Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  The consequences were predictable. Williams’s letter was passed on to police headquarters, where no fewer than three special anti-gambling squads stood by to act on such pseudonymous tips. There it found its way onto the desk of the man commanding the most active of all these units: a cop just then making a name for himself by cracking heads and raiding clubs throughout Satan’s Circus. Manhattan’s papers had been awash for several months with news of this man’s exploits, and by the winter of 1911, he had probably put more gamblers out of business than any other officer. He was the most admired policeman in the city. His name was Charley Becker.

  CHAPTER 5

  STRONG ARM SQUAD

  THE EVENTS THAT BROUGHT Becker to a desk at police headquarters and command of New York’s most famous “Special Squad” had their origin a decade earlier, in the summer of 1902. Mayor Seth Low’s reform administration was still in power in the city. Rosenthal was as yet a minor figure in the closed world of East Side gambling. And Charley Becker, the best part of a decade into his police career, was setting out to make a stand.

  The Becker of 1902 was, the evidence suggests, a more or less despondent man. Physically he was in his prime, twenty-nine years old and possessed of a physique hardened by years on the beat: broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, with fists like typewriters. (“He could kill a man with a punch,” an admirer once remarked, intending the observation as a compliment.) Professionally, though, Becker was becalmed. His decision to abandon the old style of policing had not borne fruit; months, stretching into years, of conscientious work had yet to earn him a promotion that was becoming overdue, and like many of his colleagues he found himself increasingly demoralized by the long hours he was required to work and by the capricious behavior of senior officers who tacitly encouraged graft but were quick to distance themselves from the taint of corruption when vice was exposed. To make matters worse, Mayor Low and his reformers had made little headway in tackling the department, as the thousands of patrolmen who voted for them had wished. Most captains still actively discriminated against men whose loyalty was less than absolute. A favorite trick, during Low’s mayoralty, was to use the old two-platoon system to inflict extra duty on such officers, calling them out of reserve and onto the streets at all hours of the day and night. This was particularly hard on married men, who were already fortunate if they slept at home one night in every four. “Captains and Sergeants,” Becker himself told a reporter from the New York Times, “have too much discretion in some matters, and the men are made subservient to them.”

  Becker was not alone in feeling poorly treated, and this no doubt explains his willingness to talk directly to the press. By 1902, indeed, morale throughout the police department was at its lowest ebb in years. Thanks to a vaguely worded piece of law, no full promotions had been made since 1899, and the ranks were becoming clogged with acting captains, sergeants, and roundsmen who had no idea whether their new positions would ever be ratified. Additional demands were also being made on patrolmen’s pockets, thanks to a new form of graft—introduced in the dying days of Mayor Robert Van Wyck’s administration—that required men to pay up to $25 every time they transferred precinct. And Low had done little to stamp out another long-standing abuse: Politics, more than ability, still determined men’s careers. This was a particular problem for Republicans such as Becker, who remained a minority on the force.*25

  The upshot of all this dissatisfaction was the so-called Revolt of the Cops, an inconclusive uprising in the spring and summer of 1902 that brought Becker a degree of prominence, at least within the ranks of the police. Stirrings of discontent had actually begun a year earlier, when the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association first made a determined attempt to secure the introduction of a three-platoon system intended to limit men to eight hours’ duty at a stretch. Three platoons would have prevented a number of the most injurious abuses of the system and, by ensuring that officers worked to a predetermined rotation, would have let the men’s families know when their loved ones would be home. But although two separate attempts to bring in the new scheme were made, both were unsuccessful. Aside from any other considerations, the costs involved meant that the idea was abandoned almost as soon as it was tried.

  What was telling about all this was not so much the failure of the campaign for three platoons as the determination shown by ordinary patrolmen, who felt angry enough at their treatment to stage what amounted to industrial action—strictly enforcing the excise laws throughout the city on one April day, thus stopping the flow of graft and annoying their bosses—and approve substantial contributions (amounting, potentially, to $60 a man) to fund their doomed campaign. Plainly, this unprecedented defiance owed much to the activities of a small number of militants, who not only talked colleagues into supporting the campaign but collected so much money that the PBA was able to set aside $150,000 to lobby for a bill in Albany and a similar sum to bribe New York’s pliant bosses. These leaders were, in fact, not officers of the Benevolent Association but ordinary patrolmen. Prominent among them were William Drennan of the Seventeenth Precinct and George Ryan of High Bridge station. The third leader of the cops’ revolt was Becker.

  Becker’s role in the affair was an important one, and in the course of the campaign he exhibited considerable organizational ability, a facile tongue, and the sheer bloody-mindedness required to persist in the face of threats. Evidently he also enjoyed a good deal of personal popularity in his own precinct and was known to other officers throughout the city, for in the spring of 1902 he was elected as spokesman for the First Platoon—that is, for half of all the policemen on the force.

  What drove Becker to involve himself in the revolt is less well documented, but his grievances were obviously rooted in his own persecution at the hands of a vengeful precinct captain. “Among the experiences recounted” at one mass meeting of patrolmen, a reporter wrote,

  was that of Charles Becker of the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street station, who presided at the meeting of the first platoon…. It is just about a year ago that Becker was transferred from the Madison Street station. According to the story related, Becker at that time had the temerity to lead a revolt similar in character to the present one. With a number of other policemen of the Madison Street Precinct he told the captain that he was unwilling to stand for the manner in which things were going. The captain is alleged to have replied that unless Becker and his friends ceased causing him (the captain) trouble, they would be either broken or transferred. Becker persisted in the stand he had taken, with the result mentioned.

  It is not too much to suggest that the part that Becker played in the cops’ revolt influenced his whole career. For one thing, it made him fearless; by August 1902, while still a mere patrolman, he was meeting face-to-face with New York’s police commissioner, John Partridge, to plead the case for three platoons.*26 For another, the agitation surely injured him, since it marked him out to his superiors as a potential troublemaker. Though he was never censured and no disciplinary action was taken against him, senior officers made their displeasure felt in other ways. Promotion remained hard to come by: Becker spent ten years as a patrolman—longer than the average at a time when men who had real political clout, or whose acts of heroism drew them to the attention of the police commissioners, might expect to become roundsmen in only four or five—and when he was eventually recommended for sergeant in 1905, Commissioner McAdoo took one look at his file and refused to authorize his elevation. In the interim Becker was also subjected to the NYPD’s usual method of taming recalcitrant officers: frequent transfers to new precincts. These punishments were probably no more than minor irritants; there was no long exile to Goatville, no dismal posting outside the island of Manhattan. But Becker, who had been serving at the Madison Street station when agitation for the three-platoon system got under way, nonetheless found himself despatched first to the Upper West Side, then to 115th Street, and finally to Charles Street in Greenwich Village. Each of these postings meant disruptions to his dail
y life. Rather more significantly, though, for the patrolman’s career, the round of transfers brought Becker into the orbit of the man who would become the greatest enemy he had on the force: the department’s great pariah, Captain Max F. Schmittberger.

  New York’s police had never forgiven Schmittberger for his testimony before the Lexow Committee seven years earlier. Lexow’s revelations concerning the system of purchase that existed within the NYPD had been bad enough. But it had been Schmittberger’s careful dissection of the Satan’s Circus graft that laid bare the workings of the department. Without the captain’s sworn testimony, Counsel Goff would probably have failed in his attempts to persuade ordinary New Yorkers that their police force was thoroughly corrupt, and there might have been no Fusion administration and no Commissioner Roosevelt. True, some police officers had benefited in consequence, and most of those who had joined the police during the reform years had no love of grafters or the graft. But even the most honest of policemen despised officers who broke the oaths that each man swore at his initiation. And every New York cop had experienced at least some ridicule as a result of Lexow’s hearings. Most blamed Max directly for this.

  Schmittberger himself was not immune from the taunts that rang in the ears of Manhattan’s policemen in the wake of his testimony. His worst moment, he once told the reporter Lincoln Steffens, came when his own children, who had been tormented in school, came home one night demanding, “Say, Pop, is it true this stuff they are saying? It’s all lies, ain’t it?” But the disgraced captain was, in addition, ostracized by almost all his colleagues, prevented from marching in the annual police parade by a vengeful Bill Devery, and forced to adopt the strictest economies in order to keep up the mortgage on the expensive house he had bought when flush with the proceeds of corruption.

  Grateful for the testimony that had helped to bring down Byrnes and Clubber Williams, reformers such as Steffens and Charles Parkhurst were by now Schmittberger’s only allies, and the captain had no real choice but to become an honest man. In the course of the next few years, Schmittberger was sent to clean up several corrupt precincts, with good results. He also became the police department’s acknowledged expert on crime in New York’s black and Italian districts—where it was said “that mothers used to quiet their children by threatening that ‘Cap’n Max’ll come and ketch you.’” Even Boss Croker found a use for him, as a living symbol of Tammany’s supposed willingness to mend its ways.

  Whether Schmittberger really regretted the old days any more than Croker did remained a matter of opinion. Steffens and several of the police commissioners who controlled the department after 1900 were sure he had reformed. But another faction, made up of opposition politicians and cynical reporters, argued that Max had not gotten better, merely smarter. He was honest, these men said, when the times called for it. But when reform was voted down and Manhattan thrown wide open, the captain plunged back into the department’s corrupt ways with as much enthusiasm as the next man.

  Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that many senior policemen ached for the chance to catch Schmittberger in some wrongdoing. The captain was carefully watched for signs of misconduct, and the junior officers in his precincts were similarly disposed against Lexow’s most celebrated witness. Certainly Becker, whose friend Clubber Williams had been cruelly exposed by Max’s testimony, had every reason to take against him when—thanks to the transfer roundabout—he wound up in Schmittberger’s Upper West Side precinct in April 1901.

  Unlike most of the captain’s enemies, however, the patrolman was not content merely to mutter against Max. Within a matter of weeks, Becker had hauled in several saloonkeepers for violations of the excise law without clearing things with Schmittberger first. Since it was clear that the premises in question could only have remained open with the approval of the precinct captain—and since it was hard for all but the most gullible to believe that the owners were not paying for the privilege—the arrests exposed Schmittberger to further criticism. Max lost no time in dealing with the situation, and within days Becker was on his way again, transferred out of the Upper West Side to another district far uptown. He resented Schmittberger’s high-handed treatment sufficiently to file charges of malfeasance against his superior. The captain countered with affidavits of his own, and though the matter was eventually smoothed over and all the charges dropped, there was bad blood between the pair thenceforth.

  Under ordinary circumstances, a falling-out between a precinct captain and a mere patrolman would have been a matter of no moment. On this occasion, however—thanks perhaps to Becker’s sudden prominence in the department—the beat man’s antipathy for Schmittberger was noted, with dramatic consequences for both men’s careers. In the course of the next five years, the pair would be pitted against each other twice more, and Becker’s determination to pursue a vendetta against his old enemy would make him the favorite of a future police commissioner.

  The second confrontation between the two men began two years later, in the first days of 1903, when the district attorney’s office launched a formal investigation into Schmittberger’s activities. Becker was one of several patrolmen assigned to a new Headquarters Squad formed to uncover graft in the captain’s new station house on East Fifty-first Street. Whether or not Schmittberger was making real efforts to stamp out vice in this heavily corrupt district, gambling and prostitution certainly continued to flourish along the borders of Satan’s Circus. No firm evidence of Max’s complicity emerged, but it did not take long for Becker and his colleagues to discover that several of Schmittberger’s men were implicated in the white slave trade. An eighteen-year-old orphan testified that a beat policeman who had promised help had instead escorted her to a brothel, where she was kept “practically a prisoner” for sixteen weeks. Schmittberger denied all knowledge of the affair, and no charges were brought against him. But the headquarters men had raised further doubts about his character.

  Becker’s work on the East Side was recognized soon afterward with elevation to the rank of roundsman—a promotion that came through in November 1903, ten years almost to the day since he first became a policeman. For a short while, his career prospered, and in the summer of 1904 he added luster to his reputation by saving a man from drowning in the Hudson River. James Butler had toppled into the water at West Tenth Street after suffering an epileptic fit. Becker jumped fully clothed into the Hudson after him, earning the police department’s highest award for bravery, the Medal of Honor, and a special commendation from Police Commissioner Greene.

  Even so, the Headquarters Squad was soon dissolved, and Roundsman Becker might still have languished for years in the outer reaches of Manhattan had it not been for the good fortune that set him in pursuit of Schmittberger again. By the early spring of 1906, three years after the men’s paths had last crossed, Max had finally secured himself a long-delayed promotion to inspector and been placed in overall command of policing New York’s entertainment district. He was a powerful figure now, and with Tammany back in power there were suspicions that he was once again collecting graft throughout Satan’s Circus. The task of investigating Schmittberger went to a new deputy police commissioner, Rhinelander Waldo, who, to make sure that the inquiry was zealously pursued, searched out a sergeant and two roundsmen with strong motives for hating their target. Each member of this new “street-cleaning” detail—a New York reporter later explained—was “known to feel that Schmittberger had done them wrong at some point in their police careers.” One of the two roundsmen detailed to the squad was Becker.

  In 1903, Schmittberger had known that he was being investigated. In 1906, headquarters was a good deal more discreet. On the afternoon of June 29, 1906, Becker, with Sergeant Robert McNaught and Roundsman Philip Faubell, mustered fifteen patrolmen, handpicked from downtown precincts, on an East Side pier—a ruse, the Times reported the next day,

  intended to give the impression that the police were going on a steamboat excursion. Then a large covered van appeared. With the sign “
Storage” on the side of it, it looked innocent enough to fool anybody…. The policemen were told they were to have a ride, and after they got into the van the big doors were shut tightly.

  Led by the three street cleaners, who traveled in a cab, the converted furniture van drove to an address on West Fifteenth Street and parked. The men inside poured out, armed with sledgehammers and axes that had been placed inside the vehicle. Urged on by McNaught, they battered down the front door of the largest gambling club on the street, while Becker and Faubell crept up onto the roof and took hatchets to a locked fire exit. Brandishing revolvers, the two roundsmen rushed down into the body of the building and detained the gamblers who ran the house, while their colleagues burst in through the front and rounded up 50 of their customers.

  The street-cleaning squad carried out three more raids that day, the most dramatic being the last, on premises at 147 West Forty-first Street, where newly fitted armor-plated doors defeated all their efforts to gain entry and Becker was forced to smash his way into the premises through barred basement windows with the aid of sledgehammers. A further 75 gamblers were discovered huddled inside, taking the total arrested in a single day to 145. The profusion of gaming clubs operating openly in Satan’s Circus, and the ease with which the police had raided them, was yet another indictment of Schmittberger’s policing, and the next morning the city’s newspapers trumpeted that the “Furniture Van Raids” had done in the inspector. Three days later Schmittberger was transferred out to Staten Island and warned that he faced charges and a likely police trial.*27