Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  “ONCE A MOTORMAN…” Ibid., p. 1058.

  “WALL STREET SUPPLIED…” Ibid., p. xviii.

  TENEMENTS Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, pp. 6–7, 17, 26–27, 30, 51, 71, 82, 124, 141, 143, 177, 185, 194; Owen Kildare, My Mamie Rose, pp. 15, 19; Sante, op. cit., pp. 23–34.

  BOARDINGHOUSES Riis, op. cit., pp. 66–72; Rachel Bernstein, Boarding-House Keepers and Brothel Keepers in New York City, 1880–1910, pp. 30, 79, 87, 96–97; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 970.

  BECKER’S JOBS Becker’s employment at Cowperthwait’s is noted by the Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915; for more on the store, see Alvin Harlow, Old Bowery Days, p. 538. On clerking, see Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 970. For Becker’s work as a baker, a salesman, and a bouncer in saloons—unreferenced but likely, given the career paths generally followed by the New York police of the day—see Logan, p. 105.

  SUICIDE HALL Sante, op. cit., pp. 119–20.

  “ONLY A FEW YEARS LATER…” Cornelius Willemse, a New Yorker who applied to join the force in 1896, when Theodore Roosevelt’s reform administration was in power (see chapter 4), had his initial application rejected on the grounds that he had once worked in the liquor business. Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, p. 20.

  INFLUENCE OF SALOONKEEPERS Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 823; Warren Sloat, A Battle for the Soul of New York, p. 14; Barlow, op. cit., p. 440; Sante, op. cit., p. 217. Several sources state that while Silver Dollar Smith’s saloon was frequently visited by customers covertly armed with chisels, no one ever succeeded in removing one of the coins embedded in his floor. This is not correct; according to Smith’s obituary in the New York Herald of January 1, 1900, one man successfully made off with fifty-two of them in a single night. Smith nonetheless proved singularly successful in getting out the vote for Tammany, which was, of course, the secret of his invulnerability. “Once,” a contemporary named Abraham Cahan wrote, “I saw him making a campaign speech from the rear of a wagon parked diagonally across from his saloon. After talking for about five minutes, he growled, ‘Boys, you know I deliver a better speech in my place than out here in the street. Let’s go, boys!’ The entire crowd followed him into his saloon. He set up drinks for everybody—on the house! That was the kind of speech he made.” Fried, op. cit., p. 28.

  TAMMANY HALL Gustavus Myers, History of Tammany Hall, pp. 73–74, 250–83; Oliver Allen, The Tiger, pp. 1–8, 21, 24–25, 46, 51, 60–61, 66–67, 70, 78, 80–169; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., pp. 822–26. On the estimated extent of graft in the 1890s, see Jay Berman, Police Administration and Progressive Reform, p. 93.

  RICHARD CROKER Even Tammany’s sharpest brains found it hard to define exactly what made Boss Croker so formidable. Like many of the Hall’s leaders, he was virtually uneducated and far from physically imposing. “All this homage,” the journalist William Allen White observed toward the end of the boss’s reign, in 1901,

  all this boot-licking, to a mild-mannered, soft-voiced, sad-faced, green-eyed chunk of a man who talks slowly that he may peg in his “seens” and his “saws,” his “dones” and his “dids” where they belong, who has a loggy wit, who cares neither for books, nor music, nor theatrical performances, nor good wine, nor a dinner, nor the society of his kind! And now he sits on a throne and dispenses a sort of jungle justice, while civilization knocks its knees together in stupid, terrified adulation!

  Yet Croker did possess, another observer put it, “a pervasive, intangible quality which words can scarcely describe,” but which made him a natural leader. So sure was the boss’s grip on the Tammany machine that he was able to enjoy long leaves of absence, amounting in some cases to several years, without losing control of the organization. On several occasions during his long reign, he faced down angry district bosses and was never known to come off worst in such a confrontation. He was an effective politician, too, being personally responsible for managing the grotesque election fraud that saw Tammany to victory in the elections of 1886. Myers, op. cit., pp. 267–89; Theodore Stoddard, Master of Manhattan, pp. 174–77; Allen, op. cit., pp. 166–78, 192–93; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., pp. 1108–10.

  “AFFAIRS OF IMMIGRANTS” George Washington Plunkitt, for years the powerful boss of Hell’s Kitchen, on the West Side, once talked a reporter through his working day. It typically began, he said, only two hours after he had retired to bed at midnight, with a knock on the door and a request to bail out a bartender arrested for violating the excise law. Having called at the police station, the boss was up again at 6:00 A.M., awakened by the noise of fire engines passing his house. Dressing quickly and following the engines—fires, Plunkitt explained, were great vote getters—he found several tenants who had been burned out, took them to a hotel, supplied them with food and clothing, and arranged temporary accommodation. By 8:30 he was in court, where he prevailed upon the magistrate to discharge four drunks and paid fines on behalf of another two. At 9:00 he was advancing the rent for a poor family so far in arrears they were about to be thrown into the street; at 11:00 he was at home, arranging jobs for four men who had called on him for help. At 3:00 in the afternoon, he attended the funeral of an Italian constituent, and in the early evening a Jewish ceremony at the synagogue. Around 7:00 P.M. he visited district headquarters to hear the reports of his captains; at 8:00 he was buying drinks for constituents at a church fair; at 9:00 he was listening to complaints from peddlers and buying tickets for a church excursion; and at 10:30 P.M. he looked in on a Jewish wedding, “having previously sent a handsome wedding present to the bride.” At midnight he went back to bed, and the entire cycle began again. William Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, pp. 91–93.

  LIFE OF BIG TIM SULLIVAN Sullivan left no personal papers; nor did any of his relations or early colleagues. It is virtually impossible to say now how much of the picture he painted of his youth as “an honest Bowery boy” was true, how much embroidered, and how much outright invention. Daniel Czitrom, author of the only scholarly article on his life, writes that Tim’s image was “at the core of [his] enormous personal popularity and political power,” and posits that “Sullivan effectively cultivated a public persona, the character of Big Tim.” This was undoubtedly true. Yet the recollections of Owen Kildare and others leave no doubt that Sullivan did possess a genuinely kindly, even altruistic streak, which need not preclude the supposition that at least part of his behavior was an act. Every other Tammany leader, after all, had as much of a motive to pose as a friend of the poor and the dispossessed, yet Big Tim was undoubtedly the most popular and best-loved district boss of them all and could move an audience to a frenzy with the simplest of speeches. Alvin Harlow reports that one, given in support of the aldermanic candidacy of “Battery Dan” Finn, ran, in its entirety:

  Boys, I’m a Democrat [cheers]. I’ve been a Democrat all my life [loud cheers]. I have voted the Democratic ticket straight all my life [uproarious cheers]. I never scratched a ticket since I first cast my vote, and I never will [pandemonium].

  Czitrom, op. cit., pp. 536–58; Kildare, op. cit., pp. 50–51; Alvin Harlow, op. cit., pp. 487–96, 505, 510–14; Sante, op. cit., p. 270.

  SULLIVAN’S SALOONS A reporter from the New York Times, assigned in 1889 to track Tim down to another of his premises, in grubby Doyers Street, wrote wonderingly of the exotic experience of paying Sullivan a call: “It is safe to say that there are not a hundred people in this city who live above Canal street who know where Doyers Street is, and if they did they would avoid it like the plague…. It is narrow and dirty, and in the day time is repulsive enough to keep anybody from trying to penetrate its mysteries, but at night, in addition to its ugliness, it looks dangerous.” Big Tim got out of the saloon business in 1893, selling what was by then a miniature empire of six establishments and moving into a new Democratic clubhouse close to the Bowery. Czitrom, op. cit., pp. 541–42.

  THE OCCIDENTAL Known to its habitués as “The Ox.” The identification of the celebrated fresco is conjectural. Commodore Dutch (below)
, who knew the place well, was probably typical of the Occidental’s patrons in referring to this work of art as “one enormous painting of some dames giving themselves a bath.” Joseph Mitchell, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, p. 127.

  RACKETS The notorious Jewish gangster “Dopey Benny” Fein, notes Jenna Joselit in Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900–1940, p. 27, “routinely walked down Grand Street ‘plastering every storekeeper with two tickets for a ball or a dance. If they had a small store, they would have to buy a dollar’s worth of tickets; if their business was larger, five dollars.’” The total raised by men of real influence often amounted to $4,000 per ball.

  The dark side of Sullivan’s and Croker’s long reigns was, of course, equally considerable. Monstrous election frauds were perpetrated. In Boss Tweed’s day, large sums (all stolen from the city) were allocated to buy elections, and considerable efforts were devoted to registering new voters. In the six weeks before one campaign, Tammany’s block leaders distributed 105,000 registration forms and 69,000 blank certificates of naturalization and oversaw the registration of 41,112 new voters. False addresses were widely used (a later investigation revealed that no fewer than forty-two Democratic voters were registered at 70 Greene Street, the location of a well-known brothel), and false witnesses were employed to swear to the good character of the new citizens. Tame judges processed the applications at the rate of as many as 2,000 per judge per day. Meanwhile, Tammany hirelings registered to vote in as many as ten different wards under a variety of names. On Election Day, one repeater cast no fewer than twenty-eight votes and the polling clerks, one sachem said, smiling, “counted the ballots in bulk, or without counting them announced the result in bulk.” All of these tactics became staples in Tammany’s election armory, and though under Croker there was a decline in instances of Election Day coercion and violence—“Blood’s news,” one Tammany loyalist explained. “It gets into the papers”—outright fraud was as common as ever. Czitrom, op. cit., pp. 549, 546.

  JOINING THE NYPD Levine, pp. 23, 173–74; Richardson, The New York Police, pp. 176–79; Willemse, op. cit., pp. 66–67, 156–58. The figure of $300 per appointment was neither widely known nor publicized but emerged during the 1894 Lexow hearings into police corruption in the city; see below.

  CONVICTIONS FOR THEFT Levine, p. 104, notes that as many as three hundred to four hundred policemen with felony convictions served in the NYPD in the 1870s. Figures for later decades are not available, but even if the abuse stopped after Tweed’s time, a good number of men recruited in the early 1870s were still serving on the force twenty years later.

  COMMISSIONER MCCLAVE Becker’s police contact is named as McClave by the Sullivan County Record, August 8, 1915, which must have had the information from a member of the Becker family. For the commissioner’s background, see Costello, op. cit., p. 500. For “buffs,” see Lewis Valentine, Night Stick, p. 24.

  3. GRAFT

  “IT WAS DARK…” Cornelius Willemse, A Cop Remembers, pp. 71–74, 101.

  “ONE NIGHT I WOKE…” Ibid., p. 75.

  INITIATION RITUALS Willemse, op. cit., pp. 72–73, 89; James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto, NYPD, p. 61.

  EARLY HISTORY OF POLICING IN NEW YORK Levine, pp. 6, 23, 28; Richardson, pp. 16–17; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 4–10; Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros, pp. 92–98; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., pp. 636–37. New Yorkers were well aware of the failings of the system—“While the city sleeps,” the joke went, “the watchmen do, too.” But, as many Londoners did in much the same period, they nonetheless opposed the creation of a more professional force because they feared the creation of what would amount to a standing army devoted to putting down any and all unrest in their city.

  FORMATION AND EARLY YEARS OF THE NYPD Levine, pp. 20–22, 28, 94, 102, 117; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 20–23, 60; Luc Sante, Low Life, pp. 237–38, 240; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 21, 30–31, 32, 45, 49, 64–65, 68, 135–40, 144–45, 157, 158, 168–70, 204; Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, p. 483; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1061.

  “NOT ONLY WILLING BUT EAGER TO PAY” McAdoo, Guarding a Great City, pp. 85–86.

  PAYMENT FOR PROMOTIONS Lexow, p. 48; New York Times, Dec. 15, 1894; Levine, pp. 171–73; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 65, 97; Sante, op. cit., p. 238. Valentine, Night Stick, p. 31, estimates that the total cost of offices purchased throughout the department amounted at “a moderate estimate” to $7 million. The example of Timothy Creeden—the sergeant mentioned here—is particularly interesting because it illustrates the complex interplay between police, commissioners, and politicians. Creeden—a popular, decorated hero who had fought in twenty-six Civil War battles—had obtained promotion to the posts of roundsman and sergeant without paying, thanks largely to Commissioner-General William “Baldy” Smith’s partiality to veterans. Expecting a lucrative promotion to captain free of charge was too much, however, and despite scoring 97.82 out of a hundred in his examination, he was told to borrow the necessary funds from friendly saloonkeepers and district leaders. When these supporters learned that Creeden’s precinct was to be on Wall Street—where the graft was almost nonexistent—they backed off until he was promised a more profitable posting. The deal was consummated, but Creeden struggled to make enough in his relatively modest first precinct to repay his loans. His backers interceded with Tammany once again, and he was transferred for a second time, eventually winding up in a post where the graft was rich enough to repay his friends. The details of his case came out during his interrogation by the Lexow Committee. Lexow, pp. 4919–5057, 5524–55, 5569; the New York World of December 21, 1893, had already carried the story, without naming any names.

  WEAK POSITION OF COMMISSIONERS Levine, p. 38; McAdoo, op. cit., pp. 2, 49–50; Astor, The New York Cops, op. cit., p. 109.

  THE PARKHURST CRUSADE Warren Sloat, A Battle for the Soul of New York, pp. 5–59; James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto, NYPD, pp. 90–91, 99–101; Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham, pp. 1164–69; Sante, Low Life, pp. 111–12, 189–91, 281–87.

  INSPECTOR BYRNES’S CORRUPTION Lexow, pp. 5711–27; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 209–10, 212; Steffens, pp. 221–30; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1062; Edmund Morris, op. cit., p. 484; Larner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 82, 85; John Hickey, Our Police Guardians, pp. 69–71. Those who had believed in Byrnes found themselves discomfited when, after his enforced retirement, the number of arrests made by the Detective Bureau doubled within a year. Jay Berman, Police Administration and Progressive Reform, pp. 62–66.

  CLUBBER WILLIAMS New York Times, Dec. 27, 28, and 29, 1894; Lexow, pp. 4524–31, 5242–5353; Richardson, op. cit., p. 205. Diligent investigation eventually showed that at least ten complaints had been lodged against Williams as early as 1879, but—thanks to his political connections—his total punishment amounted to three reprimands and the loss of two days’ pay. New York Sun, March 16; Tribune, March 17, 18, and 19 and Nov. 19; New York Times, March 18 and 19, Nov. 19, 1879. Eventually even the Custom House gang could protect him no longer, however; Williams’s ungovernable temper resulted in his transfer from Satan’s Circus to a sinecure at the (extremely corrupt) Street Cleaning Bureau at the end of the year. Tribune and World, Dec. 16, 1879. For Williams’s notorious career, see Levine, pp. 109–11; Costello, p. 558; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 64–65; Asbury, pp. 217–19; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 204–5; Sante, op. cit., pp. 247–49. Of course, not every senior policeman was a monster. Some, at least, remained essentially benign; among the most renowned was Tom Killilea, a muscular Galway man who ruled over Hell’s Kitchen from the West Forty-seventh Street precinct for more than two decades. “A giant, with a walrus mustache and fists like sacks of sand, who disliked subtlety and lace-edged legalistic fumbling,” Killilea dispensed rough justice to the neighborhood crooks until his retirement in 1892 but always remained, his wife averred, “a meek and gentle Christian.” He expected his men to keep the peace with their bare hands, ro
utinely banning them from carrying revolvers, and “would never have me look on him”—his wife recalled—“when he was splashed [with blood], so he worked out this plan: he would send one of his men before him to our house at Eighth Avenue and 52nd Street. ‘Give my fondest to Mrs. K.,’ he would tell him, ‘and have her run a hot bath. She’s not to come down till I call.’” This arrangement always seemed to work all right. Richard O’Connor, Hell’s Kitchen, pp. 78–79; Meyer Berger, The Eight Million: Journal of a New York Correspondent, pp. 134–136.

  BILL DEVERY Steffens, op. cit. I, pp. 327–37; Henry Collins Brown, From Alley Pond to Rockefeller Center, pp. 76–79; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 270–71; Richard O’Connor, Courtroom Warrior, p. 69; Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York, pp. 230–33; Sante, op. cit., pp. 248–49. Captain Herlihy’s “crime,” incidentally, was to raid gambling houses run by men with Tammany connections.

  THREAT OF TRANSFERS Levine, pp. 38, 113, 138; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 63–64; McAdoo, op. cit., p. 89; Valentine, op. cit., p. 18.

  UNSANITARY STATION HOUSES Willemse, A Cop Remembers, pp. 71, 101, 110. In 1906, during the commissionership of William McAdoo, an inspection identified no fewer than sixteen of the city’s station houses as unsanitary. The list of complaints included old and run-down buildings, poisonous air and lack of ventilation, the lack of proper bathing facilities for men, fifty-year-old bedframes and dormitories “no better than prisons.” The Nineteenth (Satan’s Circus) Precinct, “the most important in New York, maybe in the United States,” looked like “a second-class apartment house,” McAdoo wrote, and, in general, “the policeman of New York spends his time at the station house in the vilest of surroundings, in constant discomfort, and at the risk of his health. Under such circumstances he has little incentive to read anything but sensational newspapers, and to swap stories and gossip about the department. The bad policeman gets the chance here to contaminate the good one, and the whole arrangement makes for demoralization and hopelessness on the part of the rank and file.” McAdoo, op. cit., pp. 134–37.