Island of the Damned (6 page)

The
shooting took place in the luxury Park Central Hotel in mid-Manhattan, allegedly in a suite occupied by a well-known bookmaker, George McManus. An early theory for the killing was that the two had fallen out over Rothstein’s delay in paying back a hefty gambling debt, which allegedly had prompted McManus to shoot Rothstein in a drunken fury. Rothstein managed to stagger to the hotel lobby and was taken to hospital where he died two days later refusing, in time honoured tradition of
omerta
- the mafia’s oath of silence - to name his killer. Although there were no witnesses to the murder, McManus was eventually charged and put on trial: lack of hard evidence led to his acquittal. Throughout the following year, despite lengthy investigations into the murder, police and prosecutors drew a blank. The unsolved mystery became a
cause
celebre
, as rumours of incriminating evidence linking Rothstein to Tammany politicians made the rounds. Although Thomas Crain campaigned for the post of Manhattan District Attorney on a promise that within weeks he would “put Rothstein’s murderer behind bars”, it became a cold case. During Fiorello La Guardia’s first 1929 campaign to unseat Jimmy Walker as mayor, he revealed the existence of a promissory note indicating that a New York magistrate Albert Vitale had accepted a $19,600 loan from Rothstein. La Guardia gained plenty of mileage from this discovery, claiming Rothstein’s loan to Vitale was proof of the links between New York politicians and the city’s gangsters. The press seized on the revelation to speculate that enough people in high places would have benefited from Arnold Rothstein’s death.

The
second unsolved case involved not a murder but an inexplicable disappearance and presumed murder of a notable member of the judiciary. One summer evening on August 6th 1930, Judge Joseph Crater, a justice of the New York Supreme Court, waved goodbye to friends with whom he had been dining, stepped into a cab on West 45th Street and was never seen again. Judge Crater’s name has remained on the NYPD’s Missing Persons File (No. 13595) until this day. Appointed to the trial court bench by Governor Roosevelt, Crater had been a judge for only four months when he vanished. He had recently returned from a holiday with his wife in Maine, and was due to return there for her birthday. When he failed to turn up, his wife went through his papers at his New York office and discovered that on the day he vanished, he had cashed two cheques totalling over $5,000 and had taken an additional $20,000 in cash from his safe. Despite a grand jury hearing into Crater’s disappearance, involving 95 witnesses and 1,000 pages of written evidence, the investigation failed to produce clues or suspects. Theories behind Crater’s disappearance ranged from him having staged his death to avoid corruption charges, to being murdered by gangsters who were friendly with his then mistress, June Brice, a Broadway showgirl, whom he had seen on the evening he vanished. Further rumours centred on Crater’s financial transactions and connections with Tammany. In April 1930, four months before taking his seat on the bench, Crater had withdrawn $23,000 from his bank. Had he bought his judgeship from a Tammany fixer? Was the money he drew on the day of his disappearance another payoff, to someone who preferred the truth not to emerge? Some believed the mob had killed Crater because they feared he might be about to expose corruption in Tammany Hall; others suspected that Mafioso Frank Costello had arranged the assassination to keep his own Tammany protectors happy. Crater’s mistress, the showgirl June Brice, also mysteriously disappeared two weeks after being subpoenaed by the grand jury which at the time was hearing evidence related to Crater’s disappearance.

A
third, especially sinister murder mystery sparked further alarm over the perceived breakdown of the city’s law enforcement. A young divorcee and vaudeville actress, thirty nine year-old Vivian Gordon had agreed to give evidence at a 1931 judicial hearing in New York into police corruption. Several days before Gordon was due to appear in court as a key witness, she was questioned in private by a lawyer involved in the investigation, and admitted to him that she had been falsely arrested eight years earlier and framed on trumped up prostitution charges by police. She named the man responsible for her arrest and subsequent conviction as Andrew McLaughlin, a vice squad patrolman. Gordon then agreed to return and provide further evidence. The night before she was due to appear in court however, Vivian Gordon was found strangled in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, a length of rope coiled around her neck. Her head had been beaten in and her body thrown from a car. Several weeks after Gordon’s murder, her distraught sixteen year-old daughter committed suicide.

Although
over a hundred investigators were assigned to track down the killer, the hunt led nowhere. A man earlier suspected of the crime was tried but acquitted for lack of evidence: two other men who alleged they had seen the man carry out Gordon’s murder were evidently lying, suggesting a probable cover up. The tabloid press went to town over the killing, claiming – not so fancifully – that Vivian Gordon had been involved with many low life characters and mobsters, including the late Arnold Rothstein whose own murder remained unsolved. In a diary, she mentioned that she knew Arnold Rothstein and feared him, also making notes of many of the gambler’s secret business “interests”. The press wallowed in seamy half-baked “revelations” about Vivian Gordon, portrayed as everything from “a girl with five hundred sugar daddies” to “a misled woman who followed the tinsel path.” When the name and phone number of New York’s leading madam, Polly Adler, was found in Gordon’s address book, Adler wryly dismissed her as “just another attractive woman out to feather her own nest.”

It
later emerged that Gordon may herself have been running a lucrative racket, which seemed to account for her wealth, put at between $30,000 and $50,000 at her death. A search of her apartment revealed lists of names of about fifty pretty young women, accompanied by their nude photographs. It was alleged that Gordon introduced the girls to men looking for escorts: Gordon also kept the addresses and phone numbers of these men, adding them to a “client list”, many of whom she later blackmailed into handing over considerable amounts of money in return for her discretion. Although an enraged former client may, as some believed, have sought revenge by killing her, investigators thought it more probable that Gordon had extensive inside knowledge of the world of vice and racketeering, and paid with her life before she could tell the authorities all she knew. That is almost certainly the likeliest explanation, since the timing of Vivian Gordon’s murder was highly significant. Tragically, she would not have attracted so much coverage and intense police attention had she not agreed to give evidence at one of the most sensational and unprecedented judicial enquiries in New York’s history: the ground-breaking Seabury investigations.

Chapter Five - Hunting the Tiger

Early rumblings of a move to smash organised crime in New York had begun in August 1930, when one of America’s most distinguished judges, fifty seven year-old Judge Samuel Seabury, was appointed by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court to conduct an investigation into the magistrates’ courts of New York City. The investigation, which had been recommended by U.S Attorney Charles Tuttle and backed by Governor Roosevelt, who endorsed Judge Seabury’s appointment, received enthusiastic support from the New York Bar Association. It also had wholehearted approval from the city’s reform and religious groups who were becoming more vociferous in their demands for governmental and judicial transparency. In the black days following the Wall Street crash in 1929, New York’s Patrick Cardinal Hayes had publicly denounced Mayor Walker’s pleasure seeking pursuits, suggesting that the current economic devastation was just retribution for Walker’s and other “wayward” leaders’ immoral ways. Walker, who garnered more headlines being a playboy than a hard working politician, had provoked outrage by raising his own annual salary from $25,000 to $40,000. When challenged about his pay, he raised further hackles by quipping: “Why that’s cheap! Think what it would cost if I worked full time”. U.S. Attorney Charles Tuttle also warned that New York City was sliding into moral anarchy and demanded a clean-up.

For
over two years, from August 1930, the Seabury Commission delved deep into the most secret, often shameful recesses of the city’s judicial and municipal departments. It was a hugely ambitious undertaking, and, as months passed, the net spread. As Judge Seabury began his research into the magistrate’s courts, it became clear that he had to expand his enquiry to include scores of attorneys practising in the lower criminal courts whom he suspected, correctly, of “corrupt, fraudulent, unlawful or unprofessional conduct.” New revelations emerged daily and it was obvious that the dark machinations of the lower courts were a mere curtain raiser before probes of an even more sensational nature unfolded. Still to come was an almost forensic analysis of the workings of the District Attorney’s office, then under the helm of the ineffectual Thomas Crain, and a city-wide examination of every single department of New York: this final marathon probe would culminate in the resignation of Mayor Walker.

Predictably,
as news of the remit of the Seabury Commission spread through the press, Mayor Walker announced that he would not testify; eight Tammany district leaders refused to waive their immunity and testify – announcements interpreted as tantamount to an admission of guilt. However, Judge Seabury was a lifelong foe of Tammany, whose leaders evidently underestimated his commitment to smashing their organisation. Nor had they taken into account the painstaking diligence of Seabury’s team as they unearthed every shred of available paperwork and accounts related to all the city’s departments, and subpoenaed the records of New York’s 2,000 banks and brokerage houses. Seabury had hired a team of the very brightest and most enthusiastic young lawyers to carry out the probes: some were barely out of law school and, being both idealistic and ambitious, were highly motivated by the nature of the work and the honour of working for someone of Judge Seabury’s stature and integrity. Heading the team, as chief counsel, was a leading trial lawyer, Isidor Jacob Kresel, an important member of the New York Bar. After many years as a prosecutor, Kresel knew where the bodies were buried. Since official written records could not be disputed in court, he collected income tax returns, bank pay-in slips, savings accounts statements, property records, mortgage and brokerage statements amongst other files. Over the following two years the Seabury Investigations produced vast irrefutable evidence of bribes, rackets, fraud, embezzlement and other corruption, comprising over 70,000 pages of financial documents and the testimony of 4,000 witnesses including – finally – Mayor Jimmy Walker.

The
Seabury hearings delivered almost daily bombshells, stunning even cynical New Yorkers. Not since 1895, when the Lexow Commission revealed the extent of criminal activity within the city’s police department, had an exposé of such magnitude hit the headlines. Throughout the autumn of 1930, the Seabury Commission heard more than 1,000 witnesses including judges, lawyers, police officers and former defendants. All painted a staggering picture of false arrests, fraudulent bail bonds and unjust imprisonment. Because most of the innocent victims – many of them women – knew no lawyers and could not afford private counsel, they soon discovered that conviction and a prison sentence were a foregone conclusion. The only way out was for money to be paid, through certain conniving attorneys, to crooked court personnel, police, prosecutors and magistrates. The conspiracy proved highly effective. Innocent people either parted with their life’s savings or were jailed – often on Welfare Island. It emerged that fifty one young women had been framed on false charges and illegally imprisoned at a women’s prison in upstate New York.

Eventually,
heads rolled. By Christmas 1930, two judges were removed; three resigned, another disappeared overnight. Most were found to have bought their seat on the bench from a Tammany district leader; some had tacit agreements with certain leaders to drop cases involving major gangland figures, or to engineer an acquittal if a known criminal came to trial. Some judges had a conflict of interests arising from their dealings with commercial businesses, sports organisations and gambling establishments.

The
evidence of one witness was so astonishing that he regularly made the front pages. “Chile” Mapuno Acuno, from Santiago, told the court he had been hired 150 times in less than a year by the vice squad to act as their “stool pigeon.” Acuno admitted earning $150 a week throughout 1929 in return for helping police frame innocent women in regular vice raids. His role as a decoy was to engage unsuspecting women in conversation and then be “caught” by a police officer handing over money to them, at which point the woman would be arrested. Acuno named twenty eight policemen involved in these scams and admitted that he also received a share of the proceeds taken by police during raids on genuine houses of prostitution. These vice squad revelations opened a trail leading all the way to Wall Street. Over 120 policemen who took the bribes paid by innocent people in return for quashing their cases, used the money to play the stock market instead of placing it in deposit accounts.

The
evidence that emerged was so staggering that New York’s leading spokesmen and organisations, including religious leaders, appealed to Governor Roosevelt to order another, wider ranging investigation into the city’s administrative offices. At last, wanting to be seen as tough on crime, Roosevelt agreed. By now, the press and public had begun to demonise two men in particular for failing to do their job properly. One was Mayor Jimmy Walker. The other was Manhattan’s timid, elderly D.A Thomas Crain. Two august organisations, the City Club and the City Affairs Committee of New York, whose members included academics and church leaders, petitioned Governor Roosevelt for the removal of D.A Crain on the grounds that he had done nothing to investigate major crimes such as the murders of Arnold Rothstein and Vivian Gordon or to stamp out racketeering. But, while Seabury carried out a detailed investigation of the D.A’s office, he discovered only extensive inertia and inefficiency, failing to uncover evidence of corruption or bad faith. Although Seabury’s report censured Thomas Crain, he recommended to Governor Roosevelt that he should remain in office. For the moment, Crain stayed on.

Mayor
Jimmy Walker had no such easy ride. Seabury’s prime goal was to shine a spotlight on the skeletons in Walker’s cupboards, of which he knew there were many. Throughout 1932, as part of his mammoth investigation into the city’s administration, Seabury’s team ferreted out yet more evidence of racketeering and of the underworld’s power and control over the city’s services, unions and municipal businesses. Tammany leaders were found to be pocketing a cut from every function in the city from getting married or taking public transport to having a haircut, buying fish or having windows cleaned. Among scores of employees to lose their jobs was Thomas Farley, Sheriff of New York County. A police raid on the Farley Association clubhouse revealed the Sheriff relaxing in the company of the late gangster Arnold Rothstein’s associates and other mobsters with long criminal records. Eventually, when Farley failed to explain in court how he had amassed $400,000, in cash, over six years on a yearly salary of $8,500, Governor Roosevelt, on the recommendation of Judge Seabury, removed Sheriff Farley from office.

By
summer 1932, about 3,000 city workers had given evidence at the hearings, and, as revelations mounted and suspicious deposit accounts were traced, a pattern of bribery and illegal secret cash payments emerged which led right up to the office of Mayor Jimmy Walker. When Walker was at last subpoenaed to attend court for questioning by his nemesis, Judge Seabury, the mayor’s glamorous devil-may-care image finally began to crack. In August 1932 Walker was summoned for further questioning by Governor Roosevelt, who was now convinced that Walker was unfit for office. On September 1st, Walker resigned as Mayor of the City of New York, maintaining bitterly that he had been the victim of a “Communist plot”, an “un-American affair” and an “inquisition.” Walker’s resignation dealt a body blow to Tammany Hal. It was a triumph for Seabury, of whom one biographer wrote: “His anti-Tammany stand was not merely a cause. It was a mania.” In slaying the tiger Seabury had ensured that the bosses lost their power to choose and elect mayors, judges and commissioners.

The
victory turned Judge Seabury into a national hero. During the final weeks of his hearings, as he left the courthouse in Foley Square each day for lunch, thousands of working men and women hung out of windows of surrounding office blocks to cheer him. Known affectionately as “the Bishop” because of his austere pontifical air and Episcopalian clergymen’s background, Seabury was a striking figure. According to the
New
York
World
newspaper, he sat through one long case “as if his face had been carved from stone.” Prematurely white hair with a centre parting, a pince-nez, his dignity inspired respect and confidence. As onlookers waved and called out to him, Seabury raised his hat, but didn’t smile. By the end of 1932, Seabury’s supporters, made up of Republicans as well as anti-Tammany Democrats determined to achieve social and political reform, looked to him as the inspiration behind the emerging Fusion Movement. Seabury had defined Fusion politics as a movement comprising members of different parties united behind any campaign or candidate pledged to honest government. Soon, the Fusionists had a new champion in Republican congressman Fiorello La Guardia. With his mentor Judge Seabury putting his considerable power behind his second mayoral campaign, on November 7th 1933 La Guardia won the election, becoming the century’s first non-Tammany, Mayor of New York. As La Guardia was sworn into office five minutes after midnight on January 1st 1934 in Judge Seabury’s oak-panelled library at his house on East 63rd Street, a new chapter began in the history of New York City.