The Heroic Gangster_The Story of Monk Eastman, From the Streets of New York to the Battlefields of Europe and Back Read online

  ALSO BY NEIL HANSON

  The Confident Hope of a Miracle

  Unknown Soldiers

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2010 by Neil Hanson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hanson, Neil.

  Monk Eastman : the gangster who became a war hero / by Neil Hanson. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Borzoi Book”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59436-5

  1. Eastman, Monk, 1873–1920. 2. Gangsters—New York (State) — New York—Biography.

  3. Criminals—New York (State) — New York—Biography. I. Title.

  HV6248.E34H36 2010

  364.l092–dc22

  [B] 2010016840

  First Edition

  v3.1

  For the members of my gang:

  Lynn, Jack, and Drew

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  LIST OF MAPS

  Part I

  Prologue A LOT OF LITTLE WARS

  Chapter 1 THE HALL OF TEARS

  Chapter 2 BLACKER THAN A WOLF’S THROAT

  Chapter 3 AS A POOL REFLECTS THE SKY

  Chapter 4 A MODERN ROBIN HOOD

  Chapter 5 THE ROGUES’ GALLERY

  Chapter 6 THE GANGLAND CODE

  Chapter 7 THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

  Chapter 8 THE BATTLE OF RIVINGTON STREET

  Chapter 9 THE TOMBS

  Chapter 10 A NAPOLEON RETURNED FROM ELBA

  Part II

  Chapter 11 O’RYAN’S ROUGHNECKS

  Chapter 12 WE ONLY SEE OLD MEN AND BOYS

  Chapter 13 THIS REALM OF SILENCE

  Chapter 14 THE NIAGARA OF SHELLS

  Chapter 15 MORE THAN BROTHERS

  Chapter 16 THE MEN MUST GO FORWARD

  Chapter 17 A SORT OF SACRIFICE

  Chapter 18 THE HINDENBURG LINE

  Chapter 19 THE PHANTOM DIVISION

  Chapter 20 ALWAYS SHALL WE HONOR THEM

  Part III

  Chapter 21 THE FIGHTERS THAT THEY WERE

  Chapter 22 VICTIMLESS CRIMES

  Chapter 23 DRAPED IN BLACK CLOTH

  Epilogue THE WAY THINGS HAVE CHANGED

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  GLOSSARY

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  A Note About the Author

  Photo Insert

  MAPS

  MONK EASTMAN’S DOMAIN

  THE BATTLES OF MONT KEMMEL AND VIERSTRAAT RIDGE

  THE BATTLES OF THE HINDENBURG LINE AND THE SELLE AND ST.-MAURICE RIVERS

  Part I

  Monk Eastman’s Domain: The Lower East Side in 1902

  The Battles of Mont Kemmel and Vierstraat Ridge

  The Battles of the Hindenburg Line and the Selle and St.-Maurice Rivers

  Prologue

  A LOT OF LITTLE WARS

  SEPTEMBER 21, 1917

  When the sergeant manning the recruiting desk in the Brooklyn Armory glanced at the next man in the line of potential recruits, he did a double take. Since the U.S. declaration of war on April 6 of that year, he had processed an endless stream of volunteers and conscripts. Most were young and fresh-faced, excited but more than a little frightened at the prospect of going to war on a continent from which most of their forefathers had sprung, but to which they owed no present allegiance, and of which they often displayed the most profound ignorance and indifference.

  The man now standing, impassive, before him, was unlike any of those who had come before him. He was much older—thirty-nine, he said, though in that, as in much else in his life, he lied, since he was actually forty-three—but his age was not the only thing that held the recruiting sergeant’s gaze. Just five foot seven inches tall, the man was as solid as a tenement block, with powerful, simian arms and fists like clubs.1 His knuckles were crosshatched with faint white scars. His neck and face also bore scar tissue: both the rough, ragged marks left by brass knuckles, clubs, and bottles, and the clean white lines of razor and knife cuts.

  Even in his prime he was never a handsome man, but he now redefined ugliness. He was coarse and fleshy-featured, his skin pockmarked, his dark-brown, almost black, eyes hooded and close-set. “The aftermath of smallpox and brawls, his face looked like a stretch of Carolina landscape after a hurricane has blown over, with boats in the middle of town, cars overturned, cows hooked on flagpoles … Coming down a dark downtown street, he must have looked like death itself.”2 His hair was parted neatly—“an odd dandified touch, like a hat on a horse”—but his ears were cauliflowered and mangled, and his broken, flattened nose gave his thick East Side accent an even more nasal quality. His front teeth, broken in fistfights, had been capped with gold, the precious metal in this bruiser’s face as incongruous as a diamond in a dung heap.

  As he stripped to the waist for his medical examination, he revealed more scars on his back and torso, and the ugly marks left by two bullet wounds in his stomach. With the air of a man retelling a favorite anecdote, he told the sergeant that after he was shot, he’d plugged the holes with his fingers and walked to the hospital. As he stood on the scale, he added that he’d been shot so often that they should allow a little extra for the weight of the bullets still embedded in his body.

  “So what battles have you been in?” the sergeant asked.

  “Oh, a lot of little wars around New York.”3

  The path that had led the man to this armory in Brooklyn was a long and tortuous one. He had tasted wealth and fame—or at least infamy—that few had ever known, and he had sunk to depths that few others had reached. Now, in a moment that marked a personal epiphany, he stood on the brink of a final disgrace, or redemption, or perhaps even death. For the first time in his life, the man’s undoubted personal courage and his skill with his fists, knives, clubs, and firearms were to be used not in criminal pursuits, but in the legitimate service of the state.

  This year of 1917 was also an epochal moment for New York and the United States. Neither this gangster and the criminal world he inhabited nor the city in which he had lived and built his fearsome reputation would emerge from the war unchanged. Over the past century, the nation born largely of European immigrants had turned its back on the Old World and set its face resolutely to the West. Now it found itself being drawn out of its insularity to take its place in the wider world. Not all were happy with this development. For many Americans, the war raging beyond the Atlantic was just another of the endless disputes and conflicts between the decaying European powers, as meaningless and irrelevant to the United States as some Ruritanian melodrama. However, if that feeling was strongest in the American heartlands of the Midwest, it was far less keenly felt on the East Coast, and particularly in New York, where old-world ties of blood, heritage, and trade were strongest. The hordes of recent immigrants from Russia, Germany, Italy, Britain, and other European countries had left friends and family behind who were now enmeshed in the bloody conflict and, whether soldiers or civilians, were paying a heavy price. Even the Irish, locked in a
n increasingly bloody struggle for independence from English rule, had sent thousands of men to fight and bleed alongside their English comrades.

  The U.S. declaration of war had also forced many foreign-born Americans, perhaps for the first time in their lives, to confront the question of their core identity: Did they define themselves by the land of their birth, or by that of their adopted country? Hundreds of thousands of foreign-born men gave a categorical answer to the question. Before serving with the American Expeditionary Force, they adopted American citizenship under the “naturalization tree” in Louisville, Kentucky, or at similar ceremonies the length and breadth of the United States.

  German-Americans, the largest single group of foreign origin within the United States, whose patriotism was now under scrutiny and whose ancestry, language, and culture were often vilified, rarely equated their roots with sympathy for the Kaiser and German militarism. Many of the Germans who arrived in the United States in the 1870s and 1880s had emigrated for political reasons or to avoid conscription, and few of them or their descendants showed much enthusiasm for supporting, let alone enlisting in, the German armies now. In fact, after a meeting in Chicago in May 1915, a group of German-Americans formed the Deutsche-Amerikaner Freikorps—a volunteer unit to fight on the Allied side.

  Even before the U.S. declaration of war, Americans with ties of blood or friendship or who felt a psychological kinship with the Old World, impatient of their nation’s reluctance to fight, had already found ways to serve the Allied cause. Many, including a number of distinguished writers, served with volunteer American ambulance companies ferrying the wounded from the battlefields. Those wanting more direct involvement in the fighting either crossed the border and joined the Canadian forces—thirty-five thousand Americans did so, and the 97th Battalion of the Canadian army was even christened “The American Legion”—or enlisted in the British Army or the French Foreign Legion. Pilots joined British squadrons or flew with the Lafayette Escadrille, an entirely American wing under overall French command.

  Right from the outbreak of war in August 1914, daily reports on the fighting were carried in the New York newspapers and avidly read, while The New York Times devoted at least two pages of its weekly rotogravure section to photographs from the battlefields. British propaganda about “poor little Belgium” and “Hun” atrocities, the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat, and the execution of Nurse Edith Cavell had also played a significant role in increasing hostility toward Germany and public sympathy for the Allies. But for American politicians, the most powerful engine for the eventual U.S. declaration of war was perhaps less moral or strategic than financial. Since the war had broken out, Britain and the other Allies had become major trading partners of the United States, and when the Allies’ stocks of gold became depleted, large parts of their purchases of food and equipment were financed by American credit—loans totaling $9.5 billion were made to the Allies—giving the United States an ever more compelling vested interest in ensuring an Allied victory.

  With all these factors already in operation, the German resumption of unrestricted U-boat warfare against merchant shipping in February 1917, coupled with the near-simultaneous decoding of the Zimmermann telegram, offering Mexico the return of her lost territories of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico in return for an alliance with Germany against the United States, provided the impetus—or the excuse for the already committed—for the U.S. declaration of war.

  Since then, men had been flocking to enlist at armories all over New York. Their motives were as varied as their origins, some fired by a sense of duty and patriotism, others by a thirst for adventure and excitement, while still others committed out of mere curiosity to see what this “World War” was really like. If he had been asked his reasons for enlisting, the man standing before the recruiting sergeant on that September morning might genuinely have replied that he felt he had no other choice. He gave his name as William Delaney, but he had been born Edward Eastman. At various times he had also been known as John, Jack, and “Big Jack” Eastman; Edward “Eddie” Delaney; John or Joe Marvin; John or William Murray; William Smith; and Joseph “Joe” Morris, though he was far better known—infamous, in fact—as the gang leader “Monk” Eastman, once the terror of the Lower East Side and commander of a private army of well over twelve hundred men.

  A decade earlier, it would have been inconceivable that the recruiting sergeant would have failed to recognize him. In New York City he was as famous as Harry Houdini, though far less admired. Day after day, Monk’s distinctive, scowling visage stared out from the pages of the newspapers, as his gang committed another outrage or he made another court appearance.

  His story was also deeply entwined with the parallel tale of the place in which he rose to power. He was a criminal colossus bestriding the Lower East Side, the dark underbelly of the greatest city in the world. New York was the industrial and financial powerhouse of the nation, its political and cultural wellspring and the bridgehead between the Old World and the New. But it was also a city steeped in crime and corruption, a rat’s nest where the most ruthless and predatory clawed their way to the top, and none had been more predatory than Monk Eastman.

  Yet Monk was a man of puzzling contradictions. He was a brutal thug, but was often seen on the streets with a kitten tucked under his arm and a tame blue pigeon on his shoulder. He possessed iron fists but also a kind heart, and he inspired affection as well as fear. To the poor of the Lower East Side, the reasons for his charity were probably as irrelevant as the origins of his money, but if he used money as well as the threat of violence to ensure their silence about his crimes, he was also capable of acts that had no discernible ulterior motive. One naval officer who encountered Monk on the Bowery around the turn of the century still recalled his kindness and wise advice twenty years later.4

  In police stations, criminal courts, and newspaper interviews, Monk lied so instinctively and so consistently that even he himself must have had trouble distinguishing truth from falsehood, and on the rare occasions when he actually did tell the truth, he found himself disbelieved. Depending on which newspaper, police, or underworld source you referred to, Monk was either “not a moll guy” or he was a lothario, never without a woman, usually a prostitute, on his arm. He had never married; married once; married twice. He had no children; two children; four children, two of whom had died in infancy. Some said that he was illiterate, though that was contradicted by several accounts of him reading newspapers and claims that he demanded written reports from his henchmen on the crimes they committed on his behalf. Monk was an enigma to all who encountered him, and every supposed fact about him was open to question; many still remain so, nine decades after his death.

  1

  THE HALL OF TEARS

  Monk Eastman’s origins were as opaque as every other facet of his life. Some thought he was Irish, a dog-fancier or a drifter from Corlears Hook at the bend of the East River. There was a vestige of truth in that, for when he was a boy, his family had lived awhile in nearby Lewis Street, off Delancey, and it would certainly have been a fertile habitat for a man of Monk’s dubious character. A poverty-stricken area ever since the Revolution, it remained one of the most lawless parts of the city. Others thought he was Jewish, like the majority of gang members who flocked to his colors. It was claimed that he was the son of a respectable Jewish restaurant owner from the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn, and that his name had originally been Osterman.1 Yet this was merely another example of the smoke and mirrors with which Monk concealed his origins and covered his tracks. Although he has featured in many lists of “tough Jews” through the years—and never was there a man better suited to demolishing the insulting stereotype of the meek, inoffensive Jew—Monk was neither Jewish nor Irish.

  Unlike most gangsters, Monk was the product of a relatively affluent upbringing, and he descended into the underworld by choice. The son of respectable people—Samuel Eastman, a Manhattan wallpaper hanger, and Mary Ellen Parks—Monk was bor
n in December 1873, though various official documents would later give the year of his birth as 1874, 1875, and 1876.2 He had two older sisters, Lizzie—born in California three years before Monk’s birth—and Ida, and a younger sister, Francine. An older brother, Willie, had died of smallpox in infancy before Monk was born.

  Although the Eastmans’ surname could have been an anglicization of the Germanic “Osterman”—man from the east—Samuel had been born in New Hampshire, of American-born parents whose own births long predated the great waves of Jewish immigration to the United States.3 Samuel’s wife, Mary, was born in New York, and her maiden name, Parks, suggested Anglo-Saxon origins, a supposition confirmed by the origins of her mother, Esther. An immigrant, Esther came to the United States not from Germany, eastern Europe, or Russia, where the vast majority of Jewish immigrants to New York originated, but from England. Neither the Eastmans nor the Parkses left any discernible record of their religion, other than one telling fact: when Monk eventually died, the committal service was read by a Methodist pastor.

  Monk’s early family history throws up one more revelation. In 1860, Monk’s father, Samuel, was living on Seventy-third Street in the house of Thomas McSpedon.4 Ten years later, although Samuel had moved out and was living with his wife on Cannon Street, between Rivington and Delancey streets, deep in the Lower East Side territory his son would one day rule, Samuel’s elderly mother was living at Seventy-third Street under the care of the McSpedons. The most plausible explanation is that she was a blood relative, possibly the aunt, of Thomas McSpedon, whose household seems to have been a violent one: Hester McSpedon sued her husband for divorce in 1877, citing his violence, cruelty, adultery, and obscene language; she in turn was accused of foul temper and arrogance.5 McSpedon was a prominent and influential Tammany politician, an alderman for the Nineteenth Ward during the “Boss” Tweed era, and his connections to Tammany Hall—the headquarters, housed in a square brownstone building just off Union Square, of the notoriously corrupt “machine” that dominated New York’s political life—would prove beneficial, perhaps even crucial, to Monk when he began his criminal career.