Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  It was late afternoon by the time that John Johnson, one of Manton’s assistants, rushed into the Ledger’s offices, where the dancer sat waiting with a commissioner of oaths and several of the paper’s staff. Marshall still appeared cooperative, and he willingly swore a statement setting out his relationship with district attorney Whitman. The DA, Marshall said, had traced him to his new home in Washington and dispatched an assistant district attorney by the name of Frederick Groehl to offer payments totaling $355 in exchange for testimony.

  It was the nature of the testimony itself that really raised eyebrows among the waiting journalists. Marshall freely admitted to knowing Lieutenant Becker, whom he had occasionally supplied with information about the gambling houses on 120th Street. But he was equally adamant that he had never seen Bridgey Webber, Harry Vallon, or Jack Rose until shortly before the policeman’s second trial. “The first time I met Mr. Groehl,” the stool pigeon added,

  was in his office in the Criminal Court Building at which time he told me that he wanted me to testify in Becker’s case and say I saw Becker at 124th Street and Seventh Avenue in New York…. He told me he had plenty of evidence that the man to whom Becker was speaking was Jack Rose, but he wanted as many witnesses as he could get, and therefore he wanted me to swear that Becker was speaking to Jack Rose.

  Groehl’s statement was, of course, an outright lie; Whitman had no other witnesses who could testify to the Harlem Conference other than Sam Schepps, whose fragile credibility had just been utterly demolished by the court of appeals. But the lure of cash, combined with a threat of prosecution for perjury (Whitman had gotten hold of some “false affidavits” dating back to Marshall’s stool-pigeon days) was enough to persuade the dancer to testify. Marshall, by his own admission, had a hazy recollection of events on the night of the supposed Harlem Conference, said he “did not know that the man speaking to Becker was Jack Rose except from what Mr. Groehl told me and what I had read in the newspaper,” and had had to be coached intensively before giving testimony at the policeman’s trial. But he had completed his assignment successfully and been permitted to leave town. Now that he was speaking out, he feared that some unspecified “bodily harm” could well befall him.

  Of course, the New York district attorney’s office had little need to resort to the crude tactics of physical violence. On the same day that news of Marshall’s affidavit appeared in the New York press, assistant DA Groehl materialized at the apartment up on East Seventy-sixth Street rented by the dancer’s mother. Happily for Groehl, he had no sooner walked through the apartment door than the telephone rang. The caller was none other than the district attorney’s reluctant witness, phoning with the news that he was back in town. Seizing the receiver, Groehl informed Marshall that he had better get up to the apartment as rapidly as possible; almost certainly mention was made of the fact that the threatened indictment for perjury could be easily revived. “He then stated to me,” Groehl swore in a later deposition, “that he wished to make an affidavit reaffirming the testimony given by him [at] the trial.”

  James Marshall retracted his retraction later that same Sunday. He had been “drinking heavily” and was “very much intoxicated” when he struck his wife, he now insisted, and he was still drunk when the Philadelphia newsmen had gotten their statement from him hours later. It had been John Johnson, the dancer now alleged, and not the New York district attorney’s office, who had offered payment for his story—an astonishing $2,500 in total. Johnson had dictated his statement for him, Marshall added, and then fooled him into signing it.

  Deprived of the buck-and-wing man’s dramatic recantation, the defense team made little headway with Becker’s renewed appeal for a retrial. Justice Seabury’s handling of the case had been so much less inflammatory than Goff’s that it was much more difficult than before to argue that the proceedings had been biased. Manton tried his best to make the case anyway, devoting the final dozen pages of his argument to a condemnation of the judge’s “extreme partiality.” Nearly two-thirds of his submission, though, was devoted to a dissection of the prosecution case, discussing the same matters of fact that had so exercised the court of appeals almost two years earlier. Whitman’s successors in the district attorney’s office had done much the same, and it came as a considerable surprise to both sides that on this occasion the court showed practically no interest in the weaknesses of the opposing cases—that, it now ruled, was exclusively a matter for the jurors.

  In fact, the appeals court’s principal concern—it declared in an opinion only half as long as the decision that had previously gone in Becker’s favor—was the procedure of the trial: a purely technical consideration. Seen from this perspective, the second Becker hearing had been successful and well run, the judges ruled, and Seabury’s concluding charge to the twelve jurors scrupulously fair. That meant that there were no legal grounds on which an appeal could possibly be granted. The court of appeals’ decision affirmed the verdict of the lower court, and Becker’s execution was rescheduled to take place early on July 12.

  Most New Yorkers heard the decision without much surprise. Becker himself, when he was told of it that evening, seemed prepared; he had guessed, John Johnson said, that someone would have rushed in to inform him earlier if the ruling had gone his way. But the court of appeals’ opinion was remarkable nonetheless. For one thing, the new verdict exactly reversed the one handed down two years earlier—the court had voted six to one for a new trial in 1913 and now stood six to one against it. For another, no fewer than five of the seven judges on the panel had heard both the Becker appeals, and four of them had actually reversed themselves, voting against a third trial just as decisively as they had voted for a second. James Marshall’s astonishing ballet of retraction and counterretraction had scarcely been considered; the affidavit that the dancer had given Johnson, utterly repudiating his testimony at Becker’s retrial, was only “somewhat inconsistent” with his earlier statements, the court now ruled.

  Becker’s handful of remaining partisans howled that the shifting opinions of the appeals court justices could be explained only by Whitman’s recent elevation to governor.*66 But it was hard to prove that this was so, and in strictly legal terms the court’s verdict was probably correct. The technicalities, in any case, mattered little to the condemned policeman in his Sing Sing cell. All Becker knew was that his last realistic hope of freedom had been torn away. For several days after the appeals court verdict was announced, Father Cashin reported from the death house, the condemned man was “overcome by a frantic and futile anger,” laced no doubt with despair.

  Several enterprising reporters, meanwhile, sought out Bridgey Webber in the new home he was renting upriver in New Jersey. “My sympathies are with Becker,” the former poker baron said without evident sincerity. “Of course there’s no chance for a pardon. Governor Whitman certainly can’t pardon the man he prosecuted.”

  By the beginning of July 1915, less than two weeks before the scheduled execution date, Becker’s lawyers were close to exhausting the few options that remained to them. The one piece of good news was that Martin Manton’s distinguished law partner, Bourke Cockran, had agreed to take the case. Working without pay, the veteran attorney promptly applied to the United States Supreme Court for a writ of error, which, if granted, would have meant a retrial. Whitman’s offer of immunity to five confessed criminals had been unconstitutional, Cockran said.

  Like most of the defense team’s tactics, Cockran’s motion did no more than delay matters for a while. His application was denied within a week, and soon after that, Whitman rejected a direct appeal for clemency. Still Cockran did not give up. He got Becker’s execution date pushed back to late July, then helped to organize a petition that was circulated at a constitutional convention in Syracuse, asking the governor to cede responsibility for deciding the policeman’s case to the Board of Pardons. Manton, meanwhile, petitioned for the creation of a special panel of court of appeals judges to reconsider the evidence. The former di
strict attorney rejected both of these proposals out of hand. To Whitman’s enemies—there were a growing number of them, now that he was well into the second year of his governorship—this was the signal that he was prepared to harry the lieutenant to the chair. To his supporters, notably Swope of the World, it seemed merely common sense. No one knew more about the Becker case than Whitman.

  Cockran’s last resort was a motion for a new trial, brought on July 23 before the Supreme Court of New York County. It was accompanied by an order to show cause, requiring the district attorney’s office to give reasons a third hearing of the case should not be granted, and by several fresh pieces of evidence. One was Charles Becker’s own account of the entire Rosenthal affair, a thirty-eight-page handwritten deposition, along with an almost equally lengthy cover letter addressed to Whitman. Another was an affidavit sworn by Harry Applebaum, who had long been Big Tim Sullivan’s private secretary and closest aide. Cockran saw to it that both documents were released to the press, where aficionados of the Becker case fell upon them eagerly. The lieutenant’s story was the one they read most avidly: Here at last, after Becker had sat silently through two full trials, was the testimony he could, and perhaps should, have given. But it was Applebaum’s affidavit that caused the real sensation. Sullivan’s confidential aide acknowledged, for the first time since Herman’s murder, that the late ward boss had been intimately involved in Rosenthal’s gambling affairs. He also recalled some conversation between Becker and his collector, Bald Jack Rose, that—at the very least—threw floods of light on the relationship between the two. Many who read Applebaum’s statement felt it pointed firmly to Rose as the principal agent behind Herman’s murder.

  Becker’s own account of the Rosenthal affair was given added credibility by the condemned man’s refusal to beg the governor for yet another stay of execution: “I do not desire a delay,” he wrote, “that can merely serve to prolong an agony which is already almost unendurable.” Becker’s memoir contained the expected protestation of innocence and covered his experiences in Satan’s Circus from the moment of his appointment to the old Special Squad. The policeman enlarged considerably on his relationship with Bald Jack Rose and on the difficulty of recruiting and managing stool pigeons to obtain the evidence required to launch raids on gambling houses. His principal revelation, however, concerned the manner in which Big Tim Sullivan had become enmeshed in the Rosenthal affair.

  Tim, Becker recalled, had wanted to protect his old friend Herman and permit him to run his gambling houses in the entertainment district. He had spoken to Commissioner Waldo on the subject and somehow obtained the impression that Waldo had agreed to leave Herman unmolested. Then, sometime in January 1912, Sullivan had decided to make sure that Rosenthal would receive the necessary protection by summoning Lieutenant Becker to meet him. Becker (so his own account ran) made no rash promises, merely pointing out that Waldo himself ordered all his raids, and that if the commissioner was content to leave Herman alone, he and his Strong Arm Squad would have no reason to have dealings with Tim’s favorite. All of these conversations had, of course, been overtaken by events. But there can be no doubt that Becker was deeply impressed—even awed—by his encounter with Sullivan, not least because (as he himself explained) Big Tim’s “influence in the Police Department, no matter who might be its head, was believed to be unbounded. A policeman who succeeded in enlisting his favor was considered sure of promotion.” For this reason, the lieutenant pointed out, when Big Tim asked him to promise not to bring his name into the Rosenthal affair, he took the vow he made particularly seriously. This was why, at least in part, Becker had felt unable to testify in either of his trials.

  The revelation that Big Tim Sullivan had offered Rosenthal protection shocked a few New Yorkers, though it would scarcely have come as much of a surprise to the average habitué of Satan’s Circus. But the second part of Becker’s statement—an account of the last few hours before Herman’s murder—certainly was news, not least because, so the policeman recalled, he had been summoned to see Big Tim once again the night before the shooting. Harry Applebaum had tracked him down, with Bald Jack Rose’s help, and the three men had ridden in Sullivan’s car down to Sixtieth Street, where Tim maintained a private office. “We went up two flights of stairs,” Becker wrote,

  and on [my] entering his room, he asked me, “What about this Rosenthal affair?” I said, “There’s nothing of it.” He said, “It must not be allowed to go any further. Rosenthal has gone so far now, he can’t be stopped. He must be got away.”

  “That,” I said at once, “would be the very worst thing that could happen to us. Everybody would say that either you or I had caused his disappearance, and naturally it would seem that, if we induced him to leave [town], it must be because he had something discreditable to reveal. Now, everything he could say has already been said or published. It is absolutely necessary to my position in the department that his statement be faced and disproved.”

  By itself this statement of Becker’s, explaining precisely why he had not wanted Rosenthal dead, was not worth much. It was certainly insufficient to prompt the Supreme Court to review his case. But Harry Applebaum’s supporting affidavit, which supplied confirmation for almost all of the points that Becker made, also described a revealing moment that had occurred during the automobile ride downtown. Out of loyalty to his old boss, Applebaum had been hesitant to come forward with his evidence before either of Becker’s trials. Now, though, with Sullivan dead and the lieutenant only hours from the chair, he had decided to speak out “for the purpose of setting right before the public many erroneous impressions” and to explain why he believed that Jack Rose was to blame for the murder.

  Applebaum, as he recalled it, had become increasingly concerned by Rosenthal’s erratic and indiscreet behavior throughout the spring of 1912 and, with Sullivan’s approval, had spent several days talking to Herman and persuading him to get out of town. One day before the murder, Herman had at last agreed to abide by Big Tim’s wishes, and Becker had known that he would soon be on his way because Applebaum himself had told him about Rosenthal’s decision. It was Becker’s certainty that the whole affair was about to die down that made Tim’s aide quite sure that he would never have done anything so rash as to arrange to have the gambler murdered. Indeed, Applebaum clearly recalled the conversation that had passed between Becker and Jack Rose that evening:

  On our way down I told Becker that Tim wanted to do anything he could to help out the situation; that I had been talking with Rosenthal and he was willing to do anything that Tim asked him to do. Rose told me how Herman had been talking about his wife. He was very bitter over it, and made the remark that “someone ought to croak Rosenthal.” I immediately protested at such a thought, and Becker spoke up and said, “No, they hadn’t. He wants to be left alone. No friend of mine must harm a hair on his head, for if they do it will be blamed on me, and I can beat this thing all right.”

  In fact, the one thing that Applebaum and Becker disagreed on was Herman’s true motive for leaving New York. The secretary believed that Rosenthal felt indebted to his mentor, Sullivan, “so that it was not necessary to bribe him” to leave town. Becker, for his part, was equally certain that Arnold Rothstein and the Satan’s Circus gambling fraternity were paying Herman handsomely to do so: “It was a matter of common reporting in every newspaper office,” the lieutenant wrote in his letter to Whitman, “that a sum of money had been raised, probably by Rose, from the gamblers to get Rosenthal away, that Rosenthal refused the sum offered, but consented to go away for a larger sum. It was for this larger sum that he was said to have been waiting at the Metropole when he was called out.”

  That, Becker clearly believed, explained why the troublesome gambler had risked going to West Forty-third Street on the night of his death. It also solved the puzzle of why Herman had so obediently followed the messenger sent in to fetch him when he was summoned to his death. The only mystery remaining was who precisely had ordered the assassinat
ion. Plenty of people had had a motive for wanting Rosenthal silenced, after all: Arnold Rothstein, for one, and Rosenthal’s hated rival, Bridgey Webber, for another. Becker and Applebaum nonetheless both felt certain that the real culprit had been Jack Rose, the man who, rumor in Satan’s Circus had it, had been assigned to take the gamblers’ payoff to the hotel.

  At some point, the policeman and the politician guessed, Bald Jack had taken a good look at the thick rolls of dollars in his hands and decided that it would be a crying shame to pass all that cash to Herman—not least because for a mere $1,000 Rose himself could pay off Zelig’s gunmen and have Gyp the Blood and his three friends dispose of the man who had so insulted his wife. Rose, both Becker and Applebaum felt certain, had simply kept the balance of the money for himself, pocketing a sum that could easily have amounted to as much as $15,000.

  A few people, well versed in the ins and outs of the Rosenthal affair, felt that Becker’s statement and Applebaum’s affidavit answered several of the most puzzling questions still hanging over the case. Unfortunately for Becker, the members of this small group were mostly former colleagues, friends, family, or members of his own defense team. The New York papers reveled in the chance to drag the now-dead Sullivan’s name into the mire in a way they had longed to, though never dared to, while the Tammany man had been alive, but they still gave little credence to the remainder of the evidence. And none seemed to think that a new trial was justified—certainly not at this late stage.

  In strictly legal terms, the newspapers were right. Justice John Ford, of the State Supreme Court, spent the best part of a week considering the documents that Cockran had submitted to him—a delay that once again raised Becker’s hopes—and the policeman’s attorneys were able to use the delay to get one last postponement of the execution date, which was now pushed back to July 30. On the twenty-eighth, however, after five long days of thought, Ford ruled in favor of the prosecution. Cockran’s motion was denied, he said, on the purely technical grounds that Becker’s statement and Applebaum’s deposition were not actually “new evidence,” the only sort that would allow the case to be reopened. The lieutenant, Ford explained, had been free to testify to his dealings with Tim Sullivan at either of his trials.