  Satan’s Invisible World.
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| Precinct. | Time of Stay. | Sources of Revenue per Month. | Collectors’ Com. 20 per cent. | Inspectors’ Share. | Total Net Receipts. | ||||||
| 37 | 13 | months. | Blackmail on ships, $190 | 495 | — | 1,975 | |||||
| 25 | 3 | " | 10 policy shops at $20 | 168 | 200 | 472 | |||||
| Liquor dealers, $80 | |||||||||||
| 27 | 9 | " | 10 policy shops at $20 | 1,450 | 1,800 | 3,950 | |||||
| 3 pool-rooms at $200 | |||||||||||
| 5 | 2 | " | 2 pool-rooms at $200 | 160 | 150 | 590 | |||||
| 9 | 7 | " | Policy shops, $20 | 700 | 1,050 | 1,750 | |||||
| Houses of ill-fame, $10, | |||||||||||
| $25, and $50 = $500 | |||||||||||
| 19 | 12 | " | Houses of ill-fame, $200 | 480 | — | 1,920 | |||||
| 46 | 3,453 | 3,200 | 10,657 | ||||||||
The ransom extorted from the vicious and criminal classes of a single precinct by the police would seem to be an irreducible minimum of a thousand pounds per annum.
The Lexow Committee reported:—
The confessions summarised show the existence throughout the city of a system so well regulated and understood that upon the assignment of a new captain no conversation was necessary to instruct the precinct detectives or wardmen as to their line of conduct. Without a word they collected the illicit revenue, simplifying their duties as much as they could, either by granting monopolies of a special kind of crime to individuals, or imposing upon certain individuals who had knowledge of a particular class of crime the obligation of collecting for them, thus collecting monthly from all licensed vice and crime, and paying over their collections to the captain, deducting for their services twenty per cent. from the total. Or, rather, at first, paying the whole to the captain, and receiving twenty per cent. back from him, and thereafter making the deductions themselves. The captain, on his side, visited the inspector and paid over to him a substantial proportion of the amount collected.—Vol. i., pp. 45, 46.
THE CITIES WHERE DWELL THE STRANGERS WITHIN THE GATES.
View of Brooklyn Bridge from a roof in Broadway.
“THE STRANGER WITHIN THE GATES.”
“I was a stranger and ye took me in.” The familiar passage needs to be interpreted in a different sense if it is to describe the treatment of the stranger by the police of New York. In the evidence of the men who practise the confidence trick, the curious fact came out that the police expressly abandoned strangers to the tender mercies of the Bunco Steerer and Green Goods dealer. These thieves were forbidden to practise their arts upon the resident population of New York. But the “guy” was fair game. The stranger from the country was abandoned to the plunderer, who indeed could count upon the active co-operation of the police—in return for a share of the loot. The stranger was taken in indeed. But not in the sense of the Bible text.
The treatment of Americans who were strangers in the sense of not possessing a fixed abode within the city limits, was bad. The treatment of the stranger from over sea, the foreign immigrant, was infinitely worse. It has been the glory of Columbia, as one of the poets declared, that her latchkey was never drawn in to the poorest and weakest of Adam’s kin. The boast is no longer true. Restrictions upon the pauper immigrants from the Old World have been multiplied of late with ominous rapidity. But the foreigner had already established himself by the million within the Republic before the restrictive policy was begun.
In the Civil War, when the negroes were enrolled as soldiers in the Federal ranks, their presence was excused by the cynical remark that niggers were good enough food for powder. The foreign denizen of the New York slums is regarded in much the same light by the police of the city. Not as food for powder, but as material for plunder—squeezable folk who have no rights, save that of being allowed to swell the registration list of their oppressors. The police brigands levied blackmail boldly enough even when dealing with the cute Yankee and the smart New Yorker. But when they were let loose on the foreigner their rapacity knew no bounds. They had the power of a Turkish pasha in an Armenian province, and they used it almost as ruthlessly. They did not massacre, it is true. There was no occasion for such extreme measures. Even the Turk would not slaughter his taxable cattle if they were not guilty of indulging in
A witness before the Lexow Committee testified to the existence of a gang of criminals known as the Essex Market Gang, which had established a regular reign of terror in the neighbourhood. This witness, whose name was John Collins, said:—
Last night business people spoke to me; I live nineteen years in that neighbourhood and begged of me to protect them; it is impossible to live there with the gang; they can convict any man they want to, and they can make free any man they want to, because they have got their witnesses; the leading man is Martin Engel, he owns property over 200,000 dollars, got from ruining people.
Mr. Moss: You can see what power these men have when they have lots of men swearing to anything, and police officers to make arrests, and judges holding them and discharging them at will.
Chairman Lexow: If the situation is such as indicated, how is it there has not been a revolt down there?
Mr. Moss: The class of people are largely those who have come from foreign countries—countries where they have been used to that sort of thing, and supposed this Government just about the same, and, perhaps, a little worse than the place they came from; they are largely Polish Jews and Russian Jews and foreigners of that class, who have small understanding of the English language and no knowledge of our custom. Those are the class of people that are terrorised by this gang.—Vol. v., p. 4,896.
In small things as in great, the helplessness of the poor foreigner is conspicuous. Here is an instance of the way in which an Italian shoeblack was treated for daring to ask an officer, whose boots he had blacked on credit for a month until the little bill had run up to 75 cents, to settle up. The bootblack, whose name was Martini, stopped the officer, whose name was Gwinnen, as he was passing their stand, and said:—
“Gwinnen, why don’t you pay what you owe me?” so he said, “The next time you stop me on my way going across the street, I will smash you on the jaw, you dirty Italian son-of-a-bitch;” at the same time my partner got up and said, “Well, why don’t you pay us?” At the same time he rushed up against my partner like a cyclone and struck him right and left with his hand; and he had him all bleeding. I tried to step in between the two of them to separate them, and this officer Looney came along from behind me and he grabbed me by the back of the neck and punched me between the eyes, and he said, “Let us pull the guinea in.”
Q. Whom did he mean by the guinea?
A. Well, he meant us two; so we went to the station-house, and they made a charge of disorderly conduct: they claimed that we were fighting each other, me and my partner.
Q. And both of you were cut and bleeding at this time?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Were the officers in uniform?
A. All in uniform. When they went into the station-house they told their story, and when I went to tell my story, they wouldn’t listen. They heard the policeman’s story, but would not let us tell ours at all. Another officer took me to the court, and Gwinnen took my partner along; when we got to the other side of the station-house, Sixty-seventh and Lexington Avenue, this Gwinnen took off his belt, doubled it in two, and struck my partner in the face two or three times.
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And on your way to the police-court?
A. Yes, sir; I appealed to the officer that had me, and I said, “Officer, tell him that he should not hit him any more;” so after he turned around my partner was a sight.—Vol. iv., pp. 3576-7.
The sequel of this episode is interesting. The judge, apparently thinking the poor wretches who were brought before him all bloody had had enough of it, dismissed the case. Strange to say, the victims in this case endeavoured to obtain redress. They appealed to the Superintendent, who promised that the officers should be punished. Nothing was done. They then made another effort, raised £5 to pay a lawyer, and began an action for assault. One officer was held for the Grand Jury. But it was postponed again and again. The lawyer insisted on more money, which was not forthcoming, and so the Italians lost their £5, had their beating, and do not even appear to have recovered their 75 cents.
The lesson thus taught, not to throw good money after bad, and the impossibility of getting justice of a policeman, has been learned so well that one marvels at the temerity of the brave bootblacks, whose courage deserved a better fate.
The Lexow Committee in their Report put it on record as their deliberate conclusion that—
The poor ignorant foreigner residing on the great east side of the city has been especially subjected to a brutal and infamous rule by the police, in conjunction with the administration of the local inferior criminal courts, so that it is beyond a doubt that innocent people who have refused to yield to criminal extortion, have been clubbed and harassed and confined in gaol, and the extremes of oppression have been applied to them in the separation of parent and child, the blasting of reputation and consignment of innocent persons to a convict’s cell.—Vol. i.
The case which appears to have produced the deepest impression for wanton wickedness and ingenious devilry on the minds of the Commissioners was the attempt to plunder an unfortunate widow woman of the name of Urchittel. Mrs. Urchittel was a Russian Jewess, who emigrated to the United States in 1891. Her husband had died at Hamburg, from which city she sailed for New York, where she arrived, accompanied by her four children, the eldest of whom was fourteen, the youngest three. But it is best to print in her own simple language the statement of her wrongs:—
In 1891 I came to New York, a widow with four children; my husband died in Hamburg. Being without means, I applied to the Hebrew charities on Eighth Street for help, and they were kind enough to support me for starting a boarding-house in 166 Division Street, and gave me for furniture and other necessaries, and, besides 60 dollars, sent immigrants to my boarding-house. My business was increasing daily, having thirty to thirty-five persons every week, and in eight months I saved 600 dollars. I worked hard indeed, but I did it gladly, knowing that this will enable me to support my children, the orphans.
The immigration having been stopped, I had to give up boarding business, and applying again to the Charities, they supported me again, giving me 150 dollars, and sent me to Brownsville, where I bought a restaurant and made a nice living, but
I bought a cigar store in 33, Pitt Street, corner of Broome, for 175 dollars, and gave the landlord 40 dollars security, and supplied more goods for 50 dollars. On the second day of my taking possession of the store a man came in and bought a package of chew tobacco for five cents. A couple of days later the same man came in, asking me for a package of chew tobacco, to trust him, which I refused, excusing myself being recently the owner of that store; I don’t know anybody of that surrounding. I cannot do it. He took then out a dollar of his pocket and gave it to me for changing, and having no small change, only pennies, which he wouldn’t take, I sent my one-year aged daughter to get other coin for the dollar, and handing same to the man I felt a tickling in my hand caused by the quarter of the dollar in the hand of the man, and I said good-bye to him.
On the evening of that day another man came in the store, and told me that the man who was before asking for chew tobacco without money is a detective, and that he has a warrant to arrest me, and I can avoid the trouble by giving the detective 50 dollars, and refusing to do it, I will be locked up, and my children taken away from me till the twenty-first year. Not knowing to have done anything wrong, I laughed at the man, and told him that I wouldn’t give a cent to anybody, and if that man should come in again, I will chase him out with a broom.
The other night, at 11 o’clock, the children being asleep already, the same man who asked me to trust him the chew tobacco, and after which I learned he was a detective, named Hussey, came in with another man who took away my cousin that came to see me in that night, and the detective remained with me alone in the store; he told me then that he knows that I keep a disorderly house and saved 600 dollars of that dishonest business. If I wanted to escape being arrested, he wanted 50 dollars. I opposed to his assertion, and protested against his wanting money of me, saying that I ever made a living by honest business, but he wouldn’t listen to me, and in spite of my protesting and the crying of my children, I was forced to leave my store and follow him.
As we were two blocks away we met Mr. Hochstein, and crying, I told him all my trouble, and how I don’t know anything about the false accusations. It was of no avail; Mr. Hochstein told me that the detective wants 75 dollars, but he will try to settle it with 50 dollars, but without any money nothing can be done for me, and gave me also his advice, to pay 10 dollars monthly to the detective I wouldn’t be troubled at all, and that I should resume my business unhindered. I repeated again that I don’t know anything about dishonest business, but it was no use talking more.
I was dragged from corner to corner till three o’clock in the morning, insisting that I had money with me, 600 dollars I kept it in my stockings. Weary and tired out, I sat down at the corner of Essex and Rivington Streets at a dry goods store and took off my stockings, showing that I had no money in them. “If you don’t want to give the money,” said the detective to me, “I can’t help it, you must follow me to the station-house.” Being convinced that it is impossible that I should escape without giving money, I took out 25 dollars of my pocket, the only money I had, and handed them over to the detective standing by a window, which money was parted between Mr. Hochstein and himself, he taking 13 dollars and Hochstein 12 dollars.
They went with me to Essex Street, and, sending me in through a gate in the house, where I was kept about two minutes, they sent me home after with the warning to be prepared with fifty dollars. At seven o’clock in the morning the detective, Hussey, came to my store asking for the money. I cried again and begged him to let me go, that I am not able to give him any more money; but he didn’t want to hear me any more, and I had to follow him. By the signal of a whistle a man came near me, and the defective gave me over to him with the remark not to let me go till I have the fifty dollars. The name of that man is Mr. Meyer. I went with him to Mr. Lefkovitz, manufacturer of syrups, 154, Delaney Street, and to Mr. Frank —— for selling the store even for the fifty dollars, but they didn’t want to buy it, seeing the man after me and fearing trouble. After trying in vain to sell the store the detective said to Mr. Meyer, “That bad woman don’t want to give the money. Take her to the court,” and I had to stay at the trial.
Two bad, disreputed boys were engaged by the detective, Hussey, for witness. The one said that he gave me fifty cents for gratifying him, and the other said that he would give me forty cents, and I did not agree asking fifty, and thus I
MRS. URCHITTEL.
There were about fifty persons to witness that I had always made an honest living, but they were not asked at all, and being wholly unable to understand the English language, I couldn’t defend myself. The lawyer, who was sent from the Hebrew Charities, came too late, and had to give only the certificate of the society, testifying that I was supported by them, and led a decent living. It came too late, and I could not talk any more.
I was fined fifty dollars. My brother sold my store for sixty-five dollars, and paid the fine.
I ran then crazy for my children, for I didn’t know where they were. Meeting the detective he told me that they are in the hands of a society in Twenty-third Street. I ran there, but no one knew of my children. Finally, after five weeks, I received a postcard of my child, that the children are at One Hundred and Fifty-first Street and Eleventh Avenue, and when I got there, and begged to give me back my children, none would hear me.
Grieved at the depths of my heart, seeing me bereaved of my dear children, I fell sick, and was laying six months in the Sixty-sixth Street hospital, and had to undergo a great operation by Professor Mundy. After I left the hospital, I had the good chance to find a place in 558, Broadway, where I fixed up a stand by which I am enabled to make a nice living, to support and educate my children. I went again to Twenty-third Street, begging to release my children, and that was denied again. My heart craves to have my children with me.
I have nothing else in the world only them. I want to live, and to die for them. I lay my supplication before you, honourable sir, father of family, whose heart beats for your children, and feels what children are to a faithful mother. Help me to get my children. Let me be mother to them. Grant me my holy wish, and I will always pray for your happiness, and will never forget your kind and benevolent act towards me. Your very humble and faithful servant, (Signed) Caela Urchittel.—Vol. iii., pp. 2, 961-4.
The piteous plea of this bereaved mother produced a great effect upon the mind of the Committee. The children had been taken away by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, under an Act which had been passed with the best intentions in the world, but which, as the case of Mrs. Urchittel showed, was only too facile an instrument in the hands of the corrupt police. It will be noticed that in her evidence she said that “two bad, disreputed boys” were engaged to swear away her character. The allusion was a reminder of the fact that one of the worst developments of the system under which the police became bandits was the organisation of a band of professional perjurers, who would swear anything the police cared to tell them. Mrs. Urchittel’s character was irreproachable, yet on the evidence of these scoundrels she was convicted of keeping a house of prostitution. The man Hochstein, who divided the plunder with the detective, was a saloon-keeper, and a prominent politician in the district, who figures very conspicuously in the evidence of other witnesses before the Committee. No sooner had Mrs. Urchittel given her evidence than two men came to her and warned her that if she were to commence with Mr. Hochstein she would get into trouble, and be sent to prison for two years.
Oppression of the lowly and unfortunate, the coinage of money out of the miseries of life, is one of the noteworthy abuses into which the department has fallen....
The evidence of many witnesses shows the existence of a wonderful conspiracy in the neighbourhood of Essex Market police-court, headed by politicians, including criminals, professional bondsmen, professional thieves, police, and those who lay plots against the unwary, and lead them into habits of law-breaking, or surround them with a network of false evidence, and then demand money as the price of salvation, and if they do not receive it, drag their victims into court and prison, and often to a convict’s cell....
In another case, Mrs. Urchittel, a humble Russian Jewess, ignorant of our tongue, an honest and impoverished widow with three small children, whom she was striving to support, was falsely accused by a precinct detective of keeping a disorderly house in the back room of her little store where she and her little children slept, and he demanded a sum of money which she could not pay, whereupon he took her from her home, dragged her through the streets until three o’clock in the morning, pulled down and searched her stockings for money, until she in despair produced all that she had saved for her month’s rent. This being insufficient, he gave her a short time to obtain the balance, and she tried to sell her store, but failed, and then he arrested her again, lodged a false and infamous charge against her, fastened it upon her by the testimony of miserable tools whom he had employed for the purpose, and secured her conviction. Her children passed into the hands of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Her fine was paid by selling her store, and she was released, only to fall into a severe and lingering illness. When she recovered her home was gone, her children were gone, and she was penniless.
Many cases of similar oppression are found on the record.—Vol. i., pp. 43, 44.
Is it any wonder that the Lexow Committee reported under the head of “Brutality,” as it existed in the police force:—
This condition has grown to such an extent that even in the eyes of our foreign-born residents our institutions have been degraded, and those who have fled from oppression abroad have come here to be doubly oppressed in a professedly free and liberal country.—Vol. i., p. 30.
This is how “Liberty enlightens the world” from her eyrie in the Island of Manhattan.
AUGUSTINE E. COSTELLO.
THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSES OF THE POLICE.
Said Mr. Goff at one of the sittings of the Lexow Committee:—
We have, Mr. Chairman, called attention heretofore to what may be justly termed “slaughter-houses,” known as police-stations, where prisoners in custody of the officers of the law, and under the law’s protection, have been brutally kicked and maltreated, almost within view of the judge presiding in the Court.—Vol. iv., p. 3,598.
Slaughter-houses is not a bad term. The cases in which witnesses swore to violent assault on prisoners in the cells by policemen were numerous. That which immediately provoked this observation was a typical one of its kind.
One Frank Prince, who had been keeping a disorderly house in Ninety-eighth Street, had the temerity to refuse to pay the 100 dollars a month blackmail which had been demanded by the police. His house was raided, and he was taken to the station-house. He was accused before the Captain of having said that he would make him close the other disorderly house in the district, which presumably was under the Captain’s protection. Now not to pay blackmail yourself was bad enough; but it was far worse to threaten to dry up the contributory sources of police revenue. The poor wretch denied that he had ever uttered such a threat. “Take him into the cell and attend to him!” said the Captain. Prince was marched out by the wardman, who was also blackmail collector for the precinct. When they reached the cell, the turnkey and the wardman kicked him through the doorway, and then following him in fell to beating him about the head with a policeman’s billy. They kicked him violently in the abdomen, inflicting permanent injuries, and declared he deserved to have his brains knocked out. Such was the “attendance” prisoners received in the police cell to teach them the heinousness of refusing to pay ransom to the banditti of New York. This case by no means stood alone.
The most remarkable case of police brutality to prisoners under arrest, and which is one the best attested in the collection, is that of the Irish revolutionist, Mr. Augustine E. Costello.
The story of Mr. Costello was wrung from him very reluctantly. He was subpoenaed on behalf of the State, and confronted with the
Mr. Costello’s story, in brief, is this. About ten or a dozen years ago he was on the staff of the New York Herald. By his commission he was attached to the police headquarters, in which capacity he was necessarily brought into the closest relations with captains and inspectors. He discharged his duties with satisfaction to his employers, and without any complaint on the part of the police. Two lawyers of good standing, who were called as witnesses, testified that they had known him for years as a thoroughly honourable man, a newspaper man of talent and ability; one whose word they would take as soon as that of the President of the United States. Every one who knew him spoke in the highest terms of his veracity and scrupulous regard for accuracy.
Mr. Costello in 1885 conceived the idea of publishing a book about the police under the title of “Our Police Protectors.” His idea was to hand over 80 per cent. of the profits of the work to the Police Pension Fund, retaining 20 per cent. as compensation for his work. The book at first was very successful. The police sold it
FOURTEENTH STREET, NEW YORK.
But the power of the pull was to make itself felt in a still more painful fashion. Mr. Costello had several agents canvassing for orders for the book, and for advertisements. He did his best to obtain from those agents the Croker letter, and succeeded in doing so in all but two or three cases. As he had already spent his money, the only thing he could do was to continue to push his book. His agents, no doubt, when canvassing made as much capital as they could out of the credentials which Mr. Costello had originally received from the Fire Department. This was resented, and it seems to have been decided to “down” Costello. The method adopted was characteristic. The Fire Commissioners and the Police were two branches of Tammany administration. When Mr. Costello’s canvassers were going about their business, they were subjected to arrest. He had as many as
Mr. Costello, accompanied by his book-keeper, Mr. Stanley, went down to the police-station to endeavour to bail his canvassers out. Mr. Costello had no fear for himself, as he believed Captain McLaughlin was his friend—a friendship based upon the Captain’s belief that Mr. Costello’s influence had counted for something in securing his captaincy. Mr. Costello complained of the repeated arrests, and declared that he would not let it occur again if he could help it. Captain McLaughlin showed him the books that had been taken from the imprisoned canvassers, in one of which there was a loose paper containing the memorandum of sales made on that day, and a copy of the Croker letter. Mr. Costello at once took possession of the letter, which he had been trying to call in for some time. He showed it to the Captain, and then put it in his pocket, telling the Captain that if it was wanted, he would produce it in court the next day. The Captain made no objection, and they parted, apparently on friendly terms.
Mr. Costello had supper, and then went off to the police-headquarters at seven o’clock, in order to secure an order for the release of his canvassers. Suspecting nothing, he walked straight into the office, where he found himself confronted by Inspector Williams. This Inspector was famous for two things: he had the repute of being the champion clubber of the whole force, and it was he also who first gave the soubriquet of “Tenderloin” to the worst precinct in New York. The origin of this phrase was said to be a remark made by Inspector Williams on his removal from the Fourth to the Twenty-ninth Precinct. Williams, who was then captain, had said, “I have been living on rump-steak in the Fourth Precinct; I shall have some tender loin now.” Mr. Costello picked up this phrase, applied it to the Twenty-ninth Precinct, coupling it with Williams’s name. Williams never forgave Costello for this, and on one occasion had clubbed him in Madison Square.
When Costello saw the Inspector, he felt there was a storm brewing, for Williams was in one of his usual domineering moods. The moment Mr. Costello entered, the Inspector accused him of stealing a document out of Captain McLaughlin’s office, and detained him for
It was getting on to one o’clock in the morning. Costello was carrying an umbrella, as it was raining, when they came in front of the station-house. The door was wide open, and the light streamed on to the sidewalk. Just as he was placing his foot on the step he saw two men come towards him. The bright light cast a shadow, and in that shadow he saw Captain McLaughlin raise his fist and deal a savage blow at his face. He instinctively drew back his head, and the Captain’s brass-knuckled fist struck him on the cheek-bone, knocking him down into the gutter. The detectives stood by, indifferent spectators of the scene. As Costello lay half-stunned and bleeding in the muddy gutter, Captain McLaughlin attempted to kick him several times in his face. Fortunately, his victim had retained hold of his umbrella, and with its aid was able to keep the Captain’s heavy boots from kicking him into insensibility.
He struggled to his feet, when Captain McLaughlin went for him again. What followed is best told by the transcript from the evidence before the Lexow Committee:—
Augustine E. Costello examined by Mr. Moss. I said to Captain McLaughlin:—“Now, hold on; I am a prisoner here; this is a cowardly act on your part; if I have done anything to offend the laws of the State there is another way of punishing me; this is not right.” You could hardly recognise me as a human being at this time; I was covered with blood, mud, and dirt, and had rolled over and over again in trying to escape the kicks that were rained at me. I hurried myself as fast as I could into the station-house, thinking that would protect me; all this time I was being assaulted, the two detectives stood over me.
Q. What were their names?
A. I cannot recall it just now, but I can get their names later on; two wardmen of that precinct; there was a second man with the man who assaulted me; that man, I may tell you, was Captain McLaughlin.
Q. What do you mean; on the sidewalk?
By Mr. Moss:—Tell us what he did?
A. McLaughlin put himself in all sorts of attitudes and tried to strike me, and I dodged the blows.
Q. Was that in the general room of the station-house?
A. Yes. Captain Murray, of the Fire Department, was present at the time; he made the complaint against the two men.
Q. You were a prisoner, and standing in the middle of the station-house floor while McLaughlin was raining blows at you?
A. Yes. “Now,” I said to him, “McLaughlin, look here, I never felt myself placed in the position that I do to-night; no man has ever done to me what you did to-night, and I advise you to let up. Standing here, if I am assaulted again, you or I will have to die; one man of two will be taken out of this station-house dead, and so, stop.” At this time I had my fighting blood up, and had recovered from the collapse I was thrown into. I said, “You may think me not protected here; but I have a good strong arm, and if you assault me again, as sure as there is a God in Heaven, I will never take my hands from your throat until you kill me or I kill you.” He kept on blustering, but never struck me again.
Q. What was the nature of the punishment?
A. He had brass-knuckled me.—(Vol. iv., p. 4,527).
Q. You say he desisted at that moment?
A. He desisted at that moment when I said he or I would have to die if he did not stop. I was then allowed to go into his private room and wash some of the mud and gutter off my face and hands. I could not wash the blood off, because that was coming down in torrents; and when I was going downstairs, somebody kicked me or punched me severely in the back, and I feel the effects of it yet at times, and I suppose I always will. Then I was thrown into a cell bleeding, and by this time a second collapse had come over me, and I must have fainted in the cell.
Q. Did McLaughlin go into the cell?
A. No; he came down after me, after I was locked up, and made it clear he gloried in the fact that I was in that condition. So, fearing that some one would open the cell door during the night, when I would be in a faint—because I felt very weak from the loss of blood—I took out my note-book and wrote in it, “If I am found dead here to-morrow, I want it known I am murdered by Captain McLaughlin and his crowd.” I hid that in my stocking, that piece of bloody paper. I kept it for a long time, and I tried to find it to-day, but could not put my hands on it, and am very sorry I cannot put my hands on it.
Q. Were you persecuted any more that night?
A. I was persecuted in a way that they would not give me any water.
Q. Did you call for water?
A. Yes, and it was denied me; everything was denied me. From loss of blood and all that I became unconscious; and about five o’clock in the morning, when I could get a little rest, I was routed out from my bed and told to get ready; then I asked the privilege of getting something to brush off my clothes and my shoes, and after paying a little for it, I did get it; and I was taken out by these two same men that had arrested me. Now, before I proceed any further, will you let me go back a little?
Q. Yes.
A. All the five hours I was kept a prisoner at police headquarters with Inspector Williams standing over me, I might say, with drawn baton, two detectives were up at my house, which shows this was a put-up job and conspiracy to degrade me; from quarter after seven or half-past seven, from the time this happened two detectives were up at my house bullying my wife and scaring her to death, and all this time they knew I was down in the hands of Inspector Williams. Inspector Williams told me this with great glee as I was about to be taken away. I said, “You must have no heart.” I said, “I don’t mind the persecution I have been subjected to, but I don’t wish to have that inflicted on my wife and children; they will go crazy. I beg you to telephone the station-house, and have those brutes taken out of my house;” and he did, but they were there up to midnight, and all these five hours in my house bullying my wife and sending my children into hysterics.
A. Yes, sir. I begged then of the men that they would allow me to buy a pair of glasses more or less to conceal my lacerated face. I was in a terrible state. They refused until I got very near the place and I said, “I will make trouble for somebody if I go in this condition;” and they let me buy a large pair of blue goggles, and I sent for Counsellor Charles T. Duffy, who is at present justice of the peace in Long Island City, and I told him what happened to me, and he said, “These people are too much for me; I will go and get somebody to assist you. What do you think of Mr. Hummel?” I said, “Do what you like about it; have Mr. Hummel.” I paid him a retainer fee, and he said, “These are infernal brutes, and we ought to break them.” I said, “I am prepared to do what you tell me.” When the case was brought up it was laughed out of Court; there was no case for me or my men. They first had me to get bondsmen before the thing was tried; but there was no case tried—there was no case to try. Hummel said, “What have you against this man; he has not destroyed any documents.”—Vol. iv., p. 4,520.
Mr. Costello was taken home, and laid up in bed for five days. His face had to be sewn up. The doctor, who, by-the-bye, was Mr. Croker’s brother-in-law, certified that the injury to the face had been produced by brass knuckles, the cut being too severe to have been produced by the simple fist. He was threatened with erysipelas, but, fortunately, recovered.
I should have mentioned that while Mr. Costello was being taken into the station-house all bloody and muddy, his book-keeper came to obtain access to him. Captain McLaughlin stopped him, pulled open his overcoat, and searched his pockets.
“What is this for?” cried Stanley. The Captain made no answer, but continued the search. “What does this mean?” angrily asked Stanley.
“You know d—— well what it means,” was the reply.
“I do not understand you,” said Stanley. “What is it for?”
“Open the door,” said the Captain to an orderly, “open the door.” The orderly opened the door. “Now,” said the Captain, “get the Hell out of here!” and the book-keeper was promptly forced right out, and left on the sidewalk to reflect upon the irony of events which had subjected the author of “Our Police Protectors” to such treatment.
It is a very pretty story, and one which naturally provokes the inquiry as to how such things could be practised with impunity. Mr. Costello himself said that if there had not been so much Celtic blood in his veins there would have been several funerals in New York, for he was not only a Celtic Irishman but a Catholic Irishman, and murder was repugnant both to his religion and to his nature. Other redress than that which could be gained by your own right hand it was impossible to obtain, for it was this witness who made the famous remark previously quoted. Senator O’Connor asked him, “Did you ever take any proceedings against these men?” and the witness replied, “I never did, sir. It is no use going to law with the devil and court and hell!”
He probably thought himself lucky that he had escaped without permanent disfigurement. One Thomas J. Standant was less
In another case a witness was produced who could hardly speak intelligibly. On Thanksgiving morning he had bought a couple of crabs from an oyster stand, the owner of which had apparently paid blackmail, and was therefore under the protection of the police. When the policeman on the beat heard the altercation between the customer and the protected oyster stand keeper he walked up to the witness and, without a word, delivered a smashing blow upon his mouth. Two front teeth were splintered up into the gum, inflicting so severe an injury that it was two days before the swelling abated sufficiently for the dentist to be able to cut away the teeth, and four days before the roots could be touched. The dentist declared that the officer must have had something in his hand, either brass knuckles or some other weapon of that kind, to splinter the teeth so badly. But in all those cases the fist seems to have been the favourite weapon.
The only other case that I shall refer to is that in which the policeman used his club. There was a fight in the hallway of a house, and one Frank Angelo had stepped in to try to part the combatants. Up came a policeman of the name of Zimmerman, who rushed into the midst of the mÊlÉe, and striking Angelo heavily with his club, knocked his eye out. The eye hung down on the man’s cheek, and had to be subsequently removed. Angelo, all bloody, with his eye in this ghastly position, was arrested by his assailant, and taken to the police-court. The poor fellow, not knowing what would befall him, sent for a lawyer, who first of all charged him £10 for his professional services, and then said that the only way for him to get out of the scrape was to pay the officer £5, which he accordingly did. The judge asked him no question, and discharged the case. It is needless to say that Angelo brought no action against the policeman. There was no justice, he said, in New York. Justice there was indeed—hideous, diabolical, devil’s justice. It is bad enough to have your eye knocked out with a policeman’s club in the street when you are endeavouring to prevent a fight, but it is worse to have to pay that policeman £5 for having performed that operation, and an additional £10 to a lawyer to induce the ruffian to accept the money.
The members of the police force of this city commit offences of the grade of felony and misdemeanour, and they have gone for years unpunished and unwhipped for those offences, which, if committed by citizens, would have resulted in fact in sentence to State’s prison, and to the penitentiary. In other words, the operation of the law of this State, so far as it applies to the citizens of New York, and to all persons as it should, stops short of the police force. Felonious assaults have been committed upon citizens by policemen, which if committed by a civilian would result possibly in four or five years’ sentence in Sing Sing, and all the policeman need apprehend is, a charge against him, with a possible conviction finding him guilty of assault, and a fine, for instance, of ten days’ pay. A police officer of this city can brain a citizen with a club, and he may reasonably expect that all the penalty he will have to pay for that is about the sum of thirty dollars, while an ordinary citizen, if he commits that offence, is almost certain to go to State’s prison.—Vol. iii., p. 2,826.
This is not a case of one law for the rich and another for the poor. It is one law for the citizen and none at all for the policeman.
Some of the evidence taken as to the action of the police supplied the Committee with very sensational episodes. One witness, for instance, a truckman, of the name of Lucas, appeared before them with his head in a frightful state of disfigurement. The man had been drunk, and gone to sleep on a doorstep, when he was robbed of four dollars. On waking up, finding that he had lost the money, he asked a policeman if he could find out anything as to who had robbed him. This seemed to offend the officer, for he struck Lucas in the face, knocked him down in the gutter, and then standing over him, belaboured him unmercifully with his club on his face and head. “For God’s sake!” cried the man, “do not kill me altogether.” A young man, a stranger, coming past, seeing the outrageous nature of the assault, asked the policeman to stop. Thereupon another policeman in citizen’s clothes ran up, knocked him down, jumped on him, and then marched Lucas and the stranger off to the police-station. The blood running down Lucas’s neck, drenched his shirt, and one of the picturesque incidents of the inquiry was the production of the bloody shirt before the senators. The man was bleeding so freely that the sergeant of the police-station had to sew up the top of his head. It took twenty-seven stitches to sew up the wound opened by the policeman’s club. When he got into the police-station he was again assaulted, and had he not run for the sergeant, he was of the opinion that he would have been killed altogether. The next morning
The Committee summed up the whole case in the following sentences:—
It was proven by a stream of witnesses who poured continuously into the sessions of the committee, that many of the members of the force, and even superior officers, have abused the resources of physical power which have been provided for them and their use only in cases of necessity in the making of arrests and the restraint of disorder, to gratify personal spite and brutal instincts, and to reduce their victims to a condition of servility....
Besides this exhibit of convicted clubbers, still wearing the uniform of the force, there was a stream of victims of police brutality who testified before your committee. The eye of one man, pushed out by a patrolman’s club, hung on his cheek. Others were brought before the committee, fresh from their punishment, covered with blood and bruises, and in some cases battered out of recognition. Witnesses testified to severe assaults upon them while under arrest in the station-houses. The line of testimony might have been endlessly pursued by your committee.... We emphasise this finding of brutality because it affects every citizen whatever his condition, because it shows an invasion of constitutional liberty by one of the departments of government whose supreme duty it is to enforce the law, and because it establishes a condition of affairs gravely imperilling the safety and the welfare of the people in their daily avocations.—Vol. i., p. 31.
INSPECTOR WILLIAMS, CHIEF CLUBBER OF THE FORCE.
AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY’S DEPÔT.
(New York is a city whose Buildings are as colossal as the Corruption of its Police.)
KING MCNALLY AND HIS POLICE.
The Confidence Trick is perhaps the form of crime that would most naturally commend itself to the police banditti of New York. For the force was engaged all day long in playing a gigantic Confidence Trick upon the citizens. The gold brick which the swindlers sold to the credulous countryman was hardly more mythical than the enforcement of the law which was supposed to be secured by the organisation of the City police. It is therefore not surprising to learn that the police were hand-and-glove with the gang of swindlers which, under King McNally, carried on the Green Goods trade in the City of New York. It was one of the most lucrative of all the crimes which were carried on under police protection, and one of the safest. Few of all the stories told before the Lexow Committee display quite so unblushing a co-partnership between the law-breakers and the law officers as was revealed in this Green Goods swindle. The rascality of the rogues was so audacious that it provokes a laugh. For it is possible to carry impudence to a point where indignation is momentarily submerged by the sense of the ludicrous. Sheer amazement at the existence of such preposterous villains begets such a sense of its absurdity, that any censure seems as much out of place as in the nonsense tales of the nursery. Yet when the grotesque impression subsides, it is difficult to find terms strong enough to characterise this systematic misuse of the powers created for the protection of life and property and the due observance of the law for the purpose of facilitating fraud and of aiding and abetting and protecting swindling.
The evidence taken before the Lexow Committee contains a mass of materials for an exhaustive description of the criminals of New York, and the various methods by which in 1894 they preyed upon the public; but the person who undertakes the compilation of such a work is not to be envied. The Report of the Committee is a very striking illustration of the wickedness of issuing books without indexes. Here we have five bulky volumes of evidence without even an index of the names of witnesses. There is no subject-index of any kind. Witnesses are called and recalled in bewildering confusion. Nevertheless, even the most cursory perusal of the evidence
Green Goods are forged or counterfeit bank notes. The pretence is either that there has been an over-issue of certain denominations of paper money by the Treasury, or that the plates have been stolen from the Government, and by this means it is possible to offer to sell ten dollars for one.
McNally, the King of the Green Goods men, employed at times a staff of thirty-five men. He began his career some twenty years ago as a bully who was kept by a prostitute. He swindled out of all her money a mistress of his who kept a restaurant, and started an Opium Joint. He then embarked in the Green Goods business, kept his carriage, and made his fortune.
The men who work this Confidence Trick seem to have carried their organised system of swindling to a very high pitch of perfection. Their master-stroke, however, was the admission of the police to a working partnership, which enabled them not merely to carry on their swindling with impunity, but also stood them in good stead whenever a victim had to be bullied and driven out of the city. King McNally was, unfortunately, not available for examination, owing to his precipitate departure for foreign parts as soon as the inquiry began. The Committee, however, was able to secure evidence which brought out very clearly the main lines of their operations.
The chief witness was one William Applegate, whose sister accompanied McNally in his hurried departure to Paris. Applegate had been employed for three years as one of the gang. He began when nineteen as a circular-folder, for which he received 8s. a week. These formed the foundation of the Green Goods business. A Green Goods gang in full operation is constituted as follows:—
(1) The Backer or Capitalist, who supplies the bank roll—a roll of 10,000 genuine dollar bills, which are shown to the victim. He receives fifty per cent., out of which he pays the police, and so guarantees the protection of the gang.
(2) The Writer, who addresses the wrappers in which the circulars, bogus newspaper-cuttings, etc., are enclosed. He receives the other fifty per cent., out of which he has to pay the percentage due to the rest of the gang.
(3) The Bunco Steerer, who is sent to meet the victim at some hotel, fifty to a hundred miles distant from the city. He is the messenger who gives the victim the pass-word, and then leads him to the Joint or den where the swindle is completed. He receives five per cent. of the plunder.
(4) The Old Man, a respectable-looking old gentleman, who says nothing, but who sits solemnly in the Joint when the “beat” is being carried through. He receives five dollars.
(6) The Ringer, a confederate behind the partition, who dexterously replaces the good money shown in the bank roll by the bundles of bogus notes. His fee is five dollars.
(7) The Tailer, who remains on guard at the railway station, personating a policeman, for the purpose of bullying any victim who discovers he has been swindled, and returns to try to recover his money. This gentleman is also paid five dollars a victim.
With this staff, and the protection of the police, the Green Goods business can be carried on very successfully. McNally used to take as much as £1,600 in a single day. Fortunes of £40,000 were accumulated by the leading backers, although McNally’s pile was not estimated at more than £20,000.
The first step is the obtaining of directories and the arranging for the despatch of circulars. The circulars were of the familiar kind, printed as if typewritten, and addressed by a staff of writers, of whom McNally had eight or ten kept constantly at work. Enclosed in the envelope with the circular were slips printed as if they were cut out of newspapers, the same with intent to deceive, the slip being carefully written by Mr. McNally, or some member of his gang, for the purpose of giving the reader to understand that the offer of the circular was bon fide and reliable. These were sent out by thousands, the printer executing orders for 200,000 sets at a time. A slip was also included giving the address to which a telegram should be sent, in order to secure the advantageous offer made to the victim by the circular. These addresses were usually vacant lots in the city, but arrangements were made by bribing the officials of the telegraph company to hold all telegrams sent to such fictitious addresses until called for.
The business was carried on a kind of mutual partnership basis. It was worked somewhat in this fashion. A writer would send out 10,000 circulars or more a day. One, or perhaps two, of those would hook a victim, who would telegraph, making an application for the money offered him at such tempting terms. This victim would belong to the writer of the circular by which he had been caught. Having thus hooked a victim, he had to be landed, and for this purpose he had to be brought to town and personally conducted by a bunco steerer to the den or joints where three confederates fooled the victim to the top of his bent, and usually succeeded in fleecing him by one form or another of the confidence trick.
The victim, who was known as a “Come On” or as a “Guy,” was swindled by a variety of methods. One favourite plan was to undertake to sell the credulous rustic 10,000 dollars for 650 dollars. For less than 650 dollars he was told he could not have the “State rights.” The monopoly for his own State was promised
Another method of swindling was thus described by the witness Applegate when under examination by Mr. Goff:—
Q. I hand you two tin boxes; do you recognise those as belonging to McNally?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Were those boxes used in his business?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Here is a third one, and a fourth one; what were those four boxes used for?
A. They would put the money in one box for the man, in a box like that, and that would be a deal of from about 300 dollars to 500 dollars; they would put the money in this box and it would be in front of the victim, and in the meantime a duplicate box would be behind the partition, and in the duplicate box there would be a brick and some paper, and they would put the money in this box here on the desk and lock it up before the victim; it would be on the back of the desk like that, and then Billy Vosburgh would say, “Get that book,” and with that they would lift up the desk and that would hide the box from the victim, and then Walter McNally, who did the ringing, would open his trap door and take this box in and put the other box out; it would all be done in a second.
Q. I will now hand you this fifth box; what is that used for?
A. That was used for the bank roll.
Q. What is there—is there a false lid to that?
A. No; there is one, yes.
Q. How was the bank roll brought into play there; explain about that?
A. The bank roll would be laid right in there, 8,200 dollars; it would be laid there. There was supposed to be 8,200 dollars done up in packages, with three elastics around them.
Q. Now, I hand you this book, and ask you if those were the packages there were exchanged for the genuine packages?
A. Yes, sir; these were, as we called them, the dummies.
Q. Explain how they were operated?
A. You see this is a package supposed to be of 5 dollar bills. There would be a good one on the top, and a good one on the bottom, and here would lay the same package of genuine money, and Walter would count out, say, 200 dollars in 5 dollar bills, which would be so much, and he would say, to save time, “We will measure the packages together, and, instead of counting each and every bill, we will put the packages together,” and the victim would think there was the same amount of money in each one, and then, through sleight-of-hand, he would put these in the box, and the good money on top; and if the victim wanted to see the packages again he would show them, and the one on top would be good money; and if the victim is a hard victim, he might want to take the money with him, and then Walter would shift these packages, and, therefore, he got about 60 dollars for 500 dollars or 1,000 dollars.
Q. And the victim would get those packages that we now exhibit, instead of the packages containing the good money that he has seen?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. There were many of those in use, were there not?
A. Yes, sir, we would never take the elastics off these; we would just take the elastics off the good money.
Q. Here is a box with a heavy weight; see what is in this box?
A. I guess that is a brick (witness takes out a brick wrapped up in paper); that is what he would get for his 650 dollars; for a 300 dollar deal he would get half a brick; for 10,000 dollars it would have to be heavier than for a less amount.—Vol. iii., pp. 2,575-6.
In connection with McNally’s gang there was an Art Gallery fitted up adjoining a saloon used sometimes as McNally’s
Q. Now, proceed and describe the operations of the carriage?
A. Well, previous to the steerer and the guy coming to the carriage, there would be a satchel put there, a little red satchel.
Q. In the carriage?
A. In the carriage, with a brick and paper in it; there would also be two or three satchels without anything in it on the seat of the carriage. Walter Haines would get in with the guy. Walter Haines would have the money in the bag, the bank roll, and he would put the money in the satchel, a duplicate satchel to the one that had the brick in it; he would put the money in the satchel, and after the guy had paid Haines his money so—we never received theirs before we gave them ours, and after he made the deal and everything was all right, Haines would say, “I will go to the depÔt,” and the steerer would grab the satchel and run out, and Walter Haines would slip the money in the cab, and Haines would say, “The steerer will go with you,” and he would go away with the steerer.
Q. Were there any cases in which they discovered the fraud before they left the State?
A. No, we worked kind of snug; when we were working the carriage racket we worked a little on the snug.
Q. What is that?
A. We did not have the protection we ought to have had, and the steerer then would have to go with the guy and keep the satchel and see the guy on the train, and, after he got on the train, he didn’t care a darn where he went.
Q. And he did not have the facilities as in the turning joint?
A. No, sir; we would not give him the satchel until he got on the train, and would say, “We will give you this at the proper time and place.”
Q. Weren’t you in the habit of giving to the guy keys?
A. No; we generally threw the key away and told him to cut it open; not with the satchel; with the box we gave him keys.
Q. Was there any design in giving the keys with the box?
A. We never gave him the key which fitted the box.
Q. So when they got on the railroad——
A. When a guy gets a box like that there will be some combination on it, and he will get the wrong key, and he don’t know how to get out of it.
Q. And you always made sure to give him a key that would not open the box?
A. Yes, sir; the reason of that is that we gave him a key that fits the box with the money in, and that would not fit the box that had the brick in.—Vol. iii., pp. 2,613-5.
There were many ways of swindling the unfortunate guy. When once they are hooked, they can be played with to almost any extent. In this, as in higher regions, the saying holds good—
Faith, fanatic faith, once wedded fast
To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last.
A guy will pay his money down and expect the notes to be sent to his order. When they fail to turn up, he will come back and buy some more, which are to be expressed to him. When they do not
The need for great secrecy and the importance of getting a long way off the city before opening the box do not seem unreasonable to a man who knows that he is engaged in a more or less fraudulent transaction. It is the knowledge of the guy that he is doing a more or less crooked business which enables the gang to plunder him with such impunity.
Some such methods are probably familiar to the police of all the cities in the world, but that which was peculiar to New York was the arrangement made for carrying on this business, not merely with the cognizance of, but with the active co-operation of the police. This partnership was so close that in McNally’s case all the business was carried on in conjunction with a police captain of the name of Meakin, who had as his agent at headquarters a detective of the name of Hanley. It is difficult to repress a smile on reading, at the very opening of Applegate’s evidence, how things were worked.
Every now and then, when the newspapers made too much fuss concerning the scandals of the Police Department, the authorities would order what is known as a “general shake-up”—i.e., the captains would be shifted all round, the assumption being that a new broom would sweep clean, and that by changing the captains from one precinct to another the abuses that had created any fuss would be rectified. Unfortunately the whole system of blackmail and corruption was so elaborately organised that the shifting of the captains made no change. Each newcomer succeeded to the business, and carried on the collection of blackmail without losing a single day. “Business carried on as usual during alterations” might have been posted up over every police-station in New York; but in the case of Green Goods men, their business was too profitable to be lost by the captain who had once got hold of it. The consequence was that, when the shake-up took place, and Captain Meakin was transferred from the “down-town precinct” to Harlem at the other end of the island, he carried all the Green Goods men with him up to his new station. As soon as the order was given that the shake-up was to be enforced, Captain Meakin sent word to McNally that he must follow him to Harlem. McNally thereupon told all his writers, Bunco steerers and Turners that they must pack up their traps, and follow the Captain to the precinct to which he had been transferred. The notice was short, and for a moment it seemed as if the smooth course of the Green Goods business would be interfered with, for
The saloon in which the confidence trick was played, and the room in which the victim was relieved of his money, was known as the “Joint,” or the place where they “beat the victim.” The first thing necessary was, therefore, to find out a saloon that would be available for the purposes of the gang. Captain Meakin was a man of resource. He and his wardman met McNally at a drug store, and arranged with a saloon-keeper of the name of Hawkins that the joint should be opened in his saloon. The arrangement made with Hawkins was that he should have a sovereign for every man that was fleeced at his place.
Very little time was lost in bundling the boxes, with the bricks and all the other paraphernalia of the craft, into an express waggon. The King drove up in his carriage with the bank-roll and his liveried coachman, while the Turners followed by the Elevated Railway. As soon as the arrangement was fixed up with the King and the Captain and the Saloon-keeper, the signal was given, and the victims, who were planted at various saloons in the neighbourhood by the Bunco steerers waiting until the Police Captain and the King had fixed up arrangements as to the joint, were brought down and fleeced. Thus, without the loss of a single day the business was transferred, and was running merrily under the protecting Ægis of Captain Meakin and his police.
For four months this went on, until at last the scandal became so great that the Police Commissioners received representations from the inhabitants, and it became evident that the Hawkins saloon would no longer serve as headquarters. A friendly communication was sent to the thieves by Detective Charlton. He told them that they would have to quit, but at the same time he obligingly suggested that the saloon of a man named Day in the immediate neighbourhood would be quite as convenient, and would serve equally well as a place for “beating” their victims. To Day’s saloon, therefore, the Joint was transferred, and business went on for five months, ten or twelve writers being busily employed in sending out circulars, as many as fifteen thousand being sometimes despatched in a single day.
At last an order was issued from headquarters ordering the arrest of all the Green Goods men of New York. This looked serious, but when you have a friend in the force you do not get arrested, excepting as a friendly put-up job. When the order was issued from headquarters, Detective Charlton was sent by Captain Meakin to
If the matter had only stopped here, the case of the Green Goods men would not have differed materially from that of the disorderly houses, which all subsidised the police, and were protected in return. But in the case of these swindlers, who elevated the confidence trick almost to the level of a fine art, there was a further development. If any of the writers were behind in their payments to the King, McNally promptly denounced them to the Captain, and the defaulting writer was as promptly arrested. By this means discipline was enforced in the gang and all bad debts avoided. Again, if any writer refused to follow McNally to the district where he wanted him, or in any other way allowed his personal preferences to interfere with the orders of the King, he was denounced and run in by the obedient, uniformed myrmidons of his majesty.
In order to enforce discipline over the whole of New York City, it was necessary to supplement the arrangement with Captain Meakin by a similar understanding with an officer at the headquarters department. This officer was Charles Hanley. “He was McNally’s right hand man, and any time he got into trouble or his men got into trouble, the first man he sent for was Hanley; and Hanley was always sent for.” He represented the Detective Bureau, and his services were necessary when any unfortunate victim, discovering that he had nothing but a brick in his box, came back to the city and made complaint. A considerable number of the guys, or the victims, never came back, being too thoroughly ashamed of their folly to face an exposure; but a certain proportion did. These “Come-backs,” as they were called, naturally applied to the Detective Bureau at the police headquarters, and there they were taken in hand by McNally’s partner. Applegate explained the working of this system as follows:—
In cases of a come-back of any kind; in case a man has been swindled who has found the brick in the box before he has left New York; and as a rule he would go to the central office and make a holler; Hanley would always seem to be the detective that would get the man in charge; the man would be brought up town to try and identify the people, which he never could do; then we always got the tip
The method, it will be seen, was extremely ingenious. The swindlers had passed forged notes upon their victim. When he made a complaint, he was promptly arrested or driven out of the town by the confederates of the gang in the police for having counterfeit notes in his possession! No wonder things went “nice and easy.” Applegate described one scene which had evidently afforded the gang great amusement. A victim, who had been swindled, and had applied to the police for redress, was handed over in the usual course to Hanley, who took him up town to the saloon where he had been robbed, to see if he could find the Bunco steerer who had inveigled him into the Joint. Applegate himself acted as the go-between on that occasion. He warned the Steerer to keep out of the way, and then asked Hanley to bring the Guy down past the windows of the saloon, where the men who had swindled him could have some fun in watching him as he was trotted about the street on a false scent. By some strange mistake, and despite all warnings, the Steerer ran into the Detective and the Guy; but even this difficulty was overcome, for a few words from the Detective put it all right, and the Steerer went off without being arrested. For his part in that little comedy Hanley got one-half of the money of which the man had been swindled. In this case Hanley’s share of the plunder amounted to £50. The victim was chased out of the town under the threat of arrest and imprisonment for having counterfeit notes in his possession.
“You see,” said the witness, apologetically, “the guy is a guy, and you can do almost anything with him.” It is certainly not difficult, when you have the police to stand in whenever you get into a tight place.
The only terror which seemed to haunt the mind of the Green Goods men was that of being shot down by some sharper who made himself up as a guy in order to possess himself of the bank-roll of genuine money. Appo, a man who spent most of his life in picking pockets when he was at liberty, and in doing time in gaol when he was caught, had a rough experience of the murderous possibilities that the Green Goods man has to face. On one occasion a Tennessee detective made himself up as a country bumpkin. When the critical moment came, he clapped his revolver at the head of Appo, shot out his eye, lodged the bullet in his skull, from which it was never extracted, and made off with all the money at that time on Appo’s person. When examined before the Committee, Appo thus explained the modus operandi by which Green Goods men occasionally got cleaned out and murdered in the bargain. He said:—
... I take a man; I rig him up; I say, “Do you want to make 5,000 dols. or 10,000 dols.?” “Yes, sir.” “Well, you go up to a hotel room, and I will
Another ingenious precaution which was taken by McNally was to have the detectives at the various railway stations surrounding New York in his pay, so that in case any Guy were to discover that he had been swindled, and make a fuss at the station, he could be promptly arrested for holding counterfeit money, and so bullied as to make him thankful to get home without saying more about it. The detective at the Central DepÔt was paid £10 a month for his services.
The facts as they were detailed before the Lexow Committee were proved by such overwhelming evidence that the chief criminal, Captain Meakin, of the police force, was seized with an illness which rendered it impossible for him to appear in the witness-box. Perjury to an unlimited extent was familiar enough to the police captains, but the evidence about the Green Goods gang was too strong even for a police captain to brazen it out. So it came to pass that Captain Meakin was too dangerously ill during the sitting of the Committee for his evidence to be taken even at his own bedside.
The Lexow Committee reported on the subject as follows:—
It appears conclusively that a heavy traffic of this kind has been systematically carried on by these swindlers, who, in exchange for protection, shared a large part of their ill-gotten gains with the police.... The evidence indicated that the first step in the initiation of business of this character was to establish relations with the captain of the precinct in which the work was carried on.
It appears, moreover, that men notoriously engaged in the swindling or confidence business had their headquarters in the city, known to the police, where they might be ordinarily found, and that those who were receiving protection plied their trade unmolested, while others, who had not been fortunate enough to establish relations with the police, or those who intruded upon districts not assigned to them, would be warned off and in case of failure to obey would be summarily dealt with.—Vol. i., p. 39.
Strange and incredible though it may appear that the police should actually join hands with the criminals of the type of the Green Goods gang, it was entirely in keeping with the principles which had been elaborated into a system in dealing with every form of robbery.
The Lexow Committee reported:—
It has been conclusively shown that an understanding existed between headquarters’ detectives, pawnbrokers and thieves, by which stolen property may be promptly recovered by the owner on condition that he repay the pawnbroker the amount advanced on the stolen property. In almost every instance it also appears that the detective, acting between the owner and the pawnbroker, receives substantial gratuities from the owner of the property for the work done in his official capacity.—Vol. i., p. 40.
By Mr. Goff: And after the stranger is scared off, the wardman goes to the house, and isn’t it a rule that the money he is robbed of is divided with the police?
A. I have heard it ever since I have been round; that is about nine years.
Q. Where do you come in when you steal 180 dols.; where does your profit come in?
A. If the man went away quietly, the wardman would have received 90 dols. of the 180 dols., and I would have got 45 dols. out of the remaining half.
Q. And the madam for 45 dols.?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And the wardman gets, in this case, fifty per cent. of the loot?
A. Yes, sir, that is so.—Vol. i., p. 3,620.
By Chairman Lexow: How many houses have you been into to which the rule as to payment of money and the division of property applies?
A. Every one that ever I entered.
Q. How many?
A. About two dozen, I guess.—Vol. i., p. 3,622.
By Senator Bradley: What you say is a general custom?
A. A common occurrence.
Q. Is that tariff fixed ... the payment of fifty per cent. to the wardman, or the policeman, in case of panel theft?
A. Yes.
Q. That he should get one-half?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And that applies to all these twenty-four houses you speak of?
A. Yes, sir, every house I went into of that kind.—Vol. i., p. 3,623.
Excepting in the most barbarous regions of Turkey, where Pashas are sometimes suspected and accused of winking at the raids of bandits in consideration of a share of the spoil, has there ever been such a story as this?
The principle of territorial jurisdiction is so deeply rooted in the American mind that the New York police seem to have acted upon it in all their dealings with the criminals whom they shepherded. For instance, they appear to have parcelled Broadway into blocks, allotting each block to a different thief, who, of course, paid quit rent
This reverent regard for territorial landmarks is very touching. The New York police appear to have been as much opposed to poaching as are English gamekeepers.
DELMONICO’S.
THE PANTATA OF THE POLICY SHOP AND POOL-ROOM.
Among its other achievements, the Lexow Committee enriched the vocabulary of our language by the word Pantata. It is a mysterious word of Bohemian origin. What it precisely meant none of the witnesses could explain. It had no exact equivalent in the English language, but there was no difficulty about understanding how it was applied in New York. Pantata, in its origin, the interpreters explain, meant father-in-law. The term was used in households to describe your wife’s father, but it was also held to be the equivalent of Old Man; and one witness declared that in Bohemia, the country from which the word was exported, it is frequently applied to the Emperor-King of Austria-Hungary, Francis Joseph, who is said to be Pantata to his Royal Bohemians.
Whatever may be the original significance of the term, it was applied by the Bohemian Liquor Dealers’ Association to the Police Captain of the precinct in which they did their business. He was their Pantata, and from this beginning the term came to be used as a generic title for the police official, who was on terms of family relationship with the vicious and criminal class under his jurisdiction. The New York police captain was in a special sense the father-in-law, or Father-in-the-Law, to a very numerous progeny of disreputable people. Instead of being a terror to evildoers, he became their Pantata, who looked after them with semi-paternal care, and generally acted as their Father-in-the-Law, regarding it indeed as his chief function to relax the law in their behalf in return, of course, for consideration received. So long as his dues were paid there was nothing that Pantata would not do. He could, for instance, and did, practically suspend the legislation for Sunday closing. But that is a mere trifle.
It was proved by the evidence of one witness that the Pantata police did not hesitate to issue irregular licences of their own for the keeping of unlicensed saloons, or shebeens, as we would say.
One witness, Anna Newstatel, held a licence once down to the year 1890. When running a full licensed saloon she paid five dollars a month to the police. After 1890 her licence was revoked, but in consideration of her having been a good paying subject, the police told her that she might go on selling all kinds of liquor without a
Q. What was your licence revoked for?
A. For selling liquor on a beer licence.
Q. And after your licence was revoked the police allowed you to sell everything without a licence?
A. After I paid them 200 dollars at the start and then 50 dollars a month.
Q. Now did you pay 200 dollars at the start?
A. I said I couldn’t afford to do that—I would sooner rent out the saloon; and they said if I rent out the saloon as a store, and I should live private upstairs and carry on my saloon business upstairs for half of the amount—for 100 dollars to start, and 25 dollars every month—and I should try that, and they will help me and see that I shall have customers enough to do business.
Q. In other words, they told you you must go upstairs?
Chairman Lexow: That is to say, they would reduce the amount one-half if she would do that?
Q. You sold on Sunday as well as on weekdays?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Now, about the custom that you had. Did the detectives provide you with the custom; did they give you custom?
A. No, they did not; they came in sometimes themselves and like this, only they never paid when they came in; only they allowed me to keep open any hour and all the time.—Vol. v., p. 4,592.
This claim to be supplied with drink whenever they felt they wanted a glass appears to have been very generally recognised by the liquor dealers of New York. Sometimes the police would pretend that they would pay, but, as a matter of fact, the principle of free drinks seems to have been very widely recognised.
In the regular saloons there was comparatively little necessity for invoking the assistance of the benevolent Pantata. He had a much wider field in dealing with the gaming houses, which flourished in every precinct in New York. According to the law, no gaming house was allowed to run. Yet, by permission of the police, there were about a thousand of them running all the time the Lexow Committee was sitting. I had better quote here the extract from the Lexow Committee’s Report:—
The evidence is conclusive that with reference to this class of vice the police occupied substantially the same position as they did with respect to disorderly houses.
It was proven even that while the Committee was actually in session more than six hundred policy shops were in active operation in the city, running openly, and from day to day policy slips were secured in some shops in different portions of the city by detectives in the employ of your Committee.
Qualified witnesses swore that the general average of open shops was about one thousand. The testimony disclosed the remarkable fact that not only were these violators of the law protected by the police in consideration of a fixed sum of 15 dollars a month per shop, but that the area of operation of each “king” was so clearly understood and carefully guarded, that any intruder would be certified to the police, and would either be compelled to refrain from competition with a licensed “policy king,” or else would be arrested and condign punishment would be visited upon him.
It seems clear from the evidence that this division of territory was largely for the benefit of the police, insuring a more rapid and easier collection of the tribute to be paid the “policy king” to whom a particular district had been assigned, paying
Pool-rooms flourished all over the city in the same way. Large sums were extorted from their proprietors by the police, and they were permitted to remain unmolested, openly and publicly running, until a private citizen, Richard Croker, after a conference with a police commissioner, enforced their cessation practically in a single day. This is one of the most remarkable circumstances testified to before your Committee. And yet nothing was done or attempted to be done until the private citizen aforesaid commanded that they be closed, and they were closed, and closed without criminal prosecution.
It appeared subsequently in evidence that these pool-rooms, while running, had been assessed and had paid for police protection as high as 300 dollars a month.—Vol. i., p. 3,637.
We have too much betting in England—betting carried on with the active co-operation of the press—for any English journalist to be able to throw a stone at New York or Chicago, for the extent to which gambling is carried on in policy-shops or pool-rooms. The Turf is the great gaming hell of the Old Country, and nearly every newspaper in the land plays the part of a tout and tempter to those who wish to gamble. In New York, while there is betting enough among certain classes, the masses of the people seem to prefer other forms of risking their money.
A very curious picture is given in the evidence taken by the Lexow Committee of the prevalence of the gaming habit among all classes of the population, especially in the poorer districts. After making one or two ineffectual attempts, I have given up all hope of understanding, much less of explaining, the precise way in which gambling goes on in pool-rooms. From the explanations of the witness, the uninitiated outsider can only discern vaguely that policy is much more akin to the Italian lottery system than anything which prevails in this country. Any sum can be staked, from one cent upwards. The gambler chooses a number or concatenation of numbers. What is called a “saddle” consists of two sets of numbers, while a “gig” is composed of three. There are many kinds of “gigs,” which were duly described for the edification of the Committee, the “police gig” being one of those most in vogue. In the choice of “saddles” or “gigs”—or, in other words, in the selection of numbers on which to put his money—the New York gambler is exactly like a Neapolitan, and in nothing is the resemblance more remarkable than in the respect paid to dreams. Nearly every policeman, it was declared, had a dream book, and according as he dreamed, so he would put his money upon the number indicated by the dream in his pocket oracle. I made a small collection of dream books when I was in Chicago, and came to the conclusion that the dream book was much more constantly consulted in that city than the Old or New Testament. Judging from the evidence before the Committee, dream books are equally in vogue in New York, but any accident or incident would serve to suggest a favourite combination of lucky numbers, which would be in great request until
One of the most painful features of this policy gambling was the extent to which it worked downwards, even to the children. Lads coming from school would beg a cent in order to try their luck. As they could only pay by attracting customers, it was impossible to run a policy shop in secrecy. In less than a couple of days the police were perfectly well aware that a policy shop had been opened, and it was therefore absolutely necessary to secure the police in advance. This seems to have been done on strict business principles, and the partnership between the various kings or satraps, to whom the police farmed out the precinct, appears to have been very harmonious.
Bucket-shop and gambling on the tape on the prices quoted on the Stock Exchange is as common in New York as it is in London; but one ingenious method of improving on the bucket-shop was brought to light in the course of this investigation. The disadvantage of the gambling in bon fide Stock Exchange securities is that they are often sluggish, and do not go up and down with sufficient rapidity to stimulate the excitement of the gambler. In New York a bogus commission agency established a system of gambling which beat the bucket-shop hollow. Instead of waiting for the arrival of genuine prices of real stocks, the genius who ran this commission agency fixed up a tape machine in his office, and before business started in the morning wrote out a series of about five hundred different quotations for stock in purely imaginary companies. When his gamblers had assembled, he turned a handle, and wound off his tape. He made the stocks of course go up and down with the requisite rapidity, and from a gaming point of view it was in every way but one superior to the ordinary betting on the tape. The one exception, however, was a pretty considerable drawback, for the proprietor of the establishment knew in advance what figures would come out, and how the prices would fluctuate. So long, however, as he did not bet himself, this made no difference to those who wanted a flutter.
Into the ramifications of the gambling in New York it is not necessary to follow the Committee in their painstaking investigation. It did not even draw the line at the Chinese quarter; and those who wish to know all about Fantah, and the mysteries of the Button Game, will find their curiosity gratified if they read through the Report. All that need be said is that no form of gambling was carried on at New York which had not the police authorities as its protectors, and the rank and file as its patrons. Under such circumstances, it is hardly to be expected that much progress will be made in suppressing gambling in New York.
The task indeed, as every policeman knows, is one of great difficulty, even when the force is entirely free from any suspicion of
MR. MOSS, HEAD OF THE NEW YORK POLICE.
ST. PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL, NEW YORK.
(Roman Catholic.)
FARMERS-GENERAL OF THE WAGES OF SIN.
If the Police Captain was the Pantata of the Gambler, he was the Farmer-General of the Houses of Ill-fame in his Precinct. His duty, as defined by the law which he had sworn to enforce, was clear. He was bound to close every disorderly house in his jurisdiction. His practice was to let them all run—for a consideration. The Strange Woman, that pathetic and tragic figure in the streets of all great cities, whose house from of old was said to be the Way of Hell, going down into the Chambers of Death, excited in the Police Captain only the sentiment of rapacity. In his eyes she was merely an asset in his farm, and one of the most valuable.
It was when the Lexow Committee approached this part of the investigation that they found the greatest difficulties placed in their way.
During the whole of the inquiry the Police Department preserved an attitude of animosity to the Lexow Committee. This was only natural, considering that the Committee was engaged in bringing to light all the misdeeds of the Department for the last three or four years. The Committee was protected by law, and supported by public opinion; nevertheless, the police eagerly seized every opportunity that was offered them in order to embarrass the Committee’s investigations, by intimidating witnesses, and sometimes by spiriting them away altogether. It was proved that policemen had gone round to the keepers of disorderly houses, and had begged them to refuse to appear, or to refuse to testify, promising as an inducement that, if they would hold their tongues, they should be allowed to run their houses freely without interference from any one. The tune which all the policemen sang was “Wait till the clouds roll by.” The Lexow Committee was but a creature of to-day, while the Police Department was one of the permanent institutions of the city.
“These fellows have got no pull,” said the police. “You lie low for a time, and we will protect you.”
When this argument failed, they resorted to menace, threatening to close up the house, to fling the keepers into gaol, and occasionally, when these threats failed, they resorted to personal violence.
In the course of the inquiry, a man rushed into the session of your Committee, fresh from an assault made upon him by a notorious politician and two policemen, and with fear depicted upon his countenance, threw himself upon the mercy of the Committee and asked its protection, insisting that he knew of no court and of no place where he could in safety go and obtain protection from his persecutors.—Vol. i., pp. 25, 26.
The most distinguished exploit of the police, however, during the whole of the inquiry was the spiriting away of the French Madam, Matilda Hermann, one of the most notable keepers of disorderly houses in the City of New York. When it was known that the Committee was after her, and that Madam, who had been plundered to the bone by the police, was by no means indisposed to “squeal”—to quote the expressive vernacular of the Department—there was a consultation among the police authorities as to what measures should be taken to close her mouth. A considerable number of people in the same way of business had been induced to migrate to Chicago, where they remained waiting until such time as the Committee adjourned, but Madam Hermann was too dangerous a witness. She required special treatment. A purse was made up for her by the police, which, when the subscription closed, amounted to 1,700 dollars. She was then under subpoena, and was expected before the Committee the next day.
At midnight, a police officer in plain clothes came to her house, bundled her into a carriage in such hot haste that she had not time to complete her toilet, and whisked her off no one knew where. For some weeks the police appeared to have triumphed, but after a time the Committee were able to get upon her track. She had been taken first to New Jersey, and then from New Jersey had been railroaded through to Canada. From thence, after moving about from place to place, she had been taken to a Western city, where at last she was run to ground.
When the agents of the Committee found her she expressed no disinclination to return to New York and testify. She had fulfilled her part of the bargain in keeping out of the way as long as she could. Now that she was discovered she was willing to return. In great triumph she was escorted back to the city. In order to prevent any attempt at rescue, an additional staff of men were sent to Philadelphia to meet her. The precaution was timely, for as soon as they arrived at Jersey City a last desperate attempt was made by the police to prevent her evidence being taken.
She was in the custody of the Deputy Serjeant-at-Arms of the Senate, who had a party of resolute men in his train. But notwithstanding this, no sooner had the party arrived in Jersey City than they were set upon by the Jersey police, who treated them with the greatest roughness. They threatened to break their faces, hustled them about, and endeavoured in the mÊlÉe to get Madam Hermann
The sensation which this occasioned can be imagined. Fortunately, the Committee was in session, otherwise there is no knowing whether the daring attempt to seize and remove the witness might not have succeeded. The immediate publicity, however, that was given to the case convinced the police that the game was up. The Chief of the Police and the Police Magistrate refused to lend their aid in thwarting the ends of justice, and the conspirators, led by a lawyer, who was also a senator of the State of New Jersey, drew off their gang, and reluctantly allowed Madam Hermann to be brought to New York. The story reads more like an episode from the Middle Ages than an excerpt from the proceedings of a senatorial investigation in New York State in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
The French Madam, as she was called in the precinct, was evidently regarded by the police as a gold mine. She had three or four houses, with some twenty-four or twenty-five girls, and was doing a flourishing business. She paid the police altogether in the seven years that she was running the sum of over 30,000 dollars, or more than £6,000; i.e., this woman alone yielded the police a revenue of nearly £1,000 a year. Part of this money, it should be said, went to the lawyers, who shared it with the police. Every time she was raided the policeman insisted upon her taking a lawyer, and told her that if she would take the lawyer of his choice, he would not swear against her. He would swear that he was not sure of her identity. This she did, and she was discharged. Every time she took a lawyer she had to pay from £35 to £80, and the lawyer always told her that he only got part of the money, as the rest of it went to fix her detectives. Her evidence on this point was very emphatic. Whether she paid 200 dollars or 100 dollars, the lawyer only got 50 dollars; the rest went up to the police.
Q. Were you told by the lawyers that that must go up?
A. From the smallest lawyer to the biggest lawyer: every lawyer was the same.
Q. And every lawyer whose name you have mentioned told you that they had to give up to the police part of their fees they got from you?
A. Every one of them.—Vol. iv., p. 4,179.
Mrs. Hermann first went into the business from being employed as a dressmaker for the inmates of disorderly houses. She gradually added house to house, until she had four houses and twenty-five girls. She had to pay the police sometimes as much as £200 initiation fee before opening a house, and then from £60 to £100 per annum as protection money.
In addition to these payments, every policeman in the street received a dollar or two whenever he chose to ask for it. The
Her business was so profitable that she admitted in Court that she had been making between £2,000 and £3,000 a year, of which sum the police and the police lawyers seem to have had a good half. On one occasion, when she had paid £100 to her lawyer to get off with a fine of £20, she was liberated on the Friday and re-opened her house on the Saturday.
Notwithstanding the way in which they fleeced their unfortunate victim, she was still subjected, like all her class, to occasional outbursts of brutality on the part of members of the force.
When Dr. Parkhurst was making his tour of investigation through “the avenues of our municipal Inferno,” the wardman was sent round the district to the keepers of all the disorderly houses to describe Dr. Parkhurst, and to tell them to look out for him in case he appeared at their house. Another experience was when she took a house in West Twenty-third Street to start it as an ordinary boarding-house. She had furnished it, and was trying to let it. Promptly the wardman of the precinct came to her and asked her “whether she did not know the law of the precinct.” “You know very well,” he said, “that you cannot move in here until you see the Captain.” And then this estimable officer did all he could to convince her that it was idle trying to run a decent boarding-house, and she had much better open the house in the regular way. The initiation fee would be £400, £200 down and the rest to stand over until business was good. There was to be a further payment of protection money, amounting to £240 a year. She had not much ready money, whereupon the wardman suggested that she might pawn her diamonds, for, said he, “the Captain is very bad off for money.”
Another very amusing thing which came out in her evidence was the argument used by a detective named Zimmerman to induce her to give him £10. He got a couple of pounds one day, and came back the next, asking for another £2. She objected, but he said, “I will
In the ward in which he lives, the foreign immigrant never comes across any sign of moral right or moral wrong, human or divine justice. He then perceives very soon that, as far as he is concerned, ours is not a government of laws, but a government of “pulls.” When he goes into the only court of justice of which he has any knowledge, he is told he must have a “pull” on the magistrate or he will fare badly. When he opens a liquor-store, he is told he must have a “pull” on the police in order not to be “raided” or arrested for violation of a mysterious something which he hears called “law.” He learns from those of his countrymen who have been here longer than he that, in order to come into possession of this “pull,” he must secure the friendship of the district leader.—North American Review, 1890.
Mrs. Hermann was only one among a number of other Madams who appeared before the Committee, but none succeeded in exciting so much sympathy on the part of the senators. The scandalous way in which the poor woman had been fleeced, and bullied, and ultimately reduced to penury by the very officials to whom she was paying protection money, roused the indignation of the Committee. If the police had protected her in return for their fee, it would have been a different matter, but, as Senator O’Connor remarked, indignantly, in addition to paying the monthly tax, and the initiation fees, raids were got up as an excuse to enable a policeman or a class of criminal lawyers to extort money out of her. Senator Pound remarked that it was the practice to protect such women until they became wealthy, and then squeeze it out of them and leave them destitute. They say that there is “honour among thieves,” but there seems to be none with the policemen who handled Mrs. Hermann.
Another Madam, whose case attracted considerable attention, was one Augusta Thurow, whose misfortunes brought her into intimate relations with Senator Roesch, and led to the appearance of that redoubtable politician in the witness-box. The relations between her and the Captain of the Precinct seem to have been on straight business lines. About a dollar a month for each girl in the house was the regular tariff. When beginning business she went
It was shortly after this visit that Mrs. Thurow made her first acquaintance with a redoubtable policeman of the name of Hoch. Of all the collectors or wardmen who figure in the evidence, Hoch enjoys the most conspicuous notoriety. He was no sooner entrusted with the collections in that district than he insisted upon raising the fees for protection. “A ranch like that,” he said, “is worth seventy-five dollars a month, and here you are only paying twenty-five dollars, and give me only five dollars, although you promised me ten dollars.”
“Hoch,” she replied, “I cannot afford it.”
Q. What did he say when you said you could not afford it?
A. He says, “You have got the house, and why don’t you make money? It is your own fault; and that house is situated in the right spot, and you can do all the business you want and we won’t interfere with you, but you must do better than this.”
Q. Did he make any threats then to pull you, if you did not pay a higher rate?
A. He said, certainly, if I could not do better than that, he would raid the house.—Vol. i., p. 1,055.
Some time after this she was pulled by another detective. She expostulated against the injustice of being run in, although she was paying protection money, whereupon the detective remarked sententiously, “Somehow or other you did not hitch with the Boss.” She went round to the station-house, to find out what was wrong. The Captain told her that she had to find another house in the precinct, and he would protect her, but he would not stand the house in which she was any longer. The cause of this she discovered when she was told that she could not open the new house until she paid an initiation fee of £200 for the Captain, and £50 for Hoch.
It is not quite clear how it was that she got at cross purposes with the police, but one remark made by Hoch would seem to indicate the existence of an incipient jealousy between the police and Tammany Hall.
Augusta Thurow told the Committee that she said to Hoch:—
“I cannot afford to pay more than I am paying; you people treat me so terribly, and I had to go to Roesch, and I had to pay him for his trouble.” He said, “What did you pay him?” I said “Never mind what I paid him.” He says, “That is how it is with you; you people get us angry; you give money to the politicians that belong to the police.”—Vol. i., p. 1,080.
The Chairman asked her to repeat exactly what he said; and she answered, “He said, ‘You give the money to the politicians that ought to go to the police. Are the politicians doing for you, or are we doing for you?’”
The evidence of the two Madams, and of a great number of other keepers of disorderly houses, proved beyond all gainsaying that the police were in partnership with the prostitutes, and that the firstfruits of the harvest of shame were paid to the Captain of the Precinct. The Report of the Lexow Committee thus sums up the result of their investigations:—
The testimony upon this subject, taken as a whole, establishes conclusively the fact that this variety of vice was regularly and systematically licensed by the police of the city. The system had reached such a perfection in detail that the inmates of the several houses were numbered and classified, and a rateable charge placed upon each proprietor in proportion to the number of inmates, or in cases of houses of assignation the number of rooms occupied and the prices charged, reduced to a monthly rate, which was collected within a few days of the first of each month during the year. This was true apparently with reference to all disorderly houses except in the case of a few specially favoured ones. The prices ran from twenty-five to fifty dollars monthly, depending upon the considerations aforesaid, besides fixed sums for the opening of new houses or the resumption of “business” in old or temporarily abandoned houses, and for “initiation fees” designed as an
Thus it appears that transfers of captains, ostensibly made for the purpose of reform and of enforcing the discontinuance of the practice, the prevalence of which seems to have been generally understood, resulted only in the extortion from these criminal places of additional blackmail.
As an evidence of the perfect system to which this traffic has been reduced, your Committee refers to that part of the testimony which shows that in more than one instance the police officials refused to allow keepers of disorderly houses to discontinue their business, threatening them with persecution if they attempted so to do, and substantially expounding the proposition that they were for the purpose of making money to share with the police. As an evidence of the extraordinary conditions to which this system had given rise, it is proper to call your attention to the fact that in a number of cases women, who, as keepers of disorderly houses, had paid thousands of dollars for police protection, had become reduced to the verge of starvation, while those who had exacted blackmail from them were living in luxury in houses that had been furnished out of the earnings of these women, or they were wearing ornaments of jewelry purchased by them; and even the furniture of their houses had been paid for by those whom they had protected in the commission of crime.
The evidence establishes, furthermore, that not only the proprietors of disorderly houses paid for their illegal privileges, but the outcasts of society paid patrolmen on post for permission to solicit on the public highways, dividing their gains with them, and, often, as appears by proof, when brought before the police magistrates and committed to the penitentiary for disorderly conduct in default of bail, they compounded their sentence, and secured bail by paying ten dollars or fifteen dollars to the clerk of the court, or his agents, and were then released again to ply their calling and to become victimised as before.
The evidence furthermore shows that in some of the houses of the character described, visitors were systematically robbed, and when they made complaint at the station-house the man detailed to examine into the charge failed to arrest the perpetrator, and frightened the victim off by threats, and then returned and received his compensation, an equal division of the plunder between the thief and the officer.
The testimony taken as a whole conclusively establishes that the social evil was, and probably still is, fostered and protected by the police of the city, even to the extent of inducing its votaries to continue their illegal practices, maintaining substantially a partnership with them in the traffic, absorbing the largest part of the resulting profit.—Vol. i., pp. 33-36.
The most startling statement in the whole Report is that which is contained in the paragraph just quoted. From this it appears that the police were not merely toll-keepers on the way to hell, but if by any chance the Strange Woman wished to forsake her chamber of death, they thrust her back into it. What was it to them that she might wish to save her soul alive out of the pit? Her duty was to stay there and earn dollars for the police. Were they not the Farmers-General of the Wages of Sin?
Mrs. Blood, a keeper of houses of ill-fame, was compelled by a Police Captain to purchase the house of Madame Perot at some 10,000 dollars above its value, to carry it on as a house of prostitution (vol. v., p. 5,414). Another Captain smashed in the face
MADAM HERMANN.
GANSEVOORT MARKET, NEW YORK.
“ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN.”
“After all,” some readers will say, “what does it matter? These people are all outlaws; they deserve what they get, whatever it is.” But the net of the New York police was exceeding wide, and the mesh was exceeding fine, and no class of the community escaped. As the sun riseth upon the evil and the just, so the blackmailer of the Police Department marked as his prey the honest and virtuous as well as the vicious and criminal. The Lexow Committee report:—
The evidence of blackmail and extortion does not rest alone on the evidence of criminals or persons accused of the commission of crime. It has been abundantly proven that bootblacks, push-cart, and fruit vendors, as well as keepers of soda-water stands, corner grocerymen, sailmakers with flag poles extending a few feet beyond the place which they occupy, boxmakers, provision dealers, wholesale drygoods merchants, and builders, who are compelled at times to use the sidewalk and street, steamboat and steamship companies, who require police service on their docks, those who give public exhibitions, and in fact all persons, and all classes of persons whose business is subject to the observation of the police, or who may be reported as violating ordinances, or who may require the aid of the police, all have to contribute in substantial sums to the vast amounts which flow into the station-houses, and which, after leaving something of the nature of a deposit, then flow on higher. The commerce of the port even is taxed when the functions of the police department touch it, so that the shippers are compelled to submit to exactions in the city of New York that they do not meet with in any other port.—Vol. i., p. 42.
The chief sufferers, of course, were the poor and those who had no helper. They were as much at the mercy of their oppressors as the French people before the Revolution were at the mercy of their nobles. Again and again the senators expressed their amazement that a population so harassed and oppressed did not rise in revolt. Their wrongs certainly were immeasurably greater than those which led to the Tea-party in Boston Harbour and the Declaration of Independence. The chief abuse, the great grievance, might be summed up in one sentence. There was no justice for the poor. A witness of the name of Collins, speaking of the notorious Alderman, Silver Dollar Smith, and the gang by which he reigned supreme on the east side, said:—
Smith has a regular organisation; you couldn’t convict them people neither; you couldn’t convict them people in Court neither. It is an organisation to represent witnesses to condemn people if they have no money. If they have money to give, they are innocent; they perjure themselves if they pay money.—Vol. v., p. 4,894.
The co-ordination of all the departments of city government, under the sway of the dominant Democratic faction in that city, has produced a harmony of action operating so as to render it impossible for oppressed citizens, particularly those in the humbler walks of life, the poor and needy, to obtain redress or relief from the oppression or the tyranny of the police. Their path to justice was completely blocked. It is not credible that the abuses shown to exist have been the creation of but a short time. It is clear from the evidence that abuses have existed for many years back; that they have been constantly increasing through the years, but that they did not reach their full and perfect development until Tammany Hall obtained absolute control of the city government, and under that control the practices which have been shown conclusively before your Committee, were brought into a well regulated and comprehensive system, conducted apparently upon business principles.—Vol. i., p. 37.
The way in which the criminals in uniform and on the judge’s bench acted when by any chance they could punish any one for doing what they themselves were doing all the time has already been remarked in the case of Captain Creedon, who was the only captain suspended by the Police Board during the whole investigation. A more cruel case was that of Karl Werner. This man had tried to bribe a policeman with five dollars, and was promptly arrested. Every difficulty was placed in the way of letting him have bail. At last the Court promised to accept bail, and a professional bondsman offered to give bonds for 100 dollars. His wife raised 95 dollars, and because she could not raise the additional five on the spot, the bondsman confiscated the 95 dollars, and the poor wretch was sent to gaol. The professional bondsman is one of the worst of the harpies who prey upon the unfortunate. Mr. Goff, who reported this incident to the Commission, deplored the impotence to save the victim of the bondsman and the police. “It is,” he said, “simply another of the many instances of the terrible reign of terrorism” (vol. iv., p. 4,225).
Yet at the very time when Werner was being treated so harshly, the police were collecting blackmail by thousands of dollars every week. At first the Committee was incredulous. The Chairman asked once:—
Do you conscientiously believe that, notwithstanding these revelations, notwithstanding the situation that we are brought face to face with now, and what has occurred, there are police officers to-day in this city who accept blackmail?
But he was speedily convinced that the revelations and the terrors of exposure had only reduced the amount of the blackmail levied by reducing the number of those who could be compelled to pay. The evidence of Captain Meakin’s collector, Edward Shalvey, was conclusive on this point. He swore in the witness-box that he had gone on collecting, without making the slightest change, right down to September:—
Q. You collected from these several places, liquor dealers, policy shops, and houses of ill-fame as you did under the previous captain?
A. Yes, sir.
A. They all paid as matter of course.
Q. So that, officer, even beneath the terrible frown of the Lexow Committee, the collections went on just the same?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. The old, old story continued, is that not so?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And while, as a matter of fact, while there were exposures made and being testified to before this Committee since last April or May, right along the collections continued unbroken, did they not?
A. Yes, sir; not to such an extent.
Q. And the captains took the money in the same way?
A. Yes, sir.
Chairman Lexow: It seems incredible!—Vol. i., pp. 5,407-8.
“It is a tough old world, sir,” as the old stager remarked to an enthusiastic young Reformer, “and takes a deal of moving.” It is a very tough old world, and in the whole hemisphere there are few places tougher than New York.
The contributions paid by contractors to Mr. Croker can easily be understood. One Michael Moran, who was engaged in the towboat business, towing garbage under the Street Cleaning Department, made various subscriptions of from £10 to £30 to Tammany Hall. He was asked why he did so. He replied that Mr. Croker was the treasurer of the organisation he was doing some work for. “Tammany Hall, you mean?” asked the Chairman. “Well, I guess so,” replied Moran. “Don’t you know there is a distinction between the City and the organisation known as Tammany Hall?” asked the Chairman. There was no reply. But Moran evidently did not. Tammany Hall was the organisation that stood for the City. For him it was the City, and Moran said to subscribe to Tammany was the natural feeling amongst everybody that worked for the City; “one done it, and I didn’t want to be left behind by anybody else; I thought I would hold my own end up”:—
Q. Did any one suggest to you the advisability of giving up this money?
A. I have had conversations with other men that were in the employ of the City, and we compared notes occasionally to know what was done, and how we could keep ourselves solid.
No political contributions were made by Moran before Tammany came into power. So the Chairman asked:—
Q. How is it then that when the Department changed you felt called upon to send a cheque to Mr. Croker?
A. Well, because I didn’t think I could go on and do the amount of business I had for the City without recognising the people that were in power.
In 1892, when the Presidential Election was on, Moran doubled his subscription. Why was that? He replied:—
I compared notes with somebody in the same business that I was in myself, and found out somebody was paying a little more than I did, and I was afraid somebody in my line of business would put in a little more and I would get left.—Vol. v., pp. 4,912-6.
There came into consideration property interests; we found that if licences were refused for places where business was carried on, that the banks were affected who had loaned money on mortgages, persons who had loaned on mortgages, the banks who had notes of parties in business; the rents went to the support of persons who depended upon them solely; the tax commissioners of the city protested to the Board of Excise against the refusal to license premises, because it reduces the value of property, and for that reason reduces the taxable values, and affected the city in that way; real estate agents and other persons interested, and owners of property came to us and protested at the start that we ought not to refuse to allow a reputable business to be carried on on any premises, because they had been improperly conducted before.—Vol. iv., p. 4,379.
And it came to pass that no sooner was a saloon closed for vice or crime than it was opened again with a fresh licence.
The most mournful and tragic part of all these stories of oppression is that which relates to the treatment of the forlorn and desolate women who have no money with which to bribe the police. For them there is no mercy. The theory of the police, as we have seen, seems to have been that prostitutes existed for the purpose of raising revenue for the force. The women of the streets were the irregular tax-gatherers of the Department. Their vice was not merely connived at, but actively encouraged, so long as the police received their stipulated proportion of the wages of shame.
The women were the bondslaves of the Administration. By law they had no right to ply for hire; but, in consideration of the payment of a regular ransom, they were left free to earn their precarious living.
“This is a phase,” said Mr. Goff, “and a revolting phase, of a custom that exists in New York. I suppose it is the lowest form of oppression and corruption that possibly could be conceived by the human mind; and that is, a tax upon these unfortunate women in the streets at night; for they will not be allowed to walk the streets at night unless they pay so much to the officer, and this has been the custom in many districts of this city for years.”—Vol. iv., p. 3,617.
The tariff varied.[1] On some profitable beats, the licence fee was
In theory, in New York—and, alas, in many other great cities—the right of a woman to freedom from arbitrary arrest without process of trial, and to redress for wrongful arrest, is absolute. In practice it does not exist. Every poor woman who is out after dark is liable to be arrested by a policeman, and to a woman friendless and forlorn there is written over the portals of every police-station, “All hope abandon ye who enter here.” Before the Police Justice, the policeman’s word goes. No corroborative evidence seems to have been demanded in New York. As one worthy testified before the Committee, he made arrests on general principles, and swore that his victim was loitering for purposes of prostitution. It was not necessary that she should commit any overt act, that she should molest any one, or that any citizen should complain of her molestation. It was enough that she should be loitering in the street. The oath of the policeman as to her intent settled her fate. A hurried gabble of words in a crowded court, and she was packed off to gaol.
This is the besetting sin of all attempts to keep the streets clear of immoral women by giving men, more or less immoral themselves, absolute liberty to arrest any woman whom they please to say is loitering for purposes of prostitution. It was with a flush of pride that I came all unawares upon a reference made before the Lexow Committee to the case of Miss Cass, which made the name of Endacott a byword and a reproach in London some dozen years ago. Counsel had not got the story quite right. His version curiously mixed up the Trafalgar Square agitation with the arrest of the dressmaker in Regent Circus, but he had the main idea quite right. Scotland Yard and Mr. Matthews hit the poor girl a foul blow before the incident was ended, but it was a welcome thing to find that their belated vengeance had failed to silence the reverberations of indignation evoked by her scandalous arrest.
Americans and foreigners are often shocked at the state of London streets. Mr. Croker, I remember, expressed himself as being much horrified at the state of Piccadilly at midnight. But better a thousand times have the scandal of our streets than place the liberty of all women at the mercy of the police. The arrests of women fell 50 per cent. in London after the uproar that was made about
Some very scandalous instances of the arbitrary arrest of innocent women, and their consignment to prison on the uncorroborated oath of a policeman, were brought before the Committee. The case of Ettie Kelter is one instance of the kind of thing that follows inevitably from making the policeman practically at once sole accuser and sole judge of the right of a woman to be at large in the streets.
Ettie Kelter was a young married woman of unimpeachable character. She had lived in Albany until August, 1894, when she came to live in New York. One Saturday evening in the following month she went out shopping, and being a stranger in the city she lost her way. She asked a gentleman to direct her to her destination. He did so. She took the wrong turning, so he called after telling her where she should go. She had hardly taken a few steps in the right direction before a young man—a policeman in plain clothes—seized her arm and dragged her off to the police-station. There he gave her in charge, declaring he had known her for years. It was in vain she protested she had never been in the city till the previous month. She was removed under arrest to another police-station, where she was locked up in a cell with a prostitute. She was terrified. She had been dragged through the street at a great rate, and no sooner was she in the cell than a blood-vessel burst. The blood gushed from her nose and mouth, scaring her companion, who thought she was bleeding to death. The blood streamed over the floor of the cell. But all the efforts of her companion failed to attract the attention of the policeman or the matron. She hammered at the door with a tin cup, but no one came. Not until the morning did the officer come to release them from the bloody cell.
STREET SCENE IN NEW YORK: OYSTER ROW.
Pale, weak, distracted, almost fainting, Ettie Kelter was bundled into court in the midst of a crowd of the offscourings of the streets, and brought up before Judge Hogan. She could not hear the charge, nor could she make out what the Judge said, excepting that he said something about soliciting. She did not know what it meant, but she passionately denied that she was anything but a respectable married woman who had only just come to New York. She might as well have held her peace. “Two months’ imprisonment. After that, three hundred dollars bail good behaviour.” This was Sunday morning.
“Now you have a good chance of divorce; I arrested your wife last night, and she has got two months on the Island.”
She tried to write to her husband. But she had only two cents, and they would not give her a sheet of paper for less than five, nor would they send it out for less than fifty cents.
So the poor woman was taken to the Island, and kept there in prison for twenty-four days. At the end of that time her husband placed fifteen dollars in an envelope and handed it to Justice Hogan. His wife was released.
And that kind of infamy was going on all the time. The way in which the unfortunates were driven from pillar to post and treated as mere cattle, to be fleeced and plundered, provoked a very remarkable protest from a Police Captain who had sufficient humanity left in him to see the horror of the system which he had to administer. He was asked whose fault it was that the social evil flourished to such an extent. He said it was the fault of the law:—
Q. The law itself?
A. Yes, sir, if you give the women the same protection by law that you do a mule and a dog you will do away with two-thirds of the houses of prostitution and women of the street.—Vol. i., p. 5,198.
In reply to the Chairman he explained how it was that houses of ill-fame were so much more difficult to deal with than gaming houses. He said:—
Because, Senator, you take the women to court, they are fined a few dollars and turned out on the street again to go and get more money, be re-arrested and pay again; the trouble is that prostitutes are fined.
Q. Wasn’t that done with gamblers as well?
A. Well, you could get their paraphernalia and get them away, but you couldn’t with the women; a prostitute should never be fined and her money taken away from her; those women are not bad women until they are made so; they are dragged off the street and dragged before the court and their money taken away from them, and then drove out on the street again; they are not bad until they are drove to it; now, there were fully 30,000 arrests made from January 1st, 1876, to January 1st, 1878, in that little precinct alone, and I will venture to say there were not 1,500 women arrested, but arrested over and over again.—Vol. v., p. 5,213.
He was still further examined by Senator O’Connor:—
Q. I want to ask you a question or two: what do you mean to say, that if people would give the women the same protection given to mules and horses prostitutes would be fewer?
These words deserve to be written up in letters of gold in every place wherever men discuss the question of abating this plague. It is the verdict of experience upon the habitual resource of the unthinking. “Go to, let us harry our sisters!” is the first and last word of most of those who dream it is possible to promote the cause of morality by outraging the principles of justice.
Of the system in New York there is only one good thing to be said. Bad as it was, it is infinitely better than the hideous abomination of the European system of tolerated houses with their police des moeurs and the compulsory weekly surgical examination of their unhappy inmates. Better a thousand times even the rude, irregular tyrannies of Hoch and Koch, and all the diabolical gang of blackmailers, than elaborate all these infamies into a legalised system stamped with the seal of the approval of the State and enforced by the dread penalties of the law.
Prostitution, everywhere hateful, is at least less intolerable when it is free. When to the horrors of prostitution there is added the legalised slavery of the regulation system, you have indeed the sum of all villainies, and the abomination that maketh desolate is at last set up in the very holy of holies.
BELIAL ON THE JUDGMENT SEAT.
The effect of law, not law written in the Statute Book, but law practically enforced among the people, is to evolve a conscience. Not without deep true meaning was it said of old time “the law is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ.” For it is the law, by its pains and penalties, which educates the individual as to the obligations of morality and the duty of well-doing. But in New York the universal practice of permitting all manner of abominations to run, provided the regular fee was paid to the police, acted as a direct depravation of public morals in familiarising the worst people in the city with a moral standard which was in itself a negation of morality. A woman of the name of Flora Waters, who kept a cafÉ with waitresses in a disreputable quarter, formulated with the utmost precision her belief that she was doing right because her money was taken by the police:—
Q. You thought the business you were doing was not wrong?
A. I thought it was all right when I paid, because they all said the money was going to——
Q. I only want to get her moral idea?
A. Because they told me the wardman did not keep the money and it goes up higher, and it had to be that way, because it was not old in this country, that people that sold liquors could keep waiters; but I thought it was nothing wrong, and everybody told me the money went all through, and everybody knew how it was worked.—Vol. ii., p. 1,363.
Here we have plainly and simply set out the inevitable consequence of any system of regulation. When the police sanction anything, it is no longer wrong to practise it. The police-court is the only Sinai of the Slum.
Bad as the police were proved to be in many instances, they were gentlemen compared with some of the Justices. The fact that such foul creatures were permitted to sit on the judgment seat and deal out sentences to men and women, the worst of whom were better than their judge, is the most melancholy feature of the whole black, bad business. This is the innermost centre of the New York Inferno.
Among the magistrates or police-court justices who figure conspicuously in this hideous drama, one Justice Koch appears pre-eminent. I prefer not to attempt to express the sentiments which
I turned to him, and I said, “Don’t worry yourself; is this what you call justice?” then I said, “May God pity the poor on the east side, for with half-drunken judges on the bench whom shall they look to for justice if God forsakes them; you were half-drunk yesterday when I applied for a summons, and to-day you are so drunk you can’t see out of your eyes.”
Q. He made no effort to punish you for contempt of court?
A. No; there was one of the officers, and he turned and said, “By jee, I wouldn’t take that from anybody.” I said, “If you were in the same boat with him you would have to take it.”
Chairman Lexow: Fine commentary upon the police-court procedure!
The Witness: That is nothing; that is only a drop in the bucket.—Vol. iv., p. 4,484-5.
The police-court judge seems in many cases to have been the pivot on which the whole horrible system of oppression revolved. It would need the pen of a Zola to describe adequately these shambles of the poor. There was the headquarters of the foul crew that flourished on perjury and grew fat upon using the forms of the law to frustrate its aims. It was the paradise of the professional bondsman, the blackmailer, and all the human vermin that thrive upon the misfortunes of their fellows. The worst lawbreakers of the precinct stood inside the rail beside the judge, browbeat and bullied the unfortunate accused, and practised every kind of extortion with impunity. The blackguard lawyer, hand-and-glove with the bandit policeman, found an even more detestable scoundrel than themselves upon the bench. The fiercest invectives of Juvenal would be too weak to do justice to these sinks of iniquity, in which honesty was a byword, innocence a laughing-stock, and the law merely a convenient pretext for levying blackmail.
The Committee was constantly hearing of the abuses connected with these courts, but the inquiry closed before they could be taken seriously in hand. The infamy of the system of bail, which was worked to fill the pockets of the bondsmen, led to frequent comments. On one occasion the Chairman remarked—
That seems to me to be a point that has never been properly accentuated; the commission of the police justice and the general activity of that character of man is a very great item going to show their inefficiency. Blumenthal and Hochstein’s reputation was well known, and their insolvency was an established fact, and yet they went on bonds to the extent of thousands and thousands of dollars, and those bonds were even forfeited and not paid, and the men accepted again.—Vol. v., p. 4,490.
In the Report they say:—
While it was impossible for your Committee to spend much time in considering police courts, enough is shown upon the record to justify the conclusion that a very important reason why the police have been able to carry on and successfully perpetrate
In the examination of a witness named John Collins, Mr. Moss said—
I think that the evils perpetrated by these judges, some of them, are even worse in their results than the evil practised by the police.
Chairman Lexow: It seems to me that any evil of that kind permitted by a judge is ten times worse than that committed by any other individual.
Mr. Moss: Of course, I myself have been before some of these judges for the society which I represent, and know what it was to be sat down upon, and outraged and browbeaten.
Senator Bradley: The witness says to me that the judges eat and drink with these people, and know the character of the people well.—Vol. v., p. 4,897.
The best way of bringing out this aspect of the administration of justice in New York is to set forth, without a word of comment, the substance of the evidence taken concerning the abortionists.
Abortion is not regarded in New York with anything approaching the horror that is excited by the same crime in the Old World. According to the evidence given before the Lexow Committee by an expert there were about two hundred abortionists who advertised every day in New York their readiness to kill the unborn child. It is an irregular profession that has regular practitioners. But, like all the other vices, it is a fertile source of revenue to the police. Dr. Newton Whitehead, a leading practitioner in this recognised system of antenatal infanticide, was called before the Committee and testified as to the way in which he was at once helped and hindered by the police. Whitehead was arrested three times in six weeks. He was never tried on any one of these occasions. But he had to pay in bribing the police and feeing the police lawyer the sum of £565.
The doctor was arrested by a policeman called Frink, who insisted that he should retain for his defence a lawyer of the name of Friend. He was told that Mr. Friend had got a telephone directly from his house to police headquarters, so they informed him at once of all these cases, and he was our lawyer—the police lawyer (vol. iv., p. 4,240). Somewhat reluctantly, Whitehead sent for Friend. He had to pay him 700 dollars. Friend remarked apologetically that he would not insist on so much; but “I don’t get this money myself: I have to turn over 50 per cent. of it to the police.” “Our lawyer,” indeed!
The policeman Frink then took his prisoner off into a small court-room, and told him, “In all these cases, Doctor, we expect to have some money off from them. Pay me 500 dollars and I will guarantee that the case will be dismissed when it is called.” He paid 500 dollars and the case was dismissed, the only evidence offered incriminating, not the doctor, but a midwife, whom, however, they refused to prosecute, as “she did not have any money, and was not worth bothering with.”
Sergeant Frink remarked to me that that was a very nice place; he said he knew the proprietor, and he said, “Doctor, this would be a very nice place if you ever wanted to run a young girl in here, upstairs, it would be all right; nothing would be said.”—Vol. iv., p. 4,235.
A month later the doctor was again arrested. This time it cost him 475 dollars, paid to the lawyer. He was again arrested in the following month, and was held for the Grand Jury:—
Q. There was a regular raid on the abortionists at that time, was there not?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And all the warrants were issued by Judge Koch?
A. All the warrants were issued by Judge Koch. Yes, sir.
Q. Do you know that any have been convicted?
A. No, sir. It was simply a blackmailing scheme.
Q. Blackmailing by whom?
A. I expect by the police.
Q. Who issued the warrant you were arrested on?
A. Judge Koch.
Q. He seems to have had a monopoly on the issuing of warrants of these cases?
A. He might have been making money pretty fast out of it.—Vol. iv., p. 4,246.
“Judge Koch,” Whitehead said, “sat back in his chair, and he said he was going to make an example of me,” and he held me to wait the action to the Grand Jury. He first insisted on 7,500 dollars bail, but after various interviews with the police lawyer and the police sergeant he reduced it to 2,500 dollars.
About a day or two after he had been held for the Grand Jury a lady came to see Whitehead, and said she wanted to be treated for abortion. Whitehead refused to treat her, and said that he had been so badly blackmailed:—
I told her I thought I would not practise any more; I would leave the City of New York if they were going to prosecute me that way for nothing, and she said, “The gentleman who got me in the family way is a very influential man, and he is a judge, and can do a great deal for you, doctor.” I told her I did not think he could, because I had been held for the grand jury. She insisted, and said, “Doctor, who is this man that held you?” I said, “It was Judge Koch;” she said, “Judge Koch?” She said, “My God, he seduced me and got me in the family way five times, and Judge Koch paid the bill.”
Mr. Goff: Proceed, doctor.
A. She left my house, and she went down to Judge Koch at Essex Market, and Judge Koch sent for me.
Q. Sent for you?
A. Yes, sir, by her. I have got lots of proof of that: there is no need for him to wriggle out of it, for he cannot; and I went to see Judge Koch, and he was as sweet as sugar. He told me, “Doctor,” he says, “I am very sorry about this affair; I did not know that my girl had ever been to you,” he said. “I will do all I can for you—everything.” He said there would not anything come of this case. “Don’t you be afraid;” the girl afterwards——
Q. Wait a while; was there any one present?
A. Mr. Friend here.
Q. Was present when Judge Koch said that to you?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Just follow the narrative: how did Mr. Friend come to be there in the room?
Q. Judge Koch said?
A. Yes, sir; and when Friend came in he spoke this matter over, and Friend wanted to know what it was; he said, “It was that Alexander woman I had trouble with before.”—Vol. iv., p. 4,264.
The “Alexander woman” was an actress, apparently Koch’s mistress. Dr. Whitehead promised to perform the operation, but put it off. She went away to another doctor and had the abortion brought about.
“I may say, Mr. Chairman,” said Mr. Goff, in addressing the Committee at the close of Dr. Whitehead’s evidence, “that of all the terrible exposures that have been testified to before this Committee, and that have shocked not only our city but the civilised world, I think the most terrible of all is that which we have heard this afternoon. I think the Committee has reached the climax of the horrible in this city.”
“Satan’s Invisible World Displayed,” indeed!
DR. WHITEHEAD.
WALL STREET AND TRINITY CHURCH.
THE WORST TREASON OF ALL.
It will be remarked, somewhat impatiently I fear, by the reader of this long and dismal series of stories of the way in which the municipal Thugs did their deadly work, But where were the citizens? The good honest citizens, we are told, are always in a majority. They proved that they were able to elect their own City Government. Why did they not do it? What is the use of talking about “the land of liberty,” “the Great Republic,” and the Democratic principle, if the richest, oldest, and most highly-educated city in the Western Continent is as impotent to use the ballot-box to protect itself as if it were a city in the dominions of the Great Mogul?
The answer of the Lexow Committee—not by any means a complete answer—is as follows:—
The results of the investigation up to this point may ... be properly summarised in the general statement that it has been conclusively shown that in a very large number of the election districts of New York, almost every conceivable crime against the elective franchise was either committed or permitted by the police, invariably in the interest of the dominant Democratic organisation of the City of New York, commonly called Tammany Hall. The crimes thus committed or permitted by the police may be classified as follows:—
Arrest and brutal treatment of Republican voters, watchers, and workers; open violations of the election laws; canvassing for Tammany Hall candidates; invasion of election booths; forcing of Tammany Hall pasters upon Republican voters; general intimidation of the voters by the police directly and by Tammany Hall election district captains in the presence and with the concurrence of the police; colonisation of voters, illegal registration and repeating, aided and knowingly permitted by the police; denial to Republican voters and election district officers of their legal rights and privileges; co-operation with and acquiescence in the usurpation by Tammany Hall election district captains and watchers of alleged rights and privileges, in violation of law.
In fact, it may be stated as characteristic of the conditions shown to exist by a cloud of witnesses that the police conducted themselves at the several polling places upon the principle that they were there, not as guardians of the public peace to enforce law and order, but for the purpose of acting as agents of Tammany Hall, in securing to the candidates of that organisation by means fair or foul the largest possible majorities. They evidently regarded themselves as coadjutors of that organisation, stationed at the several polls for the purpose of securing its success whether by lawful or unlawful means, resorting to device, oppression, fraud, trickery, crime, and intimidation of almost every conceivable character....—Vol. i., pp. 15, 16.
It is to be regretted that sufficient time was not at the disposal of your Committee to enable it to subject every district in the city to a rigorous examination upon the lines of this branch of inquiry, whereby a more accurate estimate of the effect of police interference might be reached. Sufficient, however, appears upon the record to show beyond peradventure that, owing to the practices above referred to during the years covered by the investigation, honest elections had no
The date of this Report, be it remembered, was January 15th, 1895. It may be supplemented by a very significant admission made by Mr. Goff, himself a Republican and now Recorder of New York. Speaking of the election frauds which he did so much to detect and punish in November, 1893:—
It would not be just to lay the blame exclusively upon the Tammany inspectors, though, of course, being in the majority and in full control, they were chargeable with all that took place. Republican inspectors either openly co-operated with or quietly acquiesced in the perpetration of the fraud.—North American Review, February, 1894, p. 210.
The fraud on the ballot, to which both parties were privy, was all the more abominable because the provisions of the law against such abuses were very strict. But it is a favourite method in other countries than the United States to salve an uneasy conscience by passing a rigorous law without taking any precautions to see that it is carried into operation. This mode of relieving the feelings had been indulged in by New Yorkers in 1890, when the Ballot Reform Act passed into law. But, writing in 1894, Mr. Goff, who was Counsel to the Committee for the Prosecution of Election Frauds, said:—
Since the enactment of the reform-ballot law in 1890 no organised effort has been made to watch its operation or to detect any illegal practices. The public was satisfied with the popular catch-name of the Act, and it slept peacefully upon the assurance that fraud was no longer possible; but the evidence obtained by the volunteer watchers, and the finding of over sixty indictments by the Grand Jury, mainly against election officials, demonstrate that false registration, false voting, and bribery are as easily and as safely practised as they ever were, and that perjury has enormously increased, owing to the number of safeguards which must be sworn away by the fraudulent voter and the collusive inspector.—Ib., p. 204.
There were 1,157 polling stations in New York in 1893, and it was not possible to obtain competent watchers for all of them. But the evidence obtained was sufficient to show on how colossal a scale the frauds were practised, with the co-operation or connivance of both parties. Ballot-stuffing seems to have been common. Mr. Goff says:—
Almost without exception there were more ballots found in the ballot-box than the ballot clerk’s number showed to have been delivered or the poll-list showed to have been voted, and in a great number of districts more than the registration. How they came there is to some extent a mystery: but in some places ballots were folded in duplicate, and in others the pile of ballots on the table was added to by a sleight-of-hand performance.—Ib., p. 209.
In the Thirty-sixth Election District of the Second Assembly District it was estimated that 5,000 out of the 12,770 votes counted were fraudulent. In the Seventh of the Third 567 ballots were
The same men who registered did not, as a rule, vote upon the names given. To have them do so would require their maintenance at the lodging-house, and that would be too expensive. A more economic plan was adopted. A few days previous to election the proprietors of the lodging-houses were furnished, by the election-district captains, with lists of the names registered from their houses. Separate slips for each name were then supplied, and on election day the tramps, as they come along, were handed the slips, and they voted on the names thus given as frequently as they could get the slips. The election workers were never hard pushed to bring out the registered vote. They simply sent for the men when they wanted them, and were always supplied with the required number. Sometimes the floater forgot the name given to him or could not read the slip; sometimes a man who could not speak English wrestled with an American name, or an English-speaking man struggled with a Polish name. In all of these cases the obliging inspectors helped them out either by looking at the slip or by giving some sort of pronunciation to the unpronounceable name. In some election districts there was a rivalry as to who could vote on the most names, and the man who won the honours was an ex-convict, who voted eighteen times in two election districts of the Third Assembly District.—Ib., p. 205.
The evidence taken before the Lexow Committee abounds with vivid little vignettes of how elections were conducted in New York City only four years since.
Here, for instance, is what Mr. Louis Meyer, a Republican inspector in the Third Assembly District, heard given as official directions by Police Captain Devery to a platoon of policemen on the morning of the November poll, 1893. The Union League and the City Club had decided to send watchers to the polls to detect any illegal practices. So by way of preparing for their reception, Captain Devery told the police in Mr. Meyer’s hearing:—
There is a lot of silk-stocking people coming from up town to bulldose you people, and if they open their mouths, stand them on their heads.—Vol. i., p. 203, Lexow Report.
With such instructions it is not surprising that the police refused to interfere when their attention was called to the most flagrant breach of the law. Here is the story of Israel Ellis, Republican poll clerk at the Fifth Election District of the Third Assembly:—
When several voters came and they were handed sets of ballots, I wanted to get their names down, but the chairman and the officer told me it would be sufficient for me to take down the name and the vote.
I told them it was not sufficient, because if I did not do this, there would be a great deal of repeating done; and they said, “Never mind, it is none of your business; you do as we tell you; it has been carried on for a great length of time,” and I still kept on protesting. And once the chairman of inspectors and another inspector said if I didn’t shut up they would remove me from the board, and then the officer said if I would not stop he would take a hand in that too.
Q. The policeman said that to you?
Q. Did you tell the officer what you wanted him to arrest him for?
A. I told him, the officer, that he voted for the second time to my own knowledge, and the third time to the knowledge of a witness, and wanted him to arrest him.
Q. And he looked at the ceiling?
A. He looked at the ceiling.—Ib., vol. i., pp. 216-17.
One voter was allowed to vote on the Christian name John. He could not remember the other name. At the close seventy-two more votes were found in the ballot-box than there had been voters in the booth.
A similar scene was described as occurring at the Third Election District by Jacob Subin, a Republican watcher, who deposed that he had seen Mr. Rosalsky, the captain of the Socialistic Labour Party, protest against a young man who actually attempted to vote in Mr. Rosalsky’s name under his very nose. Mr. Rosalsky grabbed hold of him and demanded that he should be locked up as a repeater caught in the act. Three Tammany heelers thereupon punched Mr. Rosalsky’s face for him. He called upon the policeman to protect him. That worthy stretched himself leisurely and replied, “Well, I guess I am pretty busy just now. I will see you after four o’clock, and will have more time to spend.” The heelers then were for mauling Rosalsky more severely; but the Tammany captain interfered, and, as an act of grace, secured his release on condition that he went right away. Rosalsky bolted for his life. After this Jacob Subin deemed it wiser to content himself with a simple protest when he saw such repeating as this:—
I have seen the Tammany Hall heelers bring in five or six men, drill them into line, and from the appearance of some of them they looked like Irishmen, and some like recent importations from Chatham Square or any of those dives, and most of those voted on Hebrew names; but the fun of it was that they could not pronounce the name under any circumstances that they were voting, and of course, as a rule, the chairman of the board of inspectors used to correct them, and in some instances they forgot their names entirely, and in such cases they went out of the line, and then the heelers would approach them and bestow such vile language upon them, and curse them and swear at them for being so stupid as not to recollect the name of the person they were voting under; and then they would drill them into line again, and I protested against them. I attempted to challenge them, and I was told unless I stopped monkeying with the regular way of doing business that I would be thrown through the window.—Vol. i., p. 303.
ONE OF THE MONSTER HOTELS OF NEW YORK: HOTEL MAJESTIC.
The appearance of the Tammany captain as master of the revels thus reported by Jacob Subin is significant. Frank Nichols, in the Twenty-ninth
I said, “Why can’t they vote?” and they said, “No, they could not vote,” and I said, “What was the matter of these people they could not vote?” and they said, “You go home; go home; you people can’t vote any more,” and then I was put out in the middle of the street, and the captain of the election district said, “Take this fellow away from here,” and a fellow hit me in the eye with a brass knuckle.
Q. Did the police do anything at all?
A. No, sir; he would not arrest a cat that day as long as it belonged to Tammany Hall; he would not arrest a cat.—Vol. i., p. 301.
Canute A. Deas, who was Inspector of Election at the First Election District of the Third Assembly, protested fifty times in a single day against barefaced repeating. The policeman whispered in his ear that he meant to be fair, but he had his directions to take his orders from the Chairman of the Board. Captain Devery drove up and stood laughing and talking with the Tammany captain while the legal voters were in vain clamouring to be allowed to vote. The Republican watcher was thrown out by force under the eyes of the policeman:—
Q. Who threw him out?
A. The crowd—the Tammany Hall captain of the district, who was in there; he was authority for everything.—Ib., vol. i., p. 279.
Examined by Chairman Lexow: When you said that the Tammany Hall captain was authority for everything, what did you mean?
A. I meant that, whenever he desired to go into the polling place, he did so, that whatever he wanted was done; it seemed that they all worshipped him, bowed down to him.—Ib., vol. i., p. 287.
Another witness, Ralph Nathan, described how a Republican captain was hustled out because he swore that a voter had already voted in four election districts, for he had followed him round and had seen him do it. Mr. Nathan said:—
The Tammany henchmen around the Third Assembly district have a peculiar method of putting a man out; you cannot make a particular charge of assault against them, hardly, but they push them out and hustle them out; they have probably ten heelers at every election district, and the polling place is generally narrow and small, and they can fill up a place and push you out.—Vol. i., p. 290.
Here also is a description of the method in which repeaters were brought up when wanted. Mr. C. H. P. Collis, a prominent citizen who acted as watcher for the Twenty-second Election District of the Second Assembly District, deposed that he saw repeating going on openly:—
Q. Men voted under names that were not theirs?
A. I cannot go so far as that.
Q. Describe what you did see?
A. I saw a man who sat at my side ticking off the list, and those names that were not ticked he would take three or four of them, men who had not voted, and hand them to an active worker, I supposed for the purpose of having those people
Q. Hand those names to the people?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Then what occurred?
A. Then after awhile a man would come in and walk up to the polls.
Q. And would he call off one of those names?
A. Yes, sir. In fact one man had forgotten his name and turned to the man who brought him in, and said, “What is that?”—and he told him, “John Kelly,” or whatever the name was.—Vol. i., p. 130-1.
As a pendant to this scene take the following description of what happened at a previous election, where Mr. Thomas F. Harrington, Republican watcher, who had been challenging repeaters, was set upon by one Whitty, an ex-convict, as he was returning to the polling place to attend to his duties. Whitty was carrying a club and a revolver. Harrington argued with him, fearing that “they meant to inflict punishment upon me,” and remonstrated against causing blood to be spilled on election day. Whitty, however, held on to his man, whereupon, said Harrington:—
I grabbed him by the throat with my left hand and went to strike him with my right, when the two officers (who had been standing watching Whitty’s attack) rushed. One officer grabbed me by the coat and raised his club to strike me, and I told him if he struck me I would kill him where he stood, and a friend of mine came forward to help me, and the other officer rushed out and grabbed him, and up with his stick to strike him; they did not take hold of this Whitty at all; it was me and my friend they took hold of.
Q. And these policemen made no move to protect you in any wise in this assault, until you began to defend yourself?
A. No, sir.
Q. And then they laid hold of you and of your friend?
A. Yes, sir.—Vol. i., p. 135.
“We are in the business of carrying elections,” said Boss Tweed, and a very successful business Tammany has made of it.
But what becomes of popular sovereignty, of the majesty of the ballot, of the sacred privileges of citizenship?
MR. VAN WYCK.
First Mayor of Greater New York.
From the Journal, New York.
