Man with the Sawed-Off Leg and Other Tales of a Ne Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Daniel J. Wakin

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover photo by Percy Loomis Sperr © Milstein Division,

  The New York Public Library

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62872-845-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-849-1

  Printed in the United States

  To Vera, Thomas, and Michael

  And the memory of my parents

  A history: Past, present, and future

  Contents

  Dramatis Personae

  Introduction

  1 The Planning, Stage 1: “Bags of Money”

  2 Origins: “A Benefit to the Neighborhood”

  3 The Kidnapping: “You Are His God Now”

  4 No. 330: Baking Powder: “Their Difficulties Are Well Known”

  5 The Planning, Stage 2: “One Good Ton Deserves Another”

  6 No. 331: “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”

  7 The Heist, Part I: “Ramshackle or Abandoned Mansions”

  8 No. 333: The Canavans, Bellow, and the Duke

  9 The Heist, Part II: “Say a Word, and It Spits”

  10 No. 334: Adrenaline and “Sakura, Sakura”

  11 The Getaway: Bennie Loses a Leg

  12 No. 334, Continued: “Four Out of Five Have It”

  13 The Hunt: “A Motion Picture Director’s Dream”

  14 No. 335: “More Potent for Evil”

  15 The Gang Disintegrates: “I Lived High, Wide, and Handsome”

  16 No. 336: Rubber and Clay

  17 Breakthrough

  18 No. 337: Miss Havisham’s House: “Freedom Was Mine”

  19 Farewells

  20 The Fates of Townhouses: “Life Is Particularly Difficult”

  Chronology

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Bibliography

  Photos

  Dramatis Personae

  The Rubel Gangsters

  John “Fats” Manning, West Sider, rumrunner

  Bernard “Bennie the Bum” McMahon, same, in “Legs” Diamond’s circle

  John Oley, Albany mobster

  Francis Oley, his brother

  Percy “Angel Face” Geary, Albany mobster

  John J. “Archie” Stewart, loudmouth middleman

  Stewart “One Arm” Wallace, gang recruit

  Thomas Quinn, boatman

  John Hughes, boatman

  Joseph Kress, car thief and driver

  Plus:

  Madeline Tully, boardinghouse operator

  Dr. Harry Gilbert, underworld doctor

  Armored Car Guards

  William Lilienthal

  John Wilson

  Joseph Allen

  The Trial, June 26–July 13, 1939

  William O’Dwyer, judge. Later mayor of New York.

  William F. X. Geoghan, Brooklyn district attorney

  Hyman Barshay, prosecutor

  Burton Turkus, lawyer for Stewart Wallace

  Caesar Barra, lawyer for Thomas Quinn

  Vincent Impellitteri, lawyer for Joseph Kress and another future mayor

  John Osnato, a lead detective

  Albany Kidnapping, July 7, 1939

  Daniel O’Connell, Albany political boss

  John “Solly” O’Connell, his brother

  John “Butch” O’Connell, Solly’s son and a National Guard lieutenant

  Manny Strewl, Oley associate and go-between with the kidnappers

  The Seven Beauties

  330 RIVERSIDE DRIVE

  Robert Benson Davis, or R. B., the baking powder king

  Jennie Davis, his wife

  Lucretia Davis, or Lulu, their daughter and heir to the building

  George S. Jephson, Lulu’s husband

  331 RIVERSIDE DRIVE

  William P. Ahnelt, fashion magazine pioneer

  Marion Davies, actress and mistress of William Randolph Hearst

  333 RIVERSIDE DRIVE

  The Canavans, family of the developer David Canavan

  Duke Ellington

  Saul Bellow

  334 RIVERSIDE DRIVE

  Jokichi Takamine, Japanese entrepreneur, cherry tree donor, isolator of adrenaline

  Richard Forhan, toothpaste magnate

  Madeline Tully, boardinghouse madam

  (and briefly, Bennie the Bum)

  335 RIVERSIDE DRIVE

  Mary Donnell, banker’s widow

  The Fabers, pencil makers

  336 RIVERSIDE DRIVE

  Raymond Penfield, brick maker and Goodyear’s second president

  337 RIVERSIDE DRIVE

  Julia Marlowe, America’s leading Shakespearean actress

  Michael De Santis, indigent portraitist

  Introduction

  IN THE WANING LIGHT OF AN August evening in 1934, three men climbed up the stoop of a townhouse at 334 Riverside Drive, between 105th and 106th streets on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The building revealed pretensions to elegance from another era in its columns flanking a rounded arch over the entrance, carved stone ornamentation, and filigreed wrought iron balconies. Now it was a seedy rooming house under the care of one Madeline Tully, who catered to prostitutes and individuals in need of temporary disappearance. That night, the men carried a companion, his left pant leg soaked with blood. He was called Bennie the Bum, more formally known as Bernard McMahon, and he had had the misfortune of accidentally blasting himself in the knee with a sawed-off shotgun while motoring in a speedboat across the gray waters of Gravesend Bay off Brooklyn. Bennie, it seems, had been trying to untangle the gun from a rope in the bottom of the boat. McMahon was no expert at nautical tasks. His skills lay in driving trucks, loading crates of liquor, and knocking heads together as a former bootlegger and enforcer for the dapper gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond.

  In the bottom of the boat were canvas bags, stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars just liberated from an armored car.

  Until the misguided shotgun blast, everything had gone smoothly on that sultry Tuesday, August 21, 1934. The armored car made a stop at the Rubel Ice Company warehouse in Brooklyn’s Bath Beach section, and there Bennie and his companions robbed it of $427,950 in what was then the most lucrative armored car heist in United States history. The operation—spectacular, daring, and meticulously planned—was carried out by an ad hoc gang composed of former bootleggers, toughs from Manhattan’s West Side docks, and gangsters from Albany. They vanished in minutes, making an unusual escape by water over the bay. Half of them aboard a motorboat and the other half in a lobster dory, they curved east around a thumb of land called Seagate, then past Breezy Point at the end of the Rockaways strip. They shot through Rockaway Inlet, between mainland Brooklyn and the strip, and into Jamaic
a Bay. The men dumped their guns overboard, landed on the barrier island, and scuttled their boats. Four headed back to Manhattan by bus and subway. Two drove to a safe house in Queens. The other three procured a car to take the bleeding McMahon to the refuge on Riverside Drive. There, they brought an underworld doctor who summarily amputated McMahon’s damaged leg. Unfortunately, the Bum lost so much blood that several days later he was dead.

  For a moment, let’s leave behind the movie-quality drama of the robbery—and the greed, recklessness, and depravity displayed by its protagonists—and turn to stone, brick, and iron. Mr. McMahon’s final stop, 334 Riverside Drive, is one of a row of seven buildings that predate the Great Depression by three decades, arising at the dawn of the twentieth century. A lovely line of Beaux-Arts townhouses, they face out onto Riverside Drive, their windows staring across Riverside Park through the trees and over the Hudson River into the rise that marks the beginning of New Jersey and the continental United States.

  To the south, the row begins with No. 330 on the corner of 105th Street, the most elegant and refined of them all, a delightful Parisian lady of the Belle Epoque. Next, heading north, No. 331 and No. 333 are creamy near-identical twins. No. 332 is a gap in this urban smile, torn down sometime in the mid-twentieth century. No. 334 is a stodgy middle-aged uncle with a plainer face despite the columns and carvings. No. 335 is a slender maiden, red brick and white-trimmed with stately columns in front. No. 336 is the dullest of the lot, receding into the background next to the Dickensian-style River Mansion at No. 337, on the corner of 106th Street, a boldly designed structure with ivy-wreathed Victorian red brick, contrasting limestone ornaments, and wrought iron barricades. All are official New York City landmarks.

  Like No. 334 and the bloody chapter it witnessed, each building in this phalanx of townhouses has served as its own stage set for events of the past—of scandals, family feuds, betrayals, suicide, fortunes made and lost. The protagonists have been moguls and maids, artists and office-workers, proper burghers and petty thieves, a great scientist, a former slaveholder, and a famous kept woman. They include an extraordinary array of great names in American letters, arts, and industry, all brought together at one geographical point, right here on this quiet bit of sidewalk. It’s possible that digging into the history of many blocks in New York would unearth an impressive roster of residents. But the epoch and location of these townhouses, and the nature and history of the neighborhood, make for a pretty amazing and unique confluence of people.

  The stories of the earliest occupants bring to life the prosperous, vigorous New York City that existed in the toddler years of the twentieth century. Horse-pulled trolleys lurched down the streets and hansom cabs ferried the gentry to the sound of clip-clops. The subway was just making its tunneled arrival. Homes were heated with coal, indoor electric lighting was a relative novelty, and lamplighters lit up gas street lamps. Spittoons adorned many rooms, upper class women trussed themselves up with corsets and received visitors during at-home days, and gentlemen retreated to the library after dinner for cigars. Columbia University had recently been built just to the north in Morningside Heights, joining a collection of grand structures—the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, St. Luke’s Hospital, and Grant’s tomb among them.

  Those early owners were men who came to New York City from elsewhere to pursue profit through commerce. Unlikely to be accepted by the four hundred families of old New York, the Fifth Avenue society so finely drawn by Edith Wharton, they wound up in the elegant wilds of Riverside Drive. They had recent roots in Europe or the Midwest. These men were self-made and carved out fortunes in industries like rubber tires, publishing, and brick making. Some of these businesses made items that, amazingly, are still part of our everyday lives. The families included the Fabers of the No. 2 pencil fame; the baking powder Davises, whose product is sold in familiar yellow and red containers; the Penfields, a branch of the Goodyear tire family; a toothpaste magnate whose brand still sells in Asia; one of the nation’s earliest biotech entrepreneurs; and the German immigrant who helped invent the modern fashion magazine. In several buildings, the same families remained in residence for decades, some well into the 1950s. While Bennie the Bum was undergoing dismemberment in No. 334, the black sheep of the block, the Fabers in 335 and the Canavans, a construction business dynasty, in 333, were ensconced in their comfortable homes on either side. The Penfields and Lucretia Jephson, the Davis baking powder heir, also were carrying on with their routines.

  Artistic New Yorkers lived there too. Julia Marlowe, one of the great Shakespearean actresses of her day, owned River Mansion, on the corner of 106th Street. A more populist performer also lived on the row: Marion Davies, the former chorine, film star, and mistress of the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. Some years later, Duke Ellington bought two of the buildings, and Saul Bellow grieved for the death of his father and wrote fiction there.

  As I tooled down these paths, researching who lived in each building, the Rubel heist story burst out as the biggest and juiciest tale, one whose chapters played out far beyond a small building in one neighborhood of one borough in one metropolis. A single gruesome incident in the Rubel saga took place on Riverside Drive, but the whole story was too irresistible to stop there. So I followed the thread, through the archives of federal courts and Alcatraz prison and newspapers, through the streets and along the shoreline of Brooklyn, through the written record of crimefighting in New York City. A great story of 1930s New York emerged, an era of snap-brimmed hats, high-waisted baggy trousers, and an underworld dominated by the Irish.

  Some of the gangsters who took part in the Rubel job were longstanding waterfront toughs. In the years that followed, several participants were murdered or disappeared mysteriously. Others were sent to Alcatraz for a celebrated Albany kidnapping, the subject of William Kennedy’s novel Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, an elegiac book set in underworld Albany, a city where the political machine was just another racket.

  A few of the Rubel gang did go on trial, in a case that brought together figures who would become prominent New Yorkers. Future Mayor William O’Dwyer was the judge. Another future mayor, Vincent Impellitteri—“Impy,” irresistibly, to the tabloid headline writers—was a defense lawyer. Burton Turkus, who as a prosecutor dismantled Murder, Inc., the prototype of a mass-murdering criminal enterprise, also defended a member of the gang.

  The heist was one of the most famous robberies of its time. The popular radio program “Gang Busters” devoted an episode to several of its protagonists. A film noir called Armored Car Robbery was based, extremely loosely, on the affair. The New York Times termed the robbery “a classic in modern criminal annals.” Publications ranging from Argosy, the pulp magazine, to the New Yorker chronicled the case. (The New Yorker article, in two parts, was co-written by Jack Alexander, who later joined the Saturday Evening Post and in 1941 wrote the first major article about Alcoholics Anonymous, a piece credited with launching a worldwide movement and turning the author into a hero to AA members.)

  And yet the Rubel robbery soon fell into oblivion.

  This book attempts to resurrect that story and others. It results from a fascination with what might be called the biography of structure, the notion that buildings have life stories drawn from the flesh-and-blood beings who pass through them. Bennie’s demise happened just twenty-seven years before I, newly born, came home from the hospital to a small two-bedroom apartment just around the corner from the room where the life had bled out of him. What’s twenty-seven years? It seems so little compared to the chasm between the 1930s and now, the early years of the new millennium. My arrival, like Bennie’s departure, was just another event in a dwelling on a block of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but both are reminders that dwellings, like human beings, are vessels of memory. A succession of individuals flits through the rooms of buildings, playing out the dramas of existence: births and deaths, violent acts and domestic routines. The rooms remain, the walls stand, and the next wa
ve of residents move in, unaware of their predecessors. The rhythm brings to mind the verse from Job 14:1–2 that is carved on the memorial to an “amiable child,” St. Clair Pollack, who died at age five in 1797, and sits just a mile away in Riverside Park: “Man that is born of woman / is of few days and full / of trouble. He cometh / like a flower and is / cut down; He fleeth also / as a shadow and / continueth not.” Here is a vivid example of the brevity of life compared to the longevity of buildings.

  A strange paradox occurred to me. I had grown up around these buildings and walked by them so many times that they had become a routine part of my mental landscape. They were deeply familiar. Yet I knew nothing of the lives that were carried on within these walls. And some day one of those forgotten stories would be mine. Other people living in my home would wonder about the anonymous residents of generations past.

  In 2000, I moved back into my childhood apartment around the corner from these wonderful memory banks of brick and stone. This time I was a husband and father of two sons of my own. Now the walls that contained my progress through childhood and adolescence would do the same for two other young men. Much had changed in my childhood home. The kind of renovation that was de rigueur for big Upper West Side rental buildings going co-op eliminated a long hallway once used for roller-skating. There were new built-in closets. The peeling paint blotches on the ceiling that formed animals when stared at were smoothed away. Old appliances—a black-and-white Zenith television set, the round-edged ice box, the crude pop-up toaster—were replaced with modern items. The red corduroy couch was gone.

  The streetscape remained the same, especially the large apartment houses across the street visible through our row of windows, especially lovely after a snowfall, when white bands traced the lintels and pediments on the facade. So did the view west, where jagged ice chunks flow down the Hudson River in winter. The sound of shouts of children playing on the streets—mine when I was a child, now my own boys’—was also the same. The traffic of the West Side Highway still hummed in the dead of night. The New York Times still plopped on the doorstep early in the morning, only now I was on the paper’s payroll. I had weird flashbacks created specifically by the physical surroundings when I saw one of our little sons yell “Ow!” from a splinter bestowed by the same floorboards, or when I watched him jump up to reach the same light switch.