Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  Becker’s arrest, one newspaper observed, was “the greatest shock the police ever had.” The news, added the New York Times,

  flashed from police station to police station by a system of underground telegraphy, and Becker’s predicament was known throughout the force almost before he had reached the Criminal Court building. Everywhere throughout the department it occasioned consternation. Never before, perhaps, had “the system” faced a situation so fraught with possibilities of trouble to itself.

  Almost immediately, journalists noticed changes in the city’s cops. “Where on Monday,” a reporter wrote, “there had been assertive garrulity was now worried reticence. Smug complacence yielded to restless inactivity. Frown succeeded smile. Full tones made way for whispers.”

  It scarcely helped that the NYPD had been more or less the last to hear of Becker’s arrest and arraignment. District Attorney Whitman had carefully kept the details of his plans from Dougherty and Waldo, more in the hope of mining a rich seam of publicity than because he seriously suspected that Police Headquarters might preempt him or, worse, somehow tip off the lieutenant. Dougherty received the news from Swope sometime after Becker had arrived in court. Waldo was sitting quietly in his club, enjoying a late-night snack, when informed of the same developments. He “immediately had looked ten years older,” the reporter who conveyed the news observed.

  Badly stung by Whitman’s triumph, the police responded by redoubling their efforts to find Jack Zelig’s missing gunmen. The four murderers had gone to ground in different parts of the city more or less as soon as word had reached them of the whirlwind of outrage sweeping through Satan’s Circus, and though the authorities had plastered large areas of Manhattan with “Wanted” posters describing the men, they remained elusive for some time. Zelig, too, was no longer to be found in his usual haunts and was generally thought to have skipped town. But the Police Department had been far from idle since Rosenthal’s murder. One positive effect of the close relationships that had sprung up between gamblers, gangsters, and individual policemen was that the NYPD could call on plenty of contacts in the underworld. The police were short neither of informants nor of leads to the whereabouts of the missing men.

  The first member of the quartet of gunmen to be captured was Dago Frank Cirofici, who—being Italian rather than Jewish and not normally a part of Zelig’s gang—quite possibly received less protection than was accorded to Gyp, Whitey, and Lefty Louie. Cirofici was picked up at a boarding house on West 134th Street; the arrest came as the result of a tip-off telephoned to Dougherty, and the gangster gave the police no trouble. When the detectives detailed to arrest him entered the room, they found Frank slumped on his bed in a stupor, lying alongside a similarly catatonic girlfriend named Rose Harris. Two bags, packed with traveling clothes, sat in one corner of the room, and an opium pipe, still warm, lay beside the couple; Cirofici had smoked so much of the drug that he was still more or less unconscious when he was bundled into a cell at police headquarters and did not fully revive until the next day. Dougherty came down to question his prisoner anyway, but after putting Frank “on the grill” for two hours, the Deputy Commissioner had to admit that the gunman’s responses had been “rambling and incoherent.” Harris, who was sufficiently alert to answer questions by this time, insisted that she could give her lover an alibi for the night of the murder.

  The capture of Cirofici left the police no closer to locating the remaining gunmen, and someone—probably a friend of Dago Frank’s—took swift action to warn potential informants of the dangers of their actions. Four days after the gangster was captured, two Italian thugs walked into the Café Dante, a saloon and gambling den much frequented by Cirofici. The men burst into the card room on the third floor and shot dead the Café’s owner, one Giacomo Verella, a former dealer in ostrich feathers. The police soon concluded that the murder had been an act of revenge. Verella, they discovered, employed a retired police detective to manage his bar and was known “to be a friend of many members of the Police Department.” He had asked his patrons one too many questions about Frank’s likely whereabouts and paid the inevitable price.

  Whether or not the police had cultivated Verella as a stool pigeon, they certainly seemed to be extremely well informed about the gunmen’s movements. Cirofici had been arrested only a few hours before he had planned to leave the city. Whitey Lewis, the second of the four gangsters to be captured, was actually standing on a rural railway platform, waiting to board a train that would take him west, when he was stopped. The arresting officer was a detective who had been shadowing him for days disguised as a farm laborer.

  According to George Dougherty, Lewis’s capture was the “logical outcome of a general plan we mapped out within a couple of days of the murder.” The police, Dougherty explained, had been watching a boarding house owned by Bridgey Webber’s brother in the Catskills and had been able to identify their target as he passed through from a group photograph that the gunmen and their wives and girlfriends had unwisely posed for days before the shooting at the Metropole. As for “Whitey Jack,” he had recovered his composure by the time he was hustled into the police station in the nearby town of Kingston. The former pickpocket was shifting a large wad of chewing gum from cheek to cheek and—asked by the desk sergeant if he had ever been arrested before—responded: “I guess yes; a thousand times.”

  The capture of two of Zelig’s gunmen fueled yet further loud headlines in the New York press and gave fresh impetus to a story that might otherwise have vanished from the front pages after Becker’s arrest. In the minds of many people in Manhattan, the apprehension of Dago Frank and Whitey Lewis seemed to confirm much of what Whitman had been saying. Some skeptical New Yorkers had publicly doubted that such apparently outlandish characters as Gyp the Blood had any existence outside the fevered minds of the DA and his informants. News of the arrest of Cirofici changed all that, as Viña Delmar well remembered:

  When that extra flooded the streets, the city reacted in stunned surprise. Then there actually was a Dago Frank! The driver hadn’t been creating characters to promote himself with Mr. Whitman. Excited discussion was still under way when the newsboys were shouting again. A saloonkeeper…was now dead. In his own barroom he had fallen, with eight bullets in his heart.

  Few people cared about the saloonkeeper, but the possible significance of the murder disturbed everybody. Had he and the betrayer of Dago Frank been one and the same? If so, who had killed him? Friends of Dago Frank? Or, more chillingly, was this an unemotional, businesslike murder calculated to insure, through terror, the silence of other voices?

  It was probably no coincidence that Jack Zelig’s closest associates, Gyp the Blood and Lefty Louie, proved to be harder to locate than the other gunmen. The Police Department’s intelligence on the final pair of wanted killers was noticeably less complete than the information they had uncovered concerning Lewis and Cirofici, and for well over a month, both the NYPD and Whitman’s office wasted a good deal of time checking out worthless leads and false reports of sightings. Louie and Gyp were said to be in the Catskills, in Syracuse, in Worcester, in Boston, and sometimes yet farther afield; at one point Whitman dispatched several expensive Burns detectives to Central America in response to a tip that the pair were touring Panama. Police watched for the men at a fruit store in Methuen, Massachusetts, and at a “trotting meet” in Salem. It was not until September 14, fully two months after Rosenthal’s death, that the two were finally located, and when they were, it was in an ordinary-looking Brooklyn apartment where—it transpired—they had been hiding more or less ever since the shooting.

  Like their companions in crime, Gyp and Lefty Louie put up little resistance to the police. They “had just seated themselves at table for supper,” Herbert Swope was able to inform his readers, “when the door panels cracked and the detectives forced their way into the apartment with drawn revolvers. The little company…were taken utterly by surprise. They simply sat staring mutely at their captors. ‘Gyp the Blood
’ found his tongue first. ‘Drop the guns!’ he cried to the detectives. ‘We’re not going to start anything.’” The two gunmen, who had been lounging in casual clothes, insisted on changing into suits before they were led away. Gyp, who had mislaid his hat, created such a fuss about it that one of the policemen lent him his for the ride to the station.

  As Dougherty explained it, the gangsters had been captured because they could not bear to live without their wives. On several occasions, the police had followed the two women onto the elevated railway, only to lose them when they unexpectedly alighted and jumped into vehicles that had been waiting for them. It had taken a substantial operation, involving numerous cars and motorcycles and the stationing of men at every road and railway exit along the eastern border of the city, to locate the gangsters’ hideout.

  By now, relations between the police and the DA had reached something of a low. Whitman, perhaps irritated by the failure of his own detectives to find the missing gangsters, publicly accused Waldo’s officers of playing games. The police had always known exactly where to find the suspects, he charged. Probably the DA was angry that the four men had not been picked up sooner; he would have had more time to build a case against them if they had. In the end, Whitman had felt unable to wait any longer and, with only Lewis and Cirofici actually in custody, he persuaded a grand jury to indict all four men for murder on August 21.

  Whitman’s scrupulously laid plans were now coming to fruition. The existing indictments against Becker and Shapiro were renewed at the same time, and—to the surprise of many New Yorkers—Jack Sullivan, the bumptious “King of the Newsboys,” found himself charged with conspiracy to murder on the same day; he had previously been held merely as a material witness. There did not seem to be any real evidence that Sullivan had been plotting against Rosenthal, and the case against him would eventually be quietly dropped. For a few days, though, the new indictment loomed large over the case. The one credible reason for charging the newspaper distributor—Becker’s supporters howled—was to intimidate a potential witness. Sullivan was, after all, the only one of Whitman’s suspects to insist that he knew nothing to suggest that Becker had any involvement in the case. He had declined all offers of a deal, which made him potentially dangerous. The threat of prosecution (so the policeman’s lawyers speculated) was intended to keep him out of the Becker camp until after the trial.

  Whitman’s last public act that August was to put Jack Zelig in front of a grand jury. Zelig had not been seen in New York for more than a month, and there were many who speculated that he would never be found. But on August 15, a man answering to the gangster’s description was picked up in Providence, Rhode Island, on the charge of pickpocketing one of the passengers on an electric streetcar. It was Zelig, shorn of his followers and almost all his power, forced to return to his old profession of sneak thief. Several years of inactivity had done little for the old pickpocket’s dexterity, however, and Thomas Griffiths—the passenger in question—soon noticed the disappearance of his wallet and $65 in notes. Zelig almost escaped; giving a false name, he was granted bail before the local authorities realized who he was and disappeared after “a man named Goldberg”—whom one might guess was a local lawyer who had received funds by wire from New York—put up his $2,000 bail. But the gangster was recaptured before he could leave town, held over the weekend, and sent back to Manhattan six days after his arrest. He arrived home in New York just in time for the grand jury session that Thursday.

  Zelig, who was well known for his nerve, made the best of a bad situation. He turned up at the Criminal Courts Building on August 22 immaculately turned out in a tailored suit, stiff collar, and straw hat, and informed anyone who would listen that he had long planned to honor his obligation to testify and was assuredly not under arrest. He claimed to know nothing whatsoever about the Rosenthal affair and calmly denied any involvement in the gambler’s bloody murder.

  “Herman Rosenthal was my friend,” the gang lord assured a large crowd of reporters. “If I was not in the predicament I am at the present time, I would make it a point to find out who did the killing and break his leg for him.” Zelig added that he held Jack Rose, not Becker, to blame for his current predicament; it had been Bald Jack, he thought, whose evidence had resulted in his arrest in June. True, Rose “well knew my friends would kill him” if Zelig was actually convicted,*47 but wasn’t it well known that the bald gambler would “hang his own brother to clear his own skirts”? As for the four gunmen accused of actually shooting Herman: “I know them by sight, and I think they are decent chaps compared with this man Rose.” Turning to leave, the gangster added, as a parting shot, “I know [Rose] framed me, and I don’t believe that Becker knew anything about the frame up of me. I am under no obligations to any of them.” Then he was gone.

  District Attorney Whitman spent the next few weeks preparing feverishly for the trial.

  He wanted the proceedings to start quickly, while Manhattan was still in a frenzy of excitement over the murder, for that could only help his case. And he wanted his potential jurors to be able to come to court knowing as much as possible about the allegations spilling forth from Rose and his companions. Not many New Yorkers, Whitman knew, felt much sympathy for the police. But many citizens were equally unwilling to believe the evidence of criminals. By publicizing the details of Becker’s character, his grafting and his brutal ways, the DA hoped to make his witnesses’ behavior credible. So, for the best part of a month, Bald Jack was hauled before the grand jury almost daily to recall his version of the Rosenthal affair, while the city’s papers filled their pages with news of the lieutenant’s secret bank accounts and the dubious record of his Strong Arm Squad. Grand jury testimony was privileged, of course, which meant that Rose’s appearances were a useful way of giving evidence that would never be admissible in court—the details of Becker’s grafting, for one thing, and Bald Jack’s highly colored recollections of his boss, for another. To no one’s surprise, a good deal of this material found its way into the press.

  The steady drip of damaging testimony was such that some newspapermen eventually challenged the DA about it. Whitman denied that he had actually leaked any of Rose’s supposedly confidential testimony. But he also reminded one reporter that there was nothing illegal about a district attorney releasing reports of grand jury testimony. Even more conveniently for Whitman, it was illegal for those who had testified to correct any of the statements the DA chose to ascribe to them. Repetition of anything that had been said on the witness stand, it transpired, was a violation of the oath of secrecy administered when evidence was taken—as Dan Costigan discovered when he attempted to correct no fewer than a dozen errors in the statements Whitman had attributed to him in a press release.

  Of all the evidence assembled for the prosecution case, Bald Jack Rose’s charge against Becker was far and away the most damaging. Having taken the decision to speak out in exchange for Whitman’s promise of immunity, the garrulous stool pigeon now seemed to be determined to paint his former boss in the blackest tones imaginable. Bald Jack’s thirty-eight-page, handwritten confession (promptly passed to Herbert Swope) consisted principally of a striking portrayal of the sinister conspiracy he insisted had been hatched to do away with Rosenthal. Nothing that Webber or Vallon had to say could match the horror of Rose’s allegations—“the mission of the other two,” it was said, “being to nod their well-barbered heads vigorously.” In addition, Vallon’s admitted involvement in the murder and Shapiro’s implication that the faro dealer had been one of the shooters, made Whitman anxious not to place undue weight upon his testimony.

  According to Rose himself, his decision to disclose every detail of the plot against Rosenthal was in some sense a principled one. Bald Jack seemed anxious to establish that he was not simply a “squealer” he had decided to talk, he said, only after Becker had repeatedly threatened his life. “While I was in the Tombs,” the collector told Swope in one of a series of exclusive interviews that Whitman set up for
the World man, “Becker sent word to me that my life wouldn’t be worth a dime if I started to squeal. Five or six other cops sent me the same message…. I waited until absolutely sure that Becker had put me in the bag and was tying it up. Then I hit in self-defense, and I’m going through with the thing.”

  Rose’s claim that he and his fellow prisoners had been threatened in their cells struck many New Yorkers as credible, whether or not the men concerned had any real intention of making good on their threats. Webber, it was said, had been woken one night by an electric torch being flashed in his face, to hear a darkened figure in the shadows hiss, “Now remember, you’ll get just what Rosenthal got if you make so much as a crack against men who have been your friends, and you can tell the others that it goes for them, too.” Rose, meanwhile, had apparently been accosted in a conference room by an anonymous “messenger” who bent down and whispered in his ear, “The best thing for you to do is kill yourself.”

  Whatever the truth of the matter, the confession that Rose handed to Whitman on August 6 was as detailed and as compromising as the DA could have hoped. Beginning with a lengthy account of the manner in which he and Becker had first met, Bald Jack went on to describe his work as the lieutenant’s graft collector before bringing up the ugly rumors that had begun to float around the East Side after Zelig went to prison for carrying a gun. Terrified that the gang lord would come to the conclusion that it was he who had betrayed him to the police, Rose had rushed to seek advice from Becker. “Well he said if you do Zelig a favor he will do one in return,” ran Bald Jack’s barely punctuated, poorly spelled confession. “Find out his friends and tell them if they want to save Zelig and themselves that Rosenthal is the man who is stirring up all the trouble in N.Y. and I want him murdered.”