NOTES

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

Klein	Henry Klein, Sacrified: The Story of Police Lieut. Charles Becker. Privately published, 1927.
Levine	Jerald Levine, Police, Parties and Polity: The Bureaucratization, Unionization, and Professionalization of the New York City Police, 1870–1917. Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1971.
Lexow	New York State Senate, Report and Proceedings of the Senate Committee Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York. 5 vols., 1895.
Logan	Andy Logan, Against the Evidence: The Becker-Rosenthal Affair, A Great American Scandal. London, Weidenfeld Nicholson, 1970.
MBC	Mary Becker collection.

         

A Note on Citation

         

In order to keep the length of these notes to a reasonable minimum, I have referred to books consulted only in their short form. Full citations can be found in the Bibliography.

         

Notes on the Sources

         

PRIMARY SOURCES

Though none of the main participants in the Becker-Rosenthal affair left personal papers, manuscript material relating to the case does survive in the Municipal Archives, New York. The files of the district attorney’s office, in particular, form the largest and most complete collection of records relating to crime extant in any city; notionally, at least, every criminal indicted in Manhattan between the eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth has a file of his or her own, and the DA’s papers also include closed-case reports and even scrapbooks of newspaper clippings relating to significant prosecutions. Though disappointingly unrevealing in the Becker-Rosenthal case, they deserve to be better known.

In Becker’s case, these records are supplemented by the New York Reports—printed summaries, designed to serve as records for the legal profession, of all the cases heard in the city—and by two smaller but unique collections, the Mary Becker and the Thomas Mott Osborne Papers. Mary Becker’s papers, which remain in private hands, consist of a handful of Charles Becker’s letters to relatives together with family histories and family trees assembled in the course of genealogical research carried out in the 1980s and 1990s. Although not so extensive as an historian might wish, they offer an invaluable insight into Becker’s background and describe his thoughts as he faced execution. Thomas Mott Osborne’s papers, at Syracuse University, contain several mentioning the Becker-Rosenthal affair amid much material relating to conditions at Sing Sing and prison reform.

Newspaper coverage of the Becker case was extraordinarily extensive, and the reporters of the day not only covered the two trials and multiple appeals in considerable detail, but made a point of informing their readers about the backgrounds and opinions of the main characters in the drama. Some of their stories need to be read with a certain caution; competition between titles was fierce and many journalists of the day were not above embellishing their reports, or even inventing material outright. So many dailies covered the Becker story, though, that a consensus of sorts can almost always be formed by the comparative study of coverage in different titles and by an awareness of the biases of the newspapers’ publishers, editors, and readers.

Of New York’s papers, the American and the World were richer and had more resources than their rivals. They pursued developments in the Becker case most vigorously and regularly broke new developments and tracked down witnesses ahead of the police. Their coverage was more complete and detailed than that of any of their rivals and their use of photographs and illustrations more usefully comprehensive. The Sun, though no longer the paper it had been in its nineteenth-century heyday (by 1912 it was the only major title that still lacked the technology to print photographs), was also comprehensive and provided more sober coverage. The New York Times, on the other hand, has the inestimable benefit of being fully archived and indexed. In the last couple of years, the old printed indexes—which are, inevitably, far from complete—have been supplemented by the appearance of the Times digital archive, an utterly invaluable repository (available online on a pay-per-article basis) that offers full-text searches of the complete run of the paper. Careful interrogation of this archive has led to the exhumation of several hitherto-unknown aspects of Becker’s police career that would almost certainly never have been discovered through old-fashioned research, in particular his central involvement in the “Cops’ Revolt” of 1902. Issues of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle have also been digitized and are available online free of charge, though to date the digitization project has reached only 1902.

A large proportion of what we reliably know about Jack Zelig and the Jewish gangsters of the Lower East Side comes from the voluminous and colorful reports compiled by Abe Shoenfeld, a private investigator retained by the Bureau of Social Morals, established by a wealthy group of concerned Jewish leaders to produce intelligence on Jewish criminal activities. The group’s chief purpose in commissioning these reports was to provide intelligence on Jewish gangs, extortion rackets, and prostitution rings to the NYPD and so help clean up what was regarded as the shameful prevalence of crime within the Eastern European immigrant community. Shoenfeld responded by producing a long series of profiles on notable Jewish criminals of the period—among them most of the principals in the Becker-Rosenthal affair—together with monthly “Vice Reports” summarizing the day-today activities of his primary suspects. Because he was himself Jewish, Shoenfeld was able to penetrate the East Side underworld and mine a rich seam of anecdotal and generally unverifiable information, which paints an intricately detailed picture of New York’s Jewish underworld in the years 1912–17. The nineteen hundred reports that Shoenfeld completed found their way into the papers of Rabbi Judah Magnes, and thence to Israel, where they are currently preserved in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem.

One other “eyewitness” account of the events of 1912 exists in the form of The Becker Scandal: A Time Remembered, by Viña Delmar. The case itself forms only the backdrop to what is essentially a family memoir, but Delmar’s account is of considerable interest because her father was a close friend of Herman Rosenthal’s. The reliability of the author’s recollections is debatable; Delmar was only nine years old at the time of the gambler’s murder, compiled her memoir more than half a century after the fact, and used her skills as a novelist to tell the story, including the interpolation of large swaths of reported speech. The author’s own view on the trustworthiness of her recollections is clearly stated, nonetheless: “I do not expect anyone to believe that I am repeating every word of every conversation with the precision of a tape recorder. However, I am convinced that all that was said, all that was done, is more vividly remembered than had I been thirty at the time. A child has the advantage of an uncluttered mind, and I had a unique observation post from which to view the lives around me.”

         

SECONDARY SOURCES

Two detailed studies of the case stand out amid the secondary sources. The first, Sacrificed: The Story of Police Lieut. Charles Becker, is of special interest because its author, Henry Klein, was hired as chief investigator of a citizens’ committee organized in August 1912 to investigate “police conditions” in the wake of the Rosenthal murder. Klein began his investigations convinced of Becker’s guilt and ended them just as certain of his innocence. His detailed knowledge of the Rosenthal affair was augmented during the Great War by a stint serving as an auditor in the district attorney’s office—a position that gave him the remarkable opportunity to illicitly search District Attorney Whitman’s financial records for 1912 and turn up the first firm evidence of the methods used by the DA to assemble the bizarre collection of informants and ne’er-do-wells who testified at the two Becker trials. Receipts, examined by Klein, demonstrated that the majority had been retained, for long periods, at public cost in order to ensure Becker’s conviction. Klein’s book—privately published in 1927 and rather rare today—is an invaluable repository of all sorts of additional information as well; it incorporates statements from several of the surviving principals in the case, including revealing affidavits from Tim Sullivan’s private secretary, and contains transcripts of large portions of the trial evidence. The author remained convinced until his death that Becker’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice, and engaged in letter-column disputes with Herbert Bayard Swope over the policeman’s guilt or innocence as late as 1951.

The second major contribution to the subject is Isabel Ann “Andy” Logan’s Against the Evidence: The Becker-Rosenthal Affair, published in 1970. Logan was a well-known New York journalist who reported for years on affairs at City Hall for the New Yorker magazine and was renowned as “a diminutive figure in black with an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s social and political history.” She hated politicians’ cant and was far from beloved by a succession of New York mayors; according to legend, Ed Koch was riding downtown one day when an aide looked up and saw the sixty-year-old Logan crossing across the street ahead of their limousine. “Look!” the aide exclaimed. “There’s Andy Logan.” “Hit her!” Koch ordered his driver.

Against the Evidence remains by far the densest and most detailed account of the Becker case. Like Klein, Logan became convinced of the policeman’s innocence. Her book—heavily researched in the newspapers of the time—intelligently lays out the vast number of discrepancies in the prosecution case; it is a veritable gold mine of information, extremely thought-provoking and generally reliable. Its defects are a confused chronology and a complete lack of bibliography and footnotes. Fortunately, the Andy Logan Papers, held in the New York Public Library, contain a dozen boxes relating to the research Logan undertook before writing her book, and these papers have been used to verify and source a number of statements that I was otherwise unable to track down in the newspapers of the time.

A third book on the Becker case—the second published—proved less useful than Klein’s and Logan’s works. Jonathan Root’s The Life and Bad Times of Charlie Becker is patchily researched and contains several instances of outright invention. I have used it only very occasionally, and then with caution.

When it comes to researching the story of New York itself, the historian is spoiled for choice. Virtually every aspect of the city’s political, social, and economic life has been well illuminated by recent studies, from the highest of high society down to and including the everyday existences of boardinghouse lodgers and Bowery bums. Luc Sante’s intoxicatingly anecdotal Low Life, while perhaps understandably distrusted by academic historians, is based on wide reading and remains a vivid introduction to the realities of life in a great city. I must also mention Gotham, by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, a masterful, inclusive, and wonderfully readable study of the whole of New York’s history up to 1898; at the established pace, Wallace’s much-anticipated follow-up volume—covering the period from 1898 to the present day—is due in a little over a decade, and I will be waiting for my copy. No author, though, has taught me more about the thoughts, the sounds, and the rhythms of New York in the first half of the last century than has Joseph Mitchell, the renowned New Yorker correspondent, several of whose incomparable essays touch, if only tangentially, on my own subject. My respect for him grows all the time.

         

Notes on the Text

         

PREFACE

“ ONLY ONE HAS BEEN EXECUTED FOR MURDER” At the time of writing, two other police officers sit on death row, awaiting execution for murders committed in 1995. One, Antoinette Frank of the New Orleans Police Department, was found guilty of the cold-blooded killing of two employees of a Vietnamese restaurant she had been hired to protect in her off-duty hours, together with the murder of a member of her own department who had the misfortune to be on the premises when she arrived after closing time intent on robbery. The other, Jack Ray Hudson Jr., shot and killed two fellow policemen who had caught him attempting to steal money, guns, and drugs from an evidence lockup in Yuma, Arizona. In New York, meanwhile, two retired police officers—Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa—found guilty of working as hit men for the Mafia received life sentences that were subsequently overturned on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. Their trial revived memories of the Becker case in the New York press.

It is possible that other cases have occurred; indeed it surprises me that Charles Becker has retained his dubious distinction for as long as he has. But I have never, despite several searches, found any reference to the execution of another American police officer convicted for crimes committed while in uniform. The only reference work I have found on the subject, Michael Newton’s Killer Cops: An Encyclopedia of Lawless Lawmen (Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited, 1997), mentions only Becker, Frank, and Hudson.

“ CROOKEDEST COP” Luc Sante, Low Life, p. 249.

         

1. WIDE-OPEN

BROADWAY GARDEN Richard O’Connor, Hell’s Kitchen, p. 93; Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York, p. 259; Robert Stallman, Stephen Crane, p. 220.

THE YOUNG MAN DESCRIBED New York Sun, Sept. 17, and Journal, Oct. 17, 1896.

THE YOUNG MAN AND THE CHORUS GIRLS New York Sun, Sept. 17, and Journal, Sept. 20, 1896; Stallman, op. cit., p. 220.

DESCRIPTION OF THE REDHEAD New York Journal, Sept. 17, and Crane’s testimony and pictures in the same paper, Sept. 20, 1896.

SHIRTWAIST Leon Stein, of the Ladies’ International Garment Workers’ Union, describes the shirtwaist, in his history of The Triangle Fire, p. 160, as “a cool and efficient bodice garment, generally worn with a tailored skirt,” which conveyed the image of “a bright-eyed, fast-moving young lady, her long tresses knotted in a bun atop her proud head, ready to challenge the male in sport, drawing room, and, if properly equipped with paper cuff covers, even in the office…. The secret of its perennial popularity was in its lines…. The bouffant quality of the fabric enhanced the figure it enfolded.”

BECKER New York Sun, Sept. 17 and Oct. 16; Journal, Sept. 20 and Oct. 17, 1896; Stallman, op. cit., p. 220; Christopher Benfey, The Double Life of Stephen Crane, p. 175.

GERMANS IN THE NYPD Levine, p. 42; Cornelius Willemse, A Cop Remembers, p. 82; Lardner and Reppetto, NYPD, p. 61.

“MARKEDLY INTELLIGENT” For standards prevalent in the NYPD of 1896, see Levine. Becker’s unusual intelligence was mentioned by a number of contemporaries. Thomas Mott Osborne, warden of Sing Sing prison, for example, doubted that Becker was guilty of the crime he would eventually be charged with on the grounds that “if such a man had set his mind on murder, he would have made a better job of it.” Rudolph Chamberlain, There Is No Truce: A Life of Thomas Mott Osborne, p. 308. From this perspective it is also noteworthy that Becker’s son became a professor at the University of Wisconsin, that his grandson was a doctor of history, and that his great-granddaughter was at one time one of the leading female chess masters in the United States. Private information on the Becker family from Mary Becker, wife of the policeman’s great-grandnephew, Todson Becker. THE ENCOUNTER WITH BECKER My descriptions of the participants’ thoughts and actions are taken from Stephen Crane’s third-person account, written almost immediately after the event. New York Journal, Sept. 20, 1896. For the location of the nearest transport links to Broadway Garden, see Eric Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City, pp. 106–7.

SATAN’S CIRCUS Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham, pp. 955–9, 1068; Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros, pp. 204–5. Definitions of the district’s boundaries vary from source to source, and the district itself shifted subtly from year to year. According to Luc Sante, however, the neighborhood comprised a sixteen-block strip of the West Side, stretching between Twenty-fourth and Fortieth Streets and from Fifth Avenue across to Seventh. Sante, Low Life, p. 185.

PROSTITUTION IN SATAN’S CIRCUS Gilfoyle, op. cit., pp. 58, 205–8; Sante, op. cit., p. 188. “

UNNATURAL PRACTICES” Gilfoyle, op. cit., p. 165.

BECKER’S REPONSE New York Sun, Sept. 19, and Journal, Sept. 20, 1896.

“TWO-THIRDS IRISH” During the 1850s one officer in every four had been born either in Ireland or to Irish parents; by 1888 the figure was six in every ten; and by 1910, three-quarters of the entire New York Police Department was Irish. Levine, pp. 23–25, 42–43.

AT THE STATION HOUSE Olov Fryckstedt, “Stephen Crane in the Tenderloin,” pp. 141–42, 145.

“DORA CLARK” New York Sun, Sept. 16, and Journal, Sept. 17 and 20, 1896; Stallman, op. cit., p. 229. For her real name, see the Sun of Oct. 16, 1896.

RUBY YOUNG’S PROFESSION New York World, Oct. 16, 1896. Stallman, Crane’s biographer, (op. cit., p. 229) asserts that Young was a “kept woman,” the “mistress of a wealthy man living at the Waldorf.” This seems to be incorrect. Young had indeed had an assignation with one of the Waldorf’s guests on the night in question. But she had taken him to her own room on East Eighty-first Street, which argues against any long-term relationship. And, had she really been a rich man’s mistress, there would have been no need for her to work as a streetwalker, as she evidently did; Becker later testified that he had known her for about two years. Sun, Oct. 16, 1896. For the prostitute’s “drift,” see the eloquent comments of Sante, op. cit., pp. 179–80.

THE YOUNG MAN AND THE SERGEANT New York Journal, Sept. 20, 1896.

“WHAT HE WAS THINKING WAS…” Ibid.

“BOHEMIAN IN THE BEST SENSE” New York Journal, Oct. 17, 1896.

CRANE’S SUBJECTS Keith Gandal, The Spectacle of the Poor, pp. 90, 126. For the details of the author’s experiences in the slums, see also Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1186, 1189. Crane’s experiences as a beggar were based on a night spent in line at the yeast manufacturer Louis Fleischmann’s Model Vienna Bakery, next to Grace Church, which during the day sold sweet rolls and coffee and after midnight distributed a third of a loaf free to each of the local indigents who lined up to take advantage of this charity—thus popularizing the term “breadline.”

“QUEER” Fryckstedt, op. cit., p. 140.

CRANE, OPIUM, AND THE NEW YORK JOURNAL Ibid., pp. 140–1; Journal, Sept. 20, 1896; Benfey, op. cit., p. 174; Logan, p. 109; Stallman, op. cit., pp. 219–20.

CRANE’S THOUGHTS New York Journal, Sept. 20, 1896.

CRANE’S “PLOT” For the Boston Traveler, see Frykstedt, op. cit., p. 151. The vast majority of Stephen Crane’s biographers have chosen to accept his own version of these events, portraying him as an innocent, even chivalric, figure in this case. My account of the reporter’s aims and motives follows the reinterpretation offered by Benfey, op. cit., pp. 171–81, which I find more thoughtful and considerably more persuasive. “It seems,” Benfey writes, “highly likely that Crane knew precisely who Dora [Clark] was. It should be remembered that he set out to ‘study the police court victims in their haunts,’ and Dora was such a victim…. The coincidences are less glaring if we assume that Crane was cruising for a crisis, and that the chorus girls flagged down Dora Clark as someone who might help spark one…. It’s probably closer to the truth to say that the target for entrapment was Officer Charles Becker himself, and that Dora Clark was the bait.”

DOUBTERS New York Journal, Sept. 20, 1896; Stallman, op. cit., pp. 219, 221.

AT THE POLICE COURT New York Sun, Tribune, and Journal, Sept. 17, 1896; Frykstedt, op. cit., pp. 135–36; Stallman and Hagemann, Sketches, pp. 219–21, 261–62; Stallman, op. cit., pp. 222–25, 233–34; Benfey, op. cit., pp. 171–74.

BECKER DESCRIBED Pictures of Becker were published in the New York Journal of Sept. 19 and Oct. 17, alongside a description in the former case. See also Logan, p. 3.

ROSENBERG There were in fact no black officers in the New York Police Department at this time. The first, Samuel Battle, was not appointed until the summer of 1911, and he faced considerable hostility from his brother officers, all of whom refused to patrol with him. New York Times, June 29, July 28, and Sept. 26, 1911.

CRANE’S STATEMENT TO THE PRESS New York Journal, Sept. 19 and 20, 1896. On Crane’s typescript—an early draft of a piece for the Journal, now in the Barrett Crane Collection—see Stallman, op. cit., p. 586. All this made first-rate copy for New York papers. Most of the court reporters were inclined to favor Crane—he was, after all, a fellow journalist, and in any case they did not like the police—and many of the accounts that appeared the next day took the obvious line, comparing Crane to the hero of his famous novel. “The red badge of courage,” concluded an admiring column in the city’s biggest daily, “flamed with a new brightness as Mr. Crane walked away.” Still, not every paper published on September 19 agreed. Association with “women in scarlet,” the Chicago Dispatch wrote, was hardly proof of courage of any description.

AFTERMATH New York Tribune, Sept. 29; Journal, Oct. 8, 11, and 17; Times, Nov. 2, 1896; Stallman, op. cit., pp. 221, 225–26, 228–29; Frykstedt, op. cit., p. 152. Chicago May, whose real name was May Sharpe, was using the alias “May Kane” at this time. At the beginning of November, she and Young fought a second battle in the New York streets. Both were again arrested. New York Times, Nov. 2,1896. The combative May also got into a fight with one of the witnesses at Becker’s police trial. As the people in the courtroom filed out at the end of the hearing, she was set upon by one of Crane’s friends, Miss Effie Ward, who “made an energetic attempt to tear out all her hair.” May responded “by trying to scratch out Miss Ward’s eyes.” New York Sun, Oct. 17, 1896.

FREQUENCY OF POLICE TRIALS Lexow, p. 54. The incidence of charges brought against members of the police peaked at an astonishing 4,000 in 1875. On average, the rate generally ran at 1,500 to 1,700 charges per year; Augustine Costello, Our Police Protectors, p. 560.

AT THE POLICE TRIAL New York World, Oct. 16; Sun and Journal, Oct. 17 and 18, 1896; Fryckstedt, op. cit., pp. 153–61; Logan, pp. 110–11; Hamlin Garland, Roadside Meetings, pp. 203–4; Stallman, op. cit., pp. 227–30. The charges against Becker were formally dropped a week before Christmas. According to the Middletown Daily Argus (NY), Dec. 17, 1894, “the only evidence against the officer was given by Mr. Crane, and the Police Commissioner seems to have reached the conclusion that he has dealt so much with fiction that he does not know where the truth ends and fiction begins.”

POLICE HARASS CRANE James Richardson, New York Police, p. 262.

         

2. KING OF THE BOWERY

BECKER’S BIRTH The date of Becker’s birth remains in some doubt. The birth of a child named Charles Becker on the date given is recorded in the nearest village, Callicoon Center, but the Becker family’s genealogical research has revealed another record for the birth of a child with the same name dated exactly three years later. Records of the Callicoon Center Evangelical Church and birth registers kept in the Sullivan County Record Office, copies in MBC. Given the coincidence of both name and date, it seems one of the two records may be a misdated copy of the other. The best evidence favoring the earlier date is Becker’s statement, on his conviction for murder, that his age was then forty-two; New York Sun, Oct. 25,1912. Oddly enough, Becker’s birthplace was not much more than twenty miles from Port Jervis, the childhood home of Stephen Crane; the two men, who were practically identical in age, thus grew up together as near neighbors.

DISTANCE FROM NEW YORK This is the distance between Callicoon and New York as the crow flies. The distance by rail, in Becker’s day, was closer to 140 miles.

“NO ONE CAN MAKE MORE THAN A BASE LIVING…” Becker to Mary Weyrauch, Nov. 14, 1913, MBC.

HEINRICH BECKER AND HIS FARM Heinrich Becker appears to have dropped the German form of his given name on his arrival in New York and was known as Henry to his neighbors in Sullivan County. The German version of the name, however, appears on his tombstone, still clearly visible in the little cemetery at Callicoon Center. For the locale, see James Quinlan, History of Sullivan County, pp. 167–68; it is indicative of the low level of the early population of the county that Quinlan can devote nearly a page of this work to the story of the Becker family, down to recounting the results of a specific hunting expedition. For other accounts of the family’s history, see the Sullivan County Democrat, Aug. 6, 1912, and family genealogies in MBC, based for these generations of the family on correspondence with the church authorities in Bebra, Hesse-Kassel, and extracts from the records of Callicoon and Sullivan County mentioned above.

CALLICOON DEPOT J. S. Graham, The Callicoon Historian, pp. 40, 54–55. Today its name has contracted to a simple “Callicoon”—a word that, incidentally, comes from the Dutch “Kollikoon,” which is said to have derived from the call made by the wild turkeys that once abounded in the district.

“VARIOUSLY AS A BROKER…” Mary Becker, personal communication, Nov. 28, 2004, author’s files.

BECKER’S YOUTH IN CALLICOON CENTER For the testimony of Philip Huff and Baltazer Hauser (both of whose names are incorrectly given by the source), see the New York Herald of Aug. 2, 1912. For the correct spellings of the witnesses’ names, see Quinlan, op. cit., p. 168, and Sullivan County Democrat, Aug. 6, 1912. For the date of Becker’s departure to New York, see the Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915.

THE NEW YORK OF 1890 Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham, pp. 943–44, 1040–88, 1116–17, 1228; Luc Sante, Low Life, pp. 23–45; John Kouwenhoven, Historical Portrait of New York, pp. 381, 393; Ric Burns and James Sanders with Lisa Ades, New York, pp. 182–215, 236, 262; Eric Homburger, The Historical Atlas of New York City, pp. 110–11, 126–28, 136–37; Albert Fried, The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America, pp. 16–17; Daniel Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913,” Journal of American History 78 (1991), p. 542; Marc Eliott, Down 42nd Street, p. 77.

ICE TRUST New York World, Apr. 4, 1900; Oliver Allen, The Tiger, pp. vii–ix.

“DENSE CAT’S CRADLES…” Overground telephone wires were already on the way out by 1890; the great blizzard of 1888 had demonstrated the vulnerability of such utilities—two-thirds of Manhattan’s telephone and electricity poles were brought down by the worst storm of the century, which deposited drifts of snow as much as thirty feet deep in places—and the city had begun a major program of burying its millions of cables belowground. The speed of change accelerated further after October 1889, when thousands of New Yorkers were distressed at the sight of a Western Union lineman who had been electrocuted while making repairs to an overhead cable in the busiest part of the business district. The unfortunate electrician hung, caught in the still-live wires, for more than an hour before the power was turned off, with blue flames spitting from his mouth. Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1068; Burns, Sanders, and Ades, op. cit., p. 200.

HORSE-CARS As well as being slow, the horse-cars were inconvenient. Vicious competition between the various companies holding monopolies on various routes made it almost impossible to travel from place to place without a number of inconvenient and expensive changes. Traversing the length of Fourteenth Street, for example, meant making three changes and paying four fares. Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1057.

“ONCE A MOTORMAN…” Ibid., p. 1058.

“WALL STREET SUPPLIED…” Ibid., p. xviii.

TENEMENTS Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, pp. 6–7, 17, 26–27, 30, 51, 71, 82, 124, 141, 143, 177, 185, 194; Owen Kildare, My Mamie Rose, pp. 15, 19; Sante, op. cit., pp. 23–34.

BOARDINGHOUSES Riis, op. cit., pp. 66–72; Rachel Bernstein, Boarding-House Keepers and Brothel Keepers in New York City, 1880–1910, pp. 30, 79, 87, 96–97; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 970.

BECKER’S JOBS Becker’s employment at Cowperthwait’s is noted by the Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915; for more on the store, see Alvin Harlow, Old Bowery Days, p. 538. On clerking, see Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 970. For Becker’s work as a baker, a salesman, and a bouncer in saloons—unreferenced but likely, given the career paths generally followed by the New York police of the day—see Logan, p. 105.

SUICIDE HALL Sante, op. cit., pp. 119–20.

“ONLY A FEW YEARS LATER…” Cornelius Willemse, a New Yorker who applied to join the force in 1896, when Theodore Roosevelt’s reform administration was in power (see chapter 4), had his initial application rejected on the grounds that he had once worked in the liquor business. Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, p. 20.

INFLUENCE OF SALOONKEEPERS Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 823; Warren Sloat, A Battle for the Soul of New York, p. 14; Barlow, op. cit., p. 440; Sante, op. cit., p. 217. Several sources state that while Silver Dollar Smith’s saloon was frequently visited by customers covertly armed with chisels, no one ever succeeded in removing one of the coins embedded in his floor. This is not correct; according to Smith’s obituary in the New York Herald of January 1, 1900, one man successfully made off with fifty-two of them in a single night. Smith nonetheless proved singularly successful in getting out the vote for Tammany, which was, of course, the secret of his invulnerability. “Once,” a contemporary named Abraham Cahan wrote, “I saw him making a campaign speech from the rear of a wagon parked diagonally across from his saloon. After talking for about five minutes, he growled, ‘Boys, you know I deliver a better speech in my place than out here in the street. Let’s go, boys!’ The entire crowd followed him into his saloon. He set up drinks for everybody—on the house! That was the kind of speech he made.” Fried, op. cit., p. 28.

TAMMANY HALL Gustavus Myers, History of Tammany Hall, pp. 73–74, 250–83; Oliver Allen, The Tiger, pp. 1–8, 21, 24–25, 46, 51, 60–61, 66–67, 70, 78, 80–169; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., pp. 822–26. On the estimated extent of graft in the 1890s, see Jay Berman, Police Administration and Progressive Reform, p. 93.

RICHARD CROKER Even Tammany’s sharpest brains found it hard to define exactly what made Boss Croker so formidable. Like many of the Hall’s leaders, he was virtually uneducated and far from physically imposing. “All this homage,” the journalist William Allen White observed toward the end of the boss’s reign, in 1901,

all this boot-licking, to a mild-mannered, soft-voiced, sad-faced, green-eyed chunk of a man who talks slowly that he may peg in his “seens” and his “saws,” his “dones” and his “dids” where they belong, who has a loggy wit, who cares neither for books, nor music, nor theatrical performances, nor good wine, nor a dinner, nor the society of his kind! And now he sits on a throne and dispenses a sort of jungle justice, while civilization knocks its knees together in stupid, terrified adulation!

Yet Croker did possess, another observer put it, “a pervasive, intangible quality which words can scarcely describe,” but which made him a natural leader. So sure was the boss’s grip on the Tammany machine that he was able to enjoy long leaves of absence, amounting in some cases to several years, without losing control of the organization. On several occasions during his long reign, he faced down angry district bosses and was never known to come off worst in such a confrontation. He was an effective politician, too, being personally responsible for managing the grotesque election fraud that saw Tammany to victory in the elections of 1886. Myers, op. cit., pp. 267–89; Theodore Stoddard, Master of Manhattan, pp. 174–77; Allen, op. cit., pp. 166–78, 192–93; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., pp. 1108–10.

“AFFAIRS OF IMMIGRANTS” George Washington Plunkitt, for years the powerful boss of Hell’s Kitchen, on the West Side, once talked a reporter through his working day. It typically began, he said, only two hours after he had retired to bed at midnight, with a knock on the door and a request to bail out a bartender arrested for violating the excise law. Having called at the police station, the boss was up again at 6:00 A.M., awakened by the noise of fire engines passing his house. Dressing quickly and following the engines—fires, Plunkitt explained, were great vote getters—he found several tenants who had been burned out, took them to a hotel, supplied them with food and clothing, and arranged temporary accommodation. By 8:30 he was in court, where he prevailed upon the magistrate to discharge four drunks and paid fines on behalf of another two. At 9:00 he was advancing the rent for a poor family so far in arrears they were about to be thrown into the street; at 11:00 he was at home, arranging jobs for four men who had called on him for help. At 3:00 in the afternoon, he attended the funeral of an Italian constituent, and in the early evening a Jewish ceremony at the synagogue. Around 7:00 P.M. he visited district headquarters to hear the reports of his captains; at 8:00 he was buying drinks for constituents at a church fair; at 9:00 he was listening to complaints from peddlers and buying tickets for a church excursion; and at 10:30 P.M. he looked in on a Jewish wedding, “having previously sent a handsome wedding present to the bride.” At midnight he went back to bed, and the entire cycle began again. William Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, pp. 91–93.

LIFE OF BIG TIM SULLIVAN Sullivan left no personal papers; nor did any of his relations or early colleagues. It is virtually impossible to say now how much of the picture he painted of his youth as “an honest Bowery boy” was true, how much embroidered, and how much outright invention. Daniel Czitrom, author of the only scholarly article on his life, writes that Tim’s image was “at the core of [his] enormous personal popularity and political power,” and posits that “Sullivan effectively cultivated a public persona, the character of Big Tim.” This was undoubtedly true. Yet the recollections of Owen Kildare and others leave no doubt that Sullivan did possess a genuinely kindly, even altruistic streak, which need not preclude the supposition that at least part of his behavior was an act. Every other Tammany leader, after all, had as much of a motive to pose as a friend of the poor and the dispossessed, yet Big Tim was undoubtedly the most popular and best-loved district boss of them all and could move an audience to a frenzy with the simplest of speeches. Alvin Harlow reports that one, given in support of the aldermanic candidacy of “Battery Dan” Finn, ran, in its entirety:

Boys, I’m a Democrat [cheers]. I’ve been a Democrat all my life [loud cheers]. I have voted the Democratic ticket straight all my life [uproarious cheers]. I never scratched a ticket since I first cast my vote, and I never will [pandemonium].

Czitrom, op. cit., pp. 536–58; Kildare, op. cit., pp. 50–51; Alvin Harlow, op. cit., pp. 487–96, 505, 510–14; Sante, op. cit., p. 270.

SULLIVAN’S SALOONS A reporter from the New York Times, assigned in 1889 to track Tim down to another of his premises, in grubby Doyers Street, wrote wonderingly of the exotic experience of paying Sullivan a call: “It is safe to say that there are not a hundred people in this city who live above Canal street who know where Doyers Street is, and if they did they would avoid it like the plague…. It is narrow and dirty, and in the day time is repulsive enough to keep anybody from trying to penetrate its mysteries, but at night, in addition to its ugliness, it looks dangerous.” Big Tim got out of the saloon business in 1893, selling what was by then a miniature empire of six establishments and moving into a new Democratic clubhouse close to the Bowery. Czitrom, op. cit., pp. 541–42.

THE OCCIDENTAL Known to its habitués as “The Ox.” The identification of the celebrated fresco is conjectural. Commodore Dutch (below), who knew the place well, was probably typical of the Occidental’s patrons in referring to this work of art as “one enormous painting of some dames giving themselves a bath.” Joseph Mitchell, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, p. 127.

RACKETS The notorious Jewish gangster “Dopey Benny” Fein, notes Jenna Joselit in Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900–1940, p. 27, “routinely walked down Grand Street ‘plastering every storekeeper with two tickets for a ball or a dance. If they had a small store, they would have to buy a dollar’s worth of tickets; if their business was larger, five dollars.’” The total raised by men of real influence often amounted to $4,000 per ball.

The dark side of Sullivan’s and Croker’s long reigns was, of course, equally considerable. Monstrous election frauds were perpetrated. In Boss Tweed’s day, large sums (all stolen from the city) were allocated to buy elections, and considerable efforts were devoted to registering new voters. In the six weeks before one campaign, Tammany’s block leaders distributed 105,000 registration forms and 69,000 blank certificates of naturalization and oversaw the registration of 41,112 new voters. False addresses were widely used (a later investigation revealed that no fewer than forty-two Democratic voters were registered at 70 Greene Street, the location of a well-known brothel), and false witnesses were employed to swear to the good character of the new citizens. Tame judges processed the applications at the rate of as many as 2,000 per judge per day. Meanwhile, Tammany hirelings registered to vote in as many as ten different wards under a variety of names. On Election Day, one repeater cast no fewer than twenty-eight votes and the polling clerks, one sachem said, smiling, “counted the ballots in bulk, or without counting them announced the result in bulk.” All of these tactics became staples in Tammany’s election armory, and though under Croker there was a decline in instances of Election Day coercion and violence—“Blood’s news,” one Tammany loyalist explained. “It gets into the papers”—outright fraud was as common as ever. Czitrom, op. cit., pp. 549, 546.

JOINING THE NYPD Levine, pp. 23, 173–74; Richardson, The New York Police, pp. 176–79; Willemse, op. cit., pp. 66–67, 156–58. The figure of $300 per appointment was neither widely known nor publicized but emerged during the 1894 Lexow hearings into police corruption in the city; see below.

CONVICTIONS FOR THEFT Levine, p. 104, notes that as many as three hundred to four hundred policemen with felony convictions served in the NYPD in the 1870s. Figures for later decades are not available, but even if the abuse stopped after Tweed’s time, a good number of men recruited in the early 1870s were still serving on the force twenty years later.

COMMISSIONER MCCLAVE Becker’s police contact is named as McClave by the Sullivan County Record, August 8, 1915, which must have had the information from a member of the Becker family. For the commissioner’s background, see Costello, op. cit., p. 500. For “buffs,” see Lewis Valentine, Night Stick, p. 24.

         

3. GRAFT

“IT WAS DARK…” Cornelius Willemse, A Cop Remembers, pp. 71–74, 101.

“ONE NIGHT I WOKE…” Ibid., p. 75.

INITIATION RITUALS Willemse, op. cit., pp. 72–73, 89; James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto, NYPD, p. 61.

EARLY HISTORY OF POLICING IN NEW YORK Levine, pp. 6, 23, 28; Richardson, pp. 16–17; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 4–10; Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros, pp. 92–98; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., pp. 636–37. New Yorkers were well aware of the failings of the system—“While the city sleeps,” the joke went, “the watchmen do, too.” But, as many Londoners did in much the same period, they nonetheless opposed the creation of a more professional force because they feared the creation of what would amount to a standing army devoted to putting down any and all unrest in their city.

FORMATION AND EARLY YEARS OF THE NYPD Levine, pp. 20–22, 28, 94, 102, 117; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 20–23, 60; Luc Sante, Low Life, pp. 237–38, 240; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 21, 30–31, 32, 45, 49, 64–65, 68, 135–40, 144–45, 157, 158, 168–70, 204; Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, p. 483; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1061.

“NOT ONLY WILLING BUT EAGER TO PAY” McAdoo, Guarding a Great City, pp. 85–86.

PAYMENT FOR PROMOTIONS Lexow, p. 48; New York Times, Dec. 15, 1894; Levine, pp. 171–73; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 65, 97; Sante, op. cit., p. 238. Valentine, Night Stick, p. 31, estimates that the total cost of offices purchased throughout the department amounted at “a moderate estimate” to $7 million. The example of Timothy Creeden—the sergeant mentioned here—is particularly interesting because it illustrates the complex interplay between police, commissioners, and politicians. Creeden—a popular, decorated hero who had fought in twenty-six Civil War battles—had obtained promotion to the posts of roundsman and sergeant without paying, thanks largely to Commissioner-General William “Baldy” Smith’s partiality to veterans. Expecting a lucrative promotion to captain free of charge was too much, however, and despite scoring 97.82 out of a hundred in his examination, he was told to borrow the necessary funds from friendly saloonkeepers and district leaders. When these supporters learned that Creeden’s precinct was to be on Wall Street—where the graft was almost nonexistent—they backed off until he was promised a more profitable posting. The deal was consummated, but Creeden struggled to make enough in his relatively modest first precinct to repay his loans. His backers interceded with Tammany once again, and he was transferred for a second time, eventually winding up in a post where the graft was rich enough to repay his friends. The details of his case came out during his interrogation by the Lexow Committee. Lexow, pp. 4919–5057, 5524–55, 5569; the New York World of December 21, 1893, had already carried the story, without naming any names.

WEAK POSITION OF COMMISSIONERS Levine, p. 38; McAdoo, op. cit., pp. 2, 49–50; Astor, The New York Cops, op. cit., p. 109.

THE PARKHURST CRUSADE Warren Sloat, A Battle for the Soul of New York, pp. 5–59; James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto, NYPD, pp. 90–91, 99–101; Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham, pp. 1164–69; Sante, Low Life, pp. 111–12, 189–91, 281–87.

INSPECTOR BYRNES’S CORRUPTION Lexow, pp. 5711–27; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 209–10, 212; Steffens, pp. 221–30; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1062; Edmund Morris, op. cit., p. 484; Larner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 82, 85; John Hickey, Our Police Guardians, pp. 69–71. Those who had believed in Byrnes found themselves discomfited when, after his enforced retirement, the number of arrests made by the Detective Bureau doubled within a year. Jay Berman, Police Administration and Progressive Reform, pp. 62–66.

CLUBBER WILLIAMS New York Times, Dec. 27, 28, and 29, 1894; Lexow, pp. 4524–31, 5242–5353; Richardson, op. cit., p. 205. Diligent investigation eventually showed that at least ten complaints had been lodged against Williams as early as 1879, but—thanks to his political connections—his total punishment amounted to three reprimands and the loss of two days’ pay. New York Sun, March 16; Tribune, March 17, 18, and 19 and Nov. 19; New York Times, March 18 and 19, Nov. 19, 1879. Eventually even the Custom House gang could protect him no longer, however; Williams’s ungovernable temper resulted in his transfer from Satan’s Circus to a sinecure at the (extremely corrupt) Street Cleaning Bureau at the end of the year. Tribune and World, Dec. 16, 1879. For Williams’s notorious career, see Levine, pp. 109–11; Costello, p. 558; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 64–65; Asbury, pp. 217–19; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 204–5; Sante, op. cit., pp. 247–49. Of course, not every senior policeman was a monster. Some, at least, remained essentially benign; among the most renowned was Tom Killilea, a muscular Galway man who ruled over Hell’s Kitchen from the West Forty-seventh Street precinct for more than two decades. “A giant, with a walrus mustache and fists like sacks of sand, who disliked subtlety and lace-edged legalistic fumbling,” Killilea dispensed rough justice to the neighborhood crooks until his retirement in 1892 but always remained, his wife averred, “a meek and gentle Christian.” He expected his men to keep the peace with their bare hands, routinely banning them from carrying revolvers, and “would never have me look on him”—his wife recalled—“when he was splashed [with blood], so he worked out this plan: he would send one of his men before him to our house at Eighth Avenue and 52nd Street. ‘Give my fondest to Mrs. K.,’ he would tell him, ‘and have her run a hot bath. She’s not to come down till I call.’” This arrangement always seemed to work all right. Richard O’Connor, Hell’s Kitchen, pp. 78–79; Meyer Berger, The Eight Million: Journal of a New York Correspondent, pp. 134–136.

BILL DEVERY Steffens, op. cit. I, pp. 327–37; Henry Collins Brown, From Alley Pond to Rockefeller Center, pp. 76–79; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 270–71; Richard O’Connor, Courtroom Warrior, p. 69; Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York, pp. 230–33; Sante, op. cit., pp. 248–49. Captain Herlihy’s “crime,” incidentally, was to raid gambling houses run by men with Tammany connections.

THREAT OF TRANSFERS Levine, pp. 38, 113, 138; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 63–64; McAdoo, op. cit., p. 89; Valentine, op. cit., p. 18.

UNSANITARY STATION HOUSES Willemse, A Cop Remembers, pp. 71, 101, 110. In 1906, during the commissionership of William McAdoo, an inspection identified no fewer than sixteen of the city’s station houses as unsanitary. The list of complaints included old and run-down buildings, poisonous air and lack of ventilation, the lack of proper bathing facilities for men, fifty-year-old bedframes and dormitories “no better than prisons.” The Nineteenth (Satan’s Circus) Precinct, “the most important in New York, maybe in the United States,” looked like “a second-class apartment house,” McAdoo wrote, and, in general, “the policeman of New York spends his time at the station house in the vilest of surroundings, in constant discomfort, and at the risk of his health. Under such circumstances he has little incentive to read anything but sensational newspapers, and to swap stories and gossip about the department. The bad policeman gets the chance here to contaminate the good one, and the whole arrangement makes for demoralization and hopelessness on the part of the rank and file.” McAdoo, op. cit., pp. 134–37.

POLICE HOURS AND THE TWO-PLATOON SYSTEM To add to all the other discomforts, precinct-house beds, Cornelius Willemse explained, were set no more than two feet apart, and when a group of patrolmen turned in after an evening at the saloon, “you could have all kinds of whiffs. If you got sick of Bass’s Ale, you could turn over and might be fortunate enough to get crème de menthe or chartreuse. Flop houses and prisons would have been heaven in comparison to the hell holes the City of New York provided for what they proudly called ‘The Finest.’” Willemse, p. 110; New York Times, Aug. 21, 1902; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 58, 172; Sante, op. cit., p. 244; McAdoo, op. cit., pp. 3, 134–37; Valentine, op. cit., pp. 16, 22, 23, 25. Even police headquarters was little better appointed than an ordinary station house. The old building on Mulberry Street, once the pride of the force, was “dingy, unattractive and not overclean” by Becker’s day, the men within it alternately frozen or half baked, poisoned by coal gas and condemned to work in airless rooms in which the windows were nailed shut. Mulberry Street was finally abandoned in 1905, and the whole staff was transferred to new premises a short way downtown on Centre Street.

TRAINING, ROUTINE PATROLS, ROUNDSMEN, AND SHOO FLIES Levine, p. 39; Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, pp. 96–99; Willemse, A Cop Remembers, p. 88; McAdoo, op. cit., pp. 24, 27; Sante, op. cit., pp. 241, 243.

UNIFORMS AND EQUIPMENT The cost of outfitting a new policeman was considerable—$335 in 1882. Levine, p. 122.

LEVIES AND CONTRIBUTIONS Levine, pp. 137–41, 173–74; Willemse, pp. 124, 155–56; Richardson, op. cit., p. 68.

“COPS PICK UP AN EXTRA DOLLAR…” Willemse, p. 105.

HONEST AND DISHONEST GRAFT George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany sage whose impromptu dissections of political realities were recorded by a reporter named William Riordan a few years later, drew clear and firm distinctions between the two. “Everybody is talkin’ these days,” he said,

about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between dishonest graft and clean graft. There’s all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I’ve made a big fortune out of the game, and I’m gettin’ richer every day, but I’ve not gone in for dishonest graft—blackmailin’ gamblers, saloon-keepers, disorderly people, etc.—and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics.

There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”

Just let me explain by examples. My party’s in power in the city, and it’s goin’ to undertake a lot of public improvements. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before.

Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft.

William Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, p. 3. On the subject of police graft, see Levine, p. 13; Willemse, op. cit., pp. 105, 152, 153; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 15, 137, 274; Sante, op. cit., pp. 237–38; Valentine, op. cit., p. 24. Costigan, wrote Commissioner McAdoo (op. cit., pp. 202–3), was “one of those rare men who are naturally, aggressively, and absolutely honest. He could have been made independently rich in a short time had he wished to do so. He was threatened and bullied and tempted in a thousand ways, and still remained an honest and, if anything, a better man than when he began his work. He was, withal a modest man, who never boasted, and talked little of himself.”

“IT WILL BREAK YOU…” That the commissioner in question was Theodore Roosevelt and that Byrnes eventually proved correct in his assessment makes the quotation even more apposite, for Roosevelt was the bravest, straightest, and most self-confident politician of his day. Morris, op. cit., p. 491.

BECKER’S EARLY CAREER For Becker’s first postings, see the Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915. For Dock Rats corruption, see Levine, p. 217; for the potential for graft, see Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., p. 64, and Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., pp. 949–50.

“AMPLE OPPORTUNITY” Just how corrupt was the NYPD in 1893? According to Jerald Levine, who has studied the question more deeply than anyone, a significant proportion of the force, most of them the older “familymen” for whom police work was a way of life, probably were revolted by the prevalence of dirty graft and fastidiously refused to indulge in such practices themselves. But these same men—bound by the oaths of loyalty they had taken to their colleagues and all too conscious of the damage they could do to their careers—nevertheless ignored transgressions they knew of and so permitted excesses to persist. The remaining members of the NYPD, probably a quarter of the force at least, actively sought out dirty graft. The levels of these men’s corruption varied, depending in part upon their postings, since there were many jobs and several precincts where graft was almost nonexistent. For those with the good fortune or connections to patrol the richest and most sinful districts of Manhattan, though, the opportunities to profit were considerable. Plainly, men serving in districts such as Satan’s Circus had the best opportunities to extract graft from their districts. There was also a hierarchy of corruption within the department. Captains could channel far more in the way of illicit payments into their own pockets than could patrolmen and were consequently much more likely to be corrupt. No more than a handful of those serving in Manhattan in 1893 did not run their precincts as extortion rings for their personal benefit.

BECKER AND CHICAGO MAY May Sharpe, Chicago May: Her Story, pp. 48, 63–64, 76. “I knew big Chicago May,” added reporter Bayard Veiller in his memoirs. “There were a great many distinguished things about [her]. At one time in her career she had been married to two men and lived with both of them at the same time—one working in the daytime and one at night, and May moving from one flat to the other…. She was a big Irish girl with fair hair—not bad looking. She had been married years before to a man named Churchill, so her real name was Churchill, and she always claimed that she was the divorced wife of Police Captain Churchill, to the intense rage of that very able officer…. She was husky, strong as a man, and [she once] picked this suitor up by the seat of his pants and the back of his neck, and threw him down two flights of stairs.” Bayard Veiller, The Fun I’ve Had, pp. 39–40.

CREEP JOINTS AND PANEL HOUSES Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, pp. 71–72.

THE BADGER GAME There were many variations on the game; see Sante, op. cit., p. 186 for several.

HOWE AND HUMMEL Richard Rovere, Howe Hummel: Their True and Scandalous History, pp. 19–37.

MAY AND THE JEWELRY THEFT The pursuit in this case was so fierce that eventually May reached an agreement to give herself up and return most of the jewels to the Jewish salesman she had taken them from: “The Jew got his jewelry, the lawyer was fixed, and the cops were fixed. The Jew said I was not the girl that robbed him, so I was not held, and I walked out.” Sharpe, op. cit., p. 64.

“FIRST APPEARANCE IN THE PRESS” New York Times, Aug. 17, 1895.

“HAD BEEN UNLAWFULLY ARRESTED” New York Journal, Sept. 17, 1896.

“A RESPECTABLE NEW JERSEY MATRON” New York World, July 17, and American, July 31, 1912.

BAIL BOND GRAFT Willemse explains this form of graft in detail in A Cop Remembers, pp. 114–15.

BECKER WAYLAID Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sept. 4, 1896; New York World, July 17, 1912. Becker was fortunate to escape with his life on this occasion; one of the two women attacking him seized his gun from his pocket and attempted to discharge it in his face but was unable to pull the trigger.

SHOOTING OF A BURGLAR The shooting took place on West Thirty-fifth Street, close to Broadway. The policeman who fired the fatal bullet was named Robert Carey. New York Journal, Sept. 21 and 27; Sun, Sept. 21, 1896; World, July 17, 1912; Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915.

NIGHTSTICKS Levine, p. 107; Steffens, op. cit. I, p. 209; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 62, 70; Richardson, op. cit., p. 68; Sante, op. cit., pp. 241, 247.

CHARGED WITH BEATING UP A BOY Logan, p. 112. A few months later, Becker was in the news again, this time for arresting Satan’s Circus prostitutes attempting to take clients into cheap hotels. On this occasion Becker had the full support of his superiors. “The law gives you no such authority,” one girl’s lawyer protested to Captain Chapman of the West Thirtieth Street station. “Then the law should be changed,” Chapman shot back. “And, anyway, I don’t care what the law says about it. My will is all the authority needed in this precinct.” New York Times, June 14, 1897.

“KING” CALLAHAN H. Paul Jeffers, Commissioner Roosevelt, pp. 120–21.

BECKER AND WILLIAMS Logan, p. 112.

INTIMATELY ASSOCIATED WITH THE TENDERLOIN So much so, in fact, that it was he who, two decades earlier, was popularly assumed to have named the famous district. On derivation, see Benjamin Botkin, New York City Folklore, pp. 331–33. The earliest reference known for the origin of the name comes from Clubber’s testimony to the Lexow Committee, which went like this (Lexow, pp. 5569–70):

Q. And in fact that the Tenderloin district is the most notorious district in New York; that is also a lie?

A. No.

Q. You gave it that name, the Tenderloin?

A. No.

Q. How did it originate?

A. Through a newspaper reporter, a man that was on the Sun that used to call on me in the Fourth precinct; when I was transferred to the Twenty-ninth he came up there and asked me how I liked the change; I said, I will have been living on rump steak in the Fourth district, I will have some tenderloin now; he picked it up and it has been named that ever since…. Q. What did you mean by that?

A. Well, I got a better living in the Twenty-ninth.

APPOINTMENT OF THE LEXOW COMMITTEE Lexow, pp. 4–15; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 238–39; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., p. 102; Gabriel Chin (ed.), New York City Police Corruption Investigation Commissions, 1894–1994 I, p. 54; Robert Fogelson, Big City Police, pp. 3–4.

EARLY PROBES INTO NEW YORK CORRUPTION Very little is known about the 1840 investigation, which was held in camera; no report was ever published, and contemporary accounts are based almost entirely on hearsay, the newspapers of the day being reduced to seeking statements from witnesses and officials as they left the inquiry. David Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld, pp. 23–25. For the 1875 investigation, see Theo Ferdinand, in his introduction to the 1972 edition of Augustine Costello’s 1885 Our Police Protectors, p. xi; for 1884, see Morris, op. cit., pp. 235–36, 250–51; Berman, Police Administration, pp. 17–18. Roosevelt’s Committee to Investigate the Local Government of the City and County of New York, Morris notes, heard a million words of testimony and published two weighty reports suggesting that blackmail, extortion, and lax accounting were still widespread in local government and that the police regularly collected “hush money.”

JOHN GOFF Goff had made his name defending Charles Gardiner a few years earlier. For his early career and personality, see Dictionary of American Biography 7, pp. 359–60; Sloat, op. cit., pp. 127–42, 220–21. On his Irish nationalism—he had been a childhood friend of Charles Stewart Parnell—and Fenian activities, see Sloat, op. cit., pp. 249–50, and Peter Stevens, The Voyage of the Catalpa, pp. 170, 174.

LEXOW INVESTIGATIONS Lexow, pp. 16–54; Levine, pp. 210–39; Berman, op. cit., pp. 23–29.

MCCLAVE QUESTIONED For the commissioner’s disgrace, see Sloat, op. cit., pp. 249–65; New York Times, May 25 and July 17, 1894. The Middletown Daily Argus, in upstate New York, observed, “There can be no doubt but that Police Commissioner John McClave resigned because it was getting too warm for him. Charges of corruption were so strongly proved by internal evidence that he had no desire to remain longer on the board.” Argus, July 20, 1894.

SCHMITTBERGER Captain Max’s revelations concerning the protection enjoyed by several upmarket madams whose houses catered to men with real political influence proved to be equally shocking. These “high-toned” establishments were, Schmittberger pointed out, frequently above paying for protection, and it was easy for a man new to a precinct to make the mistake of trying to extort money from them. When Schmittberger had sent one of his men around to the house operated by a madam named Sadie West, he found himself hauled before Police Commissioner Martin that same day and ordered to apologize in person. Then there was Georgiana Hastings, “a very peculiar character” who ran an especially select establishment on Forty-fifth Street. “Some of the gentlemen who visit her house,” Schmittberger offered, “probably would not like to see their names in print…. In fact she keeps a very quiet house, and I was given the tip, so to say, if I didn’t want to burn my fingers, not to have anything to do with her, and I didn’t; I never saw the woman and I wouldn’t know her now if she stood before me.” Costello, op. cit., p. 553; Lexow, pp. 5221, 5573; New York Times, Oct. 16, 1894; Richard O’Connor, Hell’s Kitchen, pp. 127–29; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 103–4; Sloat, op. cit., pp. 361–62; Rachel Bernstein, Boarding-House Keepers and Brothel Keepers in New York City, 1880–1910, pp. 163–74.

WILLIAMS TESTIFIES New York Times, Dec. 27 and 28, 1894; Sante, op. cit., pp. 247–48; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 104–5; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 209–10.

“I GOT TO HAND IT TO YOU…” Logan, p. 115.

NEW YORK UNAWARE OF THE EXTENT OF THE SYSTEM Levine, pp. 214–15; Steffens, op. cit. I, p. 199.

THE ELECTIONS OF 1894 Sloat, op. cit., pp. 391–92, 411, 415–19.

THE NEW POLICE BOARD Morris, op. cit., p. 477; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 109–11; H. Paul Jeffers, Commissioner Roosevelt, pp. 58–74.

REMOVAL OF BYRNES AND WILLIAMS Morris, op. cit., pp. 491–92; Berman, op. cit., p. 51.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE LEXOW INQUIRY It was Tammany’s misfortune that the 1894 elections fell right in the middle of the Lexow hearings. The Hall did its best to rally its shattered forces, sending its agents into the saloons to warn that no man would ever get a beer in New York if the reformers won, and—true to form—offering Goff the massive bribe of $300,000 to stand down as a Lexow counsel. But it was too late. Tammany’s usual tactics were of no avail; Superintendent Byrnes—whether out of a genuine concern for fair play or, as likely, to ingratiate himself with the reformers—ordered the largest reassignment of men in the history of his department, packing half the force off to new precincts on Election Day to limit the prospects for sharp practice. Tammany was so demoralized that even the legendary Paddy Divver, leader of the Second Election District, was not in the city when the polling stations closed. Four years earlier Divver had worked miracles for the Democrats, “raising up the dead to vote.” Now he spent Election Day alone on Long Island, drinking himself into oblivion while the last ballots were tallied and William Strong—who had run on what was called the Fusion ticket—was proclaimed mayor by the decisive margin of 43,000 votes. New York’s Republicans, who generally counted themselves lucky to send three or four assemblymen to Albany, meanwhile triumphed in the state elections, more than quadrupling their representation. Berman, op. cit., pp. 62–91; Morris, op. cit., p. 488; Levine, pp. 239–87; Valentine, op. cit., p. 16.

“ROOSEVELT’S FIRST MONTHS IN CHARGE…” Roosevelt was, of course, only one of four police commissioners—two Democrats, two Republicans—all of whom were nominally equal. But he was elected chair of the board and proceeded to run the department as though he were its head. His fellow commissioners’ disquiet at this state of affairs (Roosevelt encountered stubborn and protracted opposition from Andrew Parker, one of his Democratic colleagues) was in part responsible for the failure of his attempts at reform. Morris, op. cit., pp. 552–58, 561.

ROOSEVELT’S NOCTURNAL EXCURSIONS Not surprisingly, Roosevelt’s encounters with the New York police featured prominently in many of the city’s papers. On one occasion the commissioner discovered Patrolman William Rath taking an illicit supper in an oyster bar. Unfortunately for the policeman, he failed to recognize Roosevelt’s distinctive features and angrily dismissed the man firing questions at him as a crank until his friend the bartender broke in, muttering, in a horrified whisper, “Shut up, Bill, it’s his nibs, sure! Don’t you see the teeth and glasses?” On another late-night excursion, Roosevelt and Avery Andrews chanced upon a patrolman named Meyers standing outside a bar in the very act of accepting a large schooner of lager from the owner. Roosevelt grabbed the policeman from behind, demanding, “Officer, give me that beer!” Instead Meyers leaped like a startled deer, tossed his schooner through the door of the saloon, and made off at full speed without bothering to find out who had accosted him. The commissioner gave chase, calling out, “Hi! Stop there, Officer, stop!” and was gaining on his quarry when the fleeing Meyers turned his head and caught a glimpse of spectacles and prominent teeth gleaming in the moonlight. “Roosevelt!” he squeaked. “Stop running, you fool!” gasped the winded commissioner, and Meyers pulled up, pleading implausibly that his drink had been a ginger ale. “That makes no difference,” his pursuer retorted. “You come down to my office and see me in the morning.” New York Tribune, May 20, 1896; Levine, pp. 246–48; Andrews, op. cit., pp. 119–20; Morris, op. cit., pp. 492–95; Jeffers, op. cit., pp. 105–10.

EXCISE LAW No Puritan himself, Roosevelt was personally sympathetic to the city’s drinking men. But being stubborn, moralistic, and imbued with a sense of righteousness that at least matched Dr. Parkhurst’s, he was convinced that he and his colleagues could not simply ignore statutes they did not believe in. Orders went out to the city’s precincts: Henceforth the excise laws were to be scrupulously observed. Levine, pp. 252–68; Morris, op. cit., pp. 495–512, 529; Berman, op. cit., pp. 108–15; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 116–17; Allen Steinberg, “The ‘Lawman’ in New York,” University of Toledo Law Review 34 (2003), p. 758–59; Sante, op. cit., pp. 134–35, 295. The law in force in 1895, incidentally, had been passed three years earlier by a Tammany administration. It had been voted through first to assuage the upstate religious vote, and second to provide the Hall with a useful weapon for blackmailing recalcitrant bar owners into supporting the Democrats.

PARKHURST’S DEATH Sloat, op. cit., p. 440.

“THE PEOPLE MAY NOT ALWAYS LIKE US…TAMMANY IS NOT A WAVE…” Oliver Allen, The Tiger, p. 189.

TAMMANY TRIUMPHANT Ibid., pp. 190–205; Richard O’Connor, Hell’s Kitchen, pp. 132–33.

BOSS MURPHY AND THE GRAFT Nancy Weiss, Charles Francis Murphy, pp. 59–62.

DEVERY AND THE CENTRALIZATION OF GRAFT Levine, pp. 294–96.

“THAT’S GOT TO STOP…” Brown, op. cit., pp. 76–79; Sloat, op. cit., p. 151, has a different version of the same story. See also Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 120–23.

CHARLES BECKER’S PERSONAL LIFE New York World, July 30, 1912, and July 31, 1915; Sullivan County Democrat, Aug. 6, 1912; Sharpe, op. cit., p. 64; Logan pp. 31, 98, 314–16; Klein p. 395.

BECKER’S LEISURE TIME Helen Becker, “My Story,” McClure’s Magazine, Sept. 1914, pp. 33–34; Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915.

“LIKED BEING A POLICEMAN” Logan, pp. 105–102.

4 . STUSS

THE HOUSE WITH THE BRONZE DOOR Herbert Asbury, Sucker’s Progress, pp. 434, 451–54.

YANKEES Glenn Stout and Richard Johnson, Yankees Century, pp. 3–12, 14–15, 49. Farrell and Devery did not sell out until 1915, when their team was purchased by the noted brewer Jacob Ruppert and a construction millionaire named Tillinghast Hudson for a highly satisfactory $460,000.

“BY 1900…” New York Times, March 9, 1900.

POOLROOMS, CARD SCHOOLS, ROULETTE William McAdoo, Guarding a Great City, pp. 206–8, 219; Luc Sante, Low Life, pp. 156–60, 166–68.

FARO AND STUSS Asbury, op. cit., pp. 3–19; Sante, op. cit., pp. 156–60.

“THE MEDIUM OF THE FIRST EXTENSIVE CHEATING…” Asbury, op. cit., p. 6.

DAN THE DUDE AND NEW YORK’S CON MEN Sante, op. cit., pp. 166–72; David Maurer, The Big Con, pp. 161, 163–64. For Dan the Dude’s real name and involvement with Becker, see the New York Herald, July 24, 1915.

“AN INVESTIGATION” New York Times, March 9, 1900.

CANFIELD’S PROTECTION Henry Chafetz, Play the Devil, p. 331. Canfield, Chafetz adds, made $12.5 million in total from gambling before losing most of his fortune in the financial panic of 1907. He died in 1914 after fracturing his skull in a heavy fall in the New York subway. Ibid, p. 338.

TIM SULLIVAN AND GAMBLING Daniel Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913.” Journal of American History 78 (1991), pp. 547–48, 550–52; Logan p. 61; Chafetz, op. cit., pp. 348.

SULLIVAN’S HESPER CLUB LETTER New York Sun, July 17, 1912.

SULLIVAN’S “GAMBLING COMMISSION” New York Times, March 9; World and Herald, March 10, 1900; Logan, p. 59; Chafetz, op. cit., pp. 341, 348; Sante, op. cit., pp. 172–73. Czitrom, op. cit., pp. 547–48, doubts the existence of the “Syndicate,” at least in the neat terms alleged by the Times. According to Jerald Levine, however, the commission was real enough but was more broadly based than suggested in the press: “Only about eight of the thirty to forty district leaders in Tammany Hall were members of the gambling combine. This clique was a closed corporation and ran things to suit themselves.” Levine, p. 305.

SAM PAUL New York Evening Post, July 17, 1912; Logan, p. 69.

ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN Donald Henderson Clarke, In the Reign of Rothstein, pp. 19–20, 25; David Pietrusza, Rothstein, pp. 2–4, 16, 28, 31–33, 55. Rothstein is generally accepted to have been the model for Nathan Detroit in Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls, and he was certainly caricatured as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby.

ROSENTHAL’S ANTECENDENTS AND YOUTH New York Sun and American, July 17, and New York Times, Aug. 17, 1912; Logan, p. 20, 53; Chafetz, op. cit., p. 398; Viña Delmar, The Becker Scandal, pp. 40–42.

ROSENTHAL THE PIMP An affidavit detailing Rosenthal’s exploitation of his first wife, sworn by Dora herself and solicited by three gamblers at Becker’s behest, was published in the New York Morning Telegraph, July 16, 1912. “I never liked him,” Dora added to a reporter from the World the next day, “and when I married to him I was very young. He wasn’t good to me, that is all.” World, July 17, 1912. According to Sam Schepps, another East Side lowlife, Herman was notorious for trying to pry other prostitutes away from their pimps. “You know we fellows all have lots of girls and they are put out in districts and do the best they can,” he told the American of August 12, 1912. “Rosenthal was always a guy to grab other fellows’ girls, instead of working in his own field…. Rosenthal wouldn’t let the other fellows’ girls alone, but would try to take them for himself.” For more on this phase of Herman’s career, see also Klein, pp. 20 and 377.

HISTORY OF PROSTITUTION IN SATAN’S CIRCUS Brothel owners paid heavily for police protection, and shakedowns and raids were regular and merciless. Only the most popular houses were highly profitable. On top of the fees paid onn opening and each time a new captain arrived in the precinct (see chapter 3), the weekly demand for graft could run as high as $150. Once all these costs were taken into account, the average madam held on to little more than 15 percent of her gross income. Rachel Bernstein, Boarding-House Keepers and Brothel Keepers in New York City, 1880–1910, pp. 121, 124, 135, 167; Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros, pp. 203–5, 207–8, 241, 254, 267, 291, 295; Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, pp. 5, 92–93.

DORA AND THE BOARDINGHOUSE New York Morning Telegraph, July 16, and American, July 20, 1912.

ROSENTHAL’S APOGEE AND DECLINE New York Journal and World, July 17, and Tageblat, July 28 and 30, 1912; Logan, pp. 63–64; Arthur Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community, pp. 25–43, 134.

“FLASHY, GREEDY, LOUDMOUTHED BRAGGART” Lately Thomas, The Mayor Who Mastered New York, p. 411; Delmar, op. cit., p. 4.

SULLIVAN’S TROUBLES Thomas Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants, pp. 4–5, 9–15, 42–46, 93, 99, 115–19, 121.

“TOUCHINGLY GENEROUS” This story was related by Viña Delmar’s father, Charles. Delmar, op. cit., pp. 44–45.

WILLIAM TRAVERS JEROME Richard O’Connor, Courtroom Warrior, pp. 70–71; Allen Steinberg, “The ‘Lawman’ in New York,” University of Toledo Law Review 34 (2003), pp. 753–80; Oliver Allen, The Tiger, pp. 203–4; Asbury, op. cit., pp. 454–55, 458–64.

ROSENTHAL RAIDED “These raids,” noted the Times, “were the first that [Jerome] has undertaken in several years, and were suggestive of his old-time performances.” New York Times, March 21 and Apr. 16, 1909, and Sun and Morning Telegraph, July 16, 1912.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE HESPER CLUB New York Times, Apr. 20, 1911; Thomas Pitkin, The Black Hand, p. 157.

BRIDGEY WEBBER Shoenfeld story #123, Oct. 21, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1782, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem; New York World and Evening Post, July 17, 1912; Klein, pp. 18–21; Logan, pp. 11–12; Sante, op. cit., pp. 127–29. The spellings “Bridgey” and “Bridgie” were used interchangeably by the newspapers of the day; I have preferred the former, the version used by both the World and the Times. By the 1930s, apparently, Webber had taken to calling himself William; see his obituary in the New York Times, July 31, 1936.

SPANISH LOUIS New York Times, June 9, 1912; Logan, p. 25; Patrick Downey, Gangster City, pp. 52–53. Louis’s picture appears in the Times. According to Asbury (a heroically industrious collector of gangland gossip, some of it mostly accurate, the rest much exaggerated), Louis worked for the independent gang leader Humpty Jackson, whose headquarters was an old graveyard on Thirteenth Street. Asbury, The Gangs of New York, pp. 246–47. Downey disputes Asbury’s account of Louis’s origins, accepting his claim to have been born in South America and stating that he had been an active gangster from about the year 1900.

TOUGH TONY Klein, p. 190.

WEBBER’S CAMPAIGN Bridgey was a Tammany district captain for some years and had close connections with several other members of the Sullivan clan—notably Larry Mulligan and Paddy Sullivan—as well as Little Tim. The exact dates of the majority of the incidents noted in this section are not known; they occurred in the period 1909–11. Shoenfeld story #123, Oct. 21, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1782; New York Evening Post, July 17, 1912; Klein, p. 20; Czitrom, op. cit., p. 555. For “Henry Williams,” see The Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Aldermen of the City of New York Appointed August 5, 1912, to Investigate the Police Department [Curran committee], pp. 13–14.

SPANISH LOUIS’S STICKY END The murder took place on April 1, 1910; Downey, op. cit., p. 53. For the circumstances, see New York American, July 18, 1912. Other sources suggest other reasons for it. The killing may possibly have been a consequence of one of New York’s gang wars, but Downey says the attack was ordered by Bridgey Webber in retaliation for the beating Louis had administered to him, which seems most plausible. According to Abe Shoenfeld, an East Side detective with a close knowledge of the criminals of the day, however, the gunman was Louis Rosenzweig, alias Lefty Louie, who “did the job” on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Second Avenue at none other than Rosenthal’s behest. Louie would later be convicted as one of the murderers of Herman Rosenthal; see chapters 8 and 12. Shoenfeld story #124, Oct. 19, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1782.

5. STRONG ARM SQUAD

“KILL A MAN WITH A PUNCH” Logan, p. 31.

OVERDUE PROMOTION Ibid., 112, 114; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., p. 65; Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915.

POLICE AGITATION AND THE TWO-PLATOON SYSTEM In fact, the problem with promotions was worse, and more complicated, than suggested here, since New York’s police commissioners continued to favor certain candidates for elevation and deliberately marked down other, apparently better-qualified men. Sergeant Jacob Brown placed top in the written examination and was rated “excellent” by his captain, and in seventeen years’ service had never been reprimanded or fined, but the commissioners graded him only “fair.” Says Jerald Levine, “The police commissioners graded those they wished to promote 100 per cent while candidates they did not know were uniformly and intentionally marked 60 per cent.” New York World and Tribune, Apr. 13, 1901, New York Times, Apr. 6, and Aug. 21, 1902; Levine, pp. 311–54; James Richardson, The New York Police, p. 282; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 120–23.

“CAPTAINS AND SERGEANTS” Conversation between Becker and a reporter from the New York Times, reported in the Times of Aug. 21, 1902.

“COSTS INVOLVED” It was estimated that more than 1,600 additional officers would be required to run three platoons. Levine, pp. 337–38.

BECKER’S TRANSFERS New York Times, June 30, 1901, and Apr. 6, 1902; Logan, pp. 112, 119. “The high point of police demoralization,” notes Levine, p. 311, “was reached when Tammany began to extort money from policemen for transfers. Beginning in 1900, the officers had to pay $15 to $25 to secure a change of precinct. Policemen desired transfers because they disliked their posts or their commanding officers, or because they wanted to be nearer their homes. Some policemen were transferred frequently, while others were sent from one end of the city to the other, miles from their families. These men, naturally, were willing to pay to be transferred back. Although the rank and file complained often, they did not do so for public consumption.”

BECKER’S PROMOTIONS Levine, pp. 40–41, 47–48; Logan pp. 114–15; Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915.

BECKER, SCHMITTBERGER, AND SCHMITTBERGER’S POST-LEXOW CAREER “With Jews and other Lower East Siders,” observe Lardner and Reppetto of this Solomonic phase of Schmittberger’s career, “[he] developed into a kind of judge or godfather. Men and women would run after him, gesticulating wildly as they scrambled for an opportunity to seek his advice, secure his protection, or gain official forgiveness for petty offenses.” New York Times, June 30, 1901; World, July 17, and American, 31, July 1912; William McAdoo, Guarding a Great City, pp. 158–59;

Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens I, pp. 266–68, 277–79;

Logan, p. 112; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 112, 125–26. 134, 139.

BECKER ASSIGNED TO “GET” SCHMITTBERGER New York Times, Feb. 8 and March 21, 1903; Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915.

BECKER’S RESCUE The circumstances surrounding Butler’s rescue remained controversial for years. A few months later, the supposed sufferer from epilepsy popped up in the New York press, having signed an affidavit to the effect that Becker had paid him $15 to stage the drama before an appreciative audience. The policeman, Butler added nastily, had struggled so badly in the water that he had been forced to help his “rescuer” ashore.

The notion that Becker faked the entire incident is certainly worth considering. Dubious river rescues became so commonplace in the early twentieth century that in 1911 a score of patrolmen were taken out onto the water and required to explain, in detail, how they had effected the rescues they claimed to have made. But in Becker’s case the victim, Butler, withdrew his statement as soon as it was made. The next day he assured anyone interested that the incident had occurred just as the policeman had said, and Becker was able to produce three separate statements from Butler confirming that the rescue had taken place as described. He had been drunk when he signed the affidavit, the victim added, and he had been promised $200 for his signature. And who had paid him such a sum of money? None other than Martin Littleton, apparently, surely not coincidentally Max Schmittberger’s legal representative. New York Times, Sept. 22, 1906; Feb. 9, 1911; and July 30, 1912; Sullivan County Democrat, Aug. 10, 1915; Logan, p. 113. SCHMITTBERGER’S PROMOTION TO INSPECTOR New York Times, March 3 and 4, 1903.

BECKER’S INVESTIGATION OF SCHMITTBERGER IN 1906 New York Times, June 30, July 24, and 28, Aug. 15, and Sept. 22, 1906; Logan, p. 113.

BECKER’S SERVICE IN 1900S New York Times, March 19, 1906, and Jan. 5, 1907; Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915; Logan, p. 115.

BECKER’S DIVORCE Paul and Letitia Becker’s marriage certificate from MBC; for Letitia’s comments, see New York World, July 30, 1912; Logan, p. 98; information regarding family tradition from Mary Becker, personal communication Nov. 20, 2004, author’s files. The World incorrectly named the Beckers’ son as “Harold,” an error picked up by other writers that has prevented his identification until now (see Epilogue).

HELEN LYNCH “My Story, by Mrs. Charles Becker,” McClure’s Magazine, Sept. 1914, pp. 33–44.

MRS. BECKER’S CAREER Helen completed high school and graduated from the normal college. Teaching was, nonetheless, neither prestigious nor well paid; education, indeed, was scarcely recognized as a profession at all. There were no universally accepted standards or qualifications, and conditions were all too often terrible. “A young woman with 56 pupils before her in her classroom,” said Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard, “has a task before her which no ordinary mortal can perform.” Matters were not helped by the fact that New York’s public-school system itself had only come into existence in 1896, and that although Superintendent John Jasper “was famous for his ability to recognize each of the system’s four thousand employees on sight, he never made a major policy recommendation.” Tammany took a hand in many appointments, and the turnover of staff was high. “Tenures were often short—men usually taught only until they found a better-paying job, and women until they married.” David Hammack, Power and Society, pp. 259–303.

BECKER’S CIRCUMSTANCES Becker paid Letitia Stenson alimony from their divorce in 1906 until her remarriage three years later. New York World, July 30; American, July 31, 1912. For circumstances in the Becker household, see McClure’s Magazine, Sept. 1914, p. 36. For Becker’s salary, see the New York World, Aug. 28, 1912.

MAYOR GAYNOR Lately Thomas, “Tammany picked an honest man,” American Heritage, Feb. 1967, and The Mayor Who Mastered New York, pp. 14, 21, 120, 134, 162, 170, 200, 202–26, 260, 290–91, 294–95, 314; Oliver Allen, The Tiger, pp. 217–20; Christopher Thale, Civilizing New York: Police Patrol, 1880–1935, pp. 890–91; David Nasaw, The Chief, pp. 223–24; Allen Steinberg, “Narratives of Crime, Historical Interpretation and the Course of Human Events: The Becker Case and American Progressivism,” in Amy Gilman Srebnick and René Lévy (eds.), Crime and Culture, p. 72. For Gaynor’s long-term distrust of the New York police, see William Gaynor, “The Lawlessness of the Police of New York,” North American Review 176 (1903), pp. 16–19.

“FOUR SQUARE BEHIND THE BILL OF RIGHTS” Gaynor, observed the Globe and Mail, “was a primitive American and really believed in the Bill of Rights. These things did not represent sentimental nonsense to him, nor did he regard them as impractical abstractions.” Cited by Logan, p. 88.

ANECDOTE OF CHARLES CHAPIN Ibid., 24; James McGrath Morris, The Rose Man of Sing Sing, p. 202.

“AS SOON AS I BECAME MAYOR…” Gaynor to the editor of the Daily Record, Long Branch, New Jersey, n.d. (1911–12), cited by Thomas, op. cit., pp. 428–29.

“THE WAY IT WORKED…” Ibid., pp. 262, 411.

NARROWING POINTS OF CONTACT Ibid., pp. 429–30.

WALDO REPLACES CROPSEY Waldo’s wealth came from his wife, who was the widow of the coal magnate John Heckscher. New York Times, May 24, 1911; Thomas, op. cit., p. 353; Logan, pp. 22–24, 116.

NEW SQUADS New York World, March 23, 24, 25, and 28, and Times, March 24, 26, and 27 and June 8 and July 9, 1911; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., p. 159.

HISTORY OF SQUADS AND RAIDING McAdoo, pp. 86–87, 202; Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York, pp. 95–96; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., p. 131; Logan, p. 116; Allen Steinberg, “The ‘Lawman’ in New York,” University of Toledo Law Review 34 (2003), pp. 766–69.

SPECIAL SQUAD New York Times, Aug. 13, 1911; for details of the Car Barn Gang, see Asbury, op. cit., pp. 324–25.

ACTIVITIES OF THE SPECIAL SQUAD New York Times, Aug. 13, 1911.

RAIDS AND AMBITION Becker’s career as a raider ran from October 5, 1911, to the middle of July 1912. New York Times, Feb. 10 and 15, and May 9, 1912; Klein, p. 404; Logan, pp. 45–46, 68–69, 116–18.

COMSTOCK’S RAID Steinberg, op. cit., pp. 758–59.

NEW ACQUAINTANCES For Hawley and Terry, see New York Sun and American, July 17, 1912; Klein, p. 33; Logan, pp. 29–30; for Masterson, see Robert DeArment, Bat Masterson, pp. 1–3, 373–97. There is, DeArment points out, no firm evidence that Masterson ever killed anybody, though he was certainly involved in a number of fights and led a generally exciting life.

POOR PUBLICITY, COMPLAINTS New York Times, Feb. 15, 1912; Logan, pp. 116–17.

EXTENT OF BECKER’S GRAFTING Details of the allegations against Becker—most of which were made by his former collector, Jack Rose (see chapter 7)—and of his hidden bank accounts appeared in the New York World, July 18 and 31, and Aug. 28, 1912; New York Times, March 9, 1900, Aug. 1 and 14, 1912, and Oct. 9, 1947; Sun, July 31, 1912; Klein, p. 428. Details of the bank accounts emerged after searches conducted on the orders of senior banking officials across the city; according to Klein, p. 57, some of the money banked by Becker consisted of “withdrawls from banks whose totals had already been included in the district attorney’s calculation.” Becker put the total at $23,000, which he insisted came from savings and bequests. The protection Becker was able to offer apparently extended to disrupting the work of the other two Strong Arm Squads; the World of July 26, 1912, published a statement by Dan Costigan explaining the circumstances in which Becker had contrived to ruin one of his planned raids. For Honest John Kelly, see Herbert Asbury, Sucker’s Progress, pp. 432–34.

BECKER’S HOUSE This property, the newspapers of the day reported, extended over no fewer than four lots. New York World, July 20, and American, July 21, 1912.

WARNING SIGNS Anon., The Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Aldermen of the City of New York Appointed August 5, 1912, to Investigate the Police Department [Curran committee], pp. 13–14.

“JUST A LITTLE LIEUTENANT” Logan, p. 50.

ROSENTHAL’S DECLINE New York World, July 16 and 17; Post, July 16, 1912; New York Times, July 31, 1915; Logan, pp. 22, 63–67. For the total borrowed from Big Tim, see the affidavit of Sullivan’s assistant, Harry Applebaum, in Klein, p. 410. According to Becker’s statement of July 1915, Sullivan’s interest in the club actually totaled $12,500. Klein, p. 366.

THE SECOND MRS. ROSENTHAL New York World, July 17, 1912; Viña Delmar, The Becker Scandal, p. 4.

BECKER AND ROSENTHAL Rosenthal’s affidavits regarding this relationship—the details of which Becker naturally challenged—appeared in the New York World of July 13, 14, and 17, 1912; see also Klein, pp. 9–12. Logan, p. 43, points out the improbability that Becker had kissed Rosenthal, as was alleged: “The Elks’ Club ball had been a crowded public affair. At the table where Rosenthal and Becker sat were some two dozen other revelers, and all the tables were jammed close together in the big ball room. The drunken kissing scene Rosenthal described would have had hundreds of possible witnesses…. Rosenthal’s affidavit described Becker, a conspicuous man, as ‘waving to the crowd’ while he stood embracing his new friend. This would have been particularly reckless since the guests at the Elks’ Club that night included George Dougherty, deputy police commissioner and head of the department’s detective bureau, who undoubtedly would have caused immediate trouble for any member of the force making a spectacle of himself with a cop-baiting gambler. Yet no casual Elks’ Club customer apparently saw the painful scene.” Becker did not deny being at the same dinner as Rosenthal but said the pair had not sat closely together. It is certainly likely that any business conversation between the two took place away from the ball itself.

BECKER’S FALLING-OUT WITH ROSENTHAL At the time it was reported—and later authors have generally agreed—that Becker’s falling-out with Rosenthal was occasioned by the actions of his press agent, Charles Plitt, who attended a Special Squad raid on March 14, 1912, presumably with the intention of gathering material for the press, and somehow contrived to shoot and kill the janitor of the house in question. See, e.g., New York American, July 18, 1912; Logan, pp. 263–65. When Plitt was arraigned and charged with manslaughter, Becker supposedly made a collection to raise money for his defense, forcing all of the businesses under his protection to pay $500 apiece toward the fund. It was allegedly Rosenthal’s refusal to pay this additional sum that led to the falling-out between the two. The story is not implausible; at least Rosenthal would have been in no position to pay such a sum. But there is no evidence that any defense fund was actually raised for Plitt and, as Klein, pp. 280–89, points out, the press agent was represented at his trial not by an expensive private lawyer but by a public attorney.

RAID ON ROSENTHAL New York World, July 14, and Sun, July 24, 1912; Klein, pp. 10–11.

6. LEFTY, WHITEY, DAGO, GYP

ROSENTHAL’S PREMISES STAND EMPTY Viña Delmar, The Becker Scandal, pp. 4–5.

ROSENTHAL, SULLIVAN, AND WALDO’S BRIBE Klein, pp. 410–11; Logan, p. 231.

POLICE IN THE HOUSE New York Evening Post, July 16, 1912; Logan, pp. 8–9.

ROSENTHAL SQUEALS New York Morning Telegraph, July 16, and American, July 17, 1912; Lately Thomas, The Mayor Who Mastered New York, pp. 411–12; Logan, pp. 10, 63–64, 69, 203–4.

“NO HONORABLE MAN…” Louis Heaton Pink, Gaynor, p. 192.

THE NEW YORK PRESS John Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press, pp. 96–103; David Nasaw, The Chief, pp. 96–103.

“HEARST’S AMERICAN” This was the new title Hearst gave to the old Journal when a burst of patriotism was urgently required in the wake of President McKinley’s 1901 assassination. The murder had been committed by a deranged anarchist inflamed (Hearst’s rivals wasted no time in alleging) by the Journal’s rabble-rousing, left-wing editorials.

JACK SULLIVAN Klein, pp. 181–82; Logan, pp. 203–4.

THE WORLD The newspaper had begun life in 1860 as a religious daily and during the 1880s had been owned by the notorious financier Jay Gould, who treated it as a plaything and took it close to bankruptcy. It began to decline during the 1920s and closed in 1931. For the newspaper in Swope’s day, see E. J. Kahn, The World of Swope, pp. 126–30; Donald Henderson Clarke, Man of the World: Recollections of an Irreverent Reporter, p. 81; my quotations regarding the paper’s style are drawn from Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham, pp. 1151–54.

HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE Clarke, op. cit., pp. 207–8; Kahn, op. cit., pp. 8, 22–23, 109, 115, 117–18, 138, 142–43; Allan Lewis, Man of the World, pp. 4, 6–7, 19–20, 24–25, 27–28. Swope’s apparently individual dress sense, incidentally, was aped; he copied it from Richard Harding Davis, who was previously the most celebrated newsman in the city, and who worked extensively for Pulitzer’s rival, Hearst. SWOPE AND ROTHSTEIN Leo Katcher, The Big Bankroll, p. 45; David Pietrusza, Rothstein, pp. 47–51. Donald Henderson Clarke, in In the Reign of Rothstein, p. 21, observes that “Arnold Rothstein loved to associate with newspapermen, who like to call themselves trained observers. He could always excel these trained observers. With him the power of observation was not a game—it was a matter of life and death.”

“BEING JUST A LITTLE SMARTER…” Pietrusza, op. cit., p. 47.

“ROSENTHAL’S RUINING EVERYTHING” Logan, p. 67. Dave Busteed owned a large gambling house on West Forty-fourth Street; Klein, p. 362.

“THE TROUBLE WITH HERMAN…” New York Evening Post, July 15, 1912.

SOME OF THE GAMBLER’S GROWING RANKS OF ENEMIES According to the testimony of several attendees, the possibility of physically harming Rosenthal was one of the principal topics of conversation at a picnic organized by the Sam Paul Association late in the first half of July 1912. Logan, pp. 69–70.

ROTHSTEIN MEETS ROSENTHAL This is one of the murkiest and least well substantiated episodes of the Becker-Rosenthal affair. The story does not appear in contemporary press reports, and the earliest account of Rothstein’s involvement in the Becker case comes in a passing mention by Clarke, op. cit., pp. 30–31, a contemporary who nonetheless wrote seventeen years after the fact. Even then Clarke merely records that while his subject kept his name out of newspapers and the public eye throughout the period 1910–17, in common “with other gambling house owners, his name was mentioned in connection with the shooting of Herman Rosenthal.” The first detailed descriptions of Rothstein’s meetings with Rosenthal are those cited here, given by Katcher, op. cit., pp. 80–84, and dating from the early 1950s. Katcher was, however, active in the late 1920s, when Rothstein was still alive, knew many of the gambler’s acquaintances, and probably picked up the tale that way. His account is based on interviews with Swope, with Rothstein’s widow, and with Nicky Arnstein, the Bankroll’s longtime right-hand man, but it is undermined to an extent by the attribution of the moniker “Beansy” to Rosenthal (“Beansey” was actually the gambler Sigmund Rosenfeld’s nickname; this error, first made by Herbert Asbury, has since appeared in many books). Clearly the dialogue is, at best, approximate. Nonetheless I think it likely, given Rothstein’s known determination to keep Satan’s Circus gaming running smoothly, that something of the sort must have taken place. Pietrusza, op. cit., pp. 74–75, gives a version of the story based on Katcher and makes the same error with nicknames, suggesting he has no new source of information. Abe Shoenfeld, the private detective, writing only a few weeks after the incident, heard that Rosenthal had been summoned to see Tim Sullivan, not Rothstein, which is also possible. Shoenfeld story #14, p. 7, Oct. 5, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1780, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem.

BALD JACK ROSE New York American, July 20, 1912; Shoenfeld story #122, Oct. 21, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1782; Klein, pp. 18, 20, 31; Henry Chafetz, Play the Devil, p. 401; Logan, pp. 41–42, 46, 75–76, 192, 204; Pietrusza, op. cit., p. 398 n72.

“FINEST POKER PLAYER” New York Sun, Oct. 13, 1912.

HATTIE ROSE Mrs. Rose, detective Abe Shoenfeld recorded, was “a very beautiful woman” who had “conned a sucker” into believing the child she and her husband had was his. This man paid Hattie $200 a month in child support, Shoenfeld added: “He would visit her and oftimes ROSE would be sleeping in one room while MRS. ROSE and the ‘sucker’ would be discussing politics in the other. So it is that ROSE always has an income.” Shoenfeld story #122, October. 21, 1912.

“VAMPIRIC” Indeed, some of the less flattering photographs and drawings of Rose in the newspapers of the period make him look alarmingly like Nosferatu, the famous vampire in the 1922 silent movie of that name, as played by Max Schreck. See particularly the New York Sun for October 13, 1912.

STOOL PIGEON In police custody Rose would indignantly deny he was any such thing. He was not believed. Klein, p. 32.

ROSE AND BECKER This passage is based on Rose’s confession to the police, dated August 6, and Becker’s statement of July 1915 concerning his relationship with Rosenthal and Rose; New York World, Aug. 15, 1912; Klein, pp. 32, 59–62, 361–70. It is noteworthy that Rose’s account places the start of his relationship with Becker at a time when the lieutenant’s squad was engaged in anti-gang, not anti-gambling, work.

DOLLAR JOHN Shoenfeld story #57, Sept. 28, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1781.

ORIGINS OF NEW YORK’S GANGLAND Michael Kaplan, The World of the B’hoys, pp. 1–146; Tyler Anbinder, Five Points, pp. 156, 269–71, 284–89; T. J. English, Paddy Whacked, pp. 18–19. Virtually every author writing on the subject of organized crime in New York has followed the work of Herbert Asbury, whose The Gangs of New York, originally published in 1928, was the first great collection of oral traditions, newspaper reports, and gossip on the subject, but it is important to note that specialists in various areas have shown Asbury to be tendentious or plain wrong. The most recent guide, based in part on archival research but lacking references, is Patrick Dempsey, Gangster City, pp. 1–73. It goes without saying that virtually all accounts of crime and criminals in this period are anecdotal and likely to be inaccurate in important ways, hence my reliance, in this passage, on the more heavily researched and analytical treatments of Kaplan and Anbinder.

“A BULLET-SHAPED HEAD…” Sante, op. cit., p. 221.

“JUST A LOT OF LITTLE WARS…” New York Times, June 9, 1912. This story crops up in several crime books discussing the period, but is usually misattributed to 1917, when Eastman joined the U.S. Army.

SUCCESSORS Downey, op. cit., pp. 11–12, 49–51. Asbury, Downey’s narrative suggests, was wrong to state that Sirocco and Tricker were partisans of Eastman’s. He was also incorrect to speculate that Zelig’s rise to eminence began as early as 1908; according to detective Abe Shoenfeld, his name was rarely heard, even on the East Side, before 1910. Shoenfeld story #14, Oct. 5, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1780. JACK ZELIG New York Sun and World, July 20, and American, Aug. 21, Oct. 6 and 7, 1912; Shoenfeld story #14, Oct. 5, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1780; Downey, op. cit., pp. 51–59.

SELIG HARRY LEFKOWITZ Previous writers on the Becker case have almost always followed Herbert Asbury, who in Gangs of New York, p. 305, states, “Big Jack Zelig’s name was William Alberts. He was born on Norfolk Street in 1882 of respectable Jewish parents, and began his criminal career at the age of 14….” The author probably took his information from a contemporary newspaper, perhaps the extensive coverage of the American of Oct. 7, 1912, which reports many of the statements regarding Zelig’s career that later appeared in Asbury’s book. In fact, Zelig was born on Broome Street a full six years later than Asbury believed, on May 13, 1888, and was thus no more than twenty-four years old when he died in October 1912, as other newspapers of the time record (cf. World, Oct. 8, 1912). According to Patrick Downey, op. cit., p. 51, his parents adopted the name of Alberts, and detective Abe Shoenfeld’s report on Zelig confirms that the gangster called himself “William Albert” occasionally in business, probably because—like other Jewish men who mixed with those from different backgrounds—he saw advantage in the possession of a gentile name. Zelig’s background is discussed by Downey, op. cit., pp. 51–52, and his real name and correct dates are given on his tall and distinctively shaped gravestone, with inscriptions in Hebrew and English, which stands at Section 4, Post 396, Row 3, Grave 4, in New York’s most crowded Jewish graveyard, the Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn.

ABE SHOENFELD Arthur Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community, pp. 79–80, 162–63, 169–72; Jenna Joselit, Our Gang, pp. 9–10, 25; Albert Fried, The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America, pp. 1–7. Shoenfeld’s reports began in August 1912, immediately after Zelig’s murder (see chapter 9).

THE RISE OF THE JEWISH GANGSTER Goren, op. cit., pp. 3–4, 13–14, 25, 142, 145, 159, 161, 180–85; Joselit, op. cit., pp. 2–4, 30–34; Fried, op. cit., pp. 1–43; Rich Cohen, Tough Jews, p. 45; Robert Rockaway, But He Was Good to His Mother, pp. 101–12.

ZELIG’S POWER Zelig’s power has been consistently overestimated in earlier accounts, most of which are based on Herbert Asbury’s telling of his story. For Asbury, Zelig was the principal gang leader in New York between the jailing of Monk Eastman in 1904 and his own death eight years later. In fact, Zelig was only sixteen years old when Eastman went to jail, features not at all in the New York press until the last twelve months of his life, was permanently short of money, and frequently resorted to picking pockets for a living—scarcely the actions of a powerful gang lord. Shoenfeld’s report on Zelig, compiled very shortly after his subject’s death, is my source for the statement that Zelig graduated from petty crime to the role of gang leader only in 1910. Shoenfeld Story #14, Oct. 5, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1780.

MRS. ZELIG New York World, Oct. 8, 1912.

ZELIG’S CAREER Shoenfeld Story #14, Oct. 5, 1912, pp. 1–12. New York Times, June 9, and Evening Post, July 16, and Journal, July 17, and New York World, Aug. 17, 1912; Asbury, op. cit., pp. 305–12; Logan, pp. 170–71, 197; Downey, op. cit., pp. 52–59. INTERNATIONAL CAFÉ Shoenfeld story #6, Magnes Papers P3/1780. Thanks in part to the information supplied in Shoenfeld’s report, the International Café actually was raided on November 19, 1912. It closed down in August 1913 on the death of its owner, Louis Segal.

ZELIG’S ALLEGIANCES For allegiance to Eastman, see Asbury, op. cit., p. 306.

“CUT-PRICE OPERATION” Compare, for example, the “rate card” that Asbury, op. cit., p. 211, reports was discovered on the Whyo gangster Piker Ryan in the 1880s—which, while antedating Zelig’s by some three decades, nonetheless quotes higher prices for most “jobs”:

         

         

LEFTY, WHITEY, DAGO, GYP One of the most peculiar contributions to the stock of information we possess concerning Zelig’s confederates comes from “Datas,” a noted British vaudeville performer whose act revolved around displays of startling feats of memory. Datas (born W. J. M. Bottle) was an otherwise-ordinary man (“He has little more education than the average laborer [and] is scarcely more articulate,” one journalist who knew him wrote) possessed of a freakishly retentive memory for facts, figures, and dates. He had been working music halls on both sides of the Atlantic since 1901—when, according to the biographical sketch penned by Ricky Jay in Learned Pigs Fireproof Women (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1986), pp. 98–101, he “went to work as usual, stoking the furnace at the Crystal Palace Gas Works, and that evening, without so much as a thought of embracing show business, he walked onto the stage of the Standard Music Hall, Victoria. He was a legitimate overnight sensation.” According to his autobiography, published two decades later, Datas was in New York around the beginning of 1912 and carrying $2,000 earned during his most recent engagement in the city. He was, he writes, in the habit of visiting Considine’s infamous saloon (see chapter 8):

One night I noticed a particularly tough lot of customers around the place. Presently old Jem Mace slithered across to me and said: “Don’t look round, Datas, but I want to give you the tip. Have you got that dough on you still?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Why? What’s the trouble?”

“Keep your eyes peeled,” said Jem; “there are some of the boys about, and I’ve heard something. If I were you I’d slope as quickly as you can. It don’t look healthy to me.” I was a young, and by this time fairly strong, fellow. Alas, I was rather intrigued. “What do you know?” I asked, and then he told me all about it.

“You see those two sallow-faced fellows—one of ’em is ‘Gyp the Blood’ and the other is ‘Leftie Louie.’ They are two of the hottest things with guns you have ever seen. The other buck over there is ‘Dago Frank,’ and the one behind him is ‘Whitey Lewis’ and they can all handle a gun like it was their own hand. They may not start any trouble to-night because Becker is here.” Becker, I learned afterwards was Lieutenant Becker of the police. But Jem went on to say that he had heard the gangster saying that they were going to “bump me off” and also that I had been insured for $20,000, and it might be as well if my body could be found floating in New York Harbour.

“They’re after your $2,000,” he assured me quite solemnly, “and they won’t stick at nothing, so if I were you I’d get.” As a matter of fact, I had booked my berth on board the Teutonic, which was to sail three days later, having finished my engagement, and although I felt that there was something wrong about the information, I decided that I would go aboard the next day. In the meantime I regarded the men who had been pointed out to me with more interest. I did not make my observation too conspicuous, but I could not help noticing that there seemed to be quite a friendly atmosphere between Becker of the police and the gangsters. Had I but known it, they were all to perish in the electric chair for one of the foulest murders ever committed—the shooting down of Herman Rosenthal, a gambling-saloon keeper who accused Becker of corruption and graft. Becker was the instigator of the murder, and the rest, together with some others, were all parties to it in return for the blind eye of Becker and his minions on their own activities.

I did not know this, however. And I was rapidly becoming lulled into a sense of security when an incident happened which caused me to change my mind. I had ordered a bottle of ginger beer and it had just been set down on my table when suddenly—Bang, and off went the top of it. Gyp the Blood had simply pulled a gun and shot it from a distance of about seven yards. It was a wonderful shot, and everyone started up in alarm, but I guess there was nobody more alarmed than I was. But I take credit that I did not show it. Instead I laughed, and just poured out my drink and took a good draught.

A few moments later Jem slid over to me again. “Cut it, son,” he whispered. “Get out right now. That was done to try and rattle you into making a fight, and if you had they would have said you started a rough house and got shot in the scrap which followed.”

This time I decided that it might be discreetly valiant to make a dignified departure. I did not hurry, but took the opportunity when nobody was looking to slip out, and away. I did not go back to my hotel, but made straight for the docks. I went aboard the Teutonic, where I explained to the captain what had happened. I learned afterwards that the moment I was missed from the saloon, “Leftie Louie” had made off to intercept me on my way to the hotel. So it is just as well that I did not go there. (Datas, The Memory Man, By Himself [London: Wright Brown, n.d. (1932)], pp. 22–29.)

This is a wildly improbable tale—even the prosecution at Becker’s murder trial advanced no evidence that he had ever met the gunmen; Gyp’s dangerous but barely remarked-on gunplay in a crowded saloon scarcely rings true; and the difficulties New York gangsters would experience in insuring and collecting on the suspicious death of a British citizen would surely be legion—but the use Datas makes of the case is, if nothing else, indicative of the grip that Becker’s story exerted on the public as late as the 1930s, when his book was published. There is no reason to doubt that the performer was in New York around the date stated, though, nor that he knew a good deal about Becker. According to Jay, “Datas had a peculiar penchant for morbid trivia and his passions, both private and public, were murders, hangings and disasters. When he traveled to a new town on his music hall tours, he would start each day at the police station to learn of crimes and accidents, and then spend a few hours at churches, museums, etc., which was all he needed to make his act topical.”

CHARLES WHITMAN Biographical details from Dictionary of American Biography supplement 4 (1946–50), pp. 884–85; Logan, pp. 31–32, 47–49.

FIRST ATTEMPTED MURDER New York Journal, July 17, and Sun and New York Times, Aug. 1, 1912; Kahn, op. cit., p. 146; Klein, pp. 118–19, points out that the four gunmen, when tried, denied that this incident had ever taken place.

ROSENTHAL’S AFFIDAVIT New York World, July 13, 1912.

SWOPE AND WHITMAN New York Sun, July 15, 1912; Kahn, op. cit., pp. 146–47;

Logan, pp. 48–49; Lewis, op. cit., p. 29.

ROSENTHAL’S SECOND ENCOUNTER WITH ROTHSTEIN New York American, July 16, 1912; Katcher, op. cit., pp. 83–84.

“ALL QUITTERS” New York Tribune, July 13, 1912.

WHITMAN’S STATEMENT OF JULY 15 This statement appeared in the first editions of most New York papers of July 16, 1912. For reasons that will soon be clear, it was no longer news by the time later editions were printed.

“IT WAS IN THE AIR…” Chafetz, op. cit., p. 403.

“YOU’LL FIND ME DEAD…” Meyer Berger, The Eight Million: Journal of a New York Correspondent, p. 139.

“YOU MAY LAUGH…” Logan, p. 52.

“BETTER MEN THAN I AM…” New York Journal, July 16, 1912.

MEETING AT SEVEN New York American, July 17, 1912. Whitman would later allege that Rosenthal was due to appear before a grand jury on the morning he was murdered; this appears to be a post hoc statement designed to avert questions regarding his own hostility to the gambler before his death. Whitman to Waldo, July 18, 1912, in New York World, July 19, 1912.

7. “GOOD-BYE, HERMAN”

THE METROPOLE HOTEL This was the hotel immortalized in Cole Porter’s song “Ace in the Hole.” James Morton, Gangland: The Early Years, p. 114.

ROSENTHAL AT THE METROPOLE New York American, Sun, World, and Journal, July 17, 1912; Logan, pp. 5–15. Newspaper accounts differ considerably in the small details of events at the hotel. Only a few of the discrepancies are material, however. They will be discussed later.

ROSENTHAL’S INTENTIONS Klein, pp. 419, 425, 427. According to a statement Rosenthal gave to the World—which was not published until the day after the murder—“There is only one man in the world who can call me off, that is the big fellow, Big Tim Sullivan, and he is as honest as the day is long and I know he is in sympathy with me. He don’t want to see anybody hurt. My fight is with the police. It is purely personal with me. I am making no crusade and my friends know all about it. I am not going to hurt anyone else, and if I can’t go through with this without bringing anyone else in, I’ll quit.” New York World, July 17, 1912.

THE CONSIDINES May Sharpe, Chicago May, p. 47; Leo Katcher, The Big Bankroll, pp. 25, 109; David Pietrusza, Rothstein, p. 93.

ROSENTHAL’S COMPANIONS The identity of Rosenthal’s companions is uncertain. The American of July 17, 1912, identifies them as gamblers by the names of “Big Judge” Crowley, Sandy Clemons, and “MacMahon.” Logan, p. 7, says the three were “Fat Moe” Brown, “Butch” Kitte, and “Boob” Walker, the last named of whom was a hoodlum who often worked as an enforcer for Bridgey Webber. Webber, in a statement to Deputy Police Commissioner Dougherty, said there were actually four men at Herman’s table and named them as “Boob Walker, Hickey, Butch and Moe Brown.” Klein, p. 19.

MURDER SCENE New York Times and World, July 17, 1912; Klein, p. 130; Logan, pp. 13–14.

TAXI STAND CLEARED New York World, July 22 and 28, 1912. At Becker’s trial that October, the prosecution would imply that one of the mysterious men employed in clearing the line was none other than Charles Becker. This was plainly not the case; several people could give the lieutenant an alibi for about this time. Klein, p. 184.

ROSENTHAL’S MURDER AND AFTERMATH An interview with the New York coroner regarding Rosenthal’s autopsy, in the New York American, July 18, contradicts numerous earlier reports that the gambler had been shot five times, which have been accepted by earlier writers on the case. Several of the dead man’s wounds had in fact been caused by fragments of the two bullets that did hit him. For the details of the murder itself and its aftermath, see New York Times and World, July 16 and 17; Evening Post and Sun, July 16; Journal, July 17, 1912; Klein, pp. 7–8, 315; Logan, pp. 14, 16, 20; Jonathan Root, The Life and Bad Times of Charlie Becker, p. 15.

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT Alexander Woollcott, While Rome Burns, p. 212.

WEBBER LEAVES THE SCENE Klein, p. 28–30.

POLICE RESPONSE New York World, July 16; American, July 17; Journal, July 20, 1912.

NUMBER PLATES New York Sun, July 16 and 17; World, July 17; American, July 18, 1912.

MURDERERS’ DESCRIPTION AND THE POLICE BLOTTER The Sixteenth Precinct blotters were kept in the station house basement at West Forty-seventh Street for years; they were mined by Meyer Berger for an article published in his The Eight Million, pp. 138–39.

CHARLES GALLAGHER New York World, July 17; American, July 18, 1912.

WORD OF THE MURDER SPREADS New York Times, World, Sun, American, and Tribune July 17, 1912; Allan Lewis, Man of the World, p. 30; E. J. Kahn, The World of Swope, p. 148; Berger, op. cit.; Klein, pp. 14–17; Logan, pp. 22–24, 28–33.

LIFTS HOME Becker had the use of the car loaned to him by Colonel Sternberger of the Twenty-two second Regiment. His companions were Deacon Terry, the American reporter, and Jacob Reich ( Jack Sullivan), the newspaper distributors of whom more below. New York American and Sun, July 18, 1912.

MRS. ROSENTHAL New York American, July 16 and 17, 1912. According to the American, Mrs. Rosenthal alleged that her husband had gone to the Metropole to keep an appointment with Charles Becker. This allegation did not appear elsewhere and was never picked up by the district attorney or used in Becker’s trials. It was almost certainly a fabrication. But, if true, the allegation would be a vital piece of evidence in favor of the lieutenant’s guilt.

HAWLEY AND BECKER Klein, p. 180, 242.

ARREST OF LIBBY New York American, July 18, 1912. The Post of July 16 suggests that Libby was arrested as he was leaving the garage.

BECKER, THE BODY, AND WHITMAN’S STATEMENT New York World, July 17, 1912; Logan, pp. 36–38.

EVENTS OF JULY 16 New York Post and Sun, July 16; New York World, American, Journal, and Times, July 17 and 18, 1912. “I WAS CERTAINLY SURPRISED…” New York American, July 18, 1912.

WHO DROVE THE CAR Libby and Shapiro, it transpired, worked alternate shifts as drivers of the taxi. Libby took the daylight hours and Shapiro the night. Libby, rather than Shapiro, had returned the car to the garage after the shooting simply because Shapiro was so apprehensive about his role in the murder that he drove directly to Stuyvesant Square to tell his partner what had happened. He then begged Libby to return the vehicle to the garage for him. Ibid.

ONLY GIVE A STATEMENT TO THE DA No doubt the two chauffeurs also wanted to make sure they were not seen to be betraying Rosenthal’s murderers. “We don’t want to queer anybody else,” Shapiro emphasized in a statement given to the New York American ( July 17, 1912). “We’ll get out of this trouble all right. Nobody has squealed.”

“MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD…” New York World editorial, July 17, 1912.

“I ACCUSE…” New York Journal and World, July 17, 1912.

8. RED QUEEN

ROSENTHAL’S FUNERAL New York World, July 19, 1912; Horace Green, The Log of a Noncombatant, p. 49; Viña Delmar, The Becker Scandal, pp. 64–65.

NUMBER PLATE NOT CONCEALED According to the World of July 18, 1912, the plate had indeed been pushed partly behind the Packard’s rear lamp, partly obscuring the number. The fact that two witnesses did correctly identify its number shows that this attempt at concealment—if it was made at all—was ineffective.

“NEVER IN THEIR HISTORY…” Logan, pp. 121–22, who gives these statistics, adds that “someone once calculated that the World devoted more space to the testimony of one witness [Jack Rose] at Becker’s first trial…than it had to the sinking of the Titanic the previous April.”

“A CHALLENGE TO OUR VERY CIVILIZATION” Ibid.

EDITORIALS AND CARTOONS New York World, July 17, and American, July 19, 1912. SWOPE’S STORY E. J. Kahn, The World of Swope, p. 144. Although never acknowledged, the reporter’s motives in becoming so involved in the Rosenthal affair may have included a desire to avenge one of Becker’s raids, conducted on a club on West Forty-fifth Street operated by Arnold Rothstein and frequented by Swope. See Allen Steinberg, “The Becker Case and American Progressivism,” in Amy Gilman Srebnick and René Lévy (eds.), Crime and Culture, p. 76.

WHITMAN’S AMBITION “The consequences of the Becker case were legion,” the legal historian Allen Steinberg observes. “It made Charles Whitman the oftcopied model of what an ambitious prosecutor in New York can achieve.” Steinberg, “The Becker-Rosenthal Murder Case: The Cop and the Gambler,” in Frankie Bailey and Steven Chermak (eds.), Famous American Crimes and Trials, p. 263. From this perspective, at least, the DA’s successors certainly include Rudolph Giuliani, a onetime U.S. Attorney and later New York mayor.

SCHIEFFELIN’S COMMITTEE Logan, pp. 93–94.

WALDO’S CONFERENCE Ibid., p. 77.

CONFLICTING TESTIMONY New York World, July 16, 18, and 21, American, Sun, Journal, and Herald, July 16, 1912; Logan, pp. 70, 93.

SHAPIRO’S CONFESSION New York Journal, July 17, Sun, July 18, World, July 18 and 20, and American, July 19, 1912; Klein, p. 18.

HARRY VALLON Shoenfeld story #126, Oct. 21, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1782; Logan, pp. 94–95.

SAM SCHEPPS Born in Austria, a known gambler and a messenger for Rose, Schepps—reported Abe Shoenfeld—“traveled a great deal and smokes so heavily he is known as ‘the cigarette fiend.’” Shoenfeld story #125, Oct. 21, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1782.

GAMBLERS CONVENE AT BATHS New York American, July 24 and 25, 1912.

WHITMAN AND WALDO New York World, July 18, and American, July 18 and 20, 1912.

WEBBER QUESTIONED New York World and Evening Post, July 17, 1912; Klein, pp. 18–19.

ROSE AT HEADQUARTERS New York Evening Post, July 18, and World, Tribune, and American, July 19, 1912; Klein, pp. 20–22; Logan, pp. 75–76.

ROSE AND BECKER IN DOUGHERTY’S OFFICE New York World, Aug. 4, 1912; Klein, pp. 52–55.

BECKER’S INTIMATIONS REGARDING ROSE Rose, too, had drawn some dangerous conclusions from his encounter with Becker at headquarters. According to the gambler’s own account, the lieutenant had sworn that no harm would come to any of the men who disposed of Rosenthal. The “awful look” that Becker had shot at him convinced Bald Jack that that guarantee was void and he was “to be jobbed and made to stand for the whole thing.” Whether or not there was any truth in this, Rose plainly saw that there was now little to be gained by staying silent. “I knew I would get a ‘square deal’ from Whitman,” he continued, “so I waited until things shaped up right and then told him.” Klein, p. 55.

“DO YOU WANT ME TO ARREST LIEUTENANT BECKER?” Logan, p. 92.

PAUL, VALLON AND SULLIVAN ARRESTED New York World, July 23, 1912; Klein, pp. 23–25.

“BROUGHT INTO COURT” This was a hearing before the New York coroner, Feinberg, who in this case acted as a magistrate. New York Herald, World, and Tribune, July 23, 24, and 25, 1912; Klein, pp. 28–32.

“I’LL BE OUT IN FIVE MINUTES” New York World, July 22, 1912.

“A SYMPHONY IN BROWN” New York World, July 23, 1912. Rose, the Sun had predicted as early as July 18, would have a significant advantage over his fellow prisoners, possessing as he did the “gift of language.”

GAMBLERS QUESTIONED New York World, July 24 and 25, and American, July 25, 1912; Delmar, op. cit., p. 70.

SHAPIRO’S NEW CONFESSION New York World, July 26, 1912; Klein, pp. 26–27.

“EVERYBODY KNOWS” Logan, p. 77.

EXPOSURE OF THE COSTS OF BECKER’S HOME New York World, July 20 and 21, American, July 21, and Times, July 30, 1912. It is possible that these revelations were in some way connected to the mysterious ransacking of the offices of Becker’s lawyer shortly beforehand. Numerous documents relating to the lieutenant’s affairs went missing as a result of this burglary. American, July 21, 1912.

EXPOSURE OF BECKER’S GRAFTING New York World, Aug. 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, and 28, 1912.

BECKER’S CLAIMS REGARDING THE SOURCE OF HIS WEALTH New York Times, July 30, 1912.

SUMS RAISED FOR TAMMANY It would appear that under normal circumstances Tammany received 50 or 60 percent of the total extorted from the vice trade, the balance being retained by the police. Becker seems to have raised a total of at least $900,000 between October 1911 and the Rosenthal murder. Rose’s calculation was that the total was far higher—as much as $2.5 million. Klein, pp. 52–53.

SENATOR FITZGERALD Logan, p. 79.

WALDO’S BACKING New York World, July 20, 1912.

MAYOR GAYNOR’S VIEWS Lately Thomas, The Mayor Who Mastered New York, pp. 415, 421; Logan, p. 95.

“SWAGGERING…VERY LIGHTLY” New York American, July 20, 1912.

SIGNS OF TROUBLE AHEAD Ibid. and Sun, July 27, 1912; Logan, pp. 92–93. BECKER AND TIM SULLIVAN One of the revelations in Klein’s book was that Sullivan had summoned Becker to a meeting on the day before Rosenthal was murdered and promised the lieutenant that he would use his influence to keep the gambler quiet. In return, Becker agreed not to drag Tim’s name into the affair—a vow he kept long after the Boss’s death and through two trials for murder. In fact, Sullivan’s name was never mentioned by a single witness in either of the murder trials, a silent testimony to the influence even a failing Big Tim wielded at that time. Becker finally acknowledged his meeting with Sullivan in an affidavit made only a few days before his execution in July 1915. Klein, pp. 408–20 for Sullivan’s decline. Daniel Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913.” Journal of American History 78 (1991), pp. 556–58; Alvin Harlow, Old Bowery Days, pp. 519–20.

“TO LET BECKER BEAR THE BRUNT OF THINGS…” Logan, p. 80.

STRONG ARM SQUAD BROKEN UP New York American, July 20, 1912.

“STERN LINES IN HIS FACE…” Ibid.

SUPPOSED SUICIDE Logan, p. 78.

ADVISED NOT TO TESTIFY New York Sun, July 26, 1912.

RED QUEEN New York Tribune, July 19, 1912.

NEW PRECINCT New York World, July 23, 1912.

“ROUNDSMAN’S WORK” New York American, July 23, 1912.

DOUGHERTY DISCUSSES CHARGES New York Sun, July 21, and American, July 29, 1912.

COSTIGAN TESTIFIES New York World and Globe and Mail, July 26, 1912.

SHAPIRO’S MEMORY IMPROVES New York World and Sun, July 20, 22, and 26, 1912.

“BIG FISH, SMALL FISH” New York World, July 26, 1912; Klein, pp. 38–39.

FRAME UP DISCUSSED New York World, July 30, 1912; Klein, pp. 182–83, citing Becker trial transcript (evidence of Jack Sullivan); Logan, p. 205. According to Logan, the chief witness to the conversation of the imprisoned gamblers was Bridgey Webber’s attorney, Harford Marshall, who resigned from the case in consequence. In Marshall’s later recollection, Webber’s comment had been, “If what he wants is Becker, we’ll give him to him on a platter.” Logan, pp. 125–26.

SLEEPING IN THE SUITE New York Times, July 30, 1912.

BECKER COMPLETES WORK ON HIS HOUSE “My Story, by Mrs. Charles Becker,” McClure’s Magazine, Sept. 1914, pp. 34, 36.

“POUNDING ONE AGAINST THE OTHER…” New York Sun, July 30, 1912.

GRAND JURY ASSEMBLED New York American and World, July 30, 1912.

GAMBLER’S TESTIMONY Rather unusually, given Whitman’s avid courting of publicity, the gamblers’ statements to the grand jury were made in a closed session and the DA refused to divulge the details of their testimony. Reporters for the various dailies experienced little difficulty in reconstructing what was said, however. New York Times, World, and Sun, July 30, 1912.

SAM PAUL RELEASED Paul would play no further part in Becker’s story or the coming trials, although, as Andy Logan pointed out after a long study of all the depositions in the case, “he had taken part in the last minute planning in Bridgey Webber’s poker rooms and probably had delivered three of the gunmen [Gyp the Blood, Lefty Louie, and Whitey Lewis] there.” Logan, p. 125.

BECKER ARRESTED New York Times, World, American, and Sun, July 30, 1912. WEATHER CONDITIONS AT THE CRIMINAL COURT New York Times, July 30, 1912.

BECKER ARRAIGNED FOR MURDER Ibid. and World and Herald, July 30, and American, July 30 and 31, 1912.

9. TOMBS

DESCRIPTION OF THE TOMBS The original Tombs building, with its Egyptian columns, was torn down in 1897 and replaced by an equally forbidding structure. Meyer Berger, The Eight Million, pp. 23–35, 51–53, 57; Logan pp. 100–101, 104. Problems with settling, endemic to both prisons, were not solved until well after Becker’s time, when a third structure was erected on the site and concrete caissons, extending to bedrock 140 feet below the ground, were let into the foundations.

HELEN BECKER AND THE TOMBS “My Story, by Mrs. Charles Becker,” McClure’s Magazine, Sept. 1914, pp. 34–36.

BECKER’S VIEW OF THE TOMBS Logan, p. 138.

POLICE SHOCKED New York American and Times, July 30, 1912.

WALDO AND DOUGHERTY HEAR THE NEWS New York Tribune, July 30 and 31, 1912; Logan, p. 128.

DAGO FRANK CAPTURED New York Sun and World, July 26, 1912. This arrest took place on July 25, four days before Becker’s arraignment. According to the Sun, the police had been following Rose Harris since the night of the murder. The Times and other papers agreed that the arrest was the result of a tip. Cirofici’s brother and another man were also in the room and were both detained as material witnesses.

MURDER OF VERELLA New York Times, July 31, 1912.

CAPTURE OF WHITEY LEWIS New York World, Aug. 2, 3, and 4, 1912. According to Lewis’s improbable tale, he was actually waiting at the railway station for a New York train so he could return to the city and give himself up.

“WHEN THAT EXTRA…” Vina Delmar, The Becker Scandal, p. 76.

THE HUNT FOR GYP THE BLOOD AND LEFTY LOUIE New York World, Aug. 2, 4, 10, and 17, and Times, Aug. 25, 1912; Logan, pp. 132, 163.

CAPTURE OF GYP AND LOUIE New York World and Sun, Sept. 15, 1912; Patrick Downey, Gangster City, pp. 60–61.

WHITMAN ACCUSES Klein, p. 82.

ZELIG TRACED New York Times, Aug. 20 and 21, 1912.

ZELIG BEFORE THE GRAND JURY New York Sun, Aug. 21, 1912; Klein, pp. 82–85; Logan, pp. 136–37.

LEAKS Klein, p. 93–94.

THREATS Klein, p. 57–58. Both men firmly believed that the threats against them had originated with Becker, though the lieutenant’s partisans argued that they could just as easily have come from other gamblers.

BALD JACK’S CONFESSION New York World, Aug. 4, 11, and 15, 1912; Klein, pp. 59–71.

CORROBORATING WITNESSES Allen Steinberg, “The Becker Case and American Progressivism,” in Amy Gilman Srebnick and René Lévy (eds.), Crime and Culture, pp. 79–80.

SAM SCHEPPS New York American, Aug. 12, and World, Aug. 13 and 14, 1912; Shoenfeld story #125, Oct. 21, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1782; Klein, pp. 72–79.

“MURDER PAYMASTER” Logan, pp. 156, 161.

IN THE WEST SIDE PRISON New York American, July 31, Aug. 1, and Nov. 21, 1912; Klein, pp. 86–87; Logan, pp. 129, 155, 218.

JAMES L. SULLIVAN AND MAX STEUER New York World, July 30, 1912; Klein, p. 79. Steuer had won an acquittal for the owners of the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist factory when they were tried for causing the deaths of so many of their workers in the dreadful fire of 1911 (thus proving, as Andy Logan tartly observed, “that the deaths of 145 young garment workers were all their own fault.” Logan, pp. 124–25). The district attorney at the time, of course, was Whitman.

“GREATEST CRIMINAL LAWYER OF HIS TIMES” New York Times, Aug. 22, 1940.

BECKER’S LAWYERS New York World and American, Aug. 6, 1912; Lloyd Stryker, The Art of Advocacy, pp. 40–41, 163; Logan, pp. 156–57.

HELEN BECKER HELPS HER HUSBAND New York World, Aug. 28, 1912; “My Story, by Mrs. Charles Becker,” McClures Magazine, Sept. 1914, p. 36; Viña Delmar, The Becker Scandal, pp. 96–98, 111–12; Logan, p. 118. Helen Becker, Delmar added, contrasted vividly in her mind with Lillian Rosenthal, whom her father liked to defend (“There are women who are not given the chance to fight for their husbands. Who knows what Lillian would have done for Herman?”). “My private opinion,” she wrote, “was that Lillian would have wept and fainted and been totally inept at the desperate business of trying to save Herman’s life.”

“THEY HAVE NO ONE TO TESTIFY…” Testimony of James Hallen in Becker’s first trial. Hallen, a convicted swindler, added that Becker continued: “After this sensation is passed over, they will give me a pension for killing that damn crook Rosenthal.” Whatever Hallen’s believability, the comments he attributed to Becker regarding the unreliability of criminals’ evidence reflect the lieutenant’s known opinion. That Becker would have gone on to openly confess to a murder he had just pleaded not guilty to, while sitting in prison, within earshot of numerous other prisoners, strikes me as considerably less likely. Hallen’s reliability as a witness was certainly undermined by the manner in which he gave his evidence, reading notes he said he jotted down at the time on a sheet of yellow legal paper. Under cross-examination, Hallen—a disbarred lawyer by then serving a four-year sentence for forgery—said he could not remember how he had come by such a pad. The judges in the court of appeals were especially scathing about his testimony. Klein, pp. 173–74.

MURDER BY PROXY, TWICE REMOVED This was one of the chief criticisms of the appeals court judges who looked at Becker’s original conviction; see 210 NY 274.

FRANK MOSS Steinberg, op. cit., p. 78.

GOFF’S PROBE OF THE BECKER LETTERS; OTHER COMMITTEES Logan, p. 163; Anon (ed.), “Report of the Citizens’ Committee Appointed at the Cooper Union Meeting, August 12, 1912,” pp. 1–34.

CURRAN COMMITTEE Henry Curran, Pillar to Post, pp. 152–54, 162–74; Steinberg, op. cit., p. 79.

GOFF APPOINTED TO TRY THE CASE New York Times, Aug. 16, 1912; Logan, p. 159.

LIFE AND REPUTATION OF JOHN GOFF New York Times, Nov. 10, 1924; Dictionary of American Biography 7, 359–60; Stryker, op. cit., pp. 66–70; Logan, pp. 157–60; Steinberg, op. cit., p. 78.

“THE MOST ODIOUS VICE…” Stryker, op. cit., p. 67. The phrase is from Macaulay.

EARLY TRIAL DATE New York Times, Sept. 6, 1912; Klein, pp. 92–93.

“PROBABLY THE SHORTEST…” Logan, p. 160.

VIÑA DELMAR’S FAMILY Delmar, op. cit., pp. 96–99, 112–13.

COUPE AND MASTERSON Logan, pp. 160–63.

ZELIG’S ANTICIPATED TESTIMONY New York Times, American, World, and Sun, Oct. 7 and 8, 1912; Logan, pp. 171–73. Whitman later conceded that he had been “misquoted” in claiming Zelig as his witness. He had meant—he said—to imply he expected to obtain useful evidence from the gangster on cross-examination, if he appeared for the defense. Whether a man in Zelig’s peculiar position was really likely to give honest testimony regarding his ability and willingness to hire out gunmen to commit murder was not mentioned by the advocates on either side.

ZELIG’S DEATH, DAVIDSON’S GUN The gangster survived the shooting for a few minutes and actually died in an ambulance on his way to the hospital. New York American, Times, World, and Sun, Oct. 6, 1912; Shoenfeld story #14, Oct. 5, 1912, pp. 14–15, Magnes Papers P3/1780; Downey, op. cit., pp. 61–64.

CONTENTS OF ZELIG’S POCKETS New York Sun, Oct. 6, and Times, Oct. 8, 1912.

HORSE POISONER Jenna Joselit, Our Gang, p. 36; Albert Fried, The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America, p. 35.

ZELIG’S FUNERAL Shoenfeld story #14, Oct. 5, 1912, pp. 16–17, Magnes Papers P3/1780; New York Times, Oct. 8, 1912; Delmar, op. cit., p. 113. Delmar is the source for “forty coaches” Shoenfeld lists details of the hirers of thirty-five of them

DAVIDSON’S SENTENCE New York American, Oct. 31, 1912.

10. FIVE MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

WHITMAN’S OPENING STATEMENT New York Evening Post, Oct. 10, and Times and World, Oct. 11, 1912; Logan, p. 178.

DESCRIPTION OF THE COURT HOUSE Frances Nevins, “Mr. Tutt’s Jurisprudential Journey: The Stories of Arthur Train,” in Legal Studies Forum 19 (1995), p. 59. The quotation is an extract from one of the “Ephraim Tutt” short stories Train turned to writing after a career as an assistant district attorney in the first decade of the twentieth century.

NEWSPAPER COVERAGE Allen Steinberg, “The Becker-Rosenthal Murder Case: The Cop and the Gambler,” in Frankie Bailey and Steven Chermak (eds.), Famous American Crimes and Trials, p. 257.

BECKER ON THE MORNING OF THE TRIAL Jonathan Root, The Life and Bad Times of Charlie Becker, p. 127.

BECKER’S VIEWS ON JURY SELECTION New York Sun, Oct. 8, 1912.

JURY SELECTION Ibid. and World, Oct. 8, 1912.

“A REPUTATION FOR BEING WILLING…” Logan, p. 176.

GOFF URGES SPEED Lloyd Stryker, The Art of Advocacy, p. 68; Nevins, op. cit., p. 60.

EVENING QUESTIONING New York Sun and Evening Post, Oct. 13, 1912; Klein, pp. 134–41; Logan, pp. 191–94.

TEMPERATURE, FANS New York Times, World, and Sun, Oct. 13, 1912.

“HAVE THE SHADES DRAWN LOW” Stryker, op. cit., p. 66.

“SAINT-LIKE SON OF A BITCH” Logan, p. 173.

“BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ” Ibid.

GOFF BIOGRAPHY For Goff’s character and career, see New York Evening Post, Feb. 1, 1913, and Times, Nov. 10, 1924; Dictionary of American Biography pp. 7, 359–60.

“A SUFFERER FROM ULCERS…” Logan, p. 184.

“MR. MCINTYRE WAS MANY TIMES OVER-RULED” New York Sun, Oct. 8, 1912. THREATENED WITH ARREST Ibid.

BECKER’S APPEARANCE Ibid. and New York American, Oct. 8, 1912.

“SMALL, CHARMINGLY FEMININE AND CHEERY” New York Tribune and World, Oct. 11, 1912.

HELEN MOVED “My Story, by Mrs. Charles Becker,” McClure’s Magazine, Sept. 1914, p. 36.

FIRST WITNESSES New York Times, Oct. 11, 1912; Klein, p. 97–99. “The writer,” Klein adds, speaking of himself, “met Krause many times after Becker’s second trial…and wouldn’t believe him under oath.”

PAID $2,5000 New York Times and American, Oct. 12, 1912.

BECKER NOT MENTIONED New York Sun, Oct. 12, 1912.

THE FOUR GUNMEN PARADED Logan, pp. 181–82. Jack Sullivan was also included in this parade; Klein, pp. 98, 101.

“WILD ANIMAL” New York World, Oct. 12, 1912.

“THIS IS A COURT OF JUSTICE…” Klein, p. 221.

MORRIS LUBAN New York American, Globe and Mail, and Herald, Oct. 12, 1912; Klein, pp. 101–11. Whitman proved better able to accommodate the Luban brothers than had McIntyre and Becker. The pair were released from prison after the trial concluded and saw the charges against them dropped. Years later, in the 1960s, Andy Logan tracked down the junior member of Whitman’s staff who had been sent over to the Essex County Jail to interview the Luban brothers. “They were the very worst looking men I ever saw,” the man—by then in his eighties—told Logan. “They were abominable. They told me their awful stories, and I believed every word of them. How could I have believed such things? I went back and told Whitman. He was older and I think now he should have known better, but he seemed to have believed them, too. Looking back on it now, it all seems incredible.” Logan, pp. 182–83.

ROSE IN COURT New York World, Oct. 13, 1912; Logan, p. 186.

“SHAVEN TO THE BLOOD” New York Times, Oct. 13, 1912.

“DO YOU MEAN THAT YOU WANT SOMEONE CROAKED?” Klein, p. 118.

“THE FELLOW IS GETTING DANGEROUS…” Ibid., pp. 119, 121, 124.

FEATURES OF ROSE’S EVIDENCE Ibid., pp. 118–19, 120, 123.

HARLEM CONFERENCE Ibid. pp. 125–26.

“HALF ON HIS FEET” Logan, p. 187.

“LIKE THAT IN WHICH MACBETH…” Stryker, op. cit., p. 69.

MURRAY HILL BATHS This piece of evidence is especially problematic, as Andy Logan points out, because the timings Rose gave for the meeting in court cannot be reconciled with those the gambler gave in his evidence before the grand jury some weeks earlier. In his grand-jury testimony, Rose said Becker had met him at the Murray Hill Baths before going to the station house at West Forty-seventh Street. In Goff’s courtroom he amended this statement and said Becker had gone to the station house first. Logan, pp. 190–91.

“DON’T WORRY, JACK…” Klein, p. 131.

BECKER’S EXHORTATIONS Ibid., pp. 120, 124.

“GLOATING OVER THE BODY…” New York Times, Oct. 13, 1912.

“NEARLY EVERY MAN AND WOMAN…” New York Sun, Oct. 13, 1912.

“EVERY FEW MOMENTS…” Logan, p. 187.

“AT HALF–PAST TWO…” Stryker, op. cit., pp. 68–70.

ROSE’S OBSTRUCTIVENESS Logan, pp. 192–93.

“BALD-HEADED PIMP” Klein, p. 135.

“THE JUDGE LEANED DOWN…” Logan, p. 191.

“VISIBLY BEGAN TO LOSE HIS TRAIN OF THOUGHT” “Mr. McIntyre’s questions,” the reporter from the Sun observed, “began apparently to drift back over much-covered ground. New York Sun, Oct. 13, 1912.

“I AM TOTTERING…” Ibid.

“DIDN’T YOU GO DOWN…” New York Times, World, and American, Oct. 13, 1912; Klein, pp. 138–39.

“ONE OF JUSTICE GOFF’S CURIOUS ATTRIBUTES…” Logan, p. 193.

“COLD, CALCULATED, DELIBERATE OPPRESSION Stryker, op. cit., p. 70.

“YOUR HONOR…” New York Sun, Oct. 13, 1912.

“NO GOOD REASON…” Stryker, op. cit., p. 70. McIntyre, added Swope, who watched proceedings from the press box, “was almost a wreck…. It was physically impossible for the lawyer to continue.” New York World, Oct. 13, 1912.

GOFF ENDS LUBAN’S CROSS-EXAMINATION New York Herald, Oct. 12, 1912; Klein, p. 100.

ROSE STANDS DOWN Most of the assembled press believed that the gambler had passed his test. “Jack Rose,” wrote the New York Sun (Oct. 13, 1912), “told his whole story on the witness stand yesterday and last night and the defense failed to catch him in a lie. Without hesitating, without stopping to weigh his words, without the slightest emotion, he swore that Becker ordered and contrived the murder of Herman Rosenthal.”

GOFF’S BIAS Klein, pp. 220–32; Stryker, op. cit., p. 69; Logan, pp. 174, 204–5. The strictures cited in the text are drawn from the criticisms of the court of appeals in People v. Becker, 210 NY, p. 289.

FRANK MOSS ASKS MCINTYRE’S QUESTIONS FOR HIM Klein, pp. 193–94; Logan, p. 205.

“WEBBER’S STORY WAS AS COLD…” New York Sun, Oct. 15, 1912.

WEBBER TESTIFIES Klein, pp. 142–49.

VALLON TESTIFIES New York Times, Oct. 15, 1912; Klein, pp. 149–51.

SCHEPPS’S APPEARANCE New York Sun, Oct. 16, 1912.

“PROSPEROUS DEPARTMENT STORE AUDITOR” Logan, p. 196.

“DODGING DETECTIVES IN THE CATSKILLS” New York Sun, Oct. 16, 1912.

“MORE AND MORE PUGNACIOUS” Ibid.

“FAVORITE CHICK OF A WITNESS” Ibid.

“CAREFULLY EXCLUDED HIMSELF” Ibid.

“WHISPERED IN EACH OTHER’S EARS” Klein, p. 169.

SCHEPPS AND BECKER Ibid., pp. 164–65; Logan, p. 197.

“FROM LUNCHTIME UNTIL EVENING…” Klein, p. 162.

“WHAT HAD THE GAMBLERS DISCUSSED…?” Logan, pp. 196–97.

“HERMAN’S AT THE METROPOLE” Ibid.

“CORNER OF THE MOUTH SMILE” New York Sun, Oct. 16, 1912. “SOME HEAVY KICKS…” Klein, p. 164.

“TRY AND THINK AGAIN, MR. SCHEPPS” Ibid., p. 168.

TIME TAKEN IN CROSS-EXAMINATION New York Sun, Oct. 16, 1912.

JEROME’S AND WALDO’S TESTIMONY New York World and American, Oct. 19, 1912; Klein, p. 179; Logan, pp. 200–1.

HAWLEY’S TESTIMONY Klein, pp. 180–81; Logan, pp. 201–2.

SULLIVAN’S TESTIMONY New York Times and Evening Post, Oct. 19, 1912; Klein, pp. 181–84; Logan, pp. 203–4.

“ONE WITNESS FROM HOT SPRINGS” His name was Michael Becholtz, and the conversation, he recalled (Klein, p. 190), had run as follows:

BECHOLTZ: For God’s sake, why did you have Herman Rosenthal killed?

SCHEPPS: Why, Mike, you have no idea what a dirty dog he turned out to be afterwards.

It was scarcely the stuff courtroom sensations were made of.

SULLIVAN AFTERMATH Logan, pp. 206–7.

SHAPIRO’S EVIDENCE New York Sun, Oct. 23, 1912.

“FIVE FORMAL IMMUNITY AGREEMENTS” Logan, p. 207.

MCINTYRE’S SUMMATION New York Times, Oct. 23, 1912; Klein, pp. 196–202.

“BECKER BECAME MANIFESTLY NERVOUS” New York Evening Post, Oct. 22, 1912.

“AT LEAST ONE NEWSPAPER” New York Sun, Oct. 23, 1912.

MOSS’S SUMMATION Klein, pp. 203–8.

STATE OF THE CASE New York Sun, and Times, Oct. 24 and 25, 1912; Logan, pp. 210–11.

GOFF’S CHARGE Klein, pp. 209–19; Logan, pp. 208–9.

VIRTUALLY ORDERED TO FIND BECKER GUILTY New York American, Oct. 25, 1912.

THE WAIT New York World, American, Sun, and Tribune, Oct. 25, 1912; Logan, pp. 210–11.

THE VERDICT New York Times, World, and Sun, Oct. 25, 1912; “My Story,” pp. 36, 38; Logan, pp. 210–11. The Sun revealed that the long delay in arriving at a verdict had had nothing to do with disputes over Becker’s innocence or guilt—all twelve jurors were certain from the start that he was guilty. The debate was rather over the issue of whether the verdict should be murder in the first or second degree. Two jurors held out for a considerable time for the lesser verdict.

11. RETRIAL

“WELL,” SAID EMORY BUCKNER… New York World, Oct. 25, 1915. In 1912 Buckner was counsel to the Curran Committee; later, in the 1920s, he became one of the two highest-paid trial lawyers in the country.

WHITMAN’S POST-TRIAL CAREER For Swope, see New York World, Oct. 26, 1912; for political aspirations, see Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 4 (1946–50), p. 886; for Borah, the Evening Post, and the Committee of Fourteen, see Logan, pp. 219–21; for enhancement, Allen Steinberg, “The Becker–Rosenthal Murder Case: The Cop and the Gambler,” in Frankie Bailey and Steven Chermak (eds.), Famous American Crimes and Trials, p. 260.

“THE MAN OF THE HOUR…” Viña Delmar, The Becker Scandal, p. 124.

“A GREAT TRIAL” SOCIETY WOMEN Logan, pp. 213–15; Steinberg, op. cit., p. 261.

BECKER AFTER THE VERDICT New York World and Sun, Oct. 26, 1912.

“HAVE YOU EVER BEEN CONVICTED….?” Logan, p. 212. OO DISCOURAGED TO TALK “My Story, by Mrs. Charles Becker,” McClure’s Magazine, Sept. 1914, p. 38.

“EVERYBODY WAS CRYING BUT US TWO” Ibid.

SING SING New York Sun and American, Oct. 30, 1912; Lewis Laws, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, pp. 24–25, 78, 80; Logan, pp. 216, 221–22, 235–36; Scott Christianson, Condemned, pp. 4, 43.

A MEASURE OF REDEMPTION Logan, pp. 235–36.

SHORTAGE OF FUNDS New York Times, Oct. 27, 1912.

NEW LAWYERS Logan, pp. 212–13; Klein, p. 240.

HELEN BECKER’S TRAVAILS New York Times, Dec. 13, 1913; “My Story,” p. 36.

CHARLOTTE BECKER For the name “Ruth,” see “My Story,” p. 39; quotations from Logan, pp. 223–24. The girl is referred to as “Charlotte,” however, in a letter Becker wrote to his niece Mary Weyrauch on April 3, 1913, soon after her burial. MBC.

“I KNOW MAMA PICTURED HELEN…” Viña Delmar, The Becker Scandal, p. 131.

GUNMEN’S TRIAL So promptly did the twelve jurors reach a verdict that they did not even request that sandwiches be sent into the jury room, and, according to the New York Sun, their decision would have been announced even more swiftly had it not been for a certain sense of propriety—not to mention concern that they be seen to be doing their job conscientiously. New York Sun, World, Times, and American, Nov. 20, 1912; Logan, p. 217.

LEWIS’S PROTESTATIONS On Whitey’s atrocious marksmanship, see Shoenfeld story #127, Oct. 21, 1912, Magnes Papers P3/1782, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem. For his final statement, see New York American, Apr. 14, 1914.

“GETTING ENTANGLED WITH THE DISTRICT’S STREET GANGS” “I had the best father and mother a boy ever had,” Louie wrote, “but I was not a good son to them. I went the wrong way. Tell all the boys on the East side, the boys I know—there are hundreds of them—tell them about the mistakes I made, which I could have avoided if I had done the right thing. Let them know that the synagogue is their best home and God is their best friend…. We were supposed, the other three boys and I, to have as many friends as any fellows on the East side, but when it came to a showdown, it was only the synagogue that stood by us, outside of our parents.” New York American, Apr. 12 and 13, 1914.

DAGO FRANK’S CONFESSION New York American, Apr. 14, 1914.

EXECUTION OF THE FOUR GUNMEN The execution was a dramatic one, not least for the discovery, the day before the date set for the electrocution, that the chair had been sabotaged by another prisoner; the dynamo had been damaged so badly that it would not have delivered any current. New York American, Apr. 13, 1914. As the bodies of the four gunmen were prepared for burial, thousands of curiosity seekers flooded into the streets. The crowds appeared so menacing that Lefty Louie’s body had to be hidden in order to deter them from laying siege to the undertakers’. No such precautions were taken in the case of Gyp the Blood, whose remains were laid out at Samuel Rothschild’s undertaking establishment on Lenox Avenue. A mob of some four thousand people quickly surrounded the premises, anxious for sight of the coffin, causing such severe traffic congestion that the police decided to disperse the crowd by the stratagem of loading a dummy coffin onto a hearse. The horses pulling the carriage were lashed and set off toward a nearby cemetery at a gallop, most of the spectators streaming after it as best they could on foot. New York World, Apr. 14, 1914.

Gyp was buried the day after his execution. He was interred alongside Whitey Lewis in Mount Zion Cemetery, Maspeth. The cortege succeeded in outdistancing the crowd of gawkers still thronging the streets outside Rothschild’s, and the funeral itself was attended by only twenty people, seven of whom were members of the dead man’s immediate family. “There were no flowers and not a word was spoken until the last shovel of dirt had been thrown upon the mound,” reported the New York World on April 15, 1914. “Then Horowitz’s father fell over the grave, crying: ‘My heart is broken. He was a good boy and a good son.’”

Lefty Louie was buried in Mount Hebron Cemetery, Flushing, that same day. His interment was as disorderly as that of Gyp the Blood. The dead man’s wife fainted on her arrival at the undertaker’s and then lapsed into hysterics, delaying the cortege by twenty minutes.

Dago Frank Cirofici, meanwhile, was interred on April 15. Anxious to avoid the scenes of chaos that had marred the funerals of Rosenberg and Horowitz, his family abandoned plans for a public funeral and held a simple service in their home instead. That did not stop an unruly crowd from assembling outside the family’s “little frame dwelling” on East 187th Street, and when a neighbor’s porch collapsed under the weight of sightseers, “a panic was only narrowly averted.” Five carriages were required to carry flowers to the cemetery. World, Apr. 16, 1914.

RELEASE OF THE FOUR GAMBLERS Accounts of the release of the gamblers differ; several newspapers state that Vallon left separately through a side door and the other two men slunk off in taxis with the blinds drawn low. New York World, American, and Sun, Nov. 22, 1912; Klein, pp. 243–45; my quotation comes from Logan, p. 218.

GAMBLERS ON BROADWAY Klein, pp. 430–31.

HELEN’S MEETING WITH SCHEPPS Logan, pp. 299–300.

MARTIN MANTON New York Herald and Globe and Mail, May 14, 1914; Dictionary of American Biography supplement 13.

“MAINLY AN OFFICE-SHARING ARRANGEMENT” Logan, p. 253.

WILLIAM SULZER Klein, pp. 431–32; Jacob Friedman, The Impeachment of Governor William Sulzer, pp. 15–72.

BECKER’S DEMEANOR New York Herald, Feb. 29, 1913; Logan, pp. 224–25.

IMPEACHMENT OF SULZER Friedman, op. cit., pp. 148–90.

MANTON’S NEW EVIDENCE New York Herald, Dec. 13, 1913.

BECKER “BRIBES” WITNESSES; POLICE RAISE DEFENSE FUND Logan, p. 255.

DECLINE AND FALL OF BIG TIM SULLIVAN New York Times, Sept. 14, 15, and 30, and Sun and World, Sept. 16, 1913; Klein, p. 340; Daniel Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913,” Journal of American History 78 (1991), p. 558.

COMMODORE DUTCH Joseph Mitchell, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, pp. 131–32.

COURT OF APPEALS DECISION 210 NY, pp. 289–366; New York Times, Feb. 25, and World, Feb. 25 and 27, 1914; Klein, pp. 220–46; Logan, pp. 234–47.

“FROM A HUNDRED SLITTED WINDOWS…” New York World, Feb. 27, 1914.

RETRIAL New York Times, World, and American, May 5, 12, 14, and 19, 1914; Sun, May 19 and 23, 1914; Herbert Mitgang, The Man Who Rode the Tiger, pp. 102–105; Klein, pp. 247–332; Logan, pp. 254–76.

MARSHALL’S EVIDENCE New York Times, Herald, and World, May 19, 1914; Klein, pp. 290–314.

12. DEATH-HOUSE

RETRIALS AND MISTRIALS New York Sun, May 23, 1914.

POSSIBLE VERDICTS Ibid.

MOB; DEATH-HOUSE CELL “My Story, by Mrs. Charles Becker,” McClure’s Magazine, Sept. 1914, p. 43; Logan, p. 275.

THOMAS MOTT OSBORNE Rudolph Chamberlain, There Is No Truce, pp. 28, 34, 149, 181, 193–94, 213, 229, 235–36, 241–60, 264–74, 284, 294–95, 298, 327.

OSBORNE AND BECKER Ibid., pp. 304–6.

RELIGIOUS CONVERSION The date of the conversion is not certain, but Andy Logan puts it during the summer of 1913. Becker gave his religion as “Catholic” after his second trial a few months later (New York Sun, May 23, 1914). As for his influences, Becker’s mother was a member of the Roman church, and his wife was nominally an Irish Catholic but in practice was not religious and was not a churchgoer. Helen’s experiences during her husband’s trials and failed appeals made her if anything an atheist, leaving Father Cashin—and Becker’s own terminal predicament—as the most likely reasons for the policeman’s embracing of the Catholic faith. “My Story,” pp. 43–44; Logan, pp. 222–23, 235–36.

READING MATTER Among the effects disposed of by Becker just before his execution were copies of Theodore Roosevelt’s Through the Brazilian Wilderness and a book on the Panama Canal. New York Times, July 29, 1915.

LETTERS Becker to Gus Neuberger, Dec. 8, 1912; Becker to Mary Weyrauch, Apr. 3, 1913, both MBC; “My Story,” p. 43.

BECKER’S MOTHER Her condition was reported in the Sullivan County Record, Oct., 31, 1912. “QUEEN OF MY HEART…” Letter dated June 19, 1914, reprinted in “My Story,” p. 37.

“I TRY…” Ibid p. 43.

OLINVILLE AVENUE Ibid., p. 36; Logan, p. 276.

“ANOTHER BAD TIME” “My Story,” p. 42.

WHITMAN’S POLITICAL CAREER For Whitman’s gubernatorial campaign and presidential ambitions, see Dictionary of American Biography supplement 4 (1946–50), pp. 885–86; Logan, pp. 278–80; Allen Steinberg, “The Becker Case and American Progressivism” in Amy Gilman Srebnick and René Lévy (eds.), Crime and Culture, p. 81.

WHITMAN’S DRINKING Logan pp. 316, 336; Dictionary of American Biography supplement 4 (1946–50), pp. 885–86.

MARSHALL’S RETRACTION Philadelphia Evening Ledger, Feb. 13, 1915; New York Reports, 215 NY, pp. 159–60; Klein, pp. 293–314. Klein notes in conclusion that when, in 1919, Marshall was arrested once again, on a charge of extortion, the lawyer who represented him was Frederick Groehl.

BECKER’S SECOND APPEAL Klein, pp. 332–33. Logan, pp. 283–89, advances a detailed analysis of the voting patterns of the court of appeals and uses her knowledge of state politics to convincingly explain them.

“FRANTIC AND FUTILE ANGER” Logan, p. 285.

BRIDGEY WEBBER’S VIEWS New York Globe and Mail, May 18, 1915.

BECKER’S ACCOUNT AND APPLEBAUM’S CORROBORATION Klein, pp. 342–87, 408–15; Logan, pp. 299–306. Klein adds that Applebaum told him that he was at the Capitol in Albany a few days before Becker’s execution and passed on the details of these conversations then to Whitman, who unsurprisingly failed to act on them.

“APPLEBAUM HAD FELT UNABLE…” In fact, Applebaum said, he had had a conference with Lieutenant John Becker, the condemned man’s brother, shortly before the second trial, expressed a willingness to testify, and even suggested that Becker retain a lawyer friend of his as his trial attorney. For some unknown reason, this offer was never taken up. Klein, pp. 414–15.

LAST LEGAL EFFORTS Klein, pp. 333–41; Logan, p. 307. “DENIED, DENIED” New York Sun, July 29, 1912.

“DIE LIKE A MAN” New York Times, July 29, 1915.

LEO FRANK CASE Robert Seitz Frey and Nancy Thompson, The Silent and the Damned, pp. 85–89.

HELEN BECKER’S APPEAL New York Herald, July 30, 1915; Logan, pp. 310, 316–17.

SING SING PREPARES New York Times, July 19, 1915; Logan, pp. 308, 320.

STATEMENTS OF PRESS AND LAWYERS New York Times, July 29 and 31, and American and World, July 31, 1915; Logan, pp. 317–18.

BECKER PREPARED FOR DEATH New York Times, World, and Sun, July 29, 1915.

LAST LETTERS Klein, pp. 388–95, 399.

RELATIVES; “ROCK OF AGES” New York Times, July 30, 1915.

HELEN BECKER’S JOURNEY Ibid. and Sun and World, July 30, 1915.

HISTORY OF ELECTROCUTION John Laurence, A History of Capital Punishment, pp. 64–68.

THE EXECUTION New York World, Sun Times, and American, July 31, 1915. The executioner’s name was John Hilbert; he remained in the job until 1926 but became progressively more morose and depressed by it, finally resigning unexpectedly on the night before two more men were due to go to the chair. Hilbert was subsequently found dead, a suicide who had shot himself in the head. BECKER’S AUTOPSY New York Sun, American, and Journal, July 31, 1915; Logan, p. 323.

EPILOGUE

ROTHSTEIN AT JACK’S There is no contemporary authority for this oft-told story. It first appeared in Donald Henderson Clarke’s In the Reign of Rothstein, p. 31. Clarke knew Rothstein and had the story from several of the men present at the time, however, so it may be accepted as probably accurate. Jack’s stood on the corner of West Forty-third Street and Sixth Avenue and was—adds Herbert Asbury in Gangs of New York, p. 312—“famous for its Irish bacon and its flying wedge of waiters who ejected obstreperous customers with a minimum of motion and a maximum of efficiency.”

BODY BROUGHT BACK TO NEW YORK The hearse’s journey to and from Ossining had been fraught. The vehicle broke down five times on the way up from New York City—“tire trouble” was blamed—and once on the way back, taking a total of eleven hours to complete the round-trip. Becker’s body made the journey in a cheap, black-painted wooden coffin provided by the state. New York Journal, July 30; Tribune and World, July 31, 1915.

VISITORS New York Sun, Aug. 1, 1915; Logan, pp. 325–26.

MRS. BECKER AND THE SILVER PLATE As the papers of the time noted, there was a precedent for this. When, more than two decades earlier, a prisoner named Carlyle Harris was executed for the murder of his wife, his mother had a plate inscribed with the words “Murdered by New York State” screwed to his coffin. In Harris’s case the plate remained on the coffin and he was buried with it. New York Times, Aug. 2; World, Aug. 1 and 2; American, Aug. 2 and 3; New York Sun, Aug. 2, 1915.

BECKER’S FUNERAL An estimated eight-tenths of the vast crowd were women, the World reported, noting, too, that Becker was buried with the photograph of his wife that he had worn to his execution tucked into an inside pocket of his suit. New York American and Sun, Aug. 2; New York World, Aug. 2 and 3; Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915; Logan, pp. 326–27.

A SECOND SPASM OF REFORM It would be misleading to attribute all these changes solely to reaction to the Becker case. The impeachment of Governor Sulzer certainly aroused a statewide fury that turned more voters against the Democratic candidates for office than the murky uncertainties of the Rosenthal affair could ever do. But within the confines of New York City, the impact of Becker’s arrest, trials, and conviction was considerable. Levine, p. 14; Oliver Allen, The Tiger, pp. 223–27; Lately Thomas, The Mayor Who Mastered New York, pp. 484, 491; Gustavus Myers, The History of Tammany Hall, pp. 387–91.

COMMISSIONER WOODS Woods was a former New York Sun reporter and an English instructor who had once taught Roosevelt’s children. He was first appointed a deputy commissioner of police by Theodore Bingham in 1907. A few years later, he cemented his position and considerably enhanced his social status by marrying J. P. Morgan’s granddaughter. Levine, pp. 373–81; James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto, NYPD, p. 143; Gabriel Chin, New York City Police Corruption Investigation Commissions, 1894–1994 II, p. x; Lewis Valentine, Night Stick, pp. 34–35; Edwin Lewison, John Purroy Mitchel, pp. 117–21.

“YOU HAVE SHOWN US…” Cited in Levine, p. 380.

CURRAN COMMITTEE See The Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Aldermen of the City of New York Appointed August 5, 1912, to Investigate the Police Department, pp. 1–5; Henry Curran, Pillar to Post, pp. 162–70, 173–74.

MITCHEL VOTED OUT Though the mayor was criticized for his personal conduct—unlike his predecessor, Gaynor, he enjoyed the New York social scene—the principal issue in the campaign was education. Mitchel had backed a new program of vocational education, which Tammany used to accuse him of denying immigrants the right to the best schooling. He lost overwhelmingly.

CONFIDENTIAL SQUAD SHUT DOWN The fate of the squad’s officers was all too predictable. Transferred to Brooklyn and given unpleasant desk duty, Lewis Valentine spent the next eight years in internal exile, suffering incessant hazing from his colleagues. Valentine, op. cit., p. 37.

THE DECLINE OF TAMMANY HALL Thomas Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants, pp. 4–5, 9–15, 42–46, 93, 99, 115–19, 121.

TAMMANY AND GRAFT Ibid., pp. 97–98; Nancy Weiss, Charles Francis Murphy, 1858–1924, p. 59; Allen, op. cit., pp. 212–13.

ROTHSTEIN David Pietrusza, Rothstein, pp. 4, 91–100, 147–92, 195–203; Leo Katcher, The Big Bankroll, pp. 91–101, 349. Rothstein’s murder, incidentally, occurred within the boundaries policed by the same West Forty-seventh Street precinct house where Herman Rosenthal’s body had been brought sixteen years earlier and was recorded in the same police blotter. Meyer Berger, The Eight Million, pp. 140–41.

SWOPE Allan Lewis, Man of the World: Herbert Bayard Swope, pp. ix–x, 43, 223, 287; E. J. Kahn, The World of Swope, pp. 20, 25, 26, 149, 152–53, 331, 378, 475.

DECLINE OF THE SULLIVANS New York Times, Dec. 26, 1913; Alvin Harlow, Old Bowery Days, pp. 517–22, 535–36. It is true that Christy Sullivan went on to serve a lengthy stint in Congress on behalf of his old constituency, returning in 1937 to become the chief of Tammany Hall. But he accomplished little or nothing in either role. Allen, op. cit., p. 257.

THE OCCIDENTAL The hotel is still there and still in use, though nowadays it is known as the Sohotel Privilege—a low-budget place with a varied clientele and plenty of activity in the lobby after dark.

WHITMAN’S TERM AS GOVERNOR AND LATER LIFE No study devoted to Whitman’s administration exists. My passage is based on the entry for Whitman (by Andy Logan) in the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 4 (1946–50), pp. 884–86; Klein, p. 423; Herbert Mitgang, The Man Who Rode the Tiger, pp. 117–22; Logan, pp. 333–38; Rudolph Chamberlain, There Is No Truce, p. 347; and Whitman’s New York Times obituary, March 30, 1947.

EVEN THE SOBER TIMES…” New York Times, July 24, 1915.

JACOB LUBAN “This,” Luban wrote to a friend, “is the biggest commutation ever handed down in this State, or in any other State…. Now you understand that during my thirteen months [in jail] I have used my friends all I possibly could.” Luban’s letter was discovered by Henry Klein when he searched through the district attorney’s files relating to the Becker case. Klein, p. 115.

JOHN GOFF See the Dictionary of American Biography p. 7, pp. 359–60.

SAMUEL SEABURY Mitgang, op. cit., pp. 107–8, 181–82, 188, 203–300, 363–66; Allen, op. cit., pp. 242–59.

SULLIVAN, COCKRAN, MCINTYRE, MOSS, STRYKER, AND MANTON James McCurrin, Bourke Cockran, pp. 292–302, 321–22; Logan, pp. 281–82, 332–33; Dictionary of American Biography supplement 13, pp. 279–80; Lloyd Stryker, The Art of Advocacy, pp. 285–96.

RHINELANDER WALDO New York Times, Aug. 14, 1927.

JOHN BECKER Mary Becker, personal communication, Nov. 28, 2004, author’s files.

MAX SCHMITTBERGER AND CLUBBER WILLIAMS Previous writers on the Becker case have never agreed on Williams’s financial position or the date of his death, some stating that he died a millionaire as early as 1910. In fact, Clubber died on March 31, 1917; a report on the appraisal of his estate, revealing his poverty and giving this as the date of his death, appeared in the New York Times, Jan. 30, 1918. For Schmittberger’s career and later life, see the Times of March 14, 1909; Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens I, 278, 284; Augustine Costello, Our Police Protectors, p. 558; Logan, p. 330.

WINFIELD SHEEHAN Logan, pp. 59, 319, 330.

THOMAS MOTT OSBORNE Chamberlain, op. cit., pp. 328, 362, 367, 404, 412.

LIBBY AND SHAPIRO Shoenfeld Story #121, Magnes Papers P3/1782, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem.

“INFAMOUS GRAY PACKARD” The Rosenthal “death car” was purchased from Libby and Shapiro by a company that used it to chauffeur tourists around the main sites made famous by the Becker case. Logan, p. 220.

VALLON, SCHEPPS, MARSHALL, WEBBER, AND ROSE New York Times, June 17, 1913, and Nov. 26, 1941; Meyer Berger, “The Becker Case: View of ‘The System,’” New York Times Magazine, Nov. 11, 1951, pp. 65–66; Klein, pp. 430–31; Logan, pp. 225–28, 248, 266, 286, 299, 333; Jonathan Root, The Life and Bad Times of Charlie Becker, pp. 227, 231. Bridgey Webber died, of complications resulting from a burst appendix, on the twenty-first anniversary of Becker’s execution: July 30, 1936; New York Times, July 31, 1936. Rose died in Roosevelt Hospital, Manhattan, on October 4, 1947; a short obituary appeared in the New York Times, Oct. 9, 1947.

CHICAGO MAY May Sharpe, Chicago May: Her Story, pp. 56, 135–41, 336; Eddie Guerin, Crime, pp. 158–279; James Morton, Gangland: The Early Years, pp. 211–12, 217 and n, 221. Guerin’s escape, incidentally, was from the French prison camp at Moroni, on the mainland of French Guinea, not from Devil’s Island itself.

LETITIA, PAUL, HOWARD, AND CHRISTOPHER BECKER New York World, July 30, 1912; Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915; Humboldt and Washoe County censuses, Nevada, for 1920; American Sociological Review, Dec. 1960. Details of Howard’s personality and the “difficulty” of other members of the family are from Howard S. Becker to Mary Becker, e-mail, undated, and Mary Becker to Howard S. Becker, e-mail, undated, MBC; details of Christopher Becker’s interment are from the author’s visit to the cemetery at Callicoon Center, October 2004. Christopher Becker died in a house fire in March 1994, and it would appear that his collection of Becker material was destroyed in the same blaze.

MRS. ZELIG’S BENEFIT Shoenfeld story #272, Jan. 6, 1913, Magnes Papers P3/1786. Henrietta Young seems to have left New York for Boston soon afterward. At the end of February 1913, a bail bondsman named Henry Friedman was jailed in that city for the theft of $600 from her. This implies she must have been arrested there. Fitchburg Daily Sentinel [MA], Feb. 28, 1913.

HUMPTY JACKSON Luc Sante, Low Life, pp. 218–19.

LATER LIFE OF LILLIAN ROSENTHAL Berger, op. cit., p. 65.

LATER LIFE OF HELEN BECKER Ibid., p. 66; Logan, p. 331; Klein, p. 407. She was buried—under her maiden name—in the same grave as her husband; grave photos in MBC.

“I PREFER TO REMAIN A WIDOW” Root, op. cit., p. 285.

“HE WAS NOT AN ANGEL …” New York Herald, July 31, 1915; Logan, p. 325.