Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  Josephine Shaw Lowell, former head of C.O.S., wrote that those statistics confirmed her suspicions about the bulk of New York’s homeless; she contended that at least 200 of the 300 nightly sleepers clearly deserved the workhouse. Conveniently enough, that pier near Bellevue could take them there, if only the police would arrest them and judges convict them.

  At the mid-March board meetings, Commissioner Parker refused yet again to approve the promotion of either Brooks or McCullagh. His logjamming of McCullagh was especially irritating to Roosevelt, who would repeatedly champion the man.

  By many accounts, John McCullagh, born in 1845 in Ireland to Scotch Protestant parents, represented the beau ideal of a policeman: handsome, brave, a magnificent equestrian with a cavalry-trim dark mustache, a stickler for detail and discipline. Happily married, financially comfortable, with cousins who attended Yale, McCullagh was a fixture on the West End Avenue social scene. Absolutely incorruptible, this strict law-and-order Republican captain despised the likes of Tammany’s Devery.

  After joining the force at age twenty-five, McCullagh rose to captain in a dozen years; he helped break up many gangs. Roosevelt had the opportunity to hear an eyewitness account of McCullagh’s bravery. When Riis was a young crime reporter, he was once walking after midnight along a deserted street when he bumped into the Whyo gang—“drunken roughs ripe for mischief.” Riis recalled that “the leader had a long dirk-knife with which he playfully jabbed me in the ribs, insolently demanding what I thought of it.” Riis, struggling to sound brave, hoped his voice wouldn’t crack and answered: “About two inches longer than the law allows.” The short Evening Sun scribe tried to shove the knife aside but failed. The thug leaned forward and the tip pierced the skin on Riis’s chest.

  The Danish newspaperman feared that one good thrust forward might kill him, and the cocksure goon was pushing. Riis quickly surveyed the Whyos surrounding him: “A human life was to them in the mood they were in, worth as much as the dirt under their feet.”

  At that moment, Captain McCullagh and his plainclothes detective happened to turn the corner. The two officers immediately attacked the gang. The Whyos dispersed and Riis found himself holding the dirk as a souvenir.

  On Friday, March 13, Roosevelt tried a new tactic in the promotion wars; he officially requested that Chief Conlin deliver an evaluation of Brooks and McCullagh. He would force an opinion out of him. That night, though the board was fracturing, Andrew Parker attended a small dinner party at Roosevelt’s sister’s house, at 689 Madison. Other distinguished guests included Reverend Parkhurst and Joseph B. Bishop, of the reform New York Evening Post. Conversation apparently veered politely away from Parker and Roosevelt’s tiff over promotions.

  After the guests exited, Bishop, an admirer of TR, walked a few blocks with Parker. “I wish you would stop him from talking so much in the newspapers,” Bishop years later quoted Parker as telling him. “He talks, talks, talks all the time. Scarcely a day passes that there is not something from him in the papers … It injures our work.”

  The veteran editor had difficulty suppressing a laugh. “Stop Roosevelt talking! Why, you would kill him. He has to talk. The peculiarity about him is that he has what is essentially a boy’s mind. What he thinks he says at once … It is his distinguishing characteristic, and I don’t know as he will ever outgrow it.”

  Over the weekend, Conlin decided that he would postpone indefinitely delivering any opinion on the worthiness of Brooks or McCullagh, in effect allowing Parker’s veto to stand.

  Roosevelt wrote to his sister in England: “Gradually and in spite of great difficulties with two of my colleagues I am getting this force into good shape, but I am quite sincere when I say I do not believe that any other man in the United States, not even the president, has had as heavy a task as I have had during the past ten months.”

  Though Roosevelt and Parker were fighting hard over these top-echelon promotions, they stood shoulder to shoulder in agreement on one type of candidate who should never enter the line of promotion for a shot at becoming chief of police. They both despised the prospect of a corrupt Tammany loyalist running the show. Parker had been fired from his assistant district attorney post by Tammany, making him a lifelong anti-machine Democrat.

  On Monday, March 16, the disgraced captain William S. Devery, accompanied by his high-priced lawyer, went on trial for receiving a $100 construction site bribe, the last of the cases pursued against him. If affable Devery could beat the rap, he could seek immediate reinstatement, and Tammany would have a feisty popular brave back in the game.

  ut of uniform for eighteen months, heavier and paler, William Devery showed up smiling in a dark suit on the morning of March 16, 1896, in the courtroom of Judge Frederick Smyth. He found himself encircled by friends.

  Seated upon the bench Devery saw supreme court judge Frederick Smyth, originally of County Galway, Ireland, who for the previous year had presided as Grand Sachem at Tammany Hall. Over at the prosecution’s table up front, he recognized several more Tammany men, including the district attorney himself, Colonel John Fellows, a dependable Democratic speechmaker.

  Milling among the dozens of current and former police officers in attendance, he spotted saloon owner Bob Nelson, who was especially pleased to see Devery, since he had put up bail. Acting as bail bondsman in a high-profile case marked a departure from Nelson’s bread-and-butter business of collecting five-dollar bail from streetwalkers in Devery’s various precincts; a reform pamphlet would later claim that Nelson was “so right with Devery” that he didn’t have to give the customary kickback to the police desk sergeants.

  But having so many Tammany men nearby did not guarantee a result in any courtroom, especially in a jury trial. This past year, Police Inspector William McLaughlin, another Tammany man, had been convicted on similar charges, of receiving a bribe from this very same builder, Francis W. Seagrist. McLaughlin and Devery were old pals; Devery had helped him avoid a night in the Tombs prison—while awaiting a verdict—and had snuck him into a Turkish bath last May 10.

  Juries were fickle, and no one expected the well-respected sixty-two-year-old Judge Smyth or district attorney Fellows, to do anything ham-handed for Devery. (Something subtle, however, was not out of the question.) Both men were venerated and articulate pillars of the community, the so-called respectable wing of Tammany. Fellows had abandoned Tammany for more than a decade in the wake of Tweed and more recently, he had rallied a presidential convention with a stirring speech.

  Judge Smyth, a veteran of the legal system, ran a tight courtroom. The Tammany Times crowed that Judge Smyth had been reversed on appeal only twice in fifteen years; the most recent, however, had been Charlie Gardner, the Parkhurst tour guide, ensnared by Devery but freed after serving one-third of his sentence. Reformers claimed the judge had always been biased in favor of the police.

  Representing Devery once again was Colonel E. C. James, with his trademark halo of white hair and a large eye-catching white mustache. As ever, he exuded charm and confidence.

  The newspapers expected jury selection to zip along; they were wrong.

  Colonel James was taking no chances; neither—to all outward appearances—was the D.A.’s office. The A.D.A. read prospective jurors a complicated forty-nine-word legal question—on the topic of “hypothesis of guilt by circumstantial evidence”—and if the man was unable to translate the legalese into New Yorkese, the A.D.A. asked the judge to reject him for lack of intelligence. It was perhaps odd that the prosecution should want amateur legal scholars who might understand that the legal threshold for “extorting a bribe” involved more than the mere palming of a $100 bill.

  The defense wanted no New Yorker who had followed the Lexow hearings.

  The dueling lawyers diddled away three days to empanel a jury, leaving not enough time to open the case on Friday. Then after a man—claiming to be from the district attorney’s office—came to a juror’s home on Allen Street, asking the man’s mother questions about his politi
cs, Judge Smyth decided to sequester the jury at the Broadway Central Hotel.

  They would be locked in a suite of rooms on the fifth floor, guarded by one Captain Lynch and four court attendants. The judge refused to allow any trips to theater or church but Captain Lynch took it upon himself to allow the fourteen men to take secluded supervised carriage rides in the park.

  Sequestered, the jury men had little to do over the weekend but talk or read the newspapers, shorn of any Devery trial articles. Fortunately, they could follow the latest smashmouth installment of the Roosevelt versus Pulitzer feud.

  The World had been running ongoing features on the crime waves plaguing Manhattan. In one piece, the paper listed the “Principal Highway Robberies and Burglaries of Fifty Days, as Reported by the Police and Newspapers” from December 1 to January 19.

  In his embattled, aggravated state, TR decided to debunk Pulitzer. Despite his reformer’s zeal for cost-cutting, he convinced the board and the shorthanded department to devote hundreds of police man-hours to reexamining forty-five separate cases to refute a two-month-old newspaper article that measured nine and a half by four and a half inches.

  Roosevelt was on tilt. His official statement, endorsed by his fellow board members, sounds like a dinner party rant. “It would be quite impossible to catalogue and refute every false statement the World makes, because that would need the daily publication of a sheet very nearly as large as the World itself and most of its slanders are made so loosely that they can only be met by a general denial. But on January 20 the World was sufficiently unwary to commit itself to a definite statement. It gave, with date and place, what it called a ‘catalogue of the principal highway robberies, and burglaries of the preceding fifty days’ so as to prove that crime was increasing in this city and the police were inefficient.”

  He stated that only four of forty-five crimes cited by the World were “true.” Roosevelt distributed to newspapermen a detailed double-columned list of each of the cases, presenting the World version and the “Actual Facts”:

  And so on. Roosevelt reminded readers of the fake “Rogue’s Gallery” story in December, which he said contained what chemists would call a mere “trace” of truth; this list of crimes was 91 percent false with 9 percent true. TR called that an improvement for the World.

  The commissioner paraded his own statistics: over the same fifty days from the previous year to this one, felonies dropped from 1,083 to 911, while felons arrested increased from 732 to 847. The commissioner said the police achieved these results despite the World, with its “extensive circulation among the criminal classes,” encouraging thieves to move to New York City.

  At the conclusion of his list, Roosevelt singled out Joseph Pulitzer, accusing him of paying his “reporters to lie” and of allowing his editors to grow too lazy to find even a glimmer of truth on which to base falsehoods.

  Showing his Harvard roots, Roosevelt compared his opinions of publisher Pulitzer to British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay’s take on a French Revolutionary aristocrat named Bertrand Barère. “He who has not read Barère’s memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie.” Roosevelt added a caveat, though: “Of course, when Macaulay wrote thus of Barère’s pre-eminence in his class [of liars], Mr. Pulitzer had not been born.”

  At this point, forty-eight-year-old multimillionaire Pulitzer—nearly blind—was largely an absentee publisher, running his empire via cablegrams relayed from his yacht and estates; he had offered $2 million to Columbia College in 1892 to found the nation’s first school of journalism but President Seth Low and the trustees had snootily dilly-dallied on accepting the gift. And, William Randolph Hearst in the fall of 1895 had bought the Journal and soon dropped the price to a penny and in January deftly poached away the bulk of the World Sunday staff. The World (now one cent) and the Journal were engaging in a duel to one‑up each other in outrageous commentary, acid cartoons, vulgar crimes, and extreme politics, a duel that would ultimately culminate in screaming headlines in 1898 leading to the Spanish-American War in Cuba. With its tower dominating the skyline, the World, however, was still the largest-circulation and most financially successful newspaper in the United States.

  Rival newspapers, especially those financially supplanted by the World, feasted on TR’s vitriol. The New York Sun ran a front-page headline that read: WORLD INFAMY LAID BARE: MR. ROOSEVELT’S CRUSHING EXPOSURE OF PULITZER’S ACADEMY OF CRIME. The editorial page of the Evening Post boiled with indignation at the World using fake crimes to try to hound the Police Board out of office.

  The World fired back. With a certain shrewdness, it answered TR’s tantrum with a calm report. The paper pointed out that the forty-five crimes were found in police reports and other newspapers. It noted that Roosevelt simply ignored eight of the most notorious crimes, such as the Burden jewel robbery, and in seventeen, by commenting on police action, he was admitting that the crimes were indeed “reported,” which was all the World claimed. The original World list was topped by the words REPORTED BY THE POLICE AND NEWSPAPERS. So without straining, the World defended twenty-nine of the forty-five stories.

  The World editors then pointed out that Commissioner Roosevelt was, in effect, lambasting all the city dailies by his criticism of this World article because the bulk of the stories ran in other papers as well. Roosevelt branded eighteen as “pure fakes”; the World noted that sixteen of those eighteen ran in the Sun, the Herald, or both, as well as in other papers. The newspaper also tracked down several crime victims whom TR had labeled as fabricators. Michael Healy, accused by TR of being drunk and wrestling an umbrella, said his watch was stolen and he hadn’t seen his sister in three years. One victim, accused of lying, told the World he was mulling over suing Roosevelt. And on and on.

  One senses that the police detectives dispatched to defend the department tried very hard to deliver a report that would please the commissioner. One also senses TR becoming increasingly unhinged at the prospect of losing his job. “I don’t mind work,” he wrote his sister that month. “The only thing I am afraid of is that by and by I will have nothing to do; and I should hate to have the children grow up and see me having nothing to do.”

  On its editorial page, the World pretended to take the high road. “We present a simple statement of facts to-day which must compel an apology on the part of Commissioner Roosevelt if he is an honest man or one who cherishes self-respect.”

  None arrived, of course.

  On Monday, March 23, the World unleashed its harshest weapon of reprisal. It announced that Chief Conlin and Commissioner Parker were now running the Police Board. “The ego of the board [the World’s new nickname for TR] is in danger of eclipse.” The World was soon echoed by many other papers including the respectable Herald, which reported that Commissioner Parker, “at first the least prominent of the quartet,” had kicked over his “traces.”

  The Devery courtroom on Tuesday morning, March 24, was packed with the defendant’s friends for the resumption of the trial and the start of the testimony. The jury, fresh from the Broadway Central, looked well rested and alert. Roosevelt did not attend, nor did any other board member.

  The assistant district attorney, Austen Fox, laid out the prosecution’s case. He accused Captain Devery of extorting a bribe from a man demolishing the American Surety building at Pine Street and Broadway. He explained that Devery did not make the demand personally—“like a highwayman who says ‘Pay me money or I will arrest you’ ”—but relayed it through his plainclothes detective Edward Glennon, who had followed the captain during his previous two commands.

  Fox traced what he called Devery’s “long” but “pitiable” record as a police officer, emphasizing that investigations into prostitution in the 11th Precinct (by the Lexow Committee and Parkhurst Society) had led to Devery’s being abruptly reassigned in November 1893 to the quiet 1st Precinct post of Old Slip station, not known for vice. But even here, the captain found a way to shake down a citizen, having Glennon try to pry $100 from a bus
inessman wanting to skirt laws regarding construction sites.

  The prosecution called its first witness, Charles Bissell. A pale young man walked unsteadily forward. A New Yorker did not cavalierly testify against the police. The judge would repeatedly ask him to speak louder. This clean-shaven office “timekeeper” for a demolition company, looking downward to avoid policemen’s stares, testified that a police detective—whom he later identified as Glennon—entered the Seagrist offices on May 2, 1894, the day after demolition began. Glennon told him the police were receiving complaints about billowing dust and that he needed to see the boss. Bissell said the boss wasn’t there. Glennon returned on three consecutive days, then threatened to shut the site down. Bissell said Glennon finally met with company owner Francis Seagrist on May 5, 1894.

  The prosecution then called Seagrist. His demeanor and stride to the box contrasted sharply with his former clerk’s. The forty-six-year-old demolition man, a lifelong New Yorker with prematurely white hair and a large black mustache over a receding chin, had been knocking down buildings and selling used lumber and bricks around Wall Street for more than a decade.

  His testimony nine months earlier regarding fifty-dollar bribes had led to the conviction of Inspector William McLaughlin for acts committed when that Tammany man was captain of Old Slip in 1891.

  The prosecution opened by showing the witness’s vulnerability to extortion. Seagrist stated he had signed a contract on April 26, calling for the Pine Street demolition to be rushed and completed within twelve days, or he would forfeit $100 a day from his fee.

  Seagrist stated that on May 8, Captain Devery arrived in person with Glennon—both in uniform—at the demolition site on Broadway. He quoted Devery as telling him matter-of-factly that he had received “a good many complaints” about dust and noise and that “you have got to come and see me.” The captain even showed Seagrist a letter forwarded from Superintendent Byrnes’s office. Seagrist knew exactly what that expression “come and see me” meant; he reluctantly agreed.