The Heroic Gangster_The Story of Monk Eastman, From the Streets of New York to the Battlefields of Europe and Back

by Neil Hanson

  Several times Lamar and his hired thugs tried to lure McMahon away from his home in Long Branch. On one occasion, McMahon’s sister, Minnie, received a call from someone purporting to be his bail bondsman, who asked her to tell her brother to go to List’s Hotel. However, she recognized Lamar’s voice and called the bondsman, who knew nothing about the meeting. As a result, McMahon did not go to the hotel, where witnesses claimed that four burly men had waited for him for some time.3

  On July 9, 1903, all subterfuge having failed, Monk and Brown simply set upon McMahon in broad daylight in front of the Long Branch police court, where he was due to give evidence.4 McMahon said he was in a bootblack’s chair at the foot of the stairs leading to the justice’s office when he saw Monk, Brown, and another man walk by. The next moment he was struck on the jaw, the blow knocking him off the chair. The last he remembered, he said, was Monk’s voice shouting, “Soak him! Soak him!” His injuries included two black eyes, two cuts on the mouth, and several teeth knocked out. He was left unconscious while his assailants escaped in a waiting carriage. It was claimed that the assault took place right in front of a policeman, who made no effort to arrest the thugs.

  When McMahon recovered, he was taken to New York and took less than two minutes to identify Monk and Brown from their pictures in the police Rogues’ Gallery. The two men were arrested on the corner of Rivington and Forsyth streets on the East Side, by detectives with drawn revolvers. Monk, said to be an out-of-work printer whose face bore “the scars of two or three knife wounds,” was reported to have said, “Arrest me, will yer? Say, yer wants ter look out where yer going.5 I cut some ice in this town. Why, I make half the big politicians in New York.” McMahon subsequently picked Monk and Brown out in a police lineup, though the value of his identification was later called into question in court when it was revealed that McMahon, who claimed to have seen the two men around Forty-first Street in New York on some unspecified previous occasion, had been shown only two photos in the Rogues’ Gallery—those of Monk and Brown. In the lineup that followed, the suspects Monk and Brown were the only men wearing collarless shirts.

  Monk, “whose real name is William Delaney according to the police,” was described as “the leader of a band of Cherry Hill ruffians accused of many crimes.”6 He gave his address as 93 South Third Street, Williamsburg—as usual, a false address, though his mother had lived nearby, at 96 South Third Street, for several years. Held overnight, Monk and Brown appeared before the Tombs police court the next morning, in a room crowded with their friends and gang members. When Detective Sergeant McCafferty stood near him, Monk was unable to contain his fury at the sight of a man who had arrested him on several previous occasions. He shouted, “Take that fellow away from me,” and took a few steps toward him before detectives pushed him back.

  In answer to the charges, Monk affected his customary air of injured innocence. “Who is this man Lamar?”7 he said. “I wouldn’t know him if he came up and struck me in the face. As for McMahon, why, I never saw him until he identified me at headquarters.” Monk claimed it was a case of mistaken identity and said he had an alibi—he said he was fishing in Connecticut with Brown at the time of the assault. His brother-in-law, Lizzie’s husband, Patrick Reynolds, backed him up and “spoke bitterly about his brother-in-law’s picture being in the Rogues’ Gallery. ‘It aint right, Eastman comes from as good a family as there is in the city. Those detectives have been pursuing The Monk for years but he’s never done time yet. Inspector McClusky is trying to get even with Lamar because it was Lamar who got him fired out of the Detective Bureau.’ ”

  However, Monk’s alibi was contradicted by a barman from a Long Branch hotel, who said that the day before McMahon was beaten and stabbed the barman was introduced to Monk and Brown by Lamar and told to give them whatever refreshments they wanted and send the bill to him; Lamar later admitted paying their bills at that hotel and another one.8 The barman claimed to have overheard Monk and his companions plotting to attack someone and hide the body in the rear of the gashouse in Long Branch. It was also revealed that six days before the assault, Monk, Brown, and two other Eastman gang members had been arrested as suspicious persons on one of the steamboats bound for the Jersey Coast just before it sailed from Rector Street. A West Side gambler had found them a lawyer, who secured their prompt discharge at the Jefferson Market police court.

  New York Police Inspector McClusky then testified that Lamar had first gone to Herbert Thompson’s saloon on Seventh Avenue to hire a prizefighter to beat up McMahon, but the fighter turned the job down, so Lamar hired Monk. The inspector also claimed that, while at police headquarters, Monk had described Lamar as “a four-flusher and if he don’t stand by me he’ll get a taste of Jersey justice.”9 Arrested in New York, Monk and Brown would face the official form of Jersey justice only when extradition proceedings to Monmouth County, New Jersey, had been completed. The lawyer who entered writs of habeas corpus and certiorari on their behalf was a state senator, Thomas F. Grady, a Tammany “lickspittle”—a vivid demonstration of Monk’s importance to Tammany Hall.

  Senator Grady launched a sustained attack on McMahon’s character, repeatedly accusing him of being an ex-convict. When McMahon’s brother-in-law took the stand, Grady again shouted, “Are you not an ex-convict?” and when the man made no reply, Grady rounded on the prosecuting counsel and said, “So this is the kind of witness you are going to have testify against my clients?”10 At the end of the day’s proceedings, Grady also informed the press that there were “influences behind the case” that had not been disclosed to the public. When reporters asked if he was referring to a Wall Street clique reportedly trying to destroy David Lamar, he told them to draw their own conclusions.

  That night Monk and Brown were transferred from the Tombs to cells at police headquarters. When a sergeant there was asked why the transfer had been made, he refused to give an answer other than to say “it was thought better to have the prisoners locked up there.”11 The implication was either that police feared an attempted breakout from the Tombs or, more plausibly, that they wanted to prevent Monk from communicating with his gang members via other prisoners in the Tombs and—if the appeal against extradition to New Jersey was lost—arranging an escape on the journey to New Jersey or from the much less formidable jail in Monmouth County.

  At the extradition hearing before the state supreme court, both prisoners seemed to enjoy the attention they received from the crowds of spectators. Monk in particular appeared to be “much elated over the notoriety he had achieved.”12 By their next appearance, the crowd, most of them Lower East Siders, had grown so large and menacing that officials had the court cleared before continuing. The two accused could not produce a single witness to back up their alibi that they were on a fishing excursion on the day McMahon was attacked, whereas the prosecuting counsel was flanked by a dozen witnesses, all prepared to swear that they had seen Monk and Brown at the scene of the assault.

  In an acid commentary on the case, The New York Times linked Grady’s “strenuous efforts” to free Monk and Brown to the elections that coming fall.13 “At primary elections and district fights, the Eastmans have been important aids in disposing of those who did not ‘vote right’ as well as influencing the doubtful by methods of their own.” The New Jersey police also expressed astonishment at the ways in which the case had been delayed, but in the end Grady could not prevent the men’s extradition to New Jersey.

  On August 6, Monk and Joseph Brown were finally taken to New Jersey and incarcerated in the Monmouth County Jail in Freehold. Their route was changed at the last minute after reports that an attempt would be made to free them during a staged fight on the ferry. A hundred of Monk’s gang members had been in and around the courthouse and, after making signals to the prisoners, they hurried to Pier No. 8, North River, where they expected to find Monk and Brown guarded by only two New Jersey officers. However, after announcing that they would be put on the boat to Long Branch at eleven o’clock, polic
e took their prisoners in a patrol wagon to the Liberty Street ferry and then put them on a train in Jersey City. They claimed that Monk could not hide his disappointment when he realized his men had been outwitted. “When I get out of this,” he was said to have growled, “I’ll kill some of that crowd.”14

  Despite Inspector McClusky’s claims that the prisoners would “squeal” and implicate Lamar, both men remained tight-lipped.15 Wearing good clothes, smoking cigarettes, and with their pockets full of cash, Monk and Brown were handcuffed together and, with Monk’s scarred face and their uneasy behavior, attracted considerable attention from the other passengers throughout the journey from New York. Constable George Van Winkle of the Long Branch police had already told reporters he was confident of obtaining a guilty verdict. “They are the fellows, all right,” he said, “and I saw them make the assault.16 I can produce other witnesses too, who saw the scuffle, including a woman who heard Delaney say ‘Give it to him good! Put him out!’ I nabbed Delaney all right, but he got in a quick jab … a vicious blow in the stomach that knocked the wind out of me, and then he jumped into a carriage which was waiting … and made his escape.”

  Monk and Brown were put in cell number 1 and cell number 4 on the second tier of the Monmouth County Jail—kept apart to prevent them from conspiring to escape together—and, save for an hour’s daily exercise in the barred corridors, were confined to their cells.17 One of Monk’s principal lieutenants, Kid Twist, backed by fifty heavily armed gang members, was then alleged to be on his way to attempt to free his leader by force. Security at the Monmouth jail was at once greatly increased. New locks and chain bolts were fitted on all the exterior doors of the jail and on the warden’s house, and a panic button was connected to the alarm bell in the courthouse, alongside the jail, to summon help in an emergency. The previously feeble jail now had the look of a fortress, and hastily sworn-in deputies maintained an all-night vigil, patrolling the outer prison yard, surrounded by a high, spiked wall. Guards armed with revolvers had instructions to shoot anybody scaling the wall or throwing anything through the prison windows.

  After it was revealed that Monk had corrupted a prisoner who was about to be discharged and slipped him a letter that he had concealed in his clothing, Monk and Brown were isolated from the rest of the prisoners, for fear that Monk would reveal the weak points of the prison’s defenses to his gang. The warden’s anxieties increased when he discovered that the prisoner had already thrown the letter out his jail window. A search by the guards proved fruitless, and it was suspected that it had been picked up by one of Monk’s gang. All new short-term prisoners who were brought in were carefully searched, since some of the Eastmans were believed to be planning to get themselves committed to jail on trivial charges in order to help Monk and Brown break out.

  A fresh alarm was raised when a turnkey saw Monk giving a signal to Brown, just as five or six mysterious figures appeared outside the jail.18 At the same time, a white bull terrier that roamed the prison yard at night began barking furiously as one of the mysterious figures tried to climb the wall at the back of the yard. Amid the increasingly wild speculation about a possible jailbreak, the Monmouth Democrat offered a welcome note of reason: “The cases are bailable ones and if the accused men have so many friends, it would seem more likely that they would rather go about the easier and more orderly method of releasing their friends, by putting up money as security.”

  The “great Monk Eastman rescue plot” ended in anticlimax.19 Lamar, who was in such financial difficulties that his mortgage was foreclosed and his house put up for sale, had sold his entire stable of horses, including the champion Speedway trotter of 1903 and the pacing champion of the Speedway, to the Fiss, Doerr & Carroll Horse Company. As a result, three stablemen and five stable boys were sent to Freehold to arrange the transport of the horses to New York. Their immediate visit to Lamar’s house, near Sea Bright, aroused suspicions that they were members of Monk’s gang. The jail was further barricaded against an attack from outside and a mob of police and heavily armed volunteer citizens followed the stablehands everywhere until they left town with Lamar’s horses.

  In New York, Inspector McClusky had heard the rumors about an attempt to storm the Monmouth County jail and at once ordered a roundup of alleged thieves that netted thirty-three East Side thugs, including twenty-five members of Monk’s gang. They were “packed in the cells to the point of suffocation, but that didn’t matter.”20 Among them were “Big Shinsky,” “Kid” Carter, “Sheeny Sam,” “Whitey,” and “Little Frank,” though Inspector McClusky noted that “Eastman is the only real tough one in the lot.”

  When they appeared in court the next morning, the extent to which corrupt politicians and police colluded in the protection of the gangs was blatantly displayed. Inspector McClusky claimed that all but three of the men were professional thieves, and “I guess it didn’t hurt the other three to be in keep for the night.”21 Yet Inspector Max Schmittberger urged the discharge of all the prisoners, and Deputy Police Commissioner Davis added that he did not think there were any gangs “organized specifically for the purposes of plunder.” He explained away the existence of “the so-called ‘Monk’ Eastman gang” as merely being part of “the gregariousness of young toughs.” Inspector McClusky’s attempts to keep the Eastmans away from Freehold, New Jersey, came to nothing. When the thirty-three men appeared before the Tombs police court, Magistrate Hogan duly discharged every one of them, adding that “the arrest of these men was a nice piece of nonsense on the part of the police.”22

  If Kid Twist and the Eastman gang did go to New Jersey, no rescue attempt was made, and Monk himself laughed off such talk, declaring, “I would not have walked out of jail without bail, even if the doors had been opened for me.”23 Even without a posse of rescuers to break him out, his freedom was not to be long delayed. Flush with cash, he and Brown at first spared no expense on their comfort, spurning the jail food and having Freehold “scoured for luxuries.” The newspapers printed the supper brought in for Monk and Brown: “Tenderloin steak, hot buns, pears, cakes, jelly, tea and ice cream soda. He sent out for two boxes of the best cigars obtainable, and grumbled over the quality.” Two sets of all the editions of the New York morning and evening newspapers were also delivered to their cells and, after complaining that the light filtering into his cell was so dim that it hurt his eyes to read, Monk also sent out for some candles.

  Such was their rate of spending that within a few days their money was running out, but a letter from Monk’s wife, Margaret, who had written in an attempt to cheer him up, telling him he would soon be freed, proved correct. After ten days’ incarceration in the Monmouth County jailhouse, the two men were released on bail following a visit by Margaret and Monk’s brother-in-law Patrick Reynolds. Reynolds told reporters that Monk’s mother was very ill on Long Island and was anxious to see her son before undergoing an operation the following day. Reynolds said he was prepared to stand bail, but the five-thousand-dollar bond was probably beyond his means, so a Navesink businessman eventually put up the money, stating that it was “merely a business transaction with him.”24 There were claims that Monk’s gang paid him well for the favor. As soon as he was released, Monk caught the first available train for New York and went straight to see his mother for what would prove to be almost the last time; she died later that year, the day before Thanksgiving.25

  When Monk and Brown reappeared before the court to answer to their bail, they arrived so late that it was suspected that they had taken “leg bail” (absconded).26 Justice Fort, in the course of instructing the jury, laid out the state’s damning case and concluded that “it is difficult to bring oneself to believe that in this age any person can be so steeped in moral depravity as to willfully premeditate a scheme to assault another person … engaging persons to carry it out.27 It shocks human credulity still more to believe it possible that any person would accept such an iniquitous commission.”

  A further lengthy delay then ensued, during which
Monk and Brown were again bailed, before the trial proper eventually got under way in Freehold before County Judge Heisley. A number of Monk’s gang members were in the public seating, watched closely by the court officers. Judge Heisley ordered the jury to be kept under guard together at lunchtime and at night, “a precaution unusual in New Jersey except at murder trials.”28 Monk and Brown again appeared to be reveling in their notoriety and were dressed in new clothes, with their hair “newly clipped in the distinctive Bowery fashion.” Monk wore a well-tailored black suit, and his normally unruly shock of hair was parted in the middle and smoothed down flat on his forehead. However, he appeared “nervous, this man who has seen as many battles as an ancient gladiator. Eastman crossed his legs, shifted them, rubbed his hands … He chewed gum with his front teeth, the teeth which are capped with gold.”

  The powerful influence of Tammany Hall was once more very much in evidence, as State Senator Riordan appeared as a witness for the defense. Called to the stand, he said that Monk and Brown were intimate friends of himself, Senator Grady, and Tom Foley. Riordan stated that he had met Constable Van Winkle of the New Jersey police and told him that Monk and Brown were not guilty and were “valuable friends” of Big Tom Foley. According to Riordan, Van Winkle had expressed his regrets but said that he “had to get the boys” as part of a Wall Street conspiracy to discredit or bankrupt Lamar.29

  When the prosecuting counsel asked him why he was interested in the case, Riordan said, “I am always interested in my friends when they are in trouble.”30

  “Are you being paid to come here?”

  “No.”

  “You are neglecting your business then for nothing?”