Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  Justice Goff’s conduct and his frequent intercessions had marked the Becker trial almost since its outset.

  Other judges noticed it. Goff, one said after going through the trial transcripts, had vigorously “intervened to protect the People’s witnesses on cross-examination,” had “objected to and excluded questions asked by the defendant’s counsel,” and on one occasion—when McIntyre asked the district attorney “to concede a fact on which there was apparently no dispute”—had nonetheless stepped in and ruled for Whitman (“No, I will not let him concede it”). At the same time, Goff had been generally lax in permitting Whitman and his team to make repeated references to Becker as a “grafter” who was collecting protection money from gambling houses in Satan’s Circus. These allegations, while true, were based on evidence that was not admissible in court, and the judge had been quick to put a stop to the defense’s efforts to affix similarly negative labels to the district attorney’s assemblage of gamblers and forgers.

  The members of the jury probably barely noticed such legal niceties. But all twelve jurors were certainly aware that in the Becker trial the prosecutor and the defense attorney enjoyed very different relations with the judge. It was common, at least during the first days of the hearing, for Goff and Whitman to huddle together in conference during any breaks in testimony, discussing the judge’s stewardship of the grand-jury hearings into police corruption; the Evening Post even published a short article applauding the “rapport” that had grown up between the pair and the “pleasant picture they made conferring on the bench, with Whitman’s brown head bent close to Goff’s silvery one.” McIntyre, in contrast, became the frequent subject of the judge’s wrath: “Mr. McIntyre, you know better than to object,” Goff barked at one juncture, and, at another, “There is no necessity in being so explosive about it!”

  Throughout the case Goff undermined most defense attempts to show Rose and his fellow gamblers in a less-than-flattering light. One of his most decisive interventions was to prevent McIntyre from introducing Rose’s conflicting statements in the case as evidence; without access to Bald Jack’s earliest statements to the police, the defense was not able to point out the dozens of discrepancies in his changing versions of events. Goff was also vigilant for anything that hinted that the prosecution witnesses had colluded, at one point disallowing eighteen successive questions put by McIntyre and at another preventing the defense from exploring the free-and-easy conditions under which Rose, Webber, and the others had been locked up in the West Side Jail.

  Later, in what ranked among the strangest aspects of the trial, Goff apparently grew concerned that his repeated overruling of the defense’s questions might form the basis for a possible appeal. He summoned McIntyre to the bench and told him that he could recall two of his witnesses and ask them more than twenty of the disputed queries after all.

  When the defense attorney refused, remarking that a “last-minute addendum” to his case, taken entirely out of the context, would scarcely benefit his client, Goff turned to the prosecution table. Since the defense refused to pose the questions, the judge ruled, a district attorney would do so in its stead.

  Frank Moss had spent the best part of two months striving to place Charles Becker in the electric chair. Now, under Justice Goff’s cockatrice glare, the assistant district attorney rose slowly to his feet and began asking questions of a witness on his enemy’s behalf.

  Proceedings in the Becker case resumed on the morning of Monday, October 14, when Bridgey Webber took the stand. He was just as self-controlled as Rose (“Webber’s story,” a watching journalist reported, “was as cold and emotionless as it if came from a frozen heart”), but his evidence came, inevitably, as something of an anticlimax, and it contained some statements that were frankly unbelievable—not least Bridgey’s contention that none of the imprisoned gamblers had read a single newspaper article about their case in more than a month in jail.

  Webber did corroborate several of Bald Jack’s most important statements. Like Rose, he testified that Lieutenant Becker had demanded that Rosenthal be “croaked,” and, like Rose, Bridgey claimed to have warned the policeman not to proceed (“Charley, that is a pretty serious thing—having a man murdered”). Yet the gambler added almost nothing, other than a better idea of the time, to Bald Jack’s account of the Harlem Conference. On cross-examination McIntyre asked some questions about Sam Schepps and his role in the Harlem meeting, but the defense attorney did not take issue with the idea that the conference had taken place.

  Harry Vallon, who followed Webber onto the stand, was little more illuminating. He, too, could not be certain when the Harlem assignation had occurred, though he did relate some extra details. He and Rose had stood around chatting with the lieutenant while they waited for Webber to appear, the faro dealer said; as he recalled it, “Becker was telling us he was going to raid a crap game. There was a little colored boy on the other side of the street and he called him over and spoke to him.” Sam Schepps, Vallon went on, had been nowhere to be seen, but Bridgey had assured him that Schepps was there, and he believed him. McIntyre had no more success shaking Vallon’s story than he had Rose’s and Webber’s.

  The final prosecution witness of any moment was Schepps himself. The self-satisfied fake-jewelry man took the stand first thing next morning, resplendent in a new suit and a neatly done bow tie that “made him look,” a reporter thought, “more like a prosperous department store auditor than a man recurrently dependent on Bald Jack Rose for sandwich money.” Spectators in the courtroom noted that Schepps presented his testimony with a marked intelligence that boded ill for Becker. “His sharp eyes,” the Sun man wrote, “glinted behind his nose glasses and his glances darted sideways. He folded his fingers together and tried to cross his legs, a proceeding frowned upon by the court officer who stands at the witness chair. He wore a blue suit…and black low shoes and he carefully drew up his sharply pressed trousers so that his white silk socks would be exposed.”

  Schepps’s testimony had been keenly anticipated; months of “dodging detectives in the Catskills and his stay among admiring citizens in Hot Springs had given him a kind of reputation second only to that of Rose.” Moss took him briskly through his evidence, and Schepps responded readily—albeit “in a grinning and insolent manner” at first. Later in the proceedings, when John McIntyre rose to cross-examine, “he became more and more pugnacious and more and more determined that counsel for the defense should not get the better of him.”

  McIntyre’s chief tactic was to lure Schepps into the admission that he had played some active part in the conspiracy—a confession that would have destroyed Whitman’s entire case at a stroke. The district attorney seemed unconcerned, however, scarcely bothering to interject, and indeed “his favorite chick of a witness seemed to be able to get along without coddling.” Schepps nimbly dodged the defense attorney’s traps, “carefully excluding himself from private conversations between Rose and Webber” and maintaining that he had never heard either man say anything especially incriminating; they had “whispered in each other’s ears” whenever they had wanted to talk over the details of their plan, he said. McIntyre’s efforts were hindered, once again, by Goff, who ruled that several of the smiling con man’s early depositions were inadmissible as evidence. This denied the defense the chance to show up some serious discrepancies. In court, for example, Schepps claimed barely to know the defendant, remarking that he had “probably said three words to Becker in his life.” To Whitman, some weeks earlier, he had boasted of a far more intimate acquaintance, saying that he had known the policeman for years and even called upon him several times at home.

  “Were you a deaf and dumb partner?” McIntyre “almost shouted,” goaded to the point of madness by a long stretch of this questioning.

  “They never made a confidant of me. When I realized that I wasn’t wanted, I walked away,” the lobbygow replied. Later in his testimony Schepps implausibly added that on one occasion he had left the room and simply stood
out on the pavement “from lunch time until evening” while Rose and Vallon stayed inside, plotting the details of the murder.

  What, McIntyre asked him, had the gamblers discussed with Zelig’s gunmen as they drove about the city? “Oh, the sun came up and the clouds were in the sky and things like that,” the con man smilingly responded. Well, McIntyre pressed, surely he’d been at least a little suspicious when Webber had burst into his poker rooms on the night of the murder, calling, “Herman’s at the Metropole,” and the four gangsters went tearing out? “No, why should I be suspicious?” Schepps returned indifferently. “He put on,” a watching journalist observed, “a little corner of the mouth smile at this point which was trying to McIntyre’s self-control. ‘Don’t laugh at me,’ counsel demanded. ‘You’re treating this matter as a joke.’”*54

  The principal danger, from DA Whitman’s point of view, was that his corroborator would take this studied insolence too far and actually undermine the prosecution case. This point was brought home to Schepps during the lunch break, and—one newspaper reported—“the only reason [he] did not do serious damage to the State was because he got some heavy kicks during recess…. Schepps radiated all morning; in the afternoon he gave forth less froth and more facts…. He is free from the taint of guilt in this case, but no doubt his character, as given by himself, leaves something to be desired from the standpoint of respectability.”

  Respectable or not, the vital point was that Schepps emerged from six hours of cross-examination with his story—and Whitman’s case—intact. He had not made a favorable impression on the spectators in the courtroom; his testimony had been too smug and too smart-alecky for that. But he had borne out Bald Jack Rose and Bridgey Webber, as the district attorney had intended that he should. By the time Schepps stepped down from the witness stand, the twelve jurors were more than half convinced of Becker’s guilt.

  Charles Whitman produced a total of nearly forty prosecution witnesses and devoted well over a week to going through their evidence. John McIntyre swore in almost exactly as many on Becker’s behalf, but their testimonies detained the court for much less time: for five days, rather than eight. This was only one of several indications that the defense was struggling to make a case.

  McIntyre’s main difficulty lay in finding a weakness in the DA’s parade of testimony. Schepps’s pivotal role as corroborator for the State had been one potential chink in the armor, but it was otherwise surprisingly difficult to tear the prosecution’s argument apart. Whitman had staked his chances of obtaining a conviction on the contention that Charles Becker had attended the Harlem Conference and met again with the conspirators at the Murray Hill Baths after the murder. That meant McIntyre needed to prove that Becker had not been—in fact, could not have been—present at these meetings. But Whitman’s witnesses had been so uniformly equivocal about the date of the Harlem Conference (according to Schepps it had taken place in May or June; according to Rose sometime in June or July) that it was practically impossible to show that Becker could not have traveled up to West 124th Street to attend it. The defense was forced to focus the bulk of its efforts on discrediting the prosecution’s witnesses and on the Murray Hill Baths affair.

  Things might have been different had McIntyre felt able to put Becker on the stand. As it was, the lieutenant’s unwillingness to testify appeared intrinsically suspicious, not least to a jury of New Yorkers more or less brought up to distrust the police. It also robbed the defense of both a structure and a heart. Far too much time was devoted to a stream of indistinguishable witnesses, each of whom had been called to discredit a tiny portion of the prosecution case. Probably the policeman’s lawyer was aiming for a cumulative effect—the suggestion that the DA’s case was full of holes. In fact, the impression he conveyed was of a choppy, petty argument, not a principled defense of some great truth.

  Justice Goff hardly helped, again. McIntyre had planned to open his case by calling on William Travers Jerome, the former district attorney, and Police Commissioner Waldo—two witnesses of unimpeachable integrity. Goff disallowed their evidence.*55 Fred Hawley, the Sun reporter, was sworn in next and testified that he had been with Becker for all but five minutes of the time between 3:30 and 7:30 A.M on the day of the murder. This, if true, meant that Becker could scarcely have attended the meeting at the Murray Hill Baths, and—under cross-examination—Hawley scored a considerable blow by adding that he had not informed Whitman’s office of his evidence “because I did not care to have the district attorney know what I was going to testify to.” Too many defense witnesses in too many other trials had been scared off with threatened indictments for the reporter to take that risk. Whitman was sufficiently enraged to call Hawley’s response “the most insulting statement ever made in an American court,” and he demanded to be sworn in himself. Under questioning from Moss, he testified that while Becker had been at the West Forty-seventh Street precinct house at 3:30 A.M., he had not been there after 4:00. Notionally, therefore, Becker had had sufficient time to visit the baths. The jury was left little wiser by the whole exchange.

  McIntyre’s most interesting witness was Jack Sullivan, “a short, burly man with the face of a bulldog and two odd, bald spots at the front of his head” that reminded one newsman in the press box of “little red horns.” The newspaper distributor, still himself under indictment for murder, was brought down from Whitman’s Palace to give evidence and supplied a great deal of testimony regarding the relations among Rose, Vallon, Webber, and their friends. Clearly still much angered by his own arrest, Sullivan could scarcely be prevailed upon to stop talking. The most significant difference between his evidence and that given by the imprisoned gamblers, though, was the distributor’s willingness to answer any question put to him by either the State or the defense. McIntyre made this point well, asking Goff to instruct his witness “that since he was under indictment for murder he could refuse to answer any question. Sullivan replied that he would answer any question.” But the evidence he gave was scarcely breathtaking. Most of it concerned conversations overheard in the West Side Jail. These certainly implied that Rose and his cohorts had conspired to frame Becker for Herman’s murder. But, the jury must have wondered, was the blustery Jack Sullivan—little red horns and all—really more reliable than Bald Jack Rose?*56

  McIntyre had expected great things of one other anticipated witness. William Shapiro, the chauffeur of the gray Packard, had been subpoenaed to testify for the defense. Becker’s lawyers planned to ask him some detailed questions about the passengers he had transported to the Hotel Metropole on that July evening three months earlier—an assemblage that, according to the driver’s early deposition, had included both Jack Rose and Sam Schepps. An admission of this sort would do serious damage to Whitman’s carefully promoted notion that Schepps had no foreknowledge of the murder. Once again, however, the DA smartly outmaneuvered the ponderous McIntyre. A few minutes before Shapiro was scheduled to appear, Whitman requested an adjournment. When the trial began again, it emerged that during the short interval Whitman had persuaded Justice Goff to reconvene his grand-jury investigation into police corruption and call Shapiro before it. At the district attorney’s recommendation, the chauffeur had then been granted immunity from prosecution. He now appeared not to testify for Becker but as a rebuttal witness for the prosecution.

  In these dramatically changed circumstances, few people were surprised to hear Shapiro recant his earlier testimony. Schepps had been nowhere near the murder car, he said, and nothing that McIntyre could say would shake him from that story. The real puzzle, to those who recalled the sensation that had followed the driver’s original arrest, was the timing of the DA’s last-minute offer of immunity. Whatever Whitman’s reasoning, though, his masterly maneuvering had denied McIntyre a final opportunity to do real damage to the prosecution case.*57

  Certainly the defense fared little better with its remaining witnesses. A long stream of former policemen and apartment-house neighbors spoke glowingly of Becker�
�s character; others attacked the integrity of Luban, Vallon, and Bridgey Webber. But none of this did anything to undermine the credibility of Sam Schepps or Jack Rose. McIntyre had found one witness from Hot Springs willing to swear that Schepps, in conversation, had not exactly denied involvement in the murder. But watery testimony of this sort was never going to sway the jury. Not a single witness touched in any way on the events of the Harlem Conference. As McIntyre’s defense drew to a close, it became increasingly clear that Becker’s fate would rest, as the lieutenant had always said it would, on the stark choice confronting the jurors. Who would the twelve men in the jury box believe? A brawny, brutal, utterly corrupt policeman? Or three self-confessed murderers and their oil slick of a corroborator?

  John McIntyre rose to deliver his summation at ten o’clock on the morning of October 23. He had been granted four hours to make his final plea, but—no doubt to the relief of those who had listened to two weeks’ worth of the Tammany man’s rhetoric—required no more than one to state his case.

  It was not one of the defense attorney’s finer performances. Granted, he had little material to work with. But McIntyre’s stentorian appeal to the jury’s patriotism—“I am defending an American, not a murderer”—did little more than underline his failure to make much of a dent in the prosecution case, and his summation confused many of those crammed into the court by arguing that the four gunmen, who were not on trial, might not have murdered Rosenthal.

  The defense made some good points, to be sure. Morris Luban, as McIntyre pointed out, had testified “he never saw Becker but once in his life and then he was in street clothes. But he comes here and tells you he was able to identify a nude man in a room filled with steam.” The idea that a man of the lieutenant’s obvious intelligence could have organized a murder quite so clumsily was ridiculed. But, once again, no reference was made to the really crucial points of Whitman’s case—to the Harlem Conference or the meeting at the Murray Hill Baths, without which there could be no conviction. The defense attorney’s final message to the jurors was a simple appeal to reason—or prejudice, perhaps: “Remember, it is the filth of the earth that accuses him.” His client seemed less than impressed. As McIntyre ranted on, the Evening Post observed, “Becker became manifestly nervous. He moved about in his chair. He broke into a sweat. When the lawyer finished at last, he looked greatly relieved.”