Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  The comptroller’s counsel read aloud many of these vouchers during a May 19 supreme court hearing before Judge Roger A. Pryor, a Tammany appointee, who called the expenses “monstrous” and “preposterous.” Seemingly deeply shocked, Judge Pryor wondered aloud how any city official could possibly audit and approve these types of bills. The career of this sixty-seven-year-old jurist had taken some sharp turns: he was a former Confederate general who had barely escaped hanging before reinventing himself in New York as a Tammany Hall Democratic lawyer, and now judge; he had ruled favorably on a key Devery appeal back in May 1895.

  Anyone in city government knew that the police spent money in brothels, gambling joints, and illegal saloons to gather evidence. It was deliciously ironic that Fitch accused Roosevelt’s Police Board of immorality. Roosevelt’s board was unapologetically prudish.

  Recently, for instance, two high-ranking police officers, with Roosevelt’s backing, had investigated the wedding-night scene in a Broadway show called Orange Blossoms.

  Acting inspector John J. Harley and Captain Patrick H. Pickett had attended a performance of the play in the company of Mrs. Elizabeth Grannis of the Social Purity League, the trio sitting in the orchestra seats of the Gaiety Theatre on Broadway north of 28th Street.

  This packed 800-seat theater, which had debuted as a minstrel hall, generally served up a Tenderloin evening, a bit racier than the legitimate theaters but not as lowbrow as the Bowery. But the performance that night, and for the weeks preceding, had out-of-towners buzzing: a long scene of a young bride undressing for bed on her wedding night. (She has just told her parents good night; the groom yawns and points to his watch, indicating it is time for bed; she asks him to give her a few minutes alone.)

  Petite French actress Mlle. Pilar-Morin played the bride. Later in a courtroom, she described her performance:

  “I first take off my wedding dress, and then remove my corsets and undo my petticoat strings. When they are off, I scratch myself to show my relief at having the tight corsets off. Then I make a screen with my skirt and [behind it] take off my shoes, stockings and garters. I have my stockings pulled on over a suit of thick tights. Then I slip on a night dress and get into the bed. A property man knocks and then I say ‘Entrez!’ ”

  Her silhouette was distinct throughout but only her bare arms were actually exposed. The police officers found the striptease “filthy, lewd and scandalous.” Mrs. Grannis—attending to uphold the “sacredness of marriage”—said she thought she saw the actress, while standing in just her chemise, fluff the light garment out and then glance downward at her own nudity in a kind of bemused, eye-rolling way. (Pilar-Morin denied that.)

  The police officers brought a charge of offending the public decency against theater manager John B. Doris. Abe Hummel defended Doris and pointed to Shakespeare’s Othello as having far more scandalous scenes. Many pillars of the theater testified on Doris’s behalf in the Court of Special Sessions on Monday, May 18, including playwright David Belasco, who found the pantomime “highly moral.” The police captain admitted, on cross-examination, that he could not see any more of the form (i.e., the naked body) than at the opera.

  Police magistrate Hinsdale, however, ruled against Orange Blossoms. He explained the nudity was not excessive but the context changed all. “The pantomime sketch is an invasion of the sanctity of the nuptial chamber.” He fined the stage manager $250, or thirty days in jail. Roosevelt later called the performance “one of the most flagrant ones” and thanked the judges for “their hearty co-operation.”

  Roosevelt opened the Wednesday morning papers to discover more columns full of Fitch’s mischief, detailing the brothel expenses with rows of policemen’s names and items such as “Paid for Woman: $10; Wine: $20; Cigars: $2.” One wonders how these notices played out with the officers’ wives. Ran a typical editorial: “Cab hire, dress suits, patent-leather shoes, opera hats, large amounts of wine, ‘women’, fees for peculiarly indecent behavior, constitute the bulk of these charges. It seems that the spy paints the town red at the expense of the community. He creates crime for the purpose of arresting unfortunate women. And the Police Board, under the Roosevelt management, audits his bills!” The New York Recorder added that if these charges had been made against a Tammany Police Board, “all decent citizens would have felt the [board members] ought to cool their heels in Sing Sing.”

  Roosevelt rushed to reply to Fitch, to Judge Pryor, to the delighted editorialists.

  Rocketing from one point to the next in a seven-page statement dictated to Minnie Kelly, he called Fitch the best advocate ever for the brothel industry. He said the police for years had been spending money going undercover into brothels and that judges recently had been demanding two eyewitnesses before issuing warrants. He stated that no other means existed for making these cases.

  Roosevelt pegged this crackdown on “illicit sexual intercourse” as “one of the least pleasant [duties] of the police.” He called it a “disagreeable task to get evidence against houses of prostitution” but said the job must be done, just as a surgeon must “undertake an operation for some loathsome disease.”

  Roosevelt proudly noted that over the past year, from May to May, the number of convictions for “keeping houses of prostitution or assignation” had more than doubled to 403 from 172 previously, with another 207 cases pending.

  “The case of the 15th precinct [of former Captain Eakins], which includes Wooster, Thompson, Greene and West 3rd Streets and Minetta Lane, etc. may be taken as one in point. It was formerly infested with vice from one end to the other. Within six months between forty and fifty houses in this precinct have been closed, not one of which could we have closed save by procuring testimony of the kind to which the Comptroller objects. The 15th Precinct is now a reputable part of the city. What the precinct was, the whole city would become if the Comptroller’s desires in this matter were carried out.”

  On that Wednesday, May 20, the mayor sent a private letter to Parker asking for his resignation. Strong did not inform the press. He told Parker that when he appointed him, he expected him to have “at heart the best interests of the city [to] work out a complete reformation in the department.” He wrote that he felt at the time Parker would “add greatly” to that prospect but that now, over the past four months, Parker has lost his influence with both the public and fellow board members. “I would like your resignation on receipt of this note,” he demanded.

  Roosevelt soon found out and his mood measurably improved in his letters. He wrote almost giddily of staying in town one night and dining at the Claremont with the mayor and his closest advisors. “I am on pretty good terms with the old boy now,” TR wrote to Bamie. The request for Parker’s resignation, though still a secret, was reinvigorating Roosevelt.

  A week later, Parker sent a combative private letter back to the mayor, refusing to resign. He recounted that almost a month earlier, he had offered to answer any questions. “It was the most courteous and proper method that I could conceive,” he averred. “Notwithstanding you never sought from me a particle of information.”

  Parker stated that after hearing additional hostile remarks, he again offered to talk to the mayor alone or with other gentlemen. He reminded the mayor: “[You] fixed the evening, and were to fix the hour and place and to send me word. I have never heard a word from you since.”

  Mayor Strong, experiencing the slipperiness of the man, wrote an irritated response. “You can judge my astonishment,” he stated, reminding Parker that on Monday, May 11, they had set a definite meeting time of Wednesday evening, May 13, at the mayor’s home with two reform power brokers and the city’s corporation counsel. “And we had a very pleasant evening waiting for you until 11 o’clock.”

  Mayor Strong reiterated that he expected Parker to resign. “It would save you a great deal of trouble and me a great deal of trouble and the Police Department some severe criticism.” He added it is “in your own interest that you should step quietly down and out.” That last li
ne smacked of a threat; the mayor was clearly referring to the bribery allegations that Roosevelt had whispered in his ear.

  But Parker knew nothing of the McMorrow bribery confession, and when confronted that week by the press with the rumors of his resignation, he told them that he was not “the resigning kind.” And he added: “If the mayor thinks I have been guilty of any dereliction of duty, he can prefer charges against me and I shall await them with the utmost serenity.”

  nder all the acrimony, Parker and Roosevelt still agreed on many aspects of reform, especially on not letting Big Bill Devery back onto the police force. Reverend Parkhurst had contacted Roosevelt and Andrews, and offered to help build a new case. After hurriedly sifting through files, Parkhurst Society counsel Frank Moss had sent a note informing them he was free to meet “any forenoon” the last week in May.

  But the offer of help came too late.

  The district attorney announced he was dropping the remaining indictments against ten police officers, including Devery, due to lack of evidence. The D.A. cited a judge’s ruling that the testimony of 11th Precinct brothel keeper Rhoda Sanford—based on entries such as “$1.50 to man shark” in her ledger—was not credible since she had contradicted her own words under oath at the Lexow hearing.

  The district attorney’s office had failed to convict almost all the policemen accused of crimes during the Lexow hearings; the city had spent $50,000 trying twenty-three men, including ten captains, and had landed three: one on a reduced sentence via a confession and two convictions, both under appeal. The trial results—to many New Yorkers—spelled vindication.

  On Tuesday, May 26, the board, with the utmost distaste, under legal constraints because Devery had been twice acquitted and was not under pending indictment, restored him to duty. They also restored Eddie “The Sphinx” Glennon.

  Since Devery could not be demoted, Chief Conlin assigned him to be captain of the West 125th Street precinct, an increasingly thriving German and Italian community.

  Devery’s return came less than a week before the massive June 1 police parade. (The board—after much soul-searching—had deemed the New York police department sufficiently reformed to earn the right once again to strut through the streets.)

  Chief Conlin, recently back from his European vacation, fine-tuned parade assignments. Pistol range practice was curtailed in favor of marching drills; horses were groomed and re-shod; mustaches were trimmed.

  Big Bill paid for rush alterations to his dress blues. He told friends he planned to celebrate his return by marching up Broadway. Two days after his reinstatement, Devery reported to the Twelfth Regiment Armory at 62nd Street and Ninth Avenue for parade drill practice, but the presiding officer, Captain Anthony Allaire, informed Devery that he had orders from headquarters that the captain was not permitted to participate in the parade. No record has survived of Devery’s exact verbal response. He returned to his precinct house at West 125th Street.

  Word spread quickly through the police force that the popular, funny, resilient officer—despite his full reinstatement—was banned, while Captain Max Schmittberger, who had testified against several fellow captains in exchange for immunity, was marching at the head of a company in the same battalion.

  The irritated hum of whispers regarding Devery grew so loud they made the papers, with the Times and Herald confirming much “ill feeling” among the rank and file that the “well-liked” and “persecuted” captain would be forced to stand on the pavement, a mere spectator.

  Chief Conlin, a week back in uniform, claimed that Devery’s exclusion occurred only because the captain had not drilled with his men and had been in limbo when assignments had been handed out. Conlin made these statements two days before the Monday, June 1, parade.

  Final marching orders were issued: gather at 1 p.m. at the Battery far downtown; final reminder: no gum chewing. At the very last moment, Chief Conlin, for reasons he never shared, decided to allow Captain Devery to march at the head of his precinct’s men.

  On a sunny breezy Monday, under a blue sky flecked with a few clouds at 2 p.m., a handful of Andrews’s bicycle officers led the way uptown, riding upright to avoid “bicycle hump.” Enthusiastic crowds jammed the five-mile parade route that stretched from the southern tip of Manhattan up Broadway to 23rd Street, then east to Madison Avenue, up to 41st Street, then back south along Fifth Avenue to the reviewing stand at Madison Square Park, opposite the Worth Monument.

  Roosevelt, in black frock coat and silk top hat, arrived at the V.I.P. seats with Mayor Strong in a calèche drawn by two “prancing bays,” attended by a liveried coachman and footman. The two grandstands filled up early and policemen refused to let dozens of ticket holders through the barricades. (Reverend Parkhurst waved his ticket and two policemen promptly turned their backs on him.)

  The grandstand was chockablock with senators, generals, commissioners. Grant and Andrews arrived before Parker, which led to whispers about Parker’s resigning, but Parker showed up a few minutes before 4 p.m., the slated arrival time of the paraders.

  More than 2,000 police officers, in dress blues, marched eighteen across nearly in lockstep. The patrolmen in single-breasted, long-belted coats swung their arms in near unison, and the pair of brass buttons at the sleeve glinting in the sun formed a steady mesmerizing arc. First came a marching battalion of police, then a military band playing martial music, then another battalion, proud, smiling, an idealized vision of the city’s protectors. The higher-ranking officers, mostly mounted, with more brass buttons and more gold braid and stripes, dazzled even more.

  Along the route men cheered and women, especially in the politer uptown neighborhoods, waved handkerchiefs. Chief Conlin, looking “buoyant and beaming,” deftly led the parade on his fine horse, “Prince.” The parade, after a year hiatus, marked a triumphant return to respect for this police force, humiliated by the Lexow revelations and also buffeted by relentless reproofs from Roosevelt.

  The cheers had indeed abounded all along the parade route, except for one undercurrent of resentment. Reporters heard onlookers, block after block, pointing out Captain Schmittberger and some shouted catcalls of “squealer” and worse. The tall athletic German captain kept his eyes mostly rigidly forward or downward, appearing “uncomfortable.” At the parade’s end at Madison Square Park, within earshot of Roosevelt, just as Schmittberger marched by, a dozen or so men and women began twirling wooden rattles, and the crowd gradually mounted a “storm of hisses” described as “deafening.”

  In stark contrast, any reinstated captain who had survived Lexow and defied reform was loudly cheered. And Captain William “Big Bill” Devery, leading the second company of the fifth battalion, received repeated bursts of loud applause and shouted well wishes. The Tribune reported that the captain (and former bartender) “swaggered along with a defiant look, as if he meant to say, ‘What if I did blackmail people? They could never prove it.’ ”

  Roosevelt and the city had inadvertently tossed Devery a very nice welcome-back party.

  But, before the Tammany officer could bask in the resumption of his lucrative eighteen-year police career, friends at headquarters whispered to him that the board, in rare unity, was seeking new disciplinary charges against him.

  n the day after the police parade, Roosevelt and Andrews collaborated on formulating official neglect-of-duty charges against Commissioner Parker. The most potentially damning charge of corruption—that is, of accepting the McMorrow bribe—had melted away, probably under the scrutiny of lawyers. They wrote up the detailed charges in a June 3 letter to reform Republican lawyer Elihu Root, who had mentored TR’s failed mayoral bid in 1886 and now served as private counsel to Mayor Strong.

  Root relayed them to the mayor, who on June 8 officially accused Parker of missing thirty-four of sixty-four board meetings, of ignoring 156 citizen complaints in November, of failing in his Pension Committee chairmanship duties to oversee a single pension, of delaying nineteen police misconduct verdicts, and finally of
failing for a week to grade exams of candidates for captain.

  In a private letter, Roosevelt called Parker’s neglect of duty “very much his least but also his most easily proven sin.” Roosevelt was playing for keeps. If he failed to force out his fellow commissioner, he would have to continue to work right alongside of his inscrutable, unflappable, unswayable colleague.

  Parker, too lawyerly to say too much too early, gave very brief rebuttals in the press to all five charges, and pronounced the sum of them “trivial, mere rot.” He called the last charge “petty … a schoolboy complaint.”

  The endless Police Board squabbles were finally coming to a head.

  No more backstabbing, the stabbing would now all be in an open hearing room.

  In an oddity of municipal governance, Mayor Strong, who had demanded Parker’s resignation, would now act as his impartial judge. The mayor—a business tycoon who had never played judge before—would preside in a trial that would wind up lasting for eight hearings, spread out over a month. At its end, Roosevelt would call it “really very nearly as much a trial of me as of Parker.”

  At first, city pundits expected the mayor to rubber-stamp a conviction after dozing through a kangaroo trial; they expected Republican governor Morton to affix his needed signature on the dismissal papers; they expected the canny lawyer Parker to spend a year or so appealing the verdict in the courts.

  Nothing played out as expected.

  The trial opened on the morning of Thursday, June 11, in the mayor’s office at City Hall. It was a Who’s Who of political affairs. The mayor, corporation counsel, lawyers, police commissioners, various city officials, politicians, and gawkers crammed into the large office with windows overlooking the four-acre park and landmark fountain. Former police chief Thomas Byrnes even made a surprise grand entrance. He was wearing “a light summer suit, a broad smile and he looked as happy as a big sunflower,” according to the New York World. Byrnes advanced slowly through “a siege of handshaking.”