by Mike Dash
The next day was a Sunday. A steady stream of messenger boys bearing flowers from Becker’s lawyers, Helen’s pupils, and the Sullivan clan called at the third-floor flat throughout the morning. A handful of Becker’s friends were invited in to the apartment to view the body, among them old Clubber Williams, in his seventies by now, who called twice and whose wreath—bearing a ribbon reading IN RESPECT FOR CHARLEY—was set in a place of honor at the corpse’s feet. None of those who made their way out of the house and past the assembly of waiting pressmen could bring themselves to mumble the usual comfortable platitudes about the cadaver, for there was nothing calm or peaceful about Becker’s face. The marks left by the execution were all too obvious, from the roughly shaven head to the burns where the electrodes had been placed. The undertaker had done what he could to conceal the lieutenant’s injuries under heavy greasepaint, but they remained visible even so. A scorched patch of skin on the left side of the forehead was particularly prominent.
There was one new story for the papers to report. Mrs. Becker’s hatred of Charles Whitman had come to such a head during the disastrous interview in Poughkeepsie that she had resolved, during the lengthy journey home, to denounce his actions publicly. As soon as she returned to New York, Helen commissioned a local engraver to produce a handsome silver plate, seven inches by five, for her husband’s coffin.
CHARLES BECKER
the inscription proclaimed,
MURDERED JULY 30, 1915
BY GOVERNOR WHITMAN
A single journalist was granted access to the Becker apartment and allowed to view the coffin on condition that he pooled notes with his colleagues, and the story made all the city dailies the next morning. “The plate,” one report concluded, “is screwed to the upper, removable section of the casket’s top. When the lid is put in place, the plate will be above the face.”
Whitman’s office wasted little time in taking action when this bit of news emerged. Within a matter of hours, a party of three senior policemen, led by an inspector, appeared at the apartment and gravely informed Helen that the inscription amounted to a criminal libel on the governor. The plate was unscrewed and taken to Police Headquarters on Centre Street, where it was preserved as evidence in case Whitman chose to sue. In the end the governor had the sense not to press the matter further, and Helen’s family soon obtained a replacement, this one made of aluminum and inscribed with nothing more than Becker’s name and date of death.
The interment was arranged for the first day of August. It was an abominably hot, close day, the worst of the year so far, but even the muggy beating of the sun was not sufficient to deter another gigantic New York funeral crowd, this one an estimated ten thousand strong, from descending upon University Avenue. The press of humanity was so great that the street became entirely blocked shortly after dawn.
No more than a hundred members of the throng that gathered to gawk outside the Becker home had any acquaintance with the dead policeman. The remainder were simply thrill seekers. “A championship series baseball game or a hippodrome spectacle would not have brought out a more noisy and disorderly crowd than that which attended the Becker funeral,” the American observed.
Women with babies in their arms gathered outside the apartment house soon after sunrise in order to obtain advantageous positions for viewing the funeral cortege when it started for the church. The crowd held its ground until many dropped to the pavement with exhaustion. Women engaged in heated arguments as the coffin was borne through their midst, and above the din was heard the crying of suffering infants—children whose parents or caretakers had forgotten all about them in their momentary frenzy.
Two women fainted and had to be carried away when the coffin, borne on the shoulders of six stalwart men who are now or were formerly members of the Police Department came down the narrow stairway, was pushed waveringly through the throng and finally lodged safely in the hearse. The crowd blocked the way and it was at least twenty minutes before the mounted policemen could clear the street sufficiently for it to start for church, three blocks distant. Then a footrace took place. Men, women and children threw dignity to the winds in their mad desire to be among the first to reach the church. Moving picture operators and photographers raced along in the vanguard, while many ignored the “No trespassing” signs as they made for the church across lots, through bramble bush and rag weed.
The church of St. Nicholas of Tolentine could hold seven hundred people, but at least fourteen hundred crammed into the building to hear Father George Dermody, an old friend of the Beckers’, conduct the requiem mass. There was no sermon and no eulogy. Those forced to wait outside could in any case hear nothing of the service over the hubbub of the mob, and there were further ugly scenes when the mass was over and mounted police were forced to charge the crowd repeatedly to clear a passage for the hearse. Matters were little better at Woodlawn Cemetery, where onlookers trampled down the flowers laid on other graves and dozens of women hitched up their skirts and clambered unsteadily onto tombstones to obtain a better view.
There was another short delay at the entrance to the graveyard. A uniformed attendant emerged from the gatehouse to bar the way and refused to allow the cortege into the grounds until the inflammatory inscriptions attached to several gaudy floral tributes had been removed. One elaborate flower-covered cross, with the words SACRIFICED FOR POLITICS picked out in letters nearly a foot high, was pulled from a hearse and the offending words removed. A wreath, sent by Becker’s doctor and emblazoned with the slogan TO THE MARTYR, was similarly defaced. Only then was Helen permitted to make her way into the cemetery, where a fresh grave had been dug for her husband next to the plot that held the body of their baby daughter.
It was noon by the time Charles Becker was lowered into the ground, and by then the thermometer stood at eighty-four degrees and it had become “the most depressingly hot day of the season.” Wreaths and mourners wilted in the sticky heat, but there was no ceremony and the grave was soon filled in. Helen, heavily veiled, stood almost motionless beside it. Only the intermittent wrenching of her shoulders betrayed the fact that she was weeping.
The whole Becker scandal had been so grotesque and so protracted that it helped to pitch New York into another of its periodic spasms of reform. The mayoral election of 1913—held three months after the sudden and unexpected death, from heart failure and the lingering effects of his shooting, of Mayor Gaynor on an ocean liner off the coast of Ireland—saw the forces of Tammany Hall swept aside by John Purroy Mitchel, who won a large majority campaigning on the reformist Fusion ticket. Mitchel was only thirty-four years old when he was elected, making him the youngest mayor in the city’s history, but he was already a veteran of New York politics and canny enough to know that a fresh crusade against municipal graft would play well with his voters. His administration cut waste and introduced improved accounting practices designed to make it more difficult for patronage and corruption to spread unchecked. The appointees ejected from their offices were replaced, by and large, with competent professionals.
Among those who lost their jobs in this way was the hapless Rhinelander Waldo. The new police commissioner was Arthur Woods, a protégé of Theodore Roosevelt’s who boasted a Harvard degree in administration and had already been a deputy commissioner for a while. Under Woods’s leadership the police department was extensively reorganized. The three-platoon system that Becker had fought for was at last introduced, and with it the eight-hour day and a guarantee of more time to spend at home with wives and families. Great efforts and large budgets were devoted to training. A new detective college was established. Beat cops were sent to lecture in schools, and neighborhood children were recruited into a Junior Police organization with the result that delinquency declined and relations between the police and the community began to improve at last. A police loan fund was established so that officers who found themselves in financial difficulties were not forced to turn to graft to bail themselves out. Slowly at first, and then more swiftly, the o
ld perception of the law as a force for oppression, and of the NYPD as a venal body devoted largely to its own interests, began to change.
The effects of this reform were felt within the ranks of the police as well. Encouraged to think of themselves as useful public servants, thousands of men who had never been presented with the temptations that corrupted Becker, who had restricted themselves principally to clean graft, and who, like Max Schmittberger, cared about the taunts their children suffered in the playground, responded with enthusiasm. Both the morale and the efficiency of the force improved. Mitchel grew fond of quoting one letter he received from a patrolman: “You have shown us how to be better policemen and better citizens. You have elevated us to a position of honor in the community, and enabled us to again walk the streets with heads up, eyes to the front, and fit to look any man in the face.”
Of course, corruption still existed. Few of New York’s thousands of crooked cops were punished in the wake of Becker’s trials; the Curran Committee, which finally delivered its report in 1913, struggled (as had the Lexow investigation before it) to place credible witnesses on the stand, and its fifty-two recommendations—which included a more secure tenure for the police commissioner and the creation of a central complaints bureau—were in any case voted down by the Democratic majority on the Board of Aldermen. Nearly two-thirds of Curran’s proposals were, in fact, quietly waved through a few months later in order to sweeten Tammany’s record on corruption. But the $40,000 expended on his hearings resulted in fewer than twenty indictments, and though four inspectors and six other officers did go to jail for grafting and another twenty either were sacked or resigned from the force, the great majority of guilty officers escaped punishment again. Over the next four years, a new department of internal affairs, known as the Confidential Squad and led by the freshly promoted Captain Costigan, uncovered hundreds of cases of corruption, most still involving the levying of protection payments from brothels. Tellingly, if unsurprisingly, the men drafted to the squad were highly unpopular among their colleagues. “Its members were called rats,” one squad officer, future Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine, recalled. “I have been called that name many times.” When—with the awful inevitability that afflicted all New York reform administrations—Mitchel was voted out of office at the end of 1917, the Confidential Squad was instantly shut down.*68
The election of Mayor Mitchel had been no fluke nonetheless. The Fusion triumph of 1913 was actually a product of slow changes in the fabric of the city that not only reshaped the way politics in New York worked but severely reduced the graft available to precinct captains and eventually doomed the seemingly all-powerful Sullivan clan to electoral extinction.
Tammany had first felt the ground shift beneath its feet years earlier. The consolidation of the five boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island into a single metropolis back in 1898 had altered the balance of power in the city once and for all. From then on, the votes of the laboring masses of Manhattan, which had kept the Hall in power for years on end, had to be weighed against those of the Republicans, anti-Tammany Democrats, and Fusionists who were strong in several of the outer boroughs. It was for this reason that more upright, semi-independent candidates began to appear on Tammany tickets after 1900—men such as Mayor Gaynor and Governor Sulzer, who were harder to control than their predecessors had been and who owed their nominations to Charles Murphy’s grudging recognition that old-style machine politicians could no longer be sure of finding favor with the New York electorate. If something was not done, the sachems on Fourteenth Street recognized, a city in which hundreds of thousands of voters had no direct relationship with their local Tammany organizer—a place made cynical by the shocking revelations of the Lexow investigation—would no longer be safe for democracy.
While Big Tim Sullivan was alive to direct affairs, Tammany’s organizers coped with the changing times relatively well. As early as 1895, a firm base among the Irish and German communities of lower Manhattan was no longer enough to guarantee electoral success, particularly when many established Democratic voters began to migrate north, driven out of their old tenements by the incoming floods of new Americans. But Sullivan took special pains to court the millions of Eastern European Jews pouring into the Lower East Side who threatened to wipe out Tammany’s old power bases. It was during Big Tim’s reign, as George Washington Plunkitt explained, that a Tammany block leader learned to eat “corned beef and kosher meat with equal nonchalance, and it’s all the same to him whether he takes his hat off in the church or pulls it down over his ears in the synagogue.”*69
Tammany’s dominance remained under threat even so. Many of the new generation of immigrants were socialists or anarchists who stubbornly refused to vote the Democratic ticket, and the self-sufficiency of the Jewish community—which ran many of its own social services—meant that Sullivan’s tested strategy of supplying constituents with free socks and shoes and clambakes in exchange for votes could no longer be relied on. To make matters worse, a stringent new election law, pushed through by Mayor McClellan in 1908, required citizens to sign when registering to vote, and then again on polling day. This regulation made it far more difficult for district leaders to manipulate the ballot and fatally undermined many of Tammany’s long-standing electoral malpractices.
In these changing times, the Becker scandal—with its revelations of corruption and its echoes of Lexow—had obvious potential to wreak havoc on the Hall. The lengths to which the Sullivans went to keep Big Tim’s name out of the case suggest that Tammany was well aware of this. But down on Fourteenth Street the farsighted Boss Murphy was thinking further ahead than were his district leaders, whose concerns seem to have extended no further than their own prospects and reputations. Long before Becker even came to trial, Murphy had realized that Tammany could afford no more bad publicity. That meant finding new ways to channel graft to the machine.
Murphy had learned the lesson of the scandals of the 1890s. “When I was an Assembly district leader,” he explained in a rare moment of candor, “it was borne in on me that Tammany’s evil repute came from its association with the police.” Less brutality and more discretion were required; Becker was to be the last in a long line of New York policemen, extending back through Bill Devery at least as far as Clubber Williams, to control a significant portion of Manhattan’s graft. The new middlemen would be gamblers themselves.
The most important point of contact between Tammany and New York’s gaming lords was now Arnold Rothstein. Even before Rosenthal was shot, the Big Bankroll had made a name for himself in his field; more important, he was known to be sober, intelligent, shrewd, and discreet. He was the obvious choice to become Murphy’s “man between.”
Rothstein had always made money as a fixer, but after Becker’s arrest, when New York politicians were running scared from associating with gangsters, gamblers, and criminals, he took to arranging loans and permissions. He was also clever enough to realize that the lieutenant’s well-publicized downfall meant the end of the era of expensively accoutered Manhattan gaming clubs, places whose existence was an open secret. It was Rothstein, gambling lore insists, who responded by inventing and perfecting the “floating game”—action that moved from place to place and week to week. The floating game was safer, less conspicuous, and yet it still appealed to the high rollers. There was nothing, after all, to say that gentlemen gamblers of discretion should have to play in dirty, locked back rooms; some of the biggest games flitted for years between New York’s best hotels. Swope—with Florenz Ziegfeld, the impresario, and a dozen or so others—became a member of a Rothstein game known as the Partridge Club, which rotated among the Astor, the Knickerbocker, the Ritz-Carlton, and the Imperial hotels. Partridge Club members could get themselves dealt in for a mere $30, a fee that generally included a high-class dinner. But playing cost considerably more. Single bets were sometimes of the order of $100 to $1,000.
In the course of the next decade and a half, Rothstein exp
anded his operations incrementally and without apparent conscience. He moved into labor racketeering and narcotics, opened several new clubs in the suburbs, loaned nearly $2 million to the Communist Party at a high rate of interest, and reinvested some of his profits in theater shows and racing. It has been widely accepted, if never conclusively proved, that it was he who fixed the crooked World Series of 1919, in which the underdog Cincinnati Reds downed the apparently unstoppable Chicago White Sox. Certainly he became heavily involved in organized crime as it emerged during Prohibition.
Rothstein began the 1920s by importing cargoes of whiskey and progressed to advancing funds to gangsters such as Meyer Lansky, “Lucky” Luciano, and “Legs” Diamond. The uncouth, self-made Luciano was particularly in awe of his sophisticated mentor, anxiously soliciting lessons in etiquette such as “how to behave when I met classy broads”:
He taught me how to dress, how not to wear loud things, but to have good taste; he taught me how to use knives and forks, and things like that at the dinner table, about holdin’ a door open for a girl, or helpin’ her sit down by holdin’ the chair…. Rothstein gimme a whole new image, and it had a lotta influence on me.
Mixing in such company was dangerous, of course, but Arnold Rothstein prospered nonetheless for much of the decade. His luck finally ran out on November 5, 1928, when he was shot in a hotel room on West Fifty-sixth Street—part of a gamblers’ feud. He staggered out into the street but died less than a day later, refusing until the end to name his assailant. By then his bankroll totaled somewhere between $2 and $3 million.
Rothstein’s old friend Herbert Bayard Swope was given a pay raise for his work on the Becker case. His new salary, a highly satisfactory $125 a week, was further boosted by the lineage payments he received for his coverage of the policeman’s trial. At space rates, Swope picked up an additional $645.29 from the World for a mere eleven days in John Goff’s court.
