Once Upon a Time in New York

by Herbert Mitgang

  Magistrate Albert H. Vitale was removed by the Appellate Division because of his friendship and business dealings with Arnold Rothstein. Magistrate Jean H. Norris, the first woman judge in New York City history, was a Tammany loyalist who had received her appointment through Boss Murphy. From Harlem Court to Women’s Court, she had a reputation for harshness against prostitutes. It was revealed that she had convicted some women on uncorroborated testimony and then destroyed court records.

  As Judge Seabury walked down the courthouse steps after word got out that Magistrate Norris’s judicial career was over, several hundred young women from nearby offices, standing outside during the lunch hour, cheered and applauded him.

  Louis B. Brodsky, a real estate operator buying and selling city-owned parcels of land, was the wealthiest magistrate in New York. He was also a stock market speculator whose margin operations while on the bench amounted to $7 million. Judge Seabury wanted to know the sources of his income. During Brodsky’s time on the stand, he refused to produce any financial records—but it emerged that he, too, had a tin box. When Referee Seabury turned over his evidence to the Appellate Division, three trials followed, with Seabury and Kresel acting as prosecutors.

  During his trial, Magistrate Brodsky defended himself by reading a corny prose tribute to dogs: “A man’s reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action, but a dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness,” etc. Apparently, Brodsky’s dog act worked. The majority of the Appellate Division judges ruled that Brodsky’s financial speculations were not sufficient cause to remove him from the bench. It was a setback for the investigation, and Tammany rejoiced—momentarily.

  While more and more revelations came out about the ineptitude and corruption of a dozen city magistrates, Jimmy Walker decided to spend a few weeks taking a “sun bath treatment” at the desert estate of Samuel Untermyer in Palm Springs, California. Untermyer, a prominent New York lawyer, was a self-described public-spirited citizen and an old Tammany stalwart.

  A delegation of Indians from a nearby reservation arrived at the Untermyer estate to greet the mayor. The Indian chief stepped forward and offered him a free thermal mud bath.

  Mayor Walker replied, “Thank you, no. I’ve been in one constantly during the past eighteen months.”

  Walker held a daily morning front-porch press conference during which he wore black and orange pajamas. Mr. Untermyer, a publicity hound who liked to try his cases in public, stood at his side. Walker’s face was feverishly flushed. When asked if he had received bad news from New York City, Walker abandoned his usual cool and gruffly replied:

  “No, politics has nothing to do with my health now. I think I got a little too much of this blistering sun. I don’t think I’ll even put my clothes on today.”

  Walker told the reporters that in fifteen years this was the only vacation during which he could completely relax and rest. “Ever since I let down from the tension of my Wild West reception here, I’ve had wonderful rest and enjoyed myself immensely,” he said. To one of his friends, a gossip columnist, he confided, “I’m like a burlesque theater—a lot of ballyhoo outside, but not such a good show inside.” When asked about the Seabury investigation going on in his hometown on the other side of the continent, Walker disclaimed official responsibility for any of the conditions under examination.

  “While the mayor has power to appoint magistrates,” he said, “he does not have power to fire them. A promising candidate may be selected and appointed in all good faith, but if he later turns out to be a lemon, the mayor is powerless to rectify the error.”

  Walker repeated his previous statements in Palm Springs that New York’s police department was the finest in the world, with “only a normal percentage of weak spots” that existed in any organization.

  “If John Q. Citizen will quit bribing weak officials for this, that and the other thing that he wants, most of the trouble will be eliminated,” he declared. “Then when something blows up this bribing citizen is the first and loudest squawker.”

  But not every journalist in New York was overwhelmed by Jimmy Walker’s charm and excuses. Heywood Broun, the liberal World-Telegram columnist who became the founding president of the American Newspaper Guild, observed:

  “Though I grant that James Joseph Walker is sick, it seems to me unlikely that his health can be as precarious as that of the City of New York at the present moment. It is a pity that the mayor cannot take the metropolis with him on the trip. The city stands in need of scathing sunlight, fresh air and a fine rousing wind to cleanse its lungs and vitals. In Palm Springs, I trust, the palms will be straighter and itch less than those of Tammany.”

  Just as Arnold Rothstein’s murder in 1928 had helped ignite the initial investigation, now another brutal murder set off a new chain reaction of accusations against the Walker administration’s laxity in law enforcement.

  The body of an important Seabury witness, Mrs. Vivian Gordon, was found in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The red-haired, thirty-two-year-old divorcée had been strangled with a clothesline. Only a few days before, Mrs. Gordon had been questioned in private and testified that she had been framed by a member of the police department’s vice squad. She was scheduled to appear again before Irving Ben Cooper and provide even more damaging evidence about the police who had falsely arrested her for prostitution. When Mrs. Gordon’s body was discovered, her distraught sixteen-year-old daughter committed suicide.

  From Albany, Governor Roosevelt declared that the murder of a witness put the police on trial. Mrs. Gordon’s death made headlines across the country. Police Commissioner Mulrooney said there would be “a stain on the shield of every policeman in New York” until the murder was solved. The fact that the murder had been committed in a neighborhood park, the reformers said, was a horrifying example of the cavalier attitude of criminals toward the Walker administration’s law-enforcement machinery.

  Because of his close supervision of the corruption cases and how they affected the state, Governor Roosevelt was mentioned more often in the national press as a presidential contender. He was beginning to fill the vacuum left by Mayor Walker in pursuing criminal justice in New York.

  As usual, the tabloids had a field day. They claimed that Mrs. Gordon had “five hundred sugar daddies.” More kindly, the broadsheets described her as “a misled woman who followed the tinsel path.” The phone number of Polly Adler, the town’s leading “vice entrepreneuse,” was found in the murdered woman’s address book. “She was just another attractive woman out to feather her own nest,” said Miss Adler.

  With the heat on to solve the murder, a taxicab driver piped up who told of driving the car in which “underworld friends” of Vivian Gordon strangled her. It was a story the police were pleased to believe, since it removed the possibility that one of their own had done the deed. The police arrested one Harry Stein; his record included strangling and robbing a woman. There was some evidence that he had tried to sell Mrs. Gordon’s jewelry and a fur coat. But a jury of twelve men acquitted him and an accomplice. The case against them was so thin that it sounded like a cover-up.

  All eyes turned toward Andrew G. McLaughlin, the vice squad cop who had arrested Vivian Gordon for soliciting and caused her to be convicted of prostitution. At first, McLaughlin could not be reached because he was on a cruise to Bermuda. When he returned, McLaughlin nonchalantly denied any complicity in the murder. He smilingly told newspaper reporters that the whole Seabury investigation was a farce; that he would willingly take the stand and justify the vice squad’s tactics.

  When called before Referee Seabury, McLaughlin suddenly suffered memory loss. He couldn’t recall his arrest of the Gordon woman. He couldn’t even remember “if she was black or white.” Then the Seabury-Kresel technique of “following the money” pinned McLaughlin to the mat:

  How, investigators asked, did you manage to bank $35,800.51 in two years despite the fact that your pay as a member of the vice squad was
only $3,000 a year?

  McLaughlin refused to answer on the ground that the Appellate Division was exceeding its authority and infringing on his constitutional rights.

  After a departmental trial, Police Commissioner Mulrooney dismissed McLaughlin from the force for two reasons: he had arrested women as prostitutes with insufficient evidence and he had failed to answer the Seabury inquiry’s questions.

  That was all the punishment anyone received for the crime. Vivian Gordon joined Arnold Rothstein as an officially unsolved mystery that pointed to a rotten core in the city.

  Following the resignations of the magistrates and the vice cops, Referee Seabury submitted a 70,000-word report to the Appellate Division and Governor Roosevelt that called for reforms in the lower courts to rid them of politics and graft. In what looked like a direct slap at Jimmy Walker, Seabury proposed that in the future no mayor be allowed to name any judges.

  The reforms proposed in the Seabury report included consolidation of the existing criminal courts, which would be supervised by a presiding justice with strong administrative powers; passage of a state constitutional amendment to permit the appointment of lower-court judges by the Appellate Division instead of by the mayor; the tightening of civil service regulations for court officers to eliminate political influence in appointments; higher bail for felons and persons charged with minor offenses; a law permitting the immediate arraignment of arrested persons before a judge, eliminating the booking at police precinct station houses, where most of the corruption was found to originate; elimination of the homicide courts, and the creation of a special court for all felony cases; a new law defining the circumstances under which a police officer could make an arrest; a public defender system, with attorneys designated by the Legal Aid Society, to represent poor defendants in the lower courts.

  Many of these reforms would slowly be adopted—not without a struggle in the city and state legislatures—over the next fifty years. They did not eliminate politics from the bar and bench, but they weakened the grip of the mayor and Tammany Hall on the judiciary.

  To back up his recommendations, Seabury offered evidence to underscore what he and his boys had discovered about the politicized judicial system:

  “What we have seen is a hideous caricature which parades as justice,” he said. “The insidious auspices under which the magistrates, the clerks, the assistant clerks and attendants are appointed is bad enough; the conditions under which they retain their appointments are infinitely worse because they involve the subserviency in office to district leaders and other politicians.

  “It is a byword in the corridors of the courts of this city that the intervention of a friend in the district political club is much more potent than the merits of the cause or the services of the best lawyer. Unfortunately, the truth of this statement alone prevents it from being a slander upon the good name of the city.”

  In a conclusion to his lengthy report, Judge Seabury sounded like the crusader of his early years, when he was a lawyer representing the trade unions. He emphasized that the abuses didn’t strike at people of wealth and power; they oppressed those who were poor and helpless, while the oppressor enjoyed practical immunity. There could be no remedy for these abuses, he concluded, unless the courts were entirely freed of political control.

  Long afterward, the thievery of Sheriff Farley and the other members of the citywide tin-box brigade contributed to the creation of the 1959 Broadway musical comedy Fiorello! The brilliant lyrics (copyright, by Sheldon M. Harnick) to a song titled “Little Tin Box” included these lines, slightly abridged here:

  Mr. X, may we ask you a question?

  It’s amazing is it not

  That the city pays you slightly less

  Than fifty bucks a week

  Yet you’ve purchased a private yacht?

  I am positive Your Honor must be joking,

  Any working man can do what I have done.

  For a month or two I simply gave up smoking

  And I put my extra pennies one by one

  Into a little tin box,

  A little tin box

  That a little tin key unlocks.

  There is nothing unorthodox

  About a little tin box.

  Mr. Y, we’ve been told you don’t feel well

  And we know you’ve lost your voice.

  But we wondered how you managed on the salary you make

  To acquire a Rolls Royce?

  You’re implying I’m a crook and I say No Sir,

  There is nothing in my past I care to hide.

  I’ve been taking empty bottles to the grocer

  And each nickel that I got was put aside . . .

  Into a little tin box,

  All aglitter with blue chip stocks

  There is something delectable,

  Almost respectable

  In a little tin box,

  In a little tin box!

  EIGHT

  Ring Around the Rackets

  New York’s crooked magistrates, cops, sheriffs, and low-level court officers were just the tip of the iceberg. Now attention turned to the District Attorney’s Office. As a direct result of the brazen murder of Vivian Gordon in Van Cortlandt Park, reform groups began to wonder if the Walker administration’s lackadaisical D.A., Thomas C. T. Crain, was one of the main reasons for the rampant crime problem in New York City.

  Crain had a string of failures behind him, indictments that were never brought or that collapsed. The public remembered that he had bungled the notorious murder case of gambling czar Arnold Rothstein, foolishly promising to solve the crime within two weeks. Everybody on the street seemed to know who had pulled the trigger on Big Arnie except the D.A. himself.

  The influential City Club of New York petitioned Governor Roosevelt to remove the seventy-year-old Crain. He was an elected official in New York County—that is, the borough of Manhattan. Under the state constitution, counties were subdivisions of the state, not of the city. Thus the governor had the power to discipline and discharge the D.A. (By the same token, under the city charter Mayor Walker could appoint magistrates in all five boroughs, but only the Appellate Division had the power to remove a magistrate.) The City Club charged that Crain’s office was “incompetent, inefficient and futile”; that he had failed to conduct prosecutions for “crimes and offenses cognizable by the courts”; that even when he initiated investigations he conducted them “inadequately and ineffectively.”

  Furthermore, the reformers maintained that Crain had made misleading statements about how he handled frauds concerning the “delivery business and dock racketeers”; that he failed to expose graft in the “Department of Purchase and crimes connected with the Board of Standards and Appeals”—centers of Tammany influence; and that he never bothered to investigate white-collar crime and “various stock frauds.” The corruption net was cast wider.

  Heywood Broun cracked: “The crane is mightier than the Crain and much more stalwart. The crane stands on at least one leg.”

  Confronted with the need to respond to these accusations, Governor Roosevelt asked his closest advisers: Who, other than Judge Seabury, could investigate the charges and, sustaining or dismissing them, still retain public confidence? Their answer: only Samuel Seabury.

  At the same time, Tammany insiders spread the story that Roosevelt had deliberately encouraged the City Club and other leading citizens to petition him to remove Crain. They believed that Roosevelt wished to prove he was a strong governor and to gain public favor for his presidential ambitions. The D.A. had been sponsored by John Francis Curry, the Tammany chieftain, and supported by Mayor Walker; both preferred a tame prosecutor to one who would look too closely at the patronage system. To serve as Crain’s lawyer, Tammany enlisted the support of none other than Samuel Untermyer, Jimmy Walker’s Palm Springs host.

  Governor Roosevelt retaliated by inviting Judge Seabury as his personal commissioner to look into Crain’s office. At first, Seabury declined. As an Appellate Division referee,
he was still wrapped up in exposing the crooked magistrates and cops and all they had done to discredit the courts and the police force. But Roosevelt knew how to touch a vulnerable spot in the Seabury psyche: he appealed to his sense of honor.

  In formal legal language, lawyer to lawyer, Roosevelt wrote Seabury:

  “I have decided to appoint you commissioner under Section 34 of the public officers’ law to hear and investigate formal charges which have been filed with me against the district attorney of the County of New York, and to take evidence relative thereto. I sincerely hope that you will be willing to accept this appointment in addition to the other public service you are rendering.

  “I shall be glad to have you start your duties as commissioner at the earliest possible moment; and, as you are in the very strict sense, acting as the commissioner of the Governor in this matter, I shall be glad to confer with you at any time. I am very confident that your fine reputation for fairness and justice peculiarly qualifies you.

  “You will, of course, note that the charges made do not in any way involve the personal integrity of Justice Crain, but relate solely to his competency to fulfill the office which he holds.”

  Crain, who had once served quietly on the Court of General Sessions and the state Supreme Court, had inherited millions of dollars and attended the Episcopal church regularly. In the past, Crain had been a Tammany Sachem for many years. His main service to the Hall was giving a Monday night lecture, “On the Merits of Democracy,” to young recruits for his Tammany club on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As Roosevelt pointed out, he was never accused of dishonesty, only of incompetence.

  Judge Seabury decided he couldn’t turn down the Governor’s offer.