Читать книгу Alarms and Diversions - James Thurber - Страница 10

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Just a few minutes before two o’clock on the hot, sticky morning of Tuesday, July 16th, 1912, a man sauntered up to a table in the café of the old Hotel Metropole on Forty-third Street near Broadway and spoke to another man who sat there. “Somebody wants to see you outside, Herman,” he said. In that casual sentence was spoken the doom of the famous and flourishing Hotel Metropole; it closed its doors not long afterward because of what happened in the next minute. The man at the table got up and walked briskly out onto the street, the other man following him. The one who had been addressed as Herman stood under the bright lights of the hotel’s marquee, looking around for whoever it was wanted to see him. He didn’t have to wait long. Four short dark men jumped out of a gray automobile standing at the curb, closed in on him, and fired six shots. That was the end of Herman Rosenthal, the gambler, and the beginning of one of the most celebrated murder cases in our history. Two days before this happened, Rosenthal had become known to the reading public. The World had printed an affidavit of his on that day charging that a police lieutenant named Charles Becker had exacted “protection money” from him and had then raided and closed his gambling house. It had also been intimated in the newspaper that Rosenthal would go before the grand jury and involve Becker even more deeply in corruption.

The murderers hadn’t bothered to remove or obliterate the licence plates of the gray touring car, because, as it transpired later, they had been told that “the cops are fixed” and nobody would do anything to them on account of their little job. But they reckoned without the World, District Attorney Charles S. Whitman, and a man named Charles Gallagher, a cabaret singer, who had just happened to be passing by. Gallagher caught the licence number of the car: 41313 N.Y. He went immediately to the West Forty-seventh Street police station, reported the number, and was instantly thrown in jail for his pains. His information might have been completely ignored (the police had licence numbers of their own to report, all of them wrong) had not a World reporter rung Whitman out of bed. The District Attorney got to the police station at three-twenty-five in the morning, learned about Gallagher, demanded his release, and got men to work on that licence number. Before dawn the driver of the gray car, a man named Shapiro, was arrested in his bed in a room near Washington Square. Shapiro told Whitman his car had been hired that night by a man known as Billiard Ball Jack Rose.

Born Jacob Rosenzweig, in Poland, Jack Rose, thirty-five years old, was known in certain circles as the slickest poker player in town and as graft collector for Lieutenant Becker, head of the Strong Arm Squad, which, among other things, “looked after” gambling joints in the city. There were hundreds of such places. A very popular one, on the second floor of a building at the northwest corner of Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, was run by a suave gentleman called Bridgie Webber. Rosenthal’s place was nearby, at 104 West Forty-fifth Street. The Forties writhed with gambling joints running wide open. They all paid tribute to Charles Becker. His salary was only $2,200 a year, but it came out later that he had, in one nine-month period, banked almost $60,000. All his graft money was collected for him by Baldy Jack Rose (he had several nicknames). Becker lived in a mansion of a house he had built on Olinville Avenue in the Bronx. It still stands there; Judge Peter Sheil lived in it until his death some years ago, and his widow died there last fall.

Two days after the assassination, Rose turned up at Police Headquarters, and the case’s most unusual figure thus made his formal advent. Soft-spoken, a snappy dresser--his ties and shirts and socks always matched--Rose’s physiognomy was not unlike that of Peter Lorre, in Lorre’s more familiar make-up. Rose had not a hair on his head; even his eyebrows and eyelashes were gone, the result of typhoid in infancy. He admitted, lightly, that he had hired Shapiro’s car; he had hired it to go uptown and visit a relative. He was put in a cell in the Tombs, where he was shortly joined by two other suspects, Bridgie Webber and another gambler named Harry Vallon. Webber had sent the widow Rosenthal $50 to help toward the funeral of Herman. All three men protested their innocence; they all had alibis.

The Rosenthal murder case bloomed blackly on the front pages of all the papers. Here was a more exciting story than even the story of the Titanic, which had sunk three months before. Various curious characters began to come into the case, enlivening it. There was a tough gangster chief named Big Jack Zelig (it was at this time that the word “gangster” was coined). There was a strange, blinking little man named Sam Schepps. One week after the murder, the harried Whitman, who was to become Governor because of his prosecution of this case, announced he would give immunity to anyone who named the “real culprit.” Rose, Webber, and Vallon, all good poker players, knew when it was time to quit bluffing. They made prompt confessions. They charged that Lieutenant Becker had commissioned them to arrange the murder of Herman Rosenthal. They told who the actual killers were, the men for whom Rose had hired the car, and four unforgettable names were added to the annals of American crime: Lefty Louie, Gyp the Blood, Whitey Lewis, Dago Frank. We can dismiss briefly this infamous quartet, each of whom appears to have got $250, a big price at the time, for croaking Rosenthal. They were henchmen of the gang leader, Big Jack Zelig, who obeyed Becker but hated him. People were eager to hear a gangster chief testify, but they never got the chance; just as the case was about to come to trial Big Jack Zelig was found one day shot to death. So was the proprietor of a small café who had squealed on Dago Frank, the first of the four killers to be found and arrested. But Rose, Vallon, and Webber lived to testify; the District Attorney saw to it that they were carefully guarded. They lived in style in their cells. Lefty and Gyp and Whitey and the Dago were convicted in November, 1912, and speedily sentenced to death, although they weren’t executed until a year and a half later. It was Becker, and not the four gunmen, who most interested the public--and Whitman. The case against the big, suave policeman was harder to prove.

Becker’s first trial took place three months after the murder. Billiard Ball Jack Rose, neatly dressed in a dark blue suit, his shoes brightly shined, was the State’s star witness. He told the jury that Becker had said to him, “Have Rosenthal murdered--cut his throat--dynamite him--anything!” Rose testified that Becker had advanced Rosenthal the money to open up his gambling house, had quarrelled with him, and finally raided the place. Rosenthal, unable to interest Whitman at the time, had taken his plaint to the World. Things looked black for Becker, but the testimony of the three gamblers who had turned State’s evidence was, under the law, not enough to convict. There had to be a corroborating witness, somebody entirely outside the crime. It was here that Sam Schepps, a cocky little man peering through spectacles, was brought forward by the State. Rose had told about a remarkable meeting, held in a vacant lot far uptown in Harlem and attended by himself, Vallon, Webber, and Becker, at which, Rose said, the police lieutenant had commanded them to get rid of Rosenthal. Schepps, a kind of hanger-on and toady of the gamblers, had witnessed this meeting, it was claimed, but at a distance. He swore he had had no idea what the four men were talking about; he had merely seen them talking together. On this extraordinary evidence about an extraordinary conference, Becker was sentenced to death. His lawyers appealed. Sixteen months went by, and then the Court of Appeals rejected the decision of the lower court, attacking the reliability of Schepps’ testimony, declaring that he was obviously an accomplice of the three gamblers.

On the sixth of May, 1914, almost two years after Rosenthal’s death, Becker went on trial again. At this trial a defence attorney turned on Rose and said, sharply, “When you were planning this murder, where was your conscience?” Rose answered, agonizedly but promptly, “My conscience was completely under the control of Becker.” That seems to have been the truth about Baldy Jack Rose. Like many another gambler, and many a gangster, he lived in abject fear of the cold, overbearing, and ruthless police lieutenant. It was dangerous to cross Becker; he had railroaded dozens of men who had. Becker’s lawyers claimed the gamblers had killed Rosenthal on their own, afraid of what he might reveal about them. Nobody much believed this. At this second trial--presided over by the youngish Samuel Seabury--a new corroborating witness was somehow found, a man named James Marshall, a vaudeville actor. He testified he had seen the gamblers and the lieutenant talking in the vacant lot on the night in question. His testimony was accepted; the defence failed to break it down. Becker was sentenced to death again, and this time the higher court did not interfere. He was executed, a maundering, broken hulk, on July 30th, 1915, a little more than three years after the slaying of Herman Rosenthal. Charles S. Whitman was then Governor of New York. He was considered criminally libelled by the inscription on a silver plate which Mrs. Becker had placed upon her husband’s coffin. It read:

CHARLES BECKER

Murdered July 30, 1915

by

GOVERNOR WHITMAN

The plate was removed by order of Inspector Joseph Faurot, and the police lieutenant’s widow replaced it with one bearing only his name and the dates of his birth and death. The Lusitania had been sunk two months earlier, and the memory of Becker was soon lost in the files of newspapers preoccupied with headlines of war.

Whitman, after retiring from politics, returned to the practice of law. He died of a heart attack in 1947, at the age of seventy-eight. Sam Schepps and Bridgie Webber died more than twenty years ago. What happened to James Marshall, the vaudeville actor, and to Charles Gallagher, the cabaret singer, it would be hard to find out. Webber, after the trials, went to live in New Jersey. He became, finally, vice president and secretary of the Garfield Paper Box Company of Passaic. He had lived in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and worked in Passaic for twenty years as William Webber, a man without a past, until, in 1933, he appeared as a witness in a trial over there. A lawyer asked him on the stand if he was not the Bridgie Webber of the Rosenthal case. He admitted that he was. It seems to have made little difference to his friends and business associates. He died on the thirtieth of July, 1936. There may have been some, reading of his end, who found ironic significance in the fact that Charles Becker also died on the thirtieth of July, twenty-one years before.

Jack Rose did not withdraw from the view of men after the files of the Rosenthal-Becker case were closed. He preferred to be called simply Jack, and discouraged the use of the nicknames that had made him notorious, but he did not sulk in the shadows of life or attempt to disguise himself. He wore a cap to cover his baldness, but scorned the use of a toupee. He came boldly out into the open during the war years, and went from camp to camp lecturing soldiers on the evils of gambling and other vices. He lived in a fourteen-room house in a quiet suburban community, with his wife and two sons, and when he wasn’t lecturing on “Humanology,” which he said meant the science of being human, he exhorted the children of his neighborhood to lead clean lives, and told them how he had ended up in reform school as a bad boy, where he first made contact with the underworld. He acquired a Chautauqua air, and the ardent platform manner of a reformer. His Humanology Motion Picture Corporation, founded in 1915, ended in failure two years later, but not until after he had produced six pictures based on the poems of his idol and friend, Ella Wheeler Wilcox. He liked to display a jewelled ring he wore, which Mrs. Wilcox had left him in her will. “She got the ring from an Indian rajah she met on this world tour,” he said, proudly.

Jack Rose was an able and energetic businessman, and Humanology Pictures, more an expiation than an enterprise, was one of his few failures. Before he came to New York in the Becker regime, he had had a varied career in Connecticut. He ran a hotel in Bridgeport for a while, promoted prizefights in Hartford, managed the Danbury baseball team, and became part owner of the Norwich baseball team, gambling and playing the races on the side. Rose never had any trouble getting financial backing. His principal and most successful business venture after the trials was the establishment of a chain of roadside restaurants between Milford, Connecticut, and Lynbrook, Long Island. The restaurants were large and impressive and well run. “The largest one seats 248 persons and can serve 3,000 meals a day,” he liked to boast. He supervised the planning of sunken gardens, and planned a twelve-piece orchestra for his favorite unit in the chain. Most of his customers didn’t know who he was, and he was satisfied with that. He never brought up his past except in his talks to the soldiers and the children. If a reporter called on him, as one did occasionally for a Sunday feature story, he was not evasive, but answered questions directly. What he mostly wanted to talk about, though, was some new gadget he was installing, such as a hamburger machine, which he liked to show off to visitors. He rarely came to New York and, when he did, avoided his old haunts, and made his headquarters at the uptown millinery shop of a relative. If anybody recognized him and wanted to talk, he would talk. Billiard Ball Jack Rose’s adjustment to life was never achieved by the manager of one of his restaurants, Harry Vallon. Vallon and his wife lived obscurely, refused to talk about themselves, and would hastily disappear if the subject came up. Once when Vallon dropped in on Jack at the main restaurant, he was introduced to a New York reporter. He turned on his heel without a word, hurried out to his car, and drove away.

Jack Rose died October 4, 1947, at the age of seventy-two, a few months after the death of Whitman. Nobody knows what became of Harry Vallon. The files of the Times, the Herald Tribune, and the Associated Press contain no mention of Vallon after the middle thirties. The Police Department has no record of him, either, since that time. If alive, he would be in his eighties, but it is likely that he died obscurely, possibly under an assumed name, where and when nobody may ever find out.

John’s Chop House, which had occupied the site of Rosenthal’s place at 104 West Forty-fifth Street, is no longer standing. The sixth Avenue Urban Garage, Inc., completed on November 15, 1955, is located at 104 now. Nobody there ever heard about the notorious gambling house, or of the gambler who became one of the most celebrated figures in the annals of New York crime.