Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  The Hall’s relationship with crime was regularized and brought to a high state of efficiency by Kelly’s successor, Richard Croker. It was no coincidence that the new boss was a former street brawler and petty gangster who had once been tried for murder. Croker, who ran Tammany from 1886 until 1902—and thus had charge of the machine when Becker arrived in New York—was a far more genuinely menacing figure than the affable Boss Tweed. He was utterly ruthless, almost entirely self-interested, and victory in three successive elections made him virtually untouchable.

  Still, Tammany was far from an entirely malign influence, even at the apogee of Croker’s power. A good deal of effort was poured into programs for better schooling and social relief, which immeasurably improved the Hall’s standing in the densely populated wards downtown. The machine also became ever more intimately concerned with the affairs of immigrants. “There is,” the boss himself boasted to the British journalist W. T. Stead, whom he met on a transatlantic liner,

  no such organization for taking hold of the untrained friendless man and converting him into a citizen. Who else would do it if we would not? Think of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners dumped in our city. They are too old to go to school…. They are alone, ignorant strangers, a prey to all manner of anarchical and wild notions…. Tammany looks after them for the sake of their votes, grafts them upon the Republic, makes citizens of them in short; and although you may not like our motives or our methods, what other agency is there by which so long a row could be hoed so quickly or so well?

  If there was one ward boss who embodied the best and the worst of Tammany Hall, who was admired as much as he was feared, who was generous with his time and money and yet remained engaged in almost every kind of vice, that man was “Big Tim” Sullivan.

  The tallest, best-proportioned, nicest-looking, most beloved district leader that New York ever produced, Sullivan ruled like a king over a ward that encompassed Charley Becker’s first workplaces as well as most of the heaving slums south of Fourteenth Street. His district ran from the Bowery east to the tenements of the Lower East Side and had been organized so competently that it became the greatest Democratic stronghold in the city. Tim always knew every detail of his prospects intimately. In the run-up to one election early in his career, he discovered that there were three die-hard Republicans living in one part of his ward, and he reported back to Croker accordingly. When the ballots were counted and the district’s vote was found to stand 395 to 4 in favor of the Democrats, Sullivan was outraged. “They got one more vote than I expected,” he told the boss. “But I’ll find that feller.”

  Tim had been born, in 1863, on Greenwich Street, in the heart of Manhattan’s most noisome slum. His father died when the boy was only four, and his mother remarried a violent alcoholic. The family lived miserably in a crowded wooden tenement, taking in boarders to survive, and it is scarcely surprising, in such circumstances, that the future politician received little formal schooling. Tim took part-time jobs from the age of seven, at first working as a bootblack with a stand in the local police station house—a fine spot from which to learn the realities of life downtown. Soon afterward he began hawking newspapers, progressing eventually to a position as a sort of wholesaler and organizer of younger boys. A natural leader, Sullivan did what he could to help the desperate, starving, and sometimes parentless children who looked up to him. Owen Kildare—who was orphaned in infancy and thrown onto the streets, aged seven, when his foster mother acquired a lover—recalled that when he first ventured timidly down Theater Alley, where the newsboys gathered, it was the adolescent Sullivan who approached him, advanced him a nickel as working capital, and “taught me a few tricks of the trade and advised me to invest my five pennies in just one, the best selling paper of the period.”

  At eighteen, Sullivan went to work for a newspaper distributor, a job that considerably broadened his horizons. On occasion he found himself required to go as far uptown as Central Park, this at a time when some slum dwellers lived out their entire lives without ever going north of Fourteenth Street. By now Tim stood over six feet tall, and his height and “round handsome face, bright smile and piercing blue eyes” made him physically imposing, an important asset for aspiring politicians of the day.

  Big Tim was an archetypal ward boss. He surrounded himself with men he could rely on—mostly members of his extended family; his principal aides were his brothers Paddy and Dennis,*8 his half brother Larry Mulligan, and cousins named Florrie, Christy, and “Little Tim”—and operated not from one of the newfangled Democratic clubhouses then springing up throughout the city but in the old style, dispensing help and patronage from a chain of dubious saloons. One of his earliest establishments was the headquarters of the Whyos, at the time Manhattan’s most notoriously violent street gang and a useful group to have on one’s side come election time. When he finally became respectable, Tim moved out of his saloons and into a suite at the Occidental Hotel on the Bowery: a grand four-story structure, popular with actors and noted for the vast erotic fresco, depicting Diana bathing with a group of nymphs, that adorned the ceiling of its bar.

  Big Tim’s most celebrated trait was his generosity. He was known to rise at dawn to lead gangs of the unemployed uptown to find laboring jobs on public works, and he served a vast annual Christmas dinner to as many as 5,000 Bowery bums, on one occasion spending $7,000 to set out a spread comprising 10,000 pounds of turkey together with hams, stuffing, potatoes, 500 loaves of bread, 5,000 pies, 200 gallons of coffee, and a hundred kegs of beer. In the summer months, he organized elaborate clambakes in Harlem River Park. These daylong celebrations served a twofold purpose, cementing the Sullivan clan’s reputation among the tenement poor while providing Big Tim and his cronies with an excuse to shake down businessmen and saloonkeepers along the Bowery—each of whom was expected to buy sheaves of five-dollar tickets.

  All in all, there was—as Alvin Harlow, the Bowery chronicler, observed—“never a more perplexing admixture of good and evil in one human character than in that of Timothy D. Sullivan.” Tim’s friends were loyal to him for life, and he was certainly capable of extending genuine kindness to men who could do him no conceivable good. Once, observing that an elevator attendant he’d met in Albany had never been to a “grand occasion” in his life, Tim spent $3,000 on a banquet for the man, with assemblymen and judges as guests, and a favorite dispensation was to grant a loyal supporter the right to organize a benefit in his own favor. These functions generally took the form of balls—“rackets,” they were called, because of the noise they generated. With Sullivan around, the recipients of this signal honor never had trouble selling tickets, and “Commodore Dutch,” a young Bowery bum employed to watch the goings-on in Tim’s saloons, at one time cleared $2,000 a year from the “Annual Party, Affair, Soirée Gala Naval Ball of the Original Commodore Dutch Association.” Yet this was the same Sullivan who was reported, on oath before a committee of the state assembly, to have personally beaten up opposition voters on election day, who loudly announced that if a Republican opponent dared to send in student volunteers to watch the polls, “I will say now that there won’t be enough ambulances in New York to carry them away,” and whose most vocal supporters were once described by the New York Herald as “bullet-headed, short haired, small eyed, smooth shaven, and crafty looking, with heavy, vicious features, which speak of dissipation and brutality, ready to fight at a moment’s notice.”

  Of course, the licensed excesses of the Sullivan clan, and the violence unleashed by their supporters, would scarcely have been possible had New York possessed an independent, vigorous police. But if Charley Becker learned one thing from the months he spent standing at the door of a Bowery saloon observing all the comings and goings on that famous street, it was that the city’s thousands of patrolmen were far from independent. Manipulating polls could be done only with the tacit agreement of the local precinct captains and the studied negligence, if not the active connivance, of hundreds of beat policemen. Collecting
graft from the gambling houses, brothels, and late-opening saloons, and guaranteeing their proprietors the right to run unmolested, also required control of the police.

  It was New York’s tragedy that its police department had long been vulnerable to such manipulation. The city had a lengthy history, extending back at least a century, of shameless exploitation of the police. Thousands of men had won promotion as a result of their zealousness in carrying out orders from the machines; many ordinary officers, perhaps even the majority, saw themselves as acolytes of a political party first and as patrolmen a distant second. And if Becker wished to join their ranks, his first step was to acknowledge this truth.

  Becoming a policeman, in the early 1890s, was largely a matter of connections. A prospective recruit knew someone who knew a district leader, or perhaps he came to the attention of a ward activist while working in the beer halls of the Bowery. At that point, soundings would be taken and loyalties assessed. Then, if all was well, the man received an introduction to one of New York’s police commissioners.

  In theory, potential new recruits could also apply to the department through a committee called the Civil Service Board. The board was highly respectable—it was an independent and upstanding body, a product of the reform movement of the 1880s that was committed to appointing men on merit. But its application process was rigorous. In one three-year period, its members considered 815 applications from would-be recruits, referred a mere 229 of these candidates to police surgeons for a physical examination, and eventually offered jobs to 135. The four commissioners, meanwhile, accepted 856 requests for nominations and granted 778. Men applying to the Civil Service Board, in other words, had a one-in-eight chance of getting onto the force. Men who had the support of a commissioner got their appointments through in nine cases out of every ten.

  The explanation for this spectacular discrepancy was simple: The commissioners took bribes. This was hardly surprising; they were part of the political establishment so comprehensively tainted by Tammany Hall, and a product of the mutually advantageous accommodation between the Democrats and their rival Republicans that had plunged the city into a morass of corruption. For $250 to $300 per man in Becker’s day (half to a quarter of a full year’s pay), recruits of the approved political persuasions were shepherded gently through the NYPD’s appointment process. And—since the number of men anxious to join the police always exceeded the number of vacancies—the commissioners had little trouble in ensuring that their candidates met the broad requirements of the force, which included stipulations that applicants stand at least five feet seven inches tall and weigh at least 130 pounds. But favored men got special treatment. Tammany Hall paid a tutor to “cram” loyal Democratic candidates for the not-too-tricky entrance tests, and there were cases of men who failed the physical examination being sent back to the surgeons time and again until—sometimes at their fifth or sixth appearance—the doctors finally passed men with incurable infirmities such as poor eyesight, acute rheumatism, or curvature of the spine. Occasionally, when a recruit was a renowned partisan of one faction or the other, even greater allowances were made. A single felony conviction was supposed to bar a man from ever joining the police, for instance. In practice, however, a number of New York patrolmen had convictions for burglary or theft.

  The advantages of this system were obvious, not least to the commissioners themselves. New York got policemen who had lived in the city long enough to be politically connected and thus knew their districts well. And—at an average of three hundred new recruits every twelve months—each member of the four-man Police Board received tax-free bribes amounting to $22,000 a year, a sum large enough to be a temptation to even the most affluent among them. So lucrative was the post of commissioner, in fact, that the men who held it could afford occasional indulgences. Favored political candidates might receive their nominations free of charge. Particularly outstanding recruits were also sometimes ushered in without request for payment. New York’s famous “Broadway Squad”—a body of policemen assigned to patrol the most fashionable stretches of the celebrated street, made up entirely of handsome, physically imposing men—got several of its best recruits this way. Since the chief purpose of the squad was to keep pickpockets and sneak thieves away from respectable citizens, escort well-to-do ladies across the street, and in general reassure New York’s upper classes that the city was properly policed (thus, hopefully, blinding them to excesses elsewhere), such apparent indulgences were no doubt considered investments.

  Charles Becker’s police patron was one of the four commissioners sitting in 1893: a well-known New York merchant by the name of John F. McClave. McClave, who was in his fifties, first joined the board in 1884. He was one of two Republicans who shared power with a pair of Tammany Democrats. He was also thoroughly corrupt—a failing unsurprising in a man of previously modest means who found himself exposed to considerable temptation. As a police commissioner, treasurer of the Board of Police, a trustee of the Police Pension Fund, and a member of the committee on repairs and supplies, McClave saw numerous opportunities to channel funds into his own accounts. He took them.

  How Becker made McClave’s acquaintance is not known. Ordinarily the would-be policeman would have been recommended to him by a district political leader, or perhaps been befriended by one of Manhattan’s “buffs”: businessmen who made it their job to help the police, expecting favors in return. The most influential of these men—they were usually middle-ranking politicians such as aldermen, state senators, or assemblymen—protected and assisted individual patrolmen and even controlled, to some extent, promotions to the higher ranks. Whatever the truth, McClave’s willingness to promote Becker’s career implies two things: that the Callicoon farm boy had Republican leanings, which would have made him a comparative oddity in a police department still dominated by Tammany, and that Becker had no scruples about paying for his job rather than taking the more honorable but risky course of applying through the Civil Service Board.

  In this, of course, the novice patrolman was no different from most of the men then serving with the police department, and the truth was that his physical attributes alone would have made him an impressive candidate in any era. Whether or not Becker really needed McClave’s support to obtain an appointment, however, the commissioner at least ensured that his young protégé made swift progress with his application. Becker parted with the $300 he had saved in the autumn of 1892, a little more than a year after his older brother joined the force. Thanks no doubt to McClave, his case received favorable consideration. His appointment was confirmed that November. By Christmas the new recruit was in training. And by the beginning of February 1894, he was in uniform.

  CHAPTER 3

  GRAFT

  IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER midnight in the rattletrap old station house on West Twentieth Street. Up on the second floor, in the great barracks of a dormitory, the men of the police reserve slumped facedown on their bedbug-ridden mattresses. The patrolmen slept in unwashed flannel underwear, their damp outer clothing slung on lines along the sweating walls. It was still winter, and both windows had been battened firmly down; the air in the room was stale and rank, and in the center of the floor a squat, potbellied stove blazed heat in all directions, adding the stink of burning coal to the powerful aromas of tobacco, bodies, and beer.

  Fresh out of training school, the raw recruit inched through the fug, groping his way from bed to bed until he reached his locker. It was the farthest from the window, naturally, and the iron bed frame next to it had been moved into the room that afternoon. Doing his best not to disturb the men sleeping beside him, the young patrolman perched upon his lumpy mattress and bent to untie his laces. As he did so, the bed collapsed beneath him with a crash and a great shout of laughter filled the room. It was not a friendly sound.

  Reassembling a gimmicked bed frame in the dark was tricky work, and it took the young man quite a while to do it. As he slipped and sweated on a floor slick with tobacco juice and rat droppings, the men clo
sest to him began to talk among themselves. The veterans’ accents were all Irish, and they were making no attempt to keep their voices down. It seemed they wanted to be overheard.

  “Say, Mac, do you think the big Dutchman can take it?”

  “I very much doubt it, Paddy.”

  “Have you got the rope, Jim?”

  “Sure thing, Pat, and the handcuffs, too.”

  “Hey, Bill, where’s the tar pot?”

  “It’s okay, Paddy, Barney the Brute is looking after that. He’s got it on the stove downstairs.”

  “Say, John, have you got the tape?”

  “Sure, and the paint pots, too. What color are you going to use, green or yellow?”

  “Oh, I think we’ll use the yellow. He’s Dutch anyway.”

  At last the voices stilled and turned to raucous snores. The temperature in the stifling room rose higher, and the rasps of slumbering patrolmen began to mingle once again with the distant yells of drunks in the cells far below. Miserably, in the darkness, the rookie stretched out on his reassembled bed. At that moment he wished that he had stayed at home.

  Not 1894 but 1900. Not the recollections of Charley Becker but those of another newly qualified policeman, named Cornelius Willemse. Yet Willemse’s vivid memories of the hazing he endured ring true for any year during the 1890s. Initiation into New York’s police was protracted, often physically arduous, and—as Willemse himself observed—“especially strong if your speech had no touch of the welcome brogue and your nationality didn’t happen to indicate a pure strain from the Emerald Isle, and not too far north at that.” Becker’s own earliest experiences almost certainly resembled those described by his near contemporary: practical jokes, then whispered threats—to heighten the tension—and finally, a week or so later, a midnight encounter with a squad of veterans: