CHAPTER 8
RED QUEEN
IT MAY HAVE SEEMED blindingly obvious to Charles Whitman that Becker and the New York cops had ordered Herman’s murder, but others were not so sure. Rosenthal had had so many enemies that even his fellow gamblers were not entirely sure how many men had wished him dead. When Horace Green of the Evening Post gained access to Rosenthal’s home on the night before the funeral, posing as an acquaintance, he was struck by the morbid suspicion displayed by even Herman’s closest friends. “The murderers had not yet been caught,” Green wrote, “[and] it was common knowledge that the criminals lurked in the neighborhood, and that, in order to avoid suspicion, they would appear among the chief mourners. Therefore, each eye was turned against its neighbor, and each man, as he passed you, asked the silent question: ‘Did you shoot Herman Rosenthal?’”
The dead man’s body lay in an open casket, a tribute to the undertaker’s craft. Lillian Rosenthal, looking fatter than ever in a billowing crepe gown, had begged Sam Paul and Bridgey Webber to meet the funeral expenses, and her husband’s old rivals had obliged. But neither man attended Rosenthal’s interment, on a stuffy afternoon two days after he was killed, and only a few of Herman’s friends cared to be seen in the cortege. The funeral director’s men were pressed into service as pallbearers, and no more than a handful of relatives followed the coffin to the cemetery. There were some flowers but, conspicuously, no cards. “Herman Rosenthal a live gambler with a bank roll and a generous hand was a hero,” Swope explained in the World. “Herman Rosenthal a murdered ‘squealer’ was a thing to be shunned.”
None of these considerations, naturally, prevented thousands of curious New Yorkers from flocking to West Forty-fifth Street at the time appointed for the funeral. So dense were the crowds outside the Rosenthal apartment that Viña Delmar and her father, over from Brooklyn to pay their respects, found it impossible to get within sight of its front door. “Traffic was blocked from Fifth Avenue to Broadway,” the girl recalled.
People stood on roofs, climbed poles, and leaned from every available window to see Herman’s coffin carried from No. 104. Thousands filled the streets, perspiring and struggling to draw a step nearer to the waiting hearse. Mounted policemen vainly attempted to disperse the crowds. They backed horses into groups where brawls had suddenly exploded. They scooped fainting women out of the mob. They rescued lost children and picked up a man who had died from a heart attack. They snarled and barked and, finally, by threatening mass arrests, they cleared a passage through which Herman could be taken away forever from Forty-fifth Street.
The funeral itself was subdued. There was little ceremony, and Rabbi Samuel Greenfield delivered only a short address. He made no attempt “to dignify or glorify Rosenthal beyond his walk in life,” waiting reporters noted, but talked a little of the dead man’s generosity to friends. Greenfield also mentioned one relative who had been too ill to attend. Herman’s mother, who had depended on him for support, was dying in Brooklyn. She lay on her deathbed, raving and calling for her son, never knowing—Swope exhaled—that “her boy had preceded her on her long journey.”
Viña Delmar and her father were not the only people taken aback by the public’s consuming interest in Herman Rosenthal. New York’s underworld, more used to gangland murders going unreported and unsolved, could scarcely remember a case like it, and the active involvement of the district attorney badly shook the murderers in the gray Packard. Zelig’s men had plainly believed there would never be a full investigation of the crime, neither bothering to conceal their vehicle’s license plates nor donning disguises or masks. The gangsters went hurriedly underground, and many of the gamblers who had known Rosenthal well wasted little time in leaving town. Some fled to the Catskills, others to Hot Springs, Arkansas, a popular resort renowned for harboring criminals. Among those who left New York more or less immediately were Beansey Rosenfeld, Dan the Dude, and all three of the minor gamblers who had shared Herman’s fatal table at the Metropole.
The furor that erupted over Herman’s shooting was, in short, unprecedented, and it owed a good deal to the city’s newspapers. Every daily in the city cleared its front page to report not merely the murder but the ensuing investigation—even the Morning Telegraph, which as a rule preferred to discuss horseflesh and chorus girls. Still more remarkably, the story remained news for months. Hearst’s American featured the case on its front page on 150 of the 190 days following the shooting—this at a time when it also had to make room for a World Series between New York teams, an attempt on the life of Theodore Roosevelt, and national elections. The World and the rest of Manhattan’s dailies were not far behind. “Never in their history,” one reporter calculated, had “the New York press found room for as relentless coverage of a story as it did for the Rosenthal murder.”
What made the affair sensational, of course, was the rumored involvement of the city’s cops. Tales of police corruption sold newspapers, and it was the tantalizing possibility that someone in authority had commanded Herman’s murder that set the Rosenthal affair apart from other gangland killings. New Yorkers vividly recalled Herman’s angry allegations against Becker on July 15. The gambler’s death, coming as it had a mere eight hours before he was due to give a further statement to the authorities, seemed to confirm every accusation he had made.
District Attorney Whitman helped fan the flames. Having openly accused the NYPD of instigating and then covering up a conspiracy to murder, the DA was soon in the news again, melodramatically declaring Herman’s shooting “a challenge to our very civilization.” His well-publicized determination to crack the case resulted in a steady stream of developments, each leaked to an eager press. Editors responded by assigning their best reporters to the story, and a swarm of inquisitive newsmen were soon actively assisting Whitman in pursuing leads that had eluded him. The papers’ editorial columns and cartoonists, meanwhile, seized the chance to condemn police corruption and brutality. “Never before in this city was murder done with such openness,” the American scolded. “The tragedy seemed the limit of malignity; nothing could be worse than this.” The World published a grim cartoon showing a hulking cop, his revolver smoking and his face hidden by a strip of cloth labeled “The System,” stepping over a body sprawled on the pavement. “Strip off the mask!” the caption begged.
Swope and Whitman, who had set the whole story in motion, were the principal beneficiaries of this deluge of reporting. For Swope the affair was a godsend: the biggest story of the year, perhaps of his entire career. The opportunity to cover such a case amply justified the risks that he had taken, first in arranging to publish Herman’s unproven affidavits, next in pursuing Whitman to Rhode Island and cajoling the DA into coming home, and then in routing him from his bed on the night of the shooting to take charge of the investigation. The Rosenthal shooting made Swope’s name and secured for him the post of chief reporter for his paper.
For Whitman the case was even more important. Had it not been for Herman’s murder, the district attorney might well have served out his term in comparative obscurity, denied the chance to resuscitate his fading career. Rosenthal’s death offered the opportunity to garner headlines and present himself as a no-nonsense lawman. Throughout the ensuing weeks and months, Whitman would take considerable pains to contrast the vigor of his own investigation with the lethargy and dubious motives of the police. Whether or not the DA was really as sure as he appeared to be that the murder was no mere dispute between gamblers, he certainly did see the whole affair as an opportunity to embark on a high-profile crusade against Manhattan’s cops. By taking on those perennial New York bugbears, police corruption and brutality, Whitman hoped to build himself a platform from which to launch a new career in politics, as other district attorneys and peppery judges (Gaynor included) had already done.
Looked at in this way, Lieutenant Becker made an attractive target. There was nothing to be gained, in political terms, from prosecuting Zelig’s gunmen; even Rosenthal’s gambling enemies, Webber and Rose, were such obvious lowlifes that their convictions would scarcely raise a stir of interest. Arresting Becker, on the other hand, would create a scandal, and convicting him was an achievable goal. It simply meant proving that the lieutenant had had a hand in Herman’s murder—and pursuing Rosenthal’s charges against Becker’s grafting, too.*44
While the district attorney was busy making statements to the press, Rhinelander Waldo was pushing hard for answers. The commissioner wanted the murder solved just as badly as did Whitman, though he no doubt hoped to prove that the police had had no role in it. Waldo’s determination was due in part to a natural desire to prove to his many critics that his men could solve the case. But it evidently owed something, too, to the awkward conference he had been forced to endure with his mentor, Mayor Gaynor, soon after the shooting. “Conferring,” one newsman explained, “was perhaps not the word.” By standing at a particular spot in City Hall Park, reporters had been able to follow the progress of the interview through a half-open window in Gaynor’s office:
When the meeting began, the Mayor wore his straw hat. He took it off early in the talk, however, and was seen belaboring his police commissioner with it. Now on the head, then on the shoulders or chest, as the mood seized him. Toward the end of the talk he contented himself with poking it at the commissioner.
For all Waldo’s urgings, though, it took some time to get the police inquiry on track. Of course, Inspector Hughes and his colleagues had (at least if Whitman were correct) strong motives to leave the murder unresolved, and they often did seem baffled by an array of false statements and red herrings that, taken together, gave the impression that the whole case was a muddle. The police had to sift through statements from more than one witness who claimed that uniformed policemen had been among the killers at the Metropole. Another insisted that Sam Paul had been seen sitting in the Packard taxi, and a third swore that the man who had telephoned to rent the murder car was none other than Lieutenant Becker. None of these stories checked out, and neither did the tale told by another witness who claimed that the taxi had no connection to the murder in any case—the gunmen had walked to the Metropole, he said. As for the number of assassins who had lain in wait for Herman to emerge, conflicting testimony put the number variously at one man, three, or four.
Amid all this misinformation, though, there were three or four good leads. The best hope of breaking the case seemed to lie with William Shapiro, who remained in custody at the Sixteenth Precinct station house. Hughes, unhappy with the chauffeur’s continued insistence that he had not recognized his customers, had his prisoner arraigned for murder on his second day in custody, and—confronted by the chance that he would stand trial for the killing—Shapiro was soon revealing more of what he knew. He still refused to name any of Zelig’s gangsters. But he did recall that Harry Vallon had been one of his passengers that night. So had a second gambler named Schepps, he said.
To Hughes and the Satan’s Circus police, Shapiro’s allegations made sense. The hatchet-faced Vallon was a known minor criminal who was not only a friend of Bridgey Webber’s, but an acquaintance of Jack Rose’s. Sam Schepps, a former pimp and opium fiend, belonged to the same circle of associates. A short, plump, bespectacled sneak, and “egotistical beyond imagination,” Schepps now bought and sold fake jewelry and picked up spare change every now and then by carrying messages for Rose.
Looked at dispassionately, the chauffeur’s statement clearly pointed to the notion that Rosenthal had been killed by his fellow gamblers. Bald Jack Rose had hired the taxi seen outside the Metropole. Two close associates, Vallon and Schepps, had traveled with him in the car. Vallon, in turn, was known to work for Bridgey Webber. As for Sam Paul—who was, other than Arnold Rothstein, the most influential gambler of them all—rumors had reached the police as early as July 17 that Herman’s death was actually the consequence of a recent police raid on the Sam Paul Association, occasioned by a tip-off Paul believed had originated with Herman Rosenthal. It came as little surprise to anyone when a New York American investigation showed that at least a score of gamblers—including Paul, Webber, Vallon, Schepps, and Rose—had spent the hours after the murder together at the Lafayette Steam Baths, an all-night hangout on the East Side greatly favored in the underworld.
Whether any of this linked Becker to the murder remained a matter of dispute. Commissioner Waldo did not think so, loyally if naïvely hurrying out a statement backing the lieutenant and defending his department. But Whitman continued to insist such was the case. The DA was still not willing to let the police investigation run its course, and over the next few days he not only convened a grand jury to consider Herman’s graft allegations but also created quite a stir by asking the Burns private detective agency to conduct its own inquiries into the Rosenthal affair. The police could not be trusted to find the murderer themselves, Whitman said.
Ironically enough, in these strained circumstances, it was the much-maligned Inspector Hughes who made the next important breakthrough, tracking down Bridgey Webber and hauling him in for questioning. Webber proved unforthcoming; he gave a short statement of his movements on the night of the murder that omitted anything incriminating and implausibly insisted he and Rosenthal were close friends. “I have known Herman all my life,” he stated. “When I was blackjacked by ‘Tough Tony’ on registration day three years ago, Rosenthal took me to the doctor and took me home. People wanted to make me believe that Herman had me beaten up. I didn’t believe it. I don’t know anything about the murder.” But Hughes was certain that Bridgey knew more than he was saying. The gambler was released, but the police kept close track of his movements.
The next suspect to turn up was Jack Rose, who walked unchallenged right into police headquarters on July 18. Bald Jack, it transpired, had spent the interval since Rosenthal’s murder hiding in a friend’s apartment well uptown. According to statements he made at different times, the gambler either had been lying in bed, ill and unaware that he was wanted for questioning, or—rather more plausibly—had waited for the chance to see what Shapiro was saying before making the decision to turn himself in. Whatever the truth, his appearance on Centre Street had been meticulously planned. Rose had spent much of the previous day consulting a lawyer friend with strong connections with Tammany Hall. That morning he had carefully dressed in his best clothes and had even stopped off for a manicure on his way downtown. He strolled into the lobby of the building wearing a natty gray suit and a gray silk shirt, discreetly striped with green, and swung a cane jauntily to and fro as he made his way upstairs.
Bizarrely, the World observed, given that half the policemen in the city were supposed to be searching for him, Rose went quite unrecognized by anyone in the lobby “despite his remarkable appearance” and was able to saunter up and down the corridors unchallenged in search of Waldo’s office. The gambler was eventually directed in to see a surprised Deputy Commissioner Dougherty, who took down his age—thirty-seven—and occupation—“sporting man”—and extracted a statement as determinedly bland as Webber’s had been. “There was nothing to be gained by staying back,” Rose said when asked why he’d surrendered, “since I felt that I was perfectly innocent. I haven’t the remotest idea of why or by whom Rosenthal was killed.”
If Bald Jack’s unrevealing evidence irked Dougherty at all, the deputy commissioner did not show it. But—given Shapiro’s incriminating statements—Dougherty was not about to let Rose go free. He knew that the gambler had plenty more to say and was better placed than any man to solve the mystery of Charley Becker’s involvement in the whole affair. When Bald Jack had finished talking, Dougherty informed his prisoner he was under arrest “on a charge of acting in concert with others to cause the death of Rosenthal.” Then he stepped out of his office for a moment to arrange for a message to go straight to Whitman’s office informing him of this development.
Dougherty was still discussing the matter with a colleague along the hall when his office door flew open. The visitor was none other than Lieutenant Becker, who evidently had no idea his former collector had turned himself in. Becker had (so he would later claim) called in at police headquarters to tell his boss where Bald Jack might be hiding, and he was badly shocked to discover that he was too late, stopping “as if shot” when he saw Rose already sitting there. As for the gambler:
All of a sudden I felt, rather than saw, somebody at the door, and I may have heard a kind of hiss—I’m not sure now—but I don’t think I heard anything at all—I just felt it. I looked up and there standing in the door was Becker. I shall never forget that face if I live to be a thousand years old. He never moved a muscle. He just stood there and looked. I never had been so scared in all my life. I wanted to go to the electric chair right then—anything to get away from him and his eyes.
I hadn’t made a single crack about Becker except to boost him. But he was afraid I was beginning to tell, and anyway I had come to headquarters in spite of his orders. I always knew Charles Becker was a tough man, but I never knew the real sort of man he was until I got that flash of him looking at me. It didn’t last more than a minute, I suppose, but I felt like I had been in a furnace, I was just burning up. He disappeared without a word, and I came to with a choke as Dougherty entered.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked in a funny way.
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “I’m seeing things.”
Becker had every reason to be disconcerted by Rose’s sudden appearance at Police Headquarters. Bald Jack hiding out among the tenements well away from awkward questions was one thing. Bald Jack sitting confident and apparently talkative in the heart of police headquarters was quite another. The development certainly implied that Rose knew he could easily stand trial for the Rosenthal shooting and had come to Commissioner Dougherty to do some sort of deal. And indeed more or less as soon as the gambler was led away to the cells—still swinging his cane and protesting to waiting newsmen that he was merely doing his duty as a citizen by assisting the police with their inquiries—the tenor of the investigation changed.
To begin with, Dougherty stopped protecting Becker. The deputy commissioner had loyally followed Waldo’s line thus far, insisting there was no evidence, other than the word of criminals, that any member of the NYPD had had a thing to do with Herman’s death. “The police are too busy going after Rosenthal’s killer to pay attention to the newspaper stories that take up so much of Mr. Whitman’s time,” he brusquely informed one newsman after the shooting at the Metropole. On July 20, though, Dougherty changed his mind, calling on the DA in the latter’s offices to ask what should be done. Several of the leading dailies reported the conversation that ensued:
DOUGHERTY: Do you want me to arrest Lieutenant Becker?
WHITMAN: Not yet.
DOUGHERTY: All right. I see we agree as to who is in back of this killing.
Chauffeur Shapiro’s successive confessions, meanwhile, had at last grown detailed enough for the deputy commissioner to authorize the arrest of several leading suspects. First Bridgey Webber and then Sam Paul were summoned to headquarters for questioning, Webber because, according to the chauffeur, his rooms had been the murderers’ rendezvous, and Paul thanks to the various threats muttered against Rosenthal at a Sam Paul Association picnic held just before the murder. Paul’s arrest coincided—to the surprise of many of the journalists covering the case—with the seizure of Rosenthal’s old friend Jack Sullivan, the newspaper distributor, who had been seen lounging around Webber’s poker club at around the time the four gunmen assembled. There was still no sign of Harry Vallon or Sam Schepps, and the latter was generally believed to have fled the city. But the whereabouts of Vallon became obvious when, shortly after midnight on July 23, the faro dealer followed Rose in strolling right up Centre Street and surrendering to the police, reputedly on Webber’s orders. Vallon had been hiding out in the Catskills, and he proceeded to give a vague and unincriminating statement. Dougherty was not impressed, and he had Webber, Paul, Sullivan, and Vallon charged with conspiracy to murder.
By that Tuesday morning, then—one week after the shooting—the police had three gamblers and a hanger-on in custody along with Libby and Shapiro. So far as the general public was concerned, six arrests meant progress, and there was increasing speculation that the mystery of Herman’s murder was about to be solved. The press coverage was tumultuous; most dailies printed extra editions to report developments, and a crowd estimated at more than six thousand strong filled the streets outside the Criminal Courts Building when Webber and his friends were brought in for questioning. “A kind of lunacy descended on the city,” Viña Delmar would remember, “as one dramatic charge followed another. The days were filled with extras, which in turn were filled with rumors as well as with detailed testimony.”
From Dougherty’s perspective, though, things were not yet quite clear-cut. The prisoners all denied their guilt; Webber, the first to be detained, had been so certain he was not a suspect that he had asked the cab that brought him to headquarters to wait, since he would “be back in five minutes.” And, taken into court the next day, the gamblers maintained their silence. Bald Jack Rose’s main contribution to these initial hearings, the newsmen covering the case observed, was to turn up dressed in a “nifty” new suit: The procurer was “a symphony in brown,” Swope told his readers, “from his tie to his shoes, save that he wore a pink-striped shirt,” and Vallon informed the magistrate he had been “awfully drunk” on the night of the murder and could not remember much about it. Bridgey Webber devoted most of his efforts to intimidating Whitman’s witnesses. At least one man, a barber who had heard the shots outside the Metropole and reached the spot in time to identify the gambler, wilted under Webber’s baleful gaze and decided that he was no longer sure that it really had been Bridgey he had seen “running like hell” from the Metropole. “Didn’t you just tell me in that other room that you saw Webber?” demanded an astonished Whitman. “I—I think I did,” the man replied. “I am not sure about it…. Judge, I’m under oath, and I’m not sure now.” The DA had the witness charged with perjury.
Ultimately it was Shapiro who ended this impasse. Under increasing pressure from the district attorney’s men, who by July 25 were threatening to make him a scapegoat for the whole affair, the chauffeur at last made a detailed confession describing the events of the sixteenth. Shapiro’s new testimony was far from complete—he still had more sense than to implicate Zelig’s gunmen and claimed to have taken no active part in events whatsoever—but it was still enough to condemn the imprisoned gamblers.
“I picked up Rose and Sam Schepps,” his statement began,
and drove them back to Webber’s. I waited there about twenty-five minutes and was looking out of the corner of my eye when I saw Jack Rose come out of Webber’s place. With him were three men…. Then Rose came over to where I was and as they got in I noticed that Sam Schepps was one of them and Harry Vallon was the other. The third man I couldn’t make out at first because Rose kept him behind the others and held him back to whisper something in his ear. Then, when this fellow put his foot on the step, Rose patted him on the back and said, “Now make good,” or something like that.
I then started with my passengers toward the Metropole and as I turned into Forty-third Street I saw Jack Rose in the shadow on the north side of the street. Someone in the car said, “There’s Jack now,” and one of the others said, “Close your trap, you damn fool.”
I stopped along the south side of the street about one hundred feet east of the Metropole entrance. Vallon, Schepps and the third man got out of the car and Vallon told me not to move away. I felt that there was something going to happen, but I didn’t know what it was….
I was dozing when I heard the first shot. I had thought this was to be a “beating-up” party, but I realized it had turned to murder. There was nothing for me to do but start the car at once, which I did. The gunmen piled into the car and one of them ordered me to “beat it.”
Word of Shapiro’s revelations reached the imprisoned gamblers and their lawyers on July 25. The next day, a Friday, was spent in conference. Webber had become suddenly talkative, it emerged, and—hearing of this—the attorneys representing Bald Jack and Harry Vallon “advised their men to throw themselves on Mr. Whitman’s mercy.”
It seemed only a matter of time before all three confessed. There was still some doubt as to exactly what the prisoners would say, but even a casual reader of the daily papers realized that the DA was really interested in just one thing. Rose’s lawyer, for one, saw no harm in giving the waiting throng of newsmen a taste of his client’s evidence.
“Everyone knows,” the attorney smiled, “that the shadow of the police hangs over this crime.”
Becker’s position worsened further during the last days of July with the publication of a series of devastating disclosures concerning his income from grafting.
Both the DA’s office and the press had been searching for evidence that the lieutenant had been banking illicit payments for several weeks. It was—as most policemen and most lawyers knew—difficult to show that any officer had accepted bribes. Virtually all grafters were paid in cash, often via intermediaries, and took good care to keep no records that could possibly incriminate them. But over the years reformers had found ways of implying what could not be proved. Clubber Williams’s career had not survived the revelation that he was the proud owner of a steam yacht and an estate in Connecticut. Lieutenant Becker’s Achilles’ heel proved to be his new home in the Bronx.
Reporters had little difficulty in pinpointing the property. The house, noted the World, sprawled over no fewer than four substantial lots and was considerably larger and more elaborate than its neighbors. It rose three stories and—most incriminating of all, to the American’s reporter—included an empty garage. In 1912, as the newspaper observed, no ordinary lieutenant on a salary of $2,250 a year could reasonably have hoped to buy a car.
A few among the charitable and the naïve accepted the lieutenant’s hasty explanation that he and his wife had both saved hard for nineteen years to pay for the property—a response that owed much to the example set by Clubber Williams and his mysterious landholdings in Japan. But Becker and his wife had altogether less luck in answering their critics when Whitman began to uncover the details of their bank accounts, beginning with the news that Helen had paid in $3,000 in a single morning at one institution where that sum was the maximum customers were allowed to deposit in a month. A “flood of cash,” totaling nearly $50,000, was subsequently tracked to nearly a score of bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes. It was far more money than the Beckers could account for, although some (the lieutenant offered) had been borrowed from his brother, some represented savings set aside from Helen’s years of teaching night school, and a good proportion of the rest was cash moved, for no apparent reason, to and fro between accounts that the DA had inadvertently “miscounted.”
Over the coming months, Becker’s attempts to explain all this suspicious wealth would get considerably more elaborate. Windfalls from dead relatives would figure heavily. But few people, then or later, ever believed that his money had come from anywhere but the brothels and gambling houses of Satan’s Circus, and in consequence the policeman lost most of what little sympathy New Yorkers might have felt for him.
The exposure of Becker’s clandestine bank accounts was a severe setback for the couple—more serious, in some respects, than the allegation that he had ordered the death of Herman Rosenthal. A criminal’s story of a plan to murder another crook was one thing—the policeman, for one, shrugged off those charges as just the sort of behavior one might expect from self-confessed villains. But the exposure of Becker as a grafting cop was another matter altogether. The public found it easy to believe tales of police corruption, and before long, hostile reports of Becker’s dubious service with the Strong Arm Squads began to fill the newspapers. That was bad news for the lieutenant, but—more than that—it was also a serious concern to the real powers in the city. Tammany was terrified. With Whitman, a Republican, in the DA’s office, the cop-hating Gaynor at City Hall, and recollections of the Lexow hearings still fresh in many people’s minds, the last thing Boss Murphy could afford to sanction was another corruption scandal. When Whitman’s prisoners started talking, the sachems of Tammany suddenly found themselves as one with the gamblers of Satan’s Circus and the senior officers of the NYPD. Their most pressing concern became to deflect Whitman from pursuing his inquiries into their particular domains.
Under normal circumstances, Tammany looked after the police. Preserving corrupt cops from prosecution made sense: It kept embarrassing news out of the press, it guaranteed the loyalty of the men who gathered money for the Hall, and it minimized disruptions to the flow of graft.
There can be little doubt that Becker expected protection. It is scarcely plausible that the lieutenant had been able to extort tens of thousands of dollars from gambling houses with strong political connections without the approval of Tammany—or at least of Big Tim Sullivan. It follows that very large sums—at least half a million dollars,judging from the cash in Becker’s bank accounts, had been channeled upward from the lieutenant’s collections—sufficient, surely, for him to expect help at such a crucial juncture. And for several days after Rosenthal’s murder, it did seem that Becker might walk away from the affair unscathed. He received a visit from State Assemblyman Fitzgerald, a well-known ally of Big Tim’s, who told the press that Becker was obviously innocent. Waldo put out a statement declaring that he would not so much as suspend his onetime favorite without “real evidence”—which, the commissioner implied, was not likely to appear. Even William Gaynor, no friend to the police, observed that Herman’s statements were scarcely to be trusted. When, on July 18, Becker was summoned to spend half an hour at City Hall, the chief topic of his conversation with the mayor was the policeman’s regrettable willingness to meet Rosenthal at the Elks’ Club ball; the gambler’s murder was barely touched on. “Do not bend a single bit to clamor,” Gaynor now instructed Waldo, “and especially to clamor chiefly created by hired press agents and the gamblers with whom you are at war, and those corrupt newspapers which have been all along and are now at the service of gamblers.” It is scarcely surprising that when Becker met a gaggle of reporters the next day, he was “swaggering in his manner.” The lieutenant, one newsman added, “wore a smile constantly and appeared to take his predicament very lightly.”
In truth, however, Becker’s position was not so strong as he believed. To begin with, Tammany Hall was no longer the monolith that it had been when the policeman had begun his career. Then Tammany had still controlled not merely the city government and the police but the judiciary as well. Two decades later time and scandal had loosened the Hall’s grip on power, and Charles Murphy, its new boss, depended far less on the police for help than had his nineteenth-century predecessors. All this made it less likely that the Hall would come to the rescue of a corrupt policeman, no matter how valuable his services had been.
To make matters worse, Becker badly underestimated Whitman’s determination to drag him into the Rosenthal affair. The lieutenant seemed to have expected that the statements of “mere criminals”—no matter how damaging—would not be taken seriously by the DA or the press, and it seemed not to have occurred to him that the sworn depositions of several gamblers, not one, might be enough for Whitman to take action. And while Becker recognized that his adversary would seek to generate political capital from the case, he was taken aback by the speed with which the district attorney rounded up Herman’s enemies and contrived to get them talking.
Perhaps the biggest mistake that the policeman made, however, was to depend on Big Tim Sullivan. Becker’s faith in Tim’s ability to damp things down in Satan’s Circus was not unfounded; Sullivan had kept the peace for years, to the benefit of police, politicians, and gamblers alike. Despite his long friendship with Rosenthal, moreover, the Tammany man had nothing to gain by permitting the gambler’s murder to become a scandal. But—no doubt quite unknown to Becker, who lacked political connections and had met Big Tim in person only once—by the summer of 1912 the boss’s power was nearly gone, his health suddenly in terminal decline. Visitors to Sullivan’s headquarters at the Occidental Hotel were left to cool their heels in the bar, casting bored eyes over the famed erotic fresco on the ceiling; Tim was far too ill to see them.*45
Late that July—at the very time a fit and healthy Sullivan might have used his influence to see that Herman’s murder was swiftly tidied up—Tim passed the point of no return. He spent the last days of the month incapacitated by symptoms that included “bouts of manic depression, delusions of food poisoning, violent hallucinations and threats of suicide.” In August he was no better. And in September, soon after attending the funeral of his estranged wife, Sullivan suffered a complete nervous breakdown and was hurried out of town to be confined in a private sanatorium in Yonkers. He was only forty-nine years old, and even his enemies had expected him to rule over the vice district indefinitely. Now he was gone, and with his family in disarray, Mayor Gaynor indifferent, Rhinelander Waldo weak and ineffectual, and Tammany distracted by the looming squabble over the Sullivan legacy, no power in the city could stop District Attorney Whitman. Any attempt on the part of Becker’s superiors or the Tammany sachems who shared his graft to offer him protection risked giving the dangerously powerful DA an excuse to broaden his inquiry. Long before the end of July, rumors began to sweep along Fourteenth Street. If it would only shut up the DA, the whisper ran, the politicians planned “to let Becker take the brunt of things,” “to have him ‘take the splash,’ to ‘let him drop.’”
The signs were already there for those who wished to see them. A few days after the murder, Becker had been stripped of the command of his Strong Arm Squad and reassigned to a desk at headquarters. The squad itself was broken up; two-thirds of the policeman’s men were transferred to Dan Costigan’s command and the rest did mundane clerical tasks alongside their former chief. The Sun, which maintained a cozier relationship with Tammany Hall than did most of its rivals, took to reminding its readers of the identity of the major suspect in the case, running a panel headlined WHAT BECKER DID YESTERDAY. And a reporter who called to find the lieutenant closeted with his attorney noted that the easy smile was gone. Becker, the newsman told his readers, now had “stern lines in his face, and his manner was nervous.” “I am not going to make any statement whatever,” he scowled when the journalist knocked. “I am not going to say a single thing.” His lawyer hustled the man out of the room.
By now the New York press was scenting blood. Posses of reporters ambushed Becker on his daily journey to and from the office. Others combed through yellowing files of clippings to rake up scandals from his past. Swope—well informed as usual—was the first to pose awkward questions about the lieutenant’s dismal marital history, and when a rumor reached Newspaper Row that Becker had killed himself, a large pack of journalists hurried to Deputy Commissioner Dougherty’s office to get a comment and were disappointed to see the man himself come down the steps, decidedly alive. “Well, boys, I have committed suicide, as you can see,” the policeman shot sarcastically as he clattered past them, face set grim.
Becker clearly felt the pressure mounting. Soon after Rosenthal’s death he publicly proclaimed his willingness to testify before Whitman’s grand jury on police corruption—a decision that would have meant waiving his immunity from prosecution. Refusal to cooperate, Waldo had advised him, would be no different from confessing guilt. The dailies also got wind of Becker’s summons to another meeting with his superiors, and when the lieutenant emerged onto the street, he was instantly mobbed by reporters firing questions. Once again Becker brushed his interrogators angrily aside and stalked away, flashbulbs popping all around him. But (noted the Tribune’s man) on this occasion he at last lost his temper with the swarm of newsmen trailing him:
As he left City Hall, photographers followed, taking pictures of his back to the considerable amusement of passers-by. Every few steps, Becker would whirl on them in fury, snarling, “Arrest that man!” to no one in particular. We were reminded of nothing so much as the Red Queen, in Alice in Wonderland.
There was some temporary respite on July 22, when Becker received another permanent assignment, this one to an obscure precinct in a corner of the Bronx. His new station house was on Bathgate Avenue, near 177th Street, far enough from most reporters’ beats to keep them at arm’s length for a while. The locals were not too happy to have such a notorious character billeted on them—a few vocal community leaders protested that the posting was an insult to the borough—but Becker himself was probably happy enough to be away from his tormentors. He was assigned clerical duties once again (it was simply too much trouble to send him anywhere in public) and spent the next week engaged in “roundsman’s work,” sorting papers at a desk placed conveniently in full view of the precinct captain.
Being absent from headquarters brought problems of its own, of course. Becker was no longer in any position to hear of developments in the Rosenthal affair as they occurred, much less to know what might be going on in Whitman’s office. No doubt friends and colleagues on the force kept him informed as best they could. Yet the lieutenant had little option but to follow most events through the pages of the daily press, which continued its blanket coverage unabated into the last week of July.
On the whole, the news was bad. Deputy Police Commissioner Dougherty was now openly discussing the likelihood that Becker would be charged with murder, “smashing his fist down on the desk in front of him,” one paper said, to emphasize his point and voicing the opinion that “any farmer sitting under his own apple tree with a straw in his mouth” could see that the lieutenant had a lot to hide. Honest Dan Costigan was popping up before Whitman’s grand jury, complaining that Becker had deliberately ruined several of his carefully planned raids.*46 And William Shapiro’s memory of the events of July 16 was still improving day by day. The chauffeur now gave a vivid account of how Harry Vallon had leaped back into his cab after the shooting, brandishing a smoking revolver. Vallon, Shapiro added, had struck him over the head with the gun while ordering him to “step on it.”
Whitman still had no firm evidence of Becker’s guilt, nonetheless, and the DA wasted no time in using these admissions to pile further pressure onto the imprisoned gamblers. Someone, they were told, would have to stand trial for the Rosenthal shooting, and charges could not be long delayed. The case for their guilt was already strong. But (Whitman added with nicely calculated emphasis), “If they can help the people get the men behind this thing—if one of them can help me assure Becker’s punishment and aid justice further—I’d have no hesitation in trying to get them clemency. Why punish the small fry? It’s the big fish who should be punished.”
The district attorney’s message was clear enough. The three gamblers could face the courts themselves. Or they could denounce Lieutenant Becker as the man who had demanded Herman’s murder.
Rose and Vallon were the first to be convinced that their one hope of avoiding trial was to turn in Charley Becker. Their old friend Webber took only a little longer to reach the same conclusion. According to Shapiro’s latest statements, the gunmen who had murdered Rosenthal had been marshaled inside Bridgey’s poker rooms, a block away from West Forty-third Street, and had stepped out of his front door straight into the waiting Packard taxi—details that, taken together with Webber’s mysterious appearance at the Metropole only a few minutes before Rosenthal was killed, were amply sufficient for Whitman to threaten the onetime dognapper with an indictment for murder.
By Sunday, July 28, the three men—grouped, thoughtfully, in cells adjoining one another—had talked the matter through and conferred with their lawyers. Several witnesses would eventually come forward to claim they had heard snatches of the conversation that passed between the gamblers; according to these men, the members of the trio swiftly concluded they had no choice but to go along with the DA. “My God,” Webber was reported to have cried, “I can’t stand this any longer! Why, they’re trying to send me to the chair. Look here, just how bad do they want Becker? What’ll they do for me if I give him to them?” To which Bald Jack Rose replied, “I would frame Waldo, the mayor, anybody to get out of here.”
That evening Rose, Vallon, and Webber were summoned to the hotel suite Whitman was using as an office. A group of reporters waiting outside were told that the DA planned to subject the men to another round of questioning, but it did not take the newsmen long to divine the way that things were going. At eleven, one of Whitman’s aides stuck his head around the door and announced that none of the men would be returning to their cells that night. All three had been granted permission to sleep, under guard, on Whitman’s sofas.
The next morning, after breakfast, the deal was done.
Charles and Helen Becker had risen a little earlier than usual that Monday. It was hot again and greasy, the air limp with the threat of an approaching storm, but the policeman did not care. He and his wife were finally ready to move into their new home, and Becker had spent nearly the whole weekend completing all the necessary chores. He had finished work on the interior, hung the shutters, and even put in some work on the garden, where—at least so Helen averred—the lord of Satan’s Circus planned to spend his leisure hours cultivating vegetables. Only a single job remained, and that morning Becker ceremonially completed it. At about 7:30 A.M., just before the start of his shift, he called at his property, took out a screwdriver, and carefully affixed the street number, 3239, to the door. An hour later he was back at his desk at the Bronx precinct house, telephoning his wife to say that all was ready for their move.
On Bathgate Avenue, the day eased by. Downtown, though, out of Becker’s hearing, things were moving at a sharper pace. By noon the twenty-three men of District Attorney Whitman’s grand jury had almost finished their work for the day. The morning had been spent listening to yet more evidence of police corruption—on this occasion details of Becker’s raid on Herman Rosenthal—but the testimony had been quickly disposed of and the whisper was that the jurors would be discharged till Tuesday morning. The members of the jury took an early lunch, after which the hoped-for permission to go home came through. The same did not apply to Whitman’s men, however, and by 3:00 P.M. the district attorney’s offices were frantic with activity. Lawyers darted in and out, bringing in statements and bearing out court papers. The DA sat closeted with Webber’s attorney. Soon afterward the lawyer left to report to his client and the imprisoned gamblers were brought back from the cells.
The interrogation that ensued lasted for several hours; later the district attorney would tell a group of reporters that he had battered at the trio relentlessly, “pounding one against the other until they all broke down and said Rosenthal was shot in front of the Metropole by a hired gang because Lieutenant Becker wanted it done.” The truth was more calculating and less dramatic. The meeting was long, but it remained thoroughly businesslike and was devoted largely to going through each part of the gamblers’ statements until Whitman was sure he knew exactly what each man would say. Soon after supper the DA emerged and the cluster of newsmen who had been waiting for him learned that Sam Paul had just been released from prison and all charges against him had been dropped. Webber, Vallon, and Rose, meanwhile, were to go before the grand jury.
It took some time to summon back the jurymen for this extraordinary session. “Sixteen members are needed to return an indictment,” the World reminded its readers, and it was not until nearly 7:00 P.M. that the necessary quorum was assembled and the gamblers brought in. Despite the relative lateness of the hour, it was distressingly close inside the courtroom; the storm that had threatened to break all day was gathering, black clouds rolling in from the horizon to seal in the humidity and heat. A group of nearly two dozen reporters, who had been made to wait outside, sprawled about in upright chairs, tugging at loosened collars and easing damp shirts away from sticky skin. Inside the room, though, no one gave much thought to the discomfort. The grand jury sat transfixed by Bald Jack Rose, who had taken the stand ahead of his companions—which was only right, because Rose had the most to tell.
“What he said,” one newsman wrote,
shot straight home. His every word was about Becker, and his story was based upon intimate knowledge of the policeman…He detailed how Becker, six weeks ago, told him that Herman Rosenthal had lived too long, that Rosenthal had to be put out of the way, and that the man who did the job had nothing to fear because he, Becker, was a power in the Police Department. So Rose went out and spread the word that the strong arm commander said that Rosenthal must be killed….
The four men who pistoled Rosenthal by this arrangement were Whitey Lewis, Lefty Louis, Dago Frank and Gyp the Blood. Rose admits that he rounded them up that night and saw that they were poised for the crime…. [He] called Becker up by phone a few minutes after Rosenthal was dead on the sidewalk in front of the Metropole. He told Becker it was a horrible thing. He said that it was more than he expected.
He was frightened clear to his heart and he was afraid to stir without a word of confidence from his master. And Becker said over the telephone while he was making preparations for a hurried trip down to the Tenderloin: “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll protect you. There won’t be much fuss over this…. What do you think I am in this department? I can do as I damn well please.”
Webber and Vallon, who followed Rose before the grand jury, offered corroboration for parts of Bald Jack’s story. Webber admitted that he had supplied $1,000 with which to hire the gunmen—Rose was temporarily short—and confirmed that the four gangsters Rose had named had received as much again when Rosenthal was dead. Vallon added that he had acted as a go-between, carrying messages to and from Bald Jack. He was silent about his presence at the Metropole, and in any case both judge and jury had heard enough. At 8:00 P.M., an indictment was handed down authorizing Becker’s immediate arrest.
Perhaps the strangest part of the proceedings was the dread displayed by the three gamblers when they heard that the policeman would soon be joining them in the cells. Webber had “cold fear” imprinted on his face, one reporter wrote, and Vallon also appeared scared. The men, added the reporter from the Sun, looked
as if a vast weight had been lifted from their minds, [but they] were nevertheless in desperate fear. It was a terror that was obviously not assumed. There was nothing theatrical about it. They were glad a load was off their souls, but they dreaded what might happen to their bodies.
“For God’s sake,” said Rose, the hand he held up trembling as if from ague. “Don’t send me to [prison] tonight. Maybe you think I’m a fool. But I swear I believe that I’d be killed some way if I went there.”
DA Whitman stepped in swiftly. There was no need for the men to be returned to prison, he offered. They could spend one more night sleeping in his office. Four of the New York County detectives assigned to his department were detailed to watch them. Another three set off for the Bronx by train just as the storm broke in full earnest. They reached Bathgate Avenue shortly before 8:30 P.M. and went straight into the station house for Becker. Incongruously enough, the tough street cop was busy cleaning a typewriter when they came for him.
The evening climaxed in appropriately Gothic fashion when Becker arrived at the Criminal Courts Building down on Centre Street. It was after 10:00 P.M., and rain was falling in sheets as the lieutenant was bundled out of the nearest El station and into the sagging monstrosity constructed at such cost to the city by Boss Tweed. By now, long after working hours, the stone interior of the building was deserted, and the ominous rumble of approaching thunder echoed along its shadowed corridors as three detectives propelled their prisoner toward the one court that remained in session. “Every now and then,” noted the man from the New York Times,
flashes of lightning threw into painful relief the tense faces and figures of the Grand Jury, assembled in extraordinary session at night for the first time within the memory of the oldest court attendant…. As this youthful appearing man in a tan suit approached the bar there was a nervous twitch in the muscles of his face, and the vivid flashes of lightning which now and then electrified the courtroom showed Becker standing strained, nerved to meet whatever might befall him.
The hearing itself took only a minute. Attorneys representing Rose, Webber, and Vallon sat to one side of the room; they “looked seriously pleased with themselves,” another reporter noted. Becker said nothing as the indictment for murder was read to him; “a set grin was on his lips,” thought Swope of the World, “but in his eyes there was the signal of collapse.” He left it to his attorney, John Hart, to enter “the normal pleas of not guilty,” and the lawyer added a request for time to confer with his client before he was led off to the Tombs prison, which stood next door. “I do not think I have the power to grant that request,” replied the judge, but Hart was assured that he would get the chance to talk things through with Becker in his cell that night.
With that, the lieutenant was given into the custody of bailiff Joseph Flaherty, who—as chance would have it—was a former policeman who had served under Becker’s command. Flaherty led the way, shuffling out of the courtroom, back along the gloomy corridors and across a low and narrow walkway that led directly from the Criminal Courts to the Tombs. The bridge arched over the main courtyard of the prison, passing over the spot where condemned men had once been executed on the gallows, and it was known, perhaps inevitably, as the Bridge of Sighs. At the far end stood a heavy gate. Flaherty knocked loudly, and with a rattle of bolts and a chink of keys, the door swung open.
Charles Becker stepped inside and was swallowed up in utter darkness.