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

by Neil Hanson

  After Miller’s eulogy, the curiosity-seekers were allowed to file past the casket to take a last look at the face of the dead gangster. A number of detectives stood by the casket and carefully scrutinized everyone who passed.

  Then the coffin lid was closed and Monk was lowered into his last resting place, a grave near that of his mother. There was a dry rattle as General O’Ryan scattered a handful of dirt on the coffin, then a lone bugler sounded taps. As the last notes of the bugle hung in the air, the mourners remained motionless, perhaps remembering not just Monk Eastman, but all those old comrades lost in East Side gang wars or buried in Flanders mud.

  A rifle squad of men from his old regiment stood ready to fire three volleys over Monk’s grave, but another figure, a man in clergyman’s robes—probably the divisional chaplain, Father Kelley—then stepped out of the crowd. “No matter how bad a man is, there’s always some good in him,” he said.31 “Eastman was a gunman, but not at heart. There were many heroic things he did during the war that never reached the ears of those over here.” Like Pastor Lockwood, Kelley told of Monk’s encounter with the fifteen-year-old German youth. “Monk’s companion was about to end the boy’s life with a bullet,” Kelley said. “ ‘Don’t shoot’ cried the ‘killer.’ ‘He’s only a kid.’ The boy was made a prisoner. That boy’s life was spared, and I am sure that, together with his mother, he prays for ‘The Monk.’ ” As he stepped back into the ranks of mourners, there was a moment’s silence and then, at a command from Lieutenant Davidson, rifle shots sounded a requiem. As the echoes faded, the crowds began to file away into the gathering dusk of that cold December afternoon.

  Even as the funeral was taking place, police had produced yet another leak about the cause of Monk’s death. It was now grudgingly admitted that Monk had been acting as a police spy. Described on the morning after his death as “a reformed gangster who could not go right,” he was now being hailed by his former comrades in the 27th Division as “a hero who had paid the price of his recovered citizenship by losing his life to the swift, relentless vengeance of the underworld.”32 However, those claims were ridiculed by Monk’s former gang members. Throughout his life, no matter what threats were made or inducements offered, Monk had adhered to the underworld code, and those who knew him refused to believe, on no more solid evidence than yet another unattributable leak from police headquarters, that he had become an informer.

  The search for his killer continued, but it appeared directionless, and police statements remained contradictory. Forty-eight hours after the shooting, they had still been insisting that the suspect, supposedly an old crony of Monk’s and a member of his gang, had not left New York, though, as one observer noted, it was obvious that their information did not extend to his present whereabouts. When it was pointed out that more than thirty-six hours had elapsed between the killing and the questioning of the first witnesses, and that the criminal—if there was only one—had had ample time to flee New York, the feeble response from the police was that they “did not believe their case had been weakened by the lapse of time, as they had to ‘work it out in our own way.’ ”33 Despite their claims that Monk had been killed for informing, the police were also forced to concede that they were still far from certain of the motive.

  Two days later, the arrest and interrogation of two material witnesses—William J. Simermeyer, the chauffeur who drove Monk and five other men from Brooklyn to the Blue Bird Cafe on the fatal night, and Sylvester Hamilton, a member of the party—produced a breakthrough. Police announced that they were now confident that Monk had been shot and killed by a man who had entertained him and five friends at a dinner in the Blue Bird Cafe immediately before the killing. He was, they said, a Williamsburg man whose business was “both legitimate and illegitimate”—a prosperous businessman who was also on intimate terms with many criminals.34

  Contradicting earlier claims of a furious argument between Monk and his killer, Hamilton insisted that “not an angry word had passed up to the time the slayer began to shoot at Eastman,” and police were now also forced to admit that, in complete contradiction of their earlier claims, the killer had left the city immediately after the murder.35 The killing was now said to be premeditated, and police claimed that Monk had been invited to the dinner to ensure that there would be no interference with the murderer’s plans.

  On December 31, 1920, the district attorney’s office released the name of the suspect: Jeremiah “Jerry” Bohan, a “dry agent” (Prohibition Enforcement Agent). Although they stopped short of naming him as the killer, the statement that Bohan was not at his home, was known to carry a gun, and had been arrested in connection with a previous shooting in Williamsburg, and that of three customers of the Blue Bird Cafe on the night of the shooting who were still unaccounted for, “we want Jerry Bohan most of all,” was probably enough of a hint for even the most dim-witted bystander.36

  On January 4, 1921, there was an astonishing development, as Jerry Bohan walked into the Lee Avenue police station in Brooklyn, voluntarily surrendered to police, and confessed to the killing, though he claimed he had shot in self-defense. Bohan said that Monk had “got mussy over nothing” in the Spatz Cafe in Brooklyn some months before and had threatened to shoot him, but the quarrel had then been patched up.37 On Christmas night they were in the Blue Bird Cafe with four other men when an argument broke out over tipping the staff and the piano player. Bohan claimed that when that had been settled, he was walking away from the Blue Bird alone when Monk grabbed him from behind, whirled him around, and told him that he had been “a rat” ever since he got the Prohibition job. At the same time, Bohan asserted, Monk, who was subsequently found not even to be armed with a penknife, “dropped his hand in his right coat pocket.” At that instant, Bohan said, remembering how Monk had threatened him before, he drew his own pistol and emptied it into Monk’s body. He also claimed that the arrival of the taxicab in which he escaped was merely a coincidence and not evidence of premeditation on his part.

  Bohan’s story was contradicted by the testimony of the other witnesses in the case, and his bizarre claim that he and Monk had fallen out over the tip at the Blue Bird Cafe was denied by the waiters there. They insisted that Bohan had not been one of the six companions with whom Monk shared his last marathon drinking session. It was also revealed that Bohan had a long criminal record. He had been tried and acquitted for the killing of Joe “The Bear” Faulkner in Brooklyn in 1911, and had been arrested four times for disorderly conduct. During the war he had again been arrested under the “Work-or-Fight” law, and then got a job on the Brooklyn waterfront “representing” the stevedore’s union, which was having trouble with the employers. Monk was “representing” the employers at the same time, and it was “thus the two met and became friendly enemies.”38

  Bohan had been fired from his job as a Prohibition agent as soon as it was known that the police were looking for him, but why he returned to New York, gave himself up, and voluntarily confessed to the killing was not revealed by him or the police. It is possible that he feared Jersey justice—a revenge shooting by one of Monk’s former gang members—more than the justice administered by the City of New York, or he may have struck a deal to plead guilty in return for money, or for other crimes being ignored.

  Three months after Monk’s funeral, one of his old gang, Edward Herberger, traveled to New York from Philadelphia to avenge his old boss. It was said that one of the ties that bound them was that they had once been arrested together on the Williamsburg Bridge, charged with picking a pocket. Herberger arrived in Brooklyn and went to the Court Cafe, the favorite haunt of Monk and many of his old followers. When he walked in, Herberger announced that he was looking for an old enemy of his pal, Monk, and dropped many hints about what he would do if he found the men he was after, but Bohan was behind bars and none of the other men Herberger named were to be found. As he sat in the Court Cafe, “brooding, with his head in his hands, his disinterested motive for the visit to New York seemed to ebb awa
y” and, according to the cafe owner, Joseph Germanhauser, Herberger suddenly jumped to his feet, drew a revolver, and said, “I guess I have got to work.”39 He then held up the cafe owner, robbed him of two thousand dollars, and fled. He was identified by Germanhauser from the portraits of Monk’s friends and criminal associates held in the Rogues’ Gallery at police headquarters, and Philadelphia police arrested him a week later. When they searched his lodgings, along with most of the two thousand dollars, they found some opium, a set of safecracking tools, and a photo of Monk draped in black cloth.

  The man Herberger had been seeking, Jerry Bohan, was initially imprisoned in the Tombs without bail, and his trial did not take place until a year after the killing.40 After pleading guilty to manslaughter in the first degree, Bohan was sentenced to from three to ten years, three months in prison. Received at Sing Sing on January 5, 1922, he was paroled on June 23, 1923, after serving just seventeen months of his sentence, giving rise to further suspicions that there was more to Monk’s death and Bohan’s confession to the killing than had ever been revealed.

  Epilogue

  THE WAY THINGS HAVE CHANGED

  Like the lawlessness of the Old West, the era of Monk Eastman in the “Wild West” gangland of the Lower East Side had passed into history, his death signaling the last rites for the old-style gangs and the dawn of the new age of organized crime. Although gangsters still strode the streets of New York, they were of a very different breed. Monk had priced his jobs at a handful of dollars and always liked to keep his hand in by inflicting an odd beating himself, a habit that put him on the path to his downfall. His successors walled themselves off from the violence perpetrated by their minions and, fueled by the liquor gold rush of Prohibition, became extremely wealthy, if not wholly respectable, businessmen.

  Rooted in the “romantic” East Side past, public perception of the modern gangsters lagged behind the reality. Writing fifteen years after Monk’s death, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Meyer Berger remarked that most people still thought of gangsters and racketeers as “loafers with turtle-neck sweaters, cauliflower ears and protruding maxilla, who beat their women and punt their offspring around the flat. That type passed out of existence during the liquor gold rush … Your modern racket boss, when he isn’t in Miami to avoid embarrassing questioning by loutish policemen … if he kicks mamma around once in a while, for old time’s sake, he does it in the privacy of his own home.”1

  Old-style gangsters might mutter scornful remarks into their beers about gang bosses with secretaries, receptionists, and smart offices in fashionable districts, but these new gangsters wouldn’t have dreamed of dirtying their manicured hands with a little Monk-style street-fighting; they enjoyed wealth, power, and influence beyond the dreams of Monk Eastman in his prime. They resented being described as gangsters and preferred to describe themselves as businessmen and their gang as their organization.

  As Meyer Berger sardonically noted, “the muscle” used for intimidation or to carry out the murders that were incidental to the business were not allowed to “clutter up the premises, because it wouldn’t look nice,” and most of the racket bosses also aspired to a place in society commensurate with their wealth. Ciro Terranova, the boss of the Harlem rackets, loved

  a canter in the park or among the lovely hills of Westchester, because you meet such interesting people on the bridle path … The East Side crime-school graduates, once devoted to pinochle and stuss, have taken up bridge … and discuss end-plays and squeezes with as much zest as they used to discuss a particularly neat skull fracture or eye displacement … Born in cold flats on the East Side and accustomed to taking their night’s ease on pool tables when the skull-fracturing and nose-busting wasn’t paying dividends … the present big-shot bosses are making up for it in the most luxurious penthouses in the city.2

  The few survivors of the old gangs and the old ways, like Humpty Jackson—when last heard of, the owner of a Harlem pet shop—could only shake their heads at the way things had changed.

  Like the Dead Rabbits and Whyos before him, Monk had been an old-school gangster, fighting and brawling his way to the top of the heap and leading from the front in the bloody, brutal gang battles to consolidate his power. Yet he also anticipated the modern gangland era, developing the sophisticated rackets that his successors would utilize and overseeing the organization of rival gangs into federations that might sometimes feud with one another, but could also collaborate for their mutual benefit. He created the template and laid the foundations that Murder Inc., the Syndicate, and the Cosa Nostra would build upon.

  He was undoubtedly a gangster, a bruiser, a burglar, a liar, a thief, a thug for hire, a pimp, and an occasional opium peddler, but the litany of his crimes and misdemeanors does not begin to tell the full story of Monk Eastman. He covered his tracks so well that even the most basic facts of his existence were open to question. Barely anyone knew his real name, his genuine age, or his true address. Even the police showed themselves unable to keep track of all his numerous arrests and convictions under a string of aliases, and they continued to file his records under “William Delaney,” believing to the end that it was his real name. They also believed that he was illiterate, but it stretches credulity to imagine that a man who could not read would have had newspapers delivered to his cell or required his subordinates to produce written reports of their crimes. Nor, if he was merely an ill-educated thug, would he have taken time to save a young sailor from his own youthful folly on the Bowery—an act of kindness the man still remembered and treasured twenty years later—nor risked his life to rescue his wounded comrades on the battlefield, nor intervened to prevent another member of his company from taking the life of a terrified German boy soldier. His army comrades had no doubts about Monk’s character, and their feelings must have been shared by those thousands of poor citizens of the Lower East Side, the majority women, who traveled across the East River to Williamsburg and Cypress Hills and stood for hours in the bitter winter cold just to attend his funeral.

  No matter how cynical his motives or how illicit his means of earning money, Monk—like his old political patron, Big Tim Sullivan—saw to it that much of it found its way into the pockets of the desperately poor inhabitants of his Lower East Side kingdom. He was no Robin Hood, and the Lower East Side was emphatically no Sherwood Forest, but his acts of kindness and generosity; his love of children and animals; the loyalty and affection he inspired, even in some of his rivals; the testimonials to his character from those—like the officers of the 106th Infantry, Charley Jones, and Morris Pockett—who had no vested interest to protect; and above all, Monk’s courage and dedication to others in the furnace of the battlefields of the Western Front argued of a far more complex character than the brutal, mindless thug his detractors described. He had lived most of his life in the shadows of the underworld, but he emerged into the light and by his actions redeemed some, perhaps all, of the many crimes he had committed. In a life characterized by venality, he also proved himself capable of selflessness and altruism, even risking his life to save others, the most Christian act a man can perform.

  An enigma throughout his life, Monk Eastman went to his grave leaving a score of unanswered questions behind him. When he spoke for the record in court, or in police or newspaper interviews, he almost invariably lied. He left not a single word written in his own hand, made no deathbed confession, and left no last will and testament. The true extent of the reformation of “Citizen Eastman”; the ultimate fate of his wives, his children, his property, and the fortune he made from his crimes; and the real reasons for his killing on that cold December night remain unknown to this day.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the many, many people who have assisted me in my research into that elusive character, Monk Eastman. In Britain, my particular thanks to the Book Supply Team at the British Library’s newspaper section at Colindale, North London—Audrey O’Sullivan, Pat Hanna, Norman, Joyce, Jeff, Spud, Prav
in, Mark, Pat Fitzgerald, Geraint, Andy, Dick, and Robert—who went far beyond the call of duty to help me in my research. My thanks also to the staff of the National Archives in Kew; the British Library in St. Pancras and its “out-station” at Boston Spa in Yorkshire; the Ilkley Library; the Leeds Library; Kevin, Carole, Ross, and the rest of the staff of my excellent local bookshop, the Grove Bookshop in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, who tracked down and obtained some obscure publications for me; Paul Anning and Mark Bukumunhe of Annings Ilkley, for their painstaking digital imaging of what is almost certainly the last remaining paper copy of The World, March 26, 1919; and Simon Wilkinson of swpix.com for his expert help and advice on photography.

  In Israel, my thanks go to Professor Shlomo Yotvat, and to Esther Lichtenstein and Hadassah Assouline at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People. In the United States, my grateful thanks to the staff of the General Research Division in Humanities 315, the Microform Reading Room, the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History, and Genealogy, and the Dorot Jewish Division at the New York Public Library; the New York City Municipal Archives; the New York State Library Reference Section, Manuscripts and Special Collections, and the New York State Archives at Albany; the Library of Congress (Madison, Adams, and Jefferson Buildings) in Washington, D.C.; the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland in College Park; the U.S. Army Center for Military History, Collins Hall, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.; and the National Archives and Record Administration in Washington D.C. and at College Park, Maryland.

  Thanks also to Jim Gandy at the New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center at Saratoga Springs; Leilani Dawson at the Brooklyn Historical Society; Meletta Bell at the archives of Big Bend, Texas; Jodye Stone and Verna Bonner, Big Bend, Texas; John Chapman in Chicago; Bonnie Nelson at the Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Paul Boag at Proquest; Valerie Swan Young at Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn; Thomas C. McCarthy of the New York Correction History Society; Ron Arons; Michael Harling; Beth Spinelli of the New York City Police Museum; the staff of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum; the New York County Surrogate’s Court; Jill Slaight at the Department of Rights and Reproductions, New-York Historical Society; and Bruce Calvert of the Silent Film Still Archive.