The Great Gatsby Rubout: Cut to the Car Chase
“The old Metropole. I can't forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there . . . he went out on the sidewalk and they shot him three times in his full belly and drove away."
The intersection of fact and fiction can sometimes keep alive events that would otherwise fade into the mist of time. The 1912 incident F. Scott Fitzgerald alluded to in The Great Gatsby was still fresh in readers’ minds when the novel appeared in 1925. The author, who was interested in money, power, and the temptations of corruption, considered the affair iconic.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, New York City police lieutenant Charles Becker patrolled the wild and woolly Tenderloin district around Times Square. He had been named head of Special Squad No. 1, a strong-arm unit that played both sides of the law.
A large, beefy man, Becker had joined the force in 1893. In a city still dominated by the machine politics of Tammany Hall, he had learned to navigate New York’s rugged underworld and to funnel payoffs up the chain of command. By 1912 he was growing rich on kickbacks himself.
About that time, gambler Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal began to gripe about the payoffs Becker demanded to serve as his “partner” in a lucrative gambling club on 45th Street. Beansie took his complaints to muckraking reporters, who loved to turn police malfeasance into juicy headlines.
During the sweltering wee hours of July 16, 1912, Rosenthal entered the Metropole Café on Broadway, a late-night hangout for actors and gangster. When he walked back outside, four men surrounded him and shot him dead.
The killers jumped into a gray Packard touring automobile on 43rd Street and “hurtled toward Sixth Avenue at fully thirty-five miles an hour.” (A car of that era had to strain to reach forty.) They outraced police officers who had commandeered a taxi. This was credited as the first car chase in a city where horse-drawn carriages were still common.
Enter stage right New York City District Attorney Charles Whitman. He saw in the sensational murder and the connection to police graft a perfect storm of publicity that could serve his political ambitions.
It wasn’t long before the killers were rounded up—eyewitnesses had seen their faces and had noted the license number of the getaway car. The newspapers used their nicknames: Gyp the Blood, Whitey Lewis, Dago Frank, and Lefty Louis. They were tried for the killing and convicted. All were scheduled to be executed.
But gangland murders were a dime a dozen. It was official corruption that sold newspapers. Whitman declared that the crime had been planned and ordered by Charles Becker. He had the lieutenant arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
Becker would become the focus of the very first Trial of the Century. Whitman emphasized the lieutenant’s hard-fisted approach to law enforcement. Becker’s take from graft, he said, was as much as $100,000 — $3 million in today’s dollars. The officer lived in what was described as a “mansion” in the Bronx with his wife, Helen.
But Becker’s guilt for the Rosenthal murder was far from clear. He had no connection to any of the killers. And knocking off the gambler would have done more to incriminate him than any allegation from a known racketeer. It seemed more likely that this was just another underworld blood feud.
The trial teetered on the testimony of a gambler named Bald Jack Rose. Rose had a motive: to silence Rosenthal, who had publicly accused Rose of collecting bribes for Becker. Given immunity, Rose admitted to hiring the button men who did the shooting. And he had rented the getaway car. But he claimed that he did it all on instructions from Becker.
Becker’s trial, which began in October 1912, ended in conviction. Becker appealed. A higher court overruled the result, determining that the trial was unfair, the judge biased, and the verdict “shockingly against the weight of evidence.”
Whitman was not ready to concede defeat. In May 1914 he hauled Becker back into court. The jury in the second trial reached the same verdict: guilty.
Becker, who had always proclaimed his innocence, awaited his execution date in Sing Sing. After further appeals failed, he had only one hope. In 1915, he asked the governor of New York for a pardon. Unfortunately for him, Charles Whitman, riding the publicity of the multi-year scandal, had been elected governor and taken office that year. He denied Becker’s plea.
The lieutenant, the only American police officer ever condemned to death, exchanged a last embrace with his wife at the prison on July 30, 1915. As he walked to the execution chamber, he responded to a priest who read the Litany of the Holy Name: From all sin — Deliver us, O Jesus. From Your wrath — Deliver us, O Jesus.
Three jolts of 1,850-volt juice were needed to send the big man to eternity. For millions of readers, the ghost of the affair would live on in Fitzgerald’s greatest novel:
“Four of them were electrocuted,” I said, remembering.
“Five with Becker.”
Please share with others.
Kirkus Reviews calls GOD SAVE BENEDICT ARNOLD “a dazzling addition to the history of the American Revolution.” Preorder HERE.
A lot has changed since then. But for the better?
Crooked cops and politicians in NYC, flabbergasted!