CHAPTER 10
FIVE MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT
THE JURY GATHERED IN the courtroom leaned forward slightly as District Attorney Whitman rose to deliver his opening statement. “The murder of Herman Rosenthal,” the DA began, “was the most cunning and atrocious of any time and any country…. We are going to claim that the real murderer, the most desperate criminal of them all, was a cool, calculating, grafting police officer.” With this, Whitman gestured to the bulky figure sitting in the dock. Lieutenant Becker, who was wearing an ill-fitting dark gray suit that clung damply to him in the Indian-summer heat, did not return his gaze.
Judge Goff’s sweltering courtroom occupied part of the first floor of the same Criminal Courts Building, just in front of City Hall, where Becker had been arraigned. By the early autumn of 1912, the shoddy workmanship that had gone into the structure was plain for all to see; the external walls had sagged and buckled, and there was talk of condemning the courthouse once and for all. “It is,” wrote the lawyer Arthur Train,
one of the gloomiest structures in the world…. Tier on tier it rises above a huge central rotunda, rimmed with dim mezzanines and corridors, and crowned by a glass roof encrusted with soot, through which filters a soiled and viscous light. The air is rancid with garlic, stale cigar smoke, sweat and the odor of the prisoners’ lunch. The corridors swarm with Negroes, Italians, blue-bloused Chinese, black-bearded rabbis, policemen, shyster lawyers and their runners, and politicians, big and little.
Goff’s courtroom had seen many famous trials. Those with long memories recalled that it was the same one in which a captivating showgirl named Nan Patterson had been acquitted for the murder of her wealthy lover, a much older man who had (the girl successfully averred) committed suicide by shooting himself in the back while the couple was sequestered in a hansom cab. But the Becker case was something else entirely. The oldest New Yorker could scarcely remember a prosecution like it. It was “the trial of the century,” several newspapers suggested, and public interest was such that accounts of the evidence occupied the first, second, and third—and sometimes fourth and fifth—pages of every Manhattan daily for the duration of the proceedings. Nor was interest in the case confined to New York. The Becker case featured as prominently in virtually every American newspaper, large and small, and in most of those published in London and Paris, too.
The proceedings got under way promptly at 1:00 P.M. on October 7. Becker had spent the morning discussing the case with a guard from the Tombs and taking an active part in a final pretrial conference with his lawyers. The principal topic of conversation was undoubtedly the best way to handle the selection of the jury. The lieutenant had definite views on the sorts of jurors who would offer him the best chance of acquittal: He wanted married men, preferably blue-eyed and tall. Married, because he wanted the jury to reflect on the enormous consequences a guilty verdict would have for Helen and her unborn child; blue-eyed because “blue-eyed men are the most intelligent” and tall because, as McIntyre explained, “Becker, as a big man, didn’t want to run the risk of entrusting his fate to a little man who might have a grudge against all six-footers.”
These stipulations slowed the process of jury selection considerably, and so did the long list of questions Becker’s attorneys insisted on putting to each potential juror. Some were sensible and obvious—McIntyre asked every candidate if he was related to any member of the prosecution team or had a grudge against the police. Others were more revealing. Each man, when he stepped forward, was interrogated as to whether he had met Inspector Schmittberger. McIntyre also wanted to know if he was prepared to convict on the testimony of accomplices. Whitman’s oddest challenge, meanwhile, was to an apparently ordinary businessman who informed the court that he had been out of the country from mid-July until the beginning of September. When the potential juror admitted that he had not read a single word of newspaper coverage about the case, the DA stepped briskly forward and had the man ejected from the panel.
With so many questions to ask, and so much at stake, the selection of the Becker jury took far longer than usual. At the DA’s request, a special “blue ribbon” panel, 250 strong and made up of well-educated jurors, had been assembled for the case. Two-thirds were automatically disqualified when they confessed that they had already made up their minds about the case; this number doubtless included many who simply did not relish deciding a case involving gangsters and powerful policemen. The remaining candidates were weeded out more slowly. After two full days of questioning, only eight jurors had been seated, and McIntyre had used all but a handful of the thirty peremptory challenges he was permitted. A further hundred prospective jurors had to be assembled, and the twelfth and final member of the panel was not seated until early on the fourth day of the trial.
It is, to say the least, debatable whether the pains McIntyre took over the selection of the jury were justified. They certainly enraged Judge Goff, who had long possessed a reputation for being “willing to sacrifice almost any legal nicety to get proceedings over and done with.” Goff had canceled a planned holiday to take the case and made it clear early in the proceedings that he wanted the entire hearing over and done with in a maximum of two weeks—an astonishingly short time for a case of such importance. It would (as the judge himself observed) set a new speed record for a major murder trial. With almost a quarter of the available time already gone, Goff ordered the court into day and night sessions, a decision that meant proceedings dragging on well into the evening, sometimes as late as 11:00 P.M. The long sessions exhausted jurors and attorneys alike and made it harder for the men in the jury box to focus on the facts. To make matters worse, whenever McIntyre or one of Becker’s other attorneys dwelled on a piece of evidence or strove to hammer home an advantage, their attempts to create an effect would be interrupted by Goff’s urgings from the bench that they should “go along,” “get along,” that “time is too precious.”
Late nights and long hours were not the only problems confronting Becker and his lawyers. Conditions inside the courtroom were thoroughly uncomfortable. The case had attracted so much attention that every one of the two hundred seats that could be crammed inside was filled, and overcrowding was exacerbated by the inclemently hot autumn weather. As temperatures inside the room rose into the high seventies, a handful of electric fans were brought in to help swirl the muggy air, but several of the jurors complained that they were having difficulty hearing testimony over the whirring of the blades. Goff had the fans turned off and, when the sounds of passing horses and roller-skating children drifting in from the busy street outside proved equally distracting, ordered all the windows sealed as well. Before long, everyone in his court was sweating and swiping at the lifeless air with court documents or newspapers. And as the case proceeded under its stifling blanket of humidity, Goff added one further refinement. “Have the shades drawn low,” the judge hissed in his characteristic thin whisper. “There is not enough gloom in this courtroom.”
The character of Justice Goff loomed large over the proceedings from the start. The judge glared down from the dais at one end of the room, a martinet who reveled in his power over a one-room kingdom. The sheer force of his personality lent him considerable presence. “Upon the bench,” recalled Lloyd Stryker, one of Becker’s junior attorneys, “sat an old man with white hair and piercing, cold, blue eyes. A superficial glance might have given the impression of quiet kindliness and serene benignity. Some said that he resembled a figure in a stained-glass window, yet how mistaken and how tragic an allusion this was…. He had a cold heart and a sadistic joy in suffering. From his face the mask of benignity was soon laid aside, and as I gazed up at the bench, I felt like some four-footed denizen of the jungle that suddenly stares into the cold visage of a python.”
From the perspective of those who encountered him in court, Goff’s principal attributes were a hair-trigger temper and an invincible sense of his own rightness. With the possible exception of Whitman, all the attorneys in the room were terrified of the judge’s snappish flares of irritation and unwillingness to tolerate the least hint of dissent. “That saintlike son of a bitch,” State Assemblyman Abraham Levy once called him, while a City Hall reporter recalled that “distinguished members of the bar, at the height of their careers, confessed to waking up in their beds in a cold sweat, having heard in nightmares the sound of that low, sibilant voice saying, ‘Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, guilty!’—a verdict he pronounced, it seemed to them, with joy.”
Strangely for a man with such an awesome reputation, Goff was poorly qualified to be a judge and possessed at best a shaky grasp of legal technicalities. An Irish immigrant who had first arrived in the country as a child in the wake of the terrible famine that had struck his homeland during the 1840s, he had been forced to leave school at an early age in order to help provide for his family. Though Goff did later take night classes at Cooper Union, the celebrated public college in downtown New York, he remained more or less self-taught and never obtained any formal degree. Even the judge’s politely worded entry in the Dictionary of American Biography confesses that “he could never be described as a scholar” and “was not profoundly learned in the law.” Goff’s real talent, his partisans observed, was as an “uncanny prestidigitator”: a cunning manipulator of procedure who had a thorough understanding of human nature and rarely bothered with the legal niceties that hamstrung less bullheaded men.
From the first day of the trial, Goff orchestrated the proceedings to suit himself. A publicity fiend who adored to see his name in print, the judge barred the general public from his court in order to increase the space allocated to reporters. Testimony dragged on for hours at a stretch, sometimes without breaks for lunch or dinner. The recesses that were granted were short in any case. “A sufferer from ulcers, Goff made do with a bowl of milk and crackers and a swig of Irish whiskey at mealtimes,” one reporter wrote, “and saw no reason to make allowances for others whose appetites were stronger than his own.” Fifteen minutes for lunch and a slightly longer break at suppertime were typical throughout the trial.
In person Goff was tall, quiet, darting, and mercurial, and it quickly became clear to most observers that Becker’s choice of attorney had been a mistake. John McIntyre—florid, corpulent, and prolix—irked the judge intensely. Oddly enough, the two men shared nearly identical backgrounds; both were Irish, and both had supported revolutionary Fenian independence movements in their youth. But there the similarities ended, and McIntyre’s overwrought interjections soon began to fray Goff’s famously short temper. On only the second day of the trial, when the defense attorney protested one too many of the judge’s rulings,*51 Goff turned on McIntyre in fury and warned him that “the interruptions which have occurred may have exceeded the bounds of propriety.” If McIntyre persisted with his objections, the judge snarled, he would have him arrested and ejected from his court. After that exchange, Becker’s relatives and friends were not the only ones to feel that Goff displayed a heavy bias against the defense.
With jury selection at an end, Charles Becker prepared carefully for his day in court. Wisely deciding to present his most serious and sober side to the twelve jurors, he entered the room at McIntyre’s left hand, looking almost scholarly with a small pair of pince-nez glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. The policeman had dressed entirely in black—even, the Sun noted,
to the four-in-hand scarf worn in the low collar that exposed his full, muscular neck…He approached the railing in with long strides, throwing glances this way and that over the crowd. His glances found the person that he sought, his wife, who sat well forward. He smiled slightly, nodded just perceptibly, and passed on as she waved smilingly.
The next time Becker rose to his feet it was to enter a formal plea of not guilty to the charge of murder, and the rest of the press corps at last had the opportunity to take a good look at the man they’d been writing about in so much detail for so long. New York newspapermen generally disliked and distrusted the police, and many of the reporters assigned to cover the trial were distinctly unimpressed by the big lieutenant’s presence. “The personality of Becker is not a pleasing one,” the man from the American observed.
The defendant is powerful of physique, his heavy body topped by a bullet-like head. There is no hint of the finer things in life in his make-up. His hands are hairy, sinewy; his black hair has not a touch of gray in it. His large nose…reveals to the student of physiognomy the fact that arrogance and relentless pursuit of any object are the strongest features of his being. Charles Becker is steeped in the memory of the power that was his. His gaze is brilliant, sardonic, menacing. I am very glad that someone dear to me will not sit on that jury and hold the life of Charles Becker in his hands.
With Becker’s plea recorded, Whitman rose to deliver his opening statement. Goff, meanwhile, seemed more preoccupied by the activities of Becker’s wife, who took a chair inside the rail leading to the judge’s chambers that placed her directly opposite the jury. Helen was by now visibly pregnant and looked—one smitten newspaperman reported—“small, charmingly feminine, and cheery” in her beaver hat and a blue silk suit that several observers pointedly remarked looked rather too expensive for a mere policeman’s wife. She sat there almost motionless throughout the DA’s hourlong address, gazing beseechingly at each juryman in turn. Goff evidently considered this an attempt to influence proceedings, for when Whitman sat down, he ordered Mrs. Becker over to the far side of the room, a few seats along from the jury benches, where the members of the panel could not see her. “That,” she remembered a few months later, was “the one day I thought I should lose my strength and sink to the floor…I had to walk across the room with every one staring at me. I almost fainted.”
The opening stages of the prosecution case were not dramatic. Whitman spent a little time outlining events outside the Metropole, calling a series of witnesses whom McIntyre did not bother to cross-examine. Patrolman Brady and Detective File described hearing shots and finding Rosenthal lying on the pavement, dead; a police surgeon and a doctor detailed the gambler’s wounds. The next two witnesses—Jacob Hecht, a waiter at the Metropole, and Louis Krause, another waiter who had been outside the hotel when Rosenthal emerged—described the murderers. Hecht had seen one man raising a pistol with three others lurking behind him. Krause described the way in which another man leaving the Metropole appeared to signal to the gunmen, and said he had seen three gunmen and noticed Bridgey Webber running from the hotel.
Krause’s evidence was the first to damage Becker’s case. The waiter insisted that he had watched Jack Sullivan approach Rosenthal’s body, roll it over, and then “turn to one of the shooters and laugh.” Since Sullivan was expected to appear as a witness for the defense, this was a potentially serious problem for McIntyre, and the lawyer spent some time trying to shake Krause’s story. The defense attorney raised eyebrows with the revelation that the waiter’s lawyer was James Sullivan, the same man who represented Bald Jack Rose. But it was Krause who landed the first really telling blow of the proceedings. He had testified before the coroner that he could not be certain who had gunned down Rosenthal. Now he unhesitatingly identified three of Zelig’s men. How, asked McIntyre, with studied insolence, could he be so certain of their faces?
“I am a waiter,” Krause shot back. “It is my business to remember faces.”
McIntyre did what he could to discredit the stream of prosecution witnesses, but without a great deal of success. He asked one loiterer outside the Metropole—who had confidently identified one gunman despite his confessed difficulty in seeing without glasses—whether it was true that Whitman had paid him $2,500 for his testimony; Goff disallowed the question and had it stricken from the record. Whitman thus triumphed in the opening exchanges, and in general the DA handled the judge far better than did his opponent. He hustled through his witnesses as rapidly as possible—this had the added advantage of allowing him to gloss over any inadequacies in their testimony—and the case that he outlined was strikingly straightforward. Acute observers in the press box noted that very little of it concerned Becker, whose name had not yet been mentioned at all in more than a day and a half of testimony.
Whitman’s main preoccupation at this stage of the trial seemed to be to produce the four imprisoned gunmen as frequently as possible—ostensibly in order to allow his witnesses to identify the men. In fact, this was scarcely difficult; far from having the quartet displayed as part of some conventional police lineup, Lefty, Whitey, Gyp, and Dago Frank were hauled into court in chains, over the Bridge of Sighs, and arrayed together in the dock. Lewis, who had white-blond hair, was impossible to miss, which made it a comparatively simple matter for a succession of the DA’s witnesses to work out who was who. Even then Thomas Ryan—the taxi driver whom File had found asleep outside the Metropole—had second thoughts when brought face-to-face with the killers. Shooting a glance at Lefty Louie (who stood “with lips drawn back until the white strong teeth glistened savagely” and looked “like some wild animal at bay”), Ryan stammeringly declared that he was no longer quite sure of his identification.
“The parading of the gunmen in and out of the courtroom,” it was later pointed out,
was most likely done to establish the evil nature of the characters involved in the murder and, by showing them off within a few feet of Becker, to encourage the jury to think of him as part of the gang. The gunmen were an ugly looking crew and had not been favored with the special attentions of the tailors, barbers, and manicurists said to be in regular attendance on Bald Jack Rose and his fellow gamblers. The question before the court, however, was not whether the gunmen had killed Rosenthal but whether Becker had had a hand in it.
Judge Goff’s renowned vindictiveness was sharply on display throughout this phase of the trial, and most of it was directed toward McIntyre. “This is a court of justice,” he snapped at the defense attorney after one particularly windy intervention. “It is not a place for a display of eloquence or emotion.” But Goff reserved his greatest scorn for McIntyre’s repeated attempts to have evidence prejudicial to his client ruled inadmissible. The attorney’s repeated protests at the parading of the four gunmen drew an especially sharp response: “You may consider,” the judge hissed, “in each instance [that] you have made an exception and that I have overruled it. That will expedite matters.” Reporting this exchange the next day, one New York paper remarked that Goff “kind of dripped each word on McIntyre so that it foamed up a little before the next one fell.”
Whitman’s next two witnesses also came into court wearing handcuffs. Jake and Morris Luban were petty thieves and forgers, then awaiting trial in New Jersey on fresh criminal charges. Morris Luban claimed to have been in the lobby of the Metropole on the night of the murder and said he could identify three of the gunmen. Considerably more damagingly for the defense, Morris also related that he had been lounging in the Lafayette Baths some three weeks before the shooting when he noticed one of his old acquaintances, Jack Rose, entering the steam room with Lieutenant Becker. Both men, he testified, were naked, and had greeted him politely before returning to their own conversation.
“Did you hear them say any words one to each other?” Frank Moss asked.
“I did. Becker spoke.”
“Give the words he said.”
“‘If that bastard Rosenthal ain’t croaked,’” replied Luban (whose words were censored in the daily press), “‘I’ll croak him myself.” ’
This was the first evidence that the court had heard of Becker’s involvement in a conspiracy to murder Herman, and over the next few days the meeting in the Lafayette Baths would become one of the three main planks in Whitman’s argument. McIntyre, rising to cross-examine, chose not to dwell on the unlikelihood that a policeman with so much to lose would have spoken quite so unguardedly in front of strangers in a public bath. He focused instead on Luban’s dubious motive for appearing for the State.
Was it not true, McIntyre asked, that Luban had previously offered to testify as a witness for Becker? That he had sent not one but four letters to the defense proposing to exchange evidence for help in getting out of jail? And that he had offered to prove not that the lieutenant had conspired to murder Rosenthal but that Becker was the victim of a “frame-up”?
“When I came over here,” the forger grudgingly accepted, “I expected some favors from the State of New York.” When McIntyre asked him what he had been doing at the Metropole that night, Luban replied that he had gone to the hotel with a girl named Annie after taking in a show at Hammerstein’s Theater. McIntyre was able to show that Hammerstein’s had not been open on the night of the murder.*52
The demolition of Morris Luban’s highly dubious evidence was a blow to Whitman’s prospects, and the district attorney was probably happy to hear Judge Goff call an end to the proceedings for the day. He and his assistants regrouped overnight and decided that the best way to repair the damage done by McIntyre’s cross-examination was to put a more reliable witness on the stand. The obvious choice was Bald Jack Rose, who was probably the quickest witted of the prosecution witnesses and by a distance the most memorable. Unlike Luban, who had arrived in the Criminal Courts Building from his prison cell in Jersey only minutes before he was scheduled to testify, Rose had been in the DA’s custody for weeks, and there had been plenty of opportunity for Whitman to go over the details of his evidence.
Bald Jack cut a compelling figure in Goff’s court the next day. A further hundred spectators had somehow crammed themselves into the already-crowded room to watch the gambler’s entrance. When Rose appeared, he was “a symphony in medium dark blue, perfectly groomed, his head lightly powdered,” and “shaven to the blood.” The gambler delivered his evidence in a colorless monotone that—many of those present found—somehow rendered the evidence he gave more rather than less bloodcurdling. Goff had ordered the windows in the court closed again, and the atmosphere in the room was “superheated” as the cadaverous Rose, cutting a thoroughly bizarre figure in the grime-filtered light, took his oath to tell the truth and embarked upon a well-rehearsed account of Becker’s treachery.
Despite the infernal heat, Bald Jack was a cool witness. He described in measured terms his own first meeting with Charles Becker, his recruitment to assist the lieutenant with his graft collections, and his own long association with Herman Rosenthal, for whom he had worked off and on for twenty years. He explained Becker’s falling-out with Rosenthal. And, under Frank Moss’s careful questioning, he recalled numerous instances in which the police lieutenant had first hinted, and then stated openly, that he wanted Herman murdered.
It had been “weeks” before the shooting, Bald Jack said, that he had first met Whitey Lewis and Lefty Louie in the Bronx to discuss the business. “Do you mean,” he recalled Lewis asking, “that you want someone croaked?” “I told them that he did,” Rose carefully explained to Moss, “and they didn’t even ask the name of the intended victim, but said that they were ready to do the job if Zelig approved of it.”
There were several interesting features to Bald Jack’s evidence. Rose said that it was he who had scared the gunmen out of killing Rosenthal in the Garden restaurant, telling them that a Burns detective was watching them as they gathered outside; the gambler insisted that he had never wanted the shooting to take place. He explained that Dago Frank had been a late addition to the murder party, recruited at the rooms where he loafed about with Whitey, Lefty, and Gyp because the other three had been briefly absent when Bald Jack called. He also claimed that Becker had sent him into the Tombs to ask for Zelig’s help. According to Rose’s testimony, the lieutenant had seemed utterly unperturbed when his collector proposed to bring the more experienced Vallon in on their plot. Becker was, Rose added, equally happy for Bridgey Webber to be included in the burgeoning conspiracy and raised no objections when Sam Schepps unexpectedly turned up at one of the plotters’ meetings. By that time (at least if the prosecution witnesses were to be believed), the fact that Becker was arranging Herman’s murder was known to Rose, Vallon, Webber, and Schepps, not to mention Zelig, his four gunmen, and any number of curious eavesdroppers at the Lafayette Baths.
Lieutenant Becker, Bald Jack went on, had grown increasingly impatient as he had tried tactic after tactic to delay the planned assassination. By Rose’s own account, he had done as much as any man reasonably could to persuade his boss to abandon the plot: “Why, Charley, don’t excite yourself. This man Rosenthal is not worth taking any such chance with.” Becker, though, had been insistent: “[He] called at my house and said, ‘Rosenthal is still at it, but I don’t see those fellows at it.’ I said, ‘They are on the job. I will go and see them again today.’”
The crux of Bald Jack’s evidence came when Moss began to question him as to the detailed planning of the murder. In order to obtain the conviction of Becker, the prosecution had to show that the lieutenant had met with Rose and his fellow gamblers and formally discussed how best to dispose of Rosenthal. Rose, moreover, would have to place Sam Schepps in his usual uncomfortable role of playing no part in the murder scheme yet being somehow present when the matter was discussed. And according to Bald Jack, this was precisely what had occurred one night that June or July—he could not begin to remember the exact date—on a street corner in Harlem.
Justice Goff by now was “half on his feet, craning his neck down from the podium” to better hear the evidence. Becker—the gambler went on—had been ordered to raid a crap game on West 124th Street. He had asked Rose and Bridgey Webber to rendezvous with him at a spot on the corner of West 124th and Seventh Avenue to go over the arrangements for Rosenthal’s murder. This meeting, henceforth generally referred to as the Harlem Conference, had also been attended by Vallon. It was on this occasion that Schepps unexpectedly turned up with Webber and—the story went—loitered half a block along the street in a spot where he could see, but not hear, what was going on.
Frank Moss spared no effort to alert the jury to the fact that this was a critical passage of evidence. The Harlem Conference, Rose explained, had taken place shortly before 10:00 P.M. The conspirators “sat on a board across [a] vacant lot talking about Rosenthal.” The lieutenant had just heard of Herman’s attempts to arrange a meeting with DA Whitman, which added to his urgency to have matters resolved. “Take charge of this thing, Bridgey,” Rose recalled him saying, “and see that it is done for me.” When Webber professed himself less than keen to get involved, the lieutenant had reassured him: “There is nothing going to happen to anybody that has any hand in the croaking of Rosenthal,” he said. The Harlem meeting concluded, Bald Jack added, with Webber grudgingly agreeing to visit Zelig’s men. “With Bridgey on the job I think we will get quick results,” Rose recalled assuring Becker as the conspirators dispersed.
The picture that Rose drew of the Harlem Conference was grotesque—“like that in which Macbeth had plotted with his hired murderers,” observed the literate Lloyd Stryker—and clearly highly damaging to Becker. So was the gambler’s recollection of a second meeting between the policeman and the associates, which Bald Jack said had taken place at the Murray Hill Baths, just up the street from Webber’s clubhouse, soon after the murder. Becker had been “all smiles” by this time, his collector recalled, and congratulated his fellow plotters on a job well done. He described visiting the West Forty-seventh Street station house and gazing down at Rosenthal’s bloody corpse. “Don’t worry, Jack,” Rose recalled him saying. “He is dead and that is the end of it. The only thing to do now is to see that those fellows get away and lay low for a few days until this thing blows over.”
Bald Jack took nearly four hours to give his evidence to a hushed and attentive court, and by the time that he had finished, many of those present were persuaded that Becker was indeed guilty. The doubts raised by Morris Luban’s devious evidence the previous day had been thoroughly assuaged; Rose’s statements were so detailed and dispassionate it was hard to believe he was not telling the truth. Above all, the New York Times declared, the gambler’s description of Becker “gloating over the body of the dead Rosenthal in the back of the West Forty-seventh Street station delivered a smashing blow to the battlements of the defense.” The Sun could only agree:
Nearly every man and woman in the court room shuddered. Rose had spoken in a quiet, absolutely expressionless tone, which intensified the dreadful visualization he was making…. Lieutenant Becker did not blanch or quail. But he was visibly exerting strong self-control. His jaw set like a rock. One could see the muscles stiffen. Sweat streamed from his face. One hand gripped his chair, the other the table in front of him…. No human being could have been subjected to a worse ordeal, but the accused man faced three hundred pairs of eyes without flinching.
Almost everything about Rose’s evidence had been memorable. On the stand the gambler had spoken in a voice so quiet that everyone in the room had to strain to catch it, creating the impression that his was by some distance the most important testimony of the trial, and his accounts of the lieutenant’s plotting had grown more, rather than less, outlandish since he first confessed his involvement in the killing: “I don’t want him beat up, I could do that myself,” Bald Jack now remembered Becker snarling. “Cut his throat, dynamite him or anything…. Don’t be particular when you do it, break into his house and get him there if you want…. What do you care who is around? Walk up and shoot him right in front of a policeman if you like.” McIntyre had done what he could to stem the flow of vitriol. “Every few moments,” one reporter noted, “there would be a rhythmic interruption in the courtroom. McIntyre: ‘Objection.’ Goff: ‘Objection overruled.’ McIntyre: ‘Exception for the record.’”
Judge Goff’s steadfast rejection of these protests meant that McIntyre did not have the chance to get at Rose until his cross-examination of the gambler began early in the afternoon. Bald Jack had to withstand this battering for nearly six and a half hours, without any recess for dinner. More than four decades later, Lloyd Stryker still vividly recalled the scene that played out in Goff’s court on that long-ago October Saturday:
At half-past two, Mr. McIntyre began his cross-examination. He continued without a break or a request for an indulgence until six in the evening. I shall never forget that afternoon. It was a steaming day and in a stifling courtroom, hour after hour, our chief counsel relentlessly pressed on…. He was a master of every field of cross-examination, but he excelled perhaps in that in which he now engaged: the discrediting of a witness by showing from his own mouth that he is unworthy of belief. Every question searched some dark chamber of this rascal’s life, reached into the putrid cesspool of his past, turned the light upon his meanness, his depravity, and his crimes…. It was a slashing and a brilliant effort. [McIntyre] laid his questions on as with a lash…. His collar wilted and sweat streamed down his face as he confronted one of the worst men who ever lived.
Many of the others present in the court that day were less impressed than Stryker by McIntyre’s style of questioning. Becker’s attorney was certainly thorough, adding layer upon layer to his portrayal of Rose in his effort to show the gambler in an unflattering light, but his efforts to develop themes and build up the momentum of his interrogation were persistently thwarted by Whitman’s objections and by the intercessions of Justice Goff. This time virtually all of the objections raised were sustained. McIntyre asked no fewer than five times whether Rose admitted to procuring Herman’s murder without obtaining an answer.
Bald Jack was equally obstructive when it came to giving a response to more innocuous questions. It took the defense counsel fifteen minutes to get Rose to agree that he was born in Poland, and twenty to define the term “lobbygow” as it applied to his associate Schepps—all of it time that might have been better spent tackling more crucial issues. Nor was Bald Jack any more forthcoming when Becker’s lawyer tried to explore his enmity for Rosenthal. The most that McIntyre elicited was a terse denial that Herman had ever called him a “bald-headed pimp” and a rejection of the suggestion that Rose himself had had Rosenthal gunned down “because he said that I was living with a woman not my wife or that my children were illegitimate.”
Judge Goff, Stryker thought, went out of his way to protect Bald Jack on the stand. Rose had given his evidence to Moss “under the friendly nods and encouraging smiles of the prosecutor’s judge…. He was fawned upon by the court. By every look and intonation, the judge revealed how much he wanted to obscure the fact that this man was not only a cunning, shrewd, calculating, dangerous criminal, but a self-confessed murderer who, in return for his testimony, had secured from the District Attorney an agreement whereby he would go scot-free.” Now, with Rose under cross-examination, Goff stepped in just as Rose was getting rattled. McIntyre’s persistent efforts to portray the witness as an unreliable crook were halted when “the judge leaned down and suggested that the witness might well plead the Fifth Amendment to this kind of thing…. Rose shook off all such questions from then on.”
Goff’s most decisive interventions, though, came later in the proceedings. Counsel McIntyre—an overweight, unhealthy fifty-seven—began to show signs of flagging around 6:00 P.M. He had been on his feet for nearly four hours, and as he reached the crucial point of questioning Rose on the gamblers’ time together in the Tombs, he began to lose his train of thought. “I am tottering on my feet,” the lawyer told Goff “in a strangled voice.” “I feel thoroughly exhausted, and if I continue now I may not be able to come back here Monday. I may collapse at any moment.” The judge insisted that he press on with his examination.
McIntyre, although now visibly distressed, did his best to comply with Goff’s command:
“Didn’t you go down on your knees…in the Tombs and swear by the grave of your dead mother that Becker had nothing to do with the ‘affair’?”
“No.”
“Did you not say to Jack Sullivan in the counsel room that to implicate Becker was your only chance?”
“No.”
“Didn’t Jack Sullivan say, ‘What can you squeal about?’ and didn’t you say, ‘The newspapers are hollering for Becker’?”
“I did not say anything like that.”
“Sullivan did not say, ‘You bald-headed——, are you going to frame up someone?’”
“There were ten in that counsel room.”
Several times between 6:00 and 8:00 P.M., Becker’s lawyer repeated his request for an adjournment, but Goff would not relent. The judge was apparently enjoying McIntyre’s growing discomfort—a product, it now appeared, not merely of exhaustion but of lunch. “One of Justice Goff’s curious attributes,” a reporter noted, “was that he had the continence of a camel. McIntyre did not. He had been forced to stay on his feet in the courtroom since two-thirty in the afternoon without a chance to go to the men’s room and was beginning noticeably to fidget.” The judge’s behavior was, Lloyd Stryker thought, “cold, calculated, deliberate oppression.”
At last, at 8:45 P.M.—six and a quarter hours after the cross-examination had begun—the defense counsel reeled and clutched at the corner of his table.
“Your Honor,” McIntyre gasped, “I am utterly exhausted. I am unable to do my full duty to my client. Won’t your Honor please accede to my request?”
“Why, Mr. McIntyre,” Goff smirked, “you are stronger than you were this morning.” He denied the defense request for a continuance. McIntyre repeated that he could not go on. “Order was disregarded,” one watching newsman noted. “Over and over again Mr. McIntyre shouted that he was worn out, that the proceeding was not fair.”
John Hart jumped to his feet and offered to take over the examination. Goff regarded him balefully.
“I do not wish to listen to you, sir,” he snapped. Then, to McIntyre: “No good reason whatever appears for an adjournment. There yet remain three hours. Counsel may have them.”
“I cannot go on,” the defense attorney groaned.
“Have you no more questions? If not I will declare the cross-examination closed and excuse the witness.”
When McIntyre began to protest once again, Goff turned to Rose and discharged him,*53 thus denying Becker’s lawyers the chance to recall Bald Jack to the stand. McIntyre staggered off toward the men’s room. Amid all the heat and the discomfort, the old attorney had lost track of his line of questioning. He had not so much as touched upon the Harlem Conference.
Justice Goff’s conduct and his frequent intercessions had marked the Becker trial almost since its outset.
Other judges noticed it. Goff, one said after going through the trial transcripts, had vigorously “intervened to protect the People’s witnesses on cross-examination,” had “objected to and excluded questions asked by the defendant’s counsel,” and on one occasion—when McIntyre asked the district attorney “to concede a fact on which there was apparently no dispute”—had nonetheless stepped in and ruled for Whitman (“No, I will not let him concede it”). At the same time, Goff had been generally lax in permitting Whitman and his team to make repeated references to Becker as a “grafter” who was collecting protection money from gambling houses in Satan’s Circus. These allegations, while true, were based on evidence that was not admissible in court, and the judge had been quick to put a stop to the defense’s efforts to affix similarly negative labels to the district attorney’s assemblage of gamblers and forgers.
The members of the jury probably barely noticed such legal niceties. But all twelve jurors were certainly aware that in the Becker trial the prosecutor and the defense attorney enjoyed very different relations with the judge. It was common, at least during the first days of the hearing, for Goff and Whitman to huddle together in conference during any breaks in testimony, discussing the judge’s stewardship of the grand-jury hearings into police corruption; the Evening Post even published a short article applauding the “rapport” that had grown up between the pair and the “pleasant picture they made conferring on the bench, with Whitman’s brown head bent close to Goff’s silvery one.” McIntyre, in contrast, became the frequent subject of the judge’s wrath: “Mr. McIntyre, you know better than to object,” Goff barked at one juncture, and, at another, “There is no necessity in being so explosive about it!”
Throughout the case Goff undermined most defense attempts to show Rose and his fellow gamblers in a less-than-flattering light. One of his most decisive interventions was to prevent McIntyre from introducing Rose’s conflicting statements in the case as evidence; without access to Bald Jack’s earliest statements to the police, the defense was not able to point out the dozens of discrepancies in his changing versions of events. Goff was also vigilant for anything that hinted that the prosecution witnesses had colluded, at one point disallowing eighteen successive questions put by McIntyre and at another preventing the defense from exploring the free-and-easy conditions under which Rose, Webber, and the others had been locked up in the West Side Jail.
Later, in what ranked among the strangest aspects of the trial, Goff apparently grew concerned that his repeated overruling of the defense’s questions might form the basis for a possible appeal. He summoned McIntyre to the bench and told him that he could recall two of his witnesses and ask them more than twenty of the disputed queries after all.
When the defense attorney refused, remarking that a “last-minute addendum” to his case, taken entirely out of the context, would scarcely benefit his client, Goff turned to the prosecution table. Since the defense refused to pose the questions, the judge ruled, a district attorney would do so in its stead.
Frank Moss had spent the best part of two months striving to place Charles Becker in the electric chair. Now, under Justice Goff’s cockatrice glare, the assistant district attorney rose slowly to his feet and began asking questions of a witness on his enemy’s behalf.
Proceedings in the Becker case resumed on the morning of Monday, October 14, when Bridgey Webber took the stand. He was just as self-controlled as Rose (“Webber’s story,” a watching journalist reported, “was as cold and emotionless as it if came from a frozen heart”), but his evidence came, inevitably, as something of an anticlimax, and it contained some statements that were frankly unbelievable—not least Bridgey’s contention that none of the imprisoned gamblers had read a single newspaper article about their case in more than a month in jail.
Webber did corroborate several of Bald Jack’s most important statements. Like Rose, he testified that Lieutenant Becker had demanded that Rosenthal be “croaked,” and, like Rose, Bridgey claimed to have warned the policeman not to proceed (“Charley, that is a pretty serious thing—having a man murdered”). Yet the gambler added almost nothing, other than a better idea of the time, to Bald Jack’s account of the Harlem Conference. On cross-examination McIntyre asked some questions about Sam Schepps and his role in the Harlem meeting, but the defense attorney did not take issue with the idea that the conference had taken place.
Harry Vallon, who followed Webber onto the stand, was little more illuminating. He, too, could not be certain when the Harlem assignation had occurred, though he did relate some extra details. He and Rose had stood around chatting with the lieutenant while they waited for Webber to appear, the faro dealer said; as he recalled it, “Becker was telling us he was going to raid a crap game. There was a little colored boy on the other side of the street and he called him over and spoke to him.” Sam Schepps, Vallon went on, had been nowhere to be seen, but Bridgey had assured him that Schepps was there, and he believed him. McIntyre had no more success shaking Vallon’s story than he had Rose’s and Webber’s.
The final prosecution witness of any moment was Schepps himself. The self-satisfied fake-jewelry man took the stand first thing next morning, resplendent in a new suit and a neatly done bow tie that “made him look,” a reporter thought, “more like a prosperous department store auditor than a man recurrently dependent on Bald Jack Rose for sandwich money.” Spectators in the courtroom noted that Schepps presented his testimony with a marked intelligence that boded ill for Becker. “His sharp eyes,” the Sun man wrote, “glinted behind his nose glasses and his glances darted sideways. He folded his fingers together and tried to cross his legs, a proceeding frowned upon by the court officer who stands at the witness chair. He wore a blue suit…and black low shoes and he carefully drew up his sharply pressed trousers so that his white silk socks would be exposed.”
Schepps’s testimony had been keenly anticipated; months of “dodging detectives in the Catskills and his stay among admiring citizens in Hot Springs had given him a kind of reputation second only to that of Rose.” Moss took him briskly through his evidence, and Schepps responded readily—albeit “in a grinning and insolent manner” at first. Later in the proceedings, when John McIntyre rose to cross-examine, “he became more and more pugnacious and more and more determined that counsel for the defense should not get the better of him.”
McIntyre’s chief tactic was to lure Schepps into the admission that he had played some active part in the conspiracy—a confession that would have destroyed Whitman’s entire case at a stroke. The district attorney seemed unconcerned, however, scarcely bothering to interject, and indeed “his favorite chick of a witness seemed to be able to get along without coddling.” Schepps nimbly dodged the defense attorney’s traps, “carefully excluding himself from private conversations between Rose and Webber” and maintaining that he had never heard either man say anything especially incriminating; they had “whispered in each other’s ears” whenever they had wanted to talk over the details of their plan, he said. McIntyre’s efforts were hindered, once again, by Goff, who ruled that several of the smiling con man’s early depositions were inadmissible as evidence. This denied the defense the chance to show up some serious discrepancies. In court, for example, Schepps claimed barely to know the defendant, remarking that he had “probably said three words to Becker in his life.” To Whitman, some weeks earlier, he had boasted of a far more intimate acquaintance, saying that he had known the policeman for years and even called upon him several times at home.
“Were you a deaf and dumb partner?” McIntyre “almost shouted,” goaded to the point of madness by a long stretch of this questioning.
“They never made a confidant of me. When I realized that I wasn’t wanted, I walked away,” the lobbygow replied. Later in his testimony Schepps implausibly added that on one occasion he had left the room and simply stood out on the pavement “from lunch time until evening” while Rose and Vallon stayed inside, plotting the details of the murder.
What, McIntyre asked him, had the gamblers discussed with Zelig’s gunmen as they drove about the city? “Oh, the sun came up and the clouds were in the sky and things like that,” the con man smilingly responded. Well, McIntyre pressed, surely he’d been at least a little suspicious when Webber had burst into his poker rooms on the night of the murder, calling, “Herman’s at the Metropole,” and the four gangsters went tearing out? “No, why should I be suspicious?” Schepps returned indifferently. “He put on,” a watching journalist observed, “a little corner of the mouth smile at this point which was trying to McIntyre’s self-control. ‘Don’t laugh at me,’ counsel demanded. ‘You’re treating this matter as a joke.’”*54
The principal danger, from DA Whitman’s point of view, was that his corroborator would take this studied insolence too far and actually undermine the prosecution case. This point was brought home to Schepps during the lunch break, and—one newspaper reported—“the only reason [he] did not do serious damage to the State was because he got some heavy kicks during recess…. Schepps radiated all morning; in the afternoon he gave forth less froth and more facts…. He is free from the taint of guilt in this case, but no doubt his character, as given by himself, leaves something to be desired from the standpoint of respectability.”
Respectable or not, the vital point was that Schepps emerged from six hours of cross-examination with his story—and Whitman’s case—intact. He had not made a favorable impression on the spectators in the courtroom; his testimony had been too smug and too smart-alecky for that. But he had borne out Bald Jack Rose and Bridgey Webber, as the district attorney had intended that he should. By the time Schepps stepped down from the witness stand, the twelve jurors were more than half convinced of Becker’s guilt.
Charles Whitman produced a total of nearly forty prosecution witnesses and devoted well over a week to going through their evidence. John McIntyre swore in almost exactly as many on Becker’s behalf, but their testimonies detained the court for much less time: for five days, rather than eight. This was only one of several indications that the defense was struggling to make a case.
McIntyre’s main difficulty lay in finding a weakness in the DA’s parade of testimony. Schepps’s pivotal role as corroborator for the State had been one potential chink in the armor, but it was otherwise surprisingly difficult to tear the prosecution’s argument apart. Whitman had staked his chances of obtaining a conviction on the contention that Charles Becker had attended the Harlem Conference and met again with the conspirators at the Murray Hill Baths after the murder. That meant McIntyre needed to prove that Becker had not been—in fact, could not have been—present at these meetings. But Whitman’s witnesses had been so uniformly equivocal about the date of the Harlem Conference (according to Schepps it had taken place in May or June; according to Rose sometime in June or July) that it was practically impossible to show that Becker could not have traveled up to West 124th Street to attend it. The defense was forced to focus the bulk of its efforts on discrediting the prosecution’s witnesses and on the Murray Hill Baths affair.
Things might have been different had McIntyre felt able to put Becker on the stand. As it was, the lieutenant’s unwillingness to testify appeared intrinsically suspicious, not least to a jury of New Yorkers more or less brought up to distrust the police. It also robbed the defense of both a structure and a heart. Far too much time was devoted to a stream of indistinguishable witnesses, each of whom had been called to discredit a tiny portion of the prosecution case. Probably the policeman’s lawyer was aiming for a cumulative effect—the suggestion that the DA’s case was full of holes. In fact, the impression he conveyed was of a choppy, petty argument, not a principled defense of some great truth.
Justice Goff hardly helped, again. McIntyre had planned to open his case by calling on William Travers Jerome, the former district attorney, and Police Commissioner Waldo—two witnesses of unimpeachable integrity. Goff disallowed their evidence.*55 Fred Hawley, the Sun reporter, was sworn in next and testified that he had been with Becker for all but five minutes of the time between 3:30 and 7:30 A.M on the day of the murder. This, if true, meant that Becker could scarcely have attended the meeting at the Murray Hill Baths, and—under cross-examination—Hawley scored a considerable blow by adding that he had not informed Whitman’s office of his evidence “because I did not care to have the district attorney know what I was going to testify to.” Too many defense witnesses in too many other trials had been scared off with threatened indictments for the reporter to take that risk. Whitman was sufficiently enraged to call Hawley’s response “the most insulting statement ever made in an American court,” and he demanded to be sworn in himself. Under questioning from Moss, he testified that while Becker had been at the West Forty-seventh Street precinct house at 3:30 A.M., he had not been there after 4:00. Notionally, therefore, Becker had had sufficient time to visit the baths. The jury was left little wiser by the whole exchange.
McIntyre’s most interesting witness was Jack Sullivan, “a short, burly man with the face of a bulldog and two odd, bald spots at the front of his head” that reminded one newsman in the press box of “little red horns.” The newspaper distributor, still himself under indictment for murder, was brought down from Whitman’s Palace to give evidence and supplied a great deal of testimony regarding the relations among Rose, Vallon, Webber, and their friends. Clearly still much angered by his own arrest, Sullivan could scarcely be prevailed upon to stop talking. The most significant difference between his evidence and that given by the imprisoned gamblers, though, was the distributor’s willingness to answer any question put to him by either the State or the defense. McIntyre made this point well, asking Goff to instruct his witness “that since he was under indictment for murder he could refuse to answer any question. Sullivan replied that he would answer any question.” But the evidence he gave was scarcely breathtaking. Most of it concerned conversations overheard in the West Side Jail. These certainly implied that Rose and his cohorts had conspired to frame Becker for Herman’s murder. But, the jury must have wondered, was the blustery Jack Sullivan—little red horns and all—really more reliable than Bald Jack Rose?*56
McIntyre had expected great things of one other anticipated witness. William Shapiro, the chauffeur of the gray Packard, had been subpoenaed to testify for the defense. Becker’s lawyers planned to ask him some detailed questions about the passengers he had transported to the Hotel Metropole on that July evening three months earlier—an assemblage that, according to the driver’s early deposition, had included both Jack Rose and Sam Schepps. An admission of this sort would do serious damage to Whitman’s carefully promoted notion that Schepps had no foreknowledge of the murder. Once again, however, the DA smartly outmaneuvered the ponderous McIntyre. A few minutes before Shapiro was scheduled to appear, Whitman requested an adjournment. When the trial began again, it emerged that during the short interval Whitman had persuaded Justice Goff to reconvene his grand-jury investigation into police corruption and call Shapiro before it. At the district attorney’s recommendation, the chauffeur had then been granted immunity from prosecution. He now appeared not to testify for Becker but as a rebuttal witness for the prosecution.
In these dramatically changed circumstances, few people were surprised to hear Shapiro recant his earlier testimony. Schepps had been nowhere near the murder car, he said, and nothing that McIntyre could say would shake him from that story. The real puzzle, to those who recalled the sensation that had followed the driver’s original arrest, was the timing of the DA’s last-minute offer of immunity. Whatever Whitman’s reasoning, though, his masterly maneuvering had denied McIntyre a final opportunity to do real damage to the prosecution case.*57
Certainly the defense fared little better with its remaining witnesses. A long stream of former policemen and apartment-house neighbors spoke glowingly of Becker’s character; others attacked the integrity of Luban, Vallon, and Bridgey Webber. But none of this did anything to undermine the credibility of Sam Schepps or Jack Rose. McIntyre had found one witness from Hot Springs willing to swear that Schepps, in conversation, had not exactly denied involvement in the murder. But watery testimony of this sort was never going to sway the jury. Not a single witness touched in any way on the events of the Harlem Conference. As McIntyre’s defense drew to a close, it became increasingly clear that Becker’s fate would rest, as the lieutenant had always said it would, on the stark choice confronting the jurors. Who would the twelve men in the jury box believe? A brawny, brutal, utterly corrupt policeman? Or three self-confessed murderers and their oil slick of a corroborator?
John McIntyre rose to deliver his summation at ten o’clock on the morning of October 23. He had been granted four hours to make his final plea, but—no doubt to the relief of those who had listened to two weeks’ worth of the Tammany man’s rhetoric—required no more than one to state his case.
It was not one of the defense attorney’s finer performances. Granted, he had little material to work with. But McIntyre’s stentorian appeal to the jury’s patriotism—“I am defending an American, not a murderer”—did little more than underline his failure to make much of a dent in the prosecution case, and his summation confused many of those crammed into the court by arguing that the four gunmen, who were not on trial, might not have murdered Rosenthal.
The defense made some good points, to be sure. Morris Luban, as McIntyre pointed out, had testified “he never saw Becker but once in his life and then he was in street clothes. But he comes here and tells you he was able to identify a nude man in a room filled with steam.” The idea that a man of the lieutenant’s obvious intelligence could have organized a murder quite so clumsily was ridiculed. But, once again, no reference was made to the really crucial points of Whitman’s case—to the Harlem Conference or the meeting at the Murray Hill Baths, without which there could be no conviction. The defense attorney’s final message to the jurors was a simple appeal to reason—or prejudice, perhaps: “Remember, it is the filth of the earth that accuses him.” His client seemed less than impressed. As McIntyre ranted on, the Evening Post observed, “Becker became manifestly nervous. He moved about in his chair. He broke into a sweat. When the lawyer finished at last, he looked greatly relieved.”
There was a short recess before Frank Moss stood to summarize the prosecution case. At least one newspaper pointed out that the assistant district attorney was far more balanced than McIntyre had been—“restrained, courteous and fair…. When he quoted testimony, he quoted all that bore on the point in question, inverting nothing, suppressing nothing”—thus contriving to imply that he had the stronger case. Moss’s summation was carefully constructed to rebut that just made by the defense. Four men had fired at Rosenthal, the prosecutor said, and there was no doubt that they were Zelig’s gunmen. Rose had been nothing but a puppet, carrying out Becker’s orders because he was terrified of what would happen to him if he shirked. Schepps was merely “an accessory after the crime,” and Becker had “prostituted himself as a policeman”—the closest that Whitman and his men dared come to mentioning his earnings from the graft.
The bearded, earnest Moss cut such an upright figure that very few of those in court noticed his occasional recourse to subterfuge. But the assistant district attorney pulled a neat trick when he dismissed Jack Sullivan’s testimony that the killers had discussed the possibility of framing Becker in the distributor’s presence—“I ask you to consider the improbability of that…. Is Rose a fool?”—without drawing attention to the fact that his own case rested heavily on similar contentions. According to the prosecution, after all, Becker had been so drunk with power that he never bothered to disguise his intention of killing Rosenthal and openly discussed his plans in front of strangers. Moss’s view of Bald Jack was considerably more respectful. Rose’s crucial testimony, he told the members of the jury, could be relied upon, not least because it matched precisely the evidence he had given to the grand jury. This last suggestion was such a naked lie that McIntyre leaped to his feet, “choleric with rage,” to interject by shouting, “That claim is not true, and the assistant district attorney knows it!”
The twelve jurors got a night to think over the evidence before Judge Goff delivered his charge the next morning. Most of the spectators in the court, and many of the newsmen, still believed that the case was finely balanced at this point, Whitman’s plainly superior presentation of the prosecution argument being offset by the plainly dubious character of so many of his witnesses and the presumption of innocence that still lay in Becker’s favor. McIntyre and his team reassured their client that the outcome would be a hung jury or an acquittal. In the district attorney’s office, meanwhile, no more than five men among the entire staff of several dozen expected anything but a verdict of not guilty.
Goff’s charge to the jury changed all that. It badly damaged Becker’s hopes. Most of the judge’s three-hour discussion of the evidence consisted of a formal instruction to the jury on a variety of points of law. But his recapitulation of the evidence, more than one reporter thought, was far from neutral. Each plank in the prosecution case was presented as fact. The meeting at the Murray Hill Baths was discussed as though it had happened the way the prosecution said it had, not as though it might never have occurred. The Harlem Conference likewise. Even Morris Luban’s evidence was given renewed credibility, and the forger’s account of the threats issued by Becker at the Lafayette Baths was repeated without comment. Becker, the judge concluded this portion of his charge, had telephoned Jack Rose on the day before the murder to tell him, “There is still time. It will look as if the gamblers did it.”
Goff’s instructions regarding Rose and Schepps were no more helpful to the defense. Goff ruled that no testimony proved that Schepps had had foreknowledge of the murder; the jury should not conclude that the fake-jewelry man was in any way an accomplice in the murder. Bald Jack’s reliability as a witness went unquestioned. Toward the end of his discussion of the case, the judge even read “at some length and with apparent interest and pleasure from Rose’s testimony” before closing with the admonition that “Becker, in law, must be held responsible for everyone who acted in pursuance of his instructions.” It was, the lieutenant admitted to the newsmen who clustered around him for a comment as the jury filed out, “virtually a direction to find me guilty.”
The Becker jurors retired to consider the evidence shortly before 4:30 P.M. The policeman and his supporters waited for the verdict in the sheriff’s office along the hall; the district attorney and his men settled down in a separate room a little way away. John Becker, by then a lieutenant of detectives, sat close to his brother; so, too, did Clubber Williams, old by now and rather drunk. Helen’s brother, John Lynch, and a small group of friends and defense lawyers stood or sat awkwardly nearby. Sandwiches and coffee were brought in, but few people felt hungry, particularly when the strains of lustily sung martial hymns came drifting down the corridor from the DA’s office. Frank Moss, it transpired, had organized the junior members of the prosecution team into an impromptu Christian chorus.
Time slunk by. Prior to the judge’s charge, Becker had been optimistic of a favorable verdict; he had even asked Helen to wear her best dress to court so they could go out to celebrate that evening. Now he felt more equivocal, and so did his wife: “Lawyers and everyone,” Mrs. Becker would say,
kept reassuring me right along…but while we were waiting for the jury to come in, I was nervous and did not feel like talking to people. Charley and I sat in the sheriff’s room hour after hour, waiting. People crowded in to see us and speak to us, and they brought rumors that the jury had disagreed or that the last vote was so and so. It was very annoying, for they really knew nothing about it.
Now it was 8:00 P.M., now 10:00, now 11:00. The panel had been out for six and a half hours. Each tick of the clock raised Becker’s spirits a fraction higher. It was common knowledge that juries took more time to bring in not-guilty verdicts than they did to find a man guilty as charged.
It was five minutes to midnight when news finally reached the sheriff’s office that the verdict had come in. Becker was led away down a set of stairs while Helen hurried back along the hall, but the jurors’ sudden reappearance had been so unexpected that she reached the courtroom late and found it already full.
“I ran as fast as I could,” the schoolteacher recalled,
but when I reached the door it was closed and they would not let me in. An attendant gave me a chair and I sat down with people pressing around me—for they all knew who I was. I waited three or four minutes—it seemed a long time—and then the door flew open.
A reporter rushed out shouting “Guilty!” He saw me just as he spoke and felt sorry for me—he told me afterward. But he could not stop the word, or alter the fact. They had found my husband guilty of murder in the first degree.