by Brad Ricca
During his first year in office, Woods locked up two hundred known criminals. He went after labor strikers, Black Handers, anarchist bombers, and reinstituted the Italian Squad. He enacted new uniform regulations to ensure that every officer’s brass buttons shone at a shared level of brilliance. Woods even created the first domestic bomb squad to combat foreign spies and terrorists. Everyone knew him now.
But Woods wasn’t just hard-boiled. The massive city map on his table was also lined out with his play streets program, whereby traffic would shut down on certain roads so that tenement kids could play stickball without fear of being run over. The police put out signs attached to cement blocks that said DETOUR as kids in hiked-up pants and white shirts laid down grounders. At the same time, out in the blue part of the map lay Woods’s controversial Harlem River Floating Station, an aquatic headquarters in the middle of the Hudson to be used in the event of emergency or terrorist attack. Woods’s nimble imagination was ready for apocalypses both small and large. He even started a project in Flatbush with police dogs called the Barking Squad.
As Woods looked over the map, his shadow crossed the streets of Harlem, otherwise known as Italian territory. Woods always thought of his friend Joe when he thought of the Italians. Every time Woods walked through the front door of headquarters, he expected Joe Petrosino, the larger-than-life cop who ran the Italian Squad, to walk out of his office to the right, smiling for all the world. Woods preferred that image in his mind, instead of the other one.
In early 1909, Joe Petrosino underwent a secret mission to Italy to hunt down Lupo the Wolf, the crime lord who had left a trail of bodies behind him in the boroughs. But the New York papers leaked his whereabouts, and Petrosino was shot dead on the beautiful streets of Palermo, leaving a wife and family behind. When his body returned to New York City, over 250,000 people attended his funeral at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Police Commissioner Woods, his friend, was among them.
The remaining Italian Squad vowed to avenge their leader by catching Lupo. While Petrosino’s lieutenants followed more traditional means—using newly passed laws against guns and kidnapping—the youngest member of the squad, an ex–pro baseball player named Thomas McDonough, was still involved in Petrosino’s last plan. McDonough crafted a perfect disguise as a fruit grocer in Little Italy and held character for a year, waiting for Lupo to slip up and reveal his whereabouts. When Lupo finally appeared on the street, the Irish kid, with the help of the Secret Service, caught the Wolf on a counterfeiting ring, finally ending his long campaign of murder.
What happened to Petrosino wasn’t the only black mark on Woods’s record. A year earlier, on July 30, explosions lit up the early-morning sky on Black Tom Island off Jersey City. The explosion was so massive that the Brooklyn Bridge began to sway back and forth in the sky. The island was an ammunitions dump, blown to smithereens by German agents seeking to keep the munitions from being supplied to the Allies. Woods did his best to clean it up and find out who did it. But it had happened under his watch.
The papers said that Woods was the kind of man who stayed in the shadows. But that wasn’t true. Standing over that map, watching his own long shadow engulf Harlem, he knew how this missing-girl case would go. Before joining the force, Woods had been a reporter for the Evening Sun. He still had friends there. That’s how he knew how fast this story would light up and go. He knew he was sitting on a firecracker. So a day later, Woods assumed personal charge of the Ruth Cruger case.
Unbeknownst to Woods, other armies stood ready to help him. At Wadleigh High School, one hundred girls volunteered to help in the search for their onetime classmate. Like the church, they decided to conduct a mail and telephone investigation of all surrounding towns. They reached out as far as Saint Louis and Atlanta. When the girls called these places on the phone, they said they were searching for their missing sister.
The neighborhood around Wadleigh was not without its own controversies. Located on 114th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, the school enrolled around 2,700 students, who were taught by eighty or so teachers. The morning session met from morning until two; the afternoon from one to five. The teachers and students knew those times well. They weren’t the only ones. When school was dismissed, long arms of departing students reached out from every side of the school and out into the frontier that was Lenox Avenue in Harlem. Just three blocks away, between 110th and 112th, a string of vaudeville joints and places called merry-go-rounds started to get going just about the same time that school let out. The girls, walking home, could hear pianos banging away on Dixieland jazz music. Women in dried-up makeup smiled at the children from dark doorways. But worse—much worse—was the group of boys who appeared from these pleasure palaces every day at exactly five o’clock to watch the girls walk home. Parents complained to the police when these boys started to brush elbows with the girls, giving them insults, mashing on them, and engaging in “low talk.”
“Our responsibility ends when the children pass into the streets,” said Wadleigh assistant principal Miss Speirs when confronted with the problem. “What happens there is the affair of the parents. We have a police officer in the building … but he cannot watch each pupil all the way home.
“Let us hope they make the trip in safety,” she added.
“It is enough to watch the girls in school,” said Miss Goodrich, another teacher. “How funny!” added another teacher, Miss Conant. “No one ever insulted me in the street.”
The police were privately calling this area the New Tenderloin, a wellborn successor to the old red-light district in the heart of Manhattan. The cops said the gang who was bothering the girls got together four years ago. The police didn’t know what they were calling themselves yet, only that they had come up from the dumps of the east side and spoke a coded jargon and used secret hand signs.
* * *
The people huddled on the subway platform stared up at the flickering terra-cotta ceiling. The lights lit the mosaic tiles on the wall that spelled out 157th Street. The crowd, bundled up in coats and hats, pressed back against the wall. They had come in down the slate stairs under the rotunda, passing the white tiled columns. When the subways opened, Mayor McClellan said that “without rapid transit Greater New York would be little more than a geographical expression.” Everyone was intrigued by the labyrinth.
A young woman, her motion stopped in frames of interrupted light, staggered out past the line of people. She was moving toward the electrified rail line. A man in a suit saw her. He raced toward her and grabbed her hand. The train was getting louder and the overhead lamps began to rattle. As the train sped out of the black tunnel, the woman pitched and began to fall off the platform itself, just as the man pulled her back. The man yelled for help, and the ticket man ran over to help her back up. As the train washed them all in light, sound, and force, they all held her back. She struggled, then screamed.
A couple, older and calm, stooped over to comfort her. The lights dimmed again.
“I’ve been away from home two nights,” the girl cried. “Something terrible has happened, and I’m afraid to go home.” The couple offered to take her to their apartment to calm her down.
When they had gone, it struck the man that the girl was the one from the papers, so he hurried to tell the cops. Detectives began a slow house-to-house search near the subway station, looking for the couple who had rescued her. When she was finally found, the girl was positively identified. She wasn’t Ruth; she was a married woman who had angered her husband.
Similar stories were appearing all over the city. A boy in scruffy clothing made his way across Times Square, dodging the people who were looking up at the electric signs. A few years ago, it was the Heatherbloom petticoats girl who stole everyone’s attention. Every night, crowds gathered and fuddy-duddies snorted as the sign sparked to life and the figure of a young girl skipped across the slashes of electric rain. The twinkling wind began to swirl, whipping up her flashing white skirts. The Heatherbloom girl was thirty
feet tall and was hailed as the most realistic depiction of a woman ever seen. The sign was gone now, replaced by one for Omega Oil. People still stared. As the boy weaved in and out, his shoe brushed against a crumpled-up piece of paper. He stopped in the middle of the pulsing crowd to pick it up. The boy looked at it, dumbfounded. In a single line, the writer said they were being detained on Riverside Drive. It was signed Ruth Cruger.
The stunned boy stuffed the note in his pocket and ran to the nearest police station. He rang the bell under the green lamp. Fourth Branch was alerted, and they sent a squad to the address on the note. The cops nearly knocked the door down, but no one lived there. They pronounced it a joker’s fake. The detectives returned back to the Fourth Branch, grumbling. This was only one of hundreds of false leads.
There were now forty full detectives assigned to the Cruger case. They all reported to Captain Alonzo Cooper, the pug-faced head of the Fourth Branch gumshoes. As leads came in, Cooper shoved them off in groups of two in a coordinated hunt across the city. They tracked down every clue, as janitors, neighbors, and passersby saw Ruth Cruger everywhere they looked. She was with foreign men, on steamships, and in movie theaters all across the city. There were young women with clothes and hair like Ruth’s living in apartments across the hall from the nineties to Hackensack—yet none of them were really Ruth; they were just different mirrored images of the same face. In the city, during those weeks, if you were a girl with dark hair or if you carried ice skates, you were given a second look—or a hard glance to the ground.
By now, detectives had counted 699 tips that had come in about Ruth Cruger. They blamed Mr. Cruger’s own public bravado for causing this tidal wave of clues. No one still expected to see Ruth at the doorstep with a sheepish look on her face and an engagement ring on her finger. Her mother knew that Ruth would at least have called by now. That simple thought, if given enough room, was insurmountable.
A few years earlier, Woods had completely revamped the way detectives worked in the city. When Woods agreed to take the job of fourth assistant deputy police commissioner, he insisted that he travel to London to study the inner workings of the famed Scotland Yard. Woods privileged the detective—the thinker, the intelligentsia—more so than the average beat cop, whom he saw as more of a useful brawler. Woods had been head of the detective bureau himself and watched as interdepartmental infighting got case after case dismissed. When Woods returned from touring Scotland Yard, he had civility and organization on his mind.
Once in charge, Woods took his detectives out of the police houses and put them in their own nests, called branches, after the English way. They had single buildings with a head captain in charge of each branch. They looked like everyday New York houses, lacking even the signature green lamps that marked the more obvious police buildings. These places were different on the inside as well. Some of the detective branches had dorms and lounge areas. Third Branch had its own jail in the basement. The Fifth in the Bronx had a garden with arbors and vines. The branches were all interconnected by a sophisticated direct phone system.
Fourth Branch was a three-story house located at 342 West 123rd Street near Manhattan Avenue. Its territory covered Fifty-ninth Street on the south and Fifth Avenue on the east, all bound up by the meandering Hudson on the west. Fourth Branch was especially known for their cooking. When crime hid itself away, detectives would don aprons instead of guns and work the new gas oven. The Washington Times sent a reporter over for a feature piece on this new breed of sophisticated lawman. The reporter was surprised to see a detective on a bench reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.
“This,” the detective said, tapping his finger to the book, “is the only story of a criminal really worth reading. It is the third time I have accompanied Jean Valjean through his amazing sad adventures. I’m reading the story to the men, and we are getting a lot of enjoyment out of the experience.”
New York was impressed by Woods and his crime fighters. The Evening News even called him “an American Sherlock Holmes.” Woods liked that.
By February 28, two weeks after her disappearance, the Times issued an editorial on Ruth Cruger. “It is one of the impenetrable mysteries of recent times,” they wrote. “It is still too early to despair about Miss Cruger. She may be found, and we trust that she will, but it is the simple fact that, in spite of all the confident reports, all the misleading clues, all the neighborhood gossip, which seems to be utterly vapid and without foundation, nobody knows where she is, why she went away. Even in the complex life of crowded modern cities there are a few such mysteries.” There were now fifty detectives on the case, all reporting to Captain Alonzo Cooper of Fourth Branch.
* * *
The ice of winter finally began to melt and New Yorkers welcomed a world they thought had been lost to them forever. Coats came off, and rain washed the filthy streets. Captain Cooper ordered a launch from Harbor B to troll through the newly splashing waters. Even at night, a police boat pushed through Pelham Bay, flashing its lights over the floating white ice. The temperature was still cold enough that all of the inlets were still frozen into blocks. There were still places that resisted them.
Outside the city, the world was also changing. The leading news item of the day was the Zimmerman telegram, an intercepted, coded page in which Germany seemed to promise parts of the American Southwest to Mexico if it would invade the United States to distract it. Austria was massing troops along the Serbian frontier, and Germany, Italy, Russia, France, and even England were in a turmoil, with panics in their capitals. On March 5, Woodrow Wilson began his second term as president, and the prospects of war seemed less dim. In gray Atlantic waters, fifty more submarines were added to the American fleet to purr under the waters, “to send enemy vessels to the bottom.”
Ruth Cruger, though still lost, was transforming, too. The photograph of her that was being shared across the country had expanded from a portrait to include her full, buxom upper body. In an interview with the Sun, her mother revealed that Ruth had suffered through typhoid fever the previous August. Her illness had left her with a slightly weakened heart, though she otherwise had recovered well.
“We thought, perhaps, the weakened heart had caused her to collapse on the street,” Mrs. Cruger said. “But we’ve searched every hospital without learning anything about her.”
“We have tried many methods,” Henry Cruger said, “and nothing has resulted so we have decided to use publicity. I hope to make the face of my daughter familiar to people, that every father and mother in America can be a detective.”
By March 1, a new assistant district attorney, John T. Dooling, had been assigned to the investigation. Dooling, a young-looking man with thick black hair parted on the side, had uncovered several new pieces of information that had the potential to jump-start the case. Dooling had discovered that Ruth had gone ice-skating—alone—at Van Cortlandt Park and Central Park more frequently than anyone knew. This was in direct opposition to what Henry Cruger was telling the press. Dooling, who was convinced that Cocchi had just gone to ground to avoid anti-Italian sentiment, sent an open letter to him through the press. Dooling promised Cocchi that if he ever came back, he would be treated fairly by the police.
These stories that were coming out of the district attorney’s office began to fray the edges of that smiling photograph of Ruth. Dooling had uncovered another story: several Sundays before she had disappeared, Ruth had an incident on her way to church. As she walked alone to Sunday school, Ruth kept tight to the sidewalk. At the intersection of 127th Street and Riverside, she saw a man sitting on the steps of a walk-up. He was very well dressed. He had a black mechanical car, gurgling at the curb. As she passed, the man smiled at Ruth.
“Would you like to go for a ride in my motorcar?” he asked.
Ruth didn’t say anything and kept walking, even faster now, but she felt his eyes on her. She told her father and her best friend about it that night, after supper, but she couldn’t remember much. She couldn’t remember any
thing about his face. She just knew that his clothes were rich and he had a smooth voice.
Dooling was also looking for the “young man,” as he was called, who was seen by Rubien, the taxicab driver. Dooling said that an informant, who wished to remain anonymous, had placed this man’s information in the hands of the Fourth Branch. This was the clue that had always been the most provocative. The readers of the papers knew that “young man” had always been code for “suitor.” There was another story of a similar young man who apparently hung around Teachers College at night and who had accosted two women. He would approach women and ask them to dinner. “He would say, ‘How do you do, Miss Smith?’ When the young woman replied that she was not Miss Smith, he said: ‘You’re not, well you certainly are very like her,’ and thereupon attempted to strike up a conversation which ended up in an invitation to dinner.”
These stories, and what they suggested, made many of Ruth’s friends angry. The Crugers’ pastor, Reverend Pattison, managed to get a five-minute appointment with Police Commissioner Woods. After waiting, Pattison was finally admitted to Woods’s office, and they talked for over an hour. Pattison defended Ruth’s reputation and tried to convince Woods that she had fallen afoul of evil. Woods didn’t agree—he was 95 percent sure that Ruth had eloped. But Woods admitted that he would never dismiss the possibility of that other 5 percent. Pattison was surprised at that.
Similarly disgusted with the police and with what he was reading in the papers about Dooling’s so-called discoveries, Henry met with the district attorney, a thin man named Edward Swann. With his approval, Henry then offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to his daughter’s whereabouts. The district attorney’s office would handle the incoming clues. Swann had been thinking about offering a reward anyway.
