Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  While other topics were discussed, Roosevelt waited his turn that afternoon, sitting at the rectangular conference table, to the mayor’s left. Opposite him sat tax commissioner E. P. Barker and catty-cornered was comptroller Ashbel Fitch. Impatient, Roosevelt occasionally popped up and paced the room. Lawyers and reporters filled the gallery of the ornate chamber in the southwest corner of City Hall.

  Frustrated over McMorrow, undermined by Parker on promotions, bereft of his constant ally Andrews, TR eagerly undertook the mission to land $9,000 in disputed allocations in order to replenish the department’s depleted “contingency funds.”

  For six months, Comptroller Fitch, elected in 1893 (pre-Lexow) and the highest-ranking Tammany Hall Democrat in Mayor Strong’s municipal government, had repeatedly denied the request. Ashbel Fitch was a short, dome-bald forty-eight-year-old Columbia College–pedigreed lawyer with an unusually thick black beard and flowing Teutonic cavalry mustache. The New York Press identified him as a “Tammany official who derives more joy from teasing reformers than from eating his dinner.”

  Roosevelt bristled over the fact that detectives had shelled out their own cash to pursue undercover gambling, brothel, and saloon arrests but had not been reimbursed; even Chief Conlin himself had peeled off $200 during a massive gambling sting. A jailhouse matron, earning a meager $1,000 a year, had reached into her own purse for several hundred dollars to provide dinner and breakfast to female prisoners and lost children—all unreimbursed. The department hovered on the verge of running out of money to pay for telephone service, telegrams, trial stenographers.

  “Contingency funds” served as a catch-all budget term for “everything else,” that is, “miscellaneous.” In 1895, the police department had plowed through the $11,000 allocated for the year and racked up another $8,000 or so. Treasurer Andrews requested on December 10 that $7,500 in unused funds allocated in 1892 to build a new 9th Precinct station house be shifted over to contingency funds. It seemed a routine request.

  Tammany’s Fitch claimed such a move would be illegal, in effect, purloining money that should be returned to the city’s general fund. When the Police Board countered that this practice had been pursued for years, Fitch slyly asked during a February hearing: “This [Police] Board is expected to be better than the old one, is it not?”

  After that meeting, Mayor Strong said that Fitch had denied the police department request “out of pure cussedness.”

  Despite Fitch’s qualms, the Board of Estimate had voted four to one back on March 4 (with Fitch dissenting) to approve the transfer of funds. Fitch, however, still refused to deliver the money, engaging in-house counsel to deliver a report showing the Police Board had acted illegally in spending money for unapproved items, and afterward demanding reimbursement. Could the police build six more station houses and demand reimbursement? Could the sanitation department buy 20,000 extra brooms? Where did it stop?

  Of course, Fitch knew better—he knew that each department needed some wiggle room in its budget, but he mockingly chose to mirror Roosevelt’s rigid enforcement of all the laws.

  The previous month, TR had told reporters that Fitch was working “in the interests of the criminal classes” because detectives would no longer risk spending their own cash to pursue undercover investigations against brothels and gambling joints.

  “[Roosevelt] is constantly saying that everybody in journalism, in office or in politics who disagrees with him on any subject is aiding the criminal classes,” responded Fitch. “He probably honestly believes it is criminal to oppose him in anything.”

  Fitch had advised the Police Board to appeal the matter to the New York State Supreme Court and the board had replied it would. That’s where the issue stood on May 5.

  The mayor introduced Roosevelt, who reiterated the Police Board demands. While he spoke for ten minutes or so, Ashbel Fitch tilted his chair back and glued a smug smile to his face. Roosevelt looked straight at Fitch: “Remember you are keeping this money away from the poor policeman, not from us, and from the poor prisoners, who will starve if they are not attended to.” For emphasis Roosevelt pointed his finger at Fitch, who, with exaggerated nonchalance, lolled further back and crossed his legs.

  Then Fitch in a low calm voice asked why the Police Board had not taken his advice a month ago and brought the matter to the courts. “You characterized my course as a move in the interest of the criminal classes. Then you shut your mouth and we heard no more for a time.”

  Fitch said he had read that Commissioner Parker would go to the courts and get the money immediately. “But you started a public row with him and he forgot all about it,” said Fitch, smiling at Roosevelt. “Your starving prisoners were not considered, were they? If anyone is to blame, it is you.”

  Roosevelt lost it. Newspapermen said he flushed deep red, balled his hands into fists, and with his eyes blazing under contorted brows, he pounded the table. “What you say is not true,” he shouted. “You are the one to blame.” Fitch, irritatingly calm as ever, replied with a faintly aristocratic accent: “I won’t discuss this matter with you in this fashion.”

  The mayor interjected: “Gentlemen, gentlemen!”

  Roosevelt was leaning in over the table toward Fitch, who said sarcastically to him: “Oh, go ahead, I know you are a fighter. You’re always fighting. It appears to be your talent.”

  Roosevelt shouted: “You wouldn’t fight! You’d run away!”

  Fitch, slowly tipping his chair forward, replied: “I’d never run from you.”

  Roosevelt: “You daren’t fight. That’s your way.”

  Fitch, with a smug smile: “What shall it be? Pistols?”

  Roosevelt was in a full rage; he banged the table; his voice hit a higher pitch: “Yes, pistols or anything you choose.”

  The mayor, despite his rheumatism and gout, slammed down his hands. “If this thing does not cease, I shall arrest you both.” The corporation counsel, Francis Scott, confirmed the mayor had the power to do it. (Pundits later cited Section 235 of the New York State Penal Code: “Any person who challenges another to a fight or a duel or who sends a written or verbal message,…or who accepts such a challenge … is punishable by imprisonment up to seven years.” They suggested TR arrest himself.)

  Fitch couldn’t let it go. “I have refused to pay this bill because you have infringed the law,” he said to TR. “You have violated a statute and should be indicted for it.” Before Roosevelt could reply, Corporation Counsel Scott jumped in again … this time with mock indignation. “I must insist that the administration gets its law from us.”

  Fitch, shifting easily to banter, asked: “Do you refer to me, sir?”

  Then, both Roosevelt and Fitch agreed to let the courts and the corporation counsel decide the issue.

  Still seething, Roosevelt returned to 300 Mulberry and finding no other commissioners there to pass any resolutions, he issued a long angry statement about how the department, deprived of funds, might soon be unable to afford telephone calls or go undercover. He vowed to continue fighting the comptroller’s efforts to cripple the force.

  Fitch kept his response playful. He said if Roosevelt “challenged” him, he would choose “Fighting Bob” Evans of the U.S. Navy as his second, and in any case, he was ready. He informed reporters that he had been a member of the elite fighting society Corps Franconia at the University of Heidelberg. The Journal advised its readers that Otto von Bismarck, a fellow member, had fought thirty-nine duels in three years.

  The Evening Sun, the paper of Roosevelt’s pal Riis, rated the would-be duelists: neither man was adept with a pistol; Roosevelt preferred “a magazine rifle with which he has often punctured grizzly bears”; Fitch opted for a sword “with which he was wont to slit cheeks and open foreheads at Heidelberg.” The paper added: “If we really thought the gentlemen were fighting mad we should propose a meeting in the City Hall Plaza with fire department hoses at thirty paces, each combatant advancing as he fired the Croton [reservoir water] at the other.�
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  The next day, Commissioner Parker walked over to Comptroller Fitch’s office at City Hall, and they agreed to file the paperwork to let the courts decide the budget issue. “It was a matter easily arranged with any sane person,” Fitch told reporters.

  The Evening News ran a cartoon of Mayor Strong trying to restrain a snarling pit bull embellished with Roosevelt’s head. Ran the caption: “Why not drown him, Willie, before he bites?” A friend of the mayor sent him a toy pistol for protection to carry to future board meetings.

  The city was having a tad too much fun at Roosevelt’s expense.

  “Yesterday I lost my temper with Fitch,” TR wrote to Lodge, unburdening himself, “which I should not have done, but he is such a contemptible lying little blackguard, and does so much mischief that I found it difficult to pardon him.”

  Roosevelt relentlessly lobbied Mayor Strong to dismiss Parker. The mayor arranged a meeting at his home on May 13 with Parker as well as several high-ranking municipal power brokers, but Parker never showed up.

  Roosevelt’s relations with the inscrutable Parker were only worsening.

  Parker blindsided Roosevelt at the end of the May 15 board meeting with the announcement that he intended to issue a statement on the successes of the revamped detective bureau. Parker, alone among the commissioners, had overseen the makeover in the wake of Byrnes’s forced resignation. The arrest numbers were startlingly good.

  TR said the board would issue a statement.

  Parker countered that he would do it.

  Roosevelt, red-faced, flared that he found it highly improper for a “private member” to give it out.

  Parker: “What is a private member?”

  Roosevelt: “I meant a ‘single member.’ ”

  Parker in his irritatingly calm way pointed out that other members had given out statements, such as Andrews about the bicycle squad or Grant about steam launches.

  “Am I to understand that it is improper for a Commissioner to express himself on a matter that is to the great credit of a most important bureau of the city?” asked Parker. “The telling of this report is an encouragement to the law abiding element and a menace to the criminal classes.”

  TR said it was permitted but he was preparing a report for the mayor that would include this same material. Commissioner Andrews, standing nearby and trying to be helpful, said to TR: “Your report would be stale then.” Parker replied: “And that is just where the shoe pinches.” Parker said he intended to issue the statement and Roosevelt could contradict his report if he liked.

  With his tone-deaf ear for publicity, Parker issued a brief statement late Friday announcing that the reorganized detective bureau had arrested nearly double the number of suspects in the past year, 2,527 (up from 1,384), that convictions had led to total prison sentences of 1,102 years (up from 751), and that property recovered increased to $197,333 from $139,502. Newspapers gave these bravura statistics an inch or so at the bottom of the Saturday police roundups.

  Parker was just adding one more bamboo shoot under Roosevelt’s fingernails, as it were. Roosevelt wrote his sister, complaining about “endless petty rows with Parker & Fitch, very irritating because they are so petty.”

  Exasperated, Roosevelt decided to go on another midnight ramble on Monday, May 18, his first nighttime hunt for derelict policemen in months. He invited along his Boston friend Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow, who was briefly passing through New York and staying at the Holland House. TR also asked Commissioner Andrews to accompany him and to bring along his roundsman, John Tracy, whom Andrews had refused to relinquish to Parker.

  Bigelow, a genuinely curious scholar who had penetrated the closed society of Japan, was eager to understand the clannish behavior of the New York police officer.

  The party set out at midnight in a carriage from the West 37th Street police station. After driving around for an hour or so on the West Side, they were rolling along 42nd Street when they saw a large patrolman leaning suspiciously against a saloon side door between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Roosevelt and his party alighted from the carriage just as the door cracked open and an arm suddenly emerged holding an oversized schooner of amber liquid. The policeman took the tankard, lifted it to his lips, and began draining it.

  Roosevelt, in a kind of racing tiptoe, sped across the street, reached the policeman, and tapped him roughly on the shoulder, sternly saying, “Officer, give me that beer.” The startled bluecoat, in mid-gulp, spritzed a geyser of foam and looked at the squat bespectacled man accosting him.

  Just then, a hand emerged from inside the bar, yanked the glass, and slammed the door shut. The patrolman took one look at Roosevelt, teeth and spectacles glinting in the moonlight, as one paper put it, and the man sprinted off without saying a word.

  Andrews by now had reached the scene and the two commissioners raced after the bluecoat. “Stop running, you fool!” shouted Roosevelt. About fifty yards away, near the corner, they caught him. Roosevelt demanded his name. “Ginger ale,” he replied, gasping for air, “Ginger ale.”

  “Not what you were drinking,” said TR to the doubled-over officer. “Your name, man.” Patrolman Joseph Meyers was ordered to come to Commissioner Roosevelt’s office at 10 a.m. and as they left him, he kept muttering, “Ginger Ale, ginger ale.” A conviction for drinking in uniform could cost a man his job.

  The hunting party wandered in its carriage through seven precincts, including Devery’s old precinct. They alighted occasionally to stalk but found only two more derelict officers, men who were seen talking to strangers for more than ten minutes.

  The four hunters ate breakfast at 6 a.m. at a Bowery restaurant. Roosevelt later pronounced himself quite pleased with the improvement in the patrolling. He rested on his couch till 10 a.m., when the three officers arrived. Meyers stuck by his ginger ale claim and told TR he ran because he had heard an emergency call-for-help whistle. The commissioner told him the timing of the whistle—unheard by TR—was uncanny, coming just as a police commissioner tapped him on the shoulder. TR had Tracy lodge misconduct complaints against all three men.

  Roosevelt and Andrews showed up a little late around 10:30 a.m. for the regular Tuesday morning board meeting. Parker and Grant were not there. A roundsman found the two men in Grant’s office talking and looking at newspapers. He informed them that the board was waiting and Parker said they were holding a “consultation” and they would attend shortly. On many occasions, Roosevelt met informally with Andrews and Grant in his office, excluding Parker, and clearly Parker in his meticulous way was playing tit for tat and returning the favor.

  Impatient as ever, Roosevelt was at a full boil by 11:15 a.m. when he sent the messenger again. He was convinced the full board needed immediately to vote through an official request for salaries for 800 additional officers, or else the mayor would be unable to present the item to the Board of Estimate. (The governor had just signed the bill; Comptroller Fitch would be handling the transfer of funds.) Roosevelt stalked out of the room to go to City Hall, a few minutes before Grant and Parker sauntered in.

  No board meeting occurred but reporters pressed Parker for a comment on TR’s anger at his absence. He said Andrews had recently been away in Texas for days, that TR “goes away often to lecture upon what he has done for the police force in this city and to tell how he has suppressed crime.” Parker added that perhaps Roosevelt was “irritable” because of his lack of sleep.

  Roosevelt race-walked to City Hall, looking for the mayor to complain yet again—and even more loudly—about Parker. By befriending Grant, Parker could now stop the board from doing even routine business that called for a majority vote. This new partnership marked an escalation in the war for control.

  Ashbel Fitch, that “contemptible lying little blackguard” as TR had called him, now accused Roosevelt of paying for prostitutes.

  Fitch instructed the comptroller’s in-house counsel to shine a light on the piles of brothel expense vouchers that Police Board treasurer Avery Andrews had n
aively included in a transfer-of-funds request.

  Although it was well known in police circles that plainclothes detectives investigated brothels, it was nonetheless quite stunning to see dozens of these expenses listed in cold type in newspapers: upstanding officers handing taxpayer dollars to soon-to-be-naked demimondaines. Fitch’s charge boiled down to Roosevelt secretly using city money to finance orgies for policemen. Each police officer’s request for reimbursement, in its terseness, did read somehow like an aide-mémoire to a night on the town.

  Detective Henry Hahn, thirty-six years old, filed a slip that read:

  - cab hire from R.R. station to Mrs. Clemens’ house of assignation in Kingsbridge: $6

  - paid May Williams and Gussie Rous for exposure of person: $10

  - bought 5 pints of wine at $2.50 pint: $12.50

  A pair of patrolmen in the Tenderloin, Thomas McGuire and Paul Gallagher, explored a high-end brothel on East 35th Street and filed these expenses:

  - hire for dress suit, shoes and hat: $5 (McGuire)

  - paid for woman: $7.50 (McGuire)

  - paid for wine: $15 (McGuire)

  - woman: $7.50 (Gallagher)

  - drinks: $4 (Gallagher)

  - cigars: $1 (Gallagher)

  Newspapers such as the Sun and the World filled column inches with these itemized accounts of nights of carousing, from the bargain prices of the East Side up to the high-end Tenderloin.

  Included in the stacks of papers was an endorsement by veteran detective Hahn: “The prices are fair and reasonable, and no greater than those charged to ordinary customers and such claim is justly due.” (It’s unclear if Roosevelt knew that during the Lexow investigation Henry Hahn had been accused of shaking down brothels in Devery’s 11th Precinct, or that both of his brothers had been tossed from the police force: Edward Hahn for drinking in uniform, Frank Hahn for secretly running a brothel.)