Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  Born in Ireland in 1842, Byrnes had arrived with the outbound wave of Potato Famine refugees, and his Irish accent reared only when he was flustered, which was rare. He had earned his fame by revolutionizing detective work in New York City, methodically cultivating and chronicling criminals. He and his forty detectives researched the habits and tendencies of thieves and murderers, building an extraordinary “Rogues’ Gallery” of photos and biographical thumbnail sketches. “Joseph Lewis, alias ‘Hungry Joe’ is a very persistent and impudent bunco steerer [con man]. He is a terrible talker—too much so for his own good.” “Sophie Levy, alias ‘Lyons’ is a notorious shoplifter, pickpocket and blackmailer … of late she has become addicted to the opium habit.” “Col. Alexander C. Branscom, Forger and Swindler … 44 years old, good education, converses well. Right arm off at the elbow. His expertness with a pen is a marvel.”

  Ultimately, Byrnes paid Tom or pounded Dick to tell on Harry. Denying the old saw about “honor among thieves,” he boasted that by cash or threat he could get any criminal to “peach on his confederates.” He manipulated these criminal contacts into a vast network of stool pigeons.

  One weekend, newspaperman Lincoln Steffens, dining out with his wife, reached to settle the tab and discovered his pay envelope missing. Recently assigned to the police beat for the prestigious Evening Post, he rushed to report the crime directly to top man Byrnes. The detective asked how much was in the envelope, what was written on it, and what route Steffens had taken home from work on Friday. “All right, I’ll have it for you on Monday morning,” Byrnes promised.

  And indeed on Monday morning, Byrnes turned over the envelope with the cash intact and walked away without saying a word. Steffens, flabbergasted, sought out the other reporters, then playing poker in the basement of 301 Mulberry. For several minutes, the veterans ignored the rookie’s question until finally one answered: “[Byrnes] knew what pickpockets were working the car lines you rode and he told the detectives who were watching them to tell them that they had robbed a friend of the chief’s of so much money in such and such an envelope.” Steffens must have still looked confused. The fellow added: “Byrnes passed the word that he wanted that dip back by Monday, and so of course, it came back Monday morning.”

  It was an open secret that Byrnes tolerated some petty thieving by certain crooks in exchange for their spying on bigger crooks. A popular saying in New York held that six hoodlums couldn’t plot a heist without one of them being in Byrnes’s pocket.

  “He chased the thieves all the way to Europe,” wrote Jacob Riis. He also gave wealthy out-of-town crooks permission to squander their loot at New York hotels and restaurants—provided they did absolutely no thieving in his city. Byrnes routinely ignored requests for extradition from other jurisdictions.

  Byrnes had recently seemed hard-pressed to hide his irritation at the harsh criticisms of the Parkhurst Society, and its boundless unrequested help. Devery met with Byrnes, and the sluggish, somewhat amateurish effort to trap Gardner now rose to a new level of sophistication: exotic marked gifts such as handkerchiefs and cigars, covert signals, traceable cash.

  On Sunday, November 20, 1892, Lillie showed up again at Gardner’s rented rooms to make another $50 payment. She found Gardner’s wife Florence there alone.

  Madam Lillie—as part of the trap—gave Florence a beautiful necklace from Casperfield & Clavellans; she had commissioned the jeweler—almost certainly acting on Byrnes’s advice—to inscribe four of the gold beads on the back with the numbers 2-2-0-5.

  Waiting for Charlie, the two women talked for three hours; Lillie dazzled the sheltered upstate girl with tales of Manhattan high life.

  Charlie finally returned home, admired the necklace, and allowed his wife to keep it. However, he soon asked her to leave the sitting room so he and Lillie could talk business; Lillie handed him another $50. “You’re a nice girl,” he said to the thirtysomething demimondaine, and told Lillie to meet him at the nearby saloon. Pregnant Florence would stay home.

  Since it was Sunday, the saloon’s front doors were locked. They each rounded the corner and entered by the side entrance; they drank two bottles of wine, in violation of the Sunday excise law. At some point, he warned her: “There is going to be a terrible rumpus in this town and you are on the list.” He said dozens of houses in three precincts would be pulled during a mass crackdown. She claimed not to believe him; he offered to take her to the Society for the Prevention of Crime offices nearby.

  When she and Gardner climbed the five flights late on that Sunday night, striking a match to light their way up, they encountered fellow agent George R. Clark. (Gardner would later claim he brought Lillie there to sign an affidavit against Grant for extortion.)

  Gardner sent Clark out to fetch a fine bottle of red wine, yet another violation of the Sabbath law. Clark—who would later cynically describe his job by saying the Society paid for wine, champagne, girls, and “you stop short of co-habitating”—walked to the Hoffman House.

  Both men bragged to Lillie that they would be reimbursed. Gardner showed Lillie a large ledger that revealed $100.50 in expenses for the past week, and $300 from an earlier investigation. “Lillie, you see these psalm-singing sons-of-bitches, they are all good for it, and I will get it all back.”

  Liquored up at this point, Gardner also opened the safe and showed her stacks of indictments against brothels, including hers: “22—Lillie Clifton” in red ink on the cover.

  The two Parkhurst agents painted a picture of ruin for the prime madams of Manhattan. Lillie said she could not believe Gardner was going to treat her like the rest; he played it coy for a while, then offered her an escape … for the steep added sum of $150. Gardner took her number 22 folder and instead of returning it to the safe, he hid it in the bookcase.

  On Friday, December 2, 1892, Lillie met again with Captain Devery to plan the endgame. Devery had taken a $100 bill to a grocery store and exchanged it for small bills, whose serial numbers he had the grocer copy down. He also prepared $50 and recorded the numbers. She left with $150 of marked identifiable police money.

  Two nights later, she went to Gardner’s rooming house.

  The elderly landlady let her in and Gardner was lying on the sofa. “Where is our little wife?” Lillie asked. “Up to her mother’s,” he replied. “You are quite lonesome?” she asked. “Yes,” he replied.

  She paid him the marked money. Some of it wound up in the sewing basket and the rest in his pocket. “We will go and have a bottle of wine; you are a good girl,” he said, and she replied: “And you are a good fellow if you come and treat.” It was crucial that Gardner be in possession of the money.

  They exited together. Lillie raised her handkerchief to dab her eyes. The waved hankie signal was apparently to alert Captain Devery and Sergeant Crowley, hiding in a nearby doorway. (The New York Herald later commented that “a detective story without a secret signal in it is not worth much.”)

  Lillie and Gardner climbed into a waiting cab; Crowley and Devery jogged after it, knowing the cab would be going only a few blocks to the nearby saloon. Crowley caught up to it just as the pair was stepping down, near some broken pavement. The police sergeant grabbed Gardner by the shoulder. Devery, jogging behind, yelled, “Search his left hand pocket.” Crowley found nothing. Devery later said he saw Gardner throw something down with his right hand. A roll of bills lay in the gutter. Devery shouted at the cab driver: “Did you see him do that?” The man, William F. Smith, confirmed he did.

  “If it was good enough for you to take,” said Sergeant Crowley, “it is good enough for you to pick it up.” Gardner snapped back: “Pick it up yourself.” The cop retrieved the money. “You’ve got me now,” said Gardner, “and I suppose you will pound me.”

  Gardner knew he was in trouble; he asked if he could stop for a drink on the way to the lockup. “It’s Sunday night, old man,” replied Crowley, suddenly a stickler for the Sabbath laws. (He did later allow Gardner to buy a cigar.)

  At he
adquarters, Sergeant Crowley performed a thorough search—including instructing Gardner to drop his trousers—and found that the Parkhurst detective was carrying $1,556 in cash, an enormous sum, more than a year’s salary for most, including a carefully folded‑up $500 bill in a jacket pocket. The cash roll found on the street matched the serial numbers from Smith & Sills Grocery; none of the money found on Gardner did.

  The next day Captain Devery, Inspector McLaughlin, and Sergeant Crowley arrived with Lillie Clifton to execute a search warrant at Gardner’s rooming house. Mr. Merritt, the seventy-two-year-old landlord, a sometime Parkhurst man, tried to stall to keep them out since wife Florence was not home. “Don’t give us any chin music,” Crowley told him, “or we’ll take you by the nape of the neck and fire you down the stoop.”

  The police found $50 in the sewing basket. The landlord wrote down the serial numbers—which, it turned out, matched Lillie’s—and sealed them in an envelope. They also found eleven Parisian handkerchiefs, and a marked box of cigars. The landlord told them where to find the wife and they then went to Gardner’s mother-in-law’s house and found Florence wearing a gold necklace with numbered beads: 2-2-0-5.

  On Monday, December 5, Superintendent Byrnes assembled the newspaper boys from across the street. He quoted Gardner as sarcastically telling Lillie that he had “100 school-teachers like you on my list.” When reporters asked Byrnes to explain why Gardner was carrying $1,556 on him, the superintendent replied: “The payments of his other school-teachers, I suppose.”

  Byrnes was clearly enjoying himself. He said he opposed allowing private societies to execute arrest warrants. He accused Parkhurst agents of practicing “a regular system of blackmail.” The Gardner arrest was splashed across the front pages of Monday-evening and Tuesday-morning papers.

  Reverend Parkhurst defiantly defended “honest” Gardner. “If the police would only show as much interest and eagerness to suppress evil as they do to suppress the efforts of our Society there would be no cause for complaint.”

  On the morning of Gardner’s showcase trial, on January 31, 1893, his very pregnant wife, weeping on the arm of her mother, entered the courtroom first. A triumvirate of reform lawyers—John Goff, William Travers Jerome, and Frank Moss—followed behind her, ready to defend her husband. Despite their spirited efforts, the jury would unanimously find him guilty.

  Lillie Clifton made a fine star prosecution witness, with an extraordinary memory for dialogue that occurred while drinking immense quantities of alcohol. Elegantly dressed in a fur-trimmed dress, with a stylish two-plumed black hat, she testified for four hours behind a white beaded veil. She walked the jury through the entire sting, and was unshakable even during a brutal cross-examination that detailed how she lived off the sins of other women, how she had profited from adultery. “You are a BAD woman, are you not?” defense lawyer Jerome abruptly shouted at her at one point. She replied calmly, “No, not altogether.” Throughout the trial, she seemed to be carrying on a flirtation with the jury foreman.

  Gardner admitted the well-documented carousings, but he denied ever taking any bribes and claimed he was working undercover to make a blackmail case against former agent Grant. He also testified that Captain Devery knocked the roll of bills out of Lillie’s hand and that Lillie planted the other roll in the sewing basket when he went to the bathroom. He contended her Sunday-night visit to Parkhurst headquarters was intended to get her to a desk with paper and pen but “she was too under the influence” to write an affidavit.

  The prosecution, headed by the Tammany district attorney, made its case even stronger by parading a series of madams and saloon owners, who claimed under oath to have been shaken down earlier by Gardner.

  Gardner also had to explain the extraordinary $1,556 he was carrying. He mentioned giving slum tours for $50 a pop and doing freelance detective work, but the D.A. had subpoenaed his bank records. In 1889, Gardner, while working six months at $80 a month for the Gerry Society ($480), had been able to deposit $1,400 in the 19th Ward Bank. At one point, he denied owning any real estate; at another, he claimed to have thirty-two lots in Westchester and new property in Rutherford, New Jersey. Gardner was tap-dancing, trying to hide that he was a wealthy young man.

  The newspapers thought Gardner’s best hope came from the daily presence of his adoring, often weeping, and very pregnant nineteen-year-old wife and from Reverend Parkhurst. The minister reported himself too ill to attend the trial but an odd deal was struck: he would testify at home and the district attorney would not cross-examine him. Parkhurst stated that in mid-October the Society had ordered Gardner to pursue Lillie Clifton for an affidavit about George Grant’s bribery attempts, and also that the Society had decided, because of Grant’s blackmail, not to pursue vice cases such as Lillie’s in the 22nd Precinct.

  All for naught. The guilty verdict was returned in six hours.

  Even the pro-reform New York Times on its editorial page agreed with the decision, calling it “absolutely conclusive” and dubbing Gardner the “vilest” of men. “These creatures will work, as Gardner did, for their own profit, and will sell out their employers and their causes without scruple.” The Times wondered if even Reverend Parkhurst could remain uncorrupted doing undercover vice work night after night.

  The pendulum had swung back toward Tammany.

  Gardner began his two-and-a-half-year sentence. And Devery received his reward. The Tammany police commissioners transferred William Stephen Devery on March 15, 1893, to the second most lucrative graft precinct in the city, the eleventh, on the overcrowded Lower East Side. Sphinx Glennon would collect and Devery would start making a bundle for the first time in his life.

  Reverend Parkhurst—perhaps not overflowing with Christian love—would choose Devery’s 11th Precinct for his next massive investigation, and send swarms of agents into the brothels there. “The police objected to Gardner’s blackmailing anyone,” Parkhurst would later write, “for the reason that they wanted the monopoly of the business themselves.”

  every’s 11th Precinct covered a scant nine-block square, one of the smallest precincts geographically, but it housed a quarter of a million people, mostly Russian and Polish Jews, crammed together in extreme poverty. Jacob Riis dubbed it “Jewtown” in his book. Reformer Frank Moss called it “New Israel” and judged it the most crowded slum in the world, topping Calcutta.

  Signs in Hebrew advertised “Room to Let” but almost no one had an entire room to him- or herself. One reformer found a family of twelve living in two rooms, and taking in six boarders to pay the rent. People slept indoors in shifts, and on rooftops in the summer months.

  Walking through the neighborhood, one heard the relentless whir of sewing machines; anyone taking the Second Avenue Elevated train—day or night—caught glimpses into second-floor tenement sweatshops, filled with men in shirtsleeves, and women and children, all making garments.

  On Fridays, Jewish peddlers hosted the “Pig Market” on several blocks of Hester Street where they sold everything but pigs. Buyers bargained in a half dozen languages for peaches, cracked eggs, socks, suspenders, shoes, candlesticks, pickles.

  And tens of thousands of New Yorkers ventured south all week long from uptown to these derelict streets seeking more than just bargain pants. “[Every] block in the Eleventh precinct … is … infested by a disorderly house connected with licensed saloons,” wrote an investigator, “[also] cigar stores masquerading as such but really houses of ill fame, cider mills of the same character, gambling rooms, and ‘crap’ games, faro banks, coffee house dives and houses of assignation without number.” He counted 242 saloons in the nine-block square and more than fifty brothels, including one at 81 Eldridge just eight doors from the police station house. (The back of this particular “disorderly house” lined up with the back of Synagogue Beth Israel Anshe Poland on Forsythe Street, and congregants sometimes complained that their chanting was interrupted by rhythmic exuberant sounds of a very different character.)

  Polic
e statistics from 1896 reveal that the 11th Precinct sported the highest crime rate in the city—12,112 arrests for assault, disorderly conduct, robberies, and so forth—almost double the next precinct, the Tenderloin.

  At night drunken men filled the crowded streets of Hester and Stanton and Allen. A snatch of song often echoed out of Steen’s concert joint on Forsythe Street, where very young girls mangled popular tunes before offering themselves. A neighborhood fixture, five-foot-tall Rebecca Abramsohn tended bar on a ramp at her two-story beer saloon at 150 Allen Street; she rented beds upstairs by the half hour. Down the street, another saloon kept its “melodeon” playing deep into the night “while disorderly women and drunken men sang low songs.” Respectable couples reported walking to synagogue and hearing half-dressed women yell at them: “I’m prettier than your wife” or “Hey, sweetie, you should come work here, you’ll make more than your husband does.” One witness cited brothels at 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 Delancey Street.

  To Big Bill Devery, all this prurience represented a gold mine.

  Within days of the captain’s arrival, his “bagman” Glennon and Big Bill began visiting the brothels in plainclothes.

  The pair showed up at 144 Chrystie Street, at the brothel of Katie Schubert, an especially pretty twenty-five-year-old German Jew who had broken into the business at age seventeen. She had owned her own brothel for two and a half years and kept five or six “girls” in her high-end parlor house, charging two dollars a customer.

  Devery never mentioned money, he merely kidded around, smoked a cigar, and told her to obey Glennon. After the captain left, the Sphinx explained the fees: a hefty $500 “new captain” initiation fee and $50 a month, to be delivered to him at the precinct house in an envelope. “I would be protected to run along quiet and not make any disturbances, fighting or any noise,” she later recalled being told. The captain didn’t want any 2 a.m. piano music or loud singing to attract attention; he didn’t want half-naked girls on the stoop or anyone calling down obscene offers from the windows.