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

by Neil Hanson

  There was little time for sleep before leaving for the following morning’s parade in Manhattan—the greatest parade in the city’s history. Grandstands had been erected along fifty-one city blocks, thus surpassing, as the 27th Division’s official historian proudly noted, the seating capacity of the Roman Colosseum. Fifth Avenue, “the Appian Way of the New World,” had been thronged all day and far into the night.13 From the Washington Arch to Sixtieth Street, Fifth Avenue was “a modern fairy land of color and illumination, a blazing golden way,” its decorations the “most pretentious and artistic ever seen, expressing three sentiments: the note of triumph, the note of memorial and the note of carnival and jubilation.” Lights of more than a hundred thousand candlepower had been arranged along the route, and searchlights played on the decorations at the three places of honor—the Victory Arch at Madison Square, the Court of the Heroic Dead at Forty-second Street, and the Arch of Jewels at the Plaza.

  Pristine white sand covered Fifth Avenue from Twenty-third to Twenty-sixth streets, flanked by a colonnade of pylons that held four huge balloons, tethered by colored ropes and decorated with Allied flags and glittering metal spirals.14 The Altar of Liberty was surrounded by massed Allied flags, and the Victory Arch stood, brilliant white and twelve stories high, above Madison Square. Golden shields emblazoned with the 27th Division’s crest hung from the trees between Fortieth and Forty-second streets. At the Court of the Heroic Dead, outside the New York Public Library, two tall pylons bore gleaming golden eagles with spread wings, while golden spears and more shields bearing the divisional crest supported a purple curtain fringed with gold and inscribed with the 27th Division’s battle honors.

  Above the list of battles was a copy of a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to the mother of six boys who lost their lives in the Civil War: “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief so overwhelming, I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”15 Below that text, half-shrouded by the purple curtain, was a huge roll of honor inscribed with the names of the dead and the heroic deeds of the 27th Division.

  Sightseers and friends and relatives of soldiers had poured into the city from upstate, and every hotel was so packed that “even the best friend of the manager” would have struggled to find a place to sleep.16 Enterprising people with apartments or offices overlooking the parade route were hiring out space to stand and watch from their windows for a few dollars a time, and one person with a room near Forty-second Street was asking three hundred dollars for a day’s hire.

  The grandstands stretched for two and a half miles along Fifth Avenue, and the city’s parks had also been stripped of their benches. Twenty-five hundred were placed between Eighteenth and Twentieth streets and seven hundred near the public library, as front-row seats for six thousand wounded and convalescent soldiers and the few remaining veterans of the Civil War. Convalescents from the Grand Central Palace Hospital viewed the parade from the backs of trucks parked in the side streets from Forty-fifth to Fifty-first streets, while the shell-shocked men from the Gun Hill Road Hospital were seated with 275 Red Cross nurses in a stand at Sixtieth Street.

  Hundreds of improvised stands had been erected for employees of the shops and offices lining Fifth Avenue. Building after building was festooned with banners and WELCOME HOME signs, and the flag of the 27th Division also hung from hundreds of improvised poles. On each flag, the divisional insignia, the stars of the constellation Orion—a punning reference to the name of the division’s commander—and the letters NYD (New York Division) were picked out in crimson on a black background. The colors also had symbolic significance: “the black for iron, the crimson for blood—The Iron and Blood Division.”17 The façade of one store bore an American flag covering five stories, and smaller flags were grouped around a replica of the great seal of New York State, topped by “27” picked out in blue lights. Thick ropes of greenery were strung from flag to flag, and there was scarcely a window that did not contain a flag or a placard.

  Clear skies and sunshine and a gentle northerly breeze greeted the 27th Division as they set out together for the last time, heralded by two airplanes, one said to be piloted by air ace Eddie Rickenbacker, that flew straight up Fifth Avenue, below the roof levels of the buildings on either side. Flying higher, they performed aerobatics above the rooftops.18

  The procession itself was led by a symbolic tribute to the dead: a flower-decked and flag-draped funeral caisson, drawn by eight horses and bearing a catafalque laden with a great laurel wreath and huge masses of flowers, filling the air with their fragrance. The caisson was followed by a group of soldiers carrying an enormous service flag bearing 1,973 gold stars—one for every member of the division killed in the war. As the great golden service flag came into view, its stars glittering in the light of the noonday sun, the crowds removed their hats and bowed their heads.

  Wounded men in trucks and automobiles came next, followed by the police department band, playing Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and behind them came the officers and men of the 27th Division, marching in their individual platoons, twenty abreast and in such close order that the rear rank man’s steel helmet was under the bayonet of the front rank man in the next platoon. The 106th Infantry had formed up on Ninth and Tenth streets, between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, before taking their place in the parade. They wore their dark green helmets displaying the division insignia and had light packs, filled canteens, and overcoats with belts and sidearms. All their equipment, except their contaminated gas masks, had been brought home from France with them.

  The parade halted for five minutes on the hour and half hour, and, whether marching or at rest, the men had been warned to maintain the military discipline that had brought their division “the respect of the world.”19 There was to be no gum-chewing; no conversation in the ranks; no smiling and waving to relatives, friends, or acquaintances; and no flowers, ribbons, or unauthorized badges or decoration of any kind.

  As the procession approached the Victory Arch, the bands stopped their triumphal music and buglers played a salute to the colors while a single soldier, Sergeant Reidar Waller, selected for his heroism in battle as a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor and the British Distinguished Service Medal, stepped forward.20 He cut the silken rope stretched across the entrance to the arch with his bayonet, while the guns of the forts along the river fired a salute.

  At the Court of the Heroic Dead by the public library, a wreath of purple orchids was carried from the caisson by an honor guard of seven veterans of the Civil War and two of the Spanish-American War, and was laid at the foot of the roll of honor, surrounded by wreaths and flowers from other states and cities. While the wreath was being laid, a band played a funeral march. The spectators bared their heads and the uniformed veterans remained at attention until the last note had died away. The caisson was then led slowly away, and as the service flag reached the Court of the Heroic Dead, a community chorus of young boys sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” after which “many persons wiped their eyes.”21

  Ever since his abrupt disappearance from the streets in September 1917, almost no one in the whole of New York City knew what had become of Monk Eastman. Now he was back, toting a gun on Fifth Avenue, but for once with no fear of arrest. “The gang”—a group of his old friends and acquaintances lining the sidewalks around Twenty-third Street—was out in force to greet him, and when the 106th Infantry appeared, “yells of ‘Hello Monk’ came from the throats of East Side admirers.”22 Most of his army comrades knew him only as “a good pal and a brave soldier who was always ready to put his comrades and country above himself.” Not until the parade did they discover that Private Edward Eastman and Monk Eastman the New York gangster were one and the same. A newspaper photograph published the next day show
ed Governor Alfred E. Smith—notoriously corrupt and Tammany to his fingertips—resplendent in a shiny top hat, leaning out of the front row of the reviewing stand to shake the hand of a doughboy friend from the East Side. The man whose hand he was shaking bore more than a passing resemblance to Monk.

  It took the parade five hours to cover the five-mile route up Fifth Avenue. The head of the procession, bearing the tributes to those buried in graves in Belgium and France, moved in slow and solemn silence, but the rest of the procession, the wounded riding in motorcars and the “effectives” striding along, were greeted by roars that never ceased. An estimated three million people had lined the route, jamming the sidewalks from curb to building line, leaning from every window and the roof edges high above them. Every seat in every stand was filled.

  Many of those who had paid for grandstand seats found that they had invested in worthless bits of pasteboard, for when they arrived, they found their seats already taken by people who showed no willingness to give them up, and who had often paid for them as well. A few who had bought tickets from reputable agencies managed to get their money back, but “those who bought from irresponsible speculators got nothing but a bit of experience for their money.”23 At some stands, attendants sold the reserved seats to the first persons who came along and then refused to do anything for the rightful owners when they appeared.

  Thousands of people stood on chairs and boxes, craning their necks for a better view, and every cross street was dense with people for at least half a block in both directions. As they tried to snatch a better view of the parade, those nearer to Fifth Avenue were pushed forward until the crush was so great that the police lines were swept aside and the avenue was flooded with a swirling mass of humanity. Each time it happened, the parade ground to a stop. At Madison Square the press of spectators forced the procession to halt for nearly half an hour. The best efforts of mounted policemen using their horses to push back the people, police chauffeurs using their automobiles and motorcycles as “tanks,” patrolmen on foot, and soldiers and sailors among the crowds resulted in the clearance of only a narrow pathway. Before General O’Ryan could lead his men under the Victory Arch, they were forced to break their platoon formation and swing into the familiar column of fours, the campaign marching formation that was rarely used on parade. O’Ryan was nearly thrown by his horse as the crowd pushed against it.24

  The crowds also later blocked Fifth Avenue in the Fifties, and again at Seventy-ninth Street. Men, women, and children were trampled underfoot; scores fainted, and three people died in the crush: a police captain had a heart attack, an insurance clerk was knocked down and run over as police struggled to clear the way, and a salesman fell down an airshaft from his viewing place high on a rooftop and suffered fatal injuries. Another dozen people were injured falling from trees that they had climbed for a better view, or from rooftops that were almost as densely packed as the streets below.

  Thirty thousand boxes of lunch had been prepared for the marchers, but their rations were also augmented by a constant fall of manna from above, causing officers to observe that never in the history of the 27th Division had its discipline been put to a greater test. General O’Ryan had ordered his men to “parade at attention,” but the distractions of family and friends calling to them from the crowd and the gifts of cigars, cigarettes, and candy showering on them from the buildings, sidewalks, and grandstands were hard to resist.25

  Although some of the men kept their eyes straight ahead whatever the distractions, not everyone was able to resist temptation, especially in the periods when the column was at rest. People dropped packs of cigarettes, bananas, and apples from the upper stories and rooftops, and “the boys didn’t let many of them hit the asphalt and only laughed at the tingling in their fingers.”26 Wounded soldiers watching the parade from curbside seats joined the scramble for cigarettes and money that came fluttering down like snowflakes from on high. When a shower of money—including coins wrapped in dollar bills—sandwiches, and cigarettes descended on the heads of the wounded men in the grandstands in front of the Netherland and Savoy hotels, many of them “forgot they were wounded” in the scramble for the gifts.

  At intervals, the procession halted while delegates of public organizations and private enterprises presented boxes of candy and sandwiches. At the American Tobacco Company’s offices at Eighteenth Street, tobacco and cigarettes were tossed to the boys, and at Fifty-ninth Street the official lunch wagon of the police department, a truck thirty feet long and six feet wide, dispensed fifteen thousand sandwiches and six thousand apples. New York had never seen such a parade.

  After the parade, fifty thousand places for dinner at forty hotels and restaurants had been offered—almost twice as many as the number of soldiers. What was described as the city’s biggest banquet featured a specially designed menu card detailing notable incidents from the 27th Division’s history, including, of course, the storming of the Hindenburg Line. The same menu was served at all the venues:27

  Olives Mixed Sweet Pickles

  Grape Fruit

  Fresh Vegetable Soup

  Half Roast Broiler (1½ pounds)

  Boiled Sweet Potato Green Peas

  Apple Pie

  Neapolitan Ice Cream

  Large Coffee with Milk and Sugar

  Cigarettes White Rock

  Unfortunately, the organizing committee had displayed rather more enthusiasm than efficiency, and tickets for dinner were not distributed until well into the afternoon, by which time many of the men had drifted away with friends and relatives or made their own arrangements to eat. The Hotel McAlpin, asked to prepare dinner for five hundred soldiers, served only seventy-two, and the Commodore Hotel served only one-third of the eighteen hundred men they had been told to expect.28 Meanwhile, Monk led “the East Side delegation”—comrades of the 27th Division from his old Lower East Side turf—on a parade of his old haunts, ending with “a dinner to Eastman,” a feast served at Pistanis on Kenmare and Elizabeth streets.

  22

  VICTIMLESS CRIMES

  The next morning, March 27, 1919, hundreds of people gathered in Brooklyn at the Atlantic Avenue Terminal of the Long Island Rail Road to give the 106th Infantry a rousing final send-off as Monk and his comrades boarded trains for Camp Upton.1 A wartime camp of hurriedly erected two-story frame barracks sixty miles east of New York City, among the pine bush and white sands of Eastern Long Island, Camp Upton was where Monk and all his comrades were to complete the last formalities before their discharge from the service. At intervals of a few minutes, twenty-five trains, each eleven to fifteen cars long and packed with men, arrived at the terminal at the south center of the camp. As the trains pulled in, officers jumped into the cars and ordered the men out double-quick; within three minutes, each train had been emptied and sent back on the spur to the main line, returning to Jamaica by the South Shore Division.

  On arrival at Camp Upton, each man was given a package containing cigarettes, chocolate, chewing gum, matches, and stamped cards. To minimize the risk of unauthorized excursions and interregimental troubles, visits by relatives and friends were not encouraged; the sections were at a remove from the station and widely separated from one another. Before their discharge could become effective, the soldiers had to sit through eight lectures, including talks on compensation, insurance, morale, and labor; fill out endless paperwork (eleven forms had to be completed for each man); settle their accounts; and undergo a physical examination.

  Along with the rest of his comrades, Monk’s formal discharge was completed on April 2, 1919.2 Each discharged man received a bonus of sixty dollars, and when the last one had been paid, the regiment was formally disbanded and ceased to exist. All the officers and men then boarded trains for New York, though they first had a long march back to the station from their section of the camp. Monk was given an honorable discharge and his papers were marked “Excellent.” He had fought with extraordinary bravery for his country, but he remained deprived of the rights o
f citizenship, including the right to vote, because he had been convicted of a felony. However, as Monk boarded the train, he carried in his shirt pocket an envelope containing a petition bearing the signatures of his regimental officers, including the commanding officer, Colonel Franklin W. Ward; Captain Robert S. Cleaver; Captain Robert G. Conrow; the regimental surgeon, Major Larsen; and Lieutenant Joseph A. Kerrigan, who was Monk’s direct superior. The petition had also been signed by every man in Company G and 150 other members of the 106th Infantry. Monk delivered the petition to supreme court justice Morschauser, who would personally present it to Governor Al Smith. The officers of the regiment also wrote letters to the governor, testifying to Monk’s excellent conduct while in the service, his loyalty to his unit and his comrades, and his bravery in action.3

  On May 2, 1919, Governor Smith duly received the petition, supported by a letter from Justice Morschauser, who had become interested in Monk’s case after meeting him. “Eastman came to see me here in Poughkeepsie and I was impressed with his desire to make good, if he had an opportunity,” Morschauser wrote.4 “He volunteered his services for his country and made good, offering his life to the end that law and order should prevail in the world.”

  The letter of support from Colonel Ward drew attention to the fact that Monk had volunteered rather than been conscripted, and noted that “his record throughout the war has been exceptional and his service has been honest and faithful.”5 Major Larsen was willing to vouch for the fact that after the 106th was withdrawn from the front lines, Monk had stayed on duty as a stretcher-bearer, “exhibiting great bravery,” and Captain Cleaver had seen firsthand Monk’s service at Kemmel Hill and the Hindenburg Line, where he displayed the “utmost courage and devotion to duty … he has been an excellent soldier and has made a good record.”