Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  Officers drained by their long hours developed ways of coping. Men on night patrol might spend as much time searching for a quiet spot where they could get some rest as they did policing the streets. “Cooping,” as it was known, had been honed into a fine art by several generations of policemen, for each precinct maintained a number of roundsmen, veterans whose job it was to check the men on the beat to see that they were at their posts. Some roundsmen remembered their days on patrol well enough to wink at the occasional indulgence; others were tougher, making it their habit to double back after checking on a man to make certain he had not vanished straight into the nearest saloon. Most feared of all were the “shoo flies”—roundsmen in plainclothes sent in from headquarters to shake up the comfortable arrangements that frequently developed between the officers of a precinct. Shoo flies were assessed according to the number of “didos” (disciplinary complaints) that each wrote up, and—as Cornelius Willemse recalled—“they did their jobs uncomfortably well.”

  The poor working conditions endured by the police might have been palatable had the men been well paid. Superficially at least, they seemed to be: The starting pay for a first-year patrolman was $800, higher than almost any other working-class salary of the time. But rookie officers such as Becker—already impoverished by the bribes they’d had to pay to join the force—soon discovered that they were required to buy not only their own uniforms and guns, at a cost of well over $300 a man, but also their precinct-house beds and bedlinens: demands that put a further heavy strain on a patrolman’s wallet. Then there were the mandatory levies to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, irregular political campaign “assessments” of $10 a man and more, and annual fund-raisers, organized by both Tammany and the Custom House, to which their partisans were expected to contribute. Many policemen resented the requirement to purchase tickets to some politician’s clambake, but open opposition to the system was suicidal. “The first couple of years were always the most expensive to be a cop,” concluded Willemse, looking back. “Moneylenders made fortunes off youngsters who were forced to pay for years and years before they got their affairs straightened out. You wonder why policemen go into restaurants and don’t pay for their meals? How can they afford to?”

  Short of cash but long on opportunities, few New York patrolmen were entirely clean. It was simply unrealistic to expect the police to pay for their appointments to the force and do their duty in a city that was corrupt from top to bottom, repay the politicians who did them favors, enforce the terms of the graft, and take home their own indifferent pay without seizing the chance to earn a little extra for themselves. A scattering of officers remained famous for their rectitude—men such as Captains Harkins and Gallagher, who quietly donated most of their wages to the poor, and “Honest Dan” Costigan, who cleaned up Chinatown, turning down thousands of dollars’ worth of bribes in the process. The fact remains, however, that Costigan’s incorruptibility was sufficiently unusual to earn him a nickname, and the pressures on a recruit’s paycheck made most happy to accept the odd gratuity. An apple exacted from a street vendor whose cart stuck out an inch or two onto the pavement, a pint of beer served free by a saloon found open after closing time: few thought such “gifts” really wrong. “Cops,” Willemse wrote with careful understatement,

  pick up an extra dollar now and then, to be sure, but they usually spend it as fast as they get it. I was no exception to this rule. I’m not trying to pose as a saint or a reformer, or one who was shocked by anything I saw. If I found an open door on post, or picked up a man for safe keeping while helplessly drunk, found a lost child or warned a man of a violation before taking action, and they felt like slipping me a few bucks, I took it and my conscience didn’t bother me then, nor does it now. Of course there are cops who have never taken a dollar, at least I’ve heard about them, but I never saw one.

  The line that most policemen of the nineties drew was not the largely unrealistic one between absolute honesty and outright corruption but that which divided “honest” from “dishonest” graft. Few officers spurned honest graft, which—from a beat patrolman’s point of view—consisted of reward money that should not have been accepted or cash proffered by shopkeepers in exchange for overlooking harmless violations. Some men working in Satan’s Circus used the same term to cover “gambling donations,” the dollars paid by gamblers to hire off-duty men to guard their premises. Dishonest or “dirty” graft was everything else: protection money and the proceeds of extortion. Only a minority of New York’s beat policemen (albeit a significant minority) crossed this line and involved themselves in genuinely criminal activity.

  The real point, as the Brooklyn judge William Gaynor*11 once conceded, was that such abuses remain private. New York’s police, in Gaynor’s view, existed to “preserve outward order and decency” in the city. It would be asking too much to expect them to be inwardly decent as well, and even the city’s handful of honest policemen believed that corruption in the department was far too deeply ingrained to be eradicated. Superintendent Byrnes himself cautioned one prominent police commissioner against attempting to reform the force: “It will break you,” the great detective warned. “You will yield. You are but human.”

  Despite the manifold discomforts of life on the beat, Patrolman Becker’s own police career got off to a promising start. For whatever reason—his size, his looks, his brother’s help, perhaps Commissioner McClave’s—the young policeman’s early postings were all prestigious ones. There would be no years in the wilds of north Manhattan for him; instead Becker began his service with eighteen months in the Second Precinct, where he served with the “Dock Rats,” a special squad assigned to the quays and wharfs around the harbor. After that, in the spring of 1895, he transferred to Satan’s Circus. A few weeks on the beat in the city’s most lucrative precinct ended with his assignment to plainclothes, quite a coup for so young an officer.

  There can be no doubt that Becker was, at the very least, exposed to considerable temptation during the formative years of his career. The Manhattan waterfront may have been in steep decline by the early 1890s; the superior port facilities of Brooklyn and New Jersey had seen to that. But the Dock Rats still had ample opportunity to filch from cargoes on the wharves, and even the most honest among them routinely picked up extra cash from steamship companies who used them as additional security whenever the great liners docked. For those willing to graft, there were plenty of river pirates and thieves ready to pay officers to look the other way, and such opportunities were multiplied later, in Satan’s Circus, where even the lowliest policeman expected—at the very least—to receive free meals and beer from the local saloons and fleshier favors from the brothels on his beat.

  Patrolman Becker’s first brushes with the underworld seem to have dated to his posting to Satan’s Circus. He had not been in the district long before he made the acquaintance of May Sharpe, the brassy prostitute who figured so memorably in the Stephen Crane affair. According to the memoirs Sharpe compiled years later, she and Becker became friends in 1895, when the patrolman was twenty-five years old and the glamorous May a mere nineteen. Within a short time, acquaintance ripened into a business relationship. There were obvious advantages, for Chicago May, in having a beat policeman in her pocket. The benefits to Becker were financial, and perhaps physical as well.

  May Sharpe was an ambitious and successful criminal, able to pay well for protection. An Irish girl who had run away from home aged only thirteen, absconding with her parents’ life savings of £60, May wound up in New York in 1894. By then she was already displaying the talents that would turn her into one of the most notorious crooks of the era. Though working primarily as a streetwalker, she branched out into the more lucrative fields of robbery and blackmail, stealing from clients who were mostly too drunk or too embarrassed to complain, and working hand in hand with the city’s “creep” and “panel” joints—brothels whose rooms were equipped with secret entrances through which skinny men would crawl, while a client was
noisily occupied, to steal the contents of his wallet. At around the same time, May became renowned throughout Satan’s Circus as the “Queen of the Badger Game,” a form of extortion that involved girls threatening well-off customers with exposure, either to their wives or, in the case of unmarried men, to their business partners or perhaps in the form of a suit for breach of promise of marriage. In almost every case, middle-class clients would discreetly settle for a handsome sum in order to preserve their reputations. Abe Hummel, the junior partner in the notorious law firm of Howe Hummel,*12 and famous in his day as probably the most crooked lawyer in the city, made his fortune brokering deals of this sort.

  By the time she first encountered Becker, May’s activities already extended to theft, and it was here that her new friend was of most value to her. Sharpe had a well-developed taste for jewels—“she invented the system,” a contemporary reporter noted, “of taking men into halls and there, burying her face in their chests, she bit the stones out of their scarf pins and went blithely on her way”—and around 1896 she stole a large consignment of jewelry from a traveling salesman whom she had laid low with some knockout drops. The robbery took place on Becker’s beat, and he agreed to shield May from her pursuers in exchange for a valuable stolen ring. This was no small matter, for the value of the consignment was such that the girl was eventually forced to flee as far as New Haven, Connecticut, to escape pursuit. Becker did his bit by concealing her in a rented room on Fifty-third Street and then hiding her for several days in the apartment of a drug addict by the name of Pauline Washbourne, who was conveniently smitten with him.

  Becker’s first fleeting appearance in the New York press, which came in the midst of one of the city’s periodic drives to clean up the liquor industry, similarly suggests a man coming to terms with a pervasive climate of corruption. Midway through August 1895, a patrolman named McConnell appeared in court to testify that Augustus Elder’s bar on Fifty-second Street had been trading on a Sunday, when all saloons should have been closed. Becker took the stand as a rebuttal witness, stating on oath that he had checked the same establishment’s doors and locks and found that it had been completely empty. It was not uncommon in those days for ward bosses to protect a friendly tavern owner by countering dangerous testimony in this manner; what was unusual was the unhappy outcome of the case. Officer Becker’s testimony was not believed, and Elder was convicted for his breaches of the excise law. The saloonkeeper went to prison for thirty days; no action, unsurprisingly, was taken against Becker for his perjury.

  Charley Becker presumably was paid, in cash or kind, for providing assistance in such matters. His favorite graft, nonetheless, was detaining women in the Tenderloin for soliciting. The scant handful of records that survive from these early years show that, even before the Crane affair, he had been involved in at least one case in which a girl had been unlawfully detained. A few months later, in February 1897, the young patrolman inadvertently became embroiled in another fracas after arresting a woman who had asked him directions to the subway. She turned out to be “a respectable New Jersey matron” and had to be released the next morning, with apologies.

  Many, if not all, of these arrests were suspect. It was common practice in the 1890s for patrolmen to stop girls on the street, arrest them for solicitation, and have them locked up at the nearest station house. Their release would be secured by a bail bondsman, who used funds provided by the girl’s pimp or madam or obtained from her family. The original charge would then be quietly dropped on the understanding that the bail money was forfeit, and the cash split among the arresting officer, his precinct captain, and the bondsman. Dirty graft of this sort was endemic throughout the Tenderloin; the prostitutes, who were losing money while in prison, were happy to post bail, and their procurers accepted the practice as a form of tax. It was only when a greedy officer detained an innocent woman—as Becker contrived to do on these occasions—that the system ever came to light.

  Of course, Patrolman Becker did his share of ordinary police work, too. There were long hours spent walking the beat, days and nights in tedious reserve, and the occasional excitement. On one occasion the rookie policeman was waylaid in a lonely stairwell and robbed by two women armed with guns. On another, less than a week after arresting Ruby Young, Becker found himself involved in the pursuit of three burglars whom he saw emerging from a Broadway cigar store at dawn. He gave chase; one man escaped, Becker brought the second down with a blow to the head from his nightstick,*13 and the third man was shot and killed by another beat policeman.

  Once again Becker found himself in the papers, but on this occasion he was praised for acting bravely and correctly. The burglars—in the police account, at least—had been given several chances to stop; both Becker and his colleague, Officer Carey, were said to have discharged warning shots into the air before opening fire in earnest; and at least one press report noted that the criminals were armed and ready to shoot back. The incident made the front pages of the New York papers, and Becker was formally commended for his actions by Police Commissioner Grant. Not until sometime later did it emerge that the dead man was no burglar but an innocent plumber’s mate by the name of John Fay, who had walked into the path of Carey’s bullets. Becker was lucky once again; the shooting was accepted as an accident, and no action was taken against the two patrolmen.

  In the 1890s, nonetheless, Charley Becker was not the sort of policeman often singled out for praise. He seemed content to be a patrolman of the old school, modeling himself, apparently consciously, on the club-swinging cops who had formed the backbone of the NYPD a decade earlier. Becker seems to have had no compunction in taking his nightstick to New York’s citizens even when they posed him little threat. In the spring of 1897, he was charged with beating up a teenage boy in the lobby of a Tenderloin theater; once again the case went nowhere.

  The way in which a policeman comported himself on the street could have important consequences for his career. An officer who stuck to the rules and resisted temptation might find himself adopted by an eager mugwump, anxious to hold him up as an example; one newly qualified patrolman by the name of Bourke, who bravely shut down the dance hall operated by a celebrated fixer known as “King” Callahan,*14 found himself promoted to the rank of roundsman by a reformist police commissioner. Patrolman Becker’s handiness with a nightstick attracted the attention of much darker elements; his mentor in the later 1890s was none other than Clubber Williams, who for all his faults had a deserved reputation for displaying paternal interest in rookie officers. Exactly what persuaded Clubber to take the young Becker in hand is not known; possibly it was politics, for both men were Republicans. Whatever the reason, the two officers formed a friendship that endured for many years.

  Becker’s eagerness to accept Clubber’s friendship is perhaps more surprising. A few years earlier, certainly, a man with Williams’s pull could have been nothing but good news for a young patrolman’s career. By the time the two men met, however, the old inspector was a mere shadow of his former self. Denounced for brutality, openly suspected of corruption, and intimately associated with the Tenderloin, Williams had been paraded before the widest-ranging commission of inquiry into corruption that New York had ever known. The revelations that ensued forced Tammany to find new ways of doing business in Satan’s Circus, helped to shape Becker’s career—and changed the city’s view of its police forever.

  The Senate Committee Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York—the Lexow Committee, as it was familiarly known, after the state senator who chaired it—began its deliberations early in February 1894. It was not the first commission set up to tackle Manhattan corruption: An earlier inquiry into the policing of the city had reported as long ago as 1840; another had sat in 1875; and a third (led by none other than Theodore Roosevelt), in 1884. Each committee had found vice flourishing in the city, and each concluded that New York’s police abetted it. Firm evidence of wrongdoing, admittedly, was scanty, and none of the commission
s produced credible witnesses who could describe the inner workings of the system. Even so, accumulated testimony demonstrated that some senior officers had been pocketing $10,000 a year from graft as early as 1839.

  The failure of a whole succession of inquiries to yield results was easy to explain: Witnesses were simply too frightened of the police to talk. Men who had been subpoenaed to give testimony proffered feeble excuses to explain their nonappearance or proved to have frustratingly hazy memories of dates, places, and amounts. Public opinion was mollified with a handful of trials, but reformers were left with little to show from any of the three investigations. A few dozen policemen—mostly juniors—lost their jobs. A single corrupt judge was fired. But the precinct captains and the ward bosses who between them ran the system were unscathed. No man well enough acquainted with the system to hurt it ever gave detailed evidence.

  The Lexow inquiry, though, was different. For one thing, it had far more clout than any of its predecessors. The new commission was the creature of Thomas Platt, the powerful Republican boss of the Custom House, who had fallen out disastrously with Tammany’s Boss Croker after three successive Democratic election triumphs had upset the comfortable accommodation between the parties in New York. Gorged on victory, the Hall no longer saw the need to channel patronage to its traditional opponents and had begun to withhold the city offices on which Platt depended to secure the loyalty of his partisans. There was little Platt could do to hurt Tammany in staunchly Democratic Manhattan. But a Republican majority in the state assembly at Albany offered him the chance to seek revenge. It was there that Platt engineered the appointment of Senator Lexow and his committee.