Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  The refusal of New York’s politicians to listen to Rosenthal and his tales of woe left the gambler in a difficult position. He had pinned his hopes of justice, as he saw it, on having Inspector Hayes and the local precinct captain, Day, disciplined—reprimands that would surely have lead to the withdrawal of the police from his house. Only Waldo had the power to order this, and since the commissioner would not see him, there was only one way left to pile up pressure on the man. Herman would have to place his story in the city’s newspapers and put trust in the power of the press.

  Rosenthal had never had a lot to do with journalists. Like most denizens of New York’s underworld, he understood instinctively that newsmen were his natural enemies. Every reporter knew that wrongdoing and graft sold papers, and—barring perhaps those who worked for papers supportive of Tammany—they could be relied on to combine detailed, salacious crime reporting with the sort of prim, moral editorials that frightened politicians and led to wearisome assaults on vice. The Lexow Committee, to take only one example, might never have sat had the press not been in an uproar at Dr. Parkhurst’s exploits, and the scandals of the Ice Trust and the New York Times’ turn-of-the-century gambling exposés remained fresh in the memories of those who had lived through them. Squealing to the press was thus a worse sin even than complaining to the cops, since it was still more likely to lead to trouble for all concerned.

  No fewer than fourteen dailies covered the city of New York, many of them appearing in both morning and evening editions, and between them they boasted an enormous circulation. The two biggest papers—Pulitzer’s World and Hearst’s American—had single-cent cover prices and sales totaling over a million. In the absence of newsreels, radio, and television, moreover, the vast majority of New Yorkers relied exclusively upon the press for news and opinion, which meant the larger titles had considerable clout that ran well beyond the confines of New York itself. Covering, as they did, the greatest metropolis in the country, the news reports and features printed by Manhattan’s dailies were frequently picked up and published in other newspapers as far away as Europe.

  Each paper had its idiosyncrasies, of course. The Sun was resolutely pro-Tammany, the Tribune just as solidly Republican. The Times, which sold many fewer copies and possessed less influence than it does today, was one of the few to give much space to foreign news. Most titles, however, and certainly those with mass circulations, relied heavily on sensation to sell copies. Gifted owners and editors had spent the better part of a century honing a formula that worked: New York had been the birthplace of modern crime reporting and, half a century later, it was the crucible of Sunday journalism, too, with its comic strips and women’s pages and its relentless parade of pseudoscientific feature articles: “The Suicide of a Horse,” “Cutting a Hole in a Man’s Chest to Look at His Intestines and Leaving a Flap That Works as if on a Hinge,” “Experimenting with an Electric Needle and an Ape’s Brain.” The bustling dailies, meanwhile, survived by supplying their readers with a steady diet of sports reporting, crime, and bad behavior: the baseball scores, exotic murders, and “scandals involving men of wealth in tuxedos and chorus girls in their underwear.”

  In principle, then, any number of New York papers might have been interested in Herman Rosenthal’s tale of vice, and the gambler was optimistic he could find a taker for his story. Having—unlike Charley Becker—no contacts with the press himself, he began by asking a friend by the name of Jack Sullivan, who worked in newspaper distribution, to make a few approaches for him.*34 Sullivan did his best, canvassing first the titles that he represented and then the city’s other papers, throughout the latter half of June. But even he could raise no interest in Herman’s allegations. Newspapermen, it transpired, were wary of printing stories based solely on the statements of a gambler. Such tales were difficult to verify and all too easily denied; under the criminal code in force at the time, moreover, they were more or less useless as evidence, since the testimony of criminals could not be admitted without full corroboration.

  It wasn’t until Rosenthal took up the baton from his friend and began to call in person on the news desks that anyone took him and his story seriously. Probably, though this is not certain, the gambler brought with him some sort of dossier of evidence, or perhaps a statement sworn before a notary, in order to pique interest. Whatever Herman’s tactics, though, the effort proved worthwhile, for early in July he at last made contact with a man willing to listen to his tale.

  Rosenthal no doubt thought that he was in luck. The journalist who sat down to go through the evidence was a young, tall, red-haired man named Herbert Bayard Swope, an extroverted and utterly self-confident reporter just making his name as one of the ablest newsmen of the day. And the paper that Swope wrote for was the biggest and boldest in all Manhattan, a title better able than any other to trumpet stories of corruption and brutality. If Herman could just persuade Swope to run his allegations, he could wreak considerable revenge on Becker, the police, and New York’s gamblers. Swope, after all, had plenty to offer. All the help—ran the reporter’s little joke—in the World.

  Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World was the leading paper of its day. Brash, bright, and physically smaller than many rival titles, it was a firm favorite among big-city commuters, who found it easy to read in crowded carriages. The World was also the first daily to run headlines across more than a single column and the first to illustrate its stories with photographs as a matter of routine. It was in these respects the progenitor of all modern newspapers.

  Pulitzer’s real genius, though, was to produce a paper everyone could read. When he acquired the title in 1883, he threw out the piousness and windy prose that had characterized news reporting until then and adopted instead a much breezier style, “putting the who-what-when-where-and-why into an easily graspable lead paragraph,” and insisting on “simple nouns, vivid verbs, and short sentences.” “I want to talk to a nation, not to a select committee,” the World’s new owner told the owner of the Evening Post when that worthy criticized the changes; to his own staff, called to a meeting to discuss plans for the paper, he explained, “Gentlemen, you realize that a change has taken place in the World. Heretofore you have all been living in the parlor and taking baths every day. Now I wish you to understand that, in future, you are all walking down the Bowery.”

  These tactics were born of necessity. The World was deeply in debt and sold a mere 15,000 copies a day. Having paid $346,000 for the title—well over the odds—Pulitzer knew that circulation would have to soar if he was ever to recover his investment. Thankfully, it did. Boosted by a mass of lurid crime reporting and by popular campaigns (it was the World that raised the funds required to erect the Statue of Liberty), sales reached 150,000 within two years and continued to grow. By the turn of the century, the paper was being published out of a new fifteen-story office, topped off with a gilded dome, which stood only a block from City Hall and afforded the editors fine views down into the newsroom of their lackluster competitors.

  The great publisher himself spent less and less time running the paper after 1887, when—burdened by pressure of work—he suffered a nervous collapse that left him partially blind. In his later years, Pulitzer developed such an acute sensitivity to noise that his infrequent visits to New York had to be spent cocooned in a darkened, soundproof room, equipped with triple-glazed windows, deep within the mansion that he kept on Seventy-third Street. But he continued to control affairs at the paper from afar, thanks in large part to his genius for selecting staff. It was Pulitzer who hired Nellie Bly, the famous “girl reporter” of the 1890s whose most celebrated feat was to best Jules Verne’s hero Phineas Fogg by traveling around the world in a mere seventy-two days. On another occasion—recalled Donald Henderson Clarke, who joined the World as a cub reporter in 1906—the editors received a cable from Pulitzer’s yacht, criticizing their newspaper for dullness. The publisher went on to propose a typically forthright remedy: “Hire the best hard-drinking reporter in New York immediately,�
�� his telegram concluded, and the World men found one, reeling, in a nearby park.*35 It was also Pulitzer who recruited Frank Cobb, a Midwest farmer’s son, as managing editor of the paper. Cobb, in turn, hired Herbert Bayard Swope. Swope would probably have appealed to Pulitzer, whom he never met. The two men came from the same town, St. Louis, and Swope got his start there on the Post-Dispatch, which was Pulitzer’s first paper. The old publisher would certainly have approved of the younger man’s eye for a story. Swope’s first big break came in 1911, when he covered the infamous Triangle fire; in the spring of 1912, he made an even bigger splash reporting on the loss of the Titanic, on this occasion scooping all his rivals by being the first American newsman to reach Halifax, where one of the ships carrying the bodies of those lost on the liner docked.

  In person Swope was a study in extremes. He was six feet one inch tall, and wiry, with a pince-nez, sharp features, and a head crowned by a blazing mop of hair. He was always neatly dressed, favoring tailored suits accessorized with canes and yellow chamois gloves, and yet a new acquaintance would invariably be struck more forcibly by a fizzing energy that made him anything but elegant. The newsman was incapable of sitting still, or staying quiet for more than five minutes at a time. He regularly worked until five or six in the morning, sleeping till noon, and possessed a voice “like a dinner gong.”

  Swope’s character was just as forceful. He was excessively ambitious: as pleasant as could be to men who might be useful to him, but to everyone else, as New York caricaturist Peggy Bacon once remarked, as “self-centered as the last dodo.” He relished an audience—according to Alexander Woollcott, he “could not write a letter unless there were four people in the room”—and did his utmost to leave a distinct impression on them. He was desperate for people to remember who he was. In a revealing memoir of his old colleague, fellow reporter Donald Henderson Clarke recalled once catching Swope unguarded in the men’s room. Believing himself to be unobserved, the newsman was working on his phone manner. “This is Herbert Bayard Swope,” he was intoning to a mirror. “This is Herbert Bayard Swope. This is Herbert Bayard Swope.”

  The real secret of Swope’s success was his ability to make friends of almost anyone. Even in his early days at the World, his acquaintances included many of the most powerful politicians in New York. But he was equally at home in the twilight world of the city’s gaming houses, and probably this is what drew him, alone of Manhattan’s newsmen, to Herman Rosenthal. Swope himself was a ferocious gambler, betting on anything and everything, playing poker for high stakes (so high indeed that he could not afford them), and wagering compulsively at racetracks. In consequence he knew about the stuss houses and roulette joints of Satan’s Circus and understood how vice was organized and protected. In all likelihood, Swope guessed, well before Rosenthal approached him, that the NYPD knew of most, if not all, the gaming operations in the city and permitted those that paid their dues to operate discreetly. And as a seasoned reporter, he certainly sensed that—properly substantiated—an exposé of vice and corruption in Satan’s Circus would play well in his paper, which had always been fervently antiauthoritarian and critical of the police.

  In truth, however, Swope had another, secret, even better reason for wanting to discover what Herman had to say. In the course of half a decade as a fixture in Manhattan’s gambling clubs, the World man had come to know Arnold Rothstein, and know him well enough to be one of the gambling lord’s few confidants. The two men were the same age, had similar backgrounds, and were well enough acquainted to travel together to racetracks and gambling houses out of town; Swope had even been best man when Rothstein wed. The precise nature of their friendship was never revealed—Swope in later years became far too respectable to dwell on the matter—though perhaps he and the gambler simply shared the pleasure of “being just a little smarter than the next person,” as Rothstein’s most recent biographer suggests. But it seems likely that these two manipulative men swapped information. Rothstein, after all, could only benefit by supplying his reporter friend with tips when there was something he needed to make public or someone he wanted to close down. And Swope lost nothing by passing tidbits concerning politics and the police to a man who never talked to other journalists.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, Rothstein learned soon enough what Rosenthal was up to. Swope’s friend seems to have known the gist of his complaints before the end of June, and he became determined to stop Herman from causing trouble in Satan’s Circus. Rothstein was not alone in this—“Rosenthal’s ruining everything,” another veteran gambler, Dave Busteed, was heard to growl angrily at about this time—but he had bigger interests than most men to protect and was perhaps more of a stickler for underworld etiquette. After all, as a third club owner told the Evening Post, “The trouble with Herman is that he doesn’t know the rules. The rules are, you pay your license money, lay low, and play like gentlemen. When you get a hint, take it and close down. It’s when fighting among the brotherhood is too noisy that the powers step in.”

  Arnold Rothstein shared this view. The question was how Herman could be silenced, and to this problem there could be only two answers: Rosenthal could be paid off, given money to compensate him for his losses, with sufficient extra to get him out of town for good. Or he could be shut up more permanently. Some of the gambler’s growing ranks of enemies already favored the latter course, among them Sam Paul, the former gangster, and Beansey Rosenfeld and Bridgey Webber—neither of whom, it can confidently be said, would care if he got hurt. Others, Becker and Inspector Hayes among them, had motives of their own for wanting Herman to be silenced, too.

  For the time being, however, Rosenthal’s story remained unpublished and his allegations against the NYPD unvoiced. There was still time for matters to be settled quietly, and Rothstein was resolved to try.

  According to one journalist who knew the Rothstein crowd, it was Tammany’s Tom Foley, the ruler of a downtown ward adjacent to Tim Sullivan’s, who first involved the gambler in the Rosenthal affair.

  Word that Herman wanted to talk to the press got out, Leo Katcher of the Evening Post recalled years later:

  One of the first to hear it was Tom Foley. Foley called Arnold Rothstein and told him to get hold of Rosenthal and shut him up. “Get that stupid son of a bitch out of town,” Foley told Rothstein.

  Rothstein sent John Shaughnessy*36 to find Rosenthal and bring him to the Rothstein home. An hour later Rosenthal was there.

  Rothstein let Rosenthal know what he thought of him. The mildest name he called Rosenthal was “fool.”

  Rosenthal defended himself. “If the Big Feller [Tim Sullivan] was here, Becker would be pounding a pavement.”

  “The Big Feller isn’t here. And if he was, he’d tell you to keep your trap shut. All you can do is make trouble for a lot of people.”

  “I don’t want to make trouble for anyone, only Becker. They ask me about anybody else, I won’t tell them. Only about Becker…. They can’t make me say what I don’t want to say.”

  Rothstein took out his bankroll and counted off $500. “[Herman],” he said, “you’ve got to get out of town. Here’s enough money to get you out. If you need more, let me know.”

  “I’m not leaving town,” Rosenthal said. “That’s what Becker wants me to do. I’m staying right here.”

  No arguments could sway him…. Finally Rothstein gave up. He informed Foley he had been unable to muffle Rosenthal.

  Arnold Rothstein’s failure to talk sense into Herman gave the vice lords of Satan’s Circus pause for thought. It was one thing for a disgruntled gambler to threaten to expose senior policemen; that, after all, might be only a front, an attempt to extort hush money in lieu of other compensation. It was quite another for the man in question to spurn money when it was offered and to reject a pointed warning. Rothstein and his more rough-and-ready colleagues could only assume that Rosenthal actually meant what he said and was determined to press ahead with his complaints—with all the potentially disastrous consequ
ences that public exposure of corruption might entail.

  Many New York gamblers viewed this prospect with dismay. The election of Mayor Gaynor had made life uncertain enough for most men’s tastes, and the appearance of aggressive East Side lowlifes within the hallowed borders of Satan’s Circus was beginning to upset the checks and balances that had kept the peace in earlier years. Plenty of faro mechanics, poolroom oddsmakers, and stuss-house owners thought Herman was dangerous and wanted him to stop. But none was more anxious to keep the squealer quiet, or more ready to take steps to silence him, than the former gaming-room manager of Rosenthal’s own faro house on West Forty-fifth, a bleak and shifty card sharp by the name of “Bald Jack” Rose.

  Rose, who had known Rosenthal since childhood, was an extraordinary man. Born Jacob Rosenzweig, in Poland, he was brought to New York in infancy and grew up on the Lower East Side. Leaving the city in his teens, he spent the best part of a decade in Connecticut, where he scraped together a living as a card player, a fight promoter, and even as manager of a minor-league baseball team based in Norwich and known, perhaps inevitably, as the Rosebuds. Rose had given all that up to come back to Manhattan and resume his career as a professional gambler; midway through the first decade of the new century, he was acknowledged as perhaps the finest poker player in the city. By 1910 he had accumulated sufficient capital to set up on his own and was listed as president of what was grandly described as “Second Avenue’s premier gambling club,” a place where Herman Rosenthal was treasurer.