Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  he thirty-eight precinct captains ruled the 3,800 cops who ruled the streets; and Superintendent Byrnes seemed to rule the captains but insiders knew better. He wasn’t exactly a figurehead—he oversaw day-to-day tactics, riots, training, ongoing investigations—but in many ways, he had his hands tied. In the byzantine command structure of the New York police, a four-member highly politicized Board of Police Commissioners controlled hiring, firing, transferring, and disciplining of the members of the police force.

  Democratic and Republican politicians struggled mightily to gain a majority on the four-man board. Clearly, if policemen, especially captains, could rake in thousands of dollars in shakedowns, then Police Board commissioners (or the politicians who controlled them) could extract thousands from the policemen in exchange for promotions to sergeant and on to captain. Money flowed up—circuitously—from the brothel and dice game to the top politicians. And it wasn’t just money; it was the power to do favors all over the city: to wink at violations or to flay enemies.

  Since the mayor appointed the police commissioners, and since Tammany had won the mayoralty in seven of the last nine elections, the Republicans needed to find a way to get Republicans onto the city Police Board.

  So the upstate Republicans, who controlled the legislature, had voted through an investigation of the New York City police, especially its role in monitoring elections. Political insiders viewed this probe as a kind of tribal war game. If Tammany Hall would agree to add a Republican police commissioner—the board had two Democrats, one Republican, and one vacancy—and would agree to legislation making the New York Police Board permanently bipartisan (two Republicans and two Democrats), then the Republicans would not investigate too hard and would certainly not expose graft that could profit both sides.

  The governor, Roswell Flower, a Democrat and no timid poker player, vetoed the $25,000 appropriation for the investigation, and he vetoed the bipartisan police bill. He did so with some self-righteousness, pointing out how the Republican majority always found it necessary to investigate only Democratic cities such as New York and never Republican strongholds such as Syracuse or Rochester. He castigated Republicans for using public moneys to further their fight over the “division of political patronage.”

  Three days later, Tammany mayor Thomas Gilroy appointed James Murray, a stalwart Republican, to the last slot on the Police Board. The backroom deal seemed complete, creating an equilibrium in plunder on the board.

  As Tammany’s George Washington Plunkitt once pointed out: “Me and the Republicans are enemies just one day in the year—election day … the rest of the time it’s live and let live with us.”

  The Republican investigation seemed dead. Then up popped Reverend Parkhurst. Hearing of the governor’s vetoes, Parkhurst approached the Chamber of Commerce to pony up the missing $25,000 in appropriations. The Chamber quickly agreed. Parkhurst approached relentless anti-Tammany lawyer Goff to handle the investigation; Goff demanded absolute control.

  Dr. Parkhurst and reform, in effect, had hijacked a show investigation, meant mainly to leverage the divvying of swag between the Republicans and Tammany Hall. Goff, who started on May 21, about six weeks after the Devery acquittal, actually intended to investigate, to probe everywhere in the New York City Police Department.

  While political insiders knew about the widespread police corruption, it had never been publicly proven and splashed on newspaper front pages, and, moreover, no high-ranking police officer had ever broken the blue wall of silence.

  The hearings were held, ironically enough, at the Tweed Courthouse, built at the obscene cost of $12 million, the work site of the so-called Prince of Plasterers, Andrew J. Garvey, a Tammany grand marshal, who received $133,187 for two days of plaster work. What better place to probe corruption than in the marble mansion of corruption?

  The third-floor hearing room was packed on Monday, May 21. John Goff, his face ruddy, his premature white beard and brows a mockery of kindly Father Christmas, interrogated the hale big-boned Republican police commissioner John McClave about his wealth. With more than a decade as a police commissioner, McClave—the owner of a city-block-sized lumberyard on West 21st near the North River—danced around most of Goff’s questions. The fifty-four-year-old, who also served as Police Board treasurer, even seemed pleased to own up to an annual income of approximately $100,000 and to having recently bought a house on West 74th Street for $70,000.

  But Goff relentlessly pushed for details of McClave’s personal finances: Did he use the police pension fund to buy stocks for himself? Did he receive checks from men seeking to join the police force? McClave’s indignation mounted. At one point, he shouted: “Anybody who told you that is a miserable contemptible liar.”

  Then Goff calmly requested permission to call another witness, Commissioner McClave’s former son-in-law, Gideon Granger, who had just divorced McClave’s daughter. Granger ambled to the witness box, chewing gum, “smiling as if he were going to the circus,” as the New York World put it. Thirty years old, his thin waxed mustache curled up, his body posture exaggeratedly relaxed, Granger made it a point to declare that he bore his former father-in-law no ill will over the very recent divorce. Then he proceeded to describe his role during his six years of marriage as a go-between, funneling bribes to the police commissioner. Of one particular transaction to speed a hopeful cop into the ranks, he effortlessly recalled: “The money was in the form of a check on the Fifth Avenue Bank, dated May 17 and numbered 215.” He told detailed anecdotes such as how a patrolman named “Ronk”—on the verge of dismissal for accidentally arresting the mayor’s son—had handed him, in addition to a $100 gold certificate, a gorgeous live fox. Granger read bribe notations from his personal memorandum book: “Burns $280; Cohen $175, Cahill $250 Mehan $370; Farnsworth $300; Coleman $500; and Mead $250.”

  McClave, furious, turned shades approaching Goff’s naturally florid Irish complexion, and, once back on the stand, denied all. He called his ex-son-in-law a “scoundrel” and a “forger,” and he stage-whispered that he’d see him sent to prison.

  Goff was off to a great start, so great that, it was later learned, around this time the Tammany Hall boss, Richard “Dick” Croker, secretly booked passage for himself and his son on the steamship Umbria to Europe.

  Though praised for his grilling of McClave, Goff was having a hard time filling the witness box daily. The Lexow Commission—named after state senator Clarence Lexow, the Republican Party stalwart who had introduced the legislation—had the power to subpoena witnesses, to recommend arrest for those failing to appear, and, most importantly, to grant immunity from prosecution for anything testified. But the investigators soon discovered almost all potential witnesses were terrified of police retaliation, and feared being “railroaded to Sing Sing,” or beaten with a “club” or a “sandbag,” according to Goff.

  Many fled, including approximately 100 Manhattan brothel madams who, it was later learned, formed an expatriate community in Chicago, not far from the Palmer House. But the police couldn’t speed the exit of everyone involved. Parkhurst seeded the Lexow investigation with hundreds of leads from his Society probes, especially in Devery’s precinct.

  So began a daily parade of plume-hatted, silk-gloved madams, of comely and homely prostitutes, of mustachioed gambling impresarios, and of unrepentant counterfeiters who all soon mesmerized the city with tales of police shakedowns and of their days spent living the low life. Newspaper articles, syndicated around the country, reinforced New York’s reputation for wickedness.

  Lena Cohen, twenty-eight years old, testified that she ran a four-girl, fifty-cent-a-fling brothel at 378 East Houston Street and that the police had threatened to arrest her if she tried to leave the business. A detective named Farrell was not only collecting $50 a month, he was seeing—and not paying—one of her prostitutes nightly. When Lena balked, the detective arrested her husband, Morris, then her.

  A gaunt blonde in a large hat, Louisa Miller testified that she had sa
ved up from her years assisting a midwife and doing washing to open a respectable boardinghouse for single gentlemen and married couples. She paid $70 a month rent for 15 East 2nd Street. Detectives raided the house and, despite finding only elderly men sleeping there, pressed charges against her for running a disorderly house. Two detectives, Cohen and Schindler, demanded $10 each at first, then much more. She refused. Despite five witnesses telling the judge about the house’s good character, she was convicted and fined $100. The detectives returned and told her, in effect: “You don’t pay, you don’t stay.” She didn’t, and the next time she was accused—and convicted—of personally soliciting an officer for sexual intercourse. The Lexow Committee had to retrieve her from the Tombs.

  And so it went … an astounding array of shakedowns. Agents for the steamship lines arriving at the nation’s busiest port testified to paying the police “from the time a ship sighted the Statue of Liberty until she had discharged her cargo.” Czech beer saloons banded together into the Bohemian Liquor Dealers’ Association and paid Detective Campbell $100 a month to stay open on Sundays. No shakedown was apparently too small. Italian bootblacks paid for select corners, and were forced to shine policemen’s shoes for free. The owner of a seafood restaurant on Catherine Slip said he paid five dollars every two months to keep a glass case of clams and oysters on the pavement, in violation of the city’s sidewalk encumbrance law.

  Peddler Billy Mayston, a chatty fellow with a scanty mustache, sold whips and cutlery out of a satchel; he told how he paid his way. “I have given up more scissors to policemen than would supply all the people in this room.” He told of another cop who judged Mayston’s scissors too long and told him to leave a pair of nail scissors with the Italian greengrocer. “He is waiting for them yet.”

  Mayston, about thirty, a New Yorker of the streets, “full of natural humor and pawkiness,” didn’t seem eager to leave the stand. He described how he played the ponies and how the police allowed at least twenty “pool rooms” to remain open, even during the Lexow investigation. He advised the senators, if they planned on placing a bet at 23 Chambers Street, to carry a “pink sheet” to get in, that is, carry the Sporting World printed on pink paper. He looked in a little memo book, citing other locations such as the Merchants Hotel, second floor back, where plainclothes police detective Sheridan often spent afternoons and had recently helped the owner bum-rush a friend of Mayston’s down the stairs. (The friend had wanted to place a bet below the hefty two-dollar minimum.)

  Over the weeks, through other witnesses, it became clear that the police in many precincts not only charged for their blindness but helped settle turf wars among the criminals. They indeed regulated vice. A man named Pomeranz started a gambling game in the back of a saloon he bought at 82 Essex Street. Max Hochstim protested that it crimped his business. A neighborhood fixer named Santfman testified that police detective Schindler coerced two ex-cons to walk into Pomeranz’s joint and start playing cards for money; the cops quickly entered, arrested everyone, and the only men that Tammany judge Hogan allowed to walk were the two ex-cons. Lawyer Frank Moss couldn’t resist commenting: “You can see what power these men have when they have lots of men swearing to anything, and police officers to make arrests and judges holding them and discharging them at will.”

  Over and above the big shakedowns of brothels and gamblers and the little shakedowns of pushcart men, another side of some officers of the New York police emerged: rude, violent, and lazy.

  The son of Tammany man Phil Wissig flirted with and insulted a man’s wife near his father’s East Side saloon. The husband testified that he confronted Wissig and the young man grabbed a policeman’s nightstick and beat him; and two cops also pummeled him and threatened to arrest him.

  A twenty-seven-year-old from Constantinople, George Alexander, owned a seafood restaurant at 103 James Street in a rough neighborhood off Cherry Street. The small fellow saw a man grab a lobster out of his glass case at 2 a.m. He threw off his apron, chased the man down yelling “thief,” and grabbed him a few blocks away right near a beat cop. The thief smacked Alexander in the face with the lobster but as the crook tried to flee, he fell. The beat cop did nothing. Alexander, his face bleeding, yelled to the cop for help. “Go to hell,” shouted back the cop. “What the hell do I care about your lobsters?” The thief ran away laughing.

  After he filed a complaint at police headquarters, two detectives visited his place. The first threatened “prison”; the second merely said: “I will fix you.”

  Alexander feared that a plainclothes detective would pay him with a dollar and then claim he had shortchanged him, or that he had served him liquor after hours. “Who will protect me then?” the immigrant asked. “My word won’t go there [in court], and as soon as they swear to that, I go to prison.” Alexander closed his business.

  On June 29, Goff announced a recess for July and August.

  That same day, the Tammany-dominated Police Board informed the public it would commence departmental trials of corrupt officers.

  An election loomed in November for a new mayor, sheriff, and other key posts, and Tammany could feel the heat of Lexow. In the most recent mayoral election, Tammany had won but a concerted effort by its political opponents, by Republicans, Reformers, anti-Tammany Democrats, and others—all riding the recent scandal—had a strong shot at victory. Tammany needed a speck of high moral ground to gain a handful of non-Tammany voters.

  The Police Board brought charges that summer against four sergeants, four precinct detectives, and four captains, including Big Bill Devery, the heretofore bulletproof Tammany man. Bringing down a captain and dismissing him would mark a feat not accomplished for two decades. With Lexow testimony making the job easy, the board charged Devery with fifty-six counts of neglect of duty in not closing brothels.

  Devery conveniently became quite ill. The family doctor diagnosed “active congestion of the brain” and described Devery’s thirteen serious “symptoms” as including flushed face, buzzing noises, watery eyes, sleeplessness, rapid pulse, confusion, and inability to concentrate. His wife, Annie, refused to allow Inspector Peter Conlin to enter their house on West 28th. “My husband’s life is more important to me than any rules of the police department,” she said.

  The Police Board carried on the trial without him. One of the first witnesses called was Louisa Scheuler, a cute fourteen-year-old in a white sailor suit, the daughter of the owner of the Atlas Hotel in Rockaway Beach. She testified that Captain Devery, vacationing a week earlier with his family, seemed “in the best of health” and had a “hearty” appetite.

  A procession of brothel owners doomed him. Attractive Katie Schubert gave details about her monthly payments to the police. “Were you told after this thing is over, you can open again?” Katie: “I shall never open again.” Why? “I got tired of earning money for other people to enjoy.”

  The board found Devery guilty, voting 3–1 to oust him. The lone dissenter, a Tammany man, pointed out that he thought Americans had a right to be present at their own trials.

  The board also found eleven of twelve officers guilty and dismissed all of them, in an unprecedented housecleaning. Captain John Thomas Stephenson went down for, among other sins, accepting four crates of peaches to ignore sidewalk violations. The board wanted to show its toughness.

  On September 6, the same day that Parkhurst returned on the White Star steamship Germania from mountain climbing in Switzerland, the police board voted to end the position of precinct detective, or “ward man”; from here on, if a plainclothes detective was needed, Superintendent Byrnes would send one from central headquarters.

  Clearly, the current board members wanted to avoid the fate of Commissioner McClave, who had retired under doctor’s orders.

  Reformers were smelling victory in the upcoming election for mayor. The big question: on whom to bestow this plum. Early names included Dr. Parkhurst, John Goff, and Theodore Roosevelt. Former congressman Lemuel Quigg made a passionate pitch to Roose
velt down in Washington.

  Theodore weighed the pros and cons. One major plus for this extremely competitive man would be erasing the sting of his 1886 defeat for mayor.

  He discussed it with his wife, Edith, and she made it clear that she opposed running. She regarded the financial risks as too great. Edith always had financial fears since her father had squandered the family fortune and she had grown up in genteel poverty; she also knew her husband’s strong suit was not managing the family budget.

  She argued that he would need to quit his current job, spend money for the campaign, and he still might lose. Then he would be unemployed; the family would be pinched. Also, the five children were so settled in D.C.

  Roosevelt listened to her arguments. He told Quigg not once but four times that he was flattered but refused to run.

  Campaigns were much shorter then, and on October 5, a mass of mostly wealthy reformers, who dubbed themselves the “Committee of Seventy,” anointed William L. Strong, a bearded avuncular sixty-seven-year-old businessman with no political experience.

  Roosevelt later confided to his best friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, his profound regrets over his decision. “I would literally have given my right arm to have made the race, win or lose,” he wrote. “It was the golden chance which never returns.”

  Rounding out the ticket, John Goff accepted running for Recorder, the highest-ranking municipal judgeship, against Tammany’s Frederick Smyth, who had presided over the Charlie Gardner case.

  The Lexow Commission resumed in the fall; the witness chair was now dubbed “Goff’s Griddle.” The chief inquisitor’s plan was clearly to array enough witnesses to build a corruption case against a high-ranking police officer, such as a captain or inspector, then use the threat of prosecution in criminal courts to force him to testify.