Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  The board also ordered that all future correspondence not include a man’s politics or religion. Commissioner Grant joked that would free him from the temptation to help Republicans, while TR—echoing his credo to keep national politics out of police administration—said knowing a man was Republican “would have just the opposite effect upon me.” (The baldness of the statement appalled the most powerful Republican in the state, boss Thomas Collier Platt, who called Roosevelt “a rich man with some force of character [but] more of a mugwump than a Republican.”)

  Roosevelt, point man for civil service reform, agreed to go in person to the Board of Estimate and request money to hire three clerks to administer written tests. While he was there, he would also ask for $2,500 to buy ten horses. Commissioner Grant modeled minimum equine standards for a patrolman’s mount after the U.S. Cavalry, and for patrol wagon horses after requirements for hauling U.S. artillery.

  “There is nothing of the purple in it,” commented TR of the board’s daily work. “It is as grimy as all work for municipal reform.”

  Roosevelt mentioned in passing at the meeting that he was disappointed to discover that many of the department’s own rules of conduct for police officers, especially those governing walking a beat, were routinely ignored. The board voted to send out a directive that all the rules must be strictly enforced.

  As Roosevelt had earlier requested, Chief Clerk Kipp now handed him a list of twenty-four officers with charges pending—including two captains and two sergeants. Roosevelt ordered that these cases be prepared and put on the calendar “at once.” He wanted the corrupt officers out. The two unseen elephants in the room at that moment were Chief Byrnes and the charismatic Inspector Alexander “Clubber” Williams.

  Byrnes’s first move at the arrival of the new commissioners was quite shrewd. He announced himself to the newspapers as a grand crusader for reform, eager to root out police corruption. TR was outflanked.

  The chief called a rare Saturday morning meeting of all the captains on May 18, 1895. These men in blue uniforms with two gold bars at the wrist and collar, some of the most powerful men in New York City, mounted the steps of 300 Mulberry Street and found themselves treated like schoolboys. Byrnes handed out pencils and sheets of paper and told the captains to take notes; he said he did not want to have to repeat himself.

  McAvoy, Eakins, Schmittberger, and others squeezed into the school desks in the room where police civil service exams were usually held. The legendary detective—fifty-two years old, six feet tall, thinning hair, pale Irish complexion—said he expected immediate dramatic changes in the department. He ordered the captains to enforce every rule in the manual “no matter how long some of them may have practically been a dead letter.”

  One has to wonder what the captains were thinking. Was the chief mouthing pieties for the commissioners or did he really mean it? Rule 422 stated that begging was illegal and all beggars under sixteen must be brought to headquarters. Enforcing that rule alone could tie up half the force for months. Patrolmen were supposed to make a report in writing any time they left their post; no one, not even the grayest graybeards, could remember ever seeing one single written report. Another rule stated all policemen must refrain from “harsh, violent, coarse, profane or insolent language” (that would eliminate half their vocabulary, sniped a newspaperman), and they’d now apparently have to start “marching in military formation” when rushing to quell a riot. The manual comprised 100-plus pages of detailed regulations covering everything down to ticketing all sleighs driven without bells.

  Byrnes, in addition, ordered that the captains enforce all laws, especially those against gambling and prostitution, and enforce the Sabbath laws preventing saloons from opening on Sundays. He warned that the department would check into any citizen’s complaint and, if substantiated, the Board of Commissioners would put the captains on trial. Again, was the chief serious? Some saloons had been open Sundays since the Civil War. One expensive brothel on Bedford Street catered mainly to judges and legislators.

  Byrnes went further to placate Roosevelt and Parkhurst and the reform movement. After he turned out the captains with their new orders, he called in Inspector Peter Conlin and told him to assign plainclothes detectives to investigate Captain Eakins’s 15th Precinct. While roundsmen tracked lowly patrolmen daily, the New York police department at that time very rarely investigated at the exalted rank of captain.

  Inspector Conlin—a by-the-book, low-key officer—assigned two men to see if any prostitutes were working the sidewalks in the area radiating out from Washington Square Park. Conlin told the men to accompany the young ladies-for-hire and to collect details about hotels and prices to see whether Eakins was ignoring disorderly houses. “Is that all Inspector Conlin told you to do?” twenty-eight-year-old officer Peter McCarty was later asked. “Well, the instructions was not to have any [sexual] intercourse with the females.”

  The dragnet was closing in on Eakins.

  But that Saturday at noon, the tight-knit fraternity of police tried to help a fellow officer. Someone at HQ must have tipped Eakins to the police department’s own investigation of him because he suddenly submitted to Chief Clerk Kipp an application to retire. In his retirement filing, Eakins stated that he had served twenty-nine years, which would by law guarantee him a half-salary pension if no charges were pending.

  Did the Parkhurst Society accusations count as “charges”? No one knew.

  Monday night Roosevelt had a secret dinner to attend; at it, he would have his first chance to talk at length with Dr. Parkhurst. (Not far away, that same night, another secret dinner of a very different sort would take place in a photographer’s studio; Stanford White, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, “electrician” Nikola Tesla, and thirty others would drink 144 bottles of champagne until the dessert course, when a near-naked sixteen-year-old popped out of a massive pie.)

  Few details have survived of Roosevelt’s dinner. It’s apparent the new police commissioner arrived leery of the unrealistic expectations of “reformers following the lead of Dr. Parkhurst,” who hoped to quash “certain evils which I fear cannot possibly be suppressed in a city like New York in our present stage of existence.” He also, like everyone else, had heard the vague stories of the minister playing leapfrog in a brothel. Lincoln Steffens wrote of his own meeting with Parkhurst, “[I expected] a wild man, ridiculous, sensational, unscrupulous, or plain crazy, [only] to call on him and find a tall slim smiling gentleman, quiet, determined, fearless, and humorous.” Apparently, TR had a similar experience, soon dubbing him a “good fellow.” Parkhurst evidently could be a charming dinner companion. Based on later events and opinions expressed, Roosevelt and Parkhurst discussed corruption in the police department and the efforts of the Society for the Prevention of Crime to help remove Big Bill Devery, Captain Eakins, and especially Chief Byrnes. Prostitution might have been too delicate a topic for either man.

  By the start of their third week on the job, Theodore Roosevelt and the other commissioners were settling into a new routine: board meetings on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays at 10 a.m. (with Roosevelt arriving early and Parker arriving late), and marathon police misconduct trials on Thursdays.

  Parker reviewed legal cases; Grant looked for waste in supplies, from harbor boats to horse feed. Andrews seconded Roosevelt. Roosevelt accepted all speaking engagements and interviews.

  TR pronounced political “pull” and bribery dead. “If a man has President Cleveland, Gov. Morton and Mayor Strong behind him, it won’t help him one particle.”

  Roosevelt was clearly developing a stump speech on police reform, a narrative he would deliver at least 100 times in the eight months remaining in 1895.

  He stressed that civil service merit—passing physical, mental, and moral tests—would alone rule for new hiring and promotions. He stressed that the police would investigate the “moral character” of all applicants. (Roosevelt, for one, it would turn out, would not approve any man who had worked in a saloon.) He promised
the civil service written test would be “simple, practical and common sense.” (The first test would measure the applicants’ talents in spelling, writing legibly, crafting a letter, simple arithmetic, and New York City geography.)

  Roosevelt also unveiled a startling new directive. He wanted New York policemen to be polite. “We are bound to make all honest, brave and efficient members of the force who are bold in their dealings with the criminals and courteous in their dealings with the ordinary citizens, understand that we are their friends.” He wanted them to regard “politeness as a sign of dignity not subservience.”

  Brisbane of the World was also present when Roosevelt reprimanded a patrolman for lounging against a wall and talking loudly at headquarters. “Officer, good manners are of importance,” TR told the man, who, according to Brisbane, seemed quite baffled at what he was doing wrong. Brisbane added that he saw “a policeman in full uniform open a door for a man” without political pull.

  It was as though the board was trying to end the era of tough undereducated men dominating the force.

  Inspector Alexander “Clubber” Williams, also in Roosevelt’s crosshairs, was just returning from a fifteen-day vacation and denied that he was quitting. “Why should I? I’m a young man yet and never felt better.”

  Williams, also known as “Fighting Aleck,” was a former ship’s carpenter, belligerent, blunt-spoken, still “full enough of brute strength and courage” that even at age fifty-five the New York World surmised he could survive in the ring with a Sullivan or a Corbett. Originally from Cape Breton, Canada, he was large, handsome, and cocky, with close-cropped hair and a beau D’Artagnan–style mustache. He intimidated people.

  By one estimate, he had racked up a staggering 358 complaints, making him “the most venomously hated, frequently tried and most valuable of police officers,” according to Harper’s magazine. During his first days as a patrolman assigned to the corner of Broadway and Houston Street, he asked around to learn who were the toughest gang members in the neighborhood. He threw first one, then the other through a plate-glass window.

  He was famed for breaking up riots and crowds. “In the days of the old walking matches at Madison Square Garden, when crowds were packed so dense about the doors that life was endangered,” observed the New York World, “ ‘Fighting Aleck’ and his club could always make a passageway.”

  Williams clubbed his way up the ranks. When he was promoted from a waterfront crime precinct to overseeing the city’s up-and-coming vice district along Broadway from the 20s to the 40s, he said: “I’ve been living on rump steak since I been on the force; now I’m going to have a bit of Tenderloin.” His nickname for the locale lasted half a century. He was said to receive a kickback for every shot of Hollywood Whiskey drunk in Tenderloin saloons. Miscellaneous complaints charged him with accepting, among other noncash items: a diamond ring, two cows, six pocket handkerchiefs, a gold-headed cane, a pistol, a pair of slippers, a velvet vest.

  Like Devery, Williams was investigated numerous times. Roosevelt even took a crack at him back in 1884 when TR was a young crusading state assemblyman heading a committee probing corruption in New York City. Captain Williams—true to his reputation—was stunningly frank on all topics including prostitution. “I take a liberal view of the matter and don’t believe that it can be suppressed,” he told the committee. “There are 40,000 strangers in the city every day, and these all go to the places in my precinct, and not from curiosity I am sure.”

  Williams admitted that he allowed brothels to remain open if they stay “orderly.” He said he opposed shutting them down because that would force the bawdy women into the streets and tenements. “It’s like taking a small-pox patient into the street, it merely spreads the disease.” Williams said he recommended creating a red-light district. At the end of his testimony, he asked if he could leave the hearing room immediately to go to a highly touted “walking match” at the Garden. “I suppose you find it even more interesting than the committee,” said Roosevelt. “One is about as big a circus as the other,” replied Clubber.

  A decade later, committees were still probing Williams. The Lexow Committee asked why he allowed eighty-three brothels to stay open in the Tenderloin. Clubber hesitated, then replied: “Well, they were fashionable.”

  GOFF: Can’t you give any other answer than that?

  WILLIAMS: No, I can’t say anything else about it. They were always there. When they were closed up, they would open again.

  GOFF: Then you, the police officer charged with carrying out the laws and paid by the people for so doing, say that you left these houses open because it was fashionable?

  WILLIAMS: Yes.

  “Don’t you know that’s an extraordinary answer?” Senator Lexow interjected. “Well, I haven’t any other,” Williams replied.

  The Lexow Committee had trouble pinpointing Williams’s wealth but uncovered ownership of a building at 109 East 10th Street, a sprawling estate in Cos Cob, Connecticut, with a 100-foot stone seawall, a dock, and boathouse, and a $4,000 steam yacht named Eleanor.

  Goff later asked Williams how he had amassed so much on a policeman’s salary. The big inspector smugly answered: “Corner lots in Japan.”

  On the rainy, unseasonably warm morning of Friday, May 27, Republican commissioners Grant and Roosevelt traveled separately to work, although they lived a block apart. Soon after their arrival, genial Grant walked into Roosevelt’s office carrying an envelope. The building was abuzz with whispers of dismissals, retirements, criminal charges. Roosevelt opened the envelope. Inside was Clubber Williams’s application for retirement with pension. TR was furious. Roosevelt sent word for Parker and Andrews to come to his office. He wanted to figure out a way to reject it even though no charges were pending, but his three colleagues disagreed with him. Parker and Andrews, both lawyers, said the law was clear. Grant was generally sympathetic to veteran police officers, especially Republican ones. TR, still seething, dismissed the others and summoned Inspector Williams to a private meeting. The stocky president did not gladhand the towering officer. He apparently lectured him for a long time on kickbacks and community trust and honor. “Clubber” left, looking “annoyed and angry,” according to a newspaperman lurking in the hallway.

  This Williams brouhaha delayed the Friday Police Board meeting two hours till noon; the meeting, barely under way, was suddenly interrupted by a messenger delivering Jacob Riis’s Evening Sun. The headline read: WILLIAMS GONE, BYRNES TO GO. TR was furious, since the board had not yet even voted on Williams’s retirement. Roosevelt could be seen hunching over each of his seated colleagues and whispering pointed questions. He then barred the press and could be heard through the door yelling at Commissioner Grant, who, it was later learned, admitted he had leaked the story. (TR would later privately call Grant a “muttonhead.”)

  At 2 p.m. Williams approached the boardroom, knocked quietly, and entered. A few minutes later, Williams exited with a grim smile. Roosevelt followed soon after. “Inspector Williams has asked for retirement and the board has unanimously granted it; the law is mandatory and we were obliged to retire him.” Roosevelt, very uncharacteristically, refused to comment further. The inspector would receive $1,750 a year for life.

  “Clubber” went downstairs, took off his uniform, and lit up a big black cigar. His lifelong cop pals teasingly sang out to the ex-inspector: “Goodbye MISTER Williams” and he replied “Goodbye, boys.” One newspaperman said these veterans “looked at him like the last rescue boat leaving a wreck.”

  Williams had one final profane statement to make. None of the newspapers could print it but that didn’t stop him. The New York Press captured it best by inserting blanks instead of paraphrasing. “I leave this department without a stain on me. I ain’t ashamed of anything I’ve done. That — — — that sat in the chair at the Lexow committee investigation and told those — — — lies about me, couldn’t prove them. Then, after throwing — — all over me, he says he is going to take a mud bath in Carls
bad. He needs a mud bath, he does. I mean that big fat Schmittberger. The Extraordinary Grand Jury hunted through every bit of evidence against me. They went from hell to Beersheba for it. — — if they could find a — shred of proof against me.”

  A reporter shouted out a question: Would Williams go into business? “No, twenty-nine years of police service have unfitted me for that,” he answered. And a surprised newspaperman added: “He said that last whole sentence without swearing. He did, really and truly.”

  Williams was gone but not in the manner TR had envisioned.

  TR and the board spent the rest of that Friday afternoon in a very testy mood dealing with mundane matters such as civil service requirements and reinstatement applications. Several newly received citizen complaint letters were passed around for quick perusal including one by a Thomas McGregor that brutally criticized Byrnes. “Murderers and thugs continue to have their own way,” it stated, “and bunco steerers and confidence men feel certain that they are safe in plying their business knowing that Byrnes … has got a great share in the swag.” Commissioner Andrews absentmindedly handed a copy of it to a reporter who had asked to see it.

  The building was humming with speculation that Byrnes would be forced out. The Chicago Tribune wondered … if bribery charges were brought, would George Gould explain “how he could give such good [stock] tips [to Byrnes] when he could not give them to himself?” It also quoted Byrnes as saying “I’m not thinking of getting out now. I am here to serve the public.” He had repeatedly told his rich, powerful friends, such as the mayor, that he was staying.

  On Saturday morning Chief Byrnes awoke to extensive column inches of negative comments about himself, rumors of his imminent departure, and big ugly helpings of that citizen’s complaint letter. “[Byrnes] is worth $1.5 million and every dollar of it was wages of blackmail and corruption,” McGregor had written. “As a police officer, [Byrnes] was never known to do any brave act but was always quick to take credit for that which was done by others.”