Satan's Circus Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  MAP

  PREFACE

  1 WIDE-OPEN

  2 KING OF THE BOWERY

  3 GRAFT

  4 STUSS

  5 STRONG ARM SQUAD

  6 LEFTY, WHITEY, DAGO, GYP

  7 “GOOD-BYE, HERMAN”

  8 RED QUEEN

  9 TOMBS

  10 FIVE MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

  11 RETRIAL

  12 DEATH HOUSE

  EPILOGUE

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Charles Becker

  Herman Rosenthal

  Charles and Helen Becker

  Big Tim Sullivan

  Charles Whitman (Library of Congress)

  Jack Rose(Library of Congress)

  Jack Zelig

  John Goff (Library of Congress)

  PREFACE

  NEARLY 5 MILLION men and women have served the United States as police officers.

  Only one has been executed for murder.

  This is the story of Charles Becker—a New York police lieutenant widely reviled in the first decades of the last century as “the crookedest cop who ever stood behind a shield”—and of the raucous, gaudy city that made him. It is also the story of the precinct that Becker’s career so frequently returned him to: Satan’s Circus, in midtown Manhattan, then both New York’s entertainment district and the heart of its vice trade.

  The cast of characters is extraordinary. Aside from Becker himself—who was able, brave, intelligent, and yet utterly corrupt—the book tells of “Big Tim” Sullivan, an election-rigging vice lord who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from ordinary New Yorkers, yet was borne to his funeral through a crowd of more than 20,000 weeping citizens; of Jack Zelig, the beloved gangster; and of John Goff, a onetime terrorist turned sadistic hanging judge. Elsewhere in its pages you will meet “Gyp the Blood,” a back-snapping thug and uselessly incompetent murderer; the sinister “Bald Jack” Rose, his entirely hairless procurer; and Bill Devery, the hulking, shrewd police chief who ran his city as one vast racket and used the money he extorted from Manhattan’s brothels to found the New York Yankees.

  Since even a novelist would hesitate to invent such characters, I want to make it clear that nothing of what follows is fiction. Satan’s Circus is closely based on contemporary sources—legal documents, newspapers, and an archive of detailed reports filed by the most prolific private detective of the day—which make it possible to reconstruct the events of a century ago in remarkable detail. Nor are any of the conversations I have included in the book invented; each one was either recalled, word for word, by one of the participants or noted down by a reporter. In the handful of places where I have speculated on the thoughts and motives of individuals, I have acknowledged that fact in the text or in the notes.

  Mike Dash

  London

  April 2, 2006

  “I’ve been living on chuck steak for a long time. Now I’m going to get me a little of the tenderloin.”

  CAPTAIN ALEXANDER “CLUBBER” WILLIAMS CELEBRATES HIS APPOINTMENT TO POLICE NEW YORK’S THEATER, GAMBLING, AND PROSTITUTION DISTRICT—“THE RICHEST GRAFTING TERRITORY IN THE CITY”

  CHAPTER 1

  WIDE-OPEN

  BROADWAY GARDEN WAS DEBAUCHED. To think of the place as just another New York saloon was perverse; the Garden bore about as much resemblance to one of the sagging, smoke-stained taverns squatting on street corners downtown as a diamond did to a paste bauble. Combining the attractions of a bar, restaurant, dance hall, and vaudeville show, it was bigger and busier than half a dozen low dives rolled into one.

  The Garden owed much of its popularity to its superb location. It stood near the corner of Broadway and West Thirty-first Street, in the heart of New York’s entertainment district, and Broadway itself—the busiest, most brightly lit thoroughfare in the world—swept a living tide of likely customers past its doors at all hours of the day and night. Even some time after midnight on a Tuesday morning, one of the quietest evenings of the week, the Garden was all jostle and hubbub, loud music and light: the sort of place that filled readily with fashionable drunks, young couples flirting their way through clandestine assignations, and single men with darting eyes who called in when the theaters closed in the hope of making the acquaintance of a chorus girl.

  On this particular evening—it was some way past midnight on September 16, 1896—a young man, rather smartly dressed in a jacket, waistcoat, and straw hat, was dawdling at a table in the Garden’s restaurant. He was in his middle twenties and not especially attractive: pale and thin, of average height, and sporting a poorly nourished mustache that quite failed to impose itself on a face dominated by a large nose and larger teeth. His long, tawny hair had been greased, parted in the middle and then plastered down across his forehead. Occasionally, as he leaned forward, a few strands would break free and dangle limply across one eye until they were pressed back into place.

  Sharing the young man’s table, and sitting directly opposite him, were two much better-looking women. These girls were even younger than their host, perhaps eighteen or twenty years old, and they were fashionably clad in thick, embroidered silk, their waists tightly nipped with stays and their neatly made-up faces half hidden beneath elaborate hats. They called themselves actresses, but they were really nothing more than dancing girls, high kickers from a nearby show. They had drunk enough over the last few hours to feel pleasantly relaxed, and now they chattered happily, giggling as they told tales of their experiences. Their companion, listening attentively, scrawled notes down on a paper pad.

  Skulking unobtrusively some twenty yards away, a second man observed this scene with interest. He was a good deal taller and much stronger than the first, but less extravagantly dressed. He was doing his best to remain inconspicuous. His vantage point, the lobby of Broadway’s Grand Hotel, was well suited to this purpose; it was crowded and less well lit than the street outside, and by pressing himself flat against a wall the man could keep a close eye on the Garden with little chance of being seen himself. He had done this sort of thing often enough to learn patience, and after a while he was grimly pleased to note that a third young woman had walked up to the table in the restaurant. The newcomer was even more striking than the chorus girls: exceptionally beautiful, her pretty, mobile face framed by a mass of startling dark red curls. She was wearing a simple shirtwaist—a fitted blouse with mannish collar and cuffs—that neatly displayed her figure, and she slid into the seat beside the man with greasy hair. He greeted her enthusiastically.

  Now the watcher knew that he was right. He pulled out a pocketwatch and checked the time. It was approaching 2:00 A.M.

  The watching man did not have long to wait. The little group around the table broke up only a few minutes later, when one of the dancers rose to leave and the young man in the straw hat offered to escort her to a streetcar stop about a hundred yards away. The other two girls loitered on the nearest corner, waiting for him. When their companion returned, he seemed lost in thought, head down, eyes fixed on the sidewalk, and only half aware of a pair of late-night revelers lurching down the road ahead of him. These men reeled up to the redhead and the chorus girl and passed them rather close; perhaps a few words were exchanged.

  At once a loud commotion snapped the young man from his reverie. The tall figure of the watcher from the Grand Hotel had materialized behind the girls and seized both by their wrists, his fingers gripping them so fiercely that they had no hope of escape. They screamed out in surprise and fear, twisting desperately to see who had accosted them, but their captor would not release his hold. After a few seconds of struggle, the redhead’s imprisoned
arm went limp, her shoulders slumped, and she burst into tears—“the wildest and most hysterical sobbing,” her male companion thought, that he had ever heard.

  The girl’s captor stared down at her, and his wide mouth cracked into a grin. He relaxed his grip but kept hold of her wrist. To the young man who had sat with her in the Garden—hurrying now toward her over the road—he seemed “picturesque as a wolf,” his face a study in triumph.

  The wolf fixed both girls with his gaze. “Come to the station house,” he said. “You are under arrest for soliciting two men.”

  His name was Charley Becker, and he was a New York City cop.

  Becker was not much older than the women he was arresting—he had only just turned twenty-six—and was an unusual policeman. Most Manhattan patrolmen of the day were stocky, street-smart Irishmen in their thirties or early forties: brave when called upon, perhaps, but swaggering, casually brutal, and all too frequently corrupt. Men of this sort, with ten or more years’ service on the streets, were princes of the city. Left to patrol their beats largely unsupervised, they became intimately familiar with the local tavern keepers, street vendors, and crooks, and few were above pocketing a dollar here and there for overlooking harmless violations, nor accepting a pint of beer and a free meal from saloons that remained open after closing time. Becker, in contrast, came from a German family, which made him “Dutch” in the police parlance of the day and an exotic rarity in a force still then more than two-thirds Irish. Standing six feet two inches in his socks, he towered over most of his contemporaries. In a department all too often officered by men of few brains and less imagination, he was also markedly intelligent.

  Charley Becker’s ancestry, cleverness, and height all set him apart from other New York policemen. But it was his inexperience that most clearly marked out the young patrolman within the precinct. With fewer than three years’ service to his name, Becker was scarcely more than a rookie: a policeman who retained some of the traits of a civilian and had yet to master all the finer details of his job. Still, months pounding a beat on the streets of Manhattan, weeks of after-hours plainclothes duty in New York’s Nineteenth Precinct, and long nights swapping stories with colleagues in the nearby station house had begun to teach harsh truths about the city. Now Becker’s police career had reached a fork familiar to every officer. He could try to be an honest and upstanding cop, stick strictly to the rules, and stay untainted by corruption. Or—more likely and far easier—he could yield to the temptations of the entertainment district.

  Already Becker’s views were being colored by experience. Respectable women, he had learned, did not wander through the theater district after midnight. Men who paid for the company of girls in fancy bars such as Broadway Garden wanted something in return. And beauties like the little redhead in his grasp did not consort with plainer, older men for the mere pleasure of their company. “Any woman,” he believed, “who talks to a man late at night on the street is a prostitute.”

  Elsewhere in the United States—indeed elsewhere in New York—Becker’s comment might have seemed outrageous. But not in midtown Manhattan. The grid of streets of which the Garden was a part had long been notorious throughout the city, and at midnight, by the cold glare of a thousand arc lights, the sidewalks swarmed with touts hawking the services the neighborhood was famous for: late-night drinking, gambling, and sex. It was a simple matter, in the early-morning hours, to find a gaming “hell” offering high-stakes card games, to drink oneself into a stupor in one of the hundreds of blind tigers (as unlicensed drinking dens were known), or to visit a brothel that sold girls as young as twelve for a dollar a time. Shocked clergymen called the place “Satan’s Circus,” and denounced it from their pulpits. For everyone else it was the Tenderloin: the most glamorous, notorious square mile on earth.*1

  Officer Becker had grown in confidence working undercover in Manhattan. In his time on the force, he had learned how to keep his bosses sweet, how to control the local toughs without bothering his desk sergeant too much (lavish use of the nightstick was prescribed for this), and, above all, the importance of maintaining a steady stream of arrests. Promotion came more readily to men whose records demonstrated energy, and—in Satan’s Circus after dark—there were many opportunities to bulge the file. Prostitutes, in particular (as the policeman well knew), were easy prey. They invariably give themselves away “by some indescribable wearing of the sealskin saque or the jaunty hat” better yet, their clients rarely wanted trouble, and the girls mostly thought of an arrest as a hazard of the job. In the course of his midnight patrols on Broadway, Becker had skulked and watched plenty of ordinary-looking men pick up pretty part-time prostitutes in the Garden. Now, with not one but two girls in his grasp, he was relishing the prospect of an easy arrest.

  The redhead and the chorus girl were proving awkward, it was true. Both women bitterly proclaimed their innocence, denied soliciting, and insisted they had said nothing to the passing revelers. To make matters worse, their male companion had not made himself scarce, as the policeman had probably expected. Instead here he was, hurrying over to insist that he, too, had witnessed nothing of the sort. A few months or years before, a younger Becker might well have believed them. Now, though, he had become implacable. He was about to march his prisoners off when the imprisoned chorus girl turned and, in sheer desperation, gestured to her new acquaintance. “Well, he’s my husband!” she cried out.

  Thrown for a second by the dancer’s lie, Patrolman Becker turned toward the lank-haired man. The girl’s claim seemed obviously preposterous, but he dared not simply dismiss it. It was dangerously unheard of for an ordinary patrolman to detain a married lady and her husband. Any mistake could be embarrassing and costly.

  In the barely perceptible pause that followed, the man from the Garden made up his mind to lie. “Yes,” he stated firmly. “I am.”

  Probably the policeman doubted him. But he had experience enough to know that there was nothing to be gained by arguing with a gentleman. He dropped the chorus girl’s arm, releasing her. “Still,” he added, “I have got this other one.”

  “Why arrest her either?” the young man demanded.

  By now Becker had had enough. “Say,” he snarled back, turning, “do you know this woman?”

  There was such an unmistakable hint of menace in the policeman’s voice that the girls’ companion felt it wisest not to lie again. “I know nothing at all about her,” he confessed. Becker flashed him a tight smile. “Well,” he said, “she is a common prostitute, and I am arresting her for soliciting those two men. If you people don’t want to get pinched, too, you had better not be seen with her.”

  And, tightening his grip around the redhead’s wrist, the policeman turned smartly away and marched off toward the station house.

  They formed a peculiar crocodile: Becker in the lead, dragging his prisoner behind him, and trailed at a distance of a yard or two by the agitated chorus girl and her by-now-cowed companion.

  The Nineteenth Precinct building was only a block away, and Becker hurried up the steps to the front door, pushing the girl in before him. He propelled his prisoner to a high writing desk positioned just inside the entrance and presented her to the policeman sitting there, Desk Sergeant McDermott.

  There can be no doubt that both officers recognized the girl. Her name was Ruby Young, though within the borders of Satan’s Circus she was generally known by her more glamorous alias, Dora Clark. Young was an interesting case, at twenty far more attractive than the ordinary run of prostitutes, and better-spoken, too—a girl, one contemporary observed, who seemed “obviously above the level of her kind.” This, together with her pretty face and figure, enabled her to snare clients of the highest class. She had recently enjoyed assignations with a wealthy businessman living at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, perhaps the grandest such establishment in the city.

  All this suggests that Young was still new to her trade and had not yet embarked upon the inevitable drift of fresh-faced novice prostitutes,
who began their careers on the streets near Broadway and ended them, a few years later, on the waterfront. Still, for all her looks, Ruby had yet to find herself a rich patron or secure the comfortable arrangement with a rich man that might have taken her off the streets. She had been detained for soliciting in Satan’s Circus three times within the last four weeks and was now well known at the station house. McDermott took one look at her and gestured with a thumb. “Take her back,” he said, and the girl was escorted to the cells.

  Young’s friend, the high-kicking actress, had trailed her to the precinct house in the hope of interceding on her behalf. But the sergeant’s short, brutal dismissal of the redhead left her incapable of further protest. It remained to the lank-haired man in the straw hat to ask McDermott if he could at least send a few things down to Young to help make her more comfortable. The man also gave the desk sergeant a statement of the night’s events, seen from his own perspective. He appeared angry and defiant and might, he added, even make a statement in the girl’s defense when she was brought before the city magistrate.

  McDermott looked down thoughtfully from his high stool. “Well,” the sergeant said, “that may all be true. I don’t defend the officer. I do not say that he was right or that he was wrong. But I give you the plain advice of a man who has been behind this desk for years and knows how these things go, and I advise you simply to stay at home. If you monkey with this case, you are pretty sure to come out with mud all over your face.”

  The would-be witness mulled this over. “I suppose so,” he replied. “I haven’t a doubt of it. But I don’t see how I can, in honesty, stay away from court in the morning.”

  “Well,” McDermott snapped in some impatience, “do it anyhow.” But what he was thinking was, “I have seen you somewhere before. I know you vaguely. I recognize your face.”