CHAPTER 7
“GOOD-BYE, HERMAN”
THREE DAZZLING ARC LIGHTS, white and garish, blazed in the darkness that had fallen over Manhattan, mercilessly illuminating the peeling facade of a narrow, six-story building on the north side of West Forty-third Street. Although most respectable New Yorkers were in bed by now, the temperature in the city still hovered in the eighties, and the building’s two doors both gaped open. Inside, passersby could glimpse a shabby lobby, hung with cheap lace curtains, and the entrance to a dimly lit café. The sounds of chatter and laughter and of a pianist pounding out the latest ragtime tunes mingled together and drifted from the interior.
This was the Hotel Metropole, owned by Big Tim Sullivan in partnership with the gamblers Jim and George Considine,*40 and once one of the jewels of the Sullivan empire. By the summer of 1912, admittedly, the hotel was so far past its prime that it was close to bankruptcy. But even in its present depressed state, the Metropole had two saving graces in the eyes of its loyal customers. The first was its location, a mere fifty yards from Times Square in the heart of Satan’s Circus. The second was a coveted twenty-four-hour liquor license—obtained through Sullivan’s influence—which allowed the Café Metropole to remain open around the clock and attracted a lively late-night crowd. The hotel was particularly popular with boxers, gamblers, and actresses.
A few minutes before midnight on July 15, the most notorious gambler in New York City waddled up West Forty-third and turned in to the lobby. Herman Rosenthal was clad in the same rumpled pink shirt he’d been wearing a few hours earlier at his meeting with Whitman and dabbed at his damp forehead with a bright silk handkerchief. Barely pausing to glance around, he rolled into the café and slumped down at a table for four, sweating profusely.
Summoning a waiter, Herman ordered himself a Horse’s Neck—bourbon, ginger ale, and a twist of lemon—and three large Havana cigars. He seemed nearly prostrated by the heat, swatting listlessly at the clammy air with the cardboard fan he clutched in one fat hand. But the gambler’s eyes were still bright and alert. The waiter who delivered his drink noted that they darted constantly from side to side, between an exit opening onto the street and the connecting door to the hotel.
Precisely what Rosenthal was doing at the Metropole that night was never fully ascertained. Certainly Herman knew the hotel well; it stood only two blocks south of his home, and he was often to be found in its private gaming room (run by Arnold Rothstein) or taking refreshment in the café. But to walk knowingly into a place filled with gamblers, men whose very livelihoods were threatened by his conniving with Whitman, was to invite—at the very least—harsh words; and to dawdle in a restaurant only hours before a dawn appointment with the DA struck some men as eccentric, even for a night owl such as Herman.
There were many, Whitman prominent among them, who were certain that the gambler was thoroughly embittered and had every intention of giving evidence as planned the next morning. But others, including some of Rosenthal’s oldest friends, were equally convinced that Herman had no intention of doing anything so dangerous. These men felt sure that the gambler had come to the Metropole to keep some other appointment and that he expected to be met—perhaps by Rothstein, perhaps by some emissary from the Sullivan clan—and paid as much as $15,000 for his silence. At seven the next morning, they contended, Herman Rosenthal fully expected to be standing not at the door of Charles Whitman’s apartment but on a platform at Grand Central Station, waiting for the train that would take him out of New York.
Whatever the gambler’s intentions, he was plainly in no hurry to leave the Café Metropole. At around ten to one, he invited three passing acquaintances to join him, and the four men spent more than half an hour in animated conversation. When these companions rose and left, Rosenthal looked up and peered around him, scanning the faces of the other diners for people that he knew.
“What do you boys think of the papers lately?” he smirked to a knot of gamblers at a nearby table. “You aren’t sore at me, are you?”
“You’re a damned fool, Herman,” one of them replied—or so the papers reported the exchange the next day.
A few minutes later, while Rosenthal was sipping at another drink, the door leading to the Metropole swung open and another gambler entered. It was Herman’s sworn enemy, Bridgey Webber. Glancing from side to side, Webber circled swiftly around the room, brushing past his adversary as he did so.
“Hello, Herman,” said Webber in a pleasant tone.
If Rosenthal was surprised to be addressed so politely by a man whom he had once tried to have killed, he gave no sign of it. “Hello, Bridgey,” he returned with equal affability. But Webber wasted no more time on pleasantries. He continued his circuit of the room, leaving the café at a brisk walk by the same door through which he had entered.
Herman finished off his drink and glanced at his watch. It was now twenty minutes to two. He pushed back his chair and heaved himself to his feet. “I guess the morning papers must be up,” he declared, knowing perfectly well that most of the Metropole’s customers could guess the likely headlines in the press. Stepping out into the street, Rosenthal found a newsboy near the hotel entrance. He bought seven copies of the New York World—which led with his allegations against Becker—and took them back to the café. As he reached his seat, Herman waved the paper over his head in triumph. “What about that for a headline?” he crowed to the men at the next table, pressing copies into their hands.
Rosenthal settled back into his chair, spreading open his own World and smiling to himself. He read the news attentively for a few more minutes. Then, just after five to two, he was interrupted by a short, well-dressed stranger who had entered the café through the street door and come up to his table.
“Herman,” the newcomer said, “there’s somebody wants to see you outside.”
Rosenthal seemed unsurprised to be accosted in this way. He set down his drink, gathered up the remainder of his papers, and, clutching at the last of his cigars, rose from his chair and followed the unknown man into the night.
Even at two in the morning, the streets around Broadway were generally busy, filled with revelers, gamblers, prostitutes, their clients, and the dregs of the theater crowd. During the summer months, Satan’s Circus was even busier than usual, as New Yorkers sought refuge from the clammy heat by lolling outside on fire escapes or pacing the streets in search of the slightest breeze. Yet on this particular July evening, West Forty-third seemed oddly quiet.
The street outside the Metropole had begun to clear soon after Bridgey Webber left the building. By about 1:40 A.M., the taxi line near the hotel—which was always crowded in the early morning hours—had emptied as a dozen cabs were dispatched one by one on a variety of errands, most of them to the outer boroughs of New York. Several men and women who had been loitering in the vicinity of the Metropole were asked to move on by tough-looking men one passerby recalled as “East Side types.” Most took the hint and walked quickly away. By ten minutes to two, there were only a handful of pedestrians outside the hotel. According to one witness, Herman Rosenthal’s old partner Beansey Rosenfeld was among them. Another was an employee of Webber’s who stood loitering by the hotel door.
A few minutes later, the silence that had fallen over West Forty-third was broken by the growl of a powerful automobile engine. A large gray touring car, its roof down and its headlights on, had turned left off Sixth Avenue. The car drove slowly toward the Metropole, pulling over to the south side of the street as it approached. It was a Packard taxi, registration 41313 New York—the same car, owned by Louis Libby, which had been used to shoot up Jack Sirocco’s café in the spring. The driver coasted to a standstill thirty yards from the hotel, leaving the motor idling. A moment or two later, both passenger doors opened and three or four dark-suited figures got out and walked toward the Metropole, coming to a halt in the shadows opposite its entrance. The Packard’s chauffeur and another man stayed in the car.
They did not have long to wait. At three minutes to two, a round figure appeared silhouetted in the doorway of the Hotel Metropole. Herman Rosenthal had come to claim his due.
Rosenthal stood blinking in the dazzle of the hotel’s lights, his sweaty handkerchief protruding from a pocket, his Havana still dangling from one plump hand. Just ahead of him, a figure wearing a felt hat lifted a hand to the brim as if in signal and then darted away. Instantly the men waiting opposite hurried across the street toward him, pulling revolvers from their jackets as they came.
Herman squinted uncertainly from side to side, evidently trying to locate the man who had called him from his table. He did not seem to realize that anything was wrong. The Metropole’s arc lights had blinded him—“the illuminations were as powerful as a spotlight on the stage,” one man who knew the scene explained—and he might not even have sensed the arms now thrusting out toward him. His eyes were given no time to adjust; a moment later the unnatural quiet enveloping West Forty-third was shattered by the crisp staccato of several shots. The gambler was hit immediately, blood erupting from his face, his knees buckling as he crumpled facedown on the pavement. His unlit cigar tumbled from slackened fingers, somersaulting on the concrete. A thick sheaf of morning papers slipped out from beneath his arm and fell softly to the ground, shrouding his body with headlines shouting his name while, beneath the flimsy pages, a sticky, spreading pool of blood matted his hair and began to run toward his nose and mouth. In another moment the assassins were crouching over him. “I gotcha!” one of them exclaimed.
Investigation would eventually establish that at least three rounds were fired. The first bullet had missed its target and embedded itself at head height deep in the wooden frame of the Metropole’s front door. But the second had struck Rosenthal in the face, passing through his cheek and jaw and shattering some teeth. At least one fragment lodged itself in the gambler’s neck as he pitched forward and began to fall; and at that instant the third round had entered Herman’s head an inch above the hairline, piercing his skull and destroying his brain. The fatal bullets had been fired from a range so close that burns caused by muzzle flash had etched themselves onto the dead man’s skin.
At the first sound of gunfire, the driver of the Packard gunned its engine, and the slate gray car emerged from the shadows, turning a lazy half circle in the street. Rosenthal’s killers leaped onto its running boards, and the vehicle moved away at a sedate pace, gathering speed as it headed east down Forty-third Street and turned left onto Madison Avenue. New Yorkers ambling along Madison watched as the vehicle accelerated noisily into the distance, the men on the running boards scrambling in as it went.
The sudden crack of gunfire had been clearly heard within the Hotel Metropole; at least one customer looked up in time to see the muzzle flashes from the murderers’ revolvers. The men and women in the café who rushed to the doors to discover what had happened found the street outside already filling as pedestrians came running from as far off as Broadway. They were too late to get a good look at the gunmen but just in time to see one of the gambling types from the café walking unhurriedly onto the street. This man stepped casually over the body lying in his path, turned and bent at the waist, his hands thrust deep in his pockets as he studied Rosenthal’s bloodied face. “Hello, Herman,” he said, smiling. Then he straightened up. “Good-bye, Herman,” the man added, and walked swiftly away.
News of the shooting spread through Satan’s Circus like wild fire. By five past two, ten minutes after the murder had occurred, a crowdfifteen or twenty people deep had formed around the body. Many members of this mob were gamblers with little reason to like Rosenthal; one reached over and tugged at the corpse’s shoulders, turning Herman onto his back and exposing his wounds for everyone to see. Word of the dead man’s identity passed swiftly through the crowd.
It took only a few minutes for reporters to arrive. One of the first men on the scene was the owlish Alexander Woollcott—then covering police affairs for the New York Times but soon to become the same paper’s theater critic*41 —who came puffing up from Broadway. Woollcott had reported plenty of murders in his time, but the scene awaiting him outside the Metropole stuck firmly in his mind. “I shall always remember the picture of that soft, fat body wilting on the sidewalk,” he recalled in later years.
I shall always remember the fish-belly faces of the sibilant crowd which, sprung in a twinkling from nowhere, formed like a clot around those clamorous wounds. Just behind me an old-timer whispered a comment which I have had more than one occasion to repeat. “From where I stand,” he said, “I can see eight murderers.”
The police who hurried to the scene did what they could to control the milling crowd, but chaos prevailed for nearly a quarter of an hour, and by then the heaving mass of rubberneckers had grown to be several hundred strong. Eventually Jim Considine summoned a waiter from the Metropole, and a hotel tablecloth was pressed into service as a makeshift shroud. A platoon of forty police reserves, called from nearby precincts, appeared and cleared a space around the body. Soon after that, a doctor arrived to examine the corpse; death, he concluded, had probably come instantly. At about two-thirty, the bloody cadaver was rolled onto a stretcher and loaded into in a police ambulance, which made its way, bell tolling, to the Sixteenth Precinct station house a quarter of a mile away. After that, the vast crowd of spectators gradually dispersed. Among those glimpsed leaving the scene was Bridgey Webber, who set off at a smart pace toward Times Square.
The clean getaway effected by Herman Rosenthal’s murderers was a considerable embarrassment for the police. No fewer than six officers had been within a hundred yards of the Metropole when the killing took place: One was standing on duty on Seventh Avenue, another on Broadway, and two more had paused for a moment on the corners of West Forty-third itself. A fifth man, Lieutenant Edward Frye, was walking east along the same street only thirty yards or so from the hotel, while the sixth policeman, Detective Billy File, had actually been sitting in the Café Metropole, only a few feet from Rosenthal, when the gambler rose to go onto the street. File, a burly former boxer who had once sparred with the heavyweight Jim Corbett, was off duty, and his attention was focused on the girl singer he was entertaining, but he reacted quickly to the sound of gunfire, leaping to his feet, drawing his revolver as he rose, and thrusting a passing waiter to one side as he made for the door. Finding it already blocked by a press of fellow customers desperate to discover what the commotion was about, File lost valuable seconds forcing his way through the crowd. By the time he reached the pavement, the taillights of the fleeing Packard were already receding into the distance.
Looking quickly up and down the street, File spotted a single taxi sitting parked in some shadows; its driver had been asleep for nearly half an hour and had escaped being moved on by the unofficial dispatcher at the taxi stand. Rousing the drowsy cabbie, File—joined by Lieutenant Frye—hand-cranked the cab and set off in pursuit. By the time the men reached Madison Avenue, however, the Packard was long gone. They cruised as far north as Fifty-ninth Street in search of it before abandoning the chase and returning disconsolately to the Metropole.
While Frye and File were gone, other patrolmen began interrogating members of the crowd. Several bystanders came forward to tell confused accounts of the murder; there was very little agreement between them. Some said that one killer had done all the shooting, others that two or three different men had fired. Several had seen the passengers from the Packard crossing the street, but a waiter from the Metropole said he thought a single assassin had been crouching behind one of the giant plant pots that stood outside the hotel entrance, while a pedestrian insisted that five shots had been fired from a moving car. The one thing all the witnesses agreed on was that none had gotten a clear look at the gunmen. The only descriptions the police came up with were of anonymous-sounding men with average builds and unremarkable clothes, their faces concealed beneath the brims of hats.
The best hope of tracing the killers seemed to be locating their vehicle. Automobiles were not so common in New York City in 1912 that the sudden appearance of one, driving at speed at well past two in the morning, would not attract attention, and it transpired that several men and women on both West Forty-third Street and Madison Avenue had turned to watch the murder car as it roared by. Several had noted the plate—one witness had even jumped in front of Frye and File’s taxi to shout out the details as they sped past. The trouble was that bystanders recalled the number differently. By the end of the night, the police had collected no fewer than seven different versions. According to the desk sergeant who recorded the first details of the killing in the police blotter at the Sixteenth Precinct, the dead gambler
was shot and killed by four unknown men about 24 years, white, 5 feet 5 or 6, smooth faced, dark complexion and hair, who after shooting Rosenthal jumped into a waiting automobile No. 13131 NY or 14131 NY.
Several other witnesses insisted that the number had been 43131 NY. On that basis, so far as the baffled detectives leafing through their statements could see, almost any combination of the numbers 1, 3, and 4 might be the correct one.
One witness, though, did not think he had the right number for the gray Packard; he knew. Charles Gallagher, an unemployed cabaret singer, had been walking toward Broadway when he heard the shots. Moments later the Packard had swept past him, men still clinging to its sides. He got a good look at the plates and—elbowing his way through the mass of people flocking to the hotel entrance—found Patrolman Thomas Brady beginning to take statements. Several members of the crowd were shouting out versions of the license plate—all wrong. Eventually the singer caught Brady’s eye.
“No,” he insisted. “41313 NY is the right number.”
The policeman seized Gallagher by the shoulders, hustled him backward through the crowd, and pressed him up against the hotel wall. He did not seem grateful for the information. “You’re wanted as a material witness,” Brady snapped, summoning a colleague.
The second policeman hurried Gallagher away to the Sixteenth Precinct building, where he was told to give his story to a harassed sergeant. The desk man wrote it down. “Name?” he asked, and Gallagher told him. “Address?”
“I’ve already given it to the detective,” the singer protested. “I don’t want any notoriety.”
At this the sergeant lost his temper. “He’s a witness. Lock him up,” he snarled to a patrolman, and the astonished Gallagher was hauled off to the cells.
“They didn’t give me a chance to explain that I only wanted to help them,” he told a World man the next day. “By the way they treated me I began to think they thought I was the man who shot Rosenthal.”
The singer’s escort fumbled with some keys, opened the door of an empty cell, and propelled him roughly into it. Gallagher slumped down on a wooden cot as the heavy door swung shut, and the authorities’ best hope of solving the Metropole shooting was left fuming behind bars.
It did not take long for word of the murder to reach the better parts of town.
Rhinelander Waldo was the first senior official to learn of Rosenthal’s demise; the telephone in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton rang at about 2:30 A.M. The commissioner responded to the news by barking out, “Ye Gods!” Then, assured by his assistants that the local precinct had things well under control, and deciding he would rather not disturb the irascible Mayor Gaynor in the middle of the night, Waldo went back to bed.
At roughly the same time, Herbert Bayard Swope was bulldozing his way into the Sixteenth Precinct building on West Forty-seventh Street. Like most newspapermen, Swope was a confirmed cynic, particularly when it came to the police. He knew that Rosenthal was far from popular with the NYPD, especially now, and especially among senior officers, who resented the allegations he had leveled against three of their number in the press. The World man looked on in growing anger at the chaos enveloping the station house; he was astonished to hear so many different versions of the license plate bandied about, and he found the desk policeman’s treatment of Charles Gallagher still more of a concern. In Swope’s opinion the cops were doing their best to lose the Packard’s number; if they were left to their own devices for much longer, the whole investigation might easily be compromised. There was only one thing he could do. The reporter pushed his way to a telephone and placed a call to DA Whitman.
Whitman was fast asleep in his apartment on East Twenty-sixth Street when the insistent ringing of the phone jerked him awake. He stumbled out of bed and picked up the receiver. At the other end of the line, shouting to make himself heard above the hubbub of the station, Swope rattled off a hurried summary of events at the Metropole, then told the district attorney that he really ought to get over to the Sixteenth Precinct right away. Whitman demurred. Surely, he grumbled, this could wait until morning.
“No. You’ve got to come right now,” Swope said.
“But I’m in bed. I’ve got my pajamas on,” the DA wailed. In the end Swope was forced to hail a taxi, drive to Whitman’s home, and virtually drag him into his clothes. The two men then went down to the street, got back into the cab, and headed for West Forty-seventh Street.
Thanks to Swope’s intervention, the district attorney arrived at the Sixteenth Precinct not long after 3:00 A.M. He went straight to a vacant office and sat down at the desk. As he did so, the phone rang. This time the caller was the precinct captain, William Day, one of the men accused by Rosenthal of graft. Someone had finally told Day that the most sensational murder in years had been committed on his doorstep, and the captain was telephoning to find out whether it was really necessary for him to come all the way back into town from his home in Brooklyn to take charge. Having had his own sleep rudely disturbed, Whitman was in no mood to be merciful. Yes, he told the captain, ice in his voice, it certainly was. For good measure the district attorney had Day’s boss, Inspector Edward Hughes, routed out of bed as well. Then he settled down to try to find out what was going on.
Whitman’s first discovery was Gallagher. Hearing from Swope and several other newsmen that a vital witness had been detained, he had the angry singer brought up from the cells. It took the DA several minutes and more than one apology to calm Gallagher down and get his story, but when he did, he realized the number matched the details given by another witness by the name of Thomas Coupe, a desk clerk at the Elks’ Club across the street from the Metropole. It had been Coupe who had leaped into the path of Billy File’s taxi shouting out the details of the murder car; like Gallagher, he had the number right. The vital lead was passed on to a bleary-eyed Inspector Hughes as he entered the station house. Hughes hastened off to check the details in a register.
In the midst of this confusion, no one had thought to tell Lillian Rosenthal of her husband’s death. The news was eventually broken by a reporter from the American who arrived outside Herman’s apartment on West Forty-fifth Street shortly before three in the morning. The house was dark, and he had trouble gaining admittance; the patrolman still stationed inside was suspicious, thinking this was another of Rosenthal’s ruses to lure the police out of his home. But at length the door opened and a disheveled Mrs. Rosenthal appeared. When the reporter told her what had occurred, she collapsed in hysterics.
“I had a premonition that something terrible was going to happen,” she sobbed to her visitor. “When Herman left home I felt certain all was not right, and I told him so. He just laughed—he always laughed. He had been warned so many times, and it’s true I’ve told him so frequently that I feared for something, that he—well, he just went.” When she had recovered herself somewhat, Mrs. Rosenthal asked the newspaperman to take her to the Metropole. She threw what the reporter thought looked like an “automobile duster” over her bulky frame and slipped into some shoes. But the second she stepped out onto the pavement, she collapsed again. By the time the American’s man had calmed her and gotten her down to the hotel, Herman’s body was long gone and there was little left to see.
Charles Becker, meanwhile, was still wide awake. He had attended the fights at Madison Square Garden earlier that evening, had a drink at a hotel, and then given several friends lifts home in Colonel Sternberger’s touring car—passing only a block from the Metropole as he did so—before returning to his own apartment off 165th Street at 2:00 A.M. Helen was lying in bed waiting for him. She got up to make her husband a roast beef sandwich; Becker ate it slowly. He had just finished when a telephone in the apartment rang. He and his wife exchanged glances; the number was private and unlisted.
Mrs. Becker picked up the phone and handed the receiver to her husband. The caller was Fred Hawley, Becker’s reporter friend from the evening Sun.
“Charley, have you heard the news?” asked Hawley.
“What news?” Becker replied.
Hawley told him. Becker seemed incredulous, asking the reporter if he was drunk. “No, Charley, listen to me,” Hawley begged. “Herman Rosenthal has been killed. I am working on the story and want a statement from you. What do you know about it?”
There was a brief pause before Becker’s voice came back down the line. “I don’t know anything about the murder,” he said, speaking with care. “But I do know a lot of things about Rosenthal. I am mighty sorry he has been killed because I had the goods on him and was about to show him up for keeps.”
Hawley scribbled in his notebook. “I think you ought to come down,” he finished. “I think you ought to get on the job.”
Becker talked over Hawley’s suggestion with his wife. “I didn’t know what to do,” he admitted later. “I told Hawley if I come downtown people may think that I have come down to gloat over the death of a man who has attacked me. If I don’t come down, the newspapers will say that when told about Rosenthal’s death I evinced no interest or emotion.” In the end curiosity got the better of the lieutenant and he decided to go. It took him until three-thirty to get to the subway station at Times Square; by then the street outside the Metropole was quiet again, and he headed for West Forty-seventh Street instead. He arrived at the precinct house shortly before 4:00 A.M, just as a large, slate-colored touring car drew up outside. It was the missing Packard taxi. Several policemen jumped down, flung open a passenger door, and dragged a stocky man with dark, wavy hair into the station. The prisoner was Louis Libby; he looked very apprehensive.
A cordon of patrolmen held back the knot of reporters gathering outside the Sixteenth Precinct. Becker, still wearing his civilian clothes, brushed past them and hastened up the steps in Libby’s wake. The first room that he came to was Captain Day’s office, which was crowded with policemen and officials. The lieutenant was about to enter when he noticed Inspector Hughes raising a hand to wave him off. Becker backed out, startled, and as he did so, he glanced down at the figure sitting in the captain’s chair. The eyes that met his were not Day’s. They belonged to District Attorney Whitman.
The police had traced the Packard easily enough. The registration details supplied by Gallagher and Coupe led them downtown to a garage on the north side of Washington Square, where Acting Captain Arthur Gloster found a gaggle of mechanics cleaning cars. Accosting one of them, Gloster demanded to be shown around. The second or third vehicle he came across was Libby’s Packard, which had been reversed into its parking space. Its plate, 41313 NY, was clearly visible.
“When did this come in?” Gloster asked the garage hands.
“Twelve o’clock. It has been down to Coney Island,” one of them replied. The policeman reached out a hand and ran it across the Packard’s hood. It was still hot to the touch.
“Keeps warm a long time, doesn’t it?” Gloster observed with a grim smile.
The garage doors were all secured, and several patrolmen set off to find the taxi’s owner. They traced Libby and his partner Shapiro to a boardinghouse on Stuyvesant Place and hauled both men out of bed. By the time they got back to Washington Square, Gloster had gotten the mechanics talking. One of them admitted that Libby had returned the taxi to the garage shortly after two-fifteen. When he did so, the man added, he had told them to spin the Coney Island story to anyone who asked. Gloster had heard enough. He bundled the chauffeur and his partner into the murder car and headed for the Sixteenth Precinct.
Lieutenant Becker hung around inside the station house for nearly half an hour after Libby was brought in. At one point, when he caught Whitman’s eye, he told the DA he wanted to go into the station’s makeshift morgue to view Rosenthal’s corpse. Whitman—so he said later—at once suspected that the lieutenant was planning to plant evidence of some sort in a pocket. “Never you mind going near it,” he snapped back. “I’ve been all over that body.” Defeated, Becker retreated to the pavement outside the precinct building, where he slouched against an iron railing trading theories with waiting newsmen. Most of the reporters thought that rival gamblers had arranged the murder, but the lieutenant disagreed. “I’ll lay you five to one it was some of Spanish Louis’s gang,” he said.
At about 4:30 A.M., Becker felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned; it was Inspector Hughes.
“Have you seen the body yet?” Hughes asked.
“No,” Becker replied.
“We’ll get a look at it,” Hughes said, and he led Becker into the station house’s yard. The two men peered through a window into the back room where the corpse was lying. It was still covered in blood. “Whoever done him, done him good,” Hughes muttered. He and Becker then walked together back inside the precinct building, where they found a highly unorthodox lineup under way. Libby, dressed in greasy overalls and his chauffeur’s cap, was standing in the middle of a row of plainclothes officers, all of whom were wearing suits. Unsurprisingly, Thomas Coupe, the Elks’ Club clerk, had no trouble picking him out.
“That’s him,” Coupe declared. The clerk then gave a statement, positively identifying the chauffeur as the man who had killed Rosenthal. Libby, he added, had not been alone in the touring car but had fired all the shots.
Coupe’s deposition crowned a satisfactory night’s work for the police. At dawn the DA went out onto the front steps of the precinct house and gave the waiting reporters a full statement. Coupe, Whitman said, had made a firm identification and could describe the murder and the scene in detail. “He will make a splendid witness,” the district attorney added. Then he ducked back into the station to continue his investigation.
In the course of the next day, things returned slowly to normal in the Sixteenth Precinct. Whitman relinquished control of the station house shortly after breakfast, returning to his usual office in the Criminal Courts Building and leaving Day and his men to get on with the tedious job of typing up statements and collating evidence. One of their first tasks was to inventory Rosenthal’s possessions and move the body to the morgue at Bellevue Hospital. The contents of the dead man’s pockets proved to consist of some keys, his handkerchief, and a little over $85 in cash. Herman had not been armed and had told friends he would never carry a gun, insisting, “If they are going to get me, they will get me.”
Shortly after Whitman’s departure, Rhinelander Waldo appeared to give his own brief statement to the press. The murder of underworld figures was not uncommon in New York, and incidents of this sort did not usually attract attention; at least six similar crimes were committed in July 1912—two on the same day that Rosenthal was shot—and none received more than a few weary lines of coverage in the press.*42 But the death of such a prominent informant, just hours before he was scheduled to give evidence of spectacular police corruption, was no ordinary affair, and Rosenthal’s murder was the lead story in every daily paper in the city. Waldo knew that he and his men would be expected to solve the crime and that failure to bring the investigation to a successful conclusion would badly damage his career. Few were surprised when the commissioner announced that the full resources of his department would be thrown into tracing Herman’s killers.
Waldo’s determination to bring somebody to justice for the Metropole shooting was only increased by the knowledge that many New Yorkers suspected the police themselves of arranging the affair. The late edition of Swope’s World reported that the NYPD had been reduced to “a state of terror” for fear that Rosenthal’s death would be traced to its doors. The same paper openly speculated that the gambler’s enemies on the force had organized the shooting and expressed surprise that Becker himself had yet to be suspended from duty and was apparently not even a suspect.
So far as Inspector Hughes and the men responsible for investigating the murder were concerned, however, the matter was not quite so clear-cut. Their only real leads were still Libby and Shapiro, and the two chauffeurs were refusing to say much about the events of the previous night. Most of the morning was devoted to questioning the pair, but progress remained slow.
To the newspapermen still clustered outside the station house, this was hardly surprising. Experienced correspondents who had been inside the building reported that Hughes’s handling of his prisoners had been extremely peculiar. The two suspects had been let out of their cells, and reporters from several papers were shocked to find them standing in a corridor unsupervised, deep in conversation. Even when Libby and Shapiro were brought up to the interview room, they were interrogated with unusual restraint. When Aaron Levy—a lawyer with long experience of defending East Side “characters” who had agreed to represent both prisoners—arrived at the Sixteenth Precinct late in the afternoon, he was startled to discover that neither of his clients had been beaten up. “I was certainly surprised to find both men sound as a dollar when I first saw them,” Levy confessed to the waiting members of the press. “Usually men who are picked up for a cowardly murder are given such a third degree that they are not very presentable in court twenty-four hours afterwards. But these two boys were looking fine.”
In fact—though the reporters did not know it—Hughes had every reason to be cautious. By the middle of the afternoon, he had discovered that Libby had a solid alibi; the chauffeur had spent the previous evening in his room, and no fewer than five of his fellow lodgers came forward to confirm that they had seen him there. And, to complicate matters further, lawyer Levy decided that both his clients would give their statements not to Hughes but straight to the DA. This was clever thinking; no policeman was going to take too many liberties with Libby and Shapiro under such circumstances, at least not while the memory of Gallagher was so fresh in their minds.
By the end of a long day of questioning, then, Hughes had coaxed no more than a few scraps of information from his suspects. Libby readily admitted that he had known Rosenthal slightly; both men had once been members of the Hesper Club. He agreed that Jack Zelig was one of his best customers. But he denied all knowledge of the murder and said that he had no idea who the Packard’s passengers had been. Shapiro, meanwhile, had confessed to driving to the Metropole. Hughes guessed, given the history of the car, that he must have known that his customers were gangsters. But there was no way of proving it, and the chauffeur refuted that charge indignantly. He had been as shocked as anyone, he said, when Rosenthal was shot. Shapiro even claimed not to have recognized his passengers, adding that when he had been slow pulling away in the aftermath of the murder, one of them had pistol-whipped him into driving faster—an odd thing to do to a trusted associate. An ugly bruise along the hairline on the driver’s scalp seemed to support this claim.
It was only at the end of a frustrating afternoon that the police finally obtained the information they really needed: the name of the man who had phoned to book the taxi to the Metropole. The caller, they were told, was Bald Jack Rose. “The car,” lawyer Levy confided to reporters after talking with his clients, “was hired from the Café Boulevard stand by telephone. The man making the call said his name was ‘Jack,’ and the [operator], who had rented the car many times to Rose, claimed he recognized the voice.”
It was a vital breakthrough. If the police could now track down Jack Rose, he could lead them to the gunmen in the Packard; in all likelihood he also knew who had hired the men and why. But Rose was a known stool pigeon of Becker’s, and the new information was important for another reason: It promised to link the gambler’s employer, Becker, to the crime.
In 1912 leads of this sort rarely remained unpublished for long, and by evening most of New York’s dailies had been tipped off about Rose. Only a handful chose to publicize the story, which was still uncorroborated at this point. The World, predictably, was one of those that did.
Swope’s paper had no doubt what Rose’s involvement meant. “Herman Rosenthal,” it proclaimed in ringing tones next morning,
was murdered in cold blood by the System.
The System is the partnership between the police of New York City and the criminals of New York City.
The System murdered Herman Rosenthal because he threatened to expose it and had begun to expose it…. It murdered him because he came to the World office Saturday night and made affidavit as to the System’s activities. It murdered him because he had declared that he would submit his evidence to the press of New York and make public the criminal profits that the police derive from the protection of lawbreakers. It murdered him in a desperate effort to save itself from destruction.
It was left to District Attorney Whitman to add the coda that the World merely implied. The DA had spent the day inspecting the murder scene and trying to discover why the men on patrol near the Metropole had not done more to catch the fleeing gunmen; he did not return to his apartment until three on the morning of July 17, twenty-four hours after he had been hustled out of bed by Swope. But when he did so, the newsmen were still waiting for him.
Several reporters cornered Whitman in the lobby of the building and pressed him for a statement. They wanted to know more about Libby and Shapiro, naturally. But they also wanted to hear the DA’s theories about the motive for the murder.
Whitman had by now reached some firm conclusions on the subject. He professed himself astonished that the police on duty in Satan’s Circus had managed to obtain half a dozen different numbers for the murder car—“all of them wrong”—and said that he believed “there was much police interest and activity behind the slaying of Rosenthal.”
“I accuse the Police Department of New York,” the DA added in conclusion,
through certain members of it, with having murdered Herman Rosenthal. Either directly or indirectly, it was because of them that he was slain in cold blood with never a chance for his life.
I have the necessary proof that there were five policemen there, two were within 100 feet of it, one was within 40 feet at the time the crime was committed,*43 and not one of them attempted to do anything that would naturally be done by the police under the circumstances…. Five men were able to shoot to pieces the head of a Grand Jury witness and escape without being even seriously inconvenienced…. The police permitted this murder and deliberately allowed the murderers to escape.
Whitman did not add that Charles Becker was one of the members of the force to whom he was referring, but he might as well have. By the early hours of July 17, the lieutenant was already the DA’s leading suspect.