New York Night by Mark Caldwell

Author:Mark Caldwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Q. And you saw McGlory do something then, didn’t you?

A. Yes sir. I saw him search one of the girls.

Q. What?

A. I saw him search one of the girls.

Q. And held her until the police arrived—didn’t he?

A. He said he wanted to make a parable of her to square himself in the eye of the public.

Q. To make a parable of himself?

A. No sir; of her—to square himself in the eyes of the public.

Martin’s testimony ended with a wrenching surprise: Mamie Thompson, she said, was her sister, and it appeared that it was Martin who had called in the force and got McGlory arrested along with the women (thinking, perhaps, that Mamie would be safer in police custody than in McGlory’s hands). In the end, everybody wound up at the precinct house. According to Officer Dooley, McGlory was outraged, claiming he himself had been behind the call to the police. “If the bloody bitch had turned up the leather [i.e., given back the pocketbook], I wouldn’t be in this trouble,” McGlory fumed. “It is the first time I ever called a copper in my house on a squeal, and I get it in the neck for trying to do what’s right. I have been trying to run or keep a dead square joint, and I get it in the neck.”

Police reluctance to shutter McGlory’s “dead square” premises was evident throughout the trial, but never became a real issue. The assistant district attorneys tiptoed away from suggesting that there might have been payoffs (though they did ask both Dooley and Clinchy how it was that they’d never detected any lawbreaking). Their lack of curiosity in this respect suggests the district attorney’s office may well have been part of the corruption loop. Instead the testimony got entangled in the question of who actually owned the Irving and who therefore was legally responsible for what went on in it. No clear answer ever emerged, but it took the jury just seven minutes to convict McGlory of keeping a disorderly house. Uncowed, he tossed his coat to the floor, dug both hands into his pants pockets, and strode up to the bar to glower at them. Krause got off. McGlory went to the Tombs, from which, in January 1892, he was sentenced to a $300 fine and a year in prison, but he was soon on the streets again, and was in trouble as late as 1903, when he was arrested for selling liquor without a license at a saloon he owned in the Bronx.

McGlory, however studiously the trial avoided the issue, clearly depended on a culture of profitable mutual back-rubbing among racketeers, the police, even the district attorney’s office and the courts. It was a corrupt rogues’ orchestra conducted by Tammany Hall, long since grown from the feather-topped fraternal drinking society of 1790 to the political juggernaut of William Tweed and his successor, Richard Croker. Tammany’s mascot was the tiger, but by the number and reach of its tentacles it was more like an octopus.

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