Villains, Scoundrels, and Rogues

by Paul Martin

  By 4:40 p.m., the workday was coming to a close inside the busy factory. Two of Triangle’s seamstresses, dark-haired sisters Sara and Tessie Saracino, ages twenty-five and twenty respectively, were chatting happily as they put away their work. Tomorrow would be their day off. The siblings had come to this country from Italy two years earlier and were helping to support their family, which lived on East 119th Street.

  Suddenly, cries of “Fire!” startled the sisters. Smoke began seeping into the ninth-floor workshop from a blaze on the floor below (a fire started by a carelessly discarded match or cigarette, it was later surmised). The two young women crossed themselves and uttered quick prayers as pandemonium broke out.

  Everywhere, screaming employees dashed for the exits. They were startled to find the stairway leading down the Greene Street side of the building already blocked by fire. Across the room, workers struggled in vain to open the door to the Washington Place stairway. The door, it seemed, was locked. A number of employees managed to escape by elevator, and others scrambled up the Greene Street stairway and onto the roof, where they climbed to safety in a nearby building. Workers on the eighth floor were aware of the fire sooner, so they had more time to flee. But for scores of employees, especially those working on the ninth floor—who only learned of the fire when it was completely out of control—there would be no escape. They were caught in the quintessential firetrap.

  Although the metal-and-stone Asch building was touted as being fireproof, the contents of the Triangle factory were anything but. The blaze quickly became an inferno, feeding on wooden tables, paper patterns, oily rags, and piles of fabric. Unbelievably, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck had never bothered to conduct fire drills to prepare their workers for an emergency.5 The only precautions consisted of hoses in the stairwells and a few water buckets. Workers attempted to fight the fire with the hoses, but there was no water pressure. The single rickety fire escape clinging to the side of the building gave way under the weight of a knot of frightened women, plunging them to their deaths. The overloaded elevators soon gave out, leaving those trapped on the upper floors with a sickening choice: they could either burn to death or leap from the windows and find death on the cold sidewalks below.

  United Press reporter William Shepherd witnessed the tragic outcome of that dilemma from the pavement on Washington Place. He looked up in horror as women and young girls stood in the eighth-floor windows high above, flames beating all around them. He turned away when the first girl jumped but watched a second girl leap to her death. At first, some of the onlookers thought the people above were throwing down bundles of cloth in order to save the material. They were quickly stunned by the sight of dozens of women leaping from the windows, forced to fling themselves into space by the raging heat behind them. Shepherd saw a young man help several girls make the deadly plunge, as if he were politely holding a door open for them. Finally, one of the girls hugged him tightly and the two kissed, then the girl plummeted to her death, followed immediately by the young man.

  “I learned a new sound,” Shepherd wrote in despair, “a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk. Thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead, thud-dead. Sixty-two thud-deads. I call them that because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time at the same instant. There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down. The height was eighty feet.”6

  Shepherd witnessed the futile efforts of the New York City Fire Department, whose streams of water fell short of the blaze and whose longest ladder only reached to the sixth floor of the ten-story building. The reporter saw one of the girls jump from above and attempt to grab the ladder, but she missed and fell to her death. On the sidewalk, the firemen held safety nets to catch the jumpers. The falling bodies tore through the nets as if they were made of cobweb.

  Hearing screams, Shepherd raced around the corner to Greene Street and beheld an even more terrifying sight. Up on the ninth floor, more girls were trapped by the flames, burning to death in plain sight of the shrieking onlookers below. When the windows finally gave way, bodies came tumbling down—“burning, smoking, flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward,” Shepherd wrote. “The whole, sound, unharmed girls who had jumped on the other side of the building had tried to fall feet down. But these fire torches, suffering ones, fell inertly, only intent that death should come to them on the sidewalk instead of in the furnace behind them.”7

  In less than thirty minutes, the gut-wrenching spectacle was over. There were no more jumpers, no more screams—only the anguished wailing of survivors and witnesses. In that brief span of time, 146 lives had been destroyed. Most of the dead were women, and almost half of the victims were still in their teens, some as young as fourteen.8 Among those killed were the Saracino sisters, whose plans for their Sunday off literally went up in smoke. Many of the survivors darted about the streets in hysteria, driven wild by the things they’d seen.

  The scorched and broken bodies of the jumpers were lined up on the sidewalks outside the Asch Building. The police attached numbered tags to the victims’ wrists. Inside the building, fireman found dozens of charred bodies, some clinging tightly to one another. More victims were discovered in the elevator and ventilation shafts. In their desperation, the trapped girls had sought any means of escape. (Elevator operator Joseph Zito reported hearing the tinkling of coins from the pay envelopes of the girls who crashed onto the top of his car.)9 A temporary morgue was set up at Charities Pier on 26th Street to allow families to identify their loved ones. In time, all but six of the victims were identified (Greenwich Village researcher Michael Hirsch established the identities of the last six in 2011).10

  Two of those who managed to escape the fire were Isaac Harris and Max Blanck. Triangle’s owners received a warning telephone call and climbed to safety from the roof of the building. However, the men weren’t able to escape the public outrage that followed the disaster—the worst industrial accident in the city’s history. On April 5, more than a hundred thousand New Yorkers turned out in a steady downpour to march in a funeral parade honoring the fire victims, and over two hundred fifty thousand more looked on in respectful silence.11 All of those grieving citizens had one question on their minds: Who was to blame for this needless tragedy?

  Though some faulted the city’s building inspectors for failing to require adequate emergency exits at the Triangle factory, most people blamed the disaster on the company’s tightfisted owners. Harris and Blanck were reviled for their lack of concern for employee safety. When Fire Chief Edward Croker told reporters that one of the doors to the ninth-floor workspace appeared to have been locked, public anger spiked.12 Two weeks after the fire, Harris and Blanck were indicted by a grand jury on manslaughter charges.

  The trial of the Shirtwaist Kings began the first week of December 1911. Strolling toward the courtroom in their derby hats—with cries of “Murderers!” ringing in their ears from distraught onlookers—the slightly built Harris and the thickset Blanck looked like comedians Laurel and Hardy, although there was nothing funny about these two steely businessmen. Russian Jews who’d immigrated to America two decades earlier, the two had succeeded in the extremely competitive garment industry with the classic formula of high volume and cheap labor. Both men owned swank, servant-filled homes, and they traveled to work in chauffeured limousines. Besides their Greenwich Village factory, they owned several other manufacturing facilities. They had it made, and they intended to hang on to the good life. Sparing no expense, the men hired one of the city’s top defense lawyers, Max Steuer. The prosecution was led by Assistant District Attorney Charles Bostwick.

  The trial hinged on the issue of the locked door blocking the Washington Place exit of the ninth-floor workroom. Bostwick contended that although fire had blocked the stairs on the Greene Street side of the building, many of those trapped on the ninth floor could have escaped down the Washington Place stairs—just as workers on the eighth floor had done—if the
door there hadn’t been locked.13 Given the tragic consequences of the fire, the rationale for bolting that door was monstrous.

  It was common knowledge that Harris and Blanck were inordinately concerned about employee theft, especially Blanck.14 To prevent pilfering, the owners had their shop foreman examine the seamstresses’ belongings each day as they left work down the narrow Greene Street stairway. To keep anyone from sneaking goods down the Washington Place stairway, the door on that side of the workroom was kept locked, in direct violation of the city safety code. Besides being against the law, the security measure was out of proportion to the threat. In his testimony, Isaac Harris admitted that pilfering had little financial impact on their business. Less than $25 worth of goods had been stolen from the Triangle factory in all its years of operation.15 The irrational fear of theft was simply the paranoia of the selfish.

  During the trial, the prosecution produced the fire-scorched lock assembly from the Washington Place door, which clearly showed the deadbolt in the locked position. A parade of survivors testified that they’d been unable to open the door. It seemed irrefutable that the door had been fastened shut, despite testimony to the contrary. (Several employees who claimed the door wasn’t locked admitted that they’d received pay hikes from Harris and Blanck shortly before the trial—a barefaced example of witness bribery that was a possible felony in its own right. And some of these witnesses apparently perjured themselves by contradicting previous statements.)16

  In a strange turn of events, Judge Thomas Crain told the jurors that they not only had to be convinced that the door was locked on the day of the fire, but that they also had to be sure that Harris and Blanck were aware it was locked. The second stipulation was virtually impossible to prove, and it seemed unnecessary besides, considering that the obsessive, penny-pinching owners were the only ones with any interest in seeing that the door was kept bolted. However, defense attorney Steuer succeeded in planting doubt in the jurors’ minds about his clients’ knowledge. After three weeks of testimony, the jury deliberated for less than two hours before acquitting the Shirtwaist Kings. It was not a popular verdict. When the proceedings adjourned, an angry, screaming crowd waited in the streets for Harris and Blanck. Running like a couple of purse snatchers, the two powerful businessmen escaped by ducking into a subway station.

  To compound the injustice of the trial’s outcome, Harris and Blanck ended up making a fat profit from the insurance they collected on the fire damage. The men received over $60,000 more in compensation than their losses.17 (Known as over-insurers, the two had profited repeatedly in the past for smaller fires, although no one had died in those.) Many of the families of the fire victims brought civil suits against the owners of the Asch Building and the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. After lengthy wrangling, the families received $75 in damages for each of the dead.18 The settlement was no doubt less than the plaintiffs had spent in legal fees.

  Not everything went the Shirtwaist Kings’ way in the succeeding years. Although Harris and Blanck attempted to reestablish their place in the garment industry after the fire, their reputations tanked. (It didn’t help when Blanck’s limousine struck two children in two different mishaps on the same day in 1912.) Worst of all, the two men learned nothing from the tragedy they’d caused: a new factory they set up immediately after the fire was found to violate several safety codes. In 1913, Blanck was fined $20 for once again locking a factory door with workers inside.19 (The judge apologized for having to levy the fine.) That same year, a factory inspection revealed multiple fire hazards, and the following year, the partners were caught attaching fake labels to their garments intended to certify that the clothing had been manufactured under safe working conditions. In 1918, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company went out of business. Two years later, the partnership was dissolved and Harris and Blanck faded into oblivion.

  Some good actually came of the events of March 25, 1911. Public revulsion at the horrors of the Triangle disaster forced the government to get serious about protecting workers. In the three years following the fire, New York’s state legislature passed thirty-six new laws regulating workplace safety.20 Increasingly powerful unions played a significant role in bringing safety concerns to light, and reformers also began to address the festering issues of low wages, long hours, and child labor. The New York laws became models for other states, as well as for the federal labor legislation passed in the 1930s as part of the New Deal. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, went so far as to say that March 25, 1911, was the first day of the New Deal.21 (In one of history’s odd twists, Perkins had witnessed the Triangle fire herself.)

  The inhumane conditions of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory were by no means unique. They existed in thousands of American companies before the advent of tough labor laws and strong unions. (When one New York factory owner of the time was told he should initiate fire drills to protect his workers, he said, “Let ’em burn. They’re a lot of cattle, anyway.”)22 Blinded by avarice, the Shirtwaist Kings wrung every possible measure of productivity from their workers with little regard for their safety or welfare. And yet, this unscrupulous pair had the gall to claim that their factory was a model of good working conditions.

  Harris and Blanck may have been regarded as hardheaded businessmen by some, but anyone inclined to admire them should ask themselves this: Was Sara Saracino’s life worth just $75? Or her sister Tessie’s? Or the lives of any of the other 144 Triangle employees who died such unimaginably horrible deaths? The most blasphemous aspect of the Triangle fire is the haunting realization that many of those people perished simply because two greedy men were afraid someone might steal a few scraps of cloth. Just as heartrending is the knowledge that, on that fateful March afternoon, the workday was almost over. In only a few more minutes, all the employees would have been safely out of the building, their weekly pay envelopes in hand.

  The fact that the Shirtwaist Kings avoided any significant punishment for their deeds should serve as a reminder that the need to protect the interests of employees never ends. Today, the lessons of the Triangle tragedy seem lost on some people—witness the ongoing assaults on collective bargaining rights and the recurring complaints from industry about “burdensome” safety regulations. Sadly, the US Department of Labor confirms that clothing sweatshops are once again flourishing in this country, preying chiefly on recent immigrants and following the same old patterns of low wages and worker exploitation.23

  In 1991, the site of the Triangle factory fire was declared a National Historic Landmark. New York University now uses the building for offices and classrooms. History, in that regard at least, has moved on. But this much remains unchanged: for callously sacrificing others to enrich themselves, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck have earned a prominent place on the list of infamous Americans. The blind spot in their characters was enormous and unforgivable. As New York Fire Chief Edward Croker angrily summarized in the wake of the Triangle disaster, “It comes right down to dollars and cents against human lives.”24

  Dean O’Banion

  On a raw November morning in 1924, a lengthy funeral procession moved with stately dignity along Chicago’s North Wells Street. People surged along the sidewalks and peered from rooftops, straining to catch a glimpse of the passing cortege. Inside the hearse, a $10,000 silver and bronze casket bore the remains of one of the city’s most well-known and flamboyant individuals. During the three days the body had been available for viewing, some forty thousand visitors had filed through the Sbarbaro funeral home, which overflowed with twenty-six carloads of flowers. By the time the procession reached the Mount Carmel Cemetery, in suburban Hillside, an estimated fifteen thousand people had assembled to witness the graveside service.1

  From such impressive numbers, strangers to Chicago might have assumed that the deceased had been an honored member of society—a philanthropist, perhaps, or maybe a high-ranking member of the clergy or revered public servant. They would have been wrong.

 
The massive crowd of Chicagoans had turned out to mourn—or secretly gloat over—the death of Charles Dean O’Banion, a kingpin in the local underworld. Before mob boss Al Capone rose to power, the short, chubby Irish American known variously as Dean, Deanie, or Dion O’Banion held sway over criminal activities throughout the city’s northeastern neighborhoods. His North Side Gang kept the illegal beer and whiskey flowing during the early years of Prohibition. A paradoxical figure, O’Banion was normally jovial and outgoing, yet he packed three “gats” in his expensive three-piece suits and was linked to the deaths of twenty-five men. The chief of police called him “Chicago’s arch criminal.”2 (In the 1931 film The Public Enemy, the jaunty mobster was a model for the character played by James Cagney—the menacing Tom Powers, a sneering psycho who famously smashes a grapefruit in his girlfriend’s face.)3

  Like many a gangster, O’Banion possessed the potentially fatal traits of hubris and ambition. On November 10, 1924, he was gunned down after repeated run-ins with his rivals. His murder set off the brutal “beer wars” that plagued Chicago for the remainder of the 1920s, climaxing in the gory St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, when Al Capone’s gunsels brazenly executed seven men associated with the North Side Gang. Hundreds of Chicago mobsters died during those violent years, but Dean O’Banion stood out from all the other hoods who went down in a hail of bullets. An alcohol-shunning family man, he was known for aiding the poor and generously staking friends who were down on their luck. And he had a surprising outlook on one of the mob’s more lucrative rackets: as a devout Catholic, he abhorred prostitution. (“I don’t peddle flesh,” he said, “and I never will.”)4