by Carrie Hagen
PART TWO:
“the cheapest way”
(AUGUST–NOVEMBER 1874)
we think we have left no clues behind us
SOUTH OF CANAL STREET IN NEW YORK CITY, A FORMER COW path called Mulberry Street ran through the heart of the city’s most infamous slum. Locals knew this area as The Bend. Notorious saloons brewed here, blocks east of Broadway. Women walked through crooked alleys, holding aprons over moldy vegetables, babies to their breasts, and firewood on their heads. Emaciated children with hacking coughs and spotty faces ate stale bread, and grocers paced in front of old, rotten slabs of meat hanging from their store doors.
On summer mornings in 1874, bartenders sidestepped bodies sleeping on lager-drenched wood shavings. The men, remnants of the past night’s drinking crowd, had rented a spot on the floor for a nickel. By the time bartenders opened the doors, sunlight had awoken the neighborhood’s street children, who yawned and stretched away from those lying next to them. The children stepped over sewage trickling through the streets and foraged for food as they began their morning errands. Some walked west to Newspaper Row, where newsboys collected their daily papers, and others meandered north toward Broadway, where they would look for a spot to polish boots or sell flowers. If the oldest boys made enough money to buy a lager or a whiskey by noon, they could return to the saloons for a free lunch.
Many of the city’s saloons were on corners, accessible from several directions. As women sat in front of tenement houses and watched their youngest children play in the streets, husbands and fathers entered the swinging doors of saloons for their afternoon meals. Posters of sports stars, paintings, pictures of nude sirens, and brewery advertisements cluttered the walls. Bartenders pushed tables and chairs, pianos and pool tables to the sides to make room for free lunches of bread, crackers, meat, salad, and soup or stew. Along the bar, men propped tired feet on the brass foot rail and spilled lager onto sawdust scattered over the floor. A mirror behind the bar reflected the back of the saloon keeper’s oily head and stiff, white shirt. From the street, hungry children could look through the wrought-iron windows and see men reaching over the bar to pay a nickel for a beer and a dime for a whiskey shot.
Charles Stromberg had owned a nearby saloon on Mott Street for a few months. It wasn’t difficult to open a tavern—even a poor man could scrape together $200 and attract a brewer to provide beer, food, and decoration in exchange for a keeper’s commitment to sell only his beer and to pay a tax on it. Stromberg, like most bartenders, usually had some time to himself between the free lunch that ended at 3:00 P.M. and the busy evening hours. Occasionally, he paused from his chores in the late afternoon to service a few customers, such as the three men who sometimes met at this time in the back of his saloon.
Stromberg knew one of the men, and he could tell the others were convicts before he met them. The younger of the two was tall, and he had red hair. He usually dressed well, so perhaps he alone could have passed as a working man. The other stranger, though, drew attention to both men. He was older, shorter, and had an odd-looking face. The index finger on his left hand came to a point, and he wore two gold rings on his middle finger. One of them had a red stone set within it. Stromberg knew the third man through Henry Hartman, one of his saloon keepers. His name was William Westervelt, and like Hartman, he was a disgraced New York police officer. The force had dismissed him earlier that year for failing to shut down an illegal lottery office. Westervelt blamed the dismissal on his refusal to contribute to a political fund-raiser. Since then, he, his wife, and his two children had moved into a one-room apartment in a tenement house. To make rent while Westervelt looked for work, his wife had sold some of their furniture.
Westervelt introduced Stromberg to his two friends. He called the redhead Smith, and he introduced the man with the odd face once as Anderson and another time as Henderson. Westervelt said they were business associates of his from Philadelphia. Together, they peddled an insect repellent they called “Mothee” around New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Stromberg didn’t trust any of them. After seeing the strangers twice, he began to record their visits. He could never successfully eavesdrop on their conversations, but he noticed that Westervelt usually came in first, followed by the others in fifteen minutes or so. As they talked, Westervelt appeared calm and the others looked frustrated. Smith often seemed nervous, and Anderson/Henderson’s voice sounded angry. Each time Stromberg saw them, the strangers left after about fifteen minutes. Westervelt would then wait another fifteen before leaving. Sometimes, Westervelt came to have a drink alone, and when he did, he spoke with his old friend and bartender Henry Hartman. Hartman asked Westervelt one night for his opinion on the Philadelphia kidnapping. He replied that if the authorities arrested the kidnappers, the Ross child would not live for three days.
Stromberg didn’t turn to the police with his suspicions or his notes. At night, saloons turned into community centers that represented the ethnicities and political values of the neighborhoods. In the Five Points bars, the patrons shared Irish heritages and lives of poverty and crime. Men turned to them to escape angry wives and hungry children, to talk to friends, to read the paper or play a game of pool. Some who stayed too late bought a box of candy nicknamed “wife pacifiers,” and others stumbled outside, joined arms, and sang about lost loves or their dear mothers. The next day, they returned to the brotherhood on the corner, where they looked for work, cashed checks, and left letters for friends, lovers, or associates. So when Westervelt asked Hartman to contact him whenever a chalk mark appeared on a cellar door outside the saloon, he agreed. And when Westervelt once left a letter at the bar for one of his friends, Stromberg kept it despite his discomfort. He returned it three days later, after neither of Westervelt’s friends appeared.
Stromberg sometimes met Westervelt for a drink at one of the other bars in Five Points. He asked him some questions about Anderson/ Henderson and Smith. Westervelt didn’t answer the questions directly, but he did say, “I can tell you confidentially that I can make from ten to fifteen thousand dollars, but by doing so I would have to give somebody away, which would send them to the state prison for ten, or fifteen, or twenty years, or for life.” Over another drink on another night, Stromberg asked Westervelt what he thought of the Charley Ross case. Westervelt said he couldn’t name any names, but he could bet “two shillings” on the identities of the kidnappers.
Around closing time, stowaways, newsboys, orphans, and beggars walked past the Five Points saloons in search of a space to sleep. Some ducked into one of the lodging houses, originally built as stately homes for the Dutch Knickerbocker settlers. They paid a few cents for a space on the floor and climbed creaky stairs. Kerosene lamps cast small shadows on the walls, wet with moisture, and smells of unclean bodies and boiled cabbage floated through the halls. When a boy found an open spot in a room, he often lay with at least a dozen sleeping men and women, any number of whom were prostitutes, river pirates, and disease sufferers who coughed through the night.
The criminals of Five Points weren’t so different at heart from the city leaders who lived blocks away. They just suffered more. In both neighborhoods, swift hands earned money, and money earned power. People expected their leaders to be crooks. The good men cared too much about reputations and business interests to pretend to fight crime.
we know not what to make of that
ON AUGUST 2, THE SUPERINTENDENT OF THE NEW YORK Police Department sent an urgent message to Chief Jones in Philadelphia.
“Chief of Police of Philadelphia:—Send detective here with original letters of kidnappers of Ross child; think I have information.
GEO. W. WALLING,
“Superintendent of New York Police.”
George W. Walling had joined the force in 1847 at age twenty-four, when a friend retired and offered him his position. From his first post in a small stationhouse, Walling quickly learned that regardless of physical condition or mental acuity, the men who won promotions were those who had the rig
ht political opinions. During his years as an officer, he studied feuding in the city and concentrated his efforts on controlling ethnic riots and class tension.
The war years were good for the social lives of the northern upper class. Advertisements and society columns offered distractions from the bloody accounts of war reporters, and perhaps as a way of denying America’s suffering, members attended record numbers of social events. Antebellum propriety faded into exhibitionism; workers framed Fifth Avenue mansions with marble and ladies flaunted diamonds and furs on the streets. Amid parties and play, it might have been possible to ignore the war. It was harder to disregard the changes brought by Reconstruction.
When cities rushed to industrialize, the arrival of more than 3 million immigrants doubled the population of urban America. Their work expanded industry, allowing the number of factories and miles of railroad track to double within a decade. Their arrival, however, threatened those capitalists who benefited from their hard labor. As race riots raged in Philadelphia, immigrants in New York protested unsanitary working conditions through strikes, protests, and lockouts at the workplace. Their dissatisfaction revealed something of a contradiction in certain pro-Union ideologies of the northern upper and emerging middle classes: sympathizers wanted a unified country, but they struggled to acknowledge freed slaves and immigrant laborers as their equals. When workers asserted their voices, employers saw danger, not frustration, in arguments over rotting docks and unsafe factories. They knew that a challenge to authority could lead to war. And since they didn’t want to negotiate their power, they turned to those men their fathers had hired to watch, target, and punish their competition. Ironically, this fear gave the immigrant and the native a common enemy: the law enforcer.
When Walling gained his first promotion, to the rank of captain in 1853, he organized his men into “strong-arm” police teams that patrolled the streets with clubs carved from locust wood. Soon, every policeman in the city walked with a nightstick, and many held Walling’s clubs. Both citizens and the police defined neighborhoods by the class and ethnicity of residents. So when the Panic of 1873 hit, and 25 percent of laborers lost their jobs, the police knew where to go to monitor unrest or search for riot leaders. Tension became so thick around Irish shanties between 91st and 106th Streets in Yorkville and Italian tenements along Third Avenue that officers walked those streets in groups of three or more. Workers with bad tempers and drinking problems knew police clubs could crack human skulls. Fear of the weapons, though, didn’t keep many from fighting back, and citizens stood around brutal encounters, yelling “Shame! Shame!” at the police.
During the summer of 1874, officers walked through targeted neighborhoods late at night and demanded that people leave their porches—some of those who refused received a beating. Working women who returned home alone after hours complained that policemen treated them like prostitutes, and they filed assault charges. Politically appointed commissioners and judges protected unethical officers, even after human-rights groups convinced the state to restructure police courts.
After becoming an inspector, Walling was promoted to superintendent. The promotion came just two weeks before he sent the telegram of August 2 to Chief Jones in Philadelphia. Already, he was irritated with changes made to his office. Prior to Walling’s nomination, the person named superintendent had had total authority over the force for an unlimited term, and he could expect to communicate directly with any officer, no matter the rank. But Walling’s power came with limitations. The Board of the Police reserved the right to remove him whenever they wished, and they implemented a new measure that curbed conversation between the city’s thirty-six captains and their superintendent. The captains were told to speak only and directly with one of four inspectors, who then reported directly to the superintendent. Walling had served for twenty-seven years—long enough to watch municipal evolution, understand its politics, and know when, where, and why decisions limiting authorial power were made. It embarrassed him that the board withdrew certain powers as soon as he assumed control.
Immediately upon taking office, Walling learned of a case that revealed a flaw in the new communication system. For a few weeks, an Officer Doyle in the city’s thirteenth ward had been communicating with a man who claimed his brother had kidnapped Charley Ross. The police knew the informant. His name was Clinton “Gil” Mosher, and he was a well-known horse thief who had served time in the state prison. Officer Doyle had followed protocol, reporting Mosher’s lead only to his superior, Captain Henry Hedden. Hedden’s instinct was to dismiss anything to do with Gil Mosher, yet he had mentioned him to his superintendent, Walling’s predecessor. That man told Hedden to pursue the lead. But then, internal restructuring in the department had slowed communication. Walling’s former boss became police commissioner, Walling was promoted, and by the time he learned Doyle’s story, two weeks of conversations had passed.
Walling demanded to see Mosher, Doyle, and Hedden immediately. He knew it would take a few days for the cops to track down Mosher, especially once the seasoned criminal heard that somebody besides Doyle was looking for him. But he also knew Gil Mosher’s type—one that would betray anybody, even a brother, for $20,000. He was right. Gil Mosher soon sat in front of Walling, agreeing to answer his questions.
“What are your reasons for suspecting that your brother William took part in kidnapping Charley Ross?” Walling asked.
“Well, I was approached by Bill, who asked me if I would join him in carrying off some child who had rich parents. The plan was to steal one of Commodore Vanderbilt’s grandchildren.”
“Which one of the children was to be taken?”
“The youngest one we could get.”
“What would you do with it?”
“Hold it for a ransom.”
“Where did he propose to conceal the child?”
“In a boat. And, I was to negotiate for the ransom.”
“Well, what then?”
“I refused to have anything to do with the business.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought there would be too much risk in trying to get money from the Vanderbilts. They are too rich, have too much power and are not the kind of people to be frightened. There would be no trouble in stealing the child, the difficulty would be in negotiating for its ransom.”
“So you gave up the plan?”
“Yes; I would not run the risk of being detected. I did not think it was a safe enterprise.”
Gil Mosher’s story sounded like a criminal’s daydream, a child’s fantasy, an aging man’s attempt at delivering a tale that would earn him some reward money. The plan, as shared with Walling, was too vague to have an implicit connection to the Ross case, and as a seasoned criminal, Gil was hardly one to “[refuse] to have anything to do” with whatever “business” might bring him some extra cash. The Vanderbilts, magnates of the Gilded Age, were untouchable icons—too rich to be within the reach of the working class, and too clever to be outsmarted by petty river pirates. Criminals may have dreamed of taking from them, but the successful ones knew to aim for smaller game. Still, though, Gil Mosher’s story had the operative terms “ransom,” “negotiate,” and “child.” If nothing else, Walling could use it as his entrance into the high-profile Charley Ross case and its hefty reward.
After receiving Walling’s telegram on August 2, Chief Jones contacted Captain Heins and Joseph Ross, Christian’s brother. The next day, the men took the ransom notes to Walling at New York’s police headquarters.
“We hope that you at least have some trustworthy information,” said Heins.
“I think I have,” Walling responded. “Through Captain Henry Hedden, of the Thirteenth Police District, I have heard of a man who professes to know who the abductors are.” He called for Hedden to join the meeting.
Joseph Ross asked, “Had you any idea who the abductors were?”
“We suspect two men,” replied Walling.
“If we have their names, they can be hunted
down,” said Joseph.
“Undoubtedly. And that is what we hope to do.”
Hedden told Heins and Ross about Gil Mosher and his brother William. “If my suspicions are correct, this William Mosher is the leader of the conspiracy. He arranged the plot and is the writer of the letters sent to Mr. Ross. I am familiar with Mosher’s writing, and can tell if I see the letters whether he is the author of them.”
“Before we show you the letters,” responded Heins, “describe to us the peculiarities of Mosher’s handwriting.”
William—or “Bill”—Mosher was a career petty thief, but an educated one. Gil told the officers that his brother had gone to school as a child, and that he had always liked to read. Gil also remembered Bill’s attempt to write a novel “some ten years before.” He said the handwriting was “dirty,” hard to read. His brother’s signature mark was the way he wrote the letter Y—looping the tail so that it spread into the next word.
“He writes very rapidly and is careless,” Gil said. “He seldom finishes a page without blotting it. He often writes either above or below the lines. When he folds a letter it is in a peculiar and awkward way.”
“At last!” cried Joseph Ross.
After hearing a short description of one man’s careless handwriting and paper-folding preference, Joseph Ross returned to Philadelphia believing that the kidnappers had been identified. He didn’t, however, share this news with his brother Christian. Walling had advised him not to.
we have heard nothing from yu
ON MONDAY, AUGUST 3, DETECTIVE TAGGART DOUBLED THE reward advertised by the Pennsylvania Bureau of Detectives for anonymous information leading to the kidnappers.
“$5,000 will be paid by us to any person who will give us a clue which will lead to the detection of the kidnappers of Charley Brewster Ross, and the name of the person giving the information shall be kept secret if desired.”
