 | |
 View Larger |
Satan's Circus: Murder, Vice, Police Corruption, and New York's Trial of the Century By Mike Dash ( Three Rivers Press )
Release Date: 2008-08-26
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $15.95
Price: $10.85
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
|  Add to Cart |
|
|
Product Description
They called it Satan’s Circus—a square mile of Midtown Manhattan where vice ruled, sin flourished, and depravity danced in every doorway. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was a place where everyone from the chorus girls to the beat cops was on the take and where bad boys became wicked men; a place where an upstanding young policeman such as Charley Becker could become the crookedest cop who ever stood behind a shield.
Murder was so common in the vice district that few people were surprised when the loudmouthed owner of a shabby casino was gunned down on the steps of its best hotel. But when, two weeks later, an ambitious district attorney charged Becker with ordering the murder, even the denizens of Satan’s Circus were surprised. The handsome lieutenant was a decorated hero, the renowned leader of New York’s vice-busting Special Squad. Was he a bad cop leading a double life, or a pawn felled by the sinister rogues who ran Manhattan’s underworld?
With appearances by the legendary and the notorious—including Big Tim Sullivan, the election-rigging vice lord of Tammany Hall; future president Theodore Roosevelt; beloved gangster Jack Zelig; and the newly famous author Stephen Crane—Satan’s Circus brings to life an almost-forgotten Gotham. Chronicling Charley Becker’s rise and fall, the book tells of the raucous, gaudy, and utterly corrupt city that made him, and recounts not one but two sensational murder trials that landed him in the electric chair.
From the Hardcover edition.
|
|
 An interesting and thorough account
I listened to this book on CD and found the story fascinating. I'd never heard of Charley Becker or Satan's Circus but the story is certainly worth hearing if only to disclose potential pitfalls in the justice system and ensure that history doesn't repeat itself. Dash provides lots of context for the story and the amount of detail indicates the level of thought and research that went into this book.
|
 An okay book... ( chan6523 )
I started reading this book and shortly after starting it I put it down. I went back to it a few months later and finished it. Well researched and written, although I had nothing but contempt for the police officer about whom the book is written. At times, the characters become confusing, but it is a decent read, nothwithstanding the distasteful nature of the police officer profiled in the book.
|
Too Much Detail and Not Enough Editing ( seybah_wolf )
This is my third book by Mike Dash and while the other two seemed to move in a flowing manner, this one was more halting and jerky. Many times in reading along, Dash jumps to another part of the story and leaves you wondering what happened. At other times he reiterates something already mentioned as if it was new.
What I found most disconcerting was Dash's inability to keep a straight timeline. In one paragraph he will mention two situations, with the time frame reversed (i.e. something happens in 1914 and then something like it in 1912). There are so many tangents and diversions (each in a short choppy paragraph) that it's hard to keep track of what's going on.
Was Becker guilty? No. Was he railroaded? Yes. Had he done enough in his prior life to be caught up in this travesty? Yes. Did he do other things that should have gotten him executed? Probably. So did he deserve what he got in the end? Not really.
|
Tammany Hall Rocked by Murder Scandal in Manhattan
This is a superior account of the murder of a failed gambling boss, Herman Rosenthal, and the subsequent trials that resulted in the execution of four of his killers, "Gyp the Blood" Horowitz, "Lefty Louie" Rosenberg, "Dago Frank" Cirofici and Whitey Lewis (a/k/a Jacob Seidenschner) and a crooked Police Lieutenant, Charles Becker. The latter was charged as a participant in a criminal conspiracy to murder Rosenthal in order to silence him before he could expose widespread police corruption in midtown Manhattan where prostitution and gambling flourished as protected vices. Becker was the leader of a special police squad that was supposed to crack down on gambling in the district that was nicknamed "Satan's Circus" by clergymen, but he contented himself to collect sizeable bribes and permitted gaming to continue with minimal interference beyond token raids. Rosenthal had threatened to blow the whistle on the payoff system after his gambling house had been closed by the police. He felt he had been betrayed by Becker, who was formerly his silent partner, and by several other professional gamblers.
Author Mike Dash has done some serious research and rectified a few errors and omissions that appeared in previous books on the same subject. This is no small accomplishment given the large number of sources to be consulted. There were many conflicting accounts to untangle, analyze and reconcile to provide readers with an approximation of the truth. Dash's engrossing book is packed with vivid details and is fully annotated. It may well be the definitive book on a subject that has inspired numerous competing titles by a variety of authors.
Becker's death sentence and execution have been the subject of constant controversy. The defendant faced the unhappy prospect of being subjected to a withering cross examination by the prosecution if he dared to take the witness stand. On trial for his life, Becker gambled and paid the supreme penalty for his decision not to testify in his own defense at either of his two trials. Yes, there were two separate trials and Becker was convicted by two separate juries.
On appeal, his original conviction was vacated and a new trial ordered due to the blatant bias of the presiding judge, John W. Goff, who was openly antagonistic to the defendant. Goff had previously served as counsel to the 1894 Lexow Committee, which had investigated police corruption, and he was elected City Recorder on the reform ticket with Mayor William L. Strong shortly afterwards. Goff became a judge in 1906, but his hatred and contempt for corrupt police officers had not abated. His open hostility to Becker deprived the defendant of a fair trial.
After the case was remanded, a second trial before the Judge Samuel Seabury, a respected jurist, resulted in a second guilty verdict and the reimposition of the death penalty. Becker went to the electric chair protesting his innocence, but his postconviction statements had no legal significance. A grim irony is that after Becker had exhausted his appeals, his former prosecutor, Charles S. Whitman, was the occupant of the Governor's Mansion in Albany. Whitman refused to pardon Becker or commute his sentence to life in prison. Becker became the only convicted police officer charged with official misconduct to be executed in American history. He died in the electric chair at Ossining, New York.
The most puzzling question not answered by the book relates to a point criminal procedure: Did Becker's defense counsel fail to attempt to secure a change of venue? In light of the sensational pretrial publicity, it seems certain that many potential jurors may have been exposed to prejudicial newspaper reports of Becker's personal corruption and his complicity in planning the murder of Rosenthal. It would have made sense for the defense to request that the trial be moved to another county. If such a motion was made and denied, the text does not address this critical issue.
|
Social History with All the Details ( amichael@columbus.rr.com )
In fairness, I bought this book for my wife, rather than for myself. This is not a book I would normally pick to read, and about halfway through, when I gave up, that "normal" self-judgment was vindicated. Dash provides the promised detailed account of life in the red-light district in turn-of-the-century New York City, and his account is tightly detailed. Within the decades of the 1890's and the 1900's, shifts in local power changed the political and social scenes considerably. New York City in 1994 and New York City in 1997 were very different places (for example), and shifts were no less profound 100 years earlier. To his credit, rather than superficially lumping the period together, Dash details each shift and the characters and consequences of it.
For me, though, that was the rub. I just wasn't that interested. The story that is promised to carry us through the detail, that of the only police officer sentenced to death, develops far too slowly and blandly to do that job. Indeed, the main character in the story, Charlie Becker, remains a cipher. Ironically, Dash does not succeed in getting us as close to the individual at the heart of the story as he does many peripheral characters.
In short, while the book succeeds moderately well on its own terms, those terms are not mine.
|
|
|
