Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  POLICE HOURS AND THE TWO-PLATOON SYSTEM To add to all the other discomforts, precinct-house beds, Cornelius Willemse explained, were set no more than two feet apart, and when a group of patrolmen turned in after an evening at the saloon, “you could have all kinds of whiffs. If you got sick of Bass’s Ale, you could turn over and might be fortunate enough to get crème de menthe or chartreuse. Flop houses and prisons would have been heaven in comparison to the hell holes the City of New York provided for what they proudly called ‘The Finest.’” Willemse, p. 110; New York Times, Aug. 21, 1902; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 58, 172; Sante, op. cit., p. 244; McAdoo, op. cit., pp. 3, 134–37; Valentine, op. cit., pp. 16, 22, 23, 25. Even police headquarters was little better appointed than an ordinary station house. The old building on Mulberry Street, once the pride of the force, was “dingy, unattractive and not overclean” by Becker’s day, the men within it alternately frozen or half baked, poisoned by coal gas and condemned to work in airless rooms in which the windows were nailed shut. Mulberry Street was finally abandoned in 1905, and the whole staff was transferred to new premises a short way downtown on Centre Street.

  TRAINING, ROUTINE PATROLS, ROUNDSMEN, AND SHOO FLIES Levine, p. 39; Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, pp. 96–99; Willemse, A Cop Remembers, p. 88; McAdoo, op. cit., pp. 24, 27; Sante, op. cit., pp. 241, 243.

  UNIFORMS AND EQUIPMENT The cost of outfitting a new policeman was considerable—$335 in 1882. Levine, p. 122.

  LEVIES AND CONTRIBUTIONS Levine, pp. 137–41, 173–74; Willemse, pp. 124, 155–56; Richardson, op. cit., p. 68.

  “COPS PICK UP AN EXTRA DOLLAR…” Willemse, p. 105.

  HONEST AND DISHONEST GRAFT George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany sage whose impromptu dissections of political realities were recorded by a reporter named William Riordan a few years later, drew clear and firm distinctions between the two. “Everybody is talkin’ these days,” he said,

  about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between dishonest graft and clean graft. There’s all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I’ve made a big fortune out of the game, and I’m gettin’ richer every day, but I’ve not gone in for dishonest graft—blackmailin’ gamblers, saloon-keepers, disorderly people, etc.—and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics.

  There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”

  Just let me explain by examples. My party’s in power in the city, and it’s goin’ to undertake a lot of public improvements. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before.

  Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft.

  William Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, p. 3. On the subject of police graft, see Levine, p. 13; Willemse, op. cit., pp. 105, 152, 153; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 15, 137, 274; Sante, op. cit., pp. 237–38; Valentine, op. cit., p. 24. Costigan, wrote Commissioner McAdoo (op. cit., pp. 202–3), was “one of those rare men who are naturally, aggressively, and absolutely honest. He could have been made independently rich in a short time had he wished to do so. He was threatened and bullied and tempted in a thousand ways, and still remained an honest and, if anything, a better man than when he began his work. He was, withal a modest man, who never boasted, and talked little of himself.”

  “IT WILL BREAK YOU…” That the commissioner in question was Theodore Roosevelt and that Byrnes eventually proved correct in his assessment makes the quotation even more apposite, for Roosevelt was the bravest, straightest, and most self-confident politician of his day. Morris, op. cit., p. 491.

  BECKER’S EARLY CAREER For Becker’s first postings, see the Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915. For Dock Rats corruption, see Levine, p. 217; for the potential for graft, see Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., p. 64, and Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., pp. 949–50.

  “AMPLE OPPORTUNITY” Just how corrupt was the NYPD in 1893? According to Jerald Levine, who has studied the question more deeply than anyone, a significant proportion of the force, most of them the older “familymen” for whom police work was a way of life, probably were revolted by the prevalence of dirty graft and fastidiously refused to indulge in such practices themselves. But these same men—bound by the oaths of loyalty they had taken to their colleagues and all too conscious of the damage they could do to their careers—nevertheless ignored transgressions they knew of and so permitted excesses to persist. The remaining members of the NYPD, probably a quarter of the force at least, actively sought out dirty graft. The levels of these men’s corruption varied, depending in part upon their postings, since there were many jobs and several precincts where graft was almost nonexistent. For those with the good fortune or connections to patrol the richest and most sinful districts of Manhattan, though, the opportunities to profit were considerable. Plainly, men serving in districts such as Satan’s Circus had the best opportunities to extract graft from their districts. There was also a hierarchy of corruption within the department. Captains could channel far more in the way of illicit payments into their own pockets than could patrolmen and were consequently much more likely to be corrupt. No more than a handful of those serving in Manhattan in 1893 did not run their precincts as extortion rings for their personal benefit.

  BECKER AND CHICAGO MAY May Sharpe, Chicago May: Her Story, pp. 48, 63–64, 76. “I knew big Chicago May,” added reporter Bayard Veiller in his memoirs. “There were a great many distinguished things about [her]. At one time in her career she had been married to two men and lived with both of them at the same time—one working in the daytime and one at night, and May moving from one flat to the other…. She was a big Irish girl with fair hair—not bad looking. She had been married years before to a man named Churchill, so her real name was Churchill, and she always claimed that she was the divorced wife of Police Captain Churchill, to the intense rage of that very able officer…. She was husky, strong as a man, and [she once] picked this suitor up by the seat of his pants and the back of his neck, and threw him down two flights of stairs.” Bayard Veiller, The Fun I’ve Had, pp. 39–40.

  CREEP JOINTS AND PANEL HOUSES Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, pp. 71–72.

  THE BADGER GAME There were many variations on the game; see Sante, op. cit., p. 186 for several.

  HOWE AND HUMMEL Richard Rovere, Howe Hummel: Their True and Scandalous History, pp. 19–37.

  MAY AND THE JEWELRY THEFT The pursuit in this case was so fierce that eventually May reached an agreement to give herself up and return most of the jewels to the Jewish salesman she had taken them from: “The Jew got his jewelry, the lawyer was fixed, and the cops were fixed. The Jew said I was not the girl that robbed him, so I was not held, and I walked out.” Sharpe, op. cit., p. 64.

  “FIRST APPEARANCE IN THE PRESS” New York Times, Aug. 17, 1895.

  “HAD BEEN UNLAWFULLY ARRESTED” New York Journal, Sept. 17, 1896.

  “A RESPECTABLE NEW JERSEY MATRON” New York World, July 17, and American, July 31, 1912.

  BAIL BOND GRAFT Willemse explains this form of graft in detail in A Cop Remembers, pp. 114–15.

  BECKER WAYLAID Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sept. 4, 1896; New York World, July 17, 1912. Becker was fortunate to escape with his life on this occasion; one of the two women attacking him seized his gun from his pocket and attempted to discharge it in his face but was unable to pull the trigger.

  SHOOTING OF A BURGLAR The shooting took place on West Thirty-fifth Street, close to Broadway. The policeman who fired the fatal bullet was named Robert Carey. New York Journal, Sept. 21 and 27; Sun, Sept. 21, 1896; World, July 17, 1912; Sullivan County Record, Aug. 8, 1915.

  NIGHTSTICKS Lev
ine, p. 107; Steffens, op. cit. I, p. 209; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 62, 70; Richardson, op. cit., p. 68; Sante, op. cit., pp. 241, 247.

  CHARGED WITH BEATING UP A BOY Logan, p. 112. A few months later, Becker was in the news again, this time for arresting Satan’s Circus prostitutes attempting to take clients into cheap hotels. On this occasion Becker had the full support of his superiors. “The law gives you no such authority,” one girl’s lawyer protested to Captain Chapman of the West Thirtieth Street station. “Then the law should be changed,” Chapman shot back. “And, anyway, I don’t care what the law says about it. My will is all the authority needed in this precinct.” New York Times, June 14, 1897.

  “KING” CALLAHAN H. Paul Jeffers, Commissioner Roosevelt, pp. 120–21.

  BECKER AND WILLIAMS Logan, p. 112.

  INTIMATELY ASSOCIATED WITH THE TENDERLOIN So much so, in fact, that it was he who, two decades earlier, was popularly assumed to have named the famous district. On derivation, see Benjamin Botkin, New York City Folklore, pp. 331–33. The earliest reference known for the origin of the name comes from Clubber’s testimony to the Lexow Committee, which went like this (Lexow, pp. 5569–70):

  Q. And in fact that the Tenderloin district is the most notorious district in New York; that is also a lie?

  A. No.

  Q. You gave it that name, the Tenderloin?

  A. No.

  Q. How did it originate?

  A. Through a newspaper reporter, a man that was on the Sun that used to call on me in the Fourth precinct; when I was transferred to the Twenty-ninth he came up there and asked me how I liked the change; I said, I will have been living on rump steak in the Fourth district, I will have some tenderloin now; he picked it up and it has been named that ever since…. Q. What did you mean by that?

  A. Well, I got a better living in the Twenty-ninth.

  APPOINTMENT OF THE LEXOW COMMITTEE Lexow, pp. 4–15; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 238–39; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., p. 102; Gabriel Chin (ed.), New York City Police Corruption Investigation Commissions, 1894–1994 I, p. 54; Robert Fogelson, Big City Police, pp. 3–4.

  EARLY PROBES INTO NEW YORK CORRUPTION Very little is known about the 1840 investigation, which was held in camera; no report was ever published, and contemporary accounts are based almost entirely on hearsay, the newspapers of the day being reduced to seeking statements from witnesses and officials as they left the inquiry. David Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld, pp. 23–25. For the 1875 investigation, see Theo Ferdinand, in his introduction to the 1972 edition of Augustine Costello’s 1885 Our Police Protectors, p. xi; for 1884, see Morris, op. cit., pp. 235–36, 250–51; Berman, Police Administration, pp. 17–18. Roosevelt’s Committee to Investigate the Local Government of the City and County of New York, Morris notes, heard a million words of testimony and published two weighty reports suggesting that blackmail, extortion, and lax accounting were still widespread in local government and that the police regularly collected “hush money.”

  JOHN GOFF Goff had made his name defending Charles Gardiner a few years earlier. For his early career and personality, see Dictionary of American Biography 7, pp. 359–60; Sloat, op. cit., pp. 127–42, 220–21. On his Irish nationalism—he had been a childhood friend of Charles Stewart Parnell—and Fenian activities, see Sloat, op. cit., pp. 249–50, and Peter Stevens, The Voyage of the Catalpa, pp. 170, 174.

  LEXOW INVESTIGATIONS Lexow, pp. 16–54; Levine, pp. 210–39; Berman, op. cit., pp. 23–29.

  MCCLAVE QUESTIONED For the commissioner’s disgrace, see Sloat, op. cit., pp. 249–65; New York Times, May 25 and July 17, 1894. The Middletown Daily Argus, in upstate New York, observed, “There can be no doubt but that Police Commissioner John McClave resigned because it was getting too warm for him. Charges of corruption were so strongly proved by internal evidence that he had no desire to remain longer on the board.” Argus, July 20, 1894.

  SCHMITTBERGER Captain Max’s revelations concerning the protection enjoyed by several upmarket madams whose houses catered to men with real political influence proved to be equally shocking. These “high-toned” establishments were, Schmittberger pointed out, frequently above paying for protection, and it was easy for a man new to a precinct to make the mistake of trying to extort money from them. When Schmittberger had sent one of his men around to the house operated by a madam named Sadie West, he found himself hauled before Police Commissioner Martin that same day and ordered to apologize in person. Then there was Georgiana Hastings, “a very peculiar character” who ran an especially select establishment on Forty-fifth Street. “Some of the gentlemen who visit her house,” Schmittberger offered, “probably would not like to see their names in print…. In fact she keeps a very quiet house, and I was given the tip, so to say, if I didn’t want to burn my fingers, not to have anything to do with her, and I didn’t; I never saw the woman and I wouldn’t know her now if she stood before me.” Costello, op. cit., p. 553; Lexow, pp. 5221, 5573; New York Times, Oct. 16, 1894; Richard O’Connor, Hell’s Kitchen, pp. 127–29; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 103–4; Sloat, op. cit., pp. 361–62; Rachel Bernstein, Boarding-House Keepers and Brothel Keepers in New York City, 1880–1910, pp. 163–74.

  WILLIAMS TESTIFIES New York Times, Dec. 27 and 28, 1894; Sante, op. cit., pp. 247–48; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 104–5; Richardson, op. cit., pp. 209–10.

  “I GOT TO HAND IT TO YOU…” Logan, p. 115.

  NEW YORK UNAWARE OF THE EXTENT OF THE SYSTEM Levine, pp. 214–15; Steffens, op. cit. I, p. 199.

  THE ELECTIONS OF 1894 Sloat, op. cit., pp. 391–92, 411, 415–19.

  THE NEW POLICE BOARD Morris, op. cit., p. 477; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 109–11; H. Paul Jeffers, Commissioner Roosevelt, pp. 58–74.

  REMOVAL OF BYRNES AND WILLIAMS Morris, op. cit., pp. 491–92; Berman, op. cit., p. 51.

  CONSEQUENCES OF THE LEXOW INQUIRY It was Tammany’s misfortune that the 1894 elections fell right in the middle of the Lexow hearings. The Hall did its best to rally its shattered forces, sending its agents into the saloons to warn that no man would ever get a beer in New York if the reformers won, and—true to form—offering Goff the massive bribe of $300,000 to stand down as a Lexow counsel. But it was too late. Tammany’s usual tactics were of no avail; Superintendent Byrnes—whether out of a genuine concern for fair play or, as likely, to ingratiate himself with the reformers—ordered the largest reassignment of men in the history of his department, packing half the force off to new precincts on Election Day to limit the prospects for sharp practice. Tammany was so demoralized that even the legendary Paddy Divver, leader of the Second Election District, was not in the city when the polling stations closed. Four years earlier Divver had worked miracles for the Democrats, “raising up the dead to vote.” Now he spent Election Day alone on Long Island, drinking himself into oblivion while the last ballots were tallied and William Strong—who had run on what was called the Fusion ticket—was proclaimed mayor by the decisive margin of 43,000 votes. New York’s Republicans, who generally counted themselves lucky to send three or four assemblymen to Albany, meanwhile triumphed in the state elections, more than quadrupling their representation. Berman, op. cit., pp. 62–91; Morris, op. cit., p. 488; Levine, pp. 239–87; Valentine, op. cit., p. 16.

  “ROOSEVELT’S FIRST MONTHS IN CHARGE…” Roosevelt was, of course, only one of four police commissioners—two Democrats, two Republicans—all of whom were nominally equal. But he was elected chair of the board and proceeded to run the department as though he were its head. His fellow commissioners’ disquiet at this state of affairs (Roosevelt encountered stubborn and protracted opposition from Andrew Parker, one of his Democratic colleagues) was in part responsible for the failure of his attempts at reform. Morris, op. cit., pp. 552–58, 561.

  ROOSEVELT’S NOCTURNAL EXCURSIONS Not surprisingly, Roosevelt’s encounters with the New York police featured prominently in many of the city’s papers. On one occasion the commissioner discovered Patrolman William Rat
h taking an illicit supper in an oyster bar. Unfortunately for the policeman, he failed to recognize Roosevelt’s distinctive features and angrily dismissed the man firing questions at him as a crank until his friend the bartender broke in, muttering, in a horrified whisper, “Shut up, Bill, it’s his nibs, sure! Don’t you see the teeth and glasses?” On another late-night excursion, Roosevelt and Avery Andrews chanced upon a patrolman named Meyers standing outside a bar in the very act of accepting a large schooner of lager from the owner. Roosevelt grabbed the policeman from behind, demanding, “Officer, give me that beer!” Instead Meyers leaped like a startled deer, tossed his schooner through the door of the saloon, and made off at full speed without bothering to find out who had accosted him. The commissioner gave chase, calling out, “Hi! Stop there, Officer, stop!” and was gaining on his quarry when the fleeing Meyers turned his head and caught a glimpse of spectacles and prominent teeth gleaming in the moonlight. “Roosevelt!” he squeaked. “Stop running, you fool!” gasped the winded commissioner, and Meyers pulled up, pleading implausibly that his drink had been a ginger ale. “That makes no difference,” his pursuer retorted. “You come down to my office and see me in the morning.” New York Tribune, May 20, 1896; Levine, pp. 246–48; Andrews, op. cit., pp. 119–20; Morris, op. cit., pp. 492–95; Jeffers, op. cit., pp. 105–10.

  EXCISE LAW No Puritan himself, Roosevelt was personally sympathetic to the city’s drinking men. But being stubborn, moralistic, and imbued with a sense of righteousness that at least matched Dr. Parkhurst’s, he was convinced that he and his colleagues could not simply ignore statutes they did not believe in. Orders went out to the city’s precincts: Henceforth the excise laws were to be scrupulously observed. Levine, pp. 252–68; Morris, op. cit., pp. 495–512, 529; Berman, op. cit., pp. 108–15; Lardner and Reppetto, op. cit., pp. 116–17; Allen Steinberg, “The ‘Lawman’ in New York,” University of Toledo Law Review 34 (2003), p. 758–59; Sante, op. cit., pp. 134–35, 295. The law in force in 1895, incidentally, had been passed three years earlier by a Tammany administration. It had been voted through first to assuage the upstate religious vote, and second to provide the Hall with a useful weapon for blackmailing recalcitrant bar owners into supporting the Democrats.