Bowery Murder, page 1
BOWERY MURDER
Willard K. Smith
Foreword
The following account of the Bowery Murder which occurred in April, 1928, is one that I believe could be compiled only by myself. My publishers, these ten years later, assume this, and it is only upon their insistence that I have finally put aside my scruples regarding publicity and, in the unusual form which follows, present the details of a crime that was a world sensation ten years ago. My particular knowledge of the case comes about, first, through my association with several of the principals, both at the time of the murder and in the years that have followed. Secondly, my friendship with Dan Carr, formerly Inspector, Detective Division of the Police Department of New York City, who had charge of the case, enabled me to obtain much information that never was published. And finally, as a newspaper reporter, ten years ago, I covered the Bowery Bar Murder and wrote many of the news stories concerning it.
I had had the idea of utilizing certain features of the case as the basis of a fiction crime story, disguising all names and facts. However, at my publishers’ suggestion, coupled with that of Carr, I have now come to disregard any pretence at fiction and tell the extraordinary occurrences of the Bowery Bar Murder as they actually happened and exactly as they were presented to a hundred million newspaper readers throughout the world. Fortunately, I have retained a dozen books of shorthand notes concerning the case and containing Carr’s verbatim comments at the time. These enable me to interpolate between the news dispatches. Inspector Carr was most reluctant to give his permission to quote him to the extent that I have, but since he has retired from the department and is engaged on a book of memoirs himself he finally consented to coöperate fully with me. I am deeply indebted to him for his aid and for granting me permission to use his comments. In fact, this story should perhaps be credited to him and not to me.
His comment concerning the case might be of interest here.
“We never, in the history of the Department,” he said, “had so many tips and so much apparent information about a murder and so little knowledge of what actually happened. The cops, you know, don’t work so much on clues as they do on tips. Sherlock Holmes stuff is all right in fiction, but it don’t go in New York. We got confessions enough, but what good were they? The case had more angles to it than a Greenwich Village picture. You and me was in it, right on the inside, as far as being on the inside was possible, and what did we know?
“Yet it was simple crime. A big mug was shot in the presence of five witnesses, and yet who shot him? Old stuff, maybe, in stories, but it was the first time I ever ran into a situation like that in real life. If you’re set on telling it go ahead and write it just as the newspapers did back in 1928 and you ought to have a good tale. Let the public know how hard a job we cops had, and maybe these smart alecks that are always criticizing the Department may learn something.”
That was Carr’s suggestion. He is, perhaps, all wrong, and I am, too, in thinking that ten years later the reading public would be interested in having a story told as millions followed it years ago. To quote the vernacular of that time, “it may just hand you a laugh” now. But the experiment is worth while, if only for the interest this presentation may have as a cross section of the sporting life of the world’s greatest city in the days when the first Atlantic flights were being made from Europe. The story may pass away an hour or two of the ten-hour ride for passengers on the present air liners between here and France, if it serves no other purpose.
WILLARD K. SMITH.
CHAPTER I
Compiler’s Note
The Bowery Bar Murder did not actually start with the report of pistol shots which brought Harry Kelly running to the back room of that famous old-time saloon—the Bowery Bar—the night of April 18, 1928. Its genesis was in the year 1908 when Rose O’Neil, aged five, picked up an old broomstick off the Bowery sidewalk and bravely sailed into a group of neighbourhood youngsters who were battling a young gladiator named Watts Gordon. Rose put the gang to flight and became the heroine of Watts’s life for a year. He was then but eight years old, and she was his first girl.
Rose was born on the Bowery and as a tomboy could outfight, outrun, and outplay any boy two to four years older than herself. She was not then the “Belle of the Bowery,” nor was Watts a famous football captain nor yet the star reporter on the Post. It was their first meeting, and I consider it a lucky one, everything considered, from the point of view of to-day. Watts Gordon seldom needed a girl to fight his battles even then, although he was not Bowery bred, despite the fact that his family lived adjacent to that famous thoroughfare. The Gordons were of what I might dubiously call the gentility. At least, “old man” Gordon, then a county surveyor, had been to college and was a Republican. These two things stamped him as different from the “old home folks” of the Bowery.
The romance of Watts and Rose did not have much time to develop, for Watts’s father, Henry Gordon, finding himself out of a job as a result of his political activities, moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where Republicans were in better standing, and eventually became Commissioner of Public Works of the Common-wealth of Pennsylvania, dying in 1924 while in office. Watts, of course, went with his family, and there was, I am told, a tearful farewell between him and Rose. Rose has denied this, but I believe it was true. Within a week, however, Watts was making new friends in Harrisburg, and Rose was forgotten for nearly twenty years. This Watts denies, but Rose affirms, and I am inclined to believe the lady in the case for reasons that are better divulged later.
In carrying back the beginning of the events of April 18, 1928, to 1908 I am breaking up the sequence of evidence noted by the police and the press after the case broke. As in many noted murder cases there was a great element of mystery about the actual killing, and at first there was even some doubt that anyone had been killed. We did not know anything about Watts Gordon’s earlier acquaintance with Rose O’Neil, nor, of course, did any of us, outside of the five people present that fatal night in the back room of Bowery Bar, know the events preceding the notorious murder. When all the principals in a killing that merits full-page headlines are people prominent in the financial, theatrical, and political life of a city the size of New York, it is obvious that the case becomes one of paramount newspaper importance even if no mystery or complications of profound proportions come into it. If there is added to the importance of the persons implicated a large political interest, strong love interest, a fateful controversy as to actual guilt; if such picturesque characters as fat Chinese Charlie Whango, Max Ratkowsky (the Bolshevik dictator of Inner Mongolia), Broadway Dixie Blake, and Billy Pluto (a half-caste thug) come into the case, then, from a news standpoint, it transcends almost anything that could happen.
It is somewhat necessary to consider Watts Gordon before any account be given of his part in the crime—a participation which did not develop as news until several days after the murder. Singularly, Gordon, a young man of splendid character, brilliant and thoroughly honourable, had been arrested by the police on five different occasions up to April 18, 1928. In no case was there, however, a conviction. Consideration of these cases will give an interesting view of his character. The first was in 1910 and I quote from the Harrisburg Patriot in part:
RECORD HOME RUN BRINGS YOUTH INTO POUCE COURT
Youngster Ten Years Old Bats Ball Over 200 Feet Through Window into Home of Mrs. G. H. Outer
Harrisburg has an embryo Tyrus Cobb making records on the baseball diamond at the age of ten. Watts Gordon, son of Material Inspector Henry Gordon of the Capitol, came up to bat yesterday in the ninth inning of a little game played on the River Drive. There were two men on bases and five on a side. The first ball looked good to Watts, and he landed on it squarely.
Tommy Baldwin, playing left field for the opponents, saw the ball go over his head, across the Drive, and straight into the front window of Mrs. G. H. Carter’s residence 200 feet away. Tommy decided to resign from the team in that instant.
Watts Gordon was already on second base when the crash came, but as a runner he was not the equal of Policeman O’Conner who, starting from the curb grandstand, caught Watts about two blocks away from home plate.
Taken to the police station, Watts admitted his prowess.
Compiler’s Note
Watts Gordon’s second arrest occurred in 1916 and did not have the elements of comedy that characterized the one six years before. Like that, however, its background was baseball. As may be judged from the following account, Watts was not blessed with a particularly meek temperament. The following is taken from the Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) Times:
VISITING BASEBALL PLAYER GOES INTO STANDS TO BEAT UP FAN
Watts Gordon, Captain of Harrisburg High School Team, Arrested and Fined
Harrisburg not alone sends us a poor baseball team as representative of its high school but sends us a rowdy in the shape of the team captain, Watts Gordon. Yesterday, when the Bethlehem High School team was leading 3 to 2 in the sixth inning, Gordon, the captain of the Harrisburg aggregation, who was pitching, disliked the conversation of a group of Bethlehem fans and deliberately left the box and ran over to the grandstand, where he vaulted the rail and started a fight with three town boys.
Only the interference of Policeman “Bob” Luckenbach prevented the fight from becoming a riot with the entire Harrisburg team supporting their captain. The umpire called the game and gave a victory to Bethlehem with the score 9 to o. Gordon was arrested along with several others, but he alone was held responsible, and he was fined 8
Compiler’s Note
From Harrisburg High School Gordon went to Harvard. His reputation as an all-round athlete had preceded him, and he pitched for the freshman baseball team and played tackle on the football team. His schooling was interrupted by the war, and in the summer of 1918 he went to aviation training camp and was about to receive his commission as a pilot when the armistice came. Subsequently he returned to Harvard and became captain of the 1920 football team.
Gordon’s third arrest came during the celebration of the victory over Yale when he was picked up with a crowd of Harvard students who were trying to tear the town apart. As a matter of fact he was merely an innocent member of the mob, and since there was no evidence against him, he was immediately released with apologies when his identity became known.
He graduated from Harvard in 1921 and returned to Harrisburg, where he took charge of the local office of a New York stock exchange and investment house. While in college he had attained some reputation as a writer, and after about six months in the financial office he resigned to become a reporter on the Harrisburg Patriot, having decided that he would make journalism his profession.
Concerning Watts Gordon’s physical characteristics, I have no better record than Inspector Carr’s impression as he remembers him on a visit to the Tombs, after Gordon’s sixth arrest.
“He was a tall lad,” Carr remarked to me, “about six feet, maybe a little less, not heavy but fairly broad in the shoulders and narrow in the hips—rangy, you might call him. Fair complexion and a good smile. Good teeth. That means a lot. Most crooks have bum teeth, somehow. He reminded me a bit of that Colonel Lindbergh who flew to Paris about a year before. You remember Lindbergh. Sure. Well, he reminded me of him. I was guarding the colonel when he was in New York after coming back from France.”
“I knew Gordon,” I remarked to Carr. “Your description is a bit glowing but true enough, I guess.”
“That’s right, you sure ought to know him. He wasn’t much for talking, though. Cool for a lad locked up in the Tombs on serious charge, without bail.
“Yes, Gordon was a type I seldom get up against. He wouldn’t have cracked in a thousand years if it hadn’t a-been for Rose O’Neil.”
The following news items and letters concerning Watts Gordon are self-explanatory, and with their conclusion I leave him, to gather up the beginnings of the main strand which directly led to the murder in the Bowery Bar. The present reader has this advantage over the 1928 reader eagerly scanning the headlines about Thomas Woodward, the financier whose name was the first to be carried in large type in connection with the events in the back of the bar. He, at least, suspects Watts Gordon of some connection with it and knows much about him that never was brought out: minor details, it is true, but indicative of his character. The press never gave full attention to his exceptional attributes because it was too concerned with personalities which it felt appealed more to the public taste in connection with a startling crime.
A Letter (Never Published) from the Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania to Cyrus V. Byers, Managing Editor, the Post, New York City
THE CAPITOL
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Office of the Lieutenant Governor Harrisburg, May 8, 1925.
Dear Cyrus:
This letter will introduce and present Watts Gordon, a son of my old associate, the late Commissioner Henry Gordon. Watts is a personal friend of mine, and I have known him ever since he came to Harrisburg, almost twenty years ago. For some time he has been a reporter on the Harrisburg Patriot but now wishes to make his mark in the big city of New York. And I believe he will do it.
His own editor here tells me that Watts is one of his best men and he would hate to lose him, but the editor knows the call of New York and cannot help himself. I want you as a personal favour to me to make a place for him on the Post if you possibly can. I know he will make good. He has real writing ability.
With kindest regards,
Yours,
Miles F. PORTOR.
To CYRUS V. BYERS,
The Post, New York.
From the Patriot (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) May 13, 1925.
SOCIETY NOTES
Miss Elen Hoffer of 48 Front Street was the hostess last evening to a number of friends of Watts Gordon, who is leaving Harrisburg to-morrow to accept an important position on the well-known New York newspaper, the Post. Twenty-two young people were present for dancing and a buffet supper.
All rumours of an engagement between Miss Hoffer and Mr. Gordon were denied, but still the idea persisted among those present, the lieutenant governor being among those who refused to accept a denial.
Extracts from a Letter to Watts Gordon from Elen Hoffer (July 27, 1925)
… Your letter this morning made me happy and not so happy,’ too. Happy to think that you would offer me so much—and not so happy because I cannot see my way clear, dearest Watts, to act on your good idea. I do really appreciate your desire to have me go to New York and be married, Watts dear, and I am indescribably touched and pleased. I have thought of it much since you first surprised me by wanting to marry me, which means more from you than it does from other men. I know that because I know you. But, my dear, I haven’t the urge, the necessary wish and the will, to take that step with you. And consequently it wouldn’t mean happiness for us….
Extracts from a Letter to Miss Elen Hoffer from Watts Gordon (About Two Years Later)
New York, Sept. 23, 1927.
DEAR ELEN:
I am not proving such a wonderful correspondent these days as I was a year or two ago, but I still think of you frequently, and sometimes I wonder if I didn’t give up too easily. But it’s too late now and I must think of you as a dear, dear friend to confess to. I read in the Patriot last month of your engagement to Arthur Ward. My sincere congratulations. Dear old Artie! But you must be reconciled to having him get fat; I told him when I saw him in New York in August that his waist line was a disgrace.
I would envy Artie so heartily, my dear, if it weren’t for things happening here that have made me lose some of the poignant heartache I carried for a year after your decision in regard to me. Yes, it’s a new girl, and a wonder! She reminds me of you very much at times. I knew her years ago when I was a youngster on the Bowery.
I am very busy on the Post, covering financial matters on Wall Street and incidentally doing a little private investigation in politics here for the paper. It may run into a big story pretty soon, and I’ll become New York’s greatest little Paul Pry, unless I get shot before. Here’s a clipping about my last escapade. It may be of interest.
I’ll write you again….
The clipping Gordon enclosed to Miss Hoffer follows. It is the story of his fourth arrest. This happened nearly a year previous to the Bowery Murder case, but it has some bearing on it, so I give it here.
From the Post (New York) June 23, 1927
DIVE RAID NETS MANY NOTABLES
3 Shot as Police Force Entrance into Palatial Chinatown Establishment
$100,000 GAMBLING EQUIPMENT SEIZED
After two weeks’ secret investigation the police last night, under the direction of Captain Matt J. O’Brien, staged Chinatown’s most spectacular raid. Amid much shooting and crashing of doors entrance was forced into a sumptuously furnished gambling and opium den at 95 Mott Street. Five luxurious rooms within the house contained gambling layouts embracing every device from a wheel of fortune to Mah Jong. In an upstairs section were several screened rooms with divans and opium-smoking equipment.
Ten officers participated in the raid, and the interior of the dive was reached only after the police had put down a spirited resistance by Chinese gunmen and had forced two iron doors. The gunmen were Manchurians, apparently of the most reckless type. Charlie Whango, the alleged proprietor, was shot through the shoulder by Detective Sergeant James Fogarty, who was wounded by a bullet through the leg. Both were attended by ambulance surgeons. Whango, who is the reputed secret boss of Chinatown and known by his peculiar name throughout the East Side, was arrested with seven other Chinese and was held in $25,000 bail, which was given by a local surety company.
