My Ears Are Bent (19 page)

And the proprietor of the refreshment stand has placed tables and the kind of twisted-wire chairs one used to see only in drugstores around his stand, and people sit there and have imitation orange drinks and listen to the music. And the sailors and their girls walk along, awkwardly kissing as they walk.

And, cursing loudly, two men begin to slug each other. They fight with abandon. A crowd gathers to give advice. Presently a policeman comes, not running, taking his time. He punches them apart with his club. They go off in opposite directions, muttering curses. The crowd dissolves.

“Song hits!” a peddler shouts. “Fi’ cents.”

One Saturday night in the month of May I was assigned to find out if it is true what they say about the Night Line. I went up the river on the side-wheeler Trojan, of Sam Rosoff’s Hudson River Navigation Corporation, the oldest steamboat line in existence.
It was the Trojan’s first voyage of the season, and I spent a chaste, sober night.

The creaking old side-wheeler made a tranquil run, transporting forty-nine sedate beer-drinking passengers and a cargo of hides and wood pulp from Pier 52 in Manhattan, hard by the chicken and duck sheds of Gansevoort Market, to Steamboat Square in Albany. The Trojan has 229 staterooms and an excursion capacity of 2,000, and the forty-nine citizens who made the first trip had plenty of elbow room. Apparently it was too early in the season for Saturday night sin on the Hudson. At no time during the run were there more than seven persons sitting around the steamer’s square bar, and John Quinn, the bartender, took his apron off at 11 P.M., drank a glass of Guinness for a nightcap and locked up his stock of bottles. The majority of the passengers were middle-aged and by midnight they were all in bed, and when the steamer tied up in Albany on Sunday at 6 A.M. there was not one hangover on board.

The Night Line has a wanton reputation, and I was disappointed. In burlesque the Night Line is synonymous with lechery. Remembering dozens of vaudeville and burlesque jokes about the lusty, uninhibited activities of Night Line passengers, I wandered forlornly about the windy decks for hours, witnessing nothing more pagan than a woman smoking a cigarette,
the hussy. By 10 P.M. the decks were deserted. Amazed by the purity of the passengers, I retired to the saloon deck and played a pinball game with the purser at a dime a game.

The purser won eight games in a row. Then I went up to the pilot house, where bald, talkative Captain George H. Warner sat in his high chair and watched the second pilot, William Burlingham, follow the Hudson’s winding channel, swinging the steamer from one side of the river to the other. As the old sideheeler—it was built in Hoboken in 1909—moved up the river, making sixteen miles an hour, he pointed out landmarks. He pointed to a tiny red light in the middle of the river and said, “That’s a lantern hung to one of the stakes on a shad net. The river’s full of shad this year. A fine fish; nothing better than a plate of shad for breakfast.”

“I like the roe,” said Mr. Burlingham. “I never yet been able to get enough shad roe.”

Off Tarrytown the Captain pointed toward a distant hill. John D. Rockefeller was alive then, and the Captain said, “Old John D. lives up there some-wheres. What a man! Giving away them dimes. What a man!” Off Ossining he pointed to the cheerful lights of Sing Sing Prison, chuckled and said, “That’s the Country Club over there.” It must have been an old joke, but both the Captain and Mr. Burlingham
appeared to enjoy it. They looked up at the prison walls and laughed.

The Captain is a third-generation Hudson River man. He lives in Troy. He has been with the Night Line for forty-five years. A verbose person, he likes to recite poetry of the Edgar Guest variety to his officers, and on one wall of the pilot house he has tacked up an inspirational motto which states, “Be glad you are alive.” He is outraged by the reputation given the Night Line by vaudeville comedians.

“People think the Night Line boats are full of loose women and gamblers and rum-drinkers, and it is an outrage,” he said, smacking the arm of his high chair with his fist. “We try to keep that element off the boats. There is a type of woman which rides up and down the river trying to get men in trouble. We call them ‘riders.’ We have a watchman, and if he sees one of them riding up and down the river night after night and stirring up trouble, he politely asks her to call a halt.

“I used to go to vaudeville shows and hear them make jokes about the Night Line. All they had to do was just mention the Night Line and people would laugh. It burned me up. It is like Brooklyn. When they mention Brooklyn in a show people will laugh, but there is nothing funny about Brooklyn when you get there. It used to put me out. If I owned the Night
Line I would sue people for damages that make dirty jokes about it.

“All that talk about wild parties and gambling on our boats is exaggerated. It reminds me of a story. One night the watchman was walking past a stateroom and he heard a woman inside crying and yelling, ‘Stop! Stop!’ The watchman thought maybe some man had pulled a woman into his room. He knocked on the door and said, ‘What’s going on in there?’ The man inside yelled out, ‘Nothing’s going on, but something’s coming off! I’m pulling a plaster off my wife’s back!’ The watchman left in a hurry.”

Captain Warner said he once took Father Divine and 2, 000 of his followers up the river on the Trojan for an excursion, and it was one of the most harrowing voyages he ever made.

“It was a mess,” he said, snorting. “They would get together on the decks and jump up and down and clap their hands and make them remarks about ‘Peace! It’s wonderful!’ I went up to this Father and said, ‘I think it is fine for you people to worship the Saviour, but you don’t have to make so much fuss about it.’ The way they were jumping up and down I was afraid they would bust the stanchions. They were a peaceful bunch except for that. They don’t do any halfway job when they worship.”

That night, however, life was dull on the Night Line, reminding one of the lobby of a resort hotel
in the off-season. The Negro waiters, dressed in new starched coats, stood about the dining room staring gloomily at the vacant chairs. The little crowd of diners, quietly eating boiled beef with horseradish sauce or creamed chicken or mackerel, the traditional Hudson steamer dishes, displayed little gaiety as the Trojan proceeded up the river.

A few went on the deck and watched the New York Central’s night expresses speeding toward Manhattan on the Hudson’s east bank. A few went forward and stood beneath the pilot house, watching Captain Warner throw his searchlight on sand and gravel scows moving sleepily down the river. A few sat around the bar and drank beer and cream ale—of the forty-nine passengers only five drank whiskey.

It was obvious that they did not take the Night Line for a night of lechery. They took it for fresh air, or for a good night’s sleep, or to get to Albany.

A bleak throng of relatives of three murderers who were to die in the electric chair huddled on the steps of Sing Sing Prison last night and waited. They passed around a quart bottle and whispered hoarsely. They still were sitting there when Robert Elliott, the State’s thin, bent little executioner, trudged up the steps and entered the barred lobby.

“That’s Elliott,” whispered a taxicab driver, sitting
with the relatives. “That’s the man that pulls the switch.”

The relatives turned and stared. Elliott shook the gate and a keeper let him in. The executioner carried a little black traveling bag. He nodded to the keeper and went upstairs to prepare the utensils with which he would destroy the three men who succeeded, after a fantastic amount of trouble, in murdering Michael Malloy, the “durable barfly.”

Elliott did not do as well as was expected last night because only three of the four men scheduled for death by electrocution reached the chair. Two hours before the time appointed for his death, the fourth man was given a respite of two weeks because someone believes he is a mental defective. So the State paid the executioner $450 for his night’s work, instead of $600.

The three momentarily awaiting what is still referred to at Sing Sing as “the hot squat” were the principal members of the Bronx insurance-murder trust, the men who killed the barfly to get the $1,290 for which they had insured his life. That was back in February 1933. The matter was arranged in a grimy little speakeasy at 3804 Third Avenue, now a vacant store.

Anthony Marino, 28, the proprietor, needed some cash and one night he said, “Business is lousy.” Frank
Pasqua, 25, a Bronx undertaker, who was standing at the bar, thought the remark over. “Why don’t we insure Malloy’s life and bump him off?” he asked.

Joseph Murphy, 29, whose real name is Archie R. Mott, a bartender in Marino’s speak, and Daniel Kriesberg, 30, a fruit dealer, who passed a lot of time in the speak, were selected to help with the murder.

Malloy, a former stationary engineer, who had been a drunken derelict for many years, was insured. Then the murderers started treating him to poisonous whiskey. Malloy enjoyed it.

They gave him oysters pickled in wood alcohol. Malloy enjoyed them.

Then they gave him a plate of poisoned sardines into which bits of ground tin had been thrown. Malloy liked the sardines.

The barfly was stubborn. They kept feeding him wood alcohol, and one night they took him, dead drunk, to a park, stripped him to the waist, threw several buckets of water on him, and left him to die. Next morning Malloy came into the speakeasy and said, “Give me some of that good whiskey. I’m about to freeze.”

Twice he was purposely run over by a taxicab. That did no good.

So, on the night of February 22, 1933, the gentle band took the barfly to a furnished room in the
Bronx, rented especially for the event, and held a gas tube in his mouth.

That killed him. Pasqua, the undertaker, got a doctor to sign a death certificate signifying that pneumonia killed the barfly. Then Malloy was buried in one of Pasqua’s cheapest coffins.

But the insurance companies had the barfly’s body exhumed, and so last night four men waited in the pre-execution cells. They were to be executed at 11 P.M. At 9 o’clock a telephone call came from Acting Governor M. William Bray giving Murphy two weeks’ respite on the strength of his lawyer’s assertion that he had new evidence that Murphy was subnormal mentally.

But no telegrams came for Pasqua, or Marino, or Kriesberg. Consequently, at a few minutes before 11 o’clock two prison vans backed up to the rear door of the prison’s administration building, within the walls.

Into the vans climbed the thirty-odd men selected by the State to witness the execution of three of its citizens. The relatives, stubborn, still waited on the stone steps.

The van rolled slowly through the prison’s yard and paused at the lane leading to the death house. The witnesses got out and stood under the bright lamp. They were ordered to walk single file down the lane.
At the end of the lane two guards grabbed each witness and expertly frisked him. Then the witnesses, jostling one another to reach the front seats first, entered the electrocution chamber.

It is a little room. On the right, as you enter, are five benches for witnesses. The electric chair is in the middle of the room. It rests on three sheets of rubber carpet.

There is a sign above the door through which the doomed are escorted. It reads “Silence.” At this door stood Principal Keeper John J. Sheehy. He stood there, red-faced, solemn, fingering the bunch of keys at his belt. On one side of the chair was a white operating table. On the other was a wooden pail.

Frank Pasqua, the Bronx undertaker, was the first to go. He wore carpet slippers, a gray sweater and an unpressed pair of flannel trousers. Father John McCaffery, the prison’s Catholic chaplain, walked beside him.

The witnesses stirred in their seats when the pale, staring human shuffled into the room, and a keeper said, “Silence, please.” Pasqua sat down in the chair. He did not say anything. He stared.

The priest held a cross in front of Pasqua’s gray face. Pasqua leaned slightly and kissed it.

Elliott, the executioner, came into the room. He went to work methodically. He pulled the headpiece,
the mask, over Pasqua’s face. Then he began strapping him into the chair. A keeper kneeled and adjusted the electrode to Pasqua’s leg.

Elliott left the room. The switches are in another room. The witnesses could see Pasqua’s fingers clutching the wooden arms of the electric chair. He clutched so fiercely that his knuckles were white.

The witnesses could hear Elliott pull the switch.

It did not last long—only three minutes.

They placed the pale little man, still staring, on the white operating table and wheeled him into the autopsy room.

Then they brought in Anthony Marino, the speakeasy proprietor who needed cash. Elliott dipped the headgear into the brine pail. He brought it out dripping. He rubbed some of the water out of it. Then he placed it on Marino’s head.

Marino smiled faintly. He kissed the ivory cross proffered by the priest. He kept on smiling. He crossed his legs, but a keeper nudged him and he uncrossed them so the electrode could be fastened to his right leg.

Elliott, the precise little executioner, hurried off and threw the switch that sent 2,200 volts of electricity through Marino’s body. It took three minutes.

It took only two minutes to kill Daniel Kriesberg, the wry-faced fruit dealer. He came in, not as pale
as his comrades, and sat down. He was escorted by Rabbi Jacob Katz, the Jewish chaplain.

As soon as the electricity whirred into the man in the chair the rabbi left the room, holding the Old Testament firmly against his breast.

“All out,” said a keeper. “Walk quietly.”

The relatives still were huddled on the prison steps. They got up and stood in the shadows, aloof, as the witnesses departed. A woman among them was moaning.

One of the men drank the last whiskey in the bottle and threw it away.