Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  His arguments spilled out of him … Byrnes could undermine fair elections; he could cavalierly pardon bribe takers. “This bill has not one redeeming feature … nothing could be imagined more subversive of discipline.” The mayor, whose receding hairline gave him something of an accidental Mohawk, sat, rocked, and listened.

  What was amazing was that Roosevelt was rushing headlong on day five of his tenure to accuse the world-famous police chief of coddling crooked cops; TR was saying, in effect, that Byrnes could not be trusted. After fifteen minutes, Roosevelt abruptly stopped. (The Washington Post once uncharitably commented: “He slays a hippopotamus or cracks a flea with the same overwhelming ardor.”)

  Roosevelt had framed his argument in black and white, good and evil, and was painting the mayor into a corner.

  Following Roosevelt’s fire came Commissioner Parker, with his icy lawyerly manner. “No matter how grave the charge, no matter how monstrous the offense, the [chief] can sit in his office and say ‘You shall not be tried.’ ” And Commissioner Grant wanted to help but felt somewhat inadequate. “If I were an eloquent man, I would pour out my eloquence in asking you not to sign the bill.”

  Mayor Strong, who said nothing, had that look of a man who had already made up his mind. He had never served in elected office prior to being anointed mayor by a coalition of reformers and Republicans, and Jacob Riis said he suffered from “the intermittent delusion that he was a shrewd politician.” Commissioner Andrews called him “a lovable gentleman of the Old School” who had a “keen wit, a dry sense of humor, wore plain black clothes, [and] chewed tobacco.”

  The mayor immediately announced that he would veto the bill. Each commissioner went up and shook Strong’s hand. As Roosevelt was leaving he could be overheard saying enthusiastically to Andrews, “The old man is a brick, isn’t he?”

  On Monday morning, May 13, Roosevelt made the three-mile commute from 689 Madison at 62nd Street down to Houston and Mulberry. (The Roosevelt family was temporarily staying for free at the elegant townhouse of his sister, Anna—better known as “Bamie”—who was then in London.) For a nickel, he could hop on the Third Avenue El at 63rd Street for eleven stops to Houston Street.

  TR arrived early to the office and then to the boardroom and fidgeted waiting for Commissioner Parker, who, Roosevelt was discovering, often seemed to operate a bit on a parallel track all his own. When Parker showed up late at 11:23 a.m., TR immediately gaveled the meeting to order.

  Roosevelt was feeling out his new colleagues. Parker, a former assistant district attorney, seemed an astute lawyer, with an eye for detail; Grant, a former minister to Austria, was congenial. By the end of the week, TR would confide to a close friend: “Parker is my mainstay; he is able and forceful but a little inclined to be tricky. Andrews is good but timid and ‘sticks in the bark’ [like an arrow that doesn’t penetrate deeply into the tree]. Grant is a good fellow but dull and easily imposed on; he is our element of weakness.”

  Roosevelt, with his usual impatience, orchestrated a breakneck pace. The previous board in one of its last meetings had passed a resolution authorizing the annual police parade, a popular New York City civic event that ranked right up there with the Fourth of July and St. Patrick’s Day. Roosevelt abruptly brought a motion to cancel the parade. Every year hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets as the men in blue marched by, not in a lockstep drill but rather as a kind of informal victory parade, with proud captains leading on horseback and police bands playing. Chief Byrnes was quietly making elaborate preparations. With no discussion, the board unanimously passed a motion to cancel; the only explanation given was that the board was too busy with other important matters.

  Clearly this represented a symbolic quashing of Byrnes and the old guard. And Roosevelt privately told Jake Riis: “We will parade when we need not be ashamed to show ourselves.”

  Next item that morning: election reform. The police then oversaw elections, checking voter registration, monitoring polling places, and counting the votes. (That was Albany’s stated reason for a bipartisan Police Board, not equal divvying of graft.) The board, to ensure fairness, passed a motion that all policemen must resign immediately from all political clubs and must stop giving donations. The Democratic Pequod Club was chockablock with Tammany Hall police officers, such as Big Bill Devery appealing his dismissal, and Inspector William McLaughlin, then on trial for bribery.

  In a further effort to banish politics from policing, Roosevelt also suggested that all job applications no longer contain any reference to a man’s party loyalties. He wanted the message out that ward heelers from both parties would find no jobs to hand out in the police department. “The ordinary politician is as keen to scent out places [jobs] as a pig is after truffles,” Roosevelt told Steffens for an Evening Post article. So the board passed a measure mandating that even the janitors and laborers would become civil service appointees.

  Next item that Monday: discipline. The board quickly agreed that it would double or triple the punishments, especially for drunkenness on duty. Andrews recited several cases, including the one of patrolman Peter MacDonald of King’s Bridge precinct in the northern Bronx, who had been caught sleeping in a railway station twice in the same night. The old regime might have slapped him with a two-day fine. Checking the man’s record, Commissioner Parker discovered that MacDonald had racked up thirty complaints, including many for being in saloons and bars. Parker recommended dismissal. Roosevelt suggested commuting the sentence to thirty days’ fine but announcing to the force that this was special “leniency” by the new board and that all punishments hereafter would be much stiffer. (Two days later, they would fire repeat offender Joseph Flynn for being caught in a saloon. “It is time that an example was made of somebody,” declared Roosevelt.)

  The new board also voted to review the entire system of police discipline, which was then anchored in a poisonous relationship whereby roundsmen sneaked around the beats of patrolmen and spied on them. The more infractions the roundsmen found, the better their chances for promotion to sergeant. The board had the novel idea that roundsmen should be promoted when the patrolmen reduced crime on their beats and did their duty.

  Next item: dismissal from the force. Roosevelt passionately wanted the right to fire any officer, without the fear of a court overturning the firing. “I want every decent man on the force to know that I am his best friend [but] every bad policeman we will get rid of as fast as we can,” said Roosevelt. “We want neither loafers nor shirks, nor corrupt men of any kind.” Under current rules, a dismissed officer could appeal to the criminal courts, which, in effect, meant that the board, to avoid being overturned, had to build rock-solid cases and use due process for witnesses and evidence. These standards were more rigorous and costly than a private employer firing someone. The board sent an urgent official message to Albany imploring the legislators to pass a bill denying dismissed policemen the right to appeal their terminations to the courts.

  The board also discussed ways to deny pensions to corrupt cops, who might now rush to retire to avoid life under a reform board. Such a strategy might also help save the pension fund from an impending deficit. Parker would investigate. The board sent a memo to the chief that cushy “special assignments,” such as guarding foreign dignitaries, should be based on seniority and valor instead of Tammany connections. To emphasize the positive, they discussed giving out more merit awards for bravery. The board immediately voted a medal of honor to patrolman Michael Nolan of the East 104th Street precinct, who had leaped into the fast-moving East River and saved a boy from drowning.

  Those were just a few of the topics taken up at that Monday meeting. The New York Recorder commented that the new board accomplished more in this one meeting than former regimes did in four months; it certainly marked a strong collegial start for reform.

  Around 2 p.m., a tall pale young man, with the build of a prizefighter, bounded up the steps of 300 Mulberry. Well dressed, in his mid-twenties, he sported a faint r
eddish mustache and matching side whiskers; he kept his identity a secret.

  He sought out Commissioner Roosevelt and handed him an envelope, and then dropped off another with the clerk for Chief Byrnes. Roosevelt closed the door to his office and opened the envelope. He found copies of three letters—one to the mayor, one to the police chief, and one to a captain—all listing extensive charges against Captain Joseph Eakins.

  Just as the Parkhurst Society had staked out a campaign in 1893 against Captain Devery for not closing brothels in the 11th Precinct on the East Side, so now it was orchestrating one against Eakins in the 15th. (This precinct covered a swath of Manhattan radiating outward from Washington Square, north to 14th Street, south to Bleecker Street; today, NYU occupies much of the area.)

  The messenger would turn out to be Arthur “Angel” Dennett, lead investigator for the Parkhurst Society, who had kicked off the 15th Precinct probe by going on New Year’s Eve with New York World reporter Nellie Bly to McAleer’s Saloon on Thompson Street. They posed as a couple needing a bed, and paid twenty-five cents to mount the stairs. As they reached the landing, they heard loud lewd talk and also the sound of “the [metal-spring] beds in constant vibration.” They saw an open door and entered a room with bare furnishings. Dennett asked the maid why there were no sheets or covers on the mattress and she explained that the customers “went to bed with [their shoes] on and would spoil the sheets if they used them.”

  So here TR was, a week into his new job, and he found Reverend Parkhurst eagerly trying to help him. Roosevelt would always publicly lavish praise on Parkhurst, but privately he said he sometimes found the reverend a bit too helpful.

  Now Parkhurst was trying to oust an officer, Eakins, who just happened to be a well-respected Republican, a Civil War veteran, a high-ranking Freemason. Even the reform paper, the New York Times, had called Eakins a “man content to live on his salary,” with an “excellent reputation.”

  Roosevelt summed up his first week in a letter to his sister. “I have never worked harder than in these last six days, and it is very worrying and harassing, for I have to deal with three colleagues, solve terribly difficult problems and do my work under hampering laws … I have rarely left the office until six in the evenings.” (At times, one catches unintended glimpses of the privileged Knickerbocker Roosevelt.)

  The next day a telegram from Albany reached police headquarters. The legislature planned to adjourn without passing any new police laws. TR and the board could not pencil in a list of officers to fire at will, and then achieve a sea change of personnel.

  Roosevelt was disappointed—a key weapon for reform was being denied him. But hurdles or not, he still planned to go after the corrupt men.

  Thursday morning Roosevelt presided over his first solo trial day. Close to 100 nervous bluecoats lined the halls of the second floor awaiting their turn. Roosevelt abruptly ordered a huge roundsman named Schauwacker to keep order. The room became unusually quiet—without the cops kidding each other in loud voices.

  The New York World sent its star reporter, Arthur Brisbane—known for his “flippant audacity”—to cover the show.

  “Sing, heavenly muse, the sad dejection of our poor policemen,” wrote Brisbane for the front page of the city’s (and the nation’s) largest-circulation newspaper. “We have a real Police Commissioner. His name is Theodore Roosevelt. His teeth are big and white; his eyes are small and piercing; his voice is rasping … his heart is full of reform, and a policeman in full uniform, with helmet, revolver and night club, is no more to him than a plain every day human being. He is at work now teaching the force that it is paid to work, not to boss.”

  So began the front-page coverage in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Roosevelt and Pulitzer would have a rocky go of it over the next decade but for that first honeymoon month or so of TR’s police job, the World and almost all the dailies treated the new commissioner admiringly.

  Think what must be the poor policeman’s feelings when he comes up for trial before a man like Roosevelt!

  Roosevelt speaks English accurately. He does not say, “I done it” or “I seen it.” He talks much more like a Boston man or an Englishman than like a New York Police Commissioner … When he asks a question, Mr. Roosevelt shoots it at the poor trembling policeman as he would shoot a bullet at a coyote. And when he asks a question, he shows a set of teeth calculated to unnerve the bravest of the finest. The teeth are very very white and almost as big as a colt’s teeth … The lower teeth look like a row of dominoes … He has a knack of showing them all at once when he speaks quickly and when he does that he seems to say: “Tell the truth to your commissioner or he’ll bite your head off…

  Under his right ear, he has a long scar. It is the opinion of all policemen who have talked with him that he got that scar fighting an Indian out West. It is also their opinion that the Indian is dead.

  But Roosevelt’s voice is the policeman’s hardest trial. It is an exasperating voice, a sharp voice, a rasping voice. It is a voice that comes from the tips of the teeth and seems to say in its tones, “What do you amount to, anyway?”

  In the good old days … the owner of such a voice as Roosevelt’s would have been clubbed on general principles. Now the bravest policeman must listen to that voice, obey it and seem to like it.

  Roosevelt was ready to clean the stables. He would hire fairly, fire as quickly as possible, and demand discipline. Jacob Riis, his staunchest ally, would say that TR brought a “moral purpose” to 300 Mulberry Street for the first time. “The ordinary attitude of Mulberry Street toward a new commissioner is one of good natured, half indulgent, half amused deference,” wrote Riis. “The coming of Roosevelt has made a sudden and extraordinary change.”

  Lincoln Steffens, less hagiographic, interpreted TR’s arrival a bit differently. “The police were excited … but … could not believe it all at once,” wrote Steffens. “They laughed, they are cynics of the worst sort; ‘the finest’ are. They are confidently wicked; they have practiced corruption so long that they believe it is good; they know it is … for it pays.”

  Atop the chain of command stood the tarnished chief of police, Thomas Byrnes, whose offer of resignation had been ignored. (The mayor happened to like him.) “I think I shall move against Byrnes at once,” Roosevelt wrote to longtime friend Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge. “I thoroughly distrust him and cannot do any thorough work while he remains. It will be a very hard fight, and I have no idea how it will come out.”

  y the time Roosevelt became a police commissioner, Thomas Byrnes was one of the most famous and recognizable New Yorkers, right up there with bulbous-nosed J. P. Morgan and hourglass-shaped Lillian Russell. (In that era, just a few years before newspapers could print photographs, being identifiable in public was rare.) “There is not, except among law breakers, a more popular man in New York City,” wrote Shepp’s New York City Illustrated in 1894, before Lexow. The guidebook advised readers bent on bird-dogging a celebrity that Byrnes, a tall heavyset man with a mustache, walked daily from his home at West 57th Street down to the Mulberry Street headquaters, smoking a large black cigar, and returned at 4 p.m.

  Veteran police officers could leave their jobs in three ways: in a coffin, by resigning honorably on a half-salary pension, or by being dismissed in disgrace without retirement money. “To force Byrnes out publicly and to have every policeman on the force know that he has been forced out would do more good than anything else.” That’s what reporter Arthur Brisbane of the World claimed was Roosevelt’s private opinion on the topic.

  The dismissal drama at 300 Mulberry now turned into something of a game of chicken. Corrupt officers could risk keeping their jobs, hoping no charges would be brought against them, or they could try to retire immediately.

  At the board meeting on Friday, May 17, Commissioner Parker slapped down a stack of more than two dozen pension applications. The board approved twenty-seven out of thirty applications, adding a hefty $20,375 to the department’s pension bu
rden. (The law clearly stated that all officers with no charges pending who had served twenty-five years—or twenty years for Civil War veterans—must be granted a pension.)

  The reform commissioners found it especially galling to approve the honorable retirement of white-haired ward detective Edward Shalvey, thirty-four years on the force, who had admitted at Lexow being a bagman for six captains, including Eakins. His Lexow testimony had freed him from prosecution.

  The board, with little choice, approved Shalvey’s annual pension of $700. The lawyers, Parker and Andrews, had advised allowing this mass retirement as the quickest way to clean out the deadwood, but it was an open secret that Roosevelt was frustrated and vowed to prosecute wherever possible.

  The Friday board meeting marked the new commissioners’ continuing strides forward in tackling issues ranging from picayune to titanic to overhaul the department. Half the precincts—due to prosecution or retirement—lacked a captain and had sergeants filling in; the board would need to promote the right men. The current budget allowed for the hiring of 300 more patrolmen, but a new police civil service system needed to be created from scratch, with new physical standards—minimum height raised from five feet seven and a half inches to five feet eight inches over Roosevelt’s objections—as well as new mental and moral standards.

  The board wanted the police force to obey its order to quit political clubs but worried that captains might whitewash the effort. So the board voted that each of the 3,800 police officers must fill out and sign a form listing their club memberships. “I presume by the time the reports come in, the men will belong to very few clubs,” Roosevelt observed.