About this time, Classon Point was opened up with a new car line, and the Bergens found a new place to play. On the first Sunday night they swooped down. They wrecked stands and booths and terrorized the crowds, insulting women and beating men who offered resistance. It was up to us to wipe out the Bergens.
We laid for them on the following week-end. I hid in a barn with a dozen mounted men, all armed with night sticks — and under instructions to use them. Footmen were in readiness to cover the Classon Point road and I had arranged with Harry Kerrigan, the superintendent of the trolley line, to have a car on a siding, waiting for prisoners. We intended to fill that car.
The Bergens swarmed in on Sunday night, aching for trouble. They started a fight in Fairyland, and then we went at them, the mounted men charging forward on their horses and swinging their clubs from the saddles. The attack was a complete surprise, and there was no escape for the Bergens. They got the beatings of their lives.
Some of them fled into a pig farm and we had to rescue them. The battle spread into near-by swamps.
When the fight was over, the trolley car was packed with prisoners. A lot of them needed attention from the doctors of Fordham Hospital.
I was taking no chances, either. On the following morning I requested the magistrate to visit Classon Point and Fairyland and inspect the damage the thugs had caused. When we got back to court he would listen to no excuses. To a man, the Bergens were sent to the workhouse, and that was the last of them.
We had taught the Bergens a lesson that was passed all along the line. The Sunday picnics were undisturbed and the station slipped back into its old peaceful ways again. In place of the usual stiff police routine, I was able to go ambling around the countryside admiring nature and enjoying myself.
That precinct was a vacation, but it was too good to last. Early that winter I got orders transferring me to the Twenty-First Precinct, at East Twenty-Second Street, in the heart of the old Gas House district.
I had many friends in the Gas House district, mostly business men I had met when working there as a boy, and was proud to return to them a sergeant of police.
I renewed my friendship with Bruno Wolfram, the owner of the New York Dog Exchange at 204 East Nineteenth Street. A prosperous business man now, he was still the same Bruno I’d known and worked with when we were both singing waiters at Coney Island. I formed the habit of dropping in on Bruno’s shop in off hours to help him out. I got in on some funny stunts in the dog-trading game, but none of them were quite so rich as the one that concerned myself.
Bruno went off to Europe and asked me to take charge of his business while he was away. Charles Roe was his manager, but it was arranged that I’d spend all my spare time at the shop, and drop in now and then when on post. Bruno agreed to give me twenty-five per cent of the net profits as my reward.
I love dogs and animals and it was pleasant work. I’d made a few good bargains, but nothing of particular profit. Then, one afternoon, a woman came into the shop. She was one of the handsomest I’d ever seen and her clothing and manner somehow made Bruno’s store look very shabby. With her was a well-dressed man of foreign appearance, plainly an admirer.
Charlie went out to wait on her and in a minute he hurried up to me. The woman, he said, spoke French and he couldn’t understand her. I addressed her in French, and she smiled delightedly.
“I’m Gaby Deslys, the actress,” she announced. “I want to buy an English bulldog.”
Mile. Gaby Deslys, the famous French dancer! — the most featured stage celebrity of the day. I turned on my best French and said I had just the dog she wanted.
He was a fine specimen, that dog. His massive, undershot jaw and tusks gave him a ferocious expression. But he was also rather old, although you had to know dogs to discover it.
“Magnifique!” cried Mile. Deslys, entirely missing the gray hairs. “What’s his name?”
He didn’t have one, but any animal favored with such appreciation deserved none but the best.
“The Duke of Montgomery,” I answered.
Such a name! Such a dog! Mile. Deslys would have him and the cost was not to be considered.
Then I remembered Little Willie, a skye terrier. If the “Duke” was big, Little Willie was the last word in tininess. We brought him up to Mile. Deslys, squatting in a big basket lined with black velvet. It was an effective arrangement. Willie didn’t seem pint-size and very easily could be taken to be one of the smallest dogs in the world, the which I implied he was.
For the Duke of Montgomery Mile. Deslys paid five hundred dollars, and for Little Willie three hundred dollars. She left orders that the dogs were to be prepared for a visit by the “man from Tiffany’s.” We prepared them, carefully. All the gray hairs were painted, just as dog sellers everywhere always do at need. The man from Tiffany’s solemnly measured the Duke and Little Willie for collars, harness and leaders of gold and precious stones.
Lucky dogs, they were old enough to appreciate fine treatment. A week later, all the newspapers had pictures of Gaby Deslys as she sailed for a vacation in France. By her side stood the Duke of Montgomery, in her arms was Little Willie, outward bound to see the world. Overnight they became famous and the New York Dog Exchange didn’t suffer any from the advertising.
But it wasn’t all fun and play in the Twenty-First Precinct. Policemen have to be more careful there with traffic than in almost any other section of the city. No other district in the Greater City has so many hospitals, and cripples come to them by the hundreds. That means careful watching at the crossings, and it’s up to the sergeants to see that the watch is maintained.
It was here, too, that I developed the hatred I’ve always felt for the flat burglar. In my estimation there’s no meaner criminal than the thief who robs the tenements of the poor. They leave more misery behind them than any bandit can cause, short of lifetaking itself. The clothing and money they steal can’t be replaced.
The Gas House district had a large number of flat burglars and I instructed my men to go after them as hard as they could. My orders were to bring such thieves in “right.” We caught several of them on the streets with bundles of clothing, or going into pawnshops to raise what they could on the belongings of some poverty-stricken family. I made it my personal business to see that each one of those thieves got his.
The rough treatment helped and I kept passing around the word that the man caught robbing a flat would get a beating he’d never forget. Such burglaries became much fewer.
Here’s just a case in point. One of the cops caught a fellow with a suitcase containing a man’s suit, a girl’s dress and coat, some shoes and other articles of clothing. We found the owner, an old widowed mother with a son and daughter who were supporting her. The thief had taken the Sunday clothes of her kids, the only decent clothing they possessed. The mother begged me not to let the children know the flat had been robbed.
“They’ll accuse me of being old and careless,” she pleaded.
I couldn’t give the clothing back to her then for we needed evidence in court. But I found a way to help her. I kept the suitcase in my locker. Every Friday afternoon she would call and take the clothing home. On Monday she would return the goods to me. I pushed the case as fast as I could, but it was several weeks before I got the thief sent up for a long stretch. The children never even suspected.
This case was almost my last in uniform, and I’ve always looked back on it with pleasure.