Rothstein (11 page)

But when Tammany reclaimed power, Schmittberger reverted to form, exacting tribute from every Tenderloin poolroom, bordello, and saloon. To help collect his loot Schmittberger engaged the services of Lieutenant Charles Becker, a cop as tough and corrupt as any of his predecessors. Born in the Catskills in 1870, as a teenager he moved to the Lower East Side’s burgeoning German neighborhood. He worked at menial jobs (including bouncer in a huge Germanic beer hall, the Atlantic Gardens), meeting the usual neighborhood characters: street toughs, gamblers, prostitutes, and Tammany politicians. Tammany liked him. He wasn’t just physically imposing, his manner distinguished him from other bullyboys. The Wigwam admired him so much, that in November 1893 it not only obtained his appointment to the force, it waived its usual fee.

Charley habitually fell into trouble, but-each time-somebody pulled him out. On the evening of September 15, 1896, Becker, on plainclothes assignment outside West 32nd Street’s newly opened Broadway Gardens, arrested three women for soliciting. Two of the ladies were being escorted by Stephen Crane, a reporter for William Randolph Hearst’s New York journal and author of the recent bestseller The Red Badge of Courage. Crane, who later claimed to be interviewing the women for an article, protested that nobody had done anything wrong. Becker released Crane’s companions, but hauled the third woman-a “really handsome,” redheaded prostitute named Dora Clark-into the 19th Precinct house on 30th Street. Crane followed. Despite police warnings, Crane defended Clark vociferously. (“Whatever her character, the arrest was an outrage. The policeman flatly lied.”) The next morning a magistrate dismissed charges against Clark, but Crane remained outraged. He discovered that only shortly before Dora Clark’s arrest, Becker had falsely accused another woman of soliciting. Crane also learned of a general police vendetta against Clark, initiated after she spurned a swarthy officer named Rosenberg, whom she mistakenly thought to be black. (“How dare you speak to a decent white woman!”) Soon after, Becker met Clark on the street, throttling, punching, and kicking her until passersby restrained him. He threatened Dora that she would “wind up in the river” if she caused any more trouble for the police.

Crane demanded that Becker be disciplined, and learned how police protect their own. Cops raided Crane’s living quarters. At Becker’s departmental hearing, every off-duty officer in the precinct appeared in a demonstration of support for their comrade. Becker’s attorney implied that Crane, never the most fastidiously moral person, was both a pimp and an opium addict. His questions were perfunctorily ruled out of order, but, nonetheless, made their way to the pages of the daily press. Becker won acquittal. Police Commissioner Roosevelt (formerly a friend and admirer of Crane’s; Crane had dined at T. R.‘s home in July and autographed a copy of The Red Badge of Courage) professed concern for gratuitous police roughness, but heartily congratulated Becker and turned his back on Crane permanently. Police accelerated Crane’s harassment. Newspapers continued questioning his morals and judgment. He left the city for safer territory.

Becker soon found himself in more trouble. On September 20, 1896-five days after arresting Dora Clark-he discovered three men robbing a tobacco store. He clubbed one man. Then he and his partner, an Officer Carey, fired at the other two. One shot went through a suspect’s heart. Police falsely identified the dead man as the “notorious fanlight operator [burglar] John O’Brien,” and Becker and Carey enjoyed considerable public approval for two full days. But the dead man was no burglar. He was nineteenyear-old plumber’s assistant John. Fay. Becker received a month’s suspension. Only Big Tim Sullivan’s intervention kept him on the force.

That December Becker arrested yet another woman for soliciting. She turned out to be the very proper wife of a Paterson, New Jersey, textile manufacturer. “I don’t care who she is,” Becker responded. “I know a whore when I see one.” Again, Big Tim saved his job. Not long afterward, a teenager charged Becker of beating him senseless in a theater lobby.

In the summer of 1904, Becker rescued a man named James Butler who had fallen off a Hudson River pier, earning the highest departmental award for heroism. Two years later, Butler alleged that Becker had promised to pay him for falling into the water and reneged on the promise. Butler hinted that he ended up saving Becker.

Becker was the quintessential bad cop, the type of officer who, if retained at all, should never be presented with even the mildest temptations. So, of course, he was transferred to Captain Max Schmittberger’s Tenderloin.

Becker saw the immense sums Schmittberger raked in. Three hundred dollars a month was the going rate for protection, and hundreds of saloons, poolrooms, brothels, and red-light hotels needed protection-protection from people like Lieutenant Becker. One day Becker entered Dollar John Langer’s West 38th Street saloon and gambling hall and informed Dollar John that in addition to the usual $300 monthly fee paid to Schmittberger, he would remit an extra $20 to him. Langer paid. Impressed by the ease of that shakedown, Becker made the rounds of the district, collecting at each stop.

The next morning, Schmittberger ordered Becker to see him. He knew all about his subordinate’s actions-whom he had visited, how much he had collected. He ordered Becker to hand over the $150 he had accumulated. He threw $15 back at Becker.

“That’s your share, ten percent,” Schmittberger snapped. “From now on you’re my collector. You’ll get ten percent. Some of the joints can stand to pay more than they are and if you can get it so much the better for you. But remember, I’ll always know exactly how much they paid.” Thus, Charles Becker became Max Schmittberger’s bagman. His bankroll grew, and so did his ego.

By 1909 reform was in the air. Tammany, eager to retain power and flexible enough to realize it once again needed a respectable and pliant front man, dumped Mayor George McClellan and turned to irascible, but clean Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice William J. Gaynor. Gaynor was more upright than Tammany would have liked. Almost immediately he broke with the machine, but his reforming was not always easily fathomable. Rather then shut down the city’s widespread vice industry, he advocated merely the preservation of “outward order and decency.” That didn’t mean shutting everything down, but it didn’t mean a wide-open town. It meant something in between.

Such a policy needed a sophisticated, intelligent practitioner-a first-rate, tough, politically savvy police commissioner. Gaynor’s first Commissioner, Brooklyn lawyer James C. Cropsey, might have been that man. However, Cropsey quickly resented Gaynor’s constant interference and quit.

Gaynor transferred Fire Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo, an energetic but naive socialite, to the job. For reasons not yet understandable (though some say at Tammany’s request), Waldo engaged Lieutenant Charles Becker to cleanse the city. Rightfully suspicious of the local precinct houses, Gaynor had created two centralized vice squads-“strong arm squads” to maintain his “outward order and decency.” Waldo created a third and named Lieutenant Charles Becker to head it.

Soon Becker basically ran all three squads, collecting graft he never dreamt of. To foster the illusion of activity and integrity (and also to warn those reluctant to pay him bribes), he raided numerous gambling houses. He staged raids on phony houses to further impress Waldo and other gullible observers. He even engaged a press agent, Broadway’s Charlie Plitt, to herald his accomplishments.

Charles Becker now required his own bagmen and enforcers. He didn’t trust other cops, so he chose as his prime collector a gambler, prizefight promoter, and onetime minor-league baseball manager named Bald Jack Rose (a.k.a. Billiard Ball Jack Rose), so nicknamed because he had not a single hair on his entire body. To help enforce discipline, when a mere raid wouldn’t do, Becker relied on the services of one of Manhattan’s up-and-coming young hoodlums, Big Jack Zelig, to beat recalcitrants into submission.

Life was good for Becker, but not without problems. Particularly vexatious was veteran East Side gambler Herman “Beansy” Rosenthal, who, in February 1912, opened a gambling house at 104 West 45th Street. Big Tim Sullivan had a soft spot for Beansy Rosenthal. Although they didn’t know why, no one could deny that the big Irishman loved the pudgy little Jew. Herman Rosenthal certainly knew it, and thought Big Tim’s patronage gave him license to operate anywhere and without paying off anyone.

Becker didn’t like the arrangement but lived with it, at least as long as he had to. In early 1912, however, Big Tim’s mind began to slip: he was suffering from syphilitic paresis. As Sullivan’s faculties went, so did his power.

Becker would now collect from Rosenthal-and, for good measure, collect more from Rosenthal’s colleagues. Becker press agent Charlie Plitt had killed a man when Becker raided what the Times called “a Harlem negro gambling resort.” Becker raised a Plitt defense fund, assessing a donation from each gambler in his territory: in Beansy’s case, $500. Rosenthal recognized this as a pure shakedown and refused to pay. Bad things started happening to Herman Rosenthal. One night Jack Zelig’s crew beat him to a pulp. When Rosenthal still wouldn’t pay, Becker took 20 percent of his gambling house. But when Commissioner Waldo demanded to know why certain gambling rooms at 104 West 45th Street remained open, Becker ended up raiding what was now his own place. Feeling doubly betrayed, Rosenthal publicly spouted off against Becker, who retaliated by posting an around-the-clock police guard to shutter Rosenthal’s house.

Rosenthal tried telling his story to Mayor Gaynor. Gaynor refused to listen, but Herbert Bayard Swope, now editor of the New York World, would. Swope had Rosenthal narrate his tale in affidavit form, then published an edited version (omitting Becker’s name). Becker traveled downtown to the World’s office to read the original version, including this passage:

The first time I met Charles Becker, now a Lieutenant of Police in New York City, and who was holding the same office at the time of our first meeting, was at a ball given by the Order of Elks in Forty-third Street, near Sixth Avenue, and we had a very good evening, drank very freely and we became very good friends. Our next meeting was by appointment on New Year’s Eve, 1912, at the Elks Club….

We drank a lot of champagne that night, and later in the morning we were all pretty well under the weather. He put his arms around me and kissed me. He said, “Anything in the world for you, Herman. I’ll get up at three o’clock in the morning to do you a favor. You can have anything I’ve got. ” And then he called over his three men, James White, Charles Foy and Charles Steinhart, and he introduced me to the three of them, saying, “This is my best pal and do anything he wants you to do.”

Rosenthal also scheduled a meeting with Manhattan’s Republican District Attorney Charles Seymour Whitman, a ruthlessly ambitious reformer. The combination of Beansy Rosenthal’s allegations and Charles Whitman’s power and drive could prove dangerous. Becker now faced numerous unpleasant scenarios, up to and including prison. But even if no indictment resulted, the situation was simply bad for business.

Arnold Rothstein knew everything that transpired on Broadway, including what his old acquaintance Beansy was up to. So did Tammany Boss Tom Foley (one of Big Tim Sullivan’s closest allies), who approached Rothstein about silencing Rosenthal. “Get that stupid son of a bitch out of town,” Foley ordered.

A. R. dispatched John Shaughnessy, a pitman at his gambling house, to bring Herman to the Rothstein brownstone. Rothstein had little patience for fools, and absolutely none for Rosenthal and his dangerous, stupid game that could sink everyone. Beansy argued that Becker had overstepped his bounds, that Big Tim Sullivan protected him, and no cop had any right to violate that protection.

“The Big Feller isn’t here,” Rothstein shot back. “And if he was, he’d tell you to keep your trap shut. All you can do is make trouble for a lot of people.”

“I don’t want to make trouble for anyone, only Becker,” Herman protested. “They ask me about anybody else, I won’t tell them. Only about Becker.” Rothstein didn’t believe him.

“They’re smarter than you are,” A. R. responded. “They’re not interested in doing you any favors. Whitman is only interested in Whitman and the Republicans. He’ll crucify the Big Feller.”

“They can’t make me say what I don’t want to say,” Beansy snapped.

Rothstein got down to business. “Beansy, you’ve got to get out of town,” he said, handing him $500. “Lay away until this thing blows over. Here’s enough money to get you out. If you need more, let me know.”

But Rosenthal was too stubborn-and stupid-to listen. “I’m not leaving town,” he responded. “That’s what Becker wants me to do. I’m staying right here.”

Herman remained in town, kept shooting off his mouth, but occasionally enjoyed spasms of good judgment. One day he visited Arnold’s home. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “Give me the money and I’ll get out of town.”

Rothstein replied icily: “You waited too long.”

Beansy didn’t realize how desperate his situation had become: “Let me have the five hundred. I’ll go ‘way someplace and hide.”

But the decision had already been made. No one has to pay dead men for silence. “You’re not worth five hundred to anyone any more, Beansy,” Rothstein responded.

Rosenthal couldn’t believe what he heard. “Then you can go to hell,” he sputtered as he fled Rothstein’s home.

On the following night, Monday July 15, 1912, Herman Rosenthal visited Charles Whitman’s office, laying out his whole story. Returning from downtown, Rosenthal again visited A. R. and still vacillated, still wanting Rothstein’s help. He told Arnold where he’d been and asked if Arnold could help with his rent money.

Rothstein remained uninterested. Beansy wouldn’t live long enough to spend the cash. “In that case,” said A. R., “if you want money you go and get it from the District Attorney.”

Rosenthal walked from A. R.‘s 46th Street home down to West 43rd Street, to his favorite haunt, the Metropole Hotel, owned by the Considine Brothers and by none other than Big Tim Sullivan him self-and where Arnold Rothstein had only recently operated the gambling concession. At the Metropole Rosenthal pawed through a pile of newspapers. Each carried stories of his big expose. The publicity pleased him: “Gambler Charges Police Lieutenant Was His Partner,” blared Swope’s World headline. Beansy liked being a big man, such a big man that nobody could touch him. Not Rothstein. Not Becker. Maybe not even Big Tim.