by Mike Dash
One night I woke up and discovered I was tied to the bed. The room was semi-dark and the gang was around me with their raincoats up to their eyes, and helmets on; they looked like so many medieval warrior ghosts. They pulled my bed out into the middle of the room under the little gas jet, shoved the other beds back against the wall, and began the evening’s entertainment—for everybody but me.
Police initiation rituals, Willemse added, followed a pattern. Newly qualified officers were generally painted green, the Irish veterans’ favorite color, first. After that, their tormentors would produce rolls of adhesive tape, plaster thick strips of it over the rookie’s body, and forcibly depilate him. Sometimes a recruit was tarred. The climax to the ceremony was a solemn oath, taken by all new men, never to reveal department secrets.
Rituals of this sort had emerged, probably, fifty years earlier, and some may have been older still. There had, after all, been police in Manhattan for as long as there had been a city: a night watch at first (commanded, as late as 1798, by the mayor in person) and then a force of part-time patrolmen, often muscular carters by profession, led for more than half a century by a powerfully built high constable named Jacob Hays. By the early 1840s, though, the septuagenarian Hays—who still patrolled the lower reaches of the city armed with no more than a gold-tipped staff, immutably clad in a black suit and stovepipe hat—had been overwhelmed by a city that had grown to 300,000 people and was increasingly menaced by violent street gangs. Prominent New Yorkers now compared their watch unfavorably to the larger, better organized, more disciplined police forces springing up in Europe. In 1845, when Hays retired, the watch system was dissolved and replaced at last with a New York Police Department.
The newfangled NYPD was given all the resources that policemen needed, including mounted patrols and a detective department. But it took time, even then, to make the force effective. Most of its officers were drawn from the same small pool of volunteers who had formed the watch; little effort was made to test recruits, law was taught sketchily at best, and there was no formal weapons training of any sort. Standards were lax in other ways as well: European visitors were shocked to see New York policemen puffing on cigars and spitting out tobacco juice, and patrolmen did not even wear uniforms until the 1850s, years after they were introduced elsewhere. As late as 1893, the department remained perennially undermanned and underfunded. To take only one example, communication between the headquarters building on Mulberry Street and outlying precincts still took place by telegraph, not telephone, and messages came down the wire letter by letter, to be announced by a system of ringing bells that had been the last word in modernity when introduced four decades earlier. Orders to policemen on the beat had to be conveyed via messengers. “In this respect,” one despairing police commissioner complained, “New York City, the metropolis of the nation, is far behind many cities of the third, fourth and even fifth class in this country.”
There were bright spots in the department’s record, certainly. The Detective Bureau, for many years under the sway of the formidable Inspector Thomas Byrnes, was widely praised and often effective, and by the 1890s even ordinary patrolmen were beginning to take some pride in their professionalism. Older, more experienced officers with families to support banded together to form the influential Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association—a union in all but name, devoted to improving conditions, salaries, and prospects. Men of this sort were almost always more committed to police work than their younger, brasher colleagues, and they formed a counterbalance to the domination of the force by the political machines.
By Charley Becker’s day, in short, New York’s police stood at something of a crossroads. The NYPD appeared—at least to out-of-towners—to be much like any other police force in the United States or Europe. Its men were uniformed, trained, armed, and highly visible. Order was, in general, maintained; the courts were full; the jails were full; sensational cases were resolved. Byrnes and his detectives often appeared in the press, their chief boasting of his achievements in preventing crime and catching criminals. Yet the department’s fatal entanglement in New York politics remained an enduring blot upon its record. The great majority of its men owed their jobs to the patronage of well-connected local politicians, and an officer’s loyalty to his bosses was brutally enforced. In the early days of the department, each man’s appointment had been renewable annually, and men who angered influential politicians, or merely failed to demonstrate a willingness to follow orders, were speedily dismissed. Even now, half a century later, New York patrolmen still lived in terror of upsetting their superiors, with all that that implied for the performance of their jobs. No one who came into contact with the police could remain unaware of their dark depths for long, and every man who joined the force had to make his own accommodation with the temptations available. Charley Becker, when he donned the uniform in 1893, made his mind up early on and stuck to it. The decision that he made shaped the remainder of his life.
Corruption remained endemic in New York. True, Tammany’s worst excesses now lay in the past. The theft of millions from the public purse, as practiced by Boss Tweed, had proved too blatant even for the Hall and far too unpopular with voters, too, which was why Honest John Kelly had preferred to raise cash from public utilities instead. Under Croker, though, even these extortions had been deemed dangerously high-profile. Between 1886, when the new boss seized power, and 1894, when Becker began to patrol the city streets, Tammany instead made millions from vice.
The system was pervasive and effective. No brothel or gambling house could operate without paying monthly tribute for protection; no saloon could stay open late unless it made appropriate “contributions” in return. Best of all, extortion of this sort roused little protest. Taxpayers’ money remained safe and the powerful shareholders of large corporations unoutraged. Even those who actually ran Manhattan’s vice saw such excesses as inevitable. Long custom had (as Police Commissioner William McAdoo observed a few years later)
made the keepers of disorderly and gambling houses not only willing but eager to pay the money. As a matter of fact, the manager of a disorderly house, whether man or woman, does not feel any sense of security unless some one representing the police authorities has received money. These men and women will withhold their money from the landlord and pay their protection rent” [in preference]…. A corrupt police captain doesn’t have to force payments. They will thrust money upon him and those under him. These men and women feel that when they pay their money they are going to be protected.
The only protests of note came from religious leaders and reform groups, which campaigned largely ineffectually against the triple evils of gambling, drunkenness, and the “white slave trade.” Such protests, when confined to church, were routinely ignored, and even complaints to the district attorney’s office were simply brushed aside; what proof, some Tammany placeman would inquire, was there of any wrongdoing? Since ministers and upper-class reformers (“mugwumps,” as they were derisively known) shuddered at the prospect of actually soiling their hands in the vice districts, evidence of the sort required to go to court was generally not forthcoming.
Every few years protests would rise to a crescendo, often in the wake of some especially dramatic crime. As recently as 1892, the Reverend Charles Parkhurst—whose attention had been drawn to New York’s lowlife by a murder in a saloon the preceding Christmas Eve—had become so outraged by the casual arrogance of the then district attorney in dismissing his complaints that he had donned a disguise, hired a detective, and set off on an extended tour of downtown dives and brothels. Parkhurst had returned some weeks later to deliver several detailed sermons on Manhattan vice, creating such a citywide furor that Tammany had closed down half a dozen brothels in response.*9 Ordinarily, however, politicians and police let things be. The NYPD’s precinct captains knew that action on their part would be highly unpopular, not merely with the bosses of the political machines but also with the tens of thousands of ordinary New Yorkers who patronized
the vice districts. It was simpler and much more lucrative to control and license sin. Madams and gamblers paid for appropriate protection. The police collected the money, kept a portion for themselves, and channeled the rest upward to City Hall.
It was easy for Tammany and its allies at the Custom House to control this system. So long as the machines retained the power to appoint policemen, they could ensure that those who joined the force were partisans who would accept the status quo. And with loyalists in senior positions and allies on the Board of Commissioners, corrupt politicians could break any policeman who annoyed them, having him fined, suspended, fired, or even jailed.
Cooperation with New York’s machines was guaranteed in still-more-sinister ways. The senior officers who arranged the collection of payments—and benefited directly from doing so—were kept in line by the simple expedient of being made to pay so heavily for promotion to the most lucrative posts that they had to graft in order to recover their investments. By 1893, when Becker joined the force, the assessment to be promoted from patrolman was $500, men paid as much as $4,000 to become sergeants, and a captaincy routinely cost $12,000—sums that no man could afford himself. Prospective candidates were generally forced to borrow funds from obliging politicians, and the handful who refused to pay found promotion denied to them. One sergeant, who had an excellent record and had excelled in his exams, twice rose to the head of the list of men qualified to become captains. Twice he refused to pay the requisite bribe to the commissioners; twice they ensured he was passed over. Each failure resulted in the man’s name being returned to the foot of the sergeants’ list, and the third time he reached the top, he capitulated and agreed to pay. On this occasion (thanks, he was told, to competition from another candidate, but perhaps simply to reinforce the lesson) the sum demanded of him was $15,000.
Over time the corruption of the city became an open secret. During his first years on the force, Becker—like every newly qualified policeman—would have seen examples of abuse of power all around him. Even New York’s most lauded officer, Inspector (by now Superintendent) Byrnes did not bother to investigate robberies unless the victim offered a substantial reward, and, despite never having earned more than $5,000 a year, had built up savings totaling $600,000 by the time of his retirement. Byrnes claimed to have amassed this fortune with the help of tips passed to him by friendly Wall Street brokers, but at least part of it was the product of more serious corruption, for while chief of the Detective Bureau he had developed ties with most of New York’s burglars and pickpockets. Crooks were permitted to operate, within carefully defined territories, on condition that they handed back the proceeds of certain robberies on demand, and it was these comfortable arrangements, rather than any special competence as a thief taker, that enabled Byrnes to recover and—with a flourish—return the purses, watches, and silver filched from the Fifth Avenue elite.
Byrnes was admittedly a special case: an officer so celebrated that he stood head and shoulders above every other policeman in the city. But there were plenty of other veterans around to show each batch of new recruits how things were done in Manhattan. The most notorious among them, certainly, was Inspector Alexander Williams, a man reputed to have engaged in an average of one fight a day throughout his years on patrol. Williams, who earned the nickname “Clubber” for the enthusiasm with which he wielded his nightstick,*10 became so widely known throughout the city that tourists stopped to gawk when he passed on the street. By 1887, after twenty-one years on the force, he had been the subject of 358 formal complaints, but his clout with New York’s politicians was such that although fined 224 times, he had never suffered serious punishment. A few years later, when Williams’s brutal career was at last subjected to detailed scrutiny, it was discovered that many of the records relating to charges against him were mysteriously missing and that others had lain on file for years without being proceeded with.
Nor was Inspector Williams the lone example of a tough and well-connected cop made good. The larger-than-life figure of Captain William S. Devery was if anything even more beloved by New York’s newspaper reporters, who liked to tease him for his habit of beginning sentences by saying, “Touchin’ on and appertainin’ to.” A cigar-chomping Irishman, almost illiterate but shrewd, Devery liked to manage his men not from an office but from a spot on the corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Ninth Avenue. The magnificently mustached “Big Bill” sat there every night from nine in the evening until 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., clever eyes gleaming in his fleshy face as he received reports from policemen, bail bondsmen, gamblers, dive owners, and assorted criminals. It was common knowledge that the captain had banked a fortune by extending his protection to all manner of illegal businesses, and his fat fingers were thrust deep into several other pies as well. It was Devery who enforced his good friend Tim Sullivan’s lucrative monopoly on the arrangement of prizefights in Manhattan.
The amoral Captain Devery, more so even than Clubber Williams, set a significant example to the young policemen of the 1890s. He differed from his peers in being more or less openly corrupt, and yet somehow he still survived every attempt to unseat him. For editors such as Lincoln Steffens of the Commercial Advertiser, he was a “magnificent villain, always good for a scandal and some laughs at the same time—as a character, as a work of art, he was a masterpiece.” By the middle of the decade, indeed, Devery had developed his robust sense of humor into a weapon, for as Steffens conceded, “Not only I myself—every reporter I ever assigned to roast the man came back smiling, and put the smile into his report.” But in truth much of what Big Bill did was no laughing matter—not least because, taking over the Eleventh Precinct on the Bowery, he proceeded to rake in graft so blatantly that he was finally indicted for extortion. Devery’s pull within Tammany Hall was so formidable, however, that he was acquitted on a technicality, had his badge restored to him by the Supreme Court, and was made chief of police in 1898. This, one authority on the New York of the period observes, “was a title he tainted so thoroughly that it was abolished after his resignation in 1901.”
Devery’s survival, in the face of repeated attempts to secure his dismissal, could hardly fail to send a message to all ranks of the force. Corrupt officers with the right connections—his repeated triumphs over his enemies implied—had nothing to fear from the law. And the ruthless use that Big Bill made of departmental procedure was another education in itself. Policemen who protested his excesses found themselves exiled to some remote, semirural precinct well away from both their families and the graft—being “sent to Goatville,” they called it, a terrifying prospect. When the new chief of police fell out with a Captain Herlihy, he had his enemy transferred to Kingsbridge, in the farthest reaches of the Bronx, and “gave him two and a half hours to take up his duties here—no mean feat considering the transportation available at the time. If Herlihy had not made it, Devery was prepared to bring charges [against him] for being absent from duty.”
It was impossible to serve on a force commanded by the likes of Bill Devery without thinking at least a little about the tests and the temptations of police work. Most officers in the early 1890s drew the inevitable conclusion that the graft was time-honored and that those who chose to sample it were unlikely to be punished. Honest men who wanted a career learned not to protest too much. And Patrolman Charley Becker, who lacked neither connections nor ambition, observed, with crystal clarity, the rewards available to the police of New York.
Life for a newly qualified patrolman could be hard nonetheless. Training was still rudimentary (recruits in 1893 received no more than a month at a school of instruction, learning 250 general orders, 700 police rules, and the basics of criminal law, first aid, and the Manhattan sanitary code), and thousands of New York policemen devoted their lives to routine work that offered scant excitement: long hours of patrolling nighttime streets, rattling padlocks, and standing firm on street corners in a howling gale. Working conditions, even in the heart of the city, remained abysmal. Half the precinct houses in
the city were so unsanitary that they would be condemned a few years later, the police commissioner of the day complaining that each of his men was forced to work in
the vilest of surroundings, in constant discomfort, and at the risk of his health. Under such circumstances, he has little incentive to read anything but sensational newspapers, and to swap stories and gossip about the department. The bad policeman gets the chance here to contaminate the good one, and the whole arrangement makes for demoralization and hopelessness on the part of the rank and file.
Conditions on the streets were scarcely better. In winter, men summoned from reserve were expected to charge out of their overheated rooms straight into temperatures that plunged well below freezing. In summer, streets and stations alike stank of rotting garbage. And, to make matters worse, the police worked longer hours than almost anybody in Manhattan—an average of nearly seventeen in every twenty-four, patrols of up to twelve hours’ duration being followed every other day by an equal period spent “in reserve.” These brutal working practices were a consequence of the “two-platoon system,” a compulsory rotation that called—in the name of efficiency—for half the entire force to be available for duty at any given time. Schedules were arranged in such a way that no policeman could hope for more than four hours’ sleep while on reserve. Nor was it uncommon for the men to be on their feet for much of their reserve periods, attending court and responding to all sorts of emergencies. Even a writer friendly to the police conceded, as early as 1885, that the system appeared to have been “devised to get all the duty out of a Patrolman that his system will stand.”
