Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  CHAPTER 4

  STUSS

  THE BUILDING AT 33 West Thirty-third Street, close to the Waldorf-Astoria hotel on the fringes of the vice district, did not attract attention from most passersby. The premises themselves were well built and substantial, as befitted such an elegant address, but then so were many similarly solid properties in the heart of fashionable Manhattan. The casual observer, noting muted signs of wealth and taste in the exterior, might suppose the place was home to a banker from some Wall Street institution.

  Upon close inspection, nonetheless, the house seemed definitely odd. It attracted, for one thing, far too many callers to be a simple private dwelling, and many of these visitors appeared at the unsocial hour of midnight, sometimes later. It was more than a little queer that all of them were male and sumptuously attired, and that many were decidedly familiar to even casual readers of the New York press. And it was stranger still that a uniformed policeman stood on guard outside the front door every evening, tipping his hat to the best-dressed callers as they swept past him up the steps.

  It was only when an observer’s gaze fell upon the door itself that the purpose of the building was revealed. The entrance to number 33 looked nothing like those that adorned everyday Manhattan homes, with their knockers, bells, and polished wood. It was, for one thing, made entirely out of metal several inches thick—wrought iron so heavy that it took a husky doorman all his strength to push it to and fro—and it hung within a massive iron frame, so stoutly built and strong that it reminded people passing of the entrance to a bank vault. This impression was amply reinforced by the numerous bolts and locks that studded the door—far more than ordinary security could possibly require. And when the iron barrier swung open, affording glimpses of the entrance hall, an even stranger sight appeared: A second doorway, still more strongly armored than the first, barred the way into the interior. It, too, was of metal, this time a lavishly decorated bronze; once, long ago, it had hung across a portal in the Doge’s Palace at Venice. The purpose of this second door was not entirely decorative. Whenever it was shut and barred, unwanted visitors gaining entry to the property would find themselves trapped within its narrow vestibule. At the very least, the time required to force an entry would give the building’s occupants a head start to make good their escape—via a rear exit, over the roofs, or through one of two tunnels leading to adjacent properties with which the building was supplied. Seeing the bronze door hanging, tightly closed and defiant, within the entrance hall of number 33, any knowledgeable New Yorker would have instantly identified the building as a gambling “hell”—a private and illegal business whose prime purpose, after making money, was to ensure complete discretion to its well-heeled clientele.

  The House with the Bronze Door was indeed a famous gaming club: perhaps the richest and most opulent in all Manhattan, an island rich in such amenities. The property had first opened back in 1891 and proceeded to run largely unmolested for a dozen years, a phenomenal achievement. When called upon at last, however, the metal doors did prove their worth, resisting the attentions of policemen armed with blowtorches for the better part of half an hour while the house’s staff took their equipment and their customers to safety through their secret passages.

  The sums that had been invested to turn the House with the Bronze Door into one of the finest establishments in New York were colossal. The syndicate that owned the club had hired Stanford White—then perhaps the best-known architect in the United States*19 —to gut and remodel the interior, then spent a further half a million on furnishings. White had toured through Europe and Asia purchasing antiques, spending $20,000 on the bronze door alone. While still in Venice, he had hired a team of ten master carvers and packed them off to Manhattan, where they spent two years working on a single ornamental banister.

  Nor was the rest of the interior neglected. According to the New York Sun,

  The large reception room at the back of the street floor is of gold, and the floor is covered with red velvet carpet…. On the walls are oil paintings which cost a fortune. On the floors were the finest examples of the art of the great rug-makers of the East. The floors were of hard wood, the work of experts. The ceilings were frescoed as only the homes of the rich could be. On the second floor is the large roulette wheel room. It is arched, with the ceiling covered with paintings. On this floor is a bath with a marble reclining slab and other apparatus which is said to have cost the owners $2,000.

  Fair play and courtesy were the keynotes of the place. The house had the reputation of integrity and honesty. The word of the player was always accepted without question. With admission to the house went the privilege of indulging in all the good things which the place afforded. A visitor was the guest of the house and was treated accordingly. At midnight a buffet lunch was served for guests. Between times wines, brandies, and cigars which cost a dollar apiece were there for those who wanted them. It has been estimated that at least $25,000 a year was spent in providing refreshments and food for visitors of the house.

  The expenditure of the best part of a million dollars would have alarmed most ordinary investors. But Frank Farrell, the master gambler who was the House’s principal backer, had a solid grasp of economics. The sums wagered, and lost, within his club’s gorgeous interior were consistently enormous; around 1900, it was estimated that as much as $50,000 changed hands there every night, thanks at least in part to limits that were high and also elastic. The sheer variety of attractions on the premises helped; in addition to roulette, baccarat, pinochle, and poker, there was a dice game known as Klondike, too, and sundry other forms of betting. The biggest single sum ever won in the House was said to be a staggering $165,000, which must imply that larger sums by far were lost. Certainly the player who carried off $210,000 after two consecutive winning nights at the House gambled away all of that money over the ensuing weeks and lost a further $80,000 into the bargain.

  It was the sheer profitability of the House with the Bronze Door that gave the place its true importance. The House was not—could not have been—in the least way typical of the ordinary gaming establishments of the city, and it had, in fact, no more than a handful of true competitors anywhere in the world. But neither was it a mere curiosity. Frank Farrell may not have been the only gambler to realize that his gentlemanly clientele made up a negligible proportion of the betting men of New York, nor even that when hundreds of thousands of clerks, laborers, and other sporting types made penny wagers on the horses or on cards, their bets—contemptible in isolation—totaled a sum in excess of the largest staked within the House. He was, however, the only man to draw the logical conclusion that money won from genteel customers could be profitably reinvested in a much rougher class of premises. Farrell’s rivals—men such as Richard Canfield, owner of the elegant Saratoga Club and perhaps the best-known gambler of the nineteenth century—had parlayed their precarious respectability into grudging acceptance by high society. Farrell, less bothered by the social whirl, cared less what his clients thought of him. He took the vast profits earned by the House with the Bronze Door and used them to open up a chain of seedy betting shops, called poolrooms, throughout the city and its suburbs. Within a few years, he controlled 250 such establishments, taking millions of small bets on racing, fights, and baseball games and swelling his profits to an almost inconceivable extent. So rich, indeed, did Farrell become that by 1903 he was able to throw away $18,000 in what many thought to be a suicidal wager: the purchase of a franchise to play in baseball’s American League and the establishment of a brand-new New York ball club to rival not merely the celebrated Giants but Brooklyn’s Robins, too. Farrell should perhaps have listened to his critics; he and his partner, Bill Devery (whose close association with the gambler in this venture no doubt explained how the House with the Bronze Door ran so freely for so long), lost money on their team in all but one of the years that they controlled the franchise. But the fact that Farrell had cash to lavish on so quixotic a gamble as the useless, struggling New York Yank
ees showed just how much could be made from low-class gambling in the city.

  During the wide-open years that followed Tammany’s return to power in 1897, hundreds of minor entrepreneurs followed Frank Farrell’s lead. By 1900 there were well over a thousand poolrooms and card rooms in Manhattan, far outnumbering the two dozen or so substantial gambling palaces and the two hundred lesser gaming clubs scattered through the borough. Many of these places—particularly the poolrooms, which, handling racing and sports betting, required telegraph equipment and other expensive fittings—were fortified nearly as strongly as the House with the Bronze Door, a fact William McAdoo, the new police commissioner, discovered after taking office. The typical poolroom, McAdoo wrote, was a considerable enterprise, employing ten men and playing host to as many as two hundred or three hundred gamblers at a time. Such places were often concealed in lofts where,

  once rented, a partition is put up, dividing the room into two unequal parts. Often there is no door whatsoever in the partition, only a small hole that would trouble a fat pigeon to go through. Behind the partition are the human spiders themselves, principals or agents of the big octopus. About one o’clock in the day…the wretched army of unfortunate and desperate gamblers, after having passed through several outer guards and two or three doors stronger and thicker than those of some safes, gather in this dingy, ill ventilated, smoke-poisoned room; for in order not to make things too public the windows are generally blinded, and the average gambler pays little attention to what he is breathing, fevered as he is by the devil of chance…. In many pool rooms, to make sure the victim cannot escape by any possible means with his money, there are various games played in the large outer room before opening time and after the races are over. The main thing that the victims want to know is the names of the horses, the jockeys and the betting odds as established at the race track. An attendant pastes lightly on the wall a sheet called the “dope-sheet” which gives this news. The poor, foolish crowd casts their eyes on this and the jabber and chatter about horses goes up.

  Those who preferred to gamble on something more immediate were also well catered for in Manhattan. Numerous poker rooms flourished in the slums. Blackjack was gaining in stature, too, and roulette was—thought McAdoo—more popular than any other game of chance. Neither of these games, nonetheless, came close to being the favorite pastime of New York’s gamblers. That honor went to the now-forgotten game of faro, originally a French invention, which had first appeared in Louisiana sometime before 1800. Faro had grown in stature throughout the nineteenth century, eventually spawning a faster, simpler variant known as stuss. The game was easy enough to grasp: Players gathered around an elaborately printed table, known as a layout, and wagered against the house by betting on the order of cards drawn from a dealing case. But, as in roulette, the variety and complexity of the wagers allowed could be bewildering, and even experienced players found it difficult to master the ever-shifting odds.*20 Faro’s real attraction lay in its reputation for offering gamblers a better chance of winning than any other game of cards; the margin in the house’s favor, while difficult to calculate, was generally reckoned to be little more than 1.5 percent. “An almost conclusive argument,” one player observed in 1900, “for the theory that the percentage at honest faro is virtually non-existent is the fact that the canny management of Monte Carlo has never permitted the game to be played at that celebrated resort.”

  “Honest faro” was, however, seldom found in the United States. Crooked layouts were especially common in Satan’s Circus, where the game became—in the words of one early historian of gambling—“the medium of the first extensive cheating at cards ever seen in the United States, and the rock upon which was reared the wolf-traps of the nineteenth century.” Trimmed and sanded cards and rigged dealing boxes were readily available and openly advertised as “advantage tools” in the trade press of the day. By manipulating concealed springs and sliding plates, skilled dealers, known as “mechanics,” could make cards appear as and when they wanted them, and they were paid accordingly. The potential for cheating was even greater in stuss, a game in which the cards were shuffled only after bets were made.

  There were indeed almost endless opportunities for canny hucksters to rook the city’s gamblers. Crooked play was ubiquitous throughout the New York of the day, and if a scant few low establishments were honest, the vast majority were bent in varying degrees. Manhattan supported so many card sharps and con men that by 1910 the fraternity had acquired its own unofficial meeting place: a hangout known as the Stag Café, run by a gambler named Louis Harris who (under the alias of “Dan the Dude”) became another friend of Becker’s. Horse races were rigged, either in the traditional way (involving the bribing of jockeys or the doping of their mounts) or via increasingly elaborate scams involving manipulation of the posting of results. Roulette wheels were often weighted to give the house an extra edge, and lottery draws were fixed. But the most common fraud by far involved the marking of playing cards. It was not hard to obtain specially printed packs that enabled a skilled sharp to know exactly what was being dealt or to doctor a deck with a custom-made “poker ring,” worn as normal on the finger of one hand and equipped with a tiny concealed needle with which to prick the surface of a card. In these ways thousands of poor men (and a few women) were relieved of their wages every week.

  It was largely thanks to endemic cheating that gambling ranked ahead of every other form of vice in terms of the profits it produced. Some notion of the sums taken by gaming clubs and poolrooms in Manhattan was given by the New York Times, which in 1900 trumpeted the results of an investigation of the city’s vice. According to the Times’ calculations, the owners of the city’s largest clubs paid as much as $12,000 a year for protection; their lesser competitors were required to part with nearly $2,000; poolrooms stayed open in exchange for $300 a month and crap games for $150. The total handed over to the police amounted to some $3 million a year, the paper added: taxes that were “as fixed as the laws of the Medes and Persians” and which could easily amount to 20 or 30 percent of a house’s turnover.*21 Yet men such as Frank Farrell prospered in the face of such demands. Gambling—more profitable than the liquor trade, more respectable than pimping, better protected, certainly, than both—was the safest way to make a fortune in Satan’s Circus. Several thousand men earned their livings from it at the turn of the century. Among them were some of the rawest characters in the city—and a handful of the richest.

  The man who made more from gambling than anyone else was almost certainly Big Tim Sullivan. By 1907, when he was forty-four years old, Sullivan had emerged as Tammany’s most important conduit to New York vice, with interests that had expanded from the mere handful of saloons he had owned in the 1880s to encompass a nationwide circuit of vaudeville theaters, several dozen nickelodeons, a variety of clubs and bars, numerous gambling establishments, and—practically certainly—income from a good number of brothels.

  Tim had always been careful not to say exactly how he made his money, although he vehemently denied involvement in the “white slave trade,” as prostitution was generally known. “Nobody who knows me well,” the Tammany man had declared in 1901,

  will believe that I would take a penny from any woman, much less from the poor creatures who are more to be pitied than any other human beings on earth. I’d be afraid to take a cent from a poor woman of the streets for fear my mother would see it. I’d a good deal rather break into a bank and rob the safe. That would be a more manly and decent way of getting money.

  Sullivan’s denials were probably true insofar as they went; no conclusive evidence ever did emerge to prove that the Tammany leader profited directly from prostitution. But it was commonly accepted that Tim’s agents and subordinates on the Lower East Side did arrange protection for brothels and more or less certain that Sullivan himself contracted syphilis, probably from a liaison with a prostitute, during the first decade of the new century. Nevertheless, the Sullivan clan’s sensitivity to the least hint
of involvement with white slavery was so acute that a cousin, the diminutive and saturnine “Little Tim” Sullivan, was sent to lead an ostentatious drive against downtown bordellos in the winter of 1901, throwing furniture out into the streets and roughing up the local pimps. All this made it altogether simpler for Sullivan himself to focus his energies on gambling, and he began investing heavily in such ventures.

  Big Tim was himself a committed gambler, who wagered, mostly unsuccessfully, on fights and horses and, during a brief spell in Congress, from 1902 to 1904, became the poker and pinochle champion of the House of Representatives. But the Tammany man’s own businesses catered resolutely to the working class. Though Sullivan was influential enough to be gifted memberships to many of the city’s plushest gaming clubs, he was seldom seen in any of them, preferring to devote his time to more working-class pursuits. In the late 1890s, Tim took a hand in horse racing, helping to organize the Metropolitan Jockey Club and supplying most of the funds needed to open a new racetrack on Long Island. Closer to home, he also arranged protection for dozens of small poolrooms, stuss houses, and lotteries in Manhattan and became a patron of several “private social clubs,” where gamblers and politicians mixed to make book and raise funds for the Wigwam.

  The most lucrative of Sullivan’s interests were operated in partnership with the Considine family, represented in New York by the brothers Jim and George, who shared Big Tim’s interest in boxing (George was for a while the manager of the famous heavyweight Jim Corbett). But Tim also operated on his own behalf, for example by helping to found the Hesper Club, an influential Second Avenue clubhouse, popular with gambling types, where frequent poker parties were held and a small casino operated. Sullivan played little active part in the running of the club, which was founded in 1899. But his influence was obvious to anyone who glanced inside the entrance, where a letter from the big Irishman hung in an honored spot within a golden frame. “Should it be possible,” Tim’s note assured its readers, “for me at any time to serve any of the members I will gladly do so. A simple word from you will command me.”