Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  Underneath it all, Roosevelt never really changed; instead of being on an impossible four-man commission, he was commander-in-chief, a job title that suited him. The Washington Post had once presciently joked about Roosevelt being reluctant to share responsibilities with God.

  Later biographers, enamored of Roosevelt’s presidency, have donned rose-tinted glasses to view his two years as New York City police commissioner. In the most simplistic view, TR is credited with single-handedly reforming and revitalizing a deeply corrupt police force.

  Much of that viewpoint seems to have come from Roosevelt’s own self-assessment in the several magazine articles he penned on his stint as commissioner and in his autobiography, which are all characteristically positive. “Our [police] efforts were crowned with entire success,” he wrote. “The improvement in the efficiency of the force went hand in hand with the improvement in its honesty. The men in uniform and the men in plainclothes—the detectives—did better work than ever before.”

  Contemporary observers were not so kind. Even the sympathetic New York Times weighed in that Roosevelt’s “fanatical gusto” in enforcing defunct laws and ordinances “undoubtedly … interposed great obstacles to the political reform of the city.”

  Lincoln Steffens observed: “The New York police force … did not reform … and the Great city of New York, nay the Greater City of New York, called back Tammany and peaceful repose in easy corruption … New York is New York again, vox populi, vox of the devil.”

  In 1919, Theodore Roosevelt and Big Bill Devery both died.

  Roosevelt’s obituary filled front pages worldwide. The obituaries for Big Bill Devery, tucked inside local newspapers, were surprisingly kind. “Devery was always on trial for something or other and always being acquitted,” opined the New York Times. “Devery’s offenses against public decency were not light, but his humor and rough-and-readiness always disposed his adversaries to have a sort of liking for him.”

  A 100-piece police band led Devery’s funeral procession in Far Rockaway, Queens; police commissioner Richard Enright ordered the flag at 300 Mulberry flown at half-mast for thirty days.

  The final appraisal of Devery’s estate—filed a decade later, in 1929—found the former chief insolvent at his death, and his wife, Annie, who had inherited all, had left only $6,218 at her death in 1926. “Devery’s generosity was well known to all his associates,” wrote one newspaperman, “as was also his fondness for [horse] racing, which made him almost a regular attendant at the races here and at Saratoga and elsewhere.”

  In most of Roosevelt’s obituaries, his other exploits squeezed out all but a fleeting mention of his police commissioner days.

  Over the decades, the New York City Police Department continued its cycle of corruption and crackdown, of palms greased, then wrists slapped. Criminals—many working in the gambling and prostitution rackets—continued to pay for the blindness of the men in blue, so as to satisfy the appetites of New Yorkers.

  “I wish about forty police captains would die over night,” a reform police commissioner told the City Club in 1908. “That is nothing personal. Neither do I mean it to their disadvantage. But they are no good.”

  The 1,500 Raines Law hotels, with cheap beds near shelves full of liquor, further corrupted the city; brothel madams noted that “by furnishing drinks or a good supper, a man can get a [shop]girl to go upstairs there,” and the madams complained bitterly about the “Amateur Competition.”

  The weathervane statue of nude Diana, with her budding breasts, stood atop Madison Square Garden till 1925, while police officers—Irish, Italian, Polish—twirling their nightsticks, walked the beat below, sometimes keeping the peace, sometimes selling a turn of their heads, selling a wink.

  The Mazet hearings (1899) were followed by the Curran Committee (1913), then the Seabury investigation (1932). And on and on, till the revelations of Frank Serpico and the Knapp Commission (1971), and then the Mollen Commission (1994).

  The Island of Vice—with its reformers and its unrepentant, with its convicted and its not yet convicted, with its endless strivers—has seesawed back and forth over the years between tolerance and less tolerance, between cops who take and cops who don’t.

  “There are no better men anywhere than the men of the New York police force,” Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography in 1913, “and when they go bad, it is because the system is wrong.” And he blamed corrupt commanders, and singled out Big Bill as “one of the Tammany leaders, who represented in the police department all that I had warred against while Commissioner.”

  Ultimately, the job of police commissioner did as much for Roosevelt as Roosevelt did for the job. His two years there launched him onto the national stage; he honed his speaking skills; he even learned to silence himself occasionally so he could carry the Republican banner another day. He developed thicker skin and an intermittent sense of humor about newspaper attacks; he learned the impracticality of bitter feuds, the dangers of impulsive crusades. He saw brutal poverty close up. He earned a reputation as a reformer.

  During his stint from 1895 to 1897, Roosevelt genuinely inspired the righteous among the police force; soon after, Big Bill helped give the rest of them their humor, their swagger, and their common sense.

  As in ancient Rome, the vitality of New York City sometimes seems to come more from the crooks than the do-gooders.

  My greatest debt is to New York City.

  My father’s family came here in 1920, moving to Coney Island when he was thirteen. He rode the nickel subway and ate the nickel hot dog. He got caught selling bootleg liquor during Prohibition and bribed a cop two cases of Slivovitz to beat the rap. He worked in the Garment District and smoked a half dozen Bering Plazas a day into his late eighties. (I went to elementary school reeking of cigars.) And about a week before he died, he confessed to me that my grandfather, who ran a saloon, had rented rooms upstairs by the hour. “By the hour,” he repeated. I got the point.

  My dad once bought us sight-obstructed seats to a Yankees World Series and we sat behind a green-painted steel girder. We leaned apart on cue as Mickey Mantle and the rest of the hitters stepped up to home plate. In high school, I played blackjack in illegal East Side parlors that had key locks on both sides of the door. I was mugged seven times. What I am trying to say is that I am a New Yorker. I have walked the streets mentioned in this book and tried to imagine them car-less in 1895, in the last days of exclusively “live” entertainment when people wandered into concert saloons, dime museums, fancy theaters, into gambling joints and opium dens.

  I came to this project a Roosevelt novice. Patty O’Toole, author of When Trumpets Call, gave me a box of TR books. I have kept them for six years. She is writing a Woodrow Wilson biography and probably needed them. Sorry.

  I contacted Edmund Morris and he allowed me to come to his home in Connecticut to look over some of his notes. I outstayed my welcome. When I came back a second day, he sped my note taking by encouraging me to use a copier in his wife’s office. I am deeply grateful and am in no way assigning him any responsibility for any mistakes. In fact, his thorough TR research has made me feel ever since like I’ve been climbing Cleopatra’s Needle covered in grease.

  I want to thank Mike Bosak and Tom Vasti, formerly of the NYPD, for making the cop’s life come alive; I want to thank Kenneth Conboy, who wrote his master’s thesis on TR and aided me over lunch at the University Club.

  Big Bill Devery’s relatives provided fine documents and leads: especially Sharon Alforque, Michelle Kelly, and Bill Cleary.

  Librarians and archivists everywhere helped: Ellen Belcher at John Jay, Ken Cobb at Municipal Archives, David Smith at New York Public, and especially, Wallace Dailey at Harvard.

  In five years, the debts mount. Paul Grondahl (who arrived via Mr. and Mrs. Smith) helped with the steep hills of Albany; Timothy Gilfoyle handled my overeager erotic queries; Jay Berman told the best story on the disappearance of the Roosevelt Police Board minutes (it involves boxes in the basem
ent of the Tweed Court House and workmen in a rush to finish a demolition job). John Vella, the superintendent in a Union Square building where I have a room with a view, read some of my other books, and kept asking when the hell I would finish. Thanks for the impatience. And thanks to all the people who e‑mailed and asked what was next. After a few years on this project, I started to feel invisible.

  I want to thank Richard Williams, Terrence Brown, executive director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, Laura Neely, Kathy Dalton, Kevin Baker, James McGrath Morris, Gary Marmorstein, Mark Epstein, Craig Rhodes, Alexander Sachs, Leroy Frazer, Patrick Dugan, Michael Daley, Rikers Island Frank, John H., Terry Dunne, Hodges Lewis, Lenora Gidlund, Michael Lorenzini, Robbi Siegel, Coralie Hunter, Kris Puopolo.

  My teenagers kept me in touch with the Westchester police, so that in a way helped the book. My wife had long faith and “long green,” and perhaps her long bet will pay off.

  This book would not exist without the ruthless editing of Bill Thomas and the gentle agenting of Esther Newberg (or perhaps it’s the other way around)…and, of course, not without the dueling agendas of Devery and Roosevelt.

  You can reach me at rzacks@forbiddenknowledge.com.

  KEY TO FREQUENTLY USED SOURCES

  HCL Henry Cabot Lodge

  HCL Papers Henry Cabot Lodge Papers

  Lexow Report and Proceedings of the Senate Committee to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York

  MOR I The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, Vol. I

  MOR II The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, Vol. II

  NYCMA New York City Municipal Archives

  NYES New York Evening Sun

  NYH New York Herald

  NYPD NewYork Police Department Museum

  NYS New York Sun

  NYT New York Times

  NY Trib New York Tribune

  NYW New York World

  People vs. Gardner The People of the State of New York vs. Charles W. Gardner

  TRB Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace

  TRC Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard University

  TRP Theodore Roosevelt Papers at the Library of Congress

  PROLOGUE

  1 “If the bloody bitch had turned up the leather”: People of the State of New York vs. William McGlory, Court of General Sessions, Dec. 28, 1891, Trial no. 19, “Trial Transcripts of the County of New York, 1883–1927,” Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

  2 “The traffic in female virtue”: Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros, p. 248.

  3 “Fornication. Three windows at a time”: “In the Matter of the Charges Preferred Against Captain Jos. B. Eakins,” testimony of illustrator Charles Higby, p. 273 (microfilm), New York Public Library.

  4 “She’s a ballet dancer; first she dances on one leg”: Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s, Archephone Records #1007, 2007, CD and liner notes.

  5 “Plenty of girls to help you drink the best of cheer”: Richard O’Connor, Hell’s Kitchen: The Roaring Days of New York’s Wild West Side, p. 82.

  6 “He was tremendously excitable”: William Muldoon interview with J. F. French, transcript, TRB.

  7 “Here lies all the civic virtue”: Richard Rovere, Howe and Hummel: Their True and Scandalous History, p. 104.

  8 “Never quiet, always in motion”: “Roosevelt in New York,” Washington Post, June 14, 1895, p. 6.

  9 “little ease where Theodore Roosevelt leads”: Jacob Riis, The Making of an American, p. 212.

  CHAPTER 1: PARKHURST AND THE SIN TOUR

  1 “a lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot”: The sermon text is in Our Fight with Tammany by Charles Parkhurst (NY, 1895), pp. 8–25.

  2 “If a family is burned out”: George Washington Plunkitt, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, p. 37.

  3 “Hell, did you weigh them dry?”: Alfred Hodder, A Fight for the City: The Story of a Campaign of Amateurs, p. 145.

  4 “a vile exchange of favors”: Thomas Beer, The Mauve Decade, p. 144.

  5 “a damnable pack of administrative bloodhounds”: Parkhurst, Our Fight with Tammany, pp. 8–25.

  6 “nothing but rumor, nothing but hearsay”: Ibid., pp. 42–45.

  7 “district attorney had lived an immoral life”: Ibid., p. 40.

  8 “never again be caught in the presence of the enemy”: Ibid.

  9 “I still flatter myself that I whirled him”: Charles W. Gardner, Doctor and the Devil, p. 32.

  10 “so coarse, so bestial, so consummately filthy”: Parkhurst, Our Fight with Tammany, p. 74.

  11 “a fashion plate of a dead year”: Gardner, Doctor and the Devil, p. 32.

  12 “South Carolina uncle”: Ibid., p. 13.

  13 “a breach of Cherry Street etiquette”: Ibid.

  14 “old enough to have been the mother of Columbus”: Ibid., p. 16.

  15 “Hey, whiskers, going to ball me off?”: Ibid., p. 18.

  16 a “200-pound” drunken woman: Ibid., p. 20.

  17 “Show me something worse”: Ibid., p. 64.

  18 “stained yellow” by “innumerable quarts of tobacco”: Ibid., p. 25.

  19 “kerosene oil, soft soap, alcohol and the chemicals”: Ibid., p. 27.

  20 “the absolute silence”: Ibid., p. 36.

  21 liked to play the “finger game”: William McAdoo, Guarding a Great City, p. 149.

  22 “the floating scum of thousands of saloons”: Gardner, Doctor and the Devil, p. 44.

  23 “a blue satin skirt that reached to her knees only”: Ibid., p. 47.

  24 “I suppose none of the police officers”: Ibid., p. 52.

  25 “unquestionably the biggest single advertisement”: William F. Mulhall, “The Golden Age of Booze,” Valentine’s Manual, no. 7 (1923): 126–37.

  26 “a scraggly little thin woman”: Gardner, Doctor and the Devil, p. 66.

  27 “This is rather a bright company”: Ibid.

  28 “the girls refused to dance”: Ibid., p. 67.

  29 “Hold up your hat!”: Ibid.

  30 described as their “summer outfits”: “Parkhurst’s Can-Can,” NYES, Apr. 6, 1892, p. 1. The New York newspapers of April 6–8 and May 6–7, 1892, provide many details (some trial testimony disagrees with the chronology in Gardner’s book): “What Dr. Parkhurst Saw,” NYS, p. 1; “Hattie Adams’s Defense,” NYES; “Dr. Parkhurst a Witness,” NYT, Apr. 7, 1892; “Two to One for Mrs. Adams,” NYS, p. 1; “The Jury Did Not Agree,” NYT, Apr. 8, 1892, p. 8; “Hot for Parkhurst,” NYES; “Parkhurst’s Sightseeing,” NYS; “Parkhurst and Erving Tell Their Stories,” NYH, May 6, 1892; “Hattie Adams Found Guilty,” NYH; “Hattie Adams Convicted,” NYS, May 7, 1892.

  31 “whose airs were those of a young girl”: Gardner, Doctor and the Devil, p. 58.

  32 “pretty, painted, powdered” “plumpest and best looking”: Ibid., p. 59.

  33 “decidedly pretty French women” “consumptive looking girl”: Ibid., p. 60.

  34 “most of the testimony … unprintable”: “Young Erving Broke Down,” NYS, May 10, 1892, p. 1.

  35 “A person who carnally knows”: Silvernail, The Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure of the State of New York, p. 139.

  36 French circus. Anthony Comstock gave a deposition regarding a circus he witnessed nearby at 224 Greene Street on June 14, 1878. The performance by five women perhaps gives an idea of what else Parkhurst might have seen that so upset him. Comstock stated that he saw women: “licking or pretending to lick one another’s sexual organs … drinking beer upon the vagina of one girl by the other, placing a cigar in the rectum of one of the girls, who [had] thrown her limbs and feet above her head, one girl getting on top of another, and pretending to go through the act of carnal intercourse, each girl being nude … sucking one another’s breast.” People v. DeForest, Court of General Sessions, July 2, 1878, District Attorney Papers, New York City Municipal Archives (hereafter NYCMA).

  37 “like a successful lot of ballet dancers”: Gardner, Doctor and the Devil
, p. 62.

  38 “the most brutal, most horrible exhibition”: Ibid.

  39 “Don’t tell me I don’t know”: Parkhurst, Our Fight with Tammany, pp. 59–78.

  40 PARKHURST’S CAN CAN and PARKHURST’S SIGHT-SEEING: “Parkhurst’s Can Can,” NYES, Apr. 6, 1892, p. 1; “Parkhurst’s Sight-seeing,” NYS, May 6, 1892, p. 1.

  41 Hattie Adams hired the leading team: Trial coverage from the NYS, NYES, NYW, New York Evening World, NYT, and NYH, May 5–7, 1892

  42 “ ‘I cannot elevate him to the level of my contempt’ ”: “Hot For Parkhurst,” New York Evening World, May 6, 1892, p. 1.

  43 “Are your guests single women?”: “Hattie Adams’s Defense,” NYES, Apr. 7, 1892, p. 1.

  44 “hatchet-faced” curly-haired brunette: “Triumph for Parkhurst,” NYW, May 7, 1892.

  45 “put her arm around your neck?”: “Young Erving Collapses,” NYW; “Young Erving Broke Down,” NYS, May 10, 1892.

  46 “Where am I? What day is it?”: Ibid.

  47 “extreme nervous prostration”: “Erving’s Testifying Ended,” NYS, May 11, 1892.

  48 “from orgy to orgy”: “Parkhurst Scored,” New York Evening World, May 10, 1892, p. 1.

  49 “sharper eyes than the 3,000 policemen”: Gardner, Doctor and the Devil, p. 71.

  50 “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em”: Plunkitt, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, p. 8.

  CHAPTER 2: THE STING

  1 Theodore Roosevelt Jr.: Future president Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) was originally called “Theodore Roosevelt Jr.”; when his father died in 1878, he dropped the “Jr.” from his name. When he had a son in 1887, he called the boy Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

  2 “swine styes, bone-boiling establishments”: New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, Annual Report, 1858, p. 38.

  3 “you could do almost what you liked”: “Richard Croker Young at 67,” NYS, Nov. 29, 1908, Sec. 3, p. 10.

  4 “Standin’ up to a bar”: “William S. Devery in the Role of Judge,” NYT, Mar. 29, 1901, p. 3.