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

by Neil Hanson

  While Monk had been behind bars, the Lower East Side—indeed the city itself—“a seething realm of change that was virtually unrecognizable from one generation to the next,” had also been undergoing one of its regular transformations.11 The physical look of the city was radically different, with old landmarks torn down and ever higher skyscrapers being built. When Monk went to jail, the tallest building in New York was thirty stories high; the Metropolitan Life Tower now stood fifty stories and seven hundred feet above the city streets. The Bowery, the western frontier of Monk’s old domain, was deep in decline from its raucous heyday. Even in 1890 there had been an estimated nine thousand homeless men in and around the Bowery; by the year of Monk’s release from Sing Sing, 1909, that number had grown to twenty-five thousand.

  Just as Jewish immigrants had supplanted the Irish on the Lower East Side during the 1880s and 1890s, so the Jews were now finding themselves being displaced by newer immigrants. As their circumstances improved, the Lower East Side Jews who had furnished Monk with most of his recruits and many of his victims were migrating uptown, crossing the new Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges (completed in 1903 and 1909) or boarding the expanding subway network to make new homes in the outlying districts. Their places were taken by fresh floods of Italian and Sicilian immigrants who neither knew nor feared Monk.

  Over the succeeding days and weeks, Monk failed to recruit more than a handful of followers, old or new. Yet one observer claimed that it was not the effects of the years in Sing Sing that sapped Monk’s spirit and broke his power, but the knowledge that the politicians no longer regarded him as worth protecting from the law.12 Even if Tammany had been eager to rehabilitate its old protégé, its power to do so was no longer unquestioned. Even at its worst, the stench of the city was not worse than the stink that clung to the way the rich had made their money, but now New York City and its wealthier inhabitants were concerned about sanitizing themselves.

  The politicians and police who had rooted in the gutters for kickbacks and bribes were now cloaking themselves in respectability; reform was no longer a dirty word. The capitalist robber barons who had clawed their way to the top of the heap of humanity, bribing, bullying, cheating, and beating their way to fortunes from steel, coal, railroads, mining, and oil that dwarfed those of the crowned heads of the Old World, were now also transmuted into churchgoing paragons of respectability. They endowed charitable foundations and cleansed their family histories of the taint of rapacity and corruption as they strove to join the Astors, rack-renting landlords of the most scabrous Lower East Side slum properties, at the very pinnacle of fashionable New York society.

  As the city’s rich and powerful secured their positions and burnished their reputations, New York was also reinventing itself, as some of the worst slums and tenements were cleared and rebuilt, or even turned into public open spaces. The notorious Mulberry Bend tenements, between Mulberry, Worth, Baxter, and Bayard streets—the foul core of New York, according to Jacob A. Riis—had been demolished as far back as 1897, with a small park, eventually named Columbus Park, in their place. While Monk had been in Sing Sing, other open spaces had been created in the most densely populated part of the city, like Seward Park at the corner of Essex Street and East Broadway, where the demolition of the existing tenements displaced three thousand people.

  The campaigns of Charles Parkhurst and the polemics of writers like Riis and Lincoln Steffens had exposed the rotten core at the heart of the Big Apple, and reforming politicians had at last begun to purge their more flagrantly corrupt officials, while a few crusading police chiefs, once as drenched in corruption as the wharves were shrouded in winter fogs, were now harassing and arresting the gangsters who had been their paymasters and partners in crime. However, it was a halting process, hampered at every step by entrenched corrupt politicians and officials.

  Politicians now had to at least offer some semblance of being tough on crime, and mayors often appointed “incorruptible” police chiefs as proof of it, but if the police chiefs showed signs of too much success in their task, they found themselves removed from office. The reelection of Tammany sachem George Brinton McClellan Jr. as mayor in 1906 had been greeted by gamblers and brothel keepers gathering in front of his headquarters to acclaim his victory and celebrate the reemergence of New York as a “wide-open town.”13 On the day his second term began, McLellan fired his reforming police chief, William McAdoo, who noted that “a combination of interests which thrive on the non-enforcement of the law or make large profits by allying themselves in a business way with criminal and vicious groups, can bring more pressure to bear for the removal of a police commissioner than an army of law-abiding honest citizens … An honest police commissioner must expect a perpetual conspiracy against his continuance in office.”

  McAdoo’s replacement, General Theodore A. Bingham, also tried to wage war on the criminal gangs of the Lower East Side, but later complained that he could not even trust the men in his own department to carry out his orders, for police commissioners were frequently changed, but the politicians always remained. “I was head of the department for an indeterminate period, which might end at any time.14 Back of me was the mayor, who chose me, and whose office would also end at an early date. Back of him was the permanent political machine, which elected him. As the policeman is in office for life, he very logically looked past both the mayor and me and made his alliances and took his orders from the only permanent influence concerned—the politician.”

  In April 1907, Bingham embarked on a wholesale reform of the police department in an attempt to root out the most corrupt officers. Eight inspectors and countless detective sergeants were transferred or demoted, and “common patrolmen cluttered the earth,” as Bingham reduced them in rank, transferred them to other, less lucrative districts, and sent the worst into exile “among the goats.”15 The head of the detective bureau, William W. McLaughlin, known as a “millionaire cop” with a mansion on East Eighty-third Street, suffered the biggest fall, being banished to the Westchester precinct, where the opportunities for graft were minimal. Monk’s old foe, Inspector “Chesty” George McClusky, was also “sent to do captain’s work” in a district that had long been used as “a scaffold” on which uncooperative policemen were hung out to dry.

  In July 1909, just like his predecessor, Bingham found that his reward for attempting to clean up the city was his abrupt removal from office by Mayor McClellan. After a two-year hiatus, the drive to clean up the police department and confront the gangs resumed in 1911 under Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo, a well-connected socialite with a fervent belief in police reform whose wealth made him less susceptible to bribery. An investigating committee was set up to look into allegations of a clearinghouse for police graft and claims that police officers had been forced to pay as much as ten thousand dollars for promotion. Waldo also formed special squads to break up the street gangs that had dominated Lower Manhattan. The means to do so were simple: “Permit the police to club the gangster out of existence without fear of political interference or reprisal.”16 To achieve this, the police were said to require only three things: a blackjack, a nightstick, and their superiors’ absolute and total backing under any circumstances.

  Strong-arm squads of police had first been used against street gangs more than half a century before. Every policeman was given a list of known gangsters and told to beat them with a nightstick whenever he sighted any of them, and warn that if they did not leave the district, they would get another dose of the same medicine every time they were spotted. Now the strong-arm squads were back. Cops were warned not to use their nightsticks on inoffensive citizens and not to strike men on the head unless they were dealing with “real bad crooks.17 Then it doesn’t make any difference whether they go to the insane asylum or to jail. They’re enemies of society and our common foe.”

  The gangsters in the cities of the East found themselves increasingly constrained, hounded, and hunted by lawmen whose former impotence or acquiescence wa
s now a fading echo of a past era. The fate of the notorious Gophers from Hell’s Kitchen was a warning to all others.18 Police had once gone in fear of them. One leader of the gang, “One Lung” Curran, had blackjacked a policeman to steal his jacket as a coat for his girlfriend after she complained of the cold. That started a fashion among the Gophers’ women, and a succession of bloodied policemen staggered back into their stations, beaten and stripped to their shirts. Now the Gophers were hounded by an alliance of policemen and a specially formed railroad corps who slugged harder, shot quicker, and clubbed and beat the once powerful gang out of the West Side railroad yards that had been its stronghold.

  For his part, Monk was now a marked and vilified outcast on the streets that he had once ruled. Respectable citizens and crooks alike were informing on him, and people were running into Eldridge Street station every ten minutes, a policeman there said wearily, accusing Monk of all sorts of crimes.19 He was also constantly harassed and beaten by the police who had once been more or less willing partners in crime, but now saw the chance to settle scores for past indignities.

  Despite his waning fortunes, Monk had married for the second time on September 8, 1911, in a ceremony at the New York City Hall.20 His wife, Worthy Cecilia Marven, was originally from Galveston, Texas; at just twenty years old, she was seventeen years Monk’s junior. The address he gave on the marriage certificate was 116 West 116th Street, which does not correspond to any known address for him at that or any other time, and his listed occupation—clerk—was equally false.

  Although the marriage certificate offered a choice of single, widowed, or divorced, Monk chose to describe himself as single. There is no record of any contact between Monk and his first wife, Margaret, since he had been sent to Sing Sing eight years before, but neither was there any record of a divorce or of Margaret’s death, raising the strong possibility that Monk’s second marriage was bigamous. His new wife’s origins were as opaque as the fate of his first. Worthy listed no occupation, but most gangsters drew their wives and girlfriends from the pool of prostitutes they controlled or consorted with, and the assumption must be that the twenty-year-old Worthy Marven was a Texan girl “gone wrong” who had moved to New York and fallen in with Monk while working as a prostitute on the Lower East Side, probably under his control.

  Although he exercised only a tiny fraction of the power he had held around the turn of the century, Monk was still bringing in money from small-scale crime and opium peddling. There was a rapidly expanding Chinese population in New York—most of them fleeing discrimination and xenophobia about the “Yellow Peril” in the West that had found legislative expression in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.21 Demand for opium increased. The drug that the British had forced into China at the point of a gun and that had been widely sold to middle-class Americans in patent medicines and child soporifics was now perceived as a pernicious substance that the Chinese not only smoked themselves, but also used to subvert the morals of white men, and especially white women.

  Chinese gangs were not yet a significant force in the New York underworld, and opium dens, although run by Chinese men, were usually white-owned. Battles were fought over control of the lucrative trade, and while Monk was now no more than a bit player in the gang wars on his former territory, on June 4, 1912, he was caught up in the aftermath of a bloody feud using pistols and bombs that began in a Chinatown saloon and spread to various parts of the city. The trigger for the violence may have been an attack on the current leader of Monk’s former gang, “Big Jack” Zelig, who was shot in the neck and left in critical condition after he himself had shot up a saloon owned by a rival.22 With no fewer than six gang fights breaking out all over the city and running battles continuing for ten hours, it seemed to some a return to old-style gang violence.

  Spurred to action by criticism of police impotence and incompetence, the strong-arm squads began a new roundup of gang members, and Monk was one of the victims.23 Acting on a tip, customs officials armed with axes and crowbars surrounded a tenement on East Thirteenth Street and smashed their way in. They claimed to have found a complete opium manufacturing outfit, and Monk himself smoking a pipe of the drug. It is conceivable that the evidence was fabricated; the order had come down from on high to rid New York of its gangsters, and, if relatively powerless now, Monk remained one of the city’s most notorious figures. The arrest and conviction of Monk Eastman would satisfy the public that something was being done about gangsters, while leaving untouched more currently powerful gangland figures and their political and police accomplices.

  The strong-arm squads, led by the ambitious and notoriously corrupt Lieutenant Charles A. Becker—who even had his own press agent to ensure his version of his exploits was always well-publicized—also raided a number of gambling dens. Those raids were the direct result of an appeal from the now aging and infirm Big Tim Sullivan to Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo and Mayor Gay nor. Big Tim complained that the owners of the gambling dens were not receiving their just returns on the hefty bribes and kickbacks they paid to the police, but it was a crass error to draw the mayor’s attention to the corrupt relationship between police, city officials, and gambling-den owners.24 A short-tempered, unpredictable character with a bullet permanently lodged in his larynx after a failed assassination attempt, Mayor Gay nor prided himself on his morality and selflessness in the city’s service and had pledged to stamp out corruption among public officials. As a result, Big Tim’s intervention proved completely counterproductive; Gay nor responded by ordering that every gambling house be shut down.

  Gay nor may also have been prodded into action by lobbying from Dr. Judah Magnes and the “Kehillah” (literally, “the communal body”), an organization formed by respectable Jews and dedicated to extirpating crime and the worst excesses of drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and gang activities from the Jewish districts of the Lower East Side.25 Their complaints had been ignored by police until Dr. Magnes paid a call on Mayor Gay nor and Commissioner Waldo; after that, police were regularly stationed in front of stuss houses, and by the time of Mayor Gynor’s death in September 1913, the Kehillah was able to claim that the criminal gangs had been broken up and the vice and crime that had infested the district for decades had been largely eradicated.

  Big Tim Sullivan, already a spent force, died in the same month as Mayor Gay nor. Newspaper reports claimed he had lost $700,000 in two years and shed sixty pounds from his once powerful two-hundred-pound frame.26 His mental condition had deteriorated so much, possibly as a result of tertiary syphilis, that he was “absolutely dominated by delusions of terrifying apprehension, fear, conspiracy, plot, attempts of poisoning, and efforts to do him bodily harm.” He was taken to a sanatorium, but in September 1913 he escaped and disappeared. His mangled body, found on a railway line, was not identified for almost a fortnight, just as it was about to be shipped to Potter’s Field for burial in a pauper’s grave. The crowd of seventy-five thousand that lined the Bowery for his funeral procession included people from every walk of life, from statesmen and judges and actors to prizefighters and panhandlers.27

  The police raids led by Lieutenant Becker on Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal’s gambling den after Sullivan’s misjudged intervention had also triggered a chain of events that led to Rosenthal’s killing, Becker’s termination as head of the strong-arm squad, and his subsequent conviction and execution for Rosenthal’s murder.28 Popular outrage at the affair ramped up pressure on police and politicians to demonstrate their integrity and incorruptibility, and a citizens’ committee appointed to investigate corruption and graft reported that it was time for more radical efforts. Surprisingly, one of Tammany’s most powerful figures, Charles F. “Silent Charlie” Murphy, had reached the same conclusion, recognizing that the old era was near its end. “New York City had emerged from its frontier stage.”29

  The information passed on by the Kehillah made Jewish gangs and gangsters particularly vulnerable to any anticorruption drive, and many, of course, believed Monk t
o be Jewish. Whether or not he was truly guilty of the offense with which he was charged—manufacturing opium without a license—when he appeared before the United States District Court, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment. Monk served his time on Blackwell’s Island, and on his release was given an ultimatum by the police: if he did not stay away from New York, he would be daily harassed, hounded, beaten with nightsticks, and arrested on any pretext.30 He duly left town, but moved only as far as Albany, where he lived on Lower Broadway. He led an apparently straight and honest life only until October 1914, when he was arrested and charged with burglary in Buffalo. He was discharged either for lack of evidence or after the intervention of some of his old Tammany friends from New York City. Driven out of town by the Buffalo police, Monk returned to Albany.

  There were reports that he had been seen back in Brooklyn soon afterward, “representing” the employers in a dispute with the stevedores’ union, though his arrest for intoxication in Albany on February 28 of the following year suggests that any return to New York was only temporary.31 Meanwhile, Mayor John PUrroy Mitchel, elected on a reform ticket after Tammany infighting had alienated voters, and his commissioners of police—first Douglas I. McKay, and then Arthur Woods, who took over in April 1914—were now completing the purge of the gangs that their predecessors had begun. During his first year in office, Commissioner Woods imprisoned more than two hundred of the most notorious crooks and thugs in the city, and gangsters against whom conclusive evidence could not be produced were hounded by detectives and routinely clubbed by uniformed patrolmen. More than ever, New York was no safe haven for Monk.