Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  Platt’s aim, in setting up this new commission of inquiry, was not to end New York rackets; they had the potential to enrich his political machine just as they enriched the Democrats. The boss merely wanted to force Croker to restore the old division of the city’s graft. The plan, it seems, was to let Lexow and his colleagues loose on a few junior placemen, create a stir in the New York press, scare the Hall into concessions, and then shut the commission down. The scheme would probably have worked had not a rump of mugwumps in the state assembly not contrived to maneuver several independent lawyers onto the committee. By the summer of 1894, Lexow’s commission had turned into a real crusade against police corruption—one that would run for the best part of a year, produce more than 10,500 printed pages of evidence, and examine nearly 680 witnesses.

  The man chiefly responsible for this state of affairs was an irascible Irishman named John Goff, the attorney chosen by the mugwumps as chief counsel. A thin-skinned, self-educated lawyer of limited ability—he was ignorant of great swaths of the law and dependent more on his undoubted ability to read character than on learning of any sort—Goff was an outlandish character. He had in his younger days been an active member of the revolutionary Clan na Gael, a terrorist group dedicated to the violent overthrow of British rule in Ireland.*15 Now, two decades later, he still possessed “the square features and craggy nose of a brawler,” but the addition of a snow-white beard had left him looking like a patriarch from Genesis. No one who actually encountered Goff, however, could be deceived by his benign appearance for long. The Irish attorney was infamous for his hot temper, and those unfortunate enough to be subjected to his interrogations visibly withered under the gaze of piercing blue eyes glittering dangerously from beneath a pair of shaggy eyebrows.

  It took even John Goff some time, but by the summer of 1894, helped by two young lawyers named Frank Moss and William Travers Jerome, the fearsome prosecutor had begun to secure truly damning testimony of police corruption. Goff’s first victim was none other than Commissioner McClave, whose account books proved to contain details of numerous suspicious payments. In one eight-month period, the Lexow panel heard, the commissioner had banked well over $20,000, each deposit coinciding to within a few days with the appointment of a new precinct captain. Nor was the testimony that Goff teased out of ordinary New York storekeepers any less revealing. One woman, a recent immigrant who operated a tiny cigar shop, swore under oath that she had been arrested as a prostitute and seen her children packed off to an asylum when she refused to pay her beat policeman the necessary bribe.

  For a while the police themselves resisted even Goff’s attempts to make them talk; the strategy of scornful silence had always served them well before. But the Lexow Committee’s lawyers were more persistent than their predecessors. When a famous precinct captain—a longtime partisan of Tammany—found himself sentenced to three and a half years in prison for accepting the gift of a six-dollar basket of fruit, several of those scheduled to follow him onto the witness stand hastily rethought their positions.

  The man who finally exposed the New York graft was Captain Max Schmittberger, a tall, handsome man who had once been a member of the Broadway Squad. Schmittberger was an unusual policeman in several ways. He was such a strapping model of a cop that he had been excused the usual initiation fee when he joined the force in 1874; the Tammany block leaders who found him working in a bakery thought he would look good in decorative posts. And, being German, he felt less bound by the Irish oaths of allegiance and secrecy that he, like every other patrolman, had been made to swear. Schmittberger also had a large family and was most reluctant to go to prison. Charged in October 1894 with accepting a $500 gratuity from a steamship company, he agreed to tell Goff everything.

  Captain Schmittberger’s evidence was nothing short of a sensation. For the first time, a serving policeman openly discussed the intricacies of police corruption in Manhattan, setting out in detail how the system worked. What really shocked the New Yorkers who read his testimony was how well refined and how pervasive graft in the vice districts had become: Every dollar collected by a precinct captain, Schmittberger explained, was split, with 20 percent going to the officer who collected it (usually the “ward man,” the precinct detective), 25 percent to his superiors, and the remainder to the precinct captain. Having unbuttoned thus far, Schmittberger went on to implicate Tammany Hall itself in the operation of the system. It was he who explained that the transfer of captains from one precinct to another—far from reducing the chances of corruption—actually fueled the system, since each time a new man arrived in a post, all the brothels, gambling dens, and dubious saloons that operated in his district would be expected to pay a further “initiation fee,” generally amounting to $500 each. Similar payments were exacted whenever a shady business of this sort changed hands or a successful gambler or madam expanded into new premises. It also cost $500 to reopen a brothel or gaming “hell” after a raid.

  By the time that Captain Max was through, the Lexow investigation had acquired a new momentum. There was no longer any doubt that there would be changes in New York. Nor was it now possible for even the most senior officers in the department to escape Goff’s clutches. The Lexow Committee spent a good deal of time listening to Alexander Williams, whose extraordinary career was mercilessly dissected over several days. Although, even as an inspector, Clubber had earned a salary of no more than a few thousand dollars a year, it transpired that he had somehow accumulated a house on East Tenth Street; a seventeen-room mansion in Cos Cob, Connecticut; a small steam yacht; and a jetty, extending 160 yards out to sea, that had cost him $39,000 to build. The wealth required to purchase all these assets, Goff alleged, came from $15-a-month protection payments made by more than six hundred lottery shops, not to mention contributions from uncounted numbers of gambling dens, whorehouses, and poolrooms. Clubber also had a financial interest in a New York hotel and in Hollywood Whisky, a rotgut brand that bartenders in his district were well advised to stock.

  There was a limit, of course, to what even John Goff could prove. Williams brazened it out—he had, he shrugged, made some lucky real-estate investments years earlier in northern Japan—and Superintendent Byrnes, who followed him onto the stand, stuck firmly to the claim that his own fortune was the product of stock-market speculation. Neither man was charged with any wrongdoing, and for all Goff’s efforts only a handful of their colleagues were ever tried for corruption. But both Williams and Byrnes felt it expedient to resign soon afterward, and overall the impact of the Lexow hearings was immense. Virtually every facet of police corruption lay exposed, and the extent of Manhattan’s graft had been laid out in such minute detail that even Bill Devery, confronted with Goff’s evidence, confessed: “I’ve got to hand it to you, feller. Honest, I had no idea it was so good until I saw it all set out in black and white.”

  It was scarcely surprising, then, given the blizzard of hostile newspaper reporting that accompanied these hearings, that Tammany lost the municipal elections of 1894. Even cynical New Yorkers had been shocked at the sheer extent of John Goff’s revelations, not least by the clear proof that bribes paid by the brothels of Satan’s Circus went straight into the coffers of the Hall. The incoming reformist mayor lost no time in appointing four new police commissioners to replace McClave and his disgraced associates, and one of them—the bumptious, passionate, and able Theodore Roosevelt—soon made himself famous for a well-publicized campaign to rid the department of corruption. Even Roosevelt, however—all fizzing energy and courage—found it impossible not merely to reform the police but to banish vice itself. The future president’s short tenure at police headquarters (he lasted barely eighteen months on Mulberry Street) made the daunting scale of the task facing reformers in New York clearer than ever.

  Roosevelt’s first months in charge of the New York Police Department, admittedly, saw him attain fresh heights of popularity. The commissioner began by announcing that he would save the city’s taxpayers $1,200 a year by dis
missing the two elderly aides who had served his predecessor and replacing them with a “girl secretary” named Minnie Kelly—a raven-haired beauty in a tight corset whose appearance at headquarters provided New York’s newspaper reporters with reams of copy. The old system of purchase was halted; henceforth men wishing to join the police were required to meet stringent physical requirements and had to undergo a series of exams. Some attempt was even made to tidy up headquarters itself, a cluttered, cramped, and stuffy building (most of the windows had been nailed shut years earlier) long ago stained a mustard yellow color by the New York soot. Still more widely acclaimed was a drive, which the commissioner led in person, to keep patrolmen on the beat after midnight.*16 Even the more enlightened of Tammany’s supporters admitted that such reforms were overdue.

  It was one thing, though, to court newspaper publicity by humiliating negligent officers, and quite another to retain the support of voters while actually obeying the law. Roosevelt’s popularity soon plummeted when he ordered his men to enforce the city’s liquor legislation, drafted by upstate Republicans: rural conservatives, religious radicals, and Prohibitionists who hated alcohol. Closure of Manhattan’s thousands of taverns and bars after midnight and on Sundays enraged the city’s drinking men—not least Jews, whose religion forbade them to visit saloons on Saturdays, and shift workers, who were glad of the chance to get a drink in the middle of the night. To make matters worse, Roosevelt had chosen to begin the campaign in June 1895, the warmest summer month for years, and by Sunday, July 21—the hottest day of the year so far—the whole city was in turmoil. Some half a million New Yorkers streamed out of Manhattan, heading for Long Island or New Jersey, where liquor was still openly available; saloonkeepers defied Roosevelt’s orders, standing outside their premises to personally vet those invited to enter through side doors; and as many as eight bars out of every ten opened in some shape or form.

  The excise-law fiasco was a disaster for the forces of reform. Roosevelt’s mailbag began to feature death threats and letter bombs, and by autumn thousands of voters who had once supported the mugwumps had been driven back into the Tammany fold. The Hall, indeed, won the next city election even more convincingly than the reformers had managed to do at the height of the Lexow hearings, and when all the results were in, thousands of men and women danced through the streets of Satan’s Circus singing endless choruses of the Tammany campaign slogan:

  Well, well, well!

  Reform has gone to hell!*17

  Mugwumps, it became clear, could never hope to hold power in New York for long. Voters might despise corruption, and even hate the Tammany machine, but neither could they abide strict enforcement of the law. “The people may not always like us,” Boss Croker complacently observed, “but they can never stomach reform…. Tammany is not a wave, but the sea itself.”

  And yet—despite everything—things did change after a fashion. Tammany’s power was never again quite so absolute as it had been between 1890 and 1893, and not even Croker dared to be quite so obvious, so unfeeling, as he had been. The loss of an election, however promptly it had been redeemed, came as a shock to Democrats who could remember nothing but repeated victories, and the readiness of Manhattan’s electorate to vote in a reform administration if they were pushed too far was duly noted. When it did return to power, Tammany preferred to be considerably more discreet in its handling of graft and corruption, and considerably more distant from crime and criminals. The sachems of the Hall learned the lessons of Lexow well, and the cleverest among them—including Croker’s fast-rising deputy, a brilliant but taciturn young ward leader named Charles Murphy—realized that a close association with the police damaged their reputation. Murphy favored raising money from clean graft wherever possible and frowned heavily on any direct links between his deputies and their old allies, the precinct captains. He also recognized that Tammany had to stand for something other than self-aggrandizement, and he offered his support to a rising generation of far more active politicians—men such as Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, who supported beneficial social legislation and would eventually become public servants of considerable accomplishment. These reforms, it is true, failed at first to convince a skeptical electorate that the Hall had really changed, and in the wake of Tammany mayor Van Wyck’s disgraceful involvement in the Ice Trust scandal, a reformer named Seth Low won the mayoral election of 1901. But Murphy persisted nonetheless, and when he finally succeeded the far more rough and ready Croker in the wake of Low’s victory, these policies became official.

  So far as the Hall, the press, and the general public were concerned, intimate ties between politicians and the police thus became history. But this did not mean that grafting in Manhattan ceased. Freed at last from their political overlords, the New York police simply began to keep the wages of corruption for themselves. Boss Murphy’s strategy became the making of Bill Devery, who seized on the chance to centralize what had been a diffuse, indeed a headless, system. New York became even more outrageously wide open. The city was systematically apportioned: Brothels catering to men of consequence and influence were designated “headquarters houses,” and precinct captains were ordered not to touch them. Gambling was also revolutionized. Hitherto, gaming-house proprietors had received what amounted to a license from a district boss and paid protection money to their precinct captain. Under Devery—and for years afterward—gambling “contributions” were channeled directly to a handful of Tammany sachems, led by Big Tim Sullivan, and to a small group of policemen.

  Devery’s scheme meant, in principle, that graft now flowed directly to him, and it had the side effect of seriously reducing the amount of cash paid out to ordinary patrolmen. A revealing story, often told by the police of the time, related that when one beat policeman was brought before the chief to answer charges of grafting, Devery pounded his fist on his desk and roared, “That’s got to stop! If there’s any graftin’ to be done, I’ll do it—leave it to me. What I want to know is, have you noticed any stray grafts runnin’ around loose that I have overlooked?” The general result was a system of corruption that was simpler to control and much less easy to buck. But since the graft available to ordinary patrolmen rapidly dried up, it also had the unintended benefit of making many ordinary policemen more honest, however unwillingly.

  Charles Becker was one of those who changed his ways in consequence. By 1900 there had been no civilian complaints concerning his behavior for years. No formal charges had been brought against him since the summer of 1897, and he had apparently decided that the best way to get ahead in the post-Lexow police department was to keep quiet and work hard.

  He was no longer concerned only for himself, in any case. Becker was an attractive man—“Handsome Charley,” his colleagues called him, in testament to his height and to the deep dimple that creased his left cheek when he smiled—and in the indulgent and promiscuous Manhattan of the nineties there were thousands of women for whom a good-looking young police officer appeared a very worthwhile catch. Becker took full advantage of this situation and enjoyed a number of affairs, one of them with Pauline Washbourne, the smitten young drug addict in whose apartment he had once stashed jewels stolen by Chicago May. Soon he was proposing marriage to Mary Mahoney, a girl whom he had quite possibly met at home in Callicoon, since she had relations in the nearby town of Jeffersonville.

  The couple was married in downtown Manhattan in February 1895, but there was no honeymoon. The new Mrs. Becker “caught cold” on her wedding night and was ordered to bed. Ten days later her illness was diagnosed as tuberculosis (“hasty consumption,” it was termed), a generally fatal affliction in that era. Mary languished for some time, seeking treatment both from doctors in New York and, when that had no effect, at a new sanatorium run by the eminent specialist Dr. Harold Loomis up in the Catskills. But her various treatments were to no avail, and on October 15 she died.

  Perhaps Becker was callous; perhaps there had simply been no opportunity for real intimacy. In any event, the prospect
of returning to a single life in the boardinghouses of Manhattan seems to have held no appeal, and he wasted little time in finding a second wife. The patrolman’s new bride was a Canadian girl, Letitia Stenson, who came from the town of Kingston, Ontario. Becker and Letitia had met each other before Mary’s death, and they became engaged soon afterward. They married three years later, in April 1898, and appear to have been moderately happy for a while. Their only child, a son—named Howard Paul after two of Charley’s elder brothers—was born in December 1899.

  Becker’s spare time was, nonetheless, spent apart from his wife. He followed sports: boxing, principally, and baseball a little, though in truth the performance of New York’s baseball teams during the 1890s left a good deal to be desired. He liked to hunt and fish for trout, and he loved horses, a passion that was probably a legacy of his youth. When the opportunity arose, he went driving in Central Park. The remainder of his off-duty hours were at least partly devoted to activities that might help his career. At some point, probably not long after his enlistment in the police, he became a Freemason, like so many other members of the force.*18

  The notion of Charley Becker as a Mason would have surprised few who knew him well. He had always been an ambitious man, and by 1900 he was growing more ambitious still. He was ambitious because he now had a family and the responsibility to care for and provide for a wife and child. He was ambitious because he saw that many of his colleagues in the police department could not match his own intelligence, and he believed that he deserved promotion. And he was also ambitious because he now understood New York.

  There was a good deal to be said for life as a patrolman. It was a secure job, which carried with it prospects of a pension, and one that Becker actively enjoyed; unlike a number of his colleagues, who felt uneasy with authority, he actually liked being a policeman. But without access to graft, it was not well paid. For Becker, maddeningly, real money was something other people had. He could see it as he stumped up and down his beat in Satan’s Circus; he could feel it being made. Above all, he knew the people making it.