Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  Whitman still had no firm evidence of Becker’s guilt, nonetheless, and the DA wasted no time in using these admissions to pile further pressure onto the imprisoned gamblers. Someone, they were told, would have to stand trial for the Rosenthal shooting, and charges could not be long delayed. The case for their guilt was already strong. But (Whitman added with nicely calculated emphasis), “If they can help the people get the men behind this thing—if one of them can help me assure Becker’s punishment and aid justice further—I’d have no hesitation in trying to get them clemency. Why punish the small fry? It’s the big fish who should be punished.”

  The district attorney’s message was clear enough. The three gamblers could face the courts themselves. Or they could denounce Lieutenant Becker as the man who had demanded Herman’s murder.

  Rose and Vallon were the first to be convinced that their one hope of avoiding trial was to turn in Charley Becker. Their old friend Webber took only a little longer to reach the same conclusion. According to Shapiro’s latest statements, the gunmen who had murdered Rosenthal had been marshaled inside Bridgey’s poker rooms, a block away from West Forty-third Street, and had stepped out of his front door straight into the waiting Packard taxi—details that, taken together with Webber’s mysterious appearance at the Metropole only a few minutes before Rosenthal was killed, were amply sufficient for Whitman to threaten the onetime dognapper with an indictment for murder.

  By Sunday, July 28, the three men—grouped, thoughtfully, in cells adjoining one another—had talked the matter through and conferred with their lawyers. Several witnesses would eventually come forward to claim they had heard snatches of the conversation that passed between the gamblers; according to these men, the members of the trio swiftly concluded they had no choice but to go along with the DA. “My God,” Webber was reported to have cried, “I can’t stand this any longer! Why, they’re trying to send me to the chair. Look here, just how bad do they want Becker? What’ll they do for me if I give him to them?” To which Bald Jack Rose replied, “I would frame Waldo, the mayor, anybody to get out of here.”

  That evening Rose, Vallon, and Webber were summoned to the hotel suite Whitman was using as an office. A group of reporters waiting outside were told that the DA planned to subject the men to another round of questioning, but it did not take the newsmen long to divine the way that things were going. At eleven, one of Whitman’s aides stuck his head around the door and announced that none of the men would be returning to their cells that night. All three had been granted permission to sleep, under guard, on Whitman’s sofas.

  The next morning, after breakfast, the deal was done.

  Charles and Helen Becker had risen a little earlier than usual that Monday. It was hot again and greasy, the air limp with the threat of an approaching storm, but the policeman did not care. He and his wife were finally ready to move into their new home, and Becker had spent nearly the whole weekend completing all the necessary chores. He had finished work on the interior, hung the shutters, and even put in some work on the garden, where—at least so Helen averred—the lord of Satan’s Circus planned to spend his leisure hours cultivating vegetables. Only a single job remained, and that morning Becker ceremonially completed it. At about 7:30 A.M., just before the start of his shift, he called at his property, took out a screwdriver, and carefully affixed the street number, 3239, to the door. An hour later he was back at his desk at the Bronx precinct house, telephoning his wife to say that all was ready for their move.

  On Bathgate Avenue, the day eased by. Downtown, though, out of Becker’s hearing, things were moving at a sharper pace. By noon the twenty-three men of District Attorney Whitman’s grand jury had almost finished their work for the day. The morning had been spent listening to yet more evidence of police corruption—on this occasion details of Becker’s raid on Herman Rosenthal—but the testimony had been quickly disposed of and the whisper was that the jurors would be discharged till Tuesday morning. The members of the jury took an early lunch, after which the hoped-for permission to go home came through. The same did not apply to Whitman’s men, however, and by 3:00 P.M. the district attorney’s offices were frantic with activity. Lawyers darted in and out, bringing in statements and bearing out court papers. The DA sat closeted with Webber’s attorney. Soon afterward the lawyer left to report to his client and the imprisoned gamblers were brought back from the cells.

  The interrogation that ensued lasted for several hours; later the district attorney would tell a group of reporters that he had battered at the trio relentlessly, “pounding one against the other until they all broke down and said Rosenthal was shot in front of the Metropole by a hired gang because Lieutenant Becker wanted it done.” The truth was more calculating and less dramatic. The meeting was long, but it remained thoroughly businesslike and was devoted largely to going through each part of the gamblers’ statements until Whitman was sure he knew exactly what each man would say. Soon after supper the DA emerged and the cluster of newsmen who had been waiting for him learned that Sam Paul had just been released from prison and all charges against him had been dropped. Webber, Vallon, and Rose, meanwhile, were to go before the grand jury.

  It took some time to summon back the jurymen for this extraordinary session. “Sixteen members are needed to return an indictment,” the World reminded its readers, and it was not until nearly 7:00 P.M. that the necessary quorum was assembled and the gamblers brought in. Despite the relative lateness of the hour, it was distressingly close inside the courtroom; the storm that had threatened to break all day was gathering, black clouds rolling in from the horizon to seal in the humidity and heat. A group of nearly two dozen reporters, who had been made to wait outside, sprawled about in upright chairs, tugging at loosened collars and easing damp shirts away from sticky skin. Inside the room, though, no one gave much thought to the discomfort. The grand jury sat transfixed by Bald Jack Rose, who had taken the stand ahead of his companions—which was only right, because Rose had the most to tell.

  “What he said,” one newsman wrote,

  shot straight home. His every word was about Becker, and his story was based upon intimate knowledge of the policeman…He detailed how Becker, six weeks ago, told him that Herman Rosenthal had lived too long, that Rosenthal had to be put out of the way, and that the man who did the job had nothing to fear because he, Becker, was a power in the Police Department. So Rose went out and spread the word that the strong arm commander said that Rosenthal must be killed….

  The four men who pistoled Rosenthal by this arrangement were Whitey Lewis, Lefty Louis, Dago Frank and Gyp the Blood. Rose admits that he rounded them up that night and saw that they were poised for the crime…. [He] called Becker up by phone a few minutes after Rosenthal was dead on the sidewalk in front of the Metropole. He told Becker it was a horrible thing. He said that it was more than he expected.

  He was frightened clear to his heart and he was afraid to stir without a word of confidence from his master. And Becker said over the telephone while he was making preparations for a hurried trip down to the Tenderloin: “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll protect you. There won’t be much fuss over this…. What do you think I am in this department? I can do as I damn well please.”

  Webber and Vallon, who followed Rose before the grand jury, offered corroboration for parts of Bald Jack’s story. Webber admitted that he had supplied $1,000 with which to hire the gunmen—Rose was temporarily short—and confirmed that the four gangsters Rose had named had received as much again when Rosenthal was dead. Vallon added that he had acted as a go-between, carrying messages to and from Bald Jack. He was silent about his presence at the Metropole, and in any case both judge and jury had heard enough. At 8:00 P.M., an indictment was handed down authorizing Becker’s immediate arrest.

  Perhaps the strangest part of the proceedings was the dread displayed by the three gamblers when they heard that the policeman would soon be joining them in the cells. Webber had “cold fear” imprinted on his face, one reporter wro
te, and Vallon also appeared scared. The men, added the reporter from the Sun, looked

  as if a vast weight had been lifted from their minds, [but they] were nevertheless in desperate fear. It was a terror that was obviously not assumed. There was nothing theatrical about it. They were glad a load was off their souls, but they dreaded what might happen to their bodies.

  “For God’s sake,” said Rose, the hand he held up trembling as if from ague. “Don’t send me to [prison] tonight. Maybe you think I’m a fool. But I swear I believe that I’d be killed some way if I went there.”

  DA Whitman stepped in swiftly. There was no need for the men to be returned to prison, he offered. They could spend one more night sleeping in his office. Four of the New York County detectives assigned to his department were detailed to watch them. Another three set off for the Bronx by train just as the storm broke in full earnest. They reached Bathgate Avenue shortly before 8:30 P.M. and went straight into the station house for Becker. Incongruously enough, the tough street cop was busy cleaning a typewriter when they came for him.

  The evening climaxed in appropriately Gothic fashion when Becker arrived at the Criminal Courts Building down on Centre Street. It was after 10:00 P.M., and rain was falling in sheets as the lieutenant was bundled out of the nearest El station and into the sagging monstrosity constructed at such cost to the city by Boss Tweed. By now, long after working hours, the stone interior of the building was deserted, and the ominous rumble of approaching thunder echoed along its shadowed corridors as three detectives propelled their prisoner toward the one court that remained in session. “Every now and then,” noted the man from the New York Times,

  flashes of lightning threw into painful relief the tense faces and figures of the Grand Jury, assembled in extraordinary session at night for the first time within the memory of the oldest court attendant…. As this youthful appearing man in a tan suit approached the bar there was a nervous twitch in the muscles of his face, and the vivid flashes of lightning which now and then electrified the courtroom showed Becker standing strained, nerved to meet whatever might befall him.

  The hearing itself took only a minute. Attorneys representing Rose, Webber, and Vallon sat to one side of the room; they “looked seriously pleased with themselves,” another reporter noted. Becker said nothing as the indictment for murder was read to him; “a set grin was on his lips,” thought Swope of the World, “but in his eyes there was the signal of collapse.” He left it to his attorney, John Hart, to enter “the normal pleas of not guilty,” and the lawyer added a request for time to confer with his client before he was led off to the Tombs prison, which stood next door. “I do not think I have the power to grant that request,” replied the judge, but Hart was assured that he would get the chance to talk things through with Becker in his cell that night.

  With that, the lieutenant was given into the custody of bailiff Joseph Flaherty, who—as chance would have it—was a former policeman who had served under Becker’s command. Flaherty led the way, shuffling out of the courtroom, back along the gloomy corridors and across a low and narrow walkway that led directly from the Criminal Courts to the Tombs. The bridge arched over the main courtyard of the prison, passing over the spot where condemned men had once been executed on the gallows, and it was known, perhaps inevitably, as the Bridge of Sighs. At the far end stood a heavy gate. Flaherty knocked loudly, and with a rattle of bolts and a chink of keys, the door swung open.

  Charles Becker stepped inside and was swallowed up in utter darkness.

  CHAPTER 9

  TOMBS

  THE TOMBS PRISON, TO which Becker had been consigned, was one of New York’s grimmest landmarks. It was a bleak and crumbling monolith, fashioned entirely of granite, and stood on the site of the old Collect Pond—which, more than a century earlier, had supplied the city with its drinking water. The pond and its surrounding marshes had never been properly drained, and the first prison buildings on the site had been erected on wooden piles crowned by a platform of hemlock logs that promptly subsided under their weight, cracking the foundations, warping the cells, and leaving the lower levels permanently dank and occasionally ankle-deep in muddy water. Decades after its completion, the building still sprang leaks continually and was popularly said to rise and fall with the tide.

  The Tombs might have been designed to break its inmates’ spirits. It had earned its portentous name because the architect of the first prison to stand there had patterned its forbidding exteriors after an old Egyptian mausoleum. This original Tombs had been pulled down and replaced a few years before Becker arrived there, but many New Yorkers still agreed with James Gordon Bennett’s description of the place as “a loathsome and dreary charnel house,” and the interiors were as cramped and gloomy as ever. By 1912 the Tombs was used chiefly to detain prisoners on remand; it was supposed to have a capacity of no more than 350 men, but overcrowding was severe and the actual number of inmates was generally at least 2,000. To make matters worse, the cells themselves had no windows and were so narrow that there was barely sufficient room for a man to stand between his iron cot and the wall. There was no running water, no sanitation except for tin pails, very little natural light, and the sole ventilation of small chimney flues that led up to the roof above. In summer, the temperature inside the building soared into the high nineties, and inmates were kept locked up for twenty-three hours a day. Even the Tombs’ own doctor conceded that “a man confined in one of these cells invariably suffers an impression of crushing weight closing in from all sides.”

  There were four floors of cells. As a rule, the handful of convicted prisoners occupied the bottom tier while those awaiting trial on various charges were billeted on the remaining three, with suspected murderers on the second floor, burglars and arsonists above them, and lesser offenders on the fourth and highest level in the smallest cells. Becker, for whatever reason, was assigned Cell 112, on the lowest, dankest tier, and it was there that his wife found him on the morning after his arrest.

  Helen Becker had been out shopping when her husband was detained, and first heard of his arraignment from the superintendent of her apartment block on 165th Street. “A little later,” she recalled,

  some lawyers came, and a friend of my husband’s, a newspaper man, who brought Charley’s revolver and his keys that had been taken from him. I tried to find out what my husband had been arrested for, but they said they did not know. They said that the wife of this newspaper man was coming to spend the night with me. I said it was not necessary—I did not know this woman and I preferred to be alone; but they insisted, and finally she came and spent the night…. I was not as disturbed as one would think—although I did not sleep well—because I could not believe that Charley was in any serious difficulty. My one idea was to see my husband and find out what had happened.

  The next morning, Becker’s reporter friend arrived—it was probably Fred Hawley of the Sun—and escorted Helen downtown to the Tombs, where the pair braved the large crowd that had assembled by the prison gates. (“They were there on account of my husband,” the policeman’s wife confessed, “but the reporter told me they were always there. He wanted to reassure me. I knew nothing about prisons at this time.”) After a short wait, Mrs. Becker was escorted down to the lower levels to visit her husband in his cell. She traveled to the prison—a ninety-minute journey from her home—seven times a week from then until the day her husband came to court.

  From Monday to Saturday, Helen was permitted to see Becker for nearly two hours a day; the couple spent most of their time talking over the details of the case and preparing for the trial. On Sundays, when visiting was not allowed, Helen would turn up anyway, bringing in Becker’s favorite food—usually a roast chicken, homemade bread, and fruit (“Charley is very fond of fruit”)—and ask one of the warders to take the meal to him. She spent the rest of her free time tackling a deluge of unwanted mail. “From now on,” she would say, “I shared my husband’s notoriety. Letters came from all over the country—beggin
g letters, religious letters, crazy letters.” Word of Becker’s grafting, and of the fortune the policeman was supposed to have banked, only made matters worse. “All sorts of people were ready to help me in my trouble if I would send them a few hundred dollars. One person in Portland, Oregon, wanted $10,000. Another wanted an artificial leg…. One day I received a letter from a man who told me to be at Grand Central Station at a certain hour, carrying a roll of paper under my left arm for identification. I must have two hundred dollars ready and hand it over when a young man claimed it. Unless I did this, the letter said threateningly that four men would call upon me. As a matter of fact, a man did call, and, being alarmed and unprotected, I had him arrested; but I dropped the case when he turned out to be a weak-minded youth whose head had been turned by newspaper reports on my great wealth.”

  As for Lieutenant Becker, his principal complaint was the lack of opportunity for exercise. He was taken out of his cell twice a day and allowed to run up and down the stairs for half an hour. The remainder of his time was spent either working on the case or studying the daily papers with increasing irritation. He was particularly irked by the suggestion that he was not eating well. “I haven’t missed a meal,” he exploded. “A guilty man would look haggard about now—that’s what they’re trying to say.”

  Becker received only two visitors other than his wife. One was a reporter from the New York Times, the other Hawley of the Sun. They wrote that the policeman looked “more massive than ever” in the confines of his cell and retained “the grip of a bear” when he shook hands. He was publicly confident of an acquittal, the newsmen added. “I have no fear of its not turning out right…. The whole thing will be tried, and it won’t be tried in the papers, either. There is a lot that the public don’t understand. It is largely a political squabble.”