Smithsonian.com

Rufus Choate approached his client just before the bang of the gavel, when Albert J. Tirrell was sitting in the dock, 22 years old and on trial for his life. It was March 24, 1846, three months after his arrest in the gruesome murder of his mistress. The defendant wore an olive coat with gilt buttons and a placid expression, looking indifferent to the gaze of the spectators. Choate leaned over the rail, raked long, skinny fingers through his thicket of black curls, and asked, “Well, sir, are you ready to make a strong push with me today?”

“Yes,” Tirrell replied.

“Very well,” Choate said. “We will make it.”

Within the week, the pair also made legal history.

By then all of Boston knew the facts of the case, reported in breathlessly lurid detail by the penny press. Around 4:30 a.m. on October 27, 1845, the body of Mrs. Mary Ann Bickford (also called Maria Bickford), age 21, was found in a “disreputable” boardinghouse on Cedar Lane in the Beacon Hill neighborhood. She lay on her back in her nightgown, nearly decapitated, her neck wound measuring six inches long and three inches deep. The room was clogged with smoke; someone had set fire to the bed. A bloodstained razor was found at its foot. The victim’s hair was singed, her skin charred. Part of one ear was split open and missing an earring. A man’s vest and a cane were spattered with blood. Albert Tirrell, who had been seen with the victim earlier that night, was nowhere to be found. One witness spotted him bargaining with a livery stable keeper. He was “in a scrape,” he reportedly said, and had to get away.

He drove south to the house of some relatives in the town of Weymouth, who hid him from police and gave him money to flee the state. The following day he headed north into Canada and wrote to his family from Montreal, announcing his plans to sail to Liverpool. Bad weather forced the crew to turn back, and instead he boarded a ship in New York City bound for New Orleans. After receiving a tip that the fugitive was headed their way, authorities in Louisiana arrested Tirrell on December 5, while he was aboard a vessel in the Gulf of Mexico. Boston newspapers identified the captured man as “Albert J. Tirrell, gentleman, of Weymouth.”

Albert Tirrell and Mary Bickford had scandalized Boston for years, both individually and as a couple, registering, as one observer noted, “a rather high percentage of moral turpitude.” Mary, the story went, married James Bickford at 16 and settled with him in Bangor, Maine. They had one child, who died in infancy. Some family friends came to console her and invited her to travel with them to Boston. Like Theodore Dreiser’s protagonist Carrie Meeber, fifty years hence, Mary found herself seduced by the big city and the sophisticated living it seemed to promise. “While in the city she appeared delighted with everything she saw,” James Bickford said, “and on her return home expressed a desire to reside permanently in Boston.” She became, he added, “dissatisfied with her humble condition” and she fled to the city again, this time for good.

Mary Bickford sent her husband a terse note:

I cannot let you know where I am, for the people where I board do not know that I have got a husband. James, I feel very unsteady, and will consent to live with you and keep house; but you must consent for me to have my liberty.”

James came to Boston at once, found Mary working in a house of ill repute on North Margin Street and returned home without her. She moved from brothel to brothel and eventually met Tirrell, a wealthy and married father of two. He and Mary traveled together as man and wife, changing their names whenever they moved, and conducted a relationship as volatile as it was passionate; Mary once confided to a fellow boarder that she enjoyed quarreling with Tirrell because they had “such a good time making up.”

On September 29, 1845, he was indicted on charges of adultery, an offense the press described as “some indelicacies with a young woman,” and eluded arrest for weeks. After his capture and arraignment, numerous friends and relatives, including his young wife, besieged the prosecutor with letters requesting a stay of proceedings in the hope that he might be reformed. His trial was postponed for six months. Tirrell came to court, posted bond and rushed back to Mary at the boardinghouse on Cedar Lane, where the owners charged exorbitant rents to cohabitating unmarried couples, and where Mary would soon be found dead.

Tirrell retained the services of Rufus Choate, legal wunderkind and erstwhile United States senator from Massachusetts, an antebellum Johnnie Cochran renowned for his velocity of speech. He once spoke “the longest sentence known to man” (1,219 words) and made his mentor, Daniel Webster, weep during a talk titled “The Age of the Pilgrims, the Heroic Period of Our History.” Choate derived much of his courtroom strategy from Webster, drawing particular inspiration from his performance at the criminal trial of a client charged with robbery. Webster’s defense was based on offense; he impugned the character of the alleged victim, suggesting that he’d staged an elaborate sham robbery in order to avoid paying debts. Webster’s alternative narrative persuaded the jurors, who found his client not guilty.

Choate kept that case in mind while plotting his defense of Tirrell, and considered an even more daring tactic: contending that Tirrell was a chronic sleepwalker. If he killed Mary Bickford, he did so in a somnambulistic trance and could not be held responsible. Choate never divulged the genesis of this strategy, but one  anecdote suggests a possibility. Henry Shute, who would later become a judge and well-known writer for The Saturday Evening Post, was a clerk in the law office of Charles Davis and William Whitman, two of Choate’s close friends. Choate stopped by often to play chess, and visited one afternoon shortly after agreeing to defend Tirrell. The famous lawyer noticed Shute reading Sylvester Sound, the Somnambulist, by the British novelist Henry Cockton. He asked to have a look. “Choate became interested, then absorbed,” Shute recalled. “After reading intently a long time he excused himself, saying, ‘Davis, my mind is not on chess today,’ and rising, left the office.” It was an unprecedented approach to a murder defense, but one that Choate believed he could sell.

On the first day of the trial, prosecutor Samuel D. Parker called numerous witnesses who helped establish a strong circumstantial case against Tirrell, but certain facets of testimony left room for doubt. The coroner’s physician conceded that Mary Bickford’s neck wound could have been self-inflicted. A woman named Mary Head, who lived near the boardinghouse, testified that on the morning of the murder Tirrell came to her home and rung the bell. When she answered he made a strange noise, a sort of gargle captured in his throat, and asked, “Are there some things here for me?” Mary was frightened by his “strange state, as if asleep or crazy.” The oddest recollection came from Tirrell’s brother-in-law, Nathaniel Bayley, who said that when Tirrell arrived in Weymouth he claimed to be fleeing from the adultery indictment. When Bayley informed him of the murder, Tirrell seemed genuinely shocked.

Rufus Choate allowed one of his junior counsel, Anniss Merrill, to deliver the opening argument for the defense. Merrill began, in homage to Daniel Webster, by maligning Mary’s character, repeating the possibility that she cut her own throat and positing that suicide was “almost the natural death of persons of her character.” Furthermore, Tirrell had been an honorable and upstanding gentleman until he met the deceased. “She had succeeded, in a wonderful manner, in ensnaring the prisoner,” Merrill insisted. “His love for her was passing the love ordinarily borne by men for women. She for a long time had held him spellbound by her depraved and lascivious arts.” It was an argument that resonated with the moralistic culture of early Victorian America, playing into fears about the growing commercialization of urban prostitution. City dwellers who witnessed a proliferation of dance halls and “fallen women” distributing calling cards on street corners could easily be persuaded that Mary was as villainous as the man who had killed her.

Merrill next introduced the issue of somnambulism, what he acknowledged was a “peculiar” and “novel” line of defense. “Alexander the Great penned a battle in his sleep,” he said. “La Fontaine wrote some of his best verses while in the same unconscious state; Condillac made calculations. Even Franklin was known to have arose and finished, in his sleep, a work that he had projected before going to bed.… Evidence will be produced to show that it had pleased Almighty God to afflict the prisoner with this species of mental derangement.”

One by one Tirrell’s family and friends recounted strange ways he’d behaved. He began sleepwalking at the age of six, and the spells had increased in frequency and severity with each passing year. He forcibly grabbed his brother, pulled down curtains and smashed windows, yanked a cousin out of bed and threatened him with a knife. While in this state he always spoke in a shrill, trembling voice. Their testimony was corroborated by Walter Channing, dean of Harvard Medical School, who testified that a person in a somnambulistic state could conceivably rise in the night, dress himself, commit a murder, set a fire and make an impromptu escape.

On the morning of the trial’s fourth day, spectators swarmed the courtroom eager to hear Rufus Choate—that “great galvanic battery of human oratory,” as the Boston Daily Mail called him. He began by ridiculing the prosecution’s case, pausing for dramatic effect after each resounding no:

How far does the testimony lead you? Did any human being see the prisoner strike the blow? No. Did any human being see him in that house after nine o’clock the previous evening? No. Did any human being see him run from the house? No. Did any human being see him with a drop of blood upon his hands? No. Can anyone say that on that night he was not laboring under a disease to which he was subject from his youth? No. Has he ever made a confession of the deed? To friend or thief taker, not one word.”

One stenographer later expressed the difficulty in capturing Choate’s thoughts: “Who can report chain lighting?”

During the last hour of his six-hour speech, Choate focused on the issue of somnambulism, stressing that 12 witnesses had testified to his client’s strange condition without challenge or disproof. “Somnambulism explains… the killing without a motive,” he argued. “Premeditated murder does not.” Here he approached the jury and lowered his voice. The courtroom hushed. “In old Rome,” he concluded, “it was always practice to bestow a civic wreath on him who saved a citizen’s life; a wreath to which all the laurels of Caesar were but weeds. Do your duty today, and you may earn that wreath.”

The jury deliberated for two hours and returned a verdict of not guilty. Spectators leapt to their feet and applauded while Albert Tirrell began to sob, his first display of emotion throughout the ordeal. Afterward he sent a letter to Rufus Choate asking the lawyer to refund half his legal fees, on the ground that it had been too easy to persuade the jury of his innocence.

Sources:

Books: Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; Silas Estabrook, The Life and Death of Mrs. Maria Bickford. Boston, 1846; Silas Estabrook, Eccentricities and Anecdotes of Albert John Tirrell. Boston, 1846; Edward Griffin Parker, Reminiscences of Rufus Choate: the Great American Advocate. New York: Mason Brothers, 1860; Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Articles: “Parker’s Reminiscences of Rufus Choate.” The Albany Law Journal, July 2, 1870; “Trial of Albert John Tirrell.” Prisoner’s Friend, April 1, 1846; ‘Somnambulism.” Prisoner’s Friend, September 9, 1846; “Continuation of Tirrell’s Trial.” The New York Herald, March 27, 1846; “Eminent Legal Rights.” Boston Daily Globe, August 27, 1888; “In the Courtroom with Rufus Choate.” Californian, December 1880; Vol. II, No. 12; “A Brief Sketch of the Life of Mary A. Bickford.” Prisoner’s Friend, December 17, 1845; “Arrest of Albert J. Tirrell.” Boston Cultivator, December 27, 1845; “Rufus Choate and His Long Sentences.” New York Times, September 15, 1900.

Polly Adler, the most celebrated brothel keeper in New York’s (and arguably the country’s) history, proudly proclaimed her goal to become “the best…madam in all America.” For more than 20 years she ran a string of brothels throughout Manhattan, her business card—featuring a parrot on a perch—bearing an East Side exchange: LExington 2-1099. From the dawn of Prohibition through World War II, “going to Polly’s” was the preferred late-night activity for the city’s haut monde: gangsters Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Dutch Schultz, boxer Jack Dempsey, Mayor Jimmy Walker and members of the Algonquin Round Table, including Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, who stacked Adler’s library shelves with classic and contemporary works. “Bob was the kindest, warmest-hearted man in the world,” she said of Benchley. “He lighted up my life like the sun.” She strove to cultivate an atmosphere that was more clubhouse than cathouse, where clients were just as likely to close a business deal or hold a dinner party as retire to an upstairs boudoir. Benchley checked in for an extended stay whenever he was on deadline, always marveling that “Lion,” the house maid, had his underwear laundered and suit impeccably pressed by morning. “The Waldorf,” he told Adler, “just isn’t in it with you when it comes to service.”

Adler, like most madams, entered the profession both accidentally and tragically. She was born Pearl Adler on April 16, 1900, in Yanow, Russia, the eldest of nine children, and her earliest goal was to attend the gymnasium in Pinsk to complete the education begun by her village rabbi. Instead her father, a tailor, decided to transplant the family to America, sending them one at a time. Polly was the first to immigrate, initially living with family friends in Holyoke, Massachusetts, where she did housework and learned English. When the advent of World War I cut her off from her family—and the monthly allowance sent by her father—she moved in with cousins in Brooklyn, attending school and working in a corset factory for $5 a week. At age 17 she was raped by her foreman and became pregnant. She found a doctor who charged $150 to perform abortions, but she had only $35. The doctor took pity, accepting $25 and telling her to “take the rest and buy some shoes and stockings.”

Ostracized by her cousins, she moved to Manhattan and continued working in a factory until 1920, when her roommate introduced her to a bootlegger named Tony. He was having an affair with a prominent married woman, he confided, and needed a discreet arrangement. If Polly would take an apartment and allow him to meet her there, Tony would pay the rent. She agreed, and adopted a pragmatic philosophy about her profession she would hold throughout her life. “I am not apologizing for my decision,” Adler wrote in her memoir, “nor do I think, even if I had been aware of the moral issues involved, I would have made a different one. My feeling is that by the time there are such choices to be made, your life already has made the decision for you.”

She rented a furnished two-room apartment on Riverside Drive and began “finding” women for Tony and other acquaintances, earning $100 a week for her efforts. One evening two police officers appeared the door and escorted her to the patrol wagon on charges of being a procuress, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. After a brief attempt to run a lingerie shop Adler returned to prostitution, determined “not to quit until I was really heeled.” Her first step was to befriend the cops, cupping a $100 bill in her palm whenever she shook their hands; any arrest inevitably resulted in a dismissal of the case.

As her business grew the so-called “Jewish Jezebel” embarked on a series of upgrades, moving to grander apartments and updating the interiors, modeling her house—not a home, she always clarified—after the long-defunct Everleigh Club of Chicago. During the height of Prohibition her house was located inside the Majestic, at 215 West 75th Street, a building whose discreetly elegant façade hid a labyrinth of hidden stairways and secret rooms. Aside from the traditional brothel décor—gilded mirrors and oil nudes, Louis Quinze competing with Louis Seize—Adler had a few signature touches, including a Chinese Room where guests could play mah-jongg, a bar built to resemble the recently excavated King Tut’s tomb and a Gobelin tapestry depicting “Vulcan and Venus having a tender moment,” as she put it. Like her Chicago forebears, Adler treated her employees as investments rather than commodities, teaching the coarser ones table manners and encouraging them to read, reminding them that they couldn’t stay in “the life” forever. She never had to advertise or lure potential “gals,” but instead turned away thirty or forty for every one she hired.

After the stock market crash of 1929, Adler feared her business would taper off, but the opposite proved true; men lined up at her door, hoping to forget their troubles, even for an hour or two. “There was an in-between period,” she recalled, “when people were trying to figure out what had hit them and estimating the extent of the damage.” But the boon was fleeting. In August 1930, the New York State Supreme Court appointed Judge Samuel Seabury to head what was—and remains—the largest investigation of municipal corruption in American history.

Adler soon received an anonymous phone call warning, “Hurry, Polly, get out of your house. They’re on their way to serve you with a subpoena.” The Seabury Commission wanted to know why Adler had never once been prosecuted for prostitution despite numerous arrests. (Under questioning, a former assistant district attorney named John C. Weston offered some insight, admitting he was “afraid of her influence” and had “laid down.”) She fled to Miami and checked into a hotel under an assumed name, following the case in the New York papers. After six months on the lam, she returned in May 1931. Two Seabury men appeared at her door the following morning, when a friend from the vice squad, Irwin O’Brien, happened to be visiting.

Judge Seabury himself questioned Adler. Was it not true, he began, that Mayor Walker and other Tammany Hall politicians celebrated important events at her house? Adler responded with a series of no’s and I-don’t-recalls until the judge produced a check, holding it up for all to see. She recognized it right away as one from O’Brien; he’d given it to her as payment for some stock.

“It’s a policeman’s paycheck, is it not, Miss Adler?” Seabury asked. “And you will notice that it is endorsed with a capital ‘P.’”

“It’s not my handwriting,” Adler insisted.

“Think it over, Miss Adler. Refresh your memory, and give me your answer tomorrow.”

Several of Adler’s police contacts were convicted, although none as a result of her testimony, but she believed the investigation ultimately helped her business. “I found when I got back in business that the Seabury investigation had…made my life easier,” she wrote. “The police no longer were a headache; there was no more kowtowing to double-crossing Vice Squad men, no more hundred-dollar handshakes, no more phony raids to up the month’s quota. In fact, thanks to Judge Seabury and his not-very-merry men, I was able to operate for three years without breaking a lease.”

Adler wasn’t so fortunate during the next vice crackdown, under Walker’s successor, the reform-minded Fiorello LaGuardia. Within one minute of his swearing-in LaGuardia ordered the arrest of Lucky Luciano and followed up with a threat to the entire police department to “Drive out the racketeers or get out yourselves” and the sledgehammering of hundreds of confiscated slot machines. The new mayor was determined to scour the city free of “incorporated filth,” and in July 1936, Adler was arrested for the 16th time. She pleaded guilty to a charge of maintaining a disreputable apartment and served 24 days of a 30-day sentence at the House of Detention for Women, pitying the aging prostitutes occupying nearby cells. “The only ‘reform’ offered these women,” she wrote, “is a term in jail with bad food and harsh treatment.”

Upon her release she sought legitimate work. A friend with a factory in New Jersey worried that associating with Madam Polly would hurt his credit. A nightclub owner said she’d be the perfect business partner if only the police would leave her alone. A restaurateur was similarly apologetic when she asked to work the hat-check and cigarette concession. Resigned, Adler returned to her old profession, reasoning that “once you’re tagged as a madam it’s for keeps.” New York society frequented her house until 1943, when she moved to Burbank, California, and retired from the sex business for good. Before dying of cancer in 1962, she realized her lifelong goal of completing high school. She had taken to calling herself “madam emeritus.”

Sources:

Books: Polly Adler, A House Is Not A Home. New York: Reinhart, 1953; Alyn Brodsky, The Great Mayor: Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of the City of New York. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003; Herbert Mitgang, The Man Who Rode the Tiger. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963.

Articles: “Ex-senator John Edwards denies report he patronized hooked linked to accused Soccer Mom Madam Anna Gristina.” New York Daily News, March 23, 2012; “Charged as Madam, and Defended as Entrepreneur and Pig Rescuer.” New York Times, March 6, 2012; “Inside Madam Anna Gristina’s Upper East Side Love Lair Brothel.” New York Post, March 9, 2012; “Vice Squad Man Got Polly Adler’s Cash.” New York Times, July 23, 1931; “Polly Adler Quits Jail.” New York Times, June 3, 1935; “Find ‘Key Witness’ On Vice Graft Ring.” New York Times, May 7, 1931; “Eleven Judges Heard In Bonding Inquiry.” New York Times, March 14, 1935; “Vice Policeman Balks On Polly Adler Deals.” New York Times, August 8, 1931. “Polly Adler, 62, Dies in California.” Harford Courant, June 11, 1962; “Polly Adler Dead; Wrote A House Is Not A Home. Washington Post, June 11, 1962; “Feared ‘Influence,’ Weston Declares.” New York Times, July 14, 1931.

Nascar is a multibillion-dollar business whose history and rich mythology are rooted in money; Southern liquor-runners and moonshiners gave the earliest, postwar version of the sport much of its tone. But long before the advent of stock-car racing, competitive drivers cared less about prize or profit than about simply completing the course. The men who lined up in the swirling snow of Times Square on the morning of February 12, 1908, were embarking on a nearly unimaginable feat: a race from New York to Paris, westward. The contest was sponsored not by Bank of America or Coors Light, but by the French newspaper Le Matin and the New York Times. The prize: a 1,400-pound trophy and proving it could be done.

The proposed route would take the drivers across the United States, including through areas with very few paved roads, and then head north through Canada. Next came a left turn at Alaska, which the drivers had to cross in order to arrive at the Bering Strait, which separated the American wilderness from the Russian one. The race’s organizers started it in the middle of winter in the hope that the strait would be frozen. The course then led through Siberia, which no one had traveled by car, before heading into the final stretch: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris—overall, a 22,000-mile trek in an age when the horse was considered more reliable than the horseless carriage. The New York-to-Paris race was suppoed to be (and is still largely considered) the greatest of them all, even surpassing the prior year’s Peking-to-Paris competition, in which the winner, Italian Prince Scipione Borghese, enlisted donkeys and mules to pull his car and sipped oily water from its radiator to relieve his thirst. His reward was a magnum of champagne.

In Times Square that morning 17 men, including drivers, mechanics and journalists, crammed into six cars from four countries: three from France, and one each from Germany, Italy and the United States. A quarter of a million people lined Broadway up to northernmost Harlem; those who couldn’t glimpse the cars had to settle for the whiff of gasoline and the strains of a brass band. The American entry, a 60-horsepower touring car called the Thomas Flyer, carried three extra gasoline tanks with a capacity of 125 gallons and primitive canvas convertible top. The race was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., when Mayor George B. McClellan Jr., son of the Union Civil War general, planned to fire the starting pistol, but he was characteristically late. At a quarter-past, railroad financier Colgate Hoyt snatched the golden gun from the table and shot it into the air.

The contestants represented an international roster of personalities. G. Bourcier de St. Chaffray, driving the French De Dion, once organized a motorboat race from Marseille to Algiers that resulted in every single boat sinking in the Mediterranean. His captain was Hans Hendrick Hansen, a swashbuckling Norwegian who claimed to have sailed a Viking ship, solo, to the North Pole. He declared that he and his companions would reach Paris or “our bodies will be found inside the car.” Frenchman Charles Godard, driving the Moto-Bloc, participated in the Peking-to-Paris race without having driven a car and set an endurance record by driving singlehandedly for 24 hours nonstop.

Emilio Sirtori, the driver for the Italian Zust, took with him 21-year-old journalist and poet Antonio Scarfoglio, who had threatened to pilot a motorboat across the Atlantic if his father didn’t let him enter the race. (His father, a prominent newspaper editor in Naples, relented.) The German entrant, driving the Protos, was an aristocratic army officer named Hans Koeppen who regarded the race as an opportunity to raise his rank from lieutenant to captain. Montague “Monty” Roberts, manning the Thomas Flyer, was a gregarious crowd favorite and one of few American drivers who actually trained for races. His teammate was George Schuster, a 35-year-old mechanic for the E. R. Thomas Motor Company in Buffalo, New York. One of 21 children born to Casper Schuster, a German immigrant who worked as a blacksmith, George was an expert radiator solderer, chassis inspector, motor tuner and test driver. To Roberts, he was an ideal choice—high enough in the factory hierarchy to be considered indispensable, but too low to steal attention from Roberts himself. After the starting shot, the cars moved forward, Scarfoglio wrote, “between two thick hedges of extended hands amidst a roar as of a falling torrent.” The poet blew a kiss to the crowd, and they were off.

August Pons, driver of the French Sizaire-Naudin, drpopped out after only 96 miles with a broken differential. The De Dion, the Zust and the Thomas Flyer quickly emerged as the leaders, with the Protos and the Moto-Bloc bringing up the rear. In Hudson, New York, the cars plowed through foot-deep snow in a single file. Schuster circled the Thomas Flyer—which had no heater or windshield—with a stick to check snow depth and put down planks for traction. The trail out of Auburn, which the New York Times described as the worst road in the United States, lived up to its reputation, with the three leading cars getting mired at Dismal Hollow in the Montezuma Swamp. The men prepared to camp for the night, but an American guide hired by the Italians came with six horses to pull the cars through.

They settled into a routine, rising at 5 a.m. and driving until 8 p.m., with the mechanics tinkering with the cars until midnight to repair cracks in the chassis and drain the radiators to keep them from freezing. (At the time, antifreeze was primarily used to produce explosives.) They stopped at hardware stores to fill up on gasoline, one bucketful at a time. The teams forged a tense agreement that they would alternate leadership every five hours, but this spirit of cooperation quickly dissolved. They convinced themselves that an hour or two would make a difference in a six-month race, and feared that their opponents would sneak off in the middle of the night. St. Chaffray took to giving imperious orders: “When you wish to go into a city ahead, you ask me,” he told Roberts. The American replied, “From now on you will know this is a race.”

The animosity increased as they trekked through the snow-battered Midwest, with the Italians accusing the Americans of cheating by using railroad tracks and the aid of a trolley car. A few of the foreign competitors took offense at the locals, whom they perceived as boorish. Scarfoglio sent off a snide dispatch: “I do not like the Americans as a whole, just as I do not like the cheesemonger whom a prize in a lottery or a sudden rise in the price of potatoes has made wealthy. There is still too much of the herdsman about them.” In Indiana, the Moto-Bloc and  Protos teams resented the fact that they had to pay significant sums for the aid of horses and men while the Thomas Flyer was swarmed by Hoosiers anxious to volunteer. They sent a plea to the president of the Chicago Automobile Club, which the Tribune printed under the headline, “FOREIGNERS’ PATHETIC APPEAL”: “We are discouraged,” the note began. “The peasants demand $3 per mile for helping us…they charged $5 each to permit us to sleep on the ground. Peasants along the way have filled up road dug by leading cars, so as to help the Thomas car…would it be possible to influence public opinion to aid us?”

By March 8, the Thomas Flyer was leading in Julesburg, Colorado, and traveling with a new passenger: Hans Hendrick Hansen. The Norwegian had quit St. Chaffray’s team after the De Dion got stuck in a particularly bad snowdrift; when Hansen, the Artic expert, failed to extricate it, he and the Frenchman began to argue. They agreed to settle the matter with a duel, but before they could find their pistols St. Chaffray made an executive (and cool-headed) decision to fire Hansen. “I could go afoot over the Siberian route and beat the De Dion car,” Hansen retorted, and pledged his allegiance to the American flag.

Meanwhile, the Zust was in Omaha, the De Dion in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Moto-Bloc in Maple Park, Illinois, and the Protos a bit behind in Geneva, Illinois. As the Thomas Flyer approached frenzied crowds in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Monty Roberts knew that his time in the great race was nearing its end. He wanted to sail to Paris in May and race in the Grand Prix. E. Linn Mathewson, the son of the general agent for Thomas cars in the Midwest, would drive the Flyer through Wyoming to Utah. Professional driver Harold Brinker, famous for surviving a crash the previous year that had killed another driver, would take command in Ogden. George Schuster, the indefatigable mechanic, would drive through Alaska and Siberia, and Roberts would return when the car neared Europe.

Before leaving Cheyenne, Schuster bought a .38-caliber Colt with a six-inch barrel, reasoning it might come in handy. He continued to sacrifice himself for the journey when no one else could or would, walking ten miles in the dead of night to find gasoline and navigating the car out of gullies they couldn’t avoid. His acumen had kept the car running through blizzards, freezing temperatures and sandstorms. At each overnight stop, he repaired the fresh damage and readied the Flyer for the next leg of the journey. And he was so unheralded that newspaper reports frequently misspelled his name when they bothered to mention him at all.

By the time the Americans left Wyoming, they were leading by two states. The Italians were starting across Nebraska from Omaha. St. Chaffray was in Iowa, awaiting parts for the De Dion, while Lieutenant Koeppen in the Protos and Charles Godard in the Moto-Bloc were just entering Iowa. The Moto-Bloc was having mechanical trouble, although Godard was loath to disclose specifics. Desperate, he decided—in violation of the rules—to ship his car to San Francisco by railroad, but abandoned the idea when a photographer caught him in the act. Godard received a cable from the owners of his car: “Quit race, sell car and come home.” The Moto-Bloc was finished, leaving only four cars.

Harold Brinker drove the Thomas Flyer from Utah through Nevada and around the border of Death Valley, arriving in San Francisco the third week of March, 900 miles ahead of his closest competitor, the Zust. Factory whistles sounded and automobile drivers blew their horns on Market Street. “The record of the Thomas car from New York to San Francisco was a remarkable feat,” the New York Times concluded. “Many skeptics declared when the New York to Paris racers started out from New York in the dead of winter that none of them would get across Wyoming until summer, some that they would not reach Chicago and a few that they could not cross New York State.” The Americans prepared to ship the Flyer on a freighter to Seattle. After a two-day trip there, it would be transferred to a cargo ship headed for Valdez, Alaska. Brinker begged Schuster to let him to continue with the team, even as an assistant, but the mechanic refused. It was finally his car and his turn.

On Wednesday, April 8, the Flyer touched Alaskan soil. The welcoming committee consisted of the entire population of Valdez, few of whom had ever seen a car. Schuster wasted no time investigating the Valdez-Fairbanks Trail in a single-horse sleigh, and concluded that the only way to cross Alaska in a car would be to dismantle it and ship the parts by dogsled. The Parisian race committee abandoned the idea of Alaska and the Bering Strait and directed the Americans to return to Seattle. Their new plan called for the cars to sail to Vladivostok and drive to Paris from there. While the Americans were still at sea, their competitors, including the ever-troubled Protos, arrived in Seattle and set sail for Russia. Then the Americans lost time getting their Russian visas in order. The Flyer had been the first to arrive on the Pacific coast but was now the last to leave, a few weeks behind the competition.

The Italian and French teams were forging across Japan when the race committee made another decision. In recognition of the time the Flyer lost detouring through Alaska, the American team was given an allowance of 15 days—which meant, essentially, that the Zust and the De Dion could beat the Flyer into Paris by two weeks and still lose. The Protos, meanwhile, would be penalized 15 days for resorting to the train from Ogden to Seattle; the committee didn’t disqualify Lieutenant Koeppen entirely, concluding that there had been some honest confusion (unlike in Godard’s case) about the rules.

In Russia, the racers were advised to give up and take the Trans-Siberian Railway. Scarfoglio reported that the “great men of the Russian government, all covered with gold lace,” outlined the many reasons the venture would fail: “We shall be met on the road by Chinese brigands, Manchurian tigers, fever, plague, pestilence, famine—to say nothing of the mud after three months of rain, mosquitoes as big as locusts and other similar delights.” The drivers agreed to start again evenly matched. With one day to prepare, George Schuster searched for a supply of gasoline, which was scarce in Siberia. Back at his hotel, he received a note summoning him to St. Chaffray’s room. When he arrived he saw that the Italian team was already there.

“There is no petrol,” the Frenchman announced. “There are no means of getting any. What there was is in my possession, and I offer it to the car which will agree to take me onboard.” The Italians left the room in disgust. St. Chaffray tried to reason with the Americans, stating that he could get a seat on the German car, but the Flyer was sure to beat the Protos into Paris and he wished to be on the first car to arrive. He added that “it would not look well for a Frenchman to ride on a German machine.” Schuster calmly said he’d think about it, but he was seething. Privately he told his team that he’d rather stay in Vladivostok for the rest of his life than accept St. Chaffray’s bribe. Without fanfare, St. Chaffray transferred the rights to his gasoline to the Italian team, but was not allowed to join. His sponsor, the Marquis Jules-Albert de Dion, had decided he was finished.

In Perm, Russia, Schuster received a telegram from the Thomas factory in Buffalo: “Do you want us to send Montague Roberts to help you when you get on the good roads of Europe?” Schuster was so mad he could’ve “eaten nails,” as he put it, and sent an immediate reply: “July 9: Arrived today. Expect to reach Paris on July 24. Schuster.” The suggestion that he was good enough to drive the Flyer through the bogs of Siberia but not through the capitals of Europe impelled him, despite deadened nerves and aching limbs. He was now only a day ahead of the Protos and determined to maintain his lead.

There was one problem: Schuster kept getting lost. The Russians couldn’t understand hand signals and the Americans couldn’t understand Russian. One wrong turn cost the Americans 15 hours. Worse, the Flyer sunk into a mudhole and needed a day’s worth of repairs. Schuster heard that Lieutenant Koeppen had left St. Petersburg the same day and was on his way to securing a three-day lead. The Italians remained 3,000 miles behind, in Atchunsk.

At 6:15 p.m. on Sunday, July 26, five and a half months and 21,933 miles from the start in Times Square, Lieutenant Koeppen arrived in Paris, slowly guiding the Protos down Boulevard Poissonniere. A delegation of editors from Le Matin greeted him with tepid enthusiasm and served a cold buffet at his reception. At the same time, Schuster was having breakfast at the Imperial Automobile Club of Berlin, where several people congratulated him on his good showing. He didn’t bother to explain that the Protos would ultimately be docked two weeks for using the train in the American west, and that the Flyer was allotted two extra weeks for attempting the trip to Alaska. Schuster had a month in which to get to Paris and still win the race.

Schuster and his crew arrived on July 30, the Flyer making its way through the lines of lighted cafes, the crowds shouting wildly: “Vive le car Americain!” They cruised toward the Place de l’Opéra, where, in front of the Café de la Paiz, a gendarme stopped the car.

“You are under arrest,” he declared. “You have no lights on your car.”

A crowd of Americans rushed from the café and tried to explain, but the officer waved them away. The law was the law: a car had to have a headlight to be on the streets of Paris at night, or the driver was to be placed under arrest. A quick-thinking man on a bicycle rode up to the car, jumped off and deposited his bike, which had a headlight, in the Flyer next to Schuster. Problem solved. The gendarme stepped aside.

Schuster graciously insisted that Monty Roberts be present for the Flyer’s triumphant return to Times Square on August 17, 1908. After the accolades and parties died down, he returned to his job at the Thomas factory, where he was promised employment as long as the company was in business. Five years later, the Thomas company collapsed and all its goods were auctioned off. Lot number 1829 was listed simply as the “Famous New York to Paris Racer.”

Sources:

Books: Julie M. Fenster, Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race. New York: Crown, 2005; Dermot Cole: Hard Driving: The 1908 Auto Race from New York to Paris. New York: Paragon House, 1991. Allen Andrews: The Mad Motorists: The Great Peking to Paris Race of ’07. Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1965.

Articles: “Macedonian Cry for Help from Foreign Autoists.” Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1908; “First in Chicago Autos’ Aim.” Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1908; “New York to Paris the Hard Way, 100 Years Ago.” New York Times, February 10, 2008; “Race to Paris Starts Today.” New York Times, February 12, 1908; “The Greatest Race—1908 New York to Paris,” by Art Evans. Sports Car Digest, September 28, 2011: http://www.sportscardigest.com/the-greatest-race-1908-new-york-to-paris/; “Tour of Autoists Like Polar Trip.” Chicago Tribune, February 25, 1908; “Mathewson At Wheel of Racer.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 12, 1908; “American Car Will Try to Cross Alaska.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 27, 1908; “Thomas, Winner, Reaches Paris.” New York Times, July 31, 1908.

The plot was conceived over a round of drinks. One afternoon in July 1932, Francis Pasqua, Daniel Kriesberg and Tony Marino sat in Marino’s eponymous speakeasy and raised their glasses, sealing their complicity, figuring the job was already half-finished. How difficult could it be to push Michael Malloy to drink himself to death? Every morning the old man showed up at Marino’s place in the Bronx and requested “Another mornin’s morning, if ya don’t mind” in his muddled brogue; hours later he would pass out on the floor. For a while Marino had let Malloy drink on credit, but he no longer paid his tabs. “Business,” the saloonkeeper confided to Pasqua and Kriesberg, “is bad.”

Pasqua, 24, an undertaker by trade, eyed Malloy’s sloping figure, the glass of whiskey hoisted to his slack mouth. No one knew much about him—not even, it seemed, Malloy himself—other than that he had come from Ireland. He had no friends or family, no definitive date of birth (most guessed him to be about 60), no apparent trade or vocation beyond the occasional odd job sweeping alleys or collecting garbage, happy to be paid in alcohol instead of money. He was, wrote the Daily Mirror, just part of the “flotsam and jetsam in the swift current of underworld speakeasy life, those no-longer-responsible derelicts who stumble through the last days of their lives in a continual haze of ‘Bowery Smoke.’ ”

“Why don’t you take out insurance on Malloy?” Pasqua asked Marino that day, according to another contemporary newspaper report. “I can take care of the rest.”

Marino paused. Pasqua knew he’d pulled off such a scheme once before. The prior year, Marino, 27, had befriended a homeless woman named Mabelle Carson and convinced her to take out a $2,000 life insurance policy, naming him as the beneficiary. One frigid night he force-fed her alcohol, stripped off her clothing, doused the sheets and mattress with ice water, and pushed the bed beneath an open window. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as bronchial pneumonia, and Marino collected the money without incident.

Marino nodded and motioned to Malloy. “He looks all in. He ain’t got much longer to go anyhow. The stuff is gettin’ him.” He and Pasqua glanced over at Daniel Kriesberg. The 29-year-old grocer and father of three would later say he participated for the sake of his family. He nodded, and the gang set into motion a macabre chain of events that would earn Michael Malloy cult immortality by proving him nearly immortal. (More…)

As midnight approached on January 16, 1920, New York was in the throes of a citywide wake. Black-bordered invitations had been dispensed weeks before, announcing “Last rites and ceremonies attending the departure of our spirited friend, John Barleycorn.” The icy streets did little to deter the “mourning parties,” which began at dinnertime and multiplied as the hours advanced.

On the eve of Prohibition, guests paid their respects at the Waldorf-Astoria, hip flasks peeking from waistbands, champagne glasses kissing in farewell toasts. Park Avenue women in cloche hats and ermine coats gripped bottles of wine with one hand and wiped real tears with the other. Uptown at Healy’s, patrons tossed empty glasses into a silk-lined casket, and eight black-clad waiters at Maxim’s hauled a coffin to the center of the dance floor. Reporters on deadline tapped out eulogies for John Barleycorn and imagined his final words. “I’ve had more friends in private and more foes in public,” quoted the Daily News, “than any other man in America.”

One of alcohol’s most formidable (and unlikely) foes was Isidor Einstein, a 40-year-old pushcart peddler and a postal clerk on the Lower East Side. After Prohibition took effect, he applied for a job as an enforcement agent at the Southern New York division headquarters of the Federal Prohibition Bureau. The pay was $40 a week, and to Izzy it seemed “a good chance for a fellow with ambition.” Chief Agent James Shelvin assessed Izzy, who stood 5-foot-5 and weighed 225 pounds, and concluded he “wasn’t the type,” but Izzy argued that there was an advantage to not looking the part—he could “fool people better.” And although he lacked experience with detective work, he said, he knew “something about people—their ways and habits—how to mix with them and gain their confidence.” He would never be spotted as a sleuth. As a bonus, the Austrian-born Izzy spoke six languages, including Polish, German, Hungarian and Yiddish. He got the job.

(See more stunning Prohibition-era photos from LIFE magazine: When Booze Ruled and How Dry we Ain’t.)

One of Izzy’s first assignments was to bust a Manhattan speakeasy that had a reputation for spotting revenue agents. With his badge affixed to his coat, he asked the proprietor, “Would you like to sell a pint of whiskey to a deserving Prohibition agent?”?

The bar owner laughed and served him a drink. “That’s some badge you’ve got there,” he said. “Where’d ya get it?”

“I’ll take you to the place it came from,” Izzy replied, and escorted the man to the station.

(More…)