Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  Rosenthal must have sensed that this was practically the end. He was nearly penniless. He had run afoul of the Satan’s Circus police. He had exhausted the patience of half the influential gamblers in the city—among them Beansey Rosenfeld, Sam Paul, and Bridgey Webber—angering his enemies enough that one or another was sure to take a certain pleasure in keeping the police informed of his activities. Worse, he owed a fortune to Tim Sullivan and now had no means of repaying it. Herman’s one chance of clearing his debts, paying off the police, and restoring his own battered finances was to reopen his club and run it free of hindrance for quite a while. To do that required police protection, and if Hayes and the men of the vice precincts would not provide it, there was only one man who could. Rosenthal had no choice but to turn to Charley Becker.

  It is impossible to state with any certainty how Becker and Herman met. Rosenthal must have heard of the activities of the Strong Arm Squads, and very likely he was perfectly aware—either from fellow gamblers or as a result of arrangements made to keep his Second Avenue stuss houses in business—that the lieutenant sold protection. But in a pair of affidavits made in July 1912, Herman gave conflicting accounts of their first encounter, stating on one occasion that he and Becker met in the course of a police raid on Second Avenue in the autumn of 1911 and on another that their initial meeting took place at an Elks’ Club ball held some weeks later. The truth, insofar as it can now be ascertained, is probably that Rosenthal did note Becker at work during the raid but did not talk to him—“I had had my experience with the cops,” he once remarked of this encounter, “and had no desire to widen my circle of acquaintance among them.” The first time that the two men actually spoke seems to have been at the Elks’ Club formal held on West Forty-third Street late in November. By then, of course, Inspector Hayes had altered Herman’s views concerning the desirability of making friends with the police. The gambler was now keen to make Becker’s acquaintance.

  “We had,” Rosenthal would say of this initial meeting, “a very good evening, drank very freely, and became very good friends.” A good deal of conversation passed between the two, and some of it no doubt concerned the protection Becker and his men could offer in Satan’s Circus. The two men (again in the gambler’s account) arranged a second rendezvous to take the matter further. They met, “by appointment,” at the Elks’ Club New Year’s ball.

  “We had a fine evening together,” Herman’s version of events continued,

  and had a lot of champagne to drink. Becker and I had been talking together through the night and he seemed very anxious to win my friendship…. Later in the morning we were all pretty well under the weather. He put his arms around me and kissed me. He said, “Anything in the world for you, Herman. I’ll get up at three o’clock in the morning to do you a favor. You can have anything I’ve got.” Then he called over three of his men…and he introduced me to the three of them, saying, “This is my best pal and do anything he wants you to do.” We went along and we met pretty often, and many nights we would take an automobile ride, and he told me then that he wished he could put in six months of this [grafting and] he would be a rich man. He was getting hold of a lot of money. I told him then, “Don’t you think you are taking a chance by me being seen with you so often?” And he told me I don’t have to fear. “But when that ‘guy’ down at headquarters (meaning Waldo) puts it up to me about meeting you, I’ll simply tell him that I am meeting you for a purpose—to get information from you.”

  Whatever the veracity of Rosenthal’s affidavit, there is no reason to doubt that he and Becker did talk business. The problem, from Herman’s point of view, was that he had little to offer. His premises on West Forty-fifth Street were still closed, and likely to remain so until he found a further source of cash. That made it pointless to agree to a simple payment of protection money. Becker, in any case, was by now getting more ambitious, and after several further meetings—Rosenthal would claim that the pair met up occasionally throughout January and February 1912—the two men reached a more interesting arrangement. Becker, it was agreed, would inject sufficient capital into the club to allow it to reopen and provide it with protection when it did. In exchange, Herman would hand over no less than one-fifth of his earnings to the grafting lieutenant.

  This agreement may well have been unprecedented; at least no similar example is known of a serving police officer becoming a sleeping partner in a gaming house. The only reasonable explanation for Becker’s willingness to take such an enormous risk is that he knew his days with the Special Squad were numbered and he hoped, by insisting on such rigorous terms, to make large additions to his bank balance quite quickly. The details of the agreement reached between the two are also interesting. Becker, who appears—with reason—to have doubted that Rosenthal would keep his side of the agreement, insisted on installing a trusted man to manage the club and ensure that the stipulated 20 percent was paid. Herman, meanwhile, was forced to secure the agreed-upon $1,500 loan by taking out a chattel mortgage on his household goods, made payable to Becker. Evidence that the lieutenant had gone into business with the gambler would eventually emerge with the discovery of this document, made out in the dummy name of “John J. Donohue.”

  Rosenthal received his money in the spring and—with, apparently, a further sum wrested from Big Tim—reopened the West Forty-fifth Street club on March 20. For a while Becker was true to his word; the premises went unmolested, and Herman heard nothing more from Inspector Hayes and the Satan’s Circus police. But Bridgey Webber found out soon enough that his enemy was back in business, and he wasted little time in causing further trouble. Within a few days of the reopening, anonymous letters reporting the existence of the club began appearing in Mayor Gaynor’s office. They were signed by the same “Henry Williams” who had been so busy causing trouble for both Becker and Rosenthal the previous year.

  The eagerness of Herman’s fellow gamblers to inform on him exposed Becker’s weak position once and for all. A few days after the first letter was received, Rosenthal would recall, “Lieutenant Becker met me by appointment and told me what a hard job he had got in stalling Waldo. That Waldo wanted to ‘get’ me.” The policeman did what he could to hold off the commissioner, pleading for time to “gather evidence.” But by the middle of April, the pressure to act was becoming too great to resist. Becker’s solution—common enough in the not-too-distant past, and probably one he had used more than once since taking command of the Special Squad—was to stage a high-profile raid designed to satisfy his superior.

  Most gamblers, being realists, accepted this sort of action as inevitable and were happy to take the long-term view that it was better to accept some damage and some lost business than it was to anger their protectors. Rosenthal did not. Short of money yet again—the tremendous drain on profits imposed by Becker himself can hardly have helped—he simply could not contemplate even the temporary closure of his club, much less the cost of replacing yet more smashed equipment. Becker did his best to make his partner see sense. “He told me,” Rosenthal recalled, “that I must give him a raid. He said, ‘You can fix it up any way you like. Get an old roulette wheel and I’ll make a bluff and smash the windows. That will satisfy Waldo, I suppose.’ I told him then that I would not stand for it. That if he wanted to raid me he would have to get the evidence. That I would not stand for a ‘frame up.’”

  Rosenthal’s intransigence was a severe embarrassment for Becker, whose commitment to the pair’s business relationship certainly did not extend to putting his police career at risk. But a direct order from Waldo could scarcely be ignored. Pausing only to promise Rosenthal that he would stall the commissioner a little longer, Becker wasted no time in setting up a raid. Possibly he felt that he could smooth things over with his partner later; possibly he did not care. There seemed, after all, to be little Herman could do to hurt him. Who would take the word of a confessed criminal over that of the most admired police lieutenant in New York?

  The Special Squad raid on 104
West Forty-fifth Street took place shortly after 10:30 P.M. on April 17, 1912. Rosenthal was not on the premises at the time, for reasons that evidently still outraged him when he came to set down his version of events some three months later:

  [Becker] called me on the wire at my home and he told me to go and see a certain party at half past ten in the evening at 59th Street and Broadway at a place called Pabst’s. When I reached Pabst’s there was nobody there to meet me. Then I suspected something was wrong, so when I came back to my home, I found the windows broken, the door smashed in, and the patrol wagon waiting outside. I wanted to go in, [but] policeman James White told me to go away, not to come. “It’s all right,” [White said.] “Everything is all right. It’s Charley making the raid, and it’s all right.”

  The anguished Rosenthal retreated to a spot across the street and waited for the police to leave. Then he ascended the steps into the club, past the wrecked gaming rooms and up to his own apartment, where his wife repeated White’s message, adding, “Charley said he had to make the raid to save himself.” According to Lillian Rosenthal, Becker had done what he could to calm her, promising that he would reimburse the couple for the cost of all the damage done: “Tell Herman to get down to the St. Paul building tomorrow and get the papers [for the chattel mortgage] from the lawyer. You tell him I am standing the expenses of this raid. You tell Herman he and I are even, and I’ll see him tomorrow.”

  Under the circumstances Becker’s offer must have been more than Rosenthal had hoped for; few other New York gamblers, after all, had ever received reimbursement for what was generally seen as one of the risks, and one of the costs, of running an illegal business. But the lieutenant’s deception, and his willingness to break what Herman saw as a promise to keep stalling on the raid, left scars. To make matters worse, one of the two men arrested in the course of the raid had been Rosenthal’s teenage nephew, a boy with no police record whose prospects might be severely blighted by a conviction for gambling.

  Becker and Herman met again in court the next morning. The encounter was a frosty one. “Charley,” Rosenthal said, “wanted me to waive examination [and said] that he wanted to make the raid look natural and that he would turn it out in the Grand Jury room”—a trick perfected by the likes of Clubber Williams that was standard practice for the grafters of the period. “I said, ‘Can I trust you?’ He said, ‘Why, it’s all right. You can.’ So I had the case adjourned until the next day to think the matter over [and then] waived examination.”

  Herman’s decision no doubt came as a relief to Becker, who must have feared the consequences of his partner’s answering questions under oath. But it did Rosenthal himself no good, and Becker’s willingness to forget about repayment of his loan made no difference in the short term to his serious predicament. The gambler’s anger grew considerably over the succeeding week as his club stayed closed, his chief source of income remained frozen, and, worst of all, Becker reneged on his promise to take care of the grand jury. When an indictment was handed down against Rosenthal’s nephew, Herman insisted on another meeting. Becker instructed him to hire a cab, drive to a prearranged location, and pull over to let him in. “We rode downtown very slowly,” the gambler recalled, “talking over different things, and we finally had an argument. When we left, we were on very bad terms.”

  CHAPTER 6

  LEFTY, WHITEY, DAGO, GYP

  THAT NIGHT, AND EVERY night thereafter, the gambling house on West Forty-fifth stood empty. Shorn of funds, short of friends, and stripped of police protection, Rosenthal could not simply refit and reopen, as he had hitherto contrived to do. His club was still shuttered and locked in June 1912, when Viña Delmar and her father rode over from Brooklyn on the first really hot weekend of the New York summer.

  It was a Sunday, the girl recalled, and West Forty-fifth seemed preternaturally deserted. The Saturday-night gamblers and roisterers who had woken the street as they stumbled out of their saloons and clubs at three or four or five in the morning now lay slumped on lumpy mattresses in dirty rooms, asleep; the churchgoers were still at church; and the remaining inhabitants of the West Forties were seeking refuge from the sun indoors. Even so, the girl observed, the neighborhood retained a whiff of menace, not least in the vicinity of Rosenthal’s ruined premises, which still awaited repair:

  The street was very seedy. Most of the other brownstones had signs offering furnished rooms. No one sat on the steps or even used them. Not a single person came in or out of the houses. The window shades were drawn to the sills on that hot and silent Sunday. There were business establishments between some of the houses and in the basements of a few. A chop suey restaurant, a dressmaker, a milliner, a hand laundry. [But although] Herman’s house looked nicer than most of the buildings on the block…something had happened to his front door. There were deep, jagged marks cut into it, as though at some time he had forgotten his key and in a fury had attacked the door with a sharp and heavy instrument.

  Rosenthal himself came down from his apartment to meet his visitors. The gambler was as finely dressed as ever, but apparently depressed. He “became serious almost immediately,” Delmar recorded, and “his face took on a dark sadness.” Her father had little doubt why this was so. His old friend was becoming desperate and had almost nowhere left to turn.

  Herman’s position had actually worsened since his falling-out with Becker two months earlier. Big Tim Sullivan, it transpired, had made one last attempt to succor his old protégé, offering, through intermediaries, to pay Rhinelander Waldo a substantial bribe to leave Rosenthal alone. But the commissioner had spurned the offer and, outraged, ordered the police to clamp down still more tightly on the gambler’s activities. On Waldo’s orders, Inspector Hayes had stationed a policeman permanently in the club itself, and relays of officers now loitered in the building around the clock, making it impossible for Rosenthal to do more business there. In the course of the next few weeks, Herman would make several increasingly desperate attempts to dislodge these unwelcome squatters—on one occasion locking the day-shift man in and relenting only when reinforcements armed with axes and hydraulic jacks appeared and on another, when the temperature was hovering in the nineties, announcing that he would light the coal furnace in the cellar and roast the waiting cop onto the street.*33 When Viña Delmarand her father called, however, the gambler and the police guard maintained a semblance of civility. “It was,” the girl would write,

  a terribly hot day, and the policeman frequently patted his forehead with a large handkerchief and fanned himself with a copy of Variety, which, in those days, had a green cover.

  “Jerry, why don’t you tell Lillian to get you a cold beer?” Herman asked.

  The policeman laughed. “I don’t like strychnine in my drinks,” he said.

  It is hard to know what went on in Rosenthal’s mind during these difficult few weeks. Much of his attention must have been given over to conjuring various schemes to get his club reopened. But it does not seem too much to suggest that as each avenue closed and his despair mounted, Herman became increasingly determined to seek retribution. His own world might lie in ruins. But he could at least take satisfaction from seeing his tormentors damned as well.

  Rosenthal had long been notorious in the closed world of New York gambling for his readiness to seek revenge. His methods, too, were often criticized. On occasion, as we have seen, he felt no compunction in physically harming rivals, but the sort of beatings meted out to Beansey Rosenfeld and Bridgey Webber were not uncommon in the underworld. It was a far worse sin, in the eyes of most Manhattan crooks, to “squeal”—to make a private grievance public and involve the press or the police in what should have remained criminal affairs. Yet Herman, perhaps buoyed by his friendship with Tim Sullivan, believed himself above such concerns. For nearly three years, ever since his gambling empire first began to crumble, he had lodged repeated protests regarding his treatment at the hands of the DA and the police. As early as February 1909, Rosenthal complained that patrolmen from
the local precinct were attempting to gain entry to his premises. Later that same year, he lodged an affidavit with Police Commissioner Baker, alleging that two policemen from the local precinct were pursuing a vendetta against him. In 1910 he had been a member of a deputation of gamblers who sought a meeting with Mayor Gaynor to “protest against their spoliation by policemen,” and in 1911 he had railed long and loud against the closure of the Hesper Club. Now, in the summer of 1912, he began striking back against his assembled enemies by putting a reporter from the New York Sun on the track of the Sans Souci, Sam Paul’s high-class stuss house—a deliberate piece of malice that resulted in an outraged article and prompted Waldo to have the place shut down.

  The surprising thing—at least to Herman’s rivals—was that he got away with this sort of behavior. For years the gambler’s clout with the Sullivan clan had been such that those who crossed him frequently regretted it; the two patrolmen who the gambler had alleged were harassing him soon found themselves patrolling Staten Island. But Rosenthal did not have quite so much influence as he liked to pretend. He certainly overstated the extent of his involvement when, in 1911, he boasted of having Deputy Commissioner Driscoll dismissed from his post for ordering the closure of the Hesper Club. And—as Big Tim’s power declined—even the modest level of influence that Herman had enjoyed evaporated. By the summer of 1912, his pull was nonexistent.

  The gambler did his best to cause some trouble nonetheless. Sullivan had left town on an extended European vacation, a holiday arranged by relatives to keep him away from supplicants such as Rosenthal. But Herman went to Waldo and Gaynor anyway, hoping to finagle an audience in which to state his case. When both the commissioner and the mayor refused to see him, he went on to call at the district attorney’s office and on the president of New York’s Board of Magistrates, with similar results. No city official seemed anxious to listen to the allegations of a self-confessed criminal, a man whose record of making impossible-to-prove charges against police and politicians had earned him a deserved reputation for difficulty.