.M. and laid it gently on a table in the parlor. A small crowd soon gathered outside, made up in part of girls who had been playing tennis on the nearby public courts. There was not much to see, but, one newspaperman reported, “from within the apartment house came the incongruous sounds of a woman crying and the faint tinkle of a piano.”
The next day was a Sunday. A steady stream of messenger boys bearing flowers from Becker’s lawyers, Helen’s pupils, and the Sullivan clan called at the third-floor flat throughout the morning. A handful of Becker’s friends were invited in to the apartment to view the body, among them old Clubber Williams, in his seventies by now, who called twice and whose wreath—bearing a ribbon reading IN RESPECT FOR CHARLEY—was set in a place of honor at the corpse’s feet. None of those who made their way out of the house and past the assembly of waiting pressmen could bring themselves to mumble the usual comfortable platitudes about the cadaver, for there was nothing calm or peaceful about Becker’s face. The marks left by the execution were all too obvious, from the roughly shaven head to the burns where the electrodes had been placed. The undertaker had done what he could to conceal the lieutenant’s injuries under heavy greasepaint, but they remained visible even so. A scorched patch of skin on the left side of the forehead was particularly prominent.
There was one new story for the papers to report. Mrs. Becker’s hatred of Charles Whitman had come to such a head during the disastrous interview in Poughkeepsie that she had resolved, during the lengthy journey home, to denounce his actions publicly. As soon as she returned to New York, Helen commissioned a local engraver to produce a handsome silver plate, seven inches by five, for her husband’s coffin.
CHARLES BECKER
the inscription proclaimed,
MURDERED JULY 30, 1915
BY GOVERNOR WHITMAN
A single journalist was granted access to the Becker apartment and allowed to view the coffin on condition that he pooled notes with his colleagues, and the story made all the city dailies the next morning. “The plate,” one report concluded, “is screwed to the upper, removable section of the casket’s top. When the lid is put in place, the plate will be above the face.”
Whitman’s office wasted little time in taking action when this bit of news emerged. Within a matter of hours, a party of three senior policemen, led by an inspector, appeared at the apartment and gravely informed Helen that the inscription amounted to a criminal libel on the governor. The plate was unscrewed and taken to Police Headquarters on Centre Street, where it was preserved as evidence in case Whitman chose to sue. In the end the governor had the sense not to press the matter further, and Helen’s family soon obtained a replacement, this one made of aluminum and inscribed with nothing more than Becker’s name and date of death.
The interment was arranged for the first day of August. It was an abominably hot, close day, the worst of the year so far, but even the muggy beating of the sun was not sufficient to deter another gigantic New York funeral crowd, this one an estimated ten thousand strong, from descending upon University Avenue. The press of humanity was so great that the street became entirely blocked shortly after dawn.
No more than a hundred members of the throng that gathered to gawk outside the Becker home had any acquaintance with the dead policeman. The remainder were simply thrill seekers. “A championship series baseball game or a hippodrome spectacle would not have brought out a more noisy and disorderly crowd than that which attended the Becker funeral,” the American observed.
Women with babies in their arms gathered outside the apartment house soon after sunrise in order to obtain advantageous positions for viewing the funeral cortege when it started for the church. The crowd held its ground until many dropped to the pavement with exhaustion. Women engaged in heated arguments as the coffin was borne through their midst, and above the din was heard the crying of suffering infants—children whose parents or caretakers had forgotten all about them in their momentary frenzy.
Two women fainted and had to be carried away when the coffin, borne on the shoulders of six stalwart men who are now or were formerly members of the Police Department came down the narrow stairway, was pushed waveringly through the throng and finally lodged safely in the hearse. The crowd blocked the way and it was at least twenty minutes before the mounted policemen could clear the street sufficiently for it to start for church, three blocks distant. Then a footrace took place. Men, women and children threw dignity to the winds in their mad desire to be among the first to reach the church. Moving picture operators and photographers raced along in the vanguard, while many ignored the “No trespassing” signs as they made for the church across lots, through bramble bush and rag weed.
The church of St. Nicholas of Tolentine could hold seven hundred people, but at least fourteen hundred crammed into the building to hear Father George Dermody, an old friend of the Beckers’, conduct the requiem mass. There was no sermon and no eulogy. Those forced to wait outside could in any case hear nothing of the service over the hubbub of the mob, and there were further ugly scenes when the mass was over and mounted police were forced to charge the crowd repeatedly to clear a passage for the hearse. Matters were little better at Woodlawn Cemetery, where onlookers trampled down the flowers laid on other graves and dozens of women hitched up their skirts and clambered unsteadily onto tombstones to obtain a better view.
There was another short delay at the entrance to the graveyard. A uniformed attendant emerged from the gatehouse to bar the way and refused to allow the cortege into the grounds until the inflammatory inscriptions attached to several gaudy floral tributes had been removed. One elaborate flower-covered cross, with the words SACRIFICED FOR POLITICS picked out in letters nearly a foot high, was pulled from a hearse and the offending words removed. A wreath, sent by Becker’s doctor and emblazoned with the slogan TO THE MARTYR, was similarly defaced. Only then was Helen permitted to make her way into the cemetery, where a fresh grave had been dug for her husband next to the plot that held the body of their baby daughter.
It was noon by the time Charles Becker was lowered into the ground, and by then the thermometer stood at eighty-four degrees and it had become “the most depressingly hot day of the season.” Wreaths and mourners wilted in the sticky heat, but there was no ceremony and the grave was soon filled in. Helen, heavily veiled, stood almost motionless beside it. Only the intermittent wrenching of her shoulders betrayed the fact that she was weeping.
The whole Becker scandal had been so grotesque and so protracted that it helped to pitch New York into another of its periodic spasms of reform. The mayoral election of 1913—held three months after the sudden and unexpected death, from heart failure and the lingering effects of his shooting, of Mayor Gaynor on an ocean liner off the coast of Ireland—saw the forces of Tammany Hall swept aside by John Purroy Mitchel, who won a large majority campaigning on the reformist Fusion ticket. Mitchel was only thirty-four years old when he was elected, making him the youngest mayor in the city’s history, but he was already a veteran of New York politics and canny enough to know that a fresh crusade against municipal graft would play well with his voters. His administration cut waste and introduced improved accounting practices designed to make it more difficult for patronage and corruption to spread unchecked. The appointees ejected from their offices were replaced, by and large, with competent professionals.
Among those who lost their jobs in this way was the hapless Rhinelander Waldo. The new police commissioner was Arthur Woods, a protégé of Theodore Roosevelt’s who boasted a Harvard degree in administration and had already been a deputy commissioner for a while. Under Woods’s leadership the police department was extensively reorganized. The three-platoon system that Becker had fought for was at last introduced, and with it the eight-hour day and a guarantee of more time to spend at home with wives and families. Great efforts and large budgets were devoted to training. A new detective college was established. Beat cops were sent to lecture in schools, and neighborhood children were recruited into a Junior Police organization with the result that delinquency declined and relations between the police and the community began to improve at last. A police loan fund was established so that officers who found themselves in financial difficulties were not forced to turn to graft to bail themselves out. Slowly at first, and then more swiftly, the old perception of the law as a force for oppression, and of the NYPD as a venal body devoted largely to its own interests, began to change.
The effects of this reform were felt within the ranks of the police as well. Encouraged to think of themselves as useful public servants, thousands of men who had never been presented with the temptations that corrupted Becker, who had restricted themselves principally to clean graft, and who, like Max Schmittberger, cared about the taunts their children suffered in the playground, responded with enthusiasm. Both the morale and the efficiency of the force improved. Mitchel grew fond of quoting one letter he received from a patrolman: “You have shown us how to be better policemen and better citizens. You have elevated us to a position of honor in the community, and enabled us to again walk the streets with heads up, eyes to the front, and fit to look any man in the face.”
Of course, corruption still existed. Few of New York’s thousands of crooked cops were punished in the wake of Becker’s trials; the Curran Committee, which finally delivered its report in 1913, struggled (as had the Lexow investigation before it) to place credible witnesses on the stand, and its fifty-two recommendations—which included a more secure tenure for the police commissioner and the creation of a central complaints bureau—were in any case voted down by the Democratic majority on the Board of Aldermen. Nearly two-thirds of Curran’s proposals were, in fact, quietly waved through a few months later in order to sweeten Tammany’s record on corruption. But the $40,000 expended on his hearings resulted in fewer than twenty indictments, and though four inspectors and six other officers did go to jail for grafting and another twenty either were sacked or resigned from the force, the great majority of guilty officers escaped punishment again. Over the next four years, a new department of internal affairs, known as the Confidential Squad and led by the freshly promoted Captain Costigan, uncovered hundreds of cases of corruption, most still involving the levying of protection payments from brothels. Tellingly, if unsurprisingly, the men drafted to the squad were highly unpopular among their colleagues. “Its members were called rats,” one squad officer, future Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine, recalled. “I have been called that name many times.” When—with the awful inevitability that afflicted all New York reform administrations—Mitchel was voted out of office at the end of 1917, the Confidential Squad was instantly shut down.*68
The election of Mayor Mitchel had been no fluke nonetheless. The Fusion triumph of 1913 was actually a product of slow changes in the fabric of the city that not only reshaped the way politics in New York worked but severely reduced the graft available to precinct captains and eventually doomed the seemingly all-powerful Sullivan clan to electoral extinction.
Tammany had first felt the ground shift beneath its feet years earlier. The consolidation of the five boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island into a single metropolis back in 1898 had altered the balance of power in the city once and for all. From then on, the votes of the laboring masses of Manhattan, which had kept the Hall in power for years on end, had to be weighed against those of the Republicans, anti-Tammany Democrats, and Fusionists who were strong in several of the outer boroughs. It was for this reason that more upright, semi-independent candidates began to appear on Tammany tickets after 1900—men such as Mayor Gaynor and Governor Sulzer, who were harder to control than their predecessors had been and who owed their nominations to Charles Murphy’s grudging recognition that old-style machine politicians could no longer be sure of finding favor with the New York electorate. If something was not done, the sachems on Fourteenth Street recognized, a city in which hundreds of thousands of voters had no direct relationship with their local Tammany organizer—a place made cynical by the shocking revelations of the Lexow investigation—would no longer be safe for democracy.
While Big Tim Sullivan was alive to direct affairs, Tammany’s organizers coped with the changing times relatively well. As early as 1895, a firm base among the Irish and German communities of lower Manhattan was no longer enough to guarantee electoral success, particularly when many established Democratic voters began to migrate north, driven out of their old tenements by the incoming floods of new Americans. But Sullivan took special pains to court the millions of Eastern European Jews pouring into the Lower East Side who threatened to wipe out Tammany’s old power bases. It was during Big Tim’s reign, as George Washington Plunkitt explained, that a Tammany block leader learned to eat “corned beef and kosher meat with equal nonchalance, and it’s all the same to him whether he takes his hat off in the church or pulls it down over his ears in the synagogue.”*69
Tammany’s dominance remained under threat even so. Many of the new generation of immigrants were socialists or anarchists who stubbornly refused to vote the Democratic ticket, and the self-sufficiency of the Jewish community—which ran many of its own social services—meant that Sullivan’s tested strategy of supplying constituents with free socks and shoes and clambakes in exchange for votes could no longer be relied on. To make matters worse, a stringent new election law, pushed through by Mayor McClellan in 1908, required citizens to sign when registering to vote, and then again on polling day. This regulation made it far more difficult for district leaders to manipulate the ballot and fatally undermined many of Tammany’s long-standing electoral malpractices.
In these changing times, the Becker scandal—with its revelations of corruption and its echoes of Lexow—had obvious potential to wreak havoc on the Hall. The lengths to which the Sullivans went to keep Big Tim’s name out of the case suggest that Tammany was well aware of this. But down on Fourteenth Street the farsighted Boss Murphy was thinking further ahead than were his district leaders, whose concerns seem to have extended no further than their own prospects and reputations. Long before Becker even came to trial, Murphy had realized that Tammany could afford no more bad publicity. That meant finding new ways to channel graft to the machine.
Murphy had learned the lesson of the scandals of the 1890s. “When I was an Assembly district leader,” he explained in a rare moment of candor, “it was borne in on me that Tammany’s evil repute came from its association with the police.” Less brutality and more discretion were required; Becker was to be the last in a long line of New York policemen, extending back through Bill Devery at least as far as Clubber Williams, to control a significant portion of Manhattan’s graft. The new middlemen would be gamblers themselves.
The most important point of contact between Tammany and New York’s gaming lords was now Arnold Rothstein. Even before Rosenthal was shot, the Big Bankroll had made a name for himself in his field; more important, he was known to be sober, intelligent, shrewd, and discreet. He was the obvious choice to become Murphy’s “man between.”
Rothstein had always made money as a fixer, but after Becker’s arrest, when New York politicians were running scared from associating with gangsters, gamblers, and criminals, he took to arranging loans and permissions. He was also clever enough to realize that the lieutenant’s well-publicized downfall meant the end of the era of expensively accoutered Manhattan gaming clubs, places whose existence was an open secret. It was Rothstein, gambling lore insists, who responded by inventing and perfecting the “floating game”—action that moved from place to place and week to week. The floating game was safer, less conspicuous, and yet it still appealed to the high rollers. There was nothing, after all, to say that gentlemen gamblers of discretion should have to play in dirty, locked back rooms; some of the biggest games flitted for years between New York’s best hotels. Swope—with Florenz Ziegfeld, the impresario, and a dozen or so others—became a member of a Rothstein game known as the Partridge Club, which rotated among the Astor, the Knickerbocker, the Ritz-Carlton, and the Imperial hotels. Partridge Club members could get themselves dealt in for a mere $30, a fee that generally included a high-class dinner. But playing cost considerably more. Single bets were sometimes of the order of $100 to $1,000.
In the course of the next decade and a half, Rothstein expanded his operations incrementally and without apparent conscience. He moved into labor racketeering and narcotics, opened several new clubs in the suburbs, loaned nearly $2 million to the Communist Party at a high rate of interest, and reinvested some of his profits in theater shows and racing. It has been widely accepted, if never conclusively proved, that it was he who fixed the crooked World Series of 1919, in which the underdog Cincinnati Reds downed the apparently unstoppable Chicago White Sox. Certainly he became heavily involved in organized crime as it emerged during Prohibition.
Rothstein began the 1920s by importing cargoes of whiskey and progressed to advancing funds to gangsters such as Meyer Lansky, “Lucky” Luciano, and “Legs” Diamond. The uncouth, self-made Luciano was particularly in awe of his sophisticated mentor, anxiously soliciting lessons in etiquette such as “how to behave when I met classy broads”:
He taught me how to dress, how not to wear loud things, but to have good taste; he taught me how to use knives and forks, and things like that at the dinner table, about holdin’ a door open for a girl, or helpin’ her sit down by holdin’ the chair…. Rothstein gimme a whole new image, and it had a lotta influence on me.
Mixing in such company was dangerous, of course, but Arnold Rothstein prospered nonetheless for much of the decade. His luck finally ran out on November 5, 1928, when he was shot in a hotel room on West Fifty-sixth Street—part of a gamblers’ feud. He staggered out into the street but died less than a day later, refusing until the end to name his assailant. By then his bankroll totaled somewhere between $2 and $3 million.
Rothstein’s old friend Herbert Bayard Swope was given a pay raise for his work on the Becker case. His new salary, a highly satisfactory $125 a week, was further boosted by the lineage payments he received for his coverage of the policeman’s trial. At space rates, Swope picked up an additional $645.29 from the World for a mere eleven days in John Goff’s court.
Swope’s role in the Rosenthal affair made him famous throughout New York. His paper awarded him a byline—still a rare honor at that time—and, during the First World War, sent him to Europe on two occasions to report on the fighting. Inside the German Empire, a collection of Swope’s dispatches from Imperial Germany, won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1917,*70 and by the early 1920s he was probably the most celebrated reporter in the United States. In the course of the next three decades, that fame spread throughout the world. When the old newsman died in 1958, the Columbia School of Journalism dedicated a room in his name.
Swope took full advantage of his new position. He became renowned as a host, and between the wars he got to know, apparently, everyone worth knowing in America and much of Western Europe. Among his more intimate acquaintances were Harpo Marx, Noël Coward, and John Barrymore; he was also on first-name terms with Howard Hughes, Woodrow Wilson, Al Smith, Adlai Stevenson, Joseph Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill. Humphrey Bogart once played an impromptu game of football in Swope’s front hall; Douglas Fairbanks Jr. met his second wife there. None of these friendships—Swope himself was fond of saying—would ever have been possible had it not been for Charley Becker.
While Swope’s star rose, the Sullivans’ sank swiftly. The family lost most of its power after Big Tim’s death and had, in truth, been in decline for years. Florrie had died a lunatic in the summer of 1909, and Sullivan’s cousin and trusted adviser Little Tim went the same way that same year, expiring from an undiagnosed “psychopathic trouble.” Christy Sullivan fought on but gambled away virtually all of his personal fortune, also that same year, in a failed attempt to win election as sheriff of New York; he retired from Manhattan politics in 1915. At about the same time, Paddy Sullivan, Tim’s brother, quarreled with the Tammany boss who ran the city’s Third Assembly District and could never be sure of his support within the Hall thereafter.
For a while Paddy did keep up the old Sullivan tradition of hosting a free Christmas dinner for the poor of the Bowery, but the practice was eventually abandoned around 1918. “Now indeed,” lamented Alvin Harlow, the chronicler of the famous street, “the giants were all departed, and nothing left but petty gangsters and ragamuffins.” Even the Occidental faded away. The vast erotic fresco over the bar began to flake and crack not long after Becker’s execution, and—stripped of Sullivan’s prestige—the name of the place was changed and it became the dull and desperate Commercial, “just another cheap wayfarers’ hotel.” By 1931, Harlow observed, it was slipping into deserved obscurity. The oldest hotel in the whole of New York, and Big Tim’s headquarters and home for many years, now differed little, except in size, “from the other forty- and fifty-cent upstairs hotels of the Bowery—a small, tile-floored office, shower baths, and a faint odor of disinfectant.”
Charles Whitman, who had built a career on New York’s disgust with Tammany and police corruption, never became president. He served two terms as governor of New York State, from 1914 to 1918, but his administration was widely viewed as undistinguished, even at the time, and historians have proved no less critical. Very little in the way of useful legislation was enacted, and much of Whitman’s time and energy was devoted to courting popularity in preparation for his expected bid for the White House. As late as 1917, he left Albany for several weeks to drum up more support on a whistlestop tour of the United States.
Whitman’s conviction that he might one day go to Washington was certainly not mere vanity. During his first days as governor, when memory of his stewardship of the Becker case remained strong everywhere, “Whitman for President” clubs sprang up around the country, and Woodrow Wilson himself was heard to say that the former DA was his most likely opponent in 1916. But Whitman’s advantage gradually dissipated as his political ineffectiveness became obvious. He failed to secure the Republican nomination for the presidency, losing out to Charles Evans Hughes, and found himself facing stiff competition in his attempt to secure reelection in New York’s gubernatorial contest. His Democratic opponent was none other than Samuel Seabury, who fought the election with the unlooked-for help of Thomas Mott Osborne. Osborne resigned his post as warden of Sing Sing in order to campaign against Whitman, citing Becker’s execution as “the vilest of crimes.” In one open letter, Osborne regretted that he could do nothing to change the past. “But,” he went on,
I do desire to influence the future…to the end that no man so weak as yourself—so shifty, so selfish, so false, so cruel—may be entrusted with further power.
Many of those who had followed the former DA’s career felt that Osborne had a point. “Whitman isn’t a great Governor,” opined the New York Call, “not even a fairly decent Governor—he’s just a temporizing, fence-fixing little politician.” Even the sober Times had grown disillusioned by now, suggesting that Whitman’s “entire political standing is based upon the convictions in the Rosenthal murder case,” and for a long time the election seemed finely balanced. In the end the governor won, thanks largely to the final collapse of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, which had split the Republicans for several years. Thousands of Progressives returned to the conservative fold in time for the ballot, and when the ballots were counted, Whitman had secured reelection by 154,000 votes.
The governor was still haunted, nonetheless, by wraiths from his past. Jack Rose turned up in Albany in 1914, seeking a favor on behalf of a friend sentenced to Sing Sing for attempted murder. Whitman signed a pardon for the man. Jacob Luban, who had been on the DA’s payroll for months in 1912, found himself back in prison serving twenty years for forgery. The governor saw to it that his sentence was commuted. Becker’s remaining partisans were not alone in wondering if their old nemesis was buying the silence of men who could still seriously embarrass him, but the lieutenant had long vanished from the front pages by this time, and no one of importance made any real attempt to learn the truth.
Whitman’s second term in Albany was in any case overshadowed by his escalating dependence on alcohol. Despite courting the religious vote by hinting that he would come out in favor of Prohibition, he appeared drunk in public on several occasions, prompting one sardonic reporter to observe that “some of the Governor’s new friends don’t seem to realize that when he says he favors a dry Manhattan, he doesn’t mean what they mean by it.” New York gossip attributed Whitman’s drinking to “a desire to escape the huge accusing ghost of Becker, the dead policeman, which, according to rumor, could be seen tramping its beat night after night along the stone battlements of the old Albany State House.” It came as no surprise when the governor failed to win a third term in office in 1918. The man who beat him was Al Smith, a large and popular Irishman and a Tammany loyalist through and through, who was widely regarded as Tim Sullivan’s political heir.
Whitman did bid once more for high office. In 1922 he sought the Republican nomination for the presidency but lost to Herbert Hoover. He returned to New York, where he was humiliatingly defeated in a bid to regain his old job as district attorney, winning fewer than one-third of the votes. After that embarrassment he retired to private practice. He died in 1947 at the age of seventy-eight.
Many of the other men associated with Becker’s prosecution served out distinguished careers.
John Goff completed his term on the New York Supreme Court bench, retiring at the beginning of 1919 only because he had reached the upper age limit for judges in the city and returning to his farmhouse and his fancy herons. He died toward the end of 1924, a month or so shy of his seventy-seventh birthday.
Samuel Seabury’s public profile benefited considerably from his stewardship of Becker’s second trial. He went to the court of appeals in 1915, dabbled in high politics with Roosevelt’s Progressives, ran against Whitman, and was even talked of at one point as a possible presidential candidate. He continued to oppose Tammany Hall, and when, in 1931, another investigation into corruption in New York was ordered, Seabury was chosen to lead it. The evidence he uncovered showed that under the long succession of Democratic mayors who had ruled the city in the twenties, the NYPD had slipped back into some of its old ways. A stool pigeon named Chile Acuna (“The Human Spittoona”) testified that he was paid $150 a week to help frame prostitutes swept up in vice raids. Several police officers explained that the vast and unexplained sums found in their bank accounts were “racetrack winnings” or the generous gifts of dead relatives; Officer Robert Morris claimed to have been handed forty thousand-dollar bills on the street in Coney Island by a wonderful “Uncle George” who conveniently dropped dead a week or two later in California. In time the investigation reached the upper echelons of the city’s government, and Tammany’s Jimmy Walker—a three-term mayor best known as the author of the sentimental ballad “Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?”—was forced to testify. Walker was charged with accepting more than a million dollars’ worth of bribes, and in September 1932 he resigned. This time there was no way back for Tammany Hall. The scandal of the Seabury hearings finally damaged it beyond repair.
Of the lawyers involved in the Becker case, James Sullivan, Jack Rose’s attorney, became U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, thanks in part to the enthusiastic endorsement of Charles Whitman. He was removed from the post a few months later after a special hearing into his “scandalously corrupt” behavior. The New York World, of all newspapers, led the anti-Sullivan campaign, revealing that within a few days of his arrival the attorney had telegraphed friends at home in New York to advise them to join him: “The pickings are fine.”
Bourke Cockran, the most distinguished member of Becker’s defense team, continued to display a willingness to take on unpopular causes. He represented Tom Mooney, the principal suspect in an infamous San Francisco anarchist bombing in 1916; Mooney, although found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, was eventually reprieved and pardoned. At about the same time, Cockran abandoned the Progressives to return to the Democratic Party and to Tammany. He nominated Al Smith as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 1920 and opposed the introduction of Prohibition before dying of a brain hemorrhage in 1923. John McIntyre joined his old adversary Goff on the New York Supreme Court bench in 1916. Frank Moss continued to serve as assistant DA until Mayor Mitchel came in, then wrote an impenetrable book entitled America’s Mission to Serve Humanity, which was published in 1919. He died soon afterward, aged sixty-one. Lloyd Stryker, who had worked on McIntyre’s team and never wavered in his belief in Becker’s innocence, became perhaps the most celebrated defense attorney in New York. “Preying” Manton, however, became the leading disgrace of the legal profession. While serving as senior judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1939, he was caught taking backhanders and convicted of “running a mill for the sale of justice.” In the end Becker’s old counsel went to prison for two years. At his trial it emerged that in the eleven months following his appointment to the court—a period in which his official pay was less than $10,000—he had contrived to wipe out debts of $710,000 and banked an additional $750,000 in graft. “Presumably,” one reporter noted, “he looked back on his most famous client as a piker.”
Most of the policemen caught up in the case enjoyed less dramatic careers than Martin Manton. Rhinelander Waldo never held another job of consequence after his dismissal as police commissioner at the end of 1913; he died in 1927 at the age of only fifty. John Becker, Charley’s brother, who had supported him throughout both trials, retired soon after the execution and went back to live in Sullivan County. He never married, and boarded with friends in Callicoon Center until his death in 1938. Max Schmittberger, Becker’s old opponent, did better; he was promoted to chief inspector, but although he consistently professed his honesty, he never quite shook off suspicions that he returned quietly to his grafting ways each time the reformers were thrown out.
Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist who had saved Schmittberger’s job after the Lexow hearings, believed implicitly in the policeman’s honor and became his firm supporter. But even Steffens—who once watched Schmittberger merrily cracking the heads of striking workers with his nightstick—had to admit that his protégé, “like all converts, was worse than the accustomed righteous [and] cared nothing for the technicalities of the law. ‘To hell with the Constitution!’ he shouted once at some Reds who cited that sacred instrument as a guaranty of their rights. He was still a policeman, in this and in other ways.”
The other police chief who had shaped Becker’s career died in the same year as Schmittberger, 1917. Clubber Williams lived rather quietly in his final years, having squandered virtually all of the spectacular wealth he had amassed in nearly three decades of service; when he died, the newspapers were shocked to discover that his estate totaled a mere $14. But Winfield Sheehan, Waldo’s gnomic, strangely affluent assistant—the man often suspected of membership in Tim Sullivan’s gambling commission—did pretty well for someone who had started out as a cub reporter on the World. He moved out to California during the war, found an opening in the film business, and by the early 1930s had emerged as head of the Fox studio, winning an Oscar there for Cavalcade in 1933. Today Sheehan’s fame, such as it is, rests chiefly on the part he played in the discovery of Rita Hayworth, whom he spotted dancing in a nightclub. But a year or two earlier, the old New Yorker had also arranged a Hollywood screen test for a prop boy whom the veteran director Raoul Walsh had told him might make it as a cowboy star.
The two men watched the test together. “He’ll do,” Sheehan concluded. “What did you say his name was?” “Morrison,” replied Walsh. “Marion Morrison.” It was Sheehan who renamed the youth John Wayne.
Thomas Mott Osborne’s career as a reformer was very nearly destroyed not long after Becker’s execution, when a committee appointed to investigate conditions at Sing Sing discovered that homosexuality was rife throughout the prison. One inmate admitted that he had sold himself to nearly two dozen fellow prisoners in a mere three months, and the recriminations that followed soon spiraled out of control. In the last days of 1915, Osborne found himself indicted on six counts. The allegations against him ranged from neglect of duty to the charge that he himself had sodomized men placed in his charge.
It cost the warden the better part of $75,000 in legal fees and payments to the famed private detective Val O’Farrell to get the charges dropped; even then their taint lingered for the rest of his career. Few were surprised when Osborne left Sing Sing in the autumn of 1916 and went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to be commander of the naval prison there. He retired not long afterward, retreating to his home in Auburn.
Osborne met with a bizarre end, dropping dead, aged sixty-eight, on his way to a masquerade party. When the police found the blueblood reformer’s body sprawled in the street, he was wearing false whiskers, a suit several sizes too small for him, and a set of slip-on goofy teeth.
The surviving members of the group that had secured Becker’s conviction went their separate ways after the lieutenant’s trials, falling out among themselves so utterly that they seldom agreed on anything again.
William Shapiro’s career as a chauffeur was ended by the Becker affair. He had his driver’s license revoked, and the infamous gray Packard had to be sold. His partner Louis Libby, deprived of his main source of income, turned to pimping instead, making a living for a while off the earnings of his wife. The oily and egotistical Sam Schepps tried his hand at the antique-furniture business, to which his talents as small-time con man undoubtedly suited him. His taste for cigarettes and good living did him in eventually, however; he died in 1936. Harry Vallon flitted from job to job on the Lower East Side—at one time giving his occupation as “chandelier salesman”—before vanishing entirely; no one knows what became of him. James Marshall, the tap-dancing perjurer whose evidence had secured Becker’s second conviction and effectively condemned him to death, also disappeared for many years. But he returned in the end to his old stomping grounds uptown, just a block or two from the spot where the fateful Harlem Conference was said to have occurred, and was to be found running dice games in the district as late as 1947. Bridgey Webber, on the other hand, secured himself a comfortable position at a factory owned by his brother-in-law. The onetime dognapper and poker magnate spent the remainder of his life making cardboard boxes in Passaic, New Jersey.
Bald Jack Rose bought himself a wig. Thus disguised, he abandoned the Satan’s Circus card rooms and turned his hand to setting up a company called Humanology Motion Pictures. The idea, supposedly, was to make moralistic shorts. When the necessary funds were not forthcoming, Rose instead forged himself an improbable evangelical career, dressing in black from head to toe and drawing church congregations numbering in the hundreds to his addresses on “Life in the Underworld.” He pursued this line of work for several years, albeit with diminishing returns. By the time Becker stood trial for a second time, Rose had been reduced to lecturing in YMCA halls, and during the First World War he sometimes made appearances at army camps.
Eventually tiring of the religious circuit, Bald Jack went into catering, it is said with considerable success. During the Roaring Twenties, he sold rotisseries in Connecticut and on Long Island. For many years his name was preserved in the form of a “Jack Rose” cocktail, served in Broadway bars and consisting of applejack, grenadine, and lemon juice.*71 He died in October 1947 at the age of seventy-two.
Not every associate of Becker’s went straight. Chicago May, the lieutenant’s old acquaintance from the Stephen Crane affair, continued her criminal career into the 1920s, working variously as a pickpocket, a blackmailer, and a whore. She married twice and lived for shorter periods with a long succession of crooks, the most notable of whom was the famed Chicago safecracker Eddie Guerin.
In 1901 May and Guerin traveled to Paris, where they joined two men planning to rob the American Express office in the city. The group successfully blew the safe and got away with $250,000, a huge fortune in that day, but they were arrested before they had the chance to spend the money. The leader of the gang confessed, and the trial was a formality. May received a sentence of five years’ hard labor, serving three; Guerin got life imprisonment in the infamous penal colony of Devil’s Island, from which, a few years later, he contrived to make a spectacular escape.*72 The couple was reunited in London, where they promptly fell out, and, in 1907, Chicago May and her latest lover waylaid Guerin and opened fire on him with a revolver. Sadly for them, Guerin survived to identify his assailants. May spent the next ten years of her life sequestered in a women’s prison in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.
Released in 1917 with her good looks largely gone, the onetime Queen of the Badger Game made her way back to New York to find herself queen of nothing much at all. She returned to a life of prostitution, robbing and blackmailing clients when she could, rising eventually to the rank of madam. After 1925—too old by now to earn much of a living from her trade—she made sporadic attempts to abandon her criminal career, at one point even penning a self-serving autobiography filled with reminiscences about her old days in Satan’s Circus sipping champagne with Charley Becker.
When money became tight again, May returned to the streets. She was by now in her early fifties, blowsy and grown rather stout, and America was teetering on the brink of the Great Depression. The fabled Chicago May died, utterly used up, in Philadelphia in 1929.
Letitia Stenson, Becker’s second wife, headed westward to Nevada after her divorce, taking with her the policeman’s only son. By the summer of 1912, she was living in Reno, where Paul Becker later acquired an interest in a blacksmith’s shop. Letitia had virtually no contact with her former husband by this time—merely an envelope containing the monthly child-support payment—and she spoke only reluctantly to a reporter from the New York World who tracked her down to her new home in the last days of July. “It wrings my heart to speak of these things now,” she said.
By 1915 Letitia had moved on again, to the little settlement of Winnemucca in the northern reaches of the state. There all trace of her is lost. She was no longer living in the town when the census was taken in 1920, and there is no way of saying where she went or when she died. Her son with Charley Becker, Howard, returned east a few years later, though enrolling at the University of Chicago to major in sociology. Chicago, in the 1920s, was perhaps the most important center for the study of this new and fashionable subject, and Becker excelled at it, eventually completing a postgraduate degree. He became a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin and built a distinguished academic career. He was the author of Man in Reciprocity and Modern Sociological Theory in Continuity and Change. When he died, on June 8, 1960, he had just been elected president of the American Sociological Association.
A number of the Beckers had reputations for being “difficult people to get along with,” as one member of the family put it, but Howard was without doubt more difficult than most. He was particularly renowned for his heavy, quashing sarcasm, which many colleagues and former students still vividly recall today. He deployed this weapon freely against a namesake, Howard S. Becker, who became a sociologist during the 1940s. The two men were not related, but the elder Becker grew irritated whenever colleagues inadvertently confused them. “I would get copies of letters he sent to people who made that mistake,” the younger man recalled,
heavily ironic letters saying it was kind of them to ask if he was interested in being an assistant professor in their department but he was already a full professor at Wisconsin. Things like that.
I’m sorry to speak ill of him, but I have to tell you that he was widely hated by his colleagues at Wisconsin and by people who had been graduate students there. After he died, a number of people came up to me at the next big sociology convention to offer condolences, and, when I told them we were not related, said some version of, “Oh, you weren’t? Well, he was a mean son of a bitch.”
It would take a psychologist, or perhaps a sociologist, to trace the roots of Howard Becker’s antipathetic personality. But it does not seem too much to suggest that the distressing memory of Charley Becker played its part in the son’s development. Howard was, of course, just old enough to have had recollections of the father who had left when he was five, but he evidently found the knowledge of his relationship to so notorious a man quite shameful. His own children (there were three, two girls and a boy) were brought up to believe that Paul Becker was their grandfather and remained in utter ignorance of their infamous relative until the late 1980s, when a cousin who had been researching family history uncovered the truth. Charley’s grandson, Christopher—a historian and renowned chess-problem setter by then in his late fifties—“really was astounded” by the news, another of the Beckers wrote, but quickly became fascinated by the Rosenthal murder and its aftermath. He assembled a large collection of material on the affair and, when he died, was interred in the old cemetery at Callicoon Center. His tombstone lies between the grave of Henry Becker and that of Charley’s father, Conrad.
And finally, the widows of the Rosenthal affair.
Henrietta Young, Jack Zelig’s girl, was last heard of on January 6, 1913, sitting in a box in the Arlington dance hall on St. Mark’s Place with a little sack of money in her lap. She was gathering tribute from the gaggle of prostitutes, pimps, opium addicts, and policemen assembled to pay their respects to her husband’s memory at a benefit arranged on her behalf.
Occasionally one of the Zelig’s old acquaintances would leave the tables clustered around the dance floor, make his way upstairs, and thrust a fistful of dollars into the grieving widow’s hands. “Humpty” Jackson, the hunchbacked leader of Spanish Louis’s old gang, purchased sixteen quarts of champagne for the members of his party and left a few dollars more at the box office. But the dance was not much of a success. Zelig’s power had dissipated so utterly after his death that the event was only sparsely attended, and few of those who showed themselves had much time for his wife. The whores up on Fourteenth Street had sent word that they would not attend. “Who is Mrs. Zelig?” one spit in disgust. “Let her go out and sell it the same as we do.”
Every man admitted to the dance wore a button badge emblazoned with Zelig’s broadly grinning face—the image of him snapped when he was arraigned on charges cooked up by Becker’s Special Squad. But there was little joy, no laughter, and scarcely any dancing in the hall. Whenever she heard voices raised, Mrs. Zelig would send word down to the meager crowd “to be quiet for her husband’s sake.” And when the last guest had departed and the expenses had been paid, it was found that only $46 remained. “If the boys knew this would have occurred,” Abe Shoenfeld wrote sadly, “they would have chipped in some money and given it to her, sooner than run a ball for $46 with two or three couples dancing on the floor.”
The two other women robbed of their husbands by the case also found life difficult thereafter. Lillian Rosenthal, the murdered man’s second wife, subsisted for a while on the charity of midtown Manhattan gamblers. But she lost money investing in a movie house and a failed dressmaking business and eventually alienated the men who had supported her by attempting to enlist them in a fresh campaign against Tammany graft. She died in considerable poverty, “a broken and fanatically embittered woman,” in September 1928.
Helen Becker, meanwhile, long outlived her former rival. She saw nothing of the fortune her husband was supposed to have hidden away during a long career of grafting. The cash was eaten up in legal fees, and in fact she found herself liable for debts of several thousand dollars, which she paid off over several years from her skimpy teacher’s salary. After that she was able to put aside enough to make several attempts to clear her husband’s name, but nothing came of any of them. Her teaching career flourished moderately, however, and by the time of her retirement in the early 1940s she was assistant principal of an elementary school in the northern reaches of Manhattan.
Helen never remarried and never had another child, though she received a number of proposals and lived on until 1962. “I prefer,” she always said to those who asked,
to remain a widow in memory of a man who was put to death by the great state of New York for a crime he did not commit.
He was not an angel; he never made a pretense of being one. He was just an ordinary human being, and that is why I loved him so.