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

by Neil Hanson

“I’ll neglect my business every day in the year for politics in the interest of my leader, Senator Grady.”

  One of Tammany’s most persuasive lawyers, former senator Henry S. Terhune, represented Monk, armed with affidavits placing him and his associates miles from the crime scene at the time the attack was carried out. Terhune said that he would prove the innocence of the defendants beyond all doubt and claimed that McMahon had been put up to his story by his lawyer, Thomas P. Fay, who wanted a rich man to sue.31 When James McMahon was assaulted, Terhune said, he was taken not to the Monmouth Memorial Hospital, “where poor men usually go,” but to Fay’s office, where his wounds were dressed by Fay’s own family physician. Terhune claimed that the missing link in the case—the alleged attackers—was then supplied by Police Inspector George McClusky. “ ‘Leave it all to me,’ said ‘Chesty George,’ as they call the Inspector in New York, ‘and I’ll furnish the crooks.’ ”

  McMahon was forced to deny claims that he had told an acquaintance that he expected to get enough money out of Lamar to last him the rest of his life and had hired the smartest lawyer in the state to do so. Terhune also pointed to a number of inconsistencies in McMahon’s testimony and called Justice Walter Brinley of Long Branch to the stand, who testified that he had witnessed the attack on McMahon from a distance of eight feet and claimed that neither Brown nor Monk had been the assailants.32

  It was a surprise to many when Monk took the stand, exposing himself to cross-examination. However, when asked if he’d ever been convicted of any crime, Monk replied “Never,” his lips parting in a grin that showed the two gold front teeth by which one of the witnesses said he had identified him.33 Monk said that he’d been asked by a saloon owner to go to New Jersey and help Lamar, whose wife was living in fear of attack by McMahon. After going to New Jersey, he and Brown had a few drinks, then went to McMahon’s house “just to scare him … so he would not bother Mr. Lamar any more.” Monk claimed that when they sobered up, they went back to New York and, on the day of the assault on McMahon, they were at Coney Island, where they rode the merry-go-round, had some drinks, and stayed at a hotel overnight. When asked if he’d registered at the hotel, Monk claimed that he never registered because he couldn’t read or write. It was a surprising assertion from someone who had the morning and evening newspapers delivered to his cell and complained that the light was too dim to read.

  Asked if he had pulled a gun when he was later arrested, Monk said, “No, I never carry a gun,” at which point there was loud laughter in the court.34 Monk said that after his arrest, Inspector McClusky had pushed him down stairs to make him confess, and when he and Brown were put on an identity parade, they were lined up alongside a row of detectives. “Anyone can tell a detective, you know,” he said, turning to the jury, “and I asked McClusky to put a bootblack in the line and to give us a fair show. He would not do it.”35

  Cross-examination failed to shake Monk’s testimony, and his claim to have been on Coney Island on the day that McMahon was attacked was corroborated by statements from the two proprietors of the American Hotel there. Lamar also took the stand, and his testimony, delivered in an undertone, with his head sunk between his shoulders, “dovetailed with considerable accuracy into that of his associates.”36

  However, despite Terhune’s best efforts, the evidence for the prosecution appeared overwhelming, and in his closing address, Judge Heisley issued a warning to the jurors: “If you have no reasonable doubt of guilt and yet bring in a verdict of acquittal, that will mean the enactment in this court of a greater scandal than the crime at Long Branch.37 I trust there will be nothing in your connection with this case which you will have cause to regret … If the perpetrators of the assault which happened in this county go unpunished, it will be an awful disgrace.”

  Earlier in the trial, District Attorney Foster had bemoaned political interference and warned that “there may be one black sheep in the jury box, but if we can keep the Lamar money away from him, I am sure of a conviction.”38 The chances of that began to recede when the jurors’ deliberations became unusually protracted. At midnight, the judge gave up and went home, leaving the court clerk to accept the verdict.

  The jury was later said to have decided on its verdict soon after midnight, but a crowd of “honest Monmouth County men” were still waiting in the courtroom, which was visible from the jury room on the far side of the courtyard.39 Perhaps fearing retribution if the “wrong” verdict was returned, the jurors remained in their room until four in the morning, when the crowd had dispersed and only the court officials remained. The jury foreman then announced that they had reached a verdict—not guilty—and the jurors left the building with considerable haste.

  So, too, did Monk and Brown. They were in the cells when Warden Fitzgerald told them they were free men. Incredulous, they “manifested childish delight,” and Monk said they wouldn’t “lose any time in getting out of this town.”40 Lamar showed no emotion when he was informed of the verdict and left town on the same 8:15 a.m. train as Monk and Brown.

  Informed of the verdict, Judge Heisley would say only, “Well, persons who have had experience with juries are often disappointed but never surprised.”41 One local newspaper used heavy irony when claiming that the verdict was “not necessarily a confession that the administration of justice in Monmouth is a failure; that the county may be invaded at pleasure by lawless people for the purpose of committing crime, and, if influential enough, expect protection in its commission; or that the average intelligence of the citizens is not above that of the people in the Southern states where lynching is justified and deliberate murder goes unpunished.”42

  Criticism of the verdict was almost universal. There were sinister rumors of attempts to bribe or otherwise influence jurors, and suggestions that they had not carried out their duties in the customary solemn manner.43 Noises had emanated from the jury room “as if a game were in progress. Much evidence of hilarity continued” until a few minutes before they delivered their verdict.

  Monk had returned to his Lower East Side territory in triumph but, as he entered James Donovan’s saloon in the Bowery for a celebratory drinking bout with five of his followers, Donovan, whose brother Peggy had wounded Monk in gunplay so badly two years earlier that he almost died, whipped out a revolver. Monk showed him his empty hands and said, “No more guns for me.44 I’m through. I’ve got money enough now to go into business and it’s ‘to the woods for mine.’ So put up your irons, Donovan, and forget it.”

  Monk paid all the bills for the party, which continued for most of the day at several saloons and restaurants and at a theater, where Monk took a box. Everywhere he went, he was shadowed by Inspector Schmittberger and eight of his men, emphasizing Schmittberger’s warning that New York would be made too warm for Monk. “The reign of terror of this crowd down here is at an end,” Schmittberger said.45 “We have sent 121 of them to the Island and we’ll send as many more if they show their heads. We have a big bunch of them now employed digging graves in Potter’s Field. I don’t expect to have much more trouble with Eastman. He was given to understand today by my men that he must get out of this city and I think you will have difficulty in finding him here tomorrow.” The police had stopped and searched Monk and his companions as they left Donovan’s but failed to find any weapons. “When I say I am through with gunwork, I mean it,” Monk said to them. “Youse fellers go and eat peanuts on the corner and save your shoes.”

  The next day, Monk duly “took to the woods” and was absent from his usual haunts for several weeks, but, contrary to Schmittberger’s boasts, Monk’s absence proved to be purely temporary. He remained away from the East Side only while his Tammany allies were issuing the necessary reminders to the police department about who paid their wages and the importance of Monk Eastman at election times. Schmittberger’s crusade against the gangs then came to an abrupt halt, and Monk at once returned to his old districts, where, with Monk surrounded by his gang members, business as usual resumed.

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  THE BATTLE OF RIVINGTON STREET

  During Monk’s lengthy court case in New Jersey, the conflict between his gang and the Five Pointers had been rumbling on, with both staging raids on their rivals’ turf; disrupting their gambling, protection, and prostitution rackets; and carrying out random assaults as well as New York’s first ever drive-by shootings. There was a cease-fire on September 15, 1903, when the Eastmans and the Five Pointers spent the day repeating at the West Side primaries. It was Tammany’s first return on its investment in securing Monk’s freedom, but open warfare broke out again between the gangs over the division of the spoils. That same night, a steamy Manhattan evening, the Eastmans fought their bloodiest pitched battle yet.

  Monk and his friends had been missing from their usual haunts all day, but at about nine o’clock, forty men—typical Bowery toughs, according to one witness—boarded a crosstown car at Stanton Street.1 They got off at Chrystie Street, walked into Livingston’s saloon at the northwest corner of First Avenue and First Street, and began fighting with eight men standing at the bar. They then made for the Bowery, where fighting and gunplay again broke out, and the furious last fusillade did not come until five hours later.

  The worst fighting occurred when half a dozen of Monk’s men chanced upon a similar number of Five Pointers who were about to raid one of the Eastman gang’s stuss games on Rivington Street, under the Allen Street arch of the Second Avenue elevated railroad.2 A “fifty foot crevasse between two rows of tenements,” Allen Street was known as the street of perpetual shadow, both for the constant darkness beneath the railroad and because it was a notorious haunt of prostitutes; one newspaper made the hyperbolic claim that there were a hundred women on every corner on Allen Street.3 4 5 Even on the brightest day, sunlight barely lightened the gloom under the arches, where the steel streetcar tracks laid in the granite cobbles shone like slug trails in the darkness.

  When the Eastmans and the Five Pointers caught sight of one another, they pulled out their revolvers and began firing indiscriminately. Monk’s gang shot and killed one of the raiders, and the remaining men on both sides took cover behind the iron pillars of the railway, from where they kept up a barrage of shots. More men from both gangs soon came running to join the fight, and by the time two policemen attempted to intervene, they found about fifty men already involved and bullets striking sparks from the ironwork.6 The gangs had turned out the streetlamps, further hampering the policemen, who fled for their lives as they came under fire from both sides. As gang reinforcements poured into the area, it became a fevered battle. Monk arrived hotfoot from his Chrystie Street headquarters and, contrary to his pledge that he was through with gunwork, directed the shooting like an army forward-fire controller from a position behind the pillar closest to the enemy. Paul Kelly’s presence was not recorded, but it is unlikely that the leader of the Five Pointers would have failed to join fighting on such a scale. By midnight, around a hundred gang members were blazing away from “behind their parapets of iron and the night.” Half a dozen members of the Gophers gang from Hell’s Kitchen had also arrived on the scene and joined in, firing indiscriminately at both sides. “A lot of the guys was poppin’ at each other,” one later explained, “so why shouldn’t we do a little poppin’ ourselves?”7

  Bullets flew in all directions, smashing windows in the neighboring tenements, ricocheting from the pylons of the El, and rattling against the undersides of trains overhead. Many windows were broken. A further half dozen policemen made a brief appearance but, greeted by a fresh hail of bullets, they also fled, and it was only when the reserves from several police stations banded together that they were able to storm Rivington Street, firing as they came. For about fifteen minutes the air was full of the sound of shooting while men on the rooftops rained bricks on the heads of the fighting policemen.8

  The battle had raged along two miles of streets in defiance of the police, until a square mile of territory was panic-stricken.9 When the gangs finally melted away into the night, they left a swath of destruction and many casualties in their wake. The walking wounded went with them, but the dead and some of the more seriously wounded had to be left behind. Once the police had reclaimed the streets, calls for ambulances were made to Gouverneur and Bellevue hospitals, and for once “the Eastman Pavilion” was treating Monk’s men as well as their victims.

  The ambulances were hearse-black, even to the beds, the pillows, the stretchers, and the curtains that screened the occupants from the curious stares of passersby. The drivers sounded their gongs as they lashed their horses on with whips, their hooves thundering on the cobbles and their flanks streaked with sweat as they tore through the traffic.

  Michael Donovan, twenty-seven years old and possibly a cousin of the saloonkeeper James Donovan, had been shot in the mouth at Stanton and Forsyth streets, and died in Bellevue an hour later from hemorrhage and strangulation.10 John Carroll, or John Smith, which he later said was his real name, thirty-seven years old, was shot in the stomach and left arm in the final battle, and was taken to Gouverneur Hospital. Anton Bernhauser was shot through both cheeks and seriously wounded. The dead and wounded had lain untended in the street throughout the fighting, in some cases for hours.

  The wounded gang members were held in “the Cage”—the prisoners’ ward at Bellevue—cells normally used for sick prisoners from police stations, the Tombs, or Blackwell’s Island. Surrounded by iron bars, watched over by warders as well as nurses, sick and wounded prisoners either recovered and were returned to custody or made the one-way journey to the morgue at the end of the lawns at Bellevue. On the bank of the river and partly built out over the water, the long, low building that housed the morgue usually contained thirty to forty unclaimed, unidentified bodies at a time, in the cheapest rough pine boxes, pending their removal to unmarked paupers’ graves in Potter’s Field on Hart Island. At the head of each coffin was a card held by an iron tack, giving all the information known about the body; often those cards were blank, save for the location where the body was found—commonly the East River. Some were suicides; many others were the disappeared, hapless, nameless, numberless victims of crimes.

  Twenty men had been arrested at or near the scene of the Battle of Rivington Street, including Monk, who gave his name as Joseph Morris and claimed to have been a mere passerby who had stopped to see what was going on.11 With his wife, Margaret, and three of his henchmen and their wives, he was locked up at the Eldridge Street station. Margaret gave her address as 601 East Thirty-ninth Street, which bore no relation to any known address of Monk’s. Several other gangsters were seized after police broke down the door of an Allen Street house where the gangsters had retreated and barricaded themselves inside. They were sent to the house of detention as witnesses, but the rest of the fighters had disappeared into the hallways and doorways of saloons and Raines Law hotels. (Passed in 1896, the Raines Law aimed to curb alcohol consumption by restricting its sale on Sunday to hotels, but since the law allowed any business that served sandwiches with drinks and had ten bedrooms to call itself a hotel, saloonkeepers exploited the loophole and became “Raines Law hotels.” To comply with the letter, if not the spirit, of the law, they often had bedrooms no bigger than cupboards, and the only food on offer was a “sandwich” of a stone, a piece of brick, or roof slate between two slices of stale bread.)

  Despite all the shooting, the only revolver recovered was one found upon the desperately wounded John Carroll/Smith. Its chambers were still warm when, along with a knife, it was taken from him.12 Carroll refused to implicate any gangster in his shooting, preferring instead to claim that he’d been shot by Detective McCoy.

  As usual, Tammany lawyers arrived to defend Monk the following morning as he made his customary brief appearance before the courts and was then discharged. His men were detained for a further twenty-four hours and were then also given their freedom when it emerged that Inspector Schmittberger and his detectives could not find a single person “along the line of the
fighting who would admit having seen the affray, although many buildings bore bullet marks or had windows broken by stray missiles.”13

  Of all those arrested, only George “Lolly” Meyers, one of Monk’s chief lieutenants, went to jail.14 15 Twenty-four hours after his arrest it was discovered that Meyers had been shot through the thigh of one leg and just above the knee of the other. He had been examined and reexamined by lawyers and police and moved from place to place, yet had remained silent about his wounds until the pain became too much to bear. No member of the Eastmans was in court when Meyers was convicted of highway robbery for holding up a man during the fighting, shooting him in the left cheek and relieving him of forty-seven dollars. Meyers was sentenced at the Tombs police court to fourteen years hard labor in Sing Sing. Everyone else walked free.

  However, the Battle of Rivington Street had been so blatant and violent that even Tammany could not swallow it without comment, and Big Tom Foley now once more threatened the gang leaders with the removal of their political protection if they did not settle their differences in less damaging ways. After Kelly was given a safe conduct guaranteed by Tammany Hall, he and Monk met face-to-face in The Palm, Monk’s Chrystie Street headquarters. Peace was declared, with the disputed territory henceforth a neutral zone, open to exploitation by both gangs; it was as sure a guarantee of future hostilities as the Treaty of Versailles. To celebrate the truce, Big Tom Foley organized a ball at which Monk and Kelly met in the center of the dance floor to shake hands and then shared a box as their followers got the ballum-rancum under way and “each gang danced with the best girls of the other.”16

  Although Tammany was merely trying to moderate the gang’s excesses, Police Commissioner Francis V. Greene was seeking to go much further.17 The morning after the Battle of Rivington Street, Greene had called a conference with Inspector Schmittberger and Assistant District Attorney Rand and announced that he would act to end the gangs’ lawlessness and gunplay. He backed up his words by authorizing a series of raids on the gangs, and also fired a warning shot across the bows of corrupt or cowardly policemen by charging one sergeant and five patrolmen with neglect of duty for their inaction during the battle.