Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  One other fundamental change occurred in the political landscape of New York while the court of appeals considered Manton’s dossier. Tim Sullivan died, mysteriously, at the beginning of September 1913. His lunacy had become more marked over the summer, and he had taken to running away from his asylum and making for the railway line into New York, where he would hitch rides on freight trains heading for the city and wander along the waterfront or into the lobby of his old headquarters at the Occidental Hotel. According to “Commodore Dutch,” the old Bowery bum to whom Tim had once granted permission to set up a racket, he would “just sit in the lobby and stare until they come and took him away.” “I seen him one day,” the Commodore recalled two decades later, “and I went over to him and I said, ‘Jesus Christ, Big Tim, old pal, ain’t there something I could do for you?’ He just sat and stared at me. It broke my heart.”

  Eventually, on August 31, at the end of an all-night card game that put his guards to sleep, Tim disappeared for good. For two weeks New Yorkers speculated as to his whereabouts; then the policeman required by law to take a last look at each body lying unclaimed in the Bronx morgue lifted the sheet covering an unidentified and badly mangled corpse. It was Sullivan. He had been run over by a train on the night he vanished—probably trying to hop another freight. There were rumors, though, that Big Tim’s death was somehow linked to the Becker case and that someone had made sure the old Tammany boss was “taken care of” before he could tell what he knew of Rosenthal’s murder. The brakeman who’d found Sullivan lying by the tracks was questioned and said the body had been cold. He believed that Tim had been dead before he was cut to pieces by the train.

  The funeral, in any event, was among the most spectacular New York had seen, and 25,000 people followed Sullivan’s coffin to Old St. Patrick’s, where the streets had been scrubbed clean in honor of the occasion and eight priests officiated at a requiem mass.

  While these minor earthquakes shook the political landscape of New York, the legal fight for Becker’s life proceeded at the traditional tortuous pace. It took the court of appeals more than three months to consider the evidence assembled by Shay and Manton, and the policeman had been in the death house for over a year when the court’s decision finally came down on February 24, 1914.

  Word of the ruling, when it did arrive, surprised almost everyone. Becker’s conviction was overturned—not by a narrow majority, or on some legal technicality, but by a six-to-one majority of the appellate judges in a verdict generally regarded as “one of the most slashing in the history of the court.” The court censured the district attorney’s office for whipping up a climate of public hysteria, and Goff’s conduct during the trial itself was criticized across seventy-seven strongly worded pages.

  Much fault was found with the evidence in the case. Whitman, the appeals court ruled, had acted improperly in arranging for the release of men such as Jacob and Morris Luban—who had been in prison prior to the trial—to enable the men to take the stand as witnesses, and had been even more at fault for promoting Sam Schepps as a corroborating witness. The slippery con man, judges of the superior court concluded, was almost certainly an accomplice to the murder of Herman Rosenthal; the notion that he could possibly have been an independent corroborating witness was “opposed to the overwhelming weight of evidence.” Indeed, the very idea that any of the DA’s principal witnesses had given independent and unbiased evidence appeared implausible, given the “ample opportunities that existed for collaboration on the evidence they were to give under their life-saving agreement to convict Becker.”

  The lieutenant’s motive for committing murder came in for equally severe scrutiny. Becker, it was pointed out, had “expressed himself as quite indifferent to Rosenthal’s efforts” to several different witnesses, and he appeared to have no reason to suppose that Herman’s desperate attempts to interest Whitman in his allegations would have dangerous consequences. As for the Harlem Conference, the justices of the court of appeals clearly doubted that it had ever taken place.

  The meat of the court’s long ruling, though, was its protracted criticism, from a legal standpoint, of the actions of Whitman and Goff. The DA was found to have wrongly made “prejudicial suggestions” that could only have damaged Becker’s hopes—the suggestion, to potential members of the jury, that the defendant was “a cool, calculating, grafting police officer,” for instance. Goff, meanwhile, was taken to task for his indecent haste and numerous instances of bias, the most serious of which—the judgment hinted—was the failure to treat the opposing teams of attorneys equally. Goff’s determination to cut short McIntyre’s cross-examination of Bald Jack Rose was cited in support of this contention. The appellate judges were also clearly worried by his charge to the jury—which outlined “most effectively” the case for the prosecution while ignoring “any arguments or evidence in behalf of the defense.” Indeed, the justices of the appeals court noted,

  without exception every appeal made by defendant’s counsel…for an adjournment was denied, whereas applications of a similar character on the part of the People were quite uniformly granted.

  “I emphatically deny,” Judge Nathan Miller concluded in his concurring opinion, “that we are obliged to sign the defendant’s death warrant simply because a jury has believed an improbable tale told by four vile criminals to shift the death penalty from themselves to another.”

  District Attorney Whitman’s position, those who digested the court of appeals’ ruling could see, now appeared unenviable. Several of his most important witnesses had been thoroughly discredited—not least Schepps, whose corroborating evidence had been the sole thread on which Whitman had dangled the tale of the Harlem Conference. The disgrace of Morris Luban similarly rendered the story of Becker’s noisy consultation at the Lafayette Baths inadmissible as evidence. To make matters worse, several senior Republicans began to mutter that the DA’s “availability” for higher office would be badly compromised by failure to convict Becker in a retrial.

  For more than a week, indeed, the very idea of trying the lieutenant again for Rosenthal’s murder seemed utterly implausible. Manton, cornered by the press, proclaimed his belief that his client would now simply be set free, and even the New York Times observed that “Mr. Whitman did not believe a second conviction would be possible in view of the decision handed down by the court.”

  It was, perhaps inevitably, Herbert Swope who steadied the DA. The World man, like Whitman, stood to lose some of his hard-won reputation if the Rosenthal case collapsed, and he was adamant that Becker had to stand trial for a second time. Swope also discerned an ugly public mood. Many New Yorkers remained convinced of Becker’s guilt—Goff’s mishandling of the lieutenant’s trial was a mere technicality, these people thought—and the reporter had little compunction in stoking this undercurrent of hatred. What the Times termed Becker’s “sincere belief” that he would one day be set free became, in the World, the policeman’s “taunt that Whitman would never dare to try him again.”

  It took only a few days of this coverage for the renewed public clamor for a retrial to become so deafening that the DA felt thoroughly emboldened. Becker, he announced in the first days of January 1914, would certainly be tried again; it was in the public interest. He and his staff would press the case as best they could “in spite of the terrible handicaps under which the prosecution must now labor.” Accordingly, a retrial was ordered and a new judge installed. And in May the whole process began again.

  One consequence of the verdict handed down by the court of appeals was that Becker became a private citizen again. He could no longer be kept at Sing Sing, and it was decided to transfer him back to the Tombs, where he could be held for his own safety while awaiting a second trial.

  The reporters who had traveled up to Ossining to see Becker reunited with his wife noted that a curious reversal had occurred. The lieutenant, who had exchanged his prison clothes for an ordinary suit for the first time in more than eighteen months, looked significantly older th
an before. But his wife—on whose face, unchivalrous newsmen observed, numerous “harsh lines” had begun to appear—once again looked carefree and a decade younger.

  There had been a massive fall of snow the previous evening, and the party had to travel from the prison to the railway station by sleigh. The Beckers’ carriage was followed by nine more sleighs filled with guards and journalists, and as the caravan slid off past the cell blocks in a hiss of snow, bells jangling in the clear air, “from the hundreds of slitted windows came a roar of cheering as, to a man, the convicts yelled their good wishes to a man who had got another chance,…an uncanny sound of concerted gladness coming from the dismal buildings.” Helen, her cheeks “scarlet with cold and pleasure,” confessed that she had never been so happy in her life.

  Charles Becker’s second trial for murder opened on May 5, 1914. Whitman had returned to lead the case for the prosecution; the DA could no more afford to let a man as earnest and unflashy as Frank Moss handle the trial than he could imagine squandering the political capital he had gained. Martin Manton marshaled the defense. The new judge was Samuel Seabury, an anti-Tammany Democrat who, like Goff, had made his name crusading against police corruption. Seabury—whose “snow white hair,” wrote the World, “neatly parted in the center, contrasted with his ruddy complexion and flowing black silk robes”—had once been the youngest judge in New York. Now, at the age of forty-one, he seemed prematurely aged, and “his air of severe judicial probity gave the room a far different atmosphere from the days when the outrageous Goff sat in the same high-backed chair.”

  The second trial was more sober, more measured, and—both the press and the spectators in the Criminal Courts Building agreed—a much more close-run thing than Becker’s first. “So tense was the courtroom,” wrote a reporter for the New York World, “that even a shrug of the judge’s shoulders during the testimony, or a smile of incredulity or a lifting of the eyebrows would have swung the case.” In this charged atmosphere, Manton was generally held to have outdone his predecessor, McIntyre, bringing home the implausibilities in the prosecution case to good effect, while Whitman’s performance was generally lackluster.

  The DA had nonetheless done remarkably well to rescue his failing case. He produced the same long stream of witnesses to the events outside the Metropole and then capped them with Jack Rose, who took the stand on the eighth day of the trial and “acted like a man who is bored to death with repeating a story which rose from his mouth as easily as water from a spring.” Rose’s evidence regarding Becker’s bloodcurdling threats, attentive reporters noted, was indistinguishable from that which he had presented at the lieutenant’s earlier trial, but Manton devoted a lengthy cross-examination to pointing up several dozen discrepancies between Bald Jack’s earliest depositions and the statements he now made in court. Becker’s attorney scored several valuable points, but, unfortunately for the policeman, he concluded his examination by making the fatal mistake of posing an open-ended question.

  “When you were planning this murder, did not your conscience prick you?” Manton demanded of Rose.

  “My conscience was under the entire control of Becker,” Bald Jack replied to a scattering of applause from the public galleries. This barb was considered a solid blow to the defense.

  Rose’s place on the witness stand was taken by Bridgey Webber, who did his best to explain away the bizarre anomaly that Manton had discovered regarding the gigantic excavation at the site of the Harlem Conference. After taking a hasty recess, Webber responded that there had been a small area along the edge of the pit where the gamblers had stood. The fact that neither Bridgey, Rose, nor Vallon had ever mentioned the thirty-foot hole that they were standing next to was played down ably by Whitman, and Webber was excused to allow Vallon to take the stand. The faro dealer’s evidence, too, was much the same as it had been before, but on this occasion Vallon did recall a good deal more about the “little colored stool pigeon” he remembered hanging about while Becker and the gamblers talked.

  The meaning of Vallon’s suddenly improved memory was not at all clear to those listening in court at the time, and the true reason for his careful description of the teenage boy did not emerge until the last day of prosecution testimony. By then, most of those in court agreed, Whitman’s case seemed weaker than it had before. Thanks, no doubt, to the savaging he had received at the hands of the court of appeals, Sam Schepps was never called to give evidence at the second trial. That meant that no one but accomplices had testified to hearing Becker say or do anything that might connect him to the murder. The lieutenant’s supposed appearance at the Lafayette Baths was likewise never mentioned before Justice Seabury, and his alleged meetings in Harlem and at the Murray Hill Baths still rested on the unsupported testimony of Jack Rose and his two friends. A large number of reporters wondered why Whitman had even introduced their evidence, since the judgment of the appeals court had made it clear that no jury could convict without hearing evidence from a corroborator. It was, with carefully judged timing, only on that final afternoon that Whitman came up with dramatic new testimony that something had indeed been discussed one June night on the corner of West 124th Street and Seventh Avenue. This time the DA had fixed a specific date for the rendezvous: June 27. He also had a new corroborating witness.

  Whitman’s surprise witness was the “little colored stool [pigeon]” Harry Vallon had mentioned in passing at Becker’s earlier trial. His name was James Marshall, and he was a scrawny “buck and wing dancer”—a tap dancer—who had picked up some money occasionally by supplying tips to the Strong Arm Squads about gambling houses up in Harlem. Superficially, at least, the evidence that Marshall gave that afternoon seemed unimportant; he testified that he had been with Becker on the night in question and had seen him talking on the street with a man in a hat, whom he identified as Bald Jack Rose. Nothing in the dancer’s testimony hinted at the topic of conversation, but the simple fact that Marshall had seen Rose and Becker talking deeply impressed both judge and jury. It suggested that Vallon’s testimony was true. And it implied that Jack Rose’s story of the Harlem Conference was correct.

  Marshall’s unexpected appearance on the stand put a stop to Manton’s bullish talk of not bothering to mount a defense, a line the attorney had been spinning to the press ever since the trial started. But the case that the defense mounted seemed much the same as that formerly assembled by McIntyre. Jack Sullivan—more vocal than ever—spoke once again for Becker, and a number of East Siders appeared to testify that Rose and Webber had been actively gathering donations from their gambling friends to help get Herman out of town. But none of the new witnesses were of good character, a fact that Whitman carefully brought out on cross-examination.

  Most observers felt after all this that the Becker case remained finely balanced. Both sides announced that they confidently expected victory. But not everyone in Whitman’s office was quite so certain as their boss was. In the days before the final pleas were heard, at least one assistant district attorney—a man named Billy De Paul—was noticed “going around town saying it was a good thing for Whitman that he didn’t have to submit the case to a jury of his own staff.” The prospects for an acquittal, Manton reassured his client, were solid.

  All this changed when Seabury made his charge to the jury. The judge, who had hitherto remained impassive—he had, the World said, “sat throughout the case as if his face was carved of stone”—was just as aware as Whitman of the political importance of the Becker case. Having privately agreed to run for office on the Democratic ticket—and gauged the prevailing hostility of the New York press to the defense—he delivered a summation that accepted almost all of the main planks of the prosecution’s argument. Becker’s junior counsel was so upset that he leaped to his feet as soon as Seabury had finished: “I object to the whole charge on the grounds that it is an animated argument for the prosecution!” the lawyer cried.

  Becker’s retrial had taken a fraction longer than Goff’s hearing—nineteen days ra
ther than seventeen—but, thanks largely to Marshall’s new evidence and to the judge’s summation, this jury required even less time than Goff’s had to find the policeman guilty: merely an hour and a half. Many of the journalists covering the case were shocked—the majority thought the policeman guilty, while agreeing there was scarcely evidence enough to justify a conviction. Manton and the defense team were stunned into silence; they were certain they had done enough to win.

  Becker, wrote Edwin Hill of the Sun, “had himself under magnificent control” as he awaited the verdict.

  His iron nerve was not bending. Those who watched him did not see a sign of agitation. He was breathing slowly—you could see that from the rise and fall of his powerful chest—and smiling slightly as he glanced towards his counsel. He took the blow without a quiver.