Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  Superintendent Byrnes and the old board, in the heat of Lexow’s anti-corruption fervor, had banned “ward detectives” in 1894 but that meant there were no local plainclothes men assigned full-time to investigate crime. This ban could start to cause problems capturing criminals and gathering leads since the reform board had also banned stool pigeons. Roosevelt and Parker were adamant about not paying one-half the city’s criminals to snoop on the other half.

  So Parker created a plan to bring back the ward detective, but he intended to weaken the bond between this plainclothes detective and the captain to deter any shakedowns. With his congenitally complicated mind, he decided that the ward detectives (two per shift per precinct) would report regularly to Chief of Detectives O’Brien at Mulberry Street, but receive daily orders from their captains.

  Parker’s plan called for extraordinarily long shifts. The day men would work 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and one of them would remain on reserve each night to help the 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift. He studied the past thoroughly and placed all the men under central office command to avoid what he had concluded was the biggest hindrance to quicker crime detection: “sarcasm and criticism” between precinct men and the fellows from headquarters.

  The four-man board approved the plan. Since the chief controlled transfers, Parker was able to single-handedly overhaul this department, with little input from the other three commissioners. Bringing back ward detectives was either brilliant or naive or, as cynics later charged, part of Parker’s devious plan to reintroduce shakedowns.

  The deeds and motives of Andrew Parker often fell into those hard-to-parse categories. He seemed to be a passionate advocate of reform. He shared a law office on Nassau Street with an anti-Tammany reformer whose father served on the board of the Parkhurst Society. He was born in the northern stretches of New York City, a year after Roosevelt; his father was a chemist; he studied law at Columbia with William C. Whitney and served as an assistant district attorney until a Tammany D.A. dismissed him. He was not married and lived in a boardinghouse at fashionable 20 East 29th Street. Parker was a guest at Sagamore Hill and at several Roosevelt dinners; he shared the dais with TR on numerous occasions, giving speeches mostly at churches, reform groups, temperance societies.

  Roosevelt wrote of Parker back in the summer of 1895: “He is dead game and very efficient. He is absolutely free from jealousy and can do many things which I cannot. He likes to work beneath the surface.” Another time: “He has exactly the peculiar knowledge and ability and the temper of courage and ruthlessness needed for our task.” And Roosevelt confided to sister Corinne that the other two commissioners “could be replaced with advantage by two high class clerks.”

  Yet, there was something off about Andrew Parker. TR once called him “queer as Dick’s hat.”

  A meticulous lawyer, he could talk endlessly about the fine print of a contract while ignoring the larger issues. His stenographer noted that Parker included punctuation when he did dictation. “He detested a misplaced comma as though it were an infectious microbe,” recalled Louis Posner. A friend of his wrote that though Parker was a nominal Democrat “his mind was so independent and logical that … he [reserved] his efforts for the men and measures that were to his liking.” He read several foreign languages, including French, German, Hebrew, and Latin. He developed a rapport with many high-ranking police officers, including Chief Conlin and Chief of Detectives O’Brien.

  His feud with Roosevelt began in earnest in February 1896. Roosevelt—so deeply frustrated on so many fronts—would over time demonize Parker and assign to him the worst motives, branding him as deceitful, corrupt, and worse.

  Fellow commissioner Andrews found a huge gulf between “the secret and evasive Parker and the open, direct emphatic Roosevelt.” Judge William Travers Jerome later commented that Roosevelt was “very much impressed by Parker” at first but that Parker eventually tied Roosevelt “in a knot.”

  The battle began over promotions. Stickler Parker, rereading the records from Albany, had discovered that the method the board had chosen—in its first months—of assigning and promoting officers technically violated the New York state legislature’s mandates.

  Back in July 1895, Roosevelt, boyishly cherishing derring-do, had pushed a system that stressed rewarding heroics by creating a merit list of “men who have done special service at the risk of their lives in saving life, in protecting life and property, in putting down disorder and in arresting dangerous criminals.”

  The board would recommend heroic officers for promotion, and they would then take a pass–fail exam. Parker found the police civil service law required a competitive exam to rank the men. Parker also discovered the board had no right to promote patrolmen to roundsmen since that technically was not a separate rank (such as captain or sergeant) but a duty assignment controlled by the chief.

  This change in method might seem obscure, but reforming the police department hinged on placing strong honorable men at the highest positions—breaking from the old patronage days. And the force at New Year’s had openings for sixteen captains (i.e., half the precincts), for two dozen sergeants, and, most importantly, for the district inspectors and deputy chief, directly in line for the top job.

  At first, Parker’s discovery about promotions hadn’t seemed too disruptive. (It was a tad ironic, though, that Parker was correcting former civil service commissioner Roosevelt over a civil service law.) The board—with Andrews taking the lead—created a new method that would respect “seniority, merit and [include a] competitive exam.” Each of the four board members would rate a candidate on a scale of 1 to 65 points based on a long list of qualities: integrity, efficiency, zeal, personal character, gallantry, courage, detection of criminals. (In practice, the long list would allow a commissioner to justify almost any rating.) A competitive written exam on laws, police rules, and tactics would determine the other 35 points.

  Each applicant would receive a numerical rating from 1 to 100; the board would vote on promoting anyone scoring above 75. Seniority would break numerical ties.

  The law stated that this bipartisan board needed a unanimous vote to promote an officer or a three-to-one vote if the applicant was endorsed by the chief of police. Here’s where the mischief began. One commissioner could gum up the works and there were bound to be disagreements among four men over several dozen promotions.

  Parker began expressing “reservations” about three veteran officers with stellar reputations, all darlings of reform: Moses Cortwright for deputy chief, and Nicholas Brooks and John McCullagh from acting inspectors to full inspectors. All three were Republicans and would be in line for the job of Chief Conlin, who had health issues, including failing eyesight. Parker—the nominal Democrat—also demanded that several other captains be allowed into the running for these plum inspector posts. Roosevelt, Andrews, and Grant opposed him.

  The feud escalated quickly from Parker’s muffled qualms to an outright battle.

  Citing a shortage of detectives for his pet project (so far fewer than half the precincts had new plainclothes precinct men), Parker suggested that all four commissioners give up their personal roundsmen, who acted as jacks-of-all-trades. For Roosevelt, this was a gut-wrenching decision. Four days into his new job, Roosevelt had hired thirty-three-year-old patrolman Michael W. Tierney; a decade earlier, when TR was captain of Company B of the Eighth Regiment of the National Guard, he had found Corporal Tierney to be “exceptionally able and trustworthy.”

  Over the last nine months, Roosevelt had probably spent more time with the beefy Irish Catholic from the streets of New York than with any other person, certainly more than with Riis or Edith or the children or even Andrews. The only near rival might be secretary Minnie, given TR’s Niagara of dictation.

  Tierney, a seven-year police veteran, had served as Roosevelt’s guide to the inner workings of the police force and to its clannish traditions. TR made Tierney work exceptionally long hours. Several times Tierney had accompanied TR on midnight rambles; t
he commissioner had also sent him on stealth investigations and several solo rambles. Back in July (before Parker’s discovery), Roosevelt had rushed through a promotion to make Tierney a roundsman so that Tierney had the authority to press charges against any patrolmen caught napping or gabbing. (It turned out a police commissioner didn’t have that power.)

  TR—always open to moral arguments about manpower—now reluctantly agreed to surrender Tierney in late January, but he did so knowing that he was secretly planning a plum reward for the loyal employee. Roosevelt days later suggested Tierney for promotion to sergeant, a scant six months after his rise to roundsman. Three of the commissioners rated him 60 out of a possible 65—Parker did not rate him for never-explained reasons—and Tierney scored 25 out of 35 on the written exam, putting him at 85, near the top of a long list of the sergeant candidates. At the meeting on Saturday, February 1, 1896, the board voted on promoting eleven men.

  Without any warning or preamble, Parker shocked Roosevelt by approving the others but opposing Tierney, saying he had “reservations.” Playing his cards close to the vest, Parker asserted that Tierney’s police record had almost a dozen minor violations and one major one. But what Parker saw as a blemish, Roosevelt regarded as a badge of honor.

  Half a decade earlier, in 1890, Tierney was suspended for twenty days for pulling a revolver and threatening to shoot a civilian during an after-hours saloon arrest. Tierney claimed he was falsely accused of being drunk and abusive during the incident because the saloon keeper was pals with a Tammany police commissioner.

  The board, siding with the saloon owner and the man arrested, had found Tierney guilty.

  Parker’s vote against Tierney that Saturday galled Roosevelt deeply.

  Snow fell hard on Monday, February 3, mantling the city in white. Commissioner Parker had told the other board members he would be in Brooklyn on police business during the Tuesday board meeting.

  At 3 p.m. on Tuesday, Roosevelt called in the other commissioners, brought forward another group of names of roundsmen for promotion to sergeant and reinserted the name of Tierney. With Parker gone, anyone receiving three ayes would also require Chief Conlin’s approval to be promoted.

  Conlin was called to the boardroom. While his relations with Roosevelt had always been cordial, Roosevelt clearly treated him like an employee, lecturing him on duty, even though the chief earned $6,000 to TR’s $5,000 and was granted key powers by the legislature. The chief looked over the list and said he could give his approval to all the names except Tierney. Roosevelt was again stunned. Was this Parker’s doing? Roosevelt said that both he and Commissioner Grant remembered the chief saying he could endorse promoting Tierney. Conlin wasn’t so sure about that. “Did you deceive your superior officer when you said [Tierney] was alright?” TR barked at him.

  Roosevelt then added that Conlin had already delivered a written recommendation for Tierney. The chief again said he didn’t recall doing so. Roosevelt had the promotion book brought to him; inside it, pinned to the pages of various officers, were brief signed endorsements from the chief, inspectors, captains. On Tierney’s page was pinned a note signed by Chief Peter Conlin. Roosevelt jabbed his finger at the signature. Again he angrily asked whether Conlin had lied during this earlier written appraisal. Then he said that if Conlin had, then the chief might be liable to charges of insubordination.

  Conlin muttered: “Since I wrote it, I’ll stand by it,” so he gave his very reluctant recommendation that Tierney be promoted. The men were all promoted to sergeant and received 33 percent pay increases to $2,000 a year. The following day, Conlin asked to see the promotion book; he examined the Tierney page. There was indeed an authentic Conlin recommendation pinned to it but it was advocating a different officer.

  Conlin—generally low key—was quite irritated. TR had bullied him in front of the commissioners, he had been duped. (Roosevelt later said that Grant had organized that promotion book; in other words, that Grant had possibly misfiled the note.)

  Sergeant Tierney was assigned to the Charles Street station. Later that year he named his newborn “Theodore Roosevelt Tierney.”

  Parker dated his falling-out with Roosevelt to the first week in February, when he had opposed Tierney and decided he could not vote for Brooks or McCullagh, two other Roosevelt favorites, as inspectors. The board had a heated closed session on February 15 but Parker would not budge.

  Away from 300 Mulberry, the ridicule of Roosevelt continued. “Let us be just,” opined the Washington Post. “By the mobilization of the thieves, thugs and murderers in New York, Mr. Roosevelt is giving the balance of the country excellent police protection.”

  The World ran a list of fifty days of New York City crimes.

  Even the reform New York Times—with its daily circulation dwindling to 10,000 copies or 1/50th of the World’s—seemed to be poking a little fun at him with its February 9 piece “War on the Banana Skin.” The Times reported that Commissioner Roosevelt had summoned three captains, along with all their roundsmen and sergeants, and “talked to them pointedly about the prevalence of banana skins in the streets on the eastside.” He read to them the city ordinance that called for up to a $5 fine and ten days in jail for littering fruit or vegetables. And, he read a second ordinance that required the posting of the first ordinance in all places selling such items. Roosevelt wanted those laws enforced. He also told them pushcarts could no longer block traffic on market days on Hester and Rivington Streets. “This law will inflict much hardship on peddlers,” said one captain. “Nothing must stand in the way of the enforcement of the law,” replied Roosevelt.

  It was becoming increasingly clear that Roosevelt was far more popular out of town than in it.

  He traveled to Chicago to give three speeches on Washington’s birthday. A thousand college students in Kent Theater at the University of Chicago greeted him in the morning with a foot-stomping chant:

  Who is “Ted-dy” Roos-e-velt?

  First in war, first in peace.

  First to reform the New York Police.

  Roosevelt’s theme was the reform of municipal government. He told them he knew the politics of only six of the last fifty men promoted in New York. He told them he never made a decision with an eye toward an election. “My closing word to you is: be honest, upright, loyal, patriotic Americans, strong for the right and against all evil.”

  As the closing of the police lodgings loomed, Commissioner Parker, true to form, raised concerns—perhaps more legalistic than charitable—about the exact number of available beds. He convinced the commissioners to push the February 15 target date back to March 1, then to March 11, 1896, until the Department of Charities and Prisons finally finished retrofitting a double-decker barge for homeless men and women in the East River.

  On that snowy, extremely windy night of March 11, hundreds of vagrants, their ill-fitting rags dusted white, showed up at station houses citywide and the desk sergeants told them to hike over either to the privately run Wayfarers’ Lodge at 520 West 28th Street or to the new city-run barge and pier at 26th Street and the East River. From the Eldridge Street station—the most frequented basement—to the cavernous public waiting room at the East Side pier marked a two-mile walk. Five inches of snow fell by 8 p.m., followed by sleet and hail; winds hit forty miles an hour; the harbormaster hung a hurricane warning flag.

  Those first hundred who had a C.O.S. ticket that night and tramped to the Wayfarers’ Lodge entered a hive of efficient charity. The Charity Organization Society had purchased several lots next to a sprawling woodyard and two years earlier had built a twenty-five- by seventy-five-foot four-story brick building, with basement shower-baths and disinfection rooms and second-, third-, and fourth-floor dormitories, able to hold 100 men. No smoking, drinking, or cursing allowed.

  The drill called for new arrivals to register, answer questions, go to the basement, strip naked, and be examined, while handing over all their clothes to be fumigated in a mesh bag, hung in a room heated to 250 degrees.
Anyone found with any money would be told to leave; any weapons would be confiscated. Everyone must bathe, and sleep in fresh pajamas. Dinner 5 to 7 p.m.—mostly meat stew except Friday fish chowder; breakfast 6 to 8 a.m.—bread, coffee, and soup. As mandatory morning-after work, men had to either double-saw an eighth of a cord of firewood or split a quarter cord with an ax.

  As for the tramps who trudged to the city’s East Side pier and barge near Bellevue Hospital, they found municipal officials trying to duplicate that Protestant charity’s efficiency. On March 11, that first night, 363 men and women slept in beds either on the barge or in the building, with the overflow slouched on benches in the waiting room on the pier. They too had to register, strip, bathe, be examined, have garments fumigated. They must wake up at 5:30 a.m. and after an ample breakfast work three hours “to redeem themselves and earn their self-respect” as Charity Commissioner John P. Faure put it. If Faure ran out of tasks, he said he’d have inmates wheel barrels of coal up and down the lawn of the hospital. Again, anyone with money would be asked to leave. Faure stated the city did not want to compete with low-end lodging houses.

  The next morning, March 12, attendants rousted the “Wandering Willies” at 5:30 a.m. and ordered them to shovel snow around Bellevue before breakfast; many offered to go seek work immediately but were not allowed to leave.

  City officials, after the first few chaotic days, began asking more detailed questions and doing background checks, and discovered that at least one-third of the men had not been in New York City for the sixty days required to qualify for municipal charity, that 429 of the first 781 home addresses were false. Also, three-quarters were under the age of forty and were described as “able-bodied and strong” by a “physician who watched them as they bathed.”