4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  Osgoodby called the system "rotten." Hetrick's opponents said corruption was driving Asbury Park to its knees. "How is it possible," one demanded, just days before the 1933 election, "to spend in one year $3,332,864 for the government of a city of 15,000 people but one square mile in area?" Against the background of the Depression and in the atmosphere of the New Deal, that question had finally grown some teeth.

  In addition, Hetrick's West Side coalition was beginning to seem vulnerable. With New Jersey repealing Prohibition in 1933, many of the underground businesses were surfacing, and the status of the ethnic outcasts was changing. Over in New York City, the first Italian-American ever elected to Congress, Fiorello La Guardia, was now waging a successful campaign for mayor. Asbury Park's Civic League was running Louis A. Croce for city council. Croce, born in Italy, had become a prosperous ice cream and candy manufacturer, secure enough socially and economically to step forward and declare, "A dictator runs this city." Another West Sider, Democratic Party leader Joseph Mattice, threw his weight to the reformers, as did the Colored Progressive club. Finally, some of Asbury's middle-class white voters had lost patience with Hetrick's government, which was over three months behind in paying city employees, including its public-school teachers.

  You could argue that Asbury Park didn't have much experience with "essential democracy." It had passed almost directly from Bradley's kingdom to Hetrick's dictatorship. Election Day, 1933, was a test, and almost as soon as the voting began, so did the accusations. Poll watchers for the reform candidates accused Hetrick's machine of hiring "floaters": unregistered out-of-towners paid to vote. Word on the street had the going rate at four bits and a shot of rum. Over at Tom Brown's taproom at 1211 Springwood Avenue, a twenty-eight-year-old colored man walked in wearing an anti-Hetrick button, got into an argument, and was shot and killed. But at the end of the day, all five of the reform candidates won. The ecstatic Citizens Association called the victory "a decisive expression on the part of the people that they want that government back in their hands."

  Democracy had triumphed. Maybe. Briefly. "Almost from the minute the reform administration took control," the Asbury Park Evening Press would later comment, "it was subjected to a bitter campaign of attack." First, the new city manager quit after only six weeks on the job. He cited illness but also "the failure of persons on all sides to give cooperation." Then, two months into the new government's term, a grand jury indicted four of the five reform councilmen for allegedly promising Eugene Capibianco he'd be police magistrate. Capibianco had supposedly delivered them the West Side.

  The paper attributed these attacks on the reformers to Clarence Hetrick, specifically to his "genius for organization." The very fact that the Monmouth County prosecutor was acting on the indictments struck some people as suspicious. The prosecutor was a local lawyer, Jonas Tumen, and he didn't have a reputation for rooting out corruption. To the contrary, by that spring of 1934, the only question Asbury Park had was whether Tumen was in Hetrick's pocket, or vice versa.

  Tumen operated one of the city's most profitable law firms along with his brother, city judge Louis Tumen. Their offices, Hetrick's office, and Monmouth's First Judicial Court were all in the Electric Building. On April Fools' Day, 1930, Jonas Tumen had been appointed county prosecutor, and according to a special investigating committee of the state General Assembly, things got funny quick.

  Barely three months after Tumen took office, one Thomas Calandriello was arrested for robbing an American Railway Express company. Despite Calandriello's long rap sheet— including a case of "atrocious assault"— Tumen never brought him to trial. In fact, two years after the arrest, the unfortunately named Monmouth County detective Harry B. Crook was a guest at Calandriello's wedding. Asked to explain all this, Tumen couldn't. As the state committee remarked, the prosecutor "professed a startling lack of knowledge of the affairs of his own office."

  What Tumen did know, apparently, was how to run a shakedown operation. His Asbury Park bagman was Phillip L. Phillips, the owner of a men's shop off Cookman Avenue. The committee heard testimony about how Phillips had visited one speakeasy and demanded $500 "protection money." When a month passed and the owner hadn't come up with the cash, Hetrick's chief of police raided the speakeasy, and the owner was taken before Judge Louis Tumen and fined $100. The same thing happened the next week. And the week after. And the week after that, until the place was finally forced to close. At the same time, other speakeasy owners testified, they'd paid the kickbacks— and stayed in business.

  Asbury Park's gambling operation worked much the same way. After the reform government took over, it set out to clean up the city, dismissing Hetrick's police chief and ordering a raid on Walter Hurley, a well-known bookie operating at 724 Cookman in the heart of the commercial district. There, the Asbury police found fifty to sixty people placing bets, as well as racing sheets and other equipment. Under a waiver from the special committee, Hurley testified that he'd been allowed to operate because he was a personal friend of county detective Crook, and that prosecutor Tumen had known all about his operation.

  Still other witnesses described a meeting at Harry's Lobster House in Sea Bright, where Phillips had taken control of Monmouth County's slot machine business. If operators didn't come to his men's store and pay ten dollars a week per machine in advance, they were raided. The confiscated slots ended up in Detective Crook's basement, where they were apparently emptied. During Tumen's first year in office, Crook deposited over $10,000 in his various bank accounts, most of it in cash. And in the midst of the Depression, Phillips managed to pay off his mortgage.

  Then there was the plot to rob the Berkeley-Carteret Hotel. It seems a vacationing New York City police sergeant, lying in his room at the St. George Hotel, overheard men planning the robbery and went to the Asbury police. He and a local detective tailed three suspects up the boardwalk. First, they stopped to play miniature golf, one of the three keeping score on a package wrapped in brown paper. From there, the suspects walked to the swimming pool on Seventh Avenue. While they swam, the detective got a key to their locker and discovered that the brown-paper package contained a .38 revolver with five cartridges.

  The three men, plus a local coconspirator, were arrested. In front of police officers and a local judge, the suspects confessed that they'd been planning a robbery and signed written statements to that effect. A grand jury indicted. Two weeks later, prosecutor Tumen got a letter from a New York City lawyer who was representing the original three suspects. The lawyer wrote that he'd been "conducting negotiations in your State through the office of Joseph F. Mattice." Tumen couldn't tell the committee what those negotiations might be, but attorney Mattice soon appeared before the grand jury to argue that his clients' confessions had been obtained through force. The judge and the police officers who had witnessed the sworn statements were never called to testify. Fifteen days after being indicted, all four suspects walked.

  It didn't look good for Asbury's new reform government that one of its prime supporters, Joe Mattice, appeared to be in cahoots with Tumen. And the new officials brought more trouble on themselves by deciding that a reform government meant a dry city. Just before the Fourth of July, 1934, the council declared no liquor could be served on the beachfront. Methodist mayor Sherman Dennis cast the deciding vote. Arthur Steinbach, managing director of the Berkeley-Carteret, savaged the decision as " extremely dangerous business judgement [that would] keep thousands of people from visiting Asbury Park." It was the ancient war revisited, though this particular skirmish was brief. The next day, the council was forced to reverse its decision in a meeting that the Asbury Evening Press described as "marked with intense personal antagonism on the parts of officials and factionalism in the crowd."

  Investigations had revealed the corruption in Hetrick's government. The question was whether the reformers had any alternative to Asbury's "capitalistic system of government." As the city was trying to figure this out, the new government was tested in an almost mira
culous way. On the night of September 8, Thomas Burley, broadcasting from WCAP's rent-free studios in Conven- tion Hall, glanced out toward the dark ocean and shouted, "She's here!" Coming straight toward the studio was an enormous luxury liner, its decks on fire, flames shooting into the night sky. As Burley broadcast, the 528-foot Mono Castle beached itself about a hundred yards from where he sat.

  The ship had caught fire at sea the night before. By breakfast time, it was close enough to land that a crowd of thousands could follow its smoke north up the Jersey shore through Brielle, Manasquan, and Sea Girt. Vendors sold food and coffee to the rubberneckers in what was described as "an almost carnival atmosphere." As dark fell that Saturday, the still-burning ship broke its towline and steered itself onto the Asbury Park beach. By then, the Mono Castle was, as one reporter described her, "a huge mass of twisted steel . . . buckled steel plates, gaunt black funnels, and a maze of charred framework." Of her 549 passengers and crew, 134 had died, either trapped belowdecks as the fire raged or drowned trying to jump to safety.

  The next day, Sunday, signs went up on the roads into Asbury: TWO MILES TO THE MORRO CASTLE WRECK. An estimated twenty-five thousand people poured into Asbury Park. With the summer season done, in the midst of the Depression, a thousand people paid twenty-five cents a head to walk out on the Convention Center pier to get a closer view of the wreckage. Maybe it wasn't a miracle, but it was certainly a bonanza. A typical reaction was a local restaurant's hastily printed advertising card. It stated the number of dead and then urged the public to "See the Wreck S.S. Morro Castle FROM the Old Vienna Garden Cafe. Good Beer Good Food." By Monday, members of the city council were announcing their intention to "claim the beached Morro Castle and use it as an entertainment attraction." The death ship could be a year-round boardwalk amusement— like the junk Bradley had littered over the beach but more popular. Only the reaction of the national press and of some local citizens forced the council to admit the idea came from "a base, vicious and mercenary desire to exploit." The city manager had to promise that all viewing fees would go to "bereaved families." By November, when the hulk was hauled away, a hundred thousand sightseers had paid to see it— and the reform government had lost the high moral ground.

  This reform brand of beachfront capitalism looked a lot like the old Hetrick variety. Meanwhile, revelations about the ex-mayor continued to come out. Three days after the Morro Castle went aground off Convention Hall, the state began investigating bribes connected to the construction of that building. Hetrick was called to Trenton to testify, as were both his secretary Grace King and his former beach commissioner J. Whitfield Brooks. Brooks never made it. That morning, sitting in his office in Neptune, the fifty-four- year-old put a bullet through his head.

  Brooks had already given the state committee private testimony admitting financial "irregularities" during his term of office. It seems Hetrick's government had paid a firm out of Newark some $2,800 to lay some terrazzo floors. Then, a second check for $2,000 had been made out to the same firm—" with erasures." The papers reported that this additional money had been turned over "to a mysterious messenger identified as Eddie Nelson." Eddie had passed the money to Commissioner Brooks, who then, a witness testified, called the offices of Tumen and Tumen to say he had the cash and would see them in the morning.

  It's just coincidence that in Bruce Springsteen's 1975 song about small-time hoods, "Meeting Across the River," the shady, unnamed deal going down involves an "Eddie" and that the payoff, as the eager narrator says, is "two grand . . . practically sitting here in my pocket." But it's no coincidence that Eddie's best and only hope— what Springsteen calls "our last chance"— is an illegal scam. By Springsteen's time, it was past clear that for many the only real access to a promised land was through the underworld. There had been hints of that since Asbury Park's founding. What the Hetrick investigation was bringing into the open was that the real money from the beachfront didn't come from tourism— from charging admission to the rides or the city-sponsored dances. That was small change. The real money passed beneath that faqade: not from the dancers, in this case, but from the dance floors.

  Beach Commissioner Brooks had denied the specifics of the bribe, but he couldn't face having to give public testimony. Meanwhile, ex-mayor Hetrick seemed undisturbed. The morning of the suicide, the most he would admit about the double payment was that "the circumstances were peculiar." He not only walked away from the investigation unindicted, but he seemed more determined than ever to regain control of his city.

  In mid-December, a new organization announced itself: the Asbury Park Civic League. It appeared to be another reform group, except it aimed to reform the reformers. Accusing the city's new government of "inefficiency in office," it started circulating petitions for a recall election. A month later, a group of creditors sued the city for defaulting on its bonds, demanding that the next budget include the $1.3 million they were owed. That was impossible, the city solicitor announced: the city was bankrupt. What's more, he was suspicious about the timing. "There is something back of it," he told the press, "something not kosher."

  The hits on the reform government started falling faster and faster. The new Civic League quickly gathered enough signatures, and a recall election was announced. In early March, a New Jersey Supreme Court justice signed an order to put Asbury Park's finances in the hands of the state. The New York Times described Mayor Dennis and his reform government as being "uncertain . . . as to the consequences of the decision." Councilman Croce wasn't uncertain. He declared that this "vicious measure" was designed to put Hetrick's allies back in power, and that analysis gained a good deal of support when the state named as its special auditor a man who had once been Fletrick's budget consultant. When this auditor called for the city's "ridiculously low" budget to include the $1.3 million owed, Councilman Croce countered by calling for the people "to know as much as Hetrick does about the matter."

  Then, three weeks before the recall vote, Mayor Dennis died of a heart attack. His reform party splintered. Suddenly, there were half a dozen factions putting forward more than a dozen candidates. One of Asbury's most successful Negro businessmen, electrical contractor William Knuckles, ran as an independent. "Democracy and true Americanism," Knuckles announced hopefully, "[have] a kindred spirit along our beautiful shore." But two weeks before the vote, the Civic League "cast aside its nonpartisan cloak" by nominating as its candidates ex-mayor Clarence Hetrick and two of his former councilmen. In a city reeling from political infighting, voters now had to choose between a reform government accused of being inefficient, a former government being investigated for corruption, and a confusing array of " independents."

  The waters grew even murkier. With the West Side still the key voting bloc, the reform government suddenly did an about-face. A week before the election, it fired the city manager: he who had gotten rid of the corrupt police chief. The reformers seemed to be signaling that housecleaning was over and, like Hetrick, they were willing to leave the city's black market economy alone. Councilman Croce voted against the move, calling it "cutthroat" and declaring himself "strictly against liquor and games of chance."

  On the eve of the vote, one citizen paid for an "Open Letter to the People of Asbury Park" in the Evening Press. "Last night," he wrote, "I sat down to think seriously about the election next Tuesday. I tried to pierce the fog of charges and counter-charges." He concluded that the election came down to a fundamental principle. "This principle," he wrote, "is the very foundation of democracy, of good government, of honest government. It is this: can a young man play square in politics and remain in office?"

  It was a good question. If Asbury Park's April 1935 election was a referendum on whether the "capitalistic system of government" was inherently corrupt and corrupting, the answer was yes. By a resounding four-to-one margin, the city voted Clarence Hetrick and his cronies back into power. You could argue that Hetrick had manipulated the recall election. You could argue that he'd orchestrated attacks on his opp
onents. You could argue that he'd once again bought voters. But the only form of democracy there was in Asbury had spoken. Knowing all it now knew about the specifics of corruption under Hetrick's rule, the city had reelected him.

  Why? Asbury Park's idea of "essential democracy" started with a strong man at the top, and Hetrick certainly was that. While he had helped get the city into its fiscal mess, he'd also kept it afloat. In the 1920s, the amusement-park industry had peaked with some fifteen hundred parks nationwide. By now, there were only four hundred, and voters may have thought it was thanks to Hetrick that Asbury was one of them. They may also have figured that those "not kosher" demands from the city's debtors would now go away as mysteriously as they'd appeared.

  Finally, and maybe most important, there was the continuing threat of a state takeover. Asbury Park wanted to stay independent, and Hetrick would fight for that. He wanted the city (and its profits) under his control. There was obvious irony in Hetrick, Asbury's machine boss, accusing the state of wanting "virtually dictatorial powers"— but the city stood behind him. When New Jersey governor Harold Hoffman called for a state commission to run the beachfront, Asbury Park suspected Hoffman's real concern wasn't reform. The papers made headline news out of the revela- tion that the governor had admitted in private letters that what he really wanted was to break Hetrick's "political organization." Later, it turned out that even as he tried to take control of the beachfront, the governor was in the midst of stealing some $300,000 of public money. Clarence Hetrick might be a crook, but he was Asbury's own crook. He took the city's case for independence all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, losing at each step but still refusing to give the state the records it needed to take over the beachfront.