Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  In 1901 May and Guerin traveled to Paris, where they joined two men planning to rob the American Express office in the city. The group successfully blew the safe and got away with $250,000, a huge fortune in that day, but they were arrested before they had the chance to spend the money. The leader of the gang confessed, and the trial was a formality. May received a sentence of five years’ hard labor, serving three; Guerin got life imprisonment in the infamous penal colony of Devil’s Island, from which, a few years later, he contrived to make a spectacular escape.*72 The couple was reunited in London, where they promptly fell out, and, in 1907, Chicago May and her latest lover waylaid Guerin and opened fire on him with a revolver. Sadly for them, Guerin survived to identify his assailants. May spent the next ten years of her life sequestered in a women’s prison in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.

  Released in 1917 with her good looks largely gone, the onetime Queen of the Badger Game made her way back to New York to find herself queen of nothing much at all. She returned to a life of prostitution, robbing and blackmailing clients when she could, rising eventually to the rank of madam. After 1925—too old by now to earn much of a living from her trade—she made sporadic attempts to abandon her criminal career, at one point even penning a self-serving autobiography filled with reminiscences about her old days in Satan’s Circus sipping champagne with Charley Becker.

  When money became tight again, May returned to the streets. She was by now in her early fifties, blowsy and grown rather stout, and America was teetering on the brink of the Great Depression. The fabled Chicago May died, utterly used up, in Philadelphia in 1929.

  Letitia Stenson, Becker’s second wife, headed westward to Nevada after her divorce, taking with her the policeman’s only son. By the summer of 1912, she was living in Reno, where Paul Becker later acquired an interest in a blacksmith’s shop. Letitia had virtually no contact with her former husband by this time—merely an envelope containing the monthly child-support payment—and she spoke only reluctantly to a reporter from the New York World who tracked her down to her new home in the last days of July. “It wrings my heart to speak of these things now,” she said.

  By 1915 Letitia had moved on again, to the little settlement of Winnemucca in the northern reaches of the state. There all trace of her is lost. She was no longer living in the town when the census was taken in 1920, and there is no way of saying where she went or when she died. Her son with Charley Becker, Howard, returned east a few years later, though enrolling at the University of Chicago to major in sociology. Chicago, in the 1920s, was perhaps the most important center for the study of this new and fashionable subject, and Becker excelled at it, eventually completing a postgraduate degree. He became a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin and built a distinguished academic career. He was the author of Man in Reciprocity and Modern Sociological Theory in Continuity and Change. When he died, on June 8, 1960, he had just been elected president of the American Sociological Association.

  A number of the Beckers had reputations for being “difficult people to get along with,” as one member of the family put it, but Howard was without doubt more difficult than most. He was particularly renowned for his heavy, quashing sarcasm, which many colleagues and former students still vividly recall today. He deployed this weapon freely against a namesake, Howard S. Becker, who became a sociologist during the 1940s. The two men were not related, but the elder Becker grew irritated whenever colleagues inadvertently confused them. “I would get copies of letters he sent to people who made that mistake,” the younger man recalled,

  heavily ironic letters saying it was kind of them to ask if he was interested in being an assistant professor in their department but he was already a full professor at Wisconsin. Things like that.

  I’m sorry to speak ill of him, but I have to tell you that he was widely hated by his colleagues at Wisconsin and by people who had been graduate students there. After he died, a number of people came up to me at the next big sociology convention to offer condolences, and, when I told them we were not related, said some version of, “Oh, you weren’t? Well, he was a mean son of a bitch.”

  It would take a psychologist, or perhaps a sociologist, to trace the roots of Howard Becker’s antipathetic personality. But it does not seem too much to suggest that the distressing memory of Charley Becker played its part in the son’s development. Howard was, of course, just old enough to have had recollections of the father who had left when he was five, but he evidently found the knowledge of his relationship to so notorious a man quite shameful. His own children (there were three, two girls and a boy) were brought up to believe that Paul Becker was their grandfather and remained in utter ignorance of their infamous relative until the late 1980s, when a cousin who had been researching family history uncovered the truth. Charley’s grandson, Christopher—a historian and renowned chess-problem setter by then in his late fifties—“really was astounded” by the news, another of the Beckers wrote, but quickly became fascinated by the Rosenthal murder and its aftermath. He assembled a large collection of material on the affair and, when he died, was interred in the old cemetery at Callicoon Center. His tombstone lies between the grave of Henry Becker and that of Charley’s father, Conrad.

  And finally, the widows of the Rosenthal affair.

  Henrietta Young, Jack Zelig’s girl, was last heard of on January 6, 1913, sitting in a box in the Arlington dance hall on St. Mark’s Place with a little sack of money in her lap. She was gathering tribute from the gaggle of prostitutes, pimps, opium addicts, and policemen assembled to pay their respects to her husband’s memory at a benefit arranged on her behalf.

  Occasionally one of the Zelig’s old acquaintances would leave the tables clustered around the dance floor, make his way upstairs, and thrust a fistful of dollars into the grieving widow’s hands. “Humpty” Jackson, the hunchbacked leader of Spanish Louis’s old gang, purchased sixteen quarts of champagne for the members of his party and left a few dollars more at the box office. But the dance was not much of a success. Zelig’s power had dissipated so utterly after his death that the event was only sparsely attended, and few of those who showed themselves had much time for his wife. The whores up on Fourteenth Street had sent word that they would not attend. “Who is Mrs. Zelig?” one spit in disgust. “Let her go out and sell it the same as we do.”

  Every man admitted to the dance wore a button badge emblazoned with Zelig’s broadly grinning face—the image of him snapped when he was arraigned on charges cooked up by Becker’s Special Squad. But there was little joy, no laughter, and scarcely any dancing in the hall. Whenever she heard voices raised, Mrs. Zelig would send word down to the meager crowd “to be quiet for her husband’s sake.” And when the last guest had departed and the expenses had been paid, it was found that only $46 remained. “If the boys knew this would have occurred,” Abe Shoenfeld wrote sadly, “they would have chipped in some money and given it to her, sooner than run a ball for $46 with two or three couples dancing on the floor.”

  The two other women robbed of their husbands by the case also found life difficult thereafter. Lillian Rosenthal, the murdered man’s second wife, subsisted for a while on the charity of midtown Manhattan gamblers. But she lost money investing in a movie house and a failed dressmaking business and eventually alienated the men who had supported her by attempting to enlist them in a fresh campaign against Tammany graft. She died in considerable poverty, “a broken and fanatically embittered woman,” in September 1928.

  Helen Becker, meanwhile, long outlived her former rival. She saw nothing of the fortune her husband was supposed to have hidden away during a long career of grafting. The cash was eaten up in legal fees, and in fact she found herself liable for debts of several thousand dollars, which she paid off over several years from her skimpy teacher’s salary. After that she was able to put aside enough to make several attempts to clear her husband’s name, but nothing came of any of them. Her teaching career flourished moderately, however, and by the tim
e of her retirement in the early 1940s she was assistant principal of an elementary school in the northern reaches of Manhattan.

  Helen never remarried and never had another child, though she received a number of proposals and lived on until 1962. “I prefer,” she always said to those who asked,

  to remain a widow in memory of a man who was put to death by the great state of New York for a crime he did not commit.

  He was not an angel; he never made a pretense of being one. He was just an ordinary human being, and that is why I loved him so.

  NOTES

  Abbreviations Used in the Notes

  Klein

  Henry Klein, Sacrified: The Story of Police Lieut. Charles Becker. Privately published, 1927.

  Levine

  Jerald Levine, Police, Parties and Polity: The Bureaucratization, Unionization, and Professionalization of the New York City Police, 1870–1917. Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1971.

  Lexow

  New York State Senate, Report and Proceedings of the Senate Committee Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York. 5 vols., 1895.

  Logan

  Andy Logan, Against the Evidence: The Becker-Rosenthal Affair, A Great American Scandal. London, Weidenfeld Nicholson, 1970.

  MBC

  Mary Becker collection.

  A Note on Citation

  In order to keep the length of these notes to a reasonable minimum, I have referred to books consulted only in their short form. Full citations can be found in the Bibliography.

  Notes on the Sources

  PRIMARY SOURCES

  Though none of the main participants in the Becker-Rosenthal affair left personal papers, manuscript material relating to the case does survive in the Municipal Archives, New York. The files of the district attorney’s office, in particular, form the largest and most complete collection of records relating to crime extant in any city; notionally, at least, every criminal indicted in Manhattan between the eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth has a file of his or her own, and the DA’s papers also include closed-case reports and even scrapbooks of newspaper clippings relating to significant prosecutions. Though disappointingly unrevealing in the Becker-Rosenthal case, they deserve to be better known.

  In Becker’s case, these records are supplemented by the New York Reports—printed summaries, designed to serve as records for the legal profession, of all the cases heard in the city—and by two smaller but unique collections, the Mary Becker and the Thomas Mott Osborne Papers. Mary Becker’s papers, which remain in private hands, consist of a handful of Charles Becker’s letters to relatives together with family histories and family trees assembled in the course of genealogical research carried out in the 1980s and 1990s. Although not so extensive as an historian might wish, they offer an invaluable insight into Becker’s background and describe his thoughts as he faced execution. Thomas Mott Osborne’s papers, at Syracuse University, contain several mentioning the Becker-Rosenthal affair amid much material relating to conditions at Sing Sing and prison reform.

  Newspaper coverage of the Becker case was extraordinarily extensive, and the reporters of the day not only covered the two trials and multiple appeals in considerable detail, but made a point of informing their readers about the backgrounds and opinions of the main characters in the drama. Some of their stories need to be read with a certain caution; competition between titles was fierce and many journalists of the day were not above embellishing their reports, or even inventing material outright. So many dailies covered the Becker story, though, that a consensus of sorts can almost always be formed by the comparative study of coverage in different titles and by an awareness of the biases of the newspapers’ publishers, editors, and readers.

  Of New York’s papers, the American and the World were richer and had more resources than their rivals. They pursued developments in the Becker case most vigorously and regularly broke new developments and tracked down witnesses ahead of the police. Their coverage was more complete and detailed than that of any of their rivals and their use of photographs and illustrations more usefully comprehensive. The Sun, though no longer the paper it had been in its nineteenth-century heyday (by 1912 it was the only major title that still lacked the technology to print photographs), was also comprehensive and provided more sober coverage. The New York Times, on the other hand, has the inestimable benefit of being fully archived and indexed. In the last couple of years, the old printed indexes—which are, inevitably, far from complete—have been supplemented by the appearance of the Times digital archive, an utterly invaluable repository (available online on a pay-per-article basis) that offers full-text searches of the complete run of the paper. Careful interrogation of this archive has led to the exhumation of several hitherto-unknown aspects of Becker’s police career that would almost certainly never have been discovered through old-fashioned research, in particular his central involvement in the “Cops’ Revolt” of 1902. Issues of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle have also been digitized and are available online free of charge, though to date the digitization project has reached only 1902.

  A large proportion of what we reliably know about Jack Zelig and the Jewish gangsters of the Lower East Side comes from the voluminous and colorful reports compiled by Abe Shoenfeld, a private investigator retained by the Bureau of Social Morals, established by a wealthy group of concerned Jewish leaders to produce intelligence on Jewish criminal activities. The group’s chief purpose in commissioning these reports was to provide intelligence on Jewish gangs, extortion rackets, and prostitution rings to the NYPD and so help clean up what was regarded as the shameful prevalence of crime within the Eastern European immigrant community. Shoenfeld responded by producing a long series of profiles on notable Jewish criminals of the period—among them most of the principals in the Becker-Rosenthal affair—together with monthly “Vice Reports” summarizing the day-today activities of his primary suspects. Because he was himself Jewish, Shoenfeld was able to penetrate the East Side underworld and mine a rich seam of anecdotal and generally unverifiable information, which paints an intricately detailed picture of New York’s Jewish underworld in the years 1912–17. The nineteen hundred reports that Shoenfeld completed found their way into the papers of Rabbi Judah Magnes, and thence to Israel, where they are currently preserved in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem.

  One other “eyewitness” account of the events of 1912 exists in the form of The Becker Scandal: A Time Remembered, by Viña Delmar. The case itself forms only the backdrop to what is essentially a family memoir, but Delmar’s account is of considerable interest because her father was a close friend of Herman Rosenthal’s. The reliability of the author’s recollections is debatable; Delmar was only nine years old at the time of the gambler’s murder, compiled her memoir more than half a century after the fact, and used her skills as a novelist to tell the story, including the interpolation of large swaths of reported speech. The author’s own view on the trustworthiness of her recollections is clearly stated, nonetheless: “I do not expect anyone to believe that I am repeating every word of every conversation with the precision of a tape recorder. However, I am convinced that all that was said, all that was done, is more vividly remembered than had I been thirty at the time. A child has the advantage of an uncluttered mind, and I had a unique observation post from which to view the lives around me.”

  SECONDARY SOURCES

  Two detailed studies of the case stand out amid the secondary sources. The first, Sacrificed: The Story of Police Lieut. Charles Becker, is of special interest because its author, Henry Klein, was hired as chief investigator of a citizens’ committee organized in August 1912 to investigate “police conditions” in the wake of the Rosenthal murder. Klein began his investigations convinced of Becker’s guilt and ended them just as certain of his innocence. His detailed knowledge of the Rosenthal affair was augmented during the Great War by a stint serving as an auditor in the district attorney’s office—a posi
tion that gave him the remarkable opportunity to illicitly search District Attorney Whitman’s financial records for 1912 and turn up the first firm evidence of the methods used by the DA to assemble the bizarre collection of informants and ne’er-do-wells who testified at the two Becker trials. Receipts, examined by Klein, demonstrated that the majority had been retained, for long periods, at public cost in order to ensure Becker’s conviction. Klein’s book—privately published in 1927 and rather rare today—is an invaluable repository of all sorts of additional information as well; it incorporates statements from several of the surviving principals in the case, including revealing affidavits from Tim Sullivan’s private secretary, and contains transcripts of large portions of the trial evidence. The author remained convinced until his death that Becker’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice, and engaged in letter-column disputes with Herbert Bayard Swope over the policeman’s guilt or innocence as late as 1951.

  The second major contribution to the subject is Isabel Ann “Andy” Logan’s Against the Evidence: The Becker-Rosenthal Affair, published in 1970. Logan was a well-known New York journalist who reported for years on affairs at City Hall for the New Yorker magazine and was renowned as “a diminutive figure in black with an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s social and political history.” She hated politicians’ cant and was far from beloved by a succession of New York mayors; according to legend, Ed Koch was riding downtown one day when an aide looked up and saw the sixty-year-old Logan crossing across the street ahead of their limousine. “Look!” the aide exclaimed. “There’s Andy Logan.” “Hit her!” Koch ordered his driver.