illiam “Big Bill” Devery and Theodore Roosevelt were born within two years of each other in the Eighteenth Ward of New York City in private homes that were located eight blocks—and a world—apart.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was born on October 27, 1858, at 28 East 20th Street, a townhouse off fashionable Broadway and not far from Fifth Avenue; the baby boy joined one of the city’s leading Knickerbocker families. Downtown, Roosevelt Street intersected Park Row. Respected Roosevelts dominated the hierarchy of elite clubs, such as the Union Club, and philanthropic organizations, such as Orthopedic Hospital.
William Devery was born on January 9, 1857, in a room over his uncle’s saloon at 177 East 24th Street, a house address then off First Avenue, amid rough blocks of low buildings. Cripples dragged themselves along those streets to reach the charity wing of nearby Bellevue Hospital at 26th Street. Irish gangs ruled the corners. A married neighbor, Eliza Shaw, had her throat slit from ear to ear around this time.
Theodore’s mother, Martha Bulloch, grew up on an azalea-filled plantation in Roswell, Georgia, attended by slaves; Theodore Roosevelt Sr. inherited a huge fortune.
Devery’s parents escaped starvation poverty in Ireland; his father was a bricklayer who served in the Union Army, his mother a laundress.
Roosevelt was born into wealth with words of Christian good deeds and hard work echoing in his ears; his future nemesis was born into an angry clannish Catholic poverty, with centuries of hard usage by wealthy English Protestants coloring his every breath, tale, joke, gesture, accomplishment, failure.
Devery’s mother, Mary Geoghegan, at age thirteen, sailed from Ireland to New York City, apparently with her older brothers, Stephen, twenty-two, and Andrew, seventeen, in 1852 in the wake of the catastrophic Potato Famine. Much of the family’s early history in America must be pieced together from snippets of conflicting official records, but some Geoghegans do eventually make the newspapers … as criminals.
Mary’s voyage over was miserably unpleasant. The escaping Irish were crammed together in the steerage deck, an unlit, stagnant-aired, low-ceilinged wooden prison, with each adult allotted a berth of eighteen-inch-wide pine plank for the six-to-eight-week voyage. Trunks, sacks, tools, all their worldly possessions cluttered the floor, making it near impassable. No privacy; no washing water; hundreds of perspiring emigrants flopped in bored, seasick writhing masses.
When storms hit, the steerage passengers were locked belowdecks for safety, all hatches closed, with nowhere to urinate or defecate except in a bucket or a corner or six feet below on the vile, unventilated, undrainable orlop deck amid cargo bundles and scurrying rats. The ever-aggregating stink would waft upward. After days or weeks at sea, the smell of vomit, urine, and shit choked the steerage deck.
Mortality rates veered toward 40 percent, much higher than slave ships. (Healthy slaves represented a profit to the ship’s owners; living Irish peasants did not.)
Between 1845 and 1855 during the Potato Famine and its aftermath, about 1 million of the 8 million Irish died of hunger and disease in Ireland and as many as 2.5 million left the country, with the largest portion landing at New York.
The British government was Protestant; the vast majority of the population of Ireland was Catholic. Over the centuries, the wealth of this verdant land of Limerick and Tipperary tipped to the arriving Protestants, who by 1778 controlled 14 million of the 15 million cultivatable acres. Generations of Irish Catholics perceived the law as a one-sided arbitrary tool of the conqueror to separate Catholics from land, money, and power.
At varying times, Catholics could not hold office, serve as judges, print books, vote, purchase land, carry firearms, own houses beyond hovels. Catholic schools and churches were suppressed; Catholic orphans were raised as Protestants.
Embittered and impoverished, they reluctantly fled their homeland in the 1840s and 1850s. Uneducated rural peasants who had lived in huts, fiercely loyal to the Catholic Church, they arrived by the tens of thousands in New York City.
And here too they found a Protestant elite ready to not welcome them. “No Irish Need Apply” would appear in the classifieds, as would stereotyped cartoons showing “Paddy,” the apelike laborer in a crumpled top hat, with a shillelagh in one hand and a beer mug in the other.
Big Bill Devery grew up neck deep in New York City vice, at least an Irish version of it. His family—mother, father, brothers, and sisters—worked for his uncle Stephen Geoghegan, who over time opened up a string of roughhouse saloons on the tough Irish east side in the Civil War era. Guidebooks described the area as filled with squatters and “swine styes, bone-boiling establishments, masses of filth and putrid pools.”
At Devery’s birth in 1857, the city’s East Side stage line stopped at 27th Street, but his uncle shrewdly opened oyster saloons along the future route of the line farther uptown.
Young Bill ran errands in his uncle’s bars, mixing with Irish thugs and criminals. Geoghegan’s “dram-shops” attracted so many armed burglars and other rowdies that the police threatened to pull the liquor license. In the 1850s and 1860s New York was a violent port town, with backroom bar brawls, roving street thieves, cockfights, dog pits. “In those days, you could do almost what you liked,” Tammany boss Croker once wistfully mused to the New York Sun.
On the night of October 5, 1892, Tammany Hall loyalist William “Big Bill” Devery was smoking his eleventh or twelfth cigar of the day in his office at the 22nd Precinct on West 47th Street when the desk sergeant announced that he had a visitor. Charlie Gardner—recently promoted to lead detective for the Parkhurst Society—wanted to see him about executing a search warrant. History has failed to record Devery’s exact curse.
“Big Bill,” after a fourteen-year police career, was captain of this precinct, just north of the Tenderloin, stretching from 42nd to 59th Street, from Sixth Avenue to the North River (i.e., the Hudson), a precinct ripe with graft possibilities, since premier brothels and gambling palaces were moving uptown. A scant ten months into his first command, he was fast approaching the clover.
Police graft trickled to beat cops; it flowed to captains, delivered from prospective lawbreakers by plainclothes police detectives, called ward men. Devery’s bag man was his brother-in-law’s brother, Edward Glennon, nicknamed the “Sphinx” for his taciturnity.
Big Bill Devery was a true Hell’s Kitchen New Yorker, mixing charm and menace, and speaking New Yorkese. When he ordered his men not to drink in saloons in uniform, he told them: “Standin’ up to a bar with the buttons on don’t look nice.” By all accounts, his men liked him; he could be brave in a dangerous situation, such as a riot, and could always be funny. He had a huge temper, but even his rants often veered into crazy humor, like when he talked about the “degenderates” coming out of the cross-dressing bars and going into the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He bet on the ponies. He was loyally married, with two daughters. He had quit drinking soon after becoming a cop. “I couldn’t risk a load,” he explained.
Above all, he was completely tolerant of vice—not violent crime, not murders, not beatings, not burglaries, but vice. Take a payoff, let the people enjoy themselves. He resented “silk stocking high hats” and ministers telling other people how to live. A reporter for a reform newspaper said Devery once came up to him on the street, grabbed him hard by the shoulders, and said: “Have you noticed any stray graft running around loose that I have overlooked?” Before the stunned reporter could answer, Devery laughed, let go of him, and walked away.
At age thirty-five, he was one of the youngest captains on the force, a clear Tammany favorite.
Charlie Gardner, always cheeky, walked into Devery’s office, carrying the warrant for a brothel in Devery’s precinct.
The latest strategy of the Parkhurst Society called for sending undercover investigators into three lush precincts: the 15th, south of Washington Square, full of French brothels and Thompson Street “Negro” streetwalkers; the 19th (the Tenderloin); and the 22nd, a growing hotbed of vice, as madams
relocated uptown to be closer to the homes of wealthier clients. Parkhurst agents gathered enough eyewitness evidence to obtain a warrant from a reform-minded judge and then executed that warrant with the police, alerted the press, and hopefully shamed the Tammany district attorney into pressing charges.
Charlie Gardner infuriated Captain Devery that night by refusing to tell him the exact location for the brothel warrant. He claimed—correctly—that the police had tipped off this place and others in the past so that when the agents arrived it was empty, or a puzzled maid greeted them asking why anyone would want to search a nice respectable boardinghouse. Devery demanded to know the house number; Gardner refused.
The thirty-five-year-old born-and-bred New York Irish police captain and the cocky twenty-six-year-old New England private detective started shouting at each other. Gardner told Devery to his face that he hated bringing warrants to this precinct because of the way Devery was doing “business” with the prostitutes. “You know what happens to people who monkey with the police, don’t you?” Devery yelled back at him, according to Gardner.
Devery gathered several plainclothes officers to accompany him and Gardner to execute the warrant; Gardner walked them north a few blocks, then motioned for the group to stop in front of 106 and 108 West 50th Street, the notorious French brothel of Lena de Meurville. “French Lena” was almost certainly the largest bribe payer in Devery’s first command.
Gardner rang the buzzer; a “colored maid” opened the door and the group barged into the elegant foyer. Upstairs, Devery and Gardner found Louis Allen, a young lawyer at the criminal defense firm of Howe & Hummel, “French Lena,” a housekeeper, and, asleep in one of the rooms, a sickly boarder. But no out-of-town businessmen, no underdressed harlots. Gardner nonetheless demanded the police arrest them all. Louis Allen, a married man, protested that he was merely consulting with a client. “Even if he is a lawyer, he doesn’t need to have his clothes off and be playing cards with a lot of prostitutes,” complained Gardner.
Allen was furious and vowed: “I will get square with you.”
He was joining a long list of New Yorkers quite irritated with Charlie Gardner.
Captain Devery knew that the Parkhurst Society was investigating other prostitutes in his precinct, including one named Lillie Clifton. He set about laying a trap for Gardner. Lou Allen was willing to help; so was a police sergeant whom Gardner had crossed; so were Lillie and other madams wanting to stay open; so were many victims of previous Gerry and Parkhurst Society closures.
The newspapers later described Lillie Clifton as a “tall, well-developed woman” of hard-to-determine age, perhaps in her mid- to late thirties. She had opened her first brothel in the Tenderloin almost a decade earlier; she now had shares in three, including two in Devery’s 22nd Precinct, just north of the Tenderloin. She had first met lawyer Louis Allen when Howe & Hummel had handled a lawsuit by her former longtime lover William F. Kidder, a patent medicine mogul. When the married Mr. Kidder had lost his fortune in 1890, he sued Clifton to recoup $6,000 in presents given to her from 1883 to 1890; the two sides settled on $2,700.
Lillie was born Catherine “Kate” Amos; she had passed occasionally as “Mrs. William F. Kidder.” She was now registered at the Bryant Park Hotel as “Mrs. Stevenson.” Shifty, playful Lillie shaped up as a fine adversary for Charlie Gardner.
Devery saw his chance when Lillie Clifton came to him to complain that a fellow named George Grant, a thirty-seven-year-old former agent for the Parkhurst Society, was trying to shake her down for protection money in the name of Charlie Gardner. Grant, a tall, muscular former Sing Sing guard with close-cropped graying hair, had shown up on a recent night and told her he wanted to arrange a meeting between her and Gardner to keep her place open.
Grant claimed Gardner agreed to this shakedown. Lillie Clifton’s brothel had featured eighteen girls in its heyday but was now operating low key during the Parkhurst scare. Clifton would later admit that she was then doing “business very quietly,” keeping only “three or four ladies” and that “every gentleman” must enter “through the basement.”
Devery found out that Grant was having a hard time setting up a face-to-face meeting between Lillie and Charlie Gardner. So Devery stepped in. He sent a message to Gardner to come talk to him on Thursday, October 13, 1892; he sent the same message to Lillie Clifton and then he purposely didn’t show up at his own precinct house. But he still had a problem, since those two didn’t know each other. He needed someone to introduce them. So he had Louis Allen of Howe & Hummel just happen to be leaning against the railing outside the station house that night. When Lillie was leaving the building she ran into Allen, and then a bit later Gardner walked up. Allen, pretending to make nice with the private detective, suggested that all three go for some sherry at Boyle’s saloon at 45th Street and Sixth Avenue.
According to Lillie’s sworn testimony at a later trial, Gardner drank plenty that first night and confirmed to her that the Parkhurst Society was chasing after her; he was a smooth talker, she said, and he promised he’d wear a silk top hat when he raided her place. She sarcastically said she admired his “style.” He hinted, though, that he might be able to help her and gave her his home address.
Lillie showed up at Gardner’s rented rooms at 76 Lexington Avenue a few days later on Sunday night, October 16. He lived there with his nineteen-year-old pregnant wife, the former Florence Collins of Poughkeepsie. He had married her on May 14 in a hastily planned ceremony inside the Statue of Liberty; wags dubbed Gardner the answer to the riddle: What man ever married one woman while inside another?
Gardner introduced Lillie as “Mrs. Smith” and soon banished his wife to another room; he and Lillie then talked price and Lillie made her first monthly protection payment of $50 to Gardner. The pair sat together for a while and Gardner pulled out a long-necked bottle of red wine and then later a scrapbook with a “lot of disgusting pictures” including “photographs” of the type of circus act seen at Hattie Adams’s house. They left his wife and went to a corner saloon for more wine.
A few days later, on October 19, Lillie met with Captain Devery, who advised her to keep making monthly payments while they figured out how best to snag Gardner with ironclad evidence.
On Wednesday, October 26, Devery sent Lillie and Charlie on a marathon night of carousing—an eight-hour binge while Gardner’s pregnant wife stayed home alone—to amass incontrovertible proof of Gardner’s character (or lack of it) for a future jury. Lillie and Charlie met that night at the corner at Sixth Avenue and 32nd Street around 8 p.m., downed a pint of champagne at Boyle’s at 45th Street, then took a carriage (with a Devery spy driving) up past the grounds for the new St. John the Divine Cathedral, past the building site for the new campus for Columbia to a saloon at 132nd Street for a pint of wine, then enjoyed a leisurely dark ride through empty fields and scattered houses and on to the rural Beaconsfield Inn at 185th Street. Along the way, Lillie said Gardner confessed that he had done “everything on the calendar except keep a w-h-o-r-e.” She said he even offered to distribute business cards for her brothel, if she’d give him a cut. They drank two quarts of champagne and ate some sandwiches with the proprietor/witness Mr. Boyer at the Beaconsfield, then on to dinner at Huber’s near the bridge to the Bronx, then south to a MacDonald’s saloon at 76th Street at 2 a.m. They then arrived at Lillie’s brothel, which Gardner left at 4 a.m. when Lillie reminded him that he had a wife.
While Devery set his trap for Gardner, the Parkhurst Society struck again in Devery’s precinct. On November 15, Parkhurst agents, led by Gardner, executed another warrant at French Lena’s, only this time without contacting the police. A reform judge, Charles Taintor, had decided to allow the private society to execute warrants.
They hauled in the eight French prostitutes, none of whom spoke English. Judge Taintor, conducting the trial with a translator, convicted the women and sentenced them to six months in the penitentiary. He found them guilty under a statute that said: “An inmat
e of a house of prostitution with no other means of support is a vagrant.” New York State did not have a law per se against prostitution (i.e., selling sexual favors).
Sentencing eight newly imported and lovely French filles de joie to prison clearly infuriated certain powerful people, including some at Tammany Hall, who set a plot in motion. Since the last afternoon Corrections Department ferry had departed for Blackwell’s Island, and the 50th Street prison was undergoing renovations, Judge Taintor was advised that the eight women should be transferred to Jefferson Market Courthouse jail. The request appeared reasonable.
That night, though, a Tammany police judge there, Thomas F. Grady, signed an order requesting the women be released; the document required the signatures of at least two commissioners of the Department of Charities and Corrections to be valid. Commissioners Sheehey and Simmons (both Tammany men) signed the document. The French filles departed into the night, never to return to prison.
Clearly, the Parkhurst Society, now armed with its own warrants, was beginning to gum up the underworld. With word of the French Lena arrest spreading through the police department, Devery traveled to police headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street to consult with the new superintendent of police, Thomas Byrnes.
The tall, paunchy, and balding fifty-year-old Byrnes was then regarded as the nation’s most famous detective; he had personally cracked some of the largest bank robberies, had made Wall Street safe by creating a “dead” zone for criminals south of Fulton, and had unraveled several high-profile cases involving the blackmailing of millionaires. Now, after a twenty-nine-year career spent largely in the parallel universe of the detective bureau, he was elevated to superintendent after his predecessor’s sudden departure in the wake of the Parkhurst fiasco. Several newspapers hailed Byrnes—an independent Democrat not affiliated with Tammany Hall who often worked closely with the city’s wealthiest Republicans—as the ideal man to reform the police.
Island of Vice Page 4
