The NYPD’s First Fifty Years
Politicians, Police Commissioners, & Patrolmen
by Bernard Whalen and Jon Whalen
Potomac Books
They were the city’s finest — and sometimes, the city’s most notorious.
“The NYPD’s First Fifty Years,” by Bernard Whalen and Jon Whalen chronicles the early arc of the police department following its formation in 1898, when 18 independent forces became one.
Some of the 21 men who ruled the NYPD through its first half-century were forward-thinking visionaries. Some were pragmatic administrators. But more than a few, the authors note, tried their hand at larceny, or at least dereliction of duty. They include:
William Devery (1898-1901)
The department’s first chief of police, a rank that was abolished in 1901 for that of police commissioner, was the king of kickbacks.
At age 24, Devery quit a bartending job to join the Metropolitan Police Force, the forerunner of the NYPD. Scoring a seat to take the police entrance exam required a $300 under-the-table payoff while to “advance in rank required payments ranging from $1,000 (to make sergeant) to $2,000 (to become a captain), even when a candidate had passed the written test with high marks.” (Consider that in 1918 — 40 years after Devery first joined the department — the starting salary of a patrolman was still only $1,200 annually!)
“Devery was more than willing to trade dollars for rank because he knew that once he became a precinct commander, he could easily recover his ‘fees,’ ” the authors write.
Earlier in his career, upon taking command of a Lower East Side police precinct, Devery was heard to say: “They tell me there’s a lot of grafting going on in this precinct. They tell me you fellows are the fiercest ever on graft. Now that’s going to stop! If there’s any grafting to be done, I’ll do it. Leave it to me.”
Devery, courtesy of the loot he hornswoggled, was able to buy the New York Highlanders, the forerunner of the New York Yankees that he and a partner sold for $300,000 in 1915. No wonder journalist Lincoln Steffens said of him: “As Chief of Police he is a disgrace, but as a character he is a work of art.”
Theodore Bingham (1906-1909)
Theodore Bingham
What shall we make of hard-charging Bingham, except that he would have been decidedly ill-suited to Twitter, had the social-media tool been around 110 years ago?
A former brigadier general who lost his left leg during an Army engineering accident in Buffalo, also was afflicted with pathological bluntness.
Bingham lobbied early in his tenure for the right to promote or demote police inspectors, a rank that carried certain civil-service protections. When a new law passed giving him the very authority he sought, Bingham was hardly mollified, insisting in an April 1908 speech that his department was still hobbled because captains were able to retain the same job protections inspectors had just lost.
“I wish that about 40 police captains would die overnight. They are no good,” he announced.
He apologized, but that September he was at it again.
This time, an article he wrote appeared that stated how “half the criminals in the city were Russian Jews, and the worst offenders were their Hebrew sons, whom he described as natural pickpockets,” the authors note.
The querulous Bingham apologized anew, but his tactlessness became an issue once more when he indiscreetly volunteered a clue on the whereabouts of Lt. Joseph Petrosino, the department’s first true media darling.
Petrosino was already famous for his heroic battles against the Black Hand, a nefarious gang and precursor to the Mafia that preyed on Italian businessmen with extortions, kidnappings and bombings.
In early 1909, the lieutenant embarked on a confidential mission to Italy, seeking criminal background records of Black Hand members operating in the Big Apple.
When asked about Petrosino’s whereabouts, Bingham blurted out, “Why he may be on the ocean bound for Europe for all I know.”
The intemperate quip — what the authors deem “this foolish slip of the tongue”— was credited with enabling reporters to learn that Petrosino had arrived in Italy. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that on the evening of March 12, he was shot dead, outside a Palermo cafe.
The case was never solved.
Many blamed Bingham’s garrulousness for what befell Petrosino, but the brusque commissioner was somehow able to weather that storm — at least for 10 more weeks, until his final act of impertinence did him in, at last. He wrote an angry letter to Mayor George B. McClellan Jr., refusing to take the blame for problems with his department. McClellan fired him for “insubordination.”
Richard Enright (1918-1925)
Richard Enright (meeting with a squad of women tasked to ferret out subway gropers in 1923) discovered that 30 members of the NYPD were also members of the Ku Klux Klan, but he did nothing.
There is an enduring NYPD maxim that has long circulated within the corridors of power within police headquarters: “Big cases, big problems. Small cases, small problems. No cases, no problems.”
The wisdom of this old chestnut was proven in the immediate aftermath of an embarrassing November 1922 front-page story in the New York World detailing how a Baptist minister in Brooklyn let the Ku Klux Klan recruit from among his parishioners.
Aghast at the news, Mayor John Francis Hylan demanded that Police Commissioner Enright follow up on that disturbing news.
“Ferret out those despicable, disloyal persons who are attempting to organize a society the aims and purposes of which are of such character that were they to prevail, the foundation of our country would be destroyed. Go after the Ku Klux Klan and do not let them get a foothold in New York City,” Hylan thundered.
Problem was, the authors note, the Klan already had a foothold here, as was demonstrated when, three weeks after Hylan’s admonition, Enright dutifully turned over a list to the Brooklyn DA containing an astonishing 800 suspected Klansmen who were living here.
That wasn’t the worst of it, though.
Thirty of those names, Enright discovered, were NYPD cops. No one on the master list had broken any laws, so a decision was reached on exactly what to do: nothing.
Joseph Warren (1927-1928)
Warren’s dereliction is best illustrated by the murder of Arnold Rothstein, once New York’s most notorious gangster.
Rothstein was alleged to have been the brains behind the infamous Black Sox scandal of 1919, in which the World Series was fixed; he was also the real-life embodiment of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unctuous creation, Meyer Wolfsheim, in “The Great Gatsby.”
Uncharacteristically, Rothstein lost $320,000 during a three-day marathon poker game in the early fall of 1928, a debt he apparently found no compunction to promptly honor, as he believed he’d been cheated. Two months later, on Sunday evening, Nov. 3, 1928, Lady Luck dealt him a very bad hand while he was at a floating poker game in room 349 of the Park Central Hotel, at Seventh Avenue and West 55th Street.
A player purportedly accused “The Brain” of being a “welch” for failing to pay his debt, which lead to heated words — and Rothstein being blasted in the gut. He stumbled from the room before being rushed to a local hospital, where he died two days later, without naming his killer.
Suspicions soon fixed on George “Hump” McManus, whose coat was left at the scene.
Police Commissioner Warren — who was legitimately beset by debilitating mental problems — inexplicably permitted his top investigator, Deputy Chief Inspector John Coughlin, commanding officer of the Detective Division, to take “a sudden extended vacation, a move that brought the investigation to a complete halt,” the authors note.
Mayor Jimmy Walker used Warren’s misstep to recruit a new police commissioner while attempting to ease Warren out, but the damage proved insurmountable. McManus strode from the courthouse a free man.
Lewis Valentine (1934-1945)
Lewis Valentine (right with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia) advised roughing up suspects.
The no-nonsense Valentine was a cop for more than 30 years when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia tapped him as his police commissioner and a fair measure of the Little Flower’s future successes can be laid at his doorstep.
They were a strange pairing: La Guardia was a liberal reformer in the socialist mold, while Valentine’s political orthodoxy seemed to hew to the right of Attila the Hun.
Valentine, whose autobiography was appropriately enough titled, “Nightstick” and who would later host a radio show, “Gang Busters,” was the embodiment of a “tough cop.” It was his good fortune to have served when he did, as the worst recent transgressions under the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program pall by comparison to the routine civil-rights abuses Valentine proudly countenanced.
He was, after all, an unapologetic partisan of “the third degree” — the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of the era — where recalcitrant suspects could be relied upon to enthusiastically share their criminal culpability after enduring brutal squad-room beatings. Everyone just winked, save the battered suspects nursing puffy eyes.
Valentine chastised the cops under his command not to coddle criminals and actually expected gangsters to tip their hats to his officers whenever they walked past, promising promotions “for the men who kick those gorillas around.”
Following the slow death of a cop who had been shot a week earlier, an already incensed Valentine grew more enraged when he spotted a jaunty-looking hoodlum, Harry Strauss, “wearing a Chesterfield overcoat with a velvet collar and pearl gray fedora cocked atop his head at a wise-guy angle.”
“When you meet such men,” he lectured his men, “draw quickly and shoot accurately. Look at him. He’s the best-dressed man in this room, yet he’s never worked a day in his life. When you meet men like this, don’t be afraid to muss ’em up. Men like him should be mussed up. Blood should be smeared all over that velvet collar. Instead, he looks as though he has come out of a barber shop.”
He wasn’t done with his sermon.
“You men will be supported by me no matter what you do, if what you do is justified,” he vowed. “Make it disagreeable for men like these. Drive them out of this city. Teach them to fear arrest. Make them fear you.”
