by James Mauro
Within three years, he was promoted to detective, third grade, and when the Bomb and Forgery Squad was formed, Pyke wanted him on his team. He’d seen Freddy in action. The previous October, Pyke had led an arrest raid on a group of eight burly members of the window cleaners union who had sprayed muriatic acid on the storefronts of various buildings along lower Broadway during the union’s strike. When the vandals tried to escape, Pyke forced their car off the road and pulled out a couple of thugs. Socha, seeing another group6 sprinting away on foot, tore out after them and chased them down Cortland Street. He came back with three more suspects in tow. Pyke liked what he saw. Socha wasn’t big, but he obviously had guts. The men he’d arrested were twice his size.
The boring part7 of Socha’s job involved the scammers, including a raid on the offices of the American Contest Company, who skimmed the profits off of a Knights of Columbus raffle. They also held8 run-of-the-mill raids at various racetrack tipping parlors, where the popular “Pay If You Win” racket* was divesting innocent gamblers of about $15 million a year, along with what seemed to be an endless effort to curb the number of bogus one-cent cigarette tax stamps. Fortunately, there were very few bomb investigations, and almost all of them turned out to be phony anyway.
Still, like Lynch, Socha knew that the squad was a fast step to promotion; within four months, he’d been advanced to detective, second grade,9 during a ceremony that marked the first time a “negro” (as the papers announced) achieved the rank of first grade, the highest rank of detectives.
Things looked up a bit at the beginning of 1938, when Joe Lynch joined the squad, eager for another promotion and another raise in pay. Pyke, noting that he now had two college men on his team, immediately partnered Lynch, who had studied pharmacy at Fordham, with Socha, the would-be physician who’d attended Columbia. Perhaps because each had switched careers from medicine to law enforcement, the two men bonded over their dashed aspirations and became fast friends.
The murder of Easter’s mother continued to haunt Joe’s marriage, although they bravely put on a good front for the children. The month of May finally brought some good news: Joe got the promotion he’d hoped for, to detective, second grade, with an accompanying pay raise to $3,200 a year. A few weeks later, Easter announced that she was pregnant with their fifth child; the new baby would require a further shuffling of their family’s already creative sleeping arrangements. In October, he got his name10 in the papers for arresting a gang of three ex-convicts who had stolen a batch of those cigarette tax stamps. Things were looking up again.
Oddly, the most popular targets for bombs in the 1930s were movie theaters. Throughout the city,11 an assortment of smoke bombs, tear gas bombs, and bottle bombs—usually four-ounce containers filled with benzyl bromide and fitted with a percussion cap and a watch timer—were set to go off at a specific hour. When they exploded, the glass would shatter with the noise of gunfire, scaring the hell out of anyone trying to watch the show and leaving behind a terrific stench. The bombings were, again, the outcome of a nasty dispute between unions, in this case the Motion Picture Machine Operators versus the Allied Motion Pictures Operators. The explosions continued at various locations for more than a year.
On one particular Thursday12 night, bombs went off in eight different theaters in a one-hour period, injuring sixty-two people and sending more than thirteen thousand stampeding into the street for safety. The following Monday, six more movie houses were targeted, most of them in Times Square, each explosion occurring at precisely nine o’clock. One woman was seriously burned, several others were cut badly by the flying glass, and a minor panic set in among most moviegoers. Attendance at one of the decade’s most popular diversions dropped off the cliff.
Throughout that summer, Joe Lynch and Freddy Socha found themselves with the enviable job of going to the movies several nights a week. The squad had grown to more than seventy-five men at that point, each and every one of whom was assigned to a different theater throughout the city. Sometimes they traveled as far as Nassau County to catch a show; on other occasions they sat in movie houses right in their own neighborhoods. They never brought their wives, and most of the bombers were never caught.
Then, almost as soon as the terror campaign of the movie bombs had died down (a truce was brokered by Brandt Theaters and union operators), a fresh battle sprang up between the International Fur Workers Union and the Associated Fur Coat Manufacturers. At three a.m.13 on September 11, 1938, two huge explosions went off in the fur district along West Twenty-ninth Street. One of them ripped a gaping hole in the front door of a fur shop and cut a six-inch crater into the sidewalk out front; the other shattered the windows of three adjoining buildings across the street. Burglar alarms rang out up and down the block, sending officers from three different police stations racing to see what was happening.
Pyke and several of his men, including Lynch and Socha, scoured the scene. They found small fragments of light metal scattered around, which meant only one thing: dynamite. Pyke found a man named Morris Schwartz checking out the condition of his nearby store and questioned him. He’d been picketed for nine months by the unions, in protest to a lockout and strike by the entire industry’s fifteen thousand fur workers. This was the end result, he guessed.
Pyke was incensed. There was too much dynamite floating around the city. Most of it was pilfered from construction sites that not only left the explosives unguarded, but actually advertised their contents in signs idiotically reading, DANGER, EXPLOSIVES! Two days earlier, Pyke had arrested a man named Louis Friedman, who had tried to rob the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, again in Times Square, during lunch hour.
“I want thirty thousand14 dollars, and if you don’t give it to me, I’ll blow up the bank,” he threatened.
Disaster had been avoided by the manager, David Groden, who simply didn’t believe it when Friedman told him, “I have a bottle of nitroglycerin up my sleeve.”
Groden lunged at him, grabbing his wrists and pinning back his arms. He and several other employees hustled Friedman into a back room while terrified customers ran out onto Forty-second Street. When Pyke arrived, however, he confirmed Groden’s suspicion: There was no nitroglycerin. What Friedman had actually been carrying was a black bag containing no fewer than thirty-four sticks of dynamite and forty-eight blasting caps. He must have been planning to blow up the entire building.
Friedman, it turned out, was an electric welder. He’d stolen the dynamite out of a shed of supplies at a job he was working on. He was from Poughkeepsie, and he’d been in the city for three months. Pyke did the math. Out in Flushing Meadows, any crackpot could pick up a carload of sticks and drive them back to Manhattan without anyone thinking twice about it. So many men swirled and lifted and hammered and welded out at the World’s Fair site, and who knew what their backgrounds were, what political beliefs they held. Or, more important, which goddamn union they belonged to.
Probably because of his own experience in the war and the scars it left on his body, Pyke hated all types of bombs, but he especially hated bombs made by people who had no idea of their killing power.
“These bombs are crudely15 constructed, but [they are] the most dangerous machines we have ever encountered,” Pyke said. “To make any effort to open them might result in an explosion, and any other means of disposing them would eliminate any chance of examination for finger prints.”
The current method of disarming a bomb by soaking it in motor oil was no doubt safer, but all traces of evidence were erased in the process. Pyke sought to find a safe way to open unexploded bombs, for instance by cutting a small hole in whatever container they happened to be placed in and then defusing them by hand. To catch those who perpetrated these acts, he began devising a method16 that would ultimately prove riskier to his squad but that he hoped would aid in identifying suspects.
Throughout the winter of 1939 and into 1940, he trained his men in this new and dangerous procedure.
* The details, including the i
nvolvement of the widow and why they all appeared at the Emergency Relief Bureau, are sketchy. Pyke, not wanting to embarrass the families, ordered that all names and incidental facts be stricken from the police department record.
* The scheme was simple enough: “Experts” would assign the name of every horse in a particular race to individual bettors. Of course one of them was bound to win, and the lucky individual became convinced that the tipster knew his stuff, thereby agreeing to place future bets that rarely paid off.
The Italian Pavilion, courtesy of Il Duce. (© Bill Cotter, worldsfairphotos.com)
10
SELLING THE FAIR
When Grover Whalen took over the World’s Fair Corporation in 1936, the project was woefully behind schedule, the corporation itself a frustrating mix of chaos and disorder. There was money to be raised—a lot of it; foreign nations needed to be coaxed into participating (not to mention the forty-eight American states); plans and designs and blueprints had to be finalized for the following April, when Flushing Meadows would be ready for construction to begin. Whalen, still chairman of Schenley, awarded himself a salary of $100,000 a year1 and almost forgot about the liquor business entirely.
On May 21, a little over two weeks after he’d been made president of the Fair corporation, he announced the formation of the Board of Design2 to tackle the enormous job of devising a general plan for the Fair. Its chairman was Stephen Voorhees, president of the American Institute of Architects, and together the seven-member committee was responsible for creating, as Whalen himself defined it, “the definition of the main theme,3 limitations of heights and areas for structures, and the general architectural characteristics, including color and lighting.” As if that weren’t enough, they were also charged with hiring everyone needed to design it, build it, landscape it, sculpt it, and paint it. Then he gave them a deadline, September 1, which allowed them the luxury of one hundred days to complete their tasks.
For the new president, running a World’s Fair was not all that different from running a department store or a police force. “The principal difference4 is that in an exposition there is a more urgent necessity for speed,” he explained. “[An executive] must know how to pick men and, having picked them, he must give them full authority to do what they see fit.”
There was one final facet to the sparkle of his leadership: “I wouldn’t engage anyone5 who couldn’t visualize the buildings we were going to erect here just as clearly as I could,” Whalen stated. “Moreover, he must have enthusiasm and be able to convey that enthusiasm to those who are working for him.”
The Board of Design’s first order of business was to create a Theme Committee, headed up by two of its members, Walter Dorwin Teague and Robert Kohn. Teague had been on the Fair of the Future committee and had contributed several designs for the Chicago Fair. Kohn had been president of the American Institute of Architects and one of the founding members of George McAneny’s Regional Plan Association. Together, borrowing heavily from the Fair of the Future proposal, they laid out the basic cornerstone of the Fair, dividing it into what would eventually become seven* distinct color-coded zones: Amusement; Government; Production and Distribution; Transportation; Communications and Business; Food; and Community Interests.
Moreover, they expanded upon Whalen’s and the corporation’s World of Tomorrow concept, elongating it into “Building the World of Tomorrow.” Somehow, that made it less of a finite statement; this World’s Fair would not be a finished product after all, but a flowing, almost organic representation of what America could be rather than what it was or would be when the gates opened in a little under three years’ time.
Their greatest challenges lay in the inherent irony regarding the future itself: how to present a utopia of machine age wonders, a “supercivilization” based on industry, when the country was nearly crushed under the oppressive weight of the Great Depression? Practically speaking, what was the true hope of average Americans in emerging from their current situation with enough bread in their bellies to enjoy a new vacuum cleaner? And, most important, how could they create a World’s Fair dedicated to the bright promise of tomorrow when today looked so bleak and barren, and the future itself wasn’t looking all that rosy, either?
It was a lofty goal, perhaps too lofty. Nevertheless, the Board of Design completed their ideas on August 31, one day ahead of schedule, much to the delight of Whalen, who was somewhat fanatical about adhering to schedules. On October 8, Voorhees and Kohn made their formal presentation to the board of directors, stating, “The New York World’s Fair6 is planned to be ‘everyman’s fair’—to show the way toward improvement of all the factors contributing to human welfare. We are convinced that the potential assets, material and spiritual, of our country are such that if rightly used they will make for a general public good such as never before has been known.”
The lofty goals became loftier, adding a hefty dose of spiritualism, human welfare, and public good to the mix. What they could not have anticipated in 1936, however, was that the two years representing the life of the World’s Fair would balance those goals against the crushing alternative that was already brewing in Germany. Those two summer seasons were shaping up to be an antidote to the madness yet to come, the “pinnacle of all inspiration” against the stupidity of war.
On the same day Voorhees and Kohn made their presentation, Robert Moses announced his resignation as a member of the corporation’s board of directors. It was one of the few threats he carried out. “I have now come to7 the definite conclusion that so far as the Fair is concerned I ought to give all my attention to the site,” he asserted, “and that it would be a mistake for me and my staff to have their attention diverted to the plans for the Fair itself.”
Whalen was livid. More bad press was exactly what he didn’t need at this point. He was preparing for a trip abroad first to convince the Bureau of International Expositions, the governing body of all World’s Fairs, to give him their official approval, and then to charm as many nations as he could to participate in it. At first, Whalen refused to accept Moses’s resignation. Then, when word came that his decision was “absolutely final,” he reassured the press that there was “no difference of opinion8 at all in any manner between Commissioner Moses and the officials of the Fair Corporation.”
Privately, he still had doubts as to whether the entire project would ever materialize. His worst fears were realized when, after making a formal appeal in Paris, the Bureau of Expositions approved New York’s Fair only in what was termed the “limited” category, meaning that European countries could exhibit if and only if the Fair provided free space for them in a uniform area of ten thousand square feet each. Had they designated it as “unlimited,” Whalen would have been free to sell whomever and whatever he pleased, for as much money and space as he could wrangle.
It was a serious setback, and Whalen had to report the disappointing news that Great Britain and France had agreed to occupy only a couple of small pavilions for which the corporation would have to foot the bill—hardly the grand showing for New York he had been expecting to deliver.
For the first time in his life, Whalen decided to play dirty. Perhaps his dealings with Moses had taught him that underhanded tactics sometimes won the match, but he quickly decided that no international bureau was going to limit his Fair, rules or no rules. Since the United States was not a member of the bureau, he felt no particular allegiance to its decision. Conveniently, neither was the USSR. So before he left France, Whalen applied for a visa to visit Moscow. If he could sell Russia on the idea of a large, expensive pavilion, he believed the other foreign nations would be forced to follow suit out of fear of being upstaged.
Russia wouldn’t even let him in. Whalen’s anti-Communist crusade as police commissioner had left him with no friends in the Kremlin. He returned to New York, crestfallen. There was still no money; at the end of 1936, the World’s Fair Corporation had been forced to borrow $1.6 million for seed capital simply in order to pay for their mak
eshift offices in the Empire State Building and a small staff of visionaries putting lofty ideas down on paper.
But Whalen had an ace up his sleeve. Among his old Tammany cronies, there was talk of Grover Whalen for mayor, to run against Fiorello La Guardia in 1937. For the time being, he was content to let them talk; if worse came to worst, his candidacy would provide an adequate excuse out of this World’s Fair mess.
On November 23, 1936, the corporation laid out its plans for raising funds at a gala dinner held at the Hotel Astor. More than two thousand guests were invited, and Whalen, Harvey Gibson, George McAneny, and a host of other directors explained that $27,829,500 would be raised by selling World’s Fair bonds to the business interests of the city. The debentures themselves would become payable on January 1, 1941, at an interest rate of 4 percent. How they arrived at such an exact figure was left to the imagination, but the man they picked to lead the charge was impressive. Richard Whitney was a past president of the New York Stock Exchange and currently headed up Richard Whitney & Co., a successful Wall Street investment firm.
As chairman of the Fair’s bond sales committee, Whitney stressed the fact that Chicago’s Fair had paid off its notes in full, with interest and principal totaling more than $11 million. Gibson, as head of the finance committee, made it clear again that New York would be an even safer investment.
“I speak sincerely9 in stressing the fact that we are not trying to fool ourselves or to fool you when I say that the bonds will be paid in full and with interest,” Whitney predicted. And everyone would benefit from the World’s Fair’s success, he stressed, including hotels, restaurants, retail stores, and theaters. It was as sure a bet as any he had seen or known in his financial career, and each of the investors had a responsibility besides. “We believe,”10 he told a group of eager-eyed prospects, “that it is proper and just that we should ask you gentlemen to finance your own prosperity in 1939.”
