One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (33 page)

JIMMY WALKER AND
his showgirl mistress Betty Compton were dining at a roadhouse popular with politicians, gangsters, and businessmen when someone fatally shot Arnold Rothstein in the Park Central Hotel. After midnight, Walker danced with Compton, who was in her stocking feet. A gangster whispered in the mayor’s ear. Walker headed for the door. Holding Compton’s fur, he told bandleader Vincent Lopez: “Rothstein has just been shot, Vince. And that means trouble from here on in.”

Little did he know. Running for reelection in 1929, Walker faced the loud, pudgy Italian who had welcomed Oscar De Priest into Congress. Fiorello La Guardia ran as a Republican reformer. He relentlessly attacked Tammany Hall, charged that the police had shied from investigating Rothstein’s murder for fear of finding ties to Tammany politicians, and proved that Rothstein had lent $10,000 to a Tammany magistrate. Few listened. A week after the stock market crash, Walker swamped La Guardia. Soon, though, hard-pressed New Yorkers fell out of love with their high-living mayor and Rothstein’s ghost came back to haunt him.

The magistrate targeted by La Guardia proved to have deposited $165,000 into bank accounts on an annual salary of $12,000. Weeks later, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater withdrew funds, got into a cab, and vanished forever. With the entire court system under suspicion, Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed a former judge renowned as a paragon of probity, Samuel Seabury, to investigate judicial corruption. Disclosures came quickly. A former waiter named Chile Acuna admitted that he had conspired with vice cops and magistrates to extort money from women by framing them on prostitution charges. The commission discovered that numerous judges had impossibly large bank balances. With evidence of widespread payoffs, Roosevelt expanded the commission’s authority to cover all municipal affairs. Now, New York learned that zoning variances were for sale and that many office holders had swollen accounts. In October 1931, the commission questioned $12,000-a-year Sheriff Thomas Farley about deposits totaling $396,000. The money came from a tin box in his house, he explained, famously adding, “It was a wonderful box.”

ANARCHY REIGNED ON
the streets as the corruption came to the fore. In May 1931, a cop killer named Francis “Two-Gun” Crowley had a two-hour gun battle with police from inside a West Side apartment. Warring between Dutch Schultz and Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll killed a five-year-old boy and wounded four children in a shootout. In August 1931, payroll bandits fatally shot a police officer, then led cops on a twelve-mile chase, killing a second cop and a four-year-old girl and wounding twelve people. All told in 1931 and 1932, gunmen killed sixteen police officers and wounded sixty-one. They also hit forty-three bystanders, killing four, in the nineteen months leading up to July 1931.
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Walker’s police commissioner—Edward Mulrooney now had the job—responded by introducing a momentous technological advance to the New York Police Department. Mulrooney equipped two hundred fifty police cars, harbor launches, two airplanes, and the departmental blimp,
Resolute
, with two-way radios. The vehicles hit the streets on February 23, 1932, the first dispatch stating: “Motor patrol 500 respond at once to Room 1, ninth floor at 20 Exchange Place. Two men attempting to pass a forged check.”
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As chief of detectives, Mulrooney had been Battle’s superior officer. Now, he elevated Battle from detective sergeant to acting lieutenant with command of a twelve-man crew known as a Radio Gun Squad. The assignment moved Battle from solving crimes after the fact to heading a forerunner of today’s SWAT teams, on the front lines, where gunmen were killing or wounding cops at a rate faster than one every two weeks.

Standard radio patrols called for pairs of officers to drive fifteen- to fifty-square-block zones.
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The Radio Gun Squads had larger territories and served as backup on the most serious calls. Typically, four plainclothes detectives and a chauffeur manned a “high powered automobile, with radio, tear gas bombs, sawed-off shotguns, gas masks, night batons and revolvers,” as Battle described the vehicle. Siren blaring, Battle rode with his men where and when he chose. They made “excellent arrests, also assisted many policemen in trouble,” and once took a man into custody after a 2 a.m. gun battle by gangsters associated with Dutch Schultz. The man turned out to be a cop who was working for Schultz. “Much pressure was brought to bear on me that morning to have this policeman released,” Battle remembered. He stood his ground, won the cop’s conviction—plus a five-hundred-dollar raise.

NEW YORKERS WERE
so fed up with crime and corruption that Walker canceled the police department’s annual parade. The springtime march of thousands, from which Battle had been barred, would never be revived. Two weeks later, on May 25, 1932, the corruption commission called Walker to the stand. “There are three things a man must do alone,” he smiled. “Be born, die and testify.”

There was a brokerage account to be explained. A company with a city contract had set up the fund and had generated $26,500 in profits for Walker without a penny’s investment. The mayor had no credible explanation. There was a second brokerage account to be explained, this one opened by a businessman seeking a subway system contract and producing $247,000 for Walker, again without a penny’s investment. The mayor had no credible explanation. Nor could Walker charmingly chat his way past a Paris vacation financed by a man to whom he had granted a bus franchise, or the $451,000 his brother had amassed on a $6,500 salary. Walker faced removal from office by Roosevelt in the thick of his first winning presidential campaign.

“Jim, you’re through,” former governor and White House contender Al Smith told him.

On September 1, 1932, Walker resigned and sailed with Compton for an extended European stay. Two placeholders then occupied the mayor’s office. Who would be police commissioner, the second was asked. “I don’t know. They haven’t told me yet,” he answered.

The power vacuum extended until November 7, 1933, when Fiorello La Guardia, “the Little Flower,” as his first name translated from Italian, won election and filled the void to bursting.

THERE WAS NO
telling what Battle would meet on leaving for duty. The anxieties of a street cop’s wife heightened for Florence as the roll of the murdered grew. Gunfights with holdup men killed Officer Peter De Carlo in Brooklyn, Officer George Gerhard on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and Officer Joseph Burke in Harlem, on Seventh Avenue, two blocks south of Strivers Row. Although the shootings abated in 1933, they extended a long shadow over life.

Danger was equally real for Wesley. Increasingly, misfits filled his company. The department transferred in men who “had bad records or were always in trouble, or men who had no friends political or otherwise,” he remembered. None too happy, Wesley’s conscripts faced among the city’s most challenging firefighting duties. Flammable materials filled the loft buildings that surrounded the station, creating traps prone to smoky blazes and collapse.

Wesley and his men had stood their ground in the cellar of a five-story SoHo loft where fire had broken out between the floor of a restaurant and the basement ceiling. They retreated from the flames when ordered by a chief, regained their breath, and plunged back into the inferno.

Twice, Wesley reached the brink of death. At one fire, he led Company 55 in rescuing four families from a burning tenement. Smoke inhalation killed one of his men and knocked Wesley unconscious. The crew placed an oxygen mask over his face as he lay supine on the sidewalk. Two hours elapsed before he revived. In 1933, the company answered an alarm in a loft building occupied by firms that worked with fabrics. Wesley led seven men to the fourth floor, only to have the blaze come up behind them. Blinded by smoke and choking on the fumes of burning cotton waste, the eight raced to the roof. Several were incapacitated. The sole hope was rescue from below. Wielding hoses and carrying inhalators, squads ascended fire escapes. They administered oxygen before Wesley and his men scaled to safety behind streams of water.
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By then, the word was out that Wesley had aced the captain’s exam and was sure to get called for promotion, assuming that the fire commissioner was of a mind to grant blessings. Battle heard the news while vacationing over Labor Day. He wrote to his former protégé on September 6, 1933: “It is my earnest desire that you will receive your promotion in the near future. Don’t rest on your oars, continue until you have attained the very highest rank as I know that you deserve same. . . . With kindest regards to your dear family and also your good father.”
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Off duty, Battle maintained the social life of a Harlem burgher. He introduced Etta Cachemaille and Fannie Robinson, Bill’s wife, to the police commissioner when they needed a permit for a fund-raising dance. He and Florence hosted several hundred guests for dinner and dancing at a club in celebration of their twenty-eighth wedding anniversary, and they donated a silver cup, the “Battle Trophy,” to be awarded to the winners of a bridge tournament.

At home, Carroll had worked his way through high school. He was a popular teenager and had inherited Battle’s athleticism. Battle insisted that Carroll would follow Jesse and Charline in earning a college degree, because that was what Sam Battle’s children did. Carroll enrolled in New York University, where he played basketball and joined the Rameses Club, a social organization that had hosted a dance for five hundred in Harlem, entertained by Nappy and his Orchestra. Meanwhile, on better psychological footing, Charline was finishing a bachelor’s degree in political science. All was in order, and then a young man came calling.
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Thornton Cherot was graceful and charming. He moved through a color-ruled world with a light skin tone and European features. On surface inspection, Jim Crow would easily have overlooked the African American lineage handed down to the son of Baldomero Cherot and the former Fanny DuPont.

Baldomero could be traced to Ecuador; he was of Quechua Indian and French extraction. Fanny was likely the descendant of a white grandfather and black grandmother. She appears to be white in a photograph taken later in life. Thornton Cherot was the fourth of Baldomero and Fanny’s children. The contributions to Thornton’s DNA explain his appearance, while his social place derives from racial strictures. The state of Virginia delineated those, first setting a standard that a person was white unless more than one-quarter black, then lowering the mark to one-sixteenth, and then, in 1924, decreeing that “the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.”
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In this era of the “one-drop rule,” the four children of Baldomero and Fanny Cherot joined the Great Migration north. By 1930, twenty-two-year-old Thornton had rented a room, or perhaps just a bed, among twenty-one lodgers who shared a townhouse down the block from Battle’s.
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Preferring to be called Eddy rather than Thornton, he found work tap dancing at the Cotton Club and playing semiprofessional baseball.

By family lore, Eddy took an interest in Charline after admiring her legs when he saw her dance. Charline began a relationship with a young man who had a playboy reputation and was estranged from a first wife. Eddy set out to get schooled in chemistry at New York University in hope of embarking on a well-paying career and, perhaps harder, earning his potential father-in-law’s respect.

BATTLE’S RANK OF
acting lieutenant was a milestone—it made him the first African American to climb that high in the department—but only full lieutenant would suffice. More well-read than ever, richly experienced in policing and welcomed to study at Delehanty’s Institute, he was confident that he would ace the lieutenant’s exam, and the captain’s exam after that, but hard experience had taught him not to go it alone. Aware that the higher he tried to climb, the steeper the climb would be, Battle sought the help of the most-connected friend he knew: Casper Holstein, the numbers baron.

Gambling in Harlem had changed radically in the five years after Holstein’s kidnapping. At first, the kings and queens of the industry did business under the threat of Dutch Schultz’s ambitions. Then, in 1931, Schultz found the opportunity for a takeover. A common superstition linked the numbers five, two, and seven with Thanksgiving. When five-two-seven came up on the Wednesday before the holiday, the numbers bankers owed more than they could pay. Schultz made an offer they couldn’t refuse: he would cover their debts and, in return, take part ownership of their operations. Many agreed, and soon they were no longer his partners. Schultz reduced them to salaried employees.

“So Harlem’s numbers business goes back into the hands of a white king after the valiant effort of the Negro bankers to keep the money in Harlem,” the
Age
reported in August 1932.

To solidify his hold, Schultz summoned Tammany’s Jimmy Hines to his Upper East Side apartment. “I can arm these different bankers in but I can’t protect them in the courts, or protect them from the police making raids,” Schultz told Hines, using the word “arm” to mean that he could use violence to force the bankers to work for his organization.
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Schultz’s lieutenant, George Weinberg, told Hines that the gang wanted “to show the people in Harlem that are working for us that we had the right kind of protection up there.” He wanted the cops to lay off and the magistrates to dismiss big gambling arrests. Hines’s price would be a thousand dollars a week. Schultz paid the first installment and put out word that his operation was untouchable.

African American numbers bosses fought back, none more vigorously than Harlem’s fearless policy queen Stephanie St. Clair. Vowing to drive out the white gangsters, St. Clair hired muscle, waged a public relations campaign against the interlopers, and hid from would-be assassins. In February 1933, Schultz called his resistant black operatives to a meeting overseen by machine-gun- and shotgun-bearing gangsters. He announced that he was restructuring the business. No longer would runners move about Harlem taking bets; the players would instead place wagers in central locations like candy stores. Schultz saw profit-boosting efficiencies. His listeners heard a ruthless white man say he was throwing hundreds of African Americans out of work in the teeth of the Depression. Worse, he was tossing them out of Harlem’s sole homegrown industry. Twenty independent bankers met to plan resistance.